Shana Abe - The Deepest Night

“Oh, God, I hope not,” I said around my hiccoughs. My life was abnormal enough as it was.

I looked up, wiping my nose along my arm.

“Doesn’t that hurt? Your leg?”

He glanced down at it with an air of surprise, as if he’d forgotten all about it.

“Er … rather.”

“I think we should return to the hunting lodge. We can do something about it there. We’ll wrap Aubrey in that blanket.” It had made the journey with him, caught in my claws. “Both of you ride my back.”

“Hunting … lodge?” Aubrey asked.

“There are beds there, and clothing. Food in the village close by.”

“Sounds like … paradise.”

I had to agree. It did.

Three dragons survived this world, not merely two.

It was driven home to me as I helped Aubrey into the bed I had slept in not four nights before, into sheets that were still marked with the mud of Mandy’s transformation.

Three of us. Perhaps the last three, so damaged and undone that if you were to combine us all together, we scarcely made up one sound creature. But here we were, back in the early dawn solitude of this cabin in the woods, and as I bent over to stuff the pillow beneath his head Aubrey’s gaze slipped downward—so very briefly—to my bare chest, and my skin began to burn.

That dragon echo in him from before. It was louder now. More difficult to ignore.

I backed away and went to find the trunk of clothing in the other chamber. I discovered Armand already there, lifting up garments. Like me, he was crisscrossed with rose-thorn scratches. Unlike me, the shin of his broken leg was swelling into a gruesome, livid blue.

I took the sweater dangling from his fingers without bothering to examine it. It was large and loose and fell to my thighs.

“You need to get off that leg,” I said.

“I know. I will. It’s just …” He was gazing at the wall, then at me. “We did it, waif. We did.”

I smiled. “Cursed near thing, though. And we’re not done yet.”

“But—”

“But you’re right. Bully for us. We did it.”

I moved to him, or he moved to me, I wasn’t certain. We were in each other’s arms, holding tight as the shadows shifted into violet and the morning’s first rays lit pearl through the foggy green forest. It was going to be a fair day somewhere, perhaps even here. Yet I longed for the fog to linger, for the mist shrouding the lake to roll closer and erase us from the sun. I wasn’t ready for daylight.

I lowered my head and let my hair cover my face. I ached for sleep and for poise and for the bandaged and broken man in the other room. For Armand and his leg, and the soldiers we’d left dead on the ground behind us. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to wipe them from my conscience anytime soon.

I also knew I was at the edge of my limits, because everything had taken on a flickery, unreal cast. Even the heat of Armand’s body felt like something I’d dreamed. If I lifted my head, I wouldn’t be in the hunting lodge. I’d be in my dormitory at Blisshaven. My cell at Moor Gate. I was a gifted dreamer and had conjured a daydream beyond all others, but in the end I’d wake and still be a nameless girl trapped behind locked doors. Ordinary and alone.

“Eleanore.”

I looked up. Armand was still there. All of it was.

“Go to sleep,” he said kindly. “Take this bed in here. I’ll bunk with Aubrey.”

“Someone should … someone needs to keep watch.”

“Yes. I will.”

I glanced at the bed, a bare mattress bumped against a headboard, a heap of blankets at its foot.

“Go on,” he said, and gave me a gentle push.

“Wake me when you need to rest,” I said, dropping to the mattress, dragging the blankets over me.

“Right.”

“Don’t …” My thoughts were drifting into soft, muddled clouds.

“Don’t what?” he murmured.

“Don’t burn the place down.”

My eyes were closed; the clouds had won. But I thought I heard him laugh a little.

“I’ll hold my breath,” Mandy said.

I was a dreamer, though. So even though I fell into those clouds, I dreamed I heard Armand and Aubrey talking. Armand’s voice low and soothing. Aubrey’s weak at first, growing stronger and stronger.

“ … landed in a field. Engine on fire. Nothing … I could do. Crawled out. Hid in a … ditch. Three days. Farmer turned me in. Didn’t blame him. Children … needed to eat.”

“Reginald took it hard. Very hard. You should know that he’s changed.”

“Heard. Asylum.”

“That’s not the half of it.”

“The … girl.”

“Yes, her. And us. You and me, too, mate. All three of us the same.”

