The Deepest Night

Chapter 26

Mr. Hunter kept a trunk full of spare clothing in the second bedroom. He was a bigger bloke than either of us, but we both got fresh shirts and trousers, and Armand a new leather coat. They were winter clothes, woolens and heavy twills, but I thought that a good thing. The sky was a much colder place than the ground, even in high summer.

Armand had gone through every book in the case searching for clues about where we were and had come up empty-handed.

“Philosophy, agriculture, crime novels. Quite a few monographs on waterfowl and guns.”

“Imagine that,” I said, gnawing at the last strip of venison.

“But this chap hasn’t kept so much as a scrap of newspaper, local or otherwise. We could be anywhere.”

“Anywhere in Germany,” I corrected him.

He was seated by the crystal goblets, a book in each hand. Splintered light from the goblets threw prisms across him, across the pages of the books. He frowned down at them, then up at me.

“Right. Anywhere in Germany. But until we figure out exactly where, we don’t know which way to go to reach Schloss des Mondes.”

“I’ll Turn to smoke and locate the nearest village. Sneak down there, find a daily or a placard, something with a name on it, then come back to you. Will that help?”

“It might,” he said, “except that it won’t be necessary, since I’m coming with you.”

“You can’t. I can’t travel as a dragon in daylight, Armand, and I don’t think either of us is up for another hours-long hike through the woods.”

His brows arched. He looked at me without speaking.

“And you can’t Turn!” I burst out, more strongly than I’d meant to. “I mean, it’s too soon for you,” I added, calmer. “There’s likely to be more pain, isn’t there? And what if you can’t hold it? What if you Turn back in midair? What am I supposed to do then?”

“What if you can’t hold it?” he countered, closing both books.

“I’m better at this than you are!”

“Only more practiced.”

“Precisely.” I folded my arms across my chest. “So I’m the obvious choice to go.”

“No. We’re a pair, remember? We stick together. That’s the way it’s meant to be.”

I laughed, but it was mostly angry. “You can’t stop me from doing what I want.”

“And,” he said quietly, rising to his feet, “you cannot stop me, either, Eleanore. Not any longer.”

Stalemate. This was my thanks for sacrificing my life for his. He’d survived one Turn and was now convinced he was the master of it. Born into wealth, coddled by society, Lord Armand had always been granted power over whatever—or whomever—he desired. How could I have forgotten it?

We glared at each other as the light grew softer and the prisms laid their rainbows long across the empty chair.

“What if you Turn into a dragon?” I asked. “Right there, in the middle of town. What if that happens, your mighty lordship?”

It had taken days after my first Turn into smoke to make myself a dragon. It might be the same for Armand. It might not. I’d thought the world topsy-turvy last night. Today it was positively upside down, inside out, and sideways.

“Then let’s hope I’m as lovely a dragon as you are,” he replied. “I’ll stun them into submission with my overwhelming splendor.”

“You’re cracked.”

“No.” He came forward, took up my hand. I half expected him to kiss it, shake it, something—but he only held on. “Merely stubborn. Heart-kin to you.”

Heart-kin. Kin of the heart.

Was that why I was so afraid for him?

The nearest village seemed very near indeed, especially from the air. It lay approximately ten miles beyond the opposite shore of the lake, an attractive collection of brick buildings and cobblestone lanes. In its middle was a wide, fine square with a statue of a man holding aloft something that might have been a club.

We floated over it, two patches of haze against the blue sky, absolutely unnoticed.

I’d made Armand Turn twice at the lodge before we’d left. He’d been right, of course: Now that he could transform into smoke, I couldn’t truly stop him from following me anywhere, but at least he’d decided to humor me and practice the Turns.

I didn’t think the stars were going to steal him now, not really. Better that he be able to remain smoke with me than to suddenly manifest as a clothesless young man in the middle of a crowd.

The first time he’d Turned back into a human, he’d thrown up again, making a mess of the kitchen floor.

The second time, he’d held it in, but only barely—I could tell.

He’d refused a third practice, looking daggers at me from behind one of the reading chairs. It was clear I wasn’t going to budge him.

“We’re wasting time. It’s already past six. We need to get going.”

“All right. Stay thin,” I said, and then thought better of it. “Not too thin, though. Thin enough to escape scrutiny. Not so thin that you—you blow away.”

“Blow away?”

“Disperse. Pull apart.”

Once more, that arched-eyebrow look.

“Just do as I do,” I growled.

