My own clothing is my coffin. My heavy hoop wire, the whalebone corset, the layers and layers of underskirts. Pinned and hooked and buttoned to my body, they drag me under. My arms and legs twist in helpless panic as water closes around the crown of my head. I’m sinking, drowning, imprisoned in my cage of finery.

Swim. The word terrifies me. Once I saw an old man’s body washed into harbor. His bloated flesh and lips blue as meat have held in my memory ever since and are what I see in my mind’s wild eye. My legs and arms flail; my skirts billow up over my face.

As if it is being tugged by invisible fingers, I feel my ring loosen from my finger. I open my eyes and watch it drop, a chunk of red and gold light through black water, and then out of sight. So this is my death.

Any consecrated space. The ruined sketches, the stain of ink. Will had wanted me to remember his fury. That afternoon had been the angriest I’d ever seen him. He’d come to me in rage, not guilt. Betrayed by a brother who, in the end, had been a stranger to him. A stranger to us both. A murderer to us both. Will’s fate is now mine.

Water is heavy like sand, and it is pushing me deeper. I’m insignificant as a pebble down a well. My death will be silent. No screams, no wailing witnesses, no grip of hands hauling me to safety.

I imagine Quinn leaning over the rails, the moon catching the reflection in his dead wolf’s eye. His hands loose in his pockets as he turns away from me, just as he’d turned away from his brother. His mind carefully, detachedly preparing his alibi.

Quinn is doubtless correct, in every word, about how my death will be perceived. Alas, poor Jennie, she never did move past her grief perhaps it is all for the best.

Maybe they’re right. What use is my life if I’ve been wrenched from everyone who meant most to me? I have lost so much. Love made me mad with pleasure, but loss has made me mad with grief. What a pleasant sleep my death will bring. Unplagued by nightmares or grim reawakening.

But this is not the way it will be. For he is here, as he always has been. Pressing colder, pressing upward. I can’t perceive, I can’t touch, I can only sense the overriding force of his protection and love. Enormous and quick and unexpected, it lifts me sharp under my arms as if I’m being offered to heaven itself. Forced up against the current, I rise in a rush of vertigo.

A spy must… A spy must…

I open my mouth to cry out, and water rushes in to fill the scream. My story is not over, and today is not my death day after all. I break through the surface of the water, gasping and reborn.


30.