The Deepest Night

there, or when. They won’t smell the smoke.”

“Are you positive?”

“No,” he said, and I silently resumed my chant.

In daylight the town was sprawling and pretty, nestled up against a giant’s backbone of green craggy hills. I wondered where we were, if we’d reached East Prussia yet. I couldn’t tell. But for the soldiers everywhere, we might have been in any idyllic, secluded part of Europe, isolated from the war’s grisly tendrils.

A breeze wound by, warm enough but still brushing goose bumps over most of my body. Despite my aching head, despite everything that had happened in the past few hours, it had not escaped me that I was fully unclothed, in close proximity to an equally unclothed Lord Armand.

This was the third time we’d been in this fix, and it seemed to me it was getting worse and worse. My reaction to it, I mean.

I’d always thought him handsome. Not in the besotted, drippy way that Belgian girl had—or any of the girls from Iverson, frankly—but purely as an acceptance of fact. Armand was handsome because he was. Armand was wealthy because he was. Armand was drakon because he was.

So, handsome hardly mattered. Far more interesting to me, far more intriguing, was the part of himself he kept veiled. The secret animal part that seemed a tantalizing near-reflection of … well, of me. I couldn’t help but wonder what this marble-skinned, keen-eyed boy was going to look like as a dragon.

I wanted so, so badly to live long enough to see that.

Is there a more powerful tool of seduction for the lonely than that of common ground?

I kept imagining what Mrs. Westcliffe would say if she could see us now.

Proper young ladies do not go into hiding with unclad men, no matter the circumstances.

Ladies do not think about what it would be like to move a mere inch over, so that bare skin may touch.

Ladies do not envisage wildly indecent things, such as kissing or embracing or rolling about beneath a bronze bell.

I concentrated vehemently upon the people below.

I couldn’t tell if he was doing the same.

“Mandy,” I said.

“Yes?”

“Can you finish things without me?”

His head turned. Now he was looking at me. “What? What do you mean?”

“If something were to happen,” I said cautiously. “If I get killed.” Or vanished. “Can you carry on without me? Complete the rescue and get back to England?”

“That is not going to happen.”

“Answer the question, if you please.”

“I’m not answering the ruddy question because it’s not going to happen. You’re not going to die.”

I risked a glance at him; he was scowling. Unkempt as a pirate.

“I will die someday. Maybe in a year, or ten years. Maybe tonight. Pretending doesn’t change things.”

“I’m not pretending.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” I said, “but there are quite a few people out there who’d love to take a shot at us. Again. Therefore I think the question’s fair. The maps are gone and likely everything else, but you can go to smoke now. So I need to know—can you carry on without me?”

“No,” he said.

I sat up, and so did he. My hair became a curtain that swayed between us, strands lifting free to caress his skin exactly as I’d been trying not to picture them doing.

“You can, though. Don’t lie.”

“It wasn’t a lie. I can’t do it.”

My temper entangled with my intent; my voice sharpened. “Well, you may have to. You may end up being all that Aubrey has. So think about that. Plan for it. Or else be stuck out here with him for all the rest of the damned war. It’s up to you.”

Just like the grotto back home, the bell swallowed my words and sent them back.

 … you-you-you … 

“Eleanore.” Armand placed his hand upon my forearm. “Aubrey is my brother. He matters to me more than I can say, and I’ll do what I can for him. But I’ve given you the honest answer to your question. I’m not going to be able to carry on without you. Haven’t you figured it out yet?”

His fingers felt cool against me. The breeze whispered between us, an invisible barrier that would be so easy to defeat.

“I love you,” he said, almost hopeless. “I can’t stop it. I can’t change it. I’ve certainly tried. So this is how it is. I don’t ask that you love me back. No one could ask that. But do me a favor and don’t die, all right? Because I can’t … be here without you.”

The breeze. Goose bumps. I was holding my breath, or it had been stolen from me. I was gazing into his eyes and falling and falling into a place I did not know. Into cobalt oceans. Into deep blue nights that held the promise of everything lush and silken and wonderful, dreams and desires. I knew I’d just been given a gift I’d never anticipated: Armand without the veil. A gift so raw and powerful I could barely comprehend it. I was too small, and he was so lovely and bright.

He couldn’t be without me. Yet I would be leaving so that he could stay.

All I could think was, What am I going to do?

Men began to shout below us. We both flattened at once, then crept to the belfry’s edge.

They hadn’t seen us; they were reacting to something else. People choked the warehouse doorway, soldiers mostly. They were pushing at each other, and then one in a helmet topped with a silver spike emerged carrying our knapsack in his arms.

My clothing. Armand’s. Our pistol and food and medical supplies.

I dropped my head into my arms and made a sound between a sigh and a groan.

“Do you believe in fate?” Armand whispered.

“No,” I mumbled into my arms, because of course I did, and what I knew of bloody fate was that it was cold and capricious and could turn on you in a heartbeat. And then you were naked and hungry in a bell tower, wondering if this was going to be the last day of your life.

“Lora. Look.”

I raised my head. He was staring at a point in the distance, at one of those outlying hills. I followed his gaze, seeing only woods and rocks.

“What?” I said.

“Look,” he repeated, patient, and this time pointed, keeping his hand close to his chest.

I squinted at the hill. At the faraway rocks, which were almost uniform in a way, structured, gray and brown like … like a fortress, almost. Like the ruins of one.

All the soldiers in town, so far from the front. The major, who had been going to want to question us—

“It’s Schloss des Mondes, I’m sure of it,” Mandy said.

I lifted up a bit to make it out more clearly. “Really? It might well be any old ruin.”

“No. That’s it.”

I tried to remember the etching from the travel journal. Mostly what I recalled was that it’d struck me as a pen-and-ink version of romantic drivel: picturesque towers collapsing into piles, wild roses rambling this way and that, a moon as round and blank as a wheel of cheese behind it all.

I tipped my head, searching for a resemblance.

“How do you know?” I asked.

He was taut and eager, a weapon primed. “I feel it. Even from here, I feel it. It’s like a blood clot in a vein, isn’t it? Like a blemish across the sun. Dark and viscous and awful. And this place. This town, living off it, feeding from it.”

“Mandy …”