Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

Her eyes opened. She registered his presence without an ounce of surprise.

“It’s not your birthday, is it?” she said, straightening. “It’s his.”

Neither of them glanced up at the portrait. Certainly Mandy didn’t need to look at it; he’d memorized it years ago.

“Aubrey Emerson Hugo, the Most Honourable Marquess of Sherborne. He’s a glorious twenty-one years old today, wherever he is.”

“No one told me you had a brother.”

“Didn’t they?” he said lightly. “I’m flabbergasted. It seems to me I can hardly go anywhere without people singing his praises.”

“Is he dead?” she asked, with that open candor no one else ever offered him.

“I hope not,” Mandy replied. “Because I don’t want to be a sodding duke.”

She nodded at that, unoffended. Another rare quality. Nothing he seemed to say or do ever amazed her.

“He’s a pilot,” he heard himself explaining. “Royal Flying Corps. Somehow even Reginald’s bluster couldn’t keep him from enlisting, although God knows Reggie tried. He bribed everyone he could think of to keep his golden boy here at home, but in the end, Aubrey just left. Just got up and went. And since he was of age, there was nothing Reggie could do about it.”

“You’re almost of age,” Eleanore said quietly, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees.

“Yes.” He smiled at her and wondered how it looked, if it was as bitter and twisted as he felt inside. “But Reginald learned his lesson, you see. He learned that when bluster and money don’t work, class does. Associations do. Family links. Insinuations. I went to the recruiting station at Eton with Laurence. I did everything he did, exactly the same. And now Laurence is part of the University and Public Schools Brigade, and I’m stuck here. I was told, officially, that as I’m still months short of the legal age, I should try again later. And then I was told, unofficially, not to bother.”

She held him in that frank, luminous gaze. “Why?”

“Oh, because I’m touched. Just like my mother.”

He stood up. He walked to his father’s desk, then to the window. The rage in him felt like a clenched fist in his chest.

“Such is the power of words, waif.” He fixed his focus beyond the panes, beyond the splash of light that was his father’s party to the very blackest part of the night. “Such is the power of having the ears of mighty men. Lost your heir to the cause? Don’t lose the spare. Whisper to all the right people about how your second son isn’t right. That his mother’s blood flows too freely in his veins. No one’s going to give a regiment to a madman.”

He heard her moving. He heard the rustle of her clothing as she stood, the footsteps that took her up to the fireplace and the portrait above it. He turned about to see her.

“She died of consumption. That’s what we say. I’ve repeated it so often now that I half-believe it myself. Consumption. As if anyone dies of that any longer.”

Eleanore kept her silence, but her eyes went back to his.

“She leapt from the roof of the castle,” Mandy said. “She killed herself, and Reggie moved us here. Not one mad parent but two. Bodes well for me, don’t you think?”

God, there, at last: He’d reached her. Her face drained of color, and she swayed and braced a hand against the mantelpiece for support. It wasn’t much, but he’d done it, he’d penetrated that stone-cold façade, he’d broken through to some deeper heart of her, he knew it. It was as gratifying as a fresh rush of morphine, and now the words spilled free and he couldn’t stop them if he tried.

“She heard voices, she said. Odd songs no one else could hear. Told my father there was something inside her, another person or something, and it kept telling her to jump. She’d tried it twice before, but Reggie had managed to stop her, so this time she waited until dark. Her body wasn’t found until the next afternoon, when finally they thought to search the grotto.” The bitter smile stretched across his face again. “So. At least I know I won’t lose my cunning in the end.”

“Armand,” Eleanore said, making his name a terrible sound, a sound so lovely and sweet and awful it pierced him to the core.

He sealed his lips together. He stood in place without moving, glaring at her, unwilling to surrender more of himself to any part of her.

“Armand,” she repeated, and lowered her arm. “Do you hear songs?”

“No,” he answered instantly, because he was cunning and he always knew the right thing to say, but this time it didn’t work. His glancing blow to her heart had opened her to him, or him to her, and he realized right then that not only had he broken her enough to see into her, but that she could see into him.