“As you wish, love.”

“I wish you’d stay here and let me take care of this.”

“Nearly as you wish, then.”

Closer inspection of the statue in the square revealed that the man was holding up a spyglass. Since there wasn’t an ocean anywhere nearby, I assumed it was meant for the stars. Perhaps this was a learned place. Perhaps the people here had their own special kinship with the inhabitants of the heavens.

If I could have shivered, I would have. Instead, I glided toward a whitewashed stall along one of the streets displaying broadsheets and periodicals. A collection of men and women loitered in front of it, some of them smoking.

Armand and I mingled with the blue-gray miasma rising up from the cigarettes and cigars.

Most of the people were clutching the same edition of a broadsheet, talking to each other excitedly. I couldn’t understand what they were saying; then I glimpsed the broadsheet, and realized I didn’t need to understand.

Ein Drache! blared the headline.

Beneath it was an illustration of a monster. It was exceedingly scary, with bulging eyes and savage, needle-pointed teeth. Flames were shooting from its mouth. Its tail was some sort of a cannon, its wings resembled those of an aeroplane, and the entire thing appeared to be cut up into segments joined by fancy clockwork gears and machinery.

It was a mechanical dragon.

It was me.

I sank closer, caught between outrage and flattery.

I hoped my eyes didn’t bulge like that. I knew they got the rest of it wrong. But still, there I was. Soldiers had been drawn at my feet, firing up at me bravely.

That company from the village. Those soldiers who’d run. That’s who they were supposed to be.

I was so enthralled with it that when the man I’d been hovering over folded up the paper and tucked it under his arm, I was annoyed. I moved over to the next man, who was still reading, and only then noticed that Armand was missing.

I made myself go still. I wanted to shoot upward, around. I wanted to fly, and fly hard. But if he’d been overcome and had to Turn back into his human shape somewhere, I needed to find him without drawing anyone’s attention.

I inched away, away from the stall. I went as thin as I dared and cast out my senses, searching for him.

People everywhere. Horses and carriages. A smattering of automobiles. Dogs, cats. Stoves stoked hot for dinners. Lives lived behind closed doors, the war so far away. The forest so near.

For some reason, I kept envisioning pastries. Delicious berry-chocolate-vanilla-pear-plum-cream pastries …

No, I need Armand.

Yeasty dough. Crumbly crusts.

Armand!

Apples and icing.

Strudel.

There was a bakery at the opposite end of the square. It had a garish orange awning and spotless windows that gleamed. Figures moved around inside, lost to shadows.

One of them had to be Mandy.

I flowed to the doorway, seeped through a crack between the door and the jamb. A man in an apron stood behind the counter, a young mother with a child attached to each hand before him, perusing trays of bread. The smaller child was bouncing on her toes and squeaking something in a treble, eager voice. Her free hand was pointing at the iced strudels, and bloody Armand was nowhere in sight, not as smoke or a boy or anything.

But he was here. I could feel him.

The baker reached over the counter to hand the little girl a bite of sweet. She accepted it with another happy squeak.

Below them, I realized. Below me. That’s where he was.

I examined the floorboards, which seemed too tightly set to slip though. Would there be a basement down there? A door leading to it?

The answer was yes to both. Off to the right behind the counter was the door, slightly agape. I hovered against the ceiling a moment, judging, then—as the baker was handing a sweet to the other child, and the mother was settling her chosen loaf into her basket—I zipped past them, squeezing through the gap of the door.

Tight wooden stairs, no lamps or any light but for what came from a single small window up near the ceiling. I flowed down into the chamber, which I realized must be where the baking was done. There were vats of flour and molasses and salt, bowls of dough rising with dampened cloths covering swollen tops, an icebox, and an oven in the wall composed of blackened bricks and a blackened iron door.

Metal contraptions that looked like the scaffolding back at Tranquility hugged the walls, only these were filled with the baker’s wares, everything from bread to cake to … strudel.

Armand was leaning against one of the racks, watching me with glowing blue eyes. The bruise on his head was more vivid than ever. A small puddle of bile near his feet had been concealed with a cloth.

I told you so seemed both mean-spirited and insufficient. Perhaps I’d try Next time you might listen to me. Or Not as easy as you thought, is it?

I Turned to girl. Before I could speak, the door above us opened—but a bell rang at nearly the same instant, accompanied by footsteps. Another customer must have arrived.

The door swung closed.