“Bespelled … by stars.”

Silence for a while; I nearly floated away. Then Mandy spoke again. “You never thought—it might not be real? That you were going mad?”

Aubrey chuckled. “She asked … the same thing.”

“She has good reason. It’s been hardest on her, I think. She was the first, and she was alone.”

“She’s …”

Mandy and I both waited.

“Miraculous,” Aubrey said.

“You’ve no notion.”

“But I will, Mandy. Swear to you I will.”

I stole food from the village, a loaf of bread here, a mutton pie there. Small things from different houses, so we’d not be easily tracked.

I took the sword from the hearth and hacked free two fine straight branches from a pine, and made a brace for Armand’s leg.

I stood as a dragon by the lake at night and mourned without words the gaping tear in my wing. It could have used some stitches, but I’d have to stay in this shape too long for it to mend. So I would endure it.

There were, after all, many others enduring much worse.

On our second morning there, I sat with Armand and Aubrey upon the big bed, offering hunks of bread and cheese as Armand smoothed out the newspaper I’d used to wrap it all in for my hike back to the lodge.

There I was again, right on the front page. I looked even more fiendish than the last drawing. This time I’d been given horns.

“Stylish,” I decided, analyzing the illustration. “Elegant but deadly. Perhaps I’ll grow some for real.”

“Perfect as you are,” Aubrey assured me.

“Even better than perfect.” Armand had to top him.

I eyed them both. I’d been hoping, now that the flickering had stopped and the sun had firmly shoved its way inside the cabin, that Aubrey’s condition wouldn’t look so dire, that Armand’s leg wouldn’t be a true break but a sprain or a very bad bruise. But there was no denying that the situation was quite as critical as I’d feared. Aubrey was propped against the pillows; he was sitting up on his own, but that was about all he could do. Armand rested beside him, his bad leg stretched atop the covers, because otherwise the bark from my brace flaked off into the sheets. His toes were turning puce.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Trying to work matters through. Obviously we need to leave here as soon as we can. Tonight. I believe if we start early enough I can get us across the Channel from here in one stretch, but we should consider what’s going to happen after that. We can land in Dover, and Mandy can say he’s been in an accident or something. But Aubrey, you’re inexplicable. You’re a peer. It’s been widely reported in the papers that you’ve been captured. You’ll have to have either a new name or a new face or a damned credible reason for being in England instead of a German prison camp, and I swear I can’t think of a single one.”

“No, I can’t go … to England. I’m no … deserter. France. Get me there. I’ll get myself home.”

My gaze fell to his hands, the blackened nails, the fingers and knuckles scabbed over so severely there wasn’t any skin left. Good hands, he’d told me, but I’d seen enough burns at Tranquility to know he’d likely never open his fingers again.

Tears pricked behind my lids, which irritated me. Neither of them was acting overly emotional, and they frankly looked as if they might breathe their last at any moment. I had to be stronger than they.

“Where in France?” I asked.

“Casualty clearing station. Army. They’ll take me in.”

I pressed, reluctant, “But I think I’m supposed to get you home.”

“Eleanore. You already have.”

I looked up, took in his ravaged face, the tender smile. The tears pricked hotter.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, miracle Eleanore.”

“What is it with you two?” I snarled. “Don’t thank me until it’s all done.”

I got up and stalked to the window. The lake outside gleamed green and slate, smooth as a looking glass, unbroken as far as I could see. The forest surrounding it seemed a lot less like the safe haven I’d first thought it. More full of holes.

“You’d better live,” I said without turning around. “Both of you.”

“I shall,” answered Aubrey.

“To my dying day,” topped Armand.

Boys.

A casualty clearing station was like a field hospital near the front. Which meant, logically, having to venture near the front. I promise you, it’s even more harrowing than it sounds. I attempted to keep us high enough to avoid the gunfire, the terrible strands of poisonous gas that slithered along the ground and ate like acid into everything they touched. Chlorine gas, phosgene. I’d seen firsthand what harm chemicals and sinister minds could do, and none of us had masks.

Trenches were laid out below us very much as they’d been on the maps, long, winding lines scarring the earth, hiding desperate men. Protecting them from the mortars that arced white and yellow fire above their heads. Smothering them with dirt and desolation.