And she didn’t believe him.

Lies, rumors, masks; he was composed of little else. She saw it now.

He did the only thing he could. Mandy walked away, out of the study, back into the celebration of his blessed brother’s life.

He did not seek out Eleanore again.

Third letter from Rue, dated November 17, 1809

Darling girl,

Time has stolen too much from me. Time has ensured we shall never again meet face-to-face. But there are a few things more I must share with you before I Travel On.

The first is a Word.

How strange it seems to me now, but there was an era when even penning this Word would summon grievous punishment from our tribal Council. We dared not write it, we dared not speak it. We lived it only in whispers. In public locations it seemed best not even to think it, lest some Sighted human steal it from our very minds.

But the Council is gone now, all those hoary old men finally Turned to dust. I confess I find no small satisfaction in surviving them. Little difference their laws ever made to me. I was always too bold for their liking. And so I tell my friend who is my eyes and useful hands in these hard, blind years to inscribe the following letters on this page: Drákon.

That is who we are. That is what we are. And your blood, my child, ensures that no matter how many of us are gone now, done in by humans or our own foolish devices, we are not quite extinct.

Not damned quite.

I’ve hidden you well. I hid your entire line from the Council and the tribe, and of all my many notorious accomplishments—I am not so modest as to deny they are many—the secret of your life and that of your progenitors is my greatest.

They never guessed where Kit and I went, or why. They never thought beyond Europe, certainly not so far as a land of warlords and rice fields and misted mountains.

A land where dragons are worshipped instead of butchered. A place where our boy, your great-grandfather, could show his true face to the sun and fly free.

Those dead old Councilmen, those iron-fisted bastards who strangled us nigh to death with their Rules. How I wish I could gloat in their faces.

You are my final vengeance upon them, and my final grace. You hold all my hopes now, as well as my heart.

Fly well,

–Rue

How did the rest of the evening play out? I’ve no idea. I exited the study after Armand in a daze, in a heart-thumping confusion of shock and incredulity. Even though I’d followed him nearly right away, I didn’t see him anywhere, not in the hallway, not in the ballroom or the gardens after that.

I do remember some of it. I remember the duke on a graveled path with torchlight in his hair, watching me, surrounded by his fellows. I remember Miss Swanston speaking gaily to a man with silver spectacles, her head tipped to the side and him bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet. Sophia and Mittie beneath a tree, sharing glasses of stolen champagne. The colored lights gleaming, the orchestra always playing. An immense tiered cake had been placed on a central table, iced white and yellow and trimmed with garlands of marzipan. The cloying scent of it nearly turned my stomach.

At some point the cake was cut. Toasts were made. I was there for that, standing by myself beyond the bulk of the crowd.

Armand never returned to the party. And all the rest of the night, all the way back to Iverson, one thought kept rattling through my head, obsessive, persistent, offering no solutions and absolutely no peace:

Could it be possible … ?

I fell asleep that night in my tower without an answer.

Tomorrow I would find Jesse. Jesse would tell me the truth.

...

He looked down at the key in his hand and thought of all the reasons why he shouldn’t be where he was, about to do what he was about to do. It was Sunday; he was technically just a visitor to Iverson, no longer a resident; he didn’t want to run into Eleanore or Chloe or Westcliffe or any of them; he didn’t know how believable his lies would be right now should anyone discover him.

He used to be so good at lying. At guile. At deflection. It occurred to Armand in that unlit, desolate hallway, holding that key, that he hadn’t felt like himself in a long while. If he truly considered it, he seemed more a circus-mirror likeness of who he used to be, all wavy and wrong, stretched in impossible directions. Even thinking about it too much made him dizzy, perhaps because so much of who he was now was zigzag reflection, not truth.

So he didn’t leave. His hand moved, fit the dull iron key into the dull iron lock. He was honestly astonished when, after an initial moment of stiff resistance, the tumblers turned. Unless the students had learned how to pick locks, it had to be more than a decade since anyone had tried this.