Armand really did look wretched. Although he was attempting to hide it, I could tell that the rack was holding him up. Chiding him now would be unsporting, I supposed.

So, instead, I reached out and took a pastry. It was one of the cream-filled ones, puffy and round. I tore off a piece of it and placed it in my mouth, never taking my gaze from his. I ate it like that, bite by bite, until it was gone.

Then I took another.

He straightened, swallowing. He removed a puff from the shelf beside him and copied me, eating it, looking at me, neither of us saying a word, until we’d each had five of them and the glow had faded from his eyes.

Then I wanted some water. There was a sink and faucet beneath the window. I found a measuring cup, blew away the layer of flour inside it, then carefully, carefully, turned the spigot.

Water trickled out. I filled the cup, drank, filled it again, closed the spigot, and carried the cup to Armand.

He accepted it. A dab of filling dotted the corner of his lips. I wiped it away with my thumb before he drank; he held still for that, unsmiling. His skin felt prickly with whiskers.

Something happened then. Something that started in my hand, the one that had touched him, and spread in a tingle up my arm. It was hot and heady, almost dizzying. It shook me awake to the fact that I wasn’t the only one without a stitch of clothing on. And that we stood only inches apart, and his lips were so warm and we were wreathed in the aroma of molasses and freshly baked bread and if I took one step, even a small one, our bodies would brush.

And I didn’t know what would happen after that.

Armand lifted his hand, drained the cup.

“Better?” I whispered.

He nodded.

“Think you can Turn?”

He nodded again.

“Last one to the lodge is a rotten egg,” I said, and made certain he flew just ahead of me the entire way back.

Armand informed me that the German broadsheet had been giving an account of a dastardly new British weapon, a monstrous dragon apparatus recently employed to raze defenseless villages, incinerate vital food supplies, and slay sobbing children.

“How insulting,” I said. I was resting flat upon the bed, trying to relax as best I could before we had to journey on later that night.

“War propaganda is hardly ever true,” he noted. Instead of the bed, he’d chosen the chair by the door again. His voice sounded sleepy. Still … maybe I hadn’t been the only one shaken back at the bakery. There was lots of room left in the bed.

“Even so,” I persisted. “It doesn’t make any sense. How could such a contraption possibly work? And why design a machine meant to do those things as a dragon? Why not a—a lion or a hawk?”

“Because dragons are the most formidable creatures of all. Because we exist at the fringes of their imaginations, nefarious and bloodcurdling and never quite fully defined. We can be shaped however they wish, assigned any horrific trait they dare to invoke. We’re the accumulation of all that they fear, most of all themselves. Why not a dragon? It makes perfect sense to me.”

“Idiots,” I muttered.

“In any case, what’s the alternative? It had to be a mechanical weapon attacking those soldiers. Everyone knows that dragons aren’t real.”

I sat up to see him. “My eyes don’t look like that. Bulging like that. Do they?”

Mandy was slouched sideways against the leather, his head tipped back and his eyes closed. But he smiled. “Not in the least. Your eyes are gorgeous. You’d be the belle of the drákon ball.”

“Are you mocking me?”

“Never.”

I remained as I was, unconvinced. He shifted to the other side of the chair.

“Your dragon eyes are nothing like what the paper showed. They’re almond-shaped, iridescent. The rest of your face is gold, but they’re ringed in purple.”

“Like a raccoon?” I’d seen a drawing of one once. It had looked like a rat with a sharp, pointed nose.

He laughed. “Not really. Just like … markings, I suppose. You’ve never seen your own face?”

“No. How could I have?” I’d barely noticed even my human face. Mirrors weren’t exactly a vital part of my existence. I used them to ensure that I was free of smudges and that my hair was pinned tightly enough to avoid Mrs. Westcliffe’s censure. That was about it.

“Belle of the ball,” he assured me. “No wonder the other girls at Iverson snipe at you.”

“Right. That’s why.”

I eased back down. Gradually the room melted into that greeny gray darkness, and Armand’s breathing slowed. I watched the air condense into night. I listened to the insects in the forest clicking their tiny dusk songs. Frogs. The water bird by the lake, piping alone.

“Are you going to marry me, Eleanore Jones?” Armand asked, his words barely breaching the dark.

Yes. No.

How could I, and how could I not?

“Ask me again later,” I answered at last. “Ask me when this is all done, and we’re back in England, and the sun is shining.”

Ask me then, if I’m still walking in this life beside you.