Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

I was certain, certain, I could raise my arms—a goddess of sea and sky, celebrating her reign—and allow the wind to lift me. And I’d be safe. I would not fall.

After all, I’d done it before, hadn’t I? I’d forgotten about it—forgotten on purpose, let the grimy haze of my London life smear away the memory. Or perhaps it had been only a dream … but surely I’d stood like this before, tilted out over an abyss. If it had been a dream, it seemed so real.

I’d climbed out the window at Blisshaven. I could still feel the slick cold glass against my fingertips, hear the squeak of the frame as I’d hefted it open.

Smoggy air on my face. The empty dark. My body feeling lighter and lighter, lighter than air.

I had tipped into that emptiness below, and then—

“Eleanore.”

I opened my eyes, just now realizing I’d closed them. Sophia had her hand on my sleeve.

“Watch it,” she said, quiet. “You’re about to make a hash of yourself.”

I looked down. I had climbed atop the low barrier between two merlons and was balanced at the rim of the stone. The tips of my shoes poked out over a dizzying drop, black leather against faraway boulders and a viscous, surging sea.

No smog. No darkness. The violence of the surf below me was clear as crystal.

I came back to myself in a sickening rush. My stomach lurched. My knees buckled. My fingers clutched at the stones.

I moved my left foot, then my right, slinking down again to the safety of the roof. Sophia released my arm.

Bloody hell. I’d nearly done it, I’d nearly stepped clean over that edge—I’d wanted to—

“Tedious lecture,” Sophia murmured while gazing at Tilbury, who was still rhapsodizing to his captive audience about the joys of medieval life. “But hardly worth ending it all, I would think.”

“Hardly,” I murmured in return, when I was convinced my voice would not break.

A frown creased her perfect brow; her eyes skimmed my frame. “You know, for a moment there, it almost looked like you were … smoldering.”

That caught me short. “I beg your pardon?”

“Like you were smoking. Your hair—your neck and hair– blurring into smoke.” Sophia shook her head once, hard. “Never mind.”

“I—”

“It’s all this wretched wind and salt, no doubt. I cannot wait to graduate from this pile of rocks, I swear.”

She walked back to the cluster of the other girls. They parted and reabsorbed her into their midst without seeming even to notice.

...

It wasn’t until we were leaving that I saw it. The lesson was concluded, and Mittie’s shivering had finally started to look real. Tilbury opened the access door and there was a short, ladylike tussle to see who would get through first, but I waited. I wasn’t sure how my knees felt about creeping down those corkscrew stairs just yet.

The clouds had thinned sheer overhead, transforming the sun into a hard silver disk. It lent a peculiar light to the limestone, blurring some crannies but heightening others, and when I gave a final glance back to the merlon I had first touched with my hand, I detected a faint tracing there that I hadn’t noticed before.

It was a single word carved along the side, where it was not readily visible. The lettering was scripted, even graceful, although stone meant to withstand the ravages of a catapult must have been damned difficult to incise.

Just as I had perceived the flicker of thoughts behind Gladys’s eyes, somehow, inexplicably, I understood that this word had been meant to serve as a final admonition, engraved as deep as desperation could manage into unyielding stone.

The word was: Don’t.

...

What if, that moment in the grotto when I asked Jesse if I was crazy, he had answered yes?

What if all this persistent strangeness about me, all the dreams and songs and the wicked voice, was not the product of mysterious magic but merely my own mundane insanity?

No such things as dragons. No such things as boys made out of stars or girls going to smoke.

I would do anything to avoid being imprisoned again. I would absolutely lie or cheat or steal.

Perhaps I would even kill.

I would kill myself. I knew that. In a soundless and static corner of my soul, I knew that.

If it meant I’d go to hell—well, it happens that there are many levels of hell, and I’d already visited a few of them.

Jumping off a castle roof would be no worse a fate.

...

I waited until twilight before attempting to find him again.

Unlike the last time I’d ventured outdoors for Jesse, I did not run through this descending eve but walked most decorously from the main doors of the castle instead. Bundled in my shawl and uniform, I might have been partaking in any one of Mrs. Westcliffe’s permitted after-supper al fresco activities, like:

Strolling to the edge of the rose garden to admire the sunset.

Strolling to the edge of the orchard to admire the sunset.

Strolling to the edge of the bridge to admire the sunset.

At England’s foremost educational opportunity for young women, strolling to the brink of things was allowed. Leaving the green—plunging beyond brinks—was not.

As the sunset tonight consisted of a watery gray cloak of clouds, it was not especially worth admiring. I was the only student even pretending to want to slog along the grounds.

Still, I tucked my shawl closer to my chest and glanced around very carefully before easing into the woods. I even scanned the castle windows, searching for telltale faces, but the panes all shone empty. If anyone did see me go, they didn’t care enough to raise a fuss.

Twilight is the best time for Fay trickery, or so I’d read. Not yet all dark, the last brief luminance of the sky fighting its inevitable death. Shadows that seemed to reach out and snatch at you; rustlings behind trees too near for comfort. Wisplights blinking off and on in the distance. Birds skipping from crown to crown of the blackened trees, calling, Farewell! Farewell! in full-throated, mournful cries… .

Gooseflesh pricked my skin, and it had nothing to do with the cold. But I was not going to be afraid of these woods, not for any reason. These were the woods that led to Jesse, so I would not be afraid.

From far away, the false thunder of airships and bombs began, a short shuddering of the air that rippled through me, but feebly, like the echo of an echo.

I walked a little faster.

In the end, it didn’t matter. By the time I found Jesse’s cottage, twilight had faded into ordinary night, and Jesse wasn’t there.

I knocked anyway, in case I was wrong. Maybe he was muting his music, like before.

The door swung open on silent hinges. No lock. No candles lit inside.

With my hand on the jamb, I took a half step forward into his home, breathing in the scent of him, subtle cinnamon overlaid now with pinewood and soap and coffee—and something else. Something that smelled very much like grass, sweetly pungent but fading rapidly.

My fingers found the bump of the cat’s-eye knot. I traced three long circles around it before turning about and leaving.

My path back to the castle looped toward the stable. I looked askance at its plain stone sides in the distance, the light leaking through the planks of the doors to lay stripes across the dirt. It appeared dollhouse small next to Iverson’s walls but in reality was likely large enough to keep horses for an entire manor.

No Jesse-music emanating from there, either, but the sweet grass smell of before billowed up and over me in waves.

Hay. Of course.

From across the yard I heard the slow, restless snufflings of very large penned animals, and the softer footsteps of someone who was likely more human-shaped.

The top level of the barn had windows of glass set back beneath the rafters, like those of a home. A figure moved behind one of them, thickset and hunched, a cap atop white hair. Mr. Hastings. He saw me and paused, then curled a hand at me from behind the glass.

Enter.

The wind puffed and the fringe of my shawl began a flutter; it seemed that as the air swept by me, the animal snufflings grew more agitated.

The gnarled hand beckoned again, more impatient.

For the second time that day, I thought, Bloody hell.

What he wanted, Jesse knew he could not fully have.

The logical part of him, the serene and celestial part of him, accepted that. She was too young; she was untested. She didn’t understand what was to come.

The enchantment threading through his every atom—tissue, bone, sinew—understood that and was strong enough and bright enough to make allowances for all those things.

But he was more than enchanted. He was a man, too. He was born of dirt, into a world of chaos and lust, and that was also his heritage. And the man in him didn’t care about her tender young years or that she had no idea what she could do or what she would have to give up to do it.

The man in him just wanted. Purely wanted. Burned with want, exactly as he had from the moment he’d watched her walking toward him that night across the train station lot, manifest at last.

Behind tonight’s mask of clouds, the stars whispered to him, cold and insistent:

she is yours and not. forever to be yours, forever to be not.

Right.

It was why he’d stayed to muck out the stalls after today’s journey into town, even though he and Hastings had done it yesterday. Even though it was well past dusk and he’d declined the shared supper of bread and stew that Hastings had offered, and the thought of retreating home was just that. Retreating. He wasn’t fit company for aught but the horses and the stable cats, who endured his ill humor well enough.