Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

He shouldn’t have stayed. He should have gone home after leaving her room. Truth was, his hair was mussed and his cuffs were damp and she wasn’t even present, and now here he was trapped beside Chloe yet again, suffocating in her noxious perfume. Pretending to listen to her natter on about a dress or a hat or her new gloves—it was always a dress, a hat, or new gloves; all right, and sometimes shoes—with his spoon gripped so tightly in his hand that his thumb and forefinger had gone white, and the tea bits whirling about in some awful, endless pattern, everything the same, every day the same, just as it always was. Just as it always was going to be.

He had a swift and utterly lucid vision of himself in this position in thirty-odd years. Loathsome tea, hot steam, silver spoon, and fifty-year-old Chloe seated opposite him talking about clothing, because to her it was categorically, absolutely, the most fascinating topic on the planet.

Besides, of course, herself.

For an unflinching instant, Armand wished with his whole heart that he were dead.

Then, at the very edge of his perception, something changed.

He glanced up.

She was passing by the doorway, walking with that fluid, nearly animal grace that no one else seemed to capture or even notice.

He was given four steps of her.

One: She moved from the hallway shadows into the light cast from the parlor. He saw her illuminated, drab colors gone bright; her skin alabaster, reflective; her hair tinted pink and gold and pink again.

Two: Her gaze met his, finding him past all the other people crowded inside the stuffy mirrored room, dying by inches and taking their tea.

Three: He was paralyzed. He couldn’t move, couldn’t smile, couldn’t nod. He was pinned in the gray of her eyes, a prisoner to their piercing clarity.

For an unflinching instant, Armand felt his heart explode like a firework, and the future seemed unwritten.

Then four: Eleanore looked away and passed the doorway. He was stuck with tea and dresses once more.

We drank, of course, at the orphanage.

We were crafty about it, or at least tried to be, and nearly universally tight-lipped regarding the specific whens and wheres and whos. Rules ensnared every aspect of our lives, Blisshaven’s rules and our own, which were tacit and far more savage. From the time we were old enough to understand what gin was, we procured it and drank it. Anyone suspected of being a snitch tended to end up in the infirmary, usually missing teeth.

We had no money. We were given no allowance, not even a ha’penny for a peppermint stick or a cup of lemonade during our precious few outings into the city. So those who landed the gin were usually the quick-fingered older boys. The ones on the verge of something larger than themselves, with cracking voices and cunning gazes, who knew that the future rushing toward them was going to be even more desolate than their lives in the dorms. Who bonded into packs for dominance, who skulked about like hungry dogs let loose in the halls.

Who could slink away from our minders without getting caught. Who could distract a shopkeeper or pubmaster—and then run.

But even though they got their gin for free, they were still dogs. The gin wasn’t free to any of the rest of us.

As I said, we had no money. So it won’t astonish you to learn that although I’d never tasted fine wine before—or even mediocre wine or whisky or champagne—I had tasted the raw, crude distillation of juniper berries in alcohol, quite a bit.

Jesse’s kiss, staggering as it was, was not my first.

I had learned the same lessons as most of the other girls in Blisshaven. Bargain for limits on time and body parts. Don’t let them use their tongues. Avoid Billy Patrick at all costs—grinning, vicious Billy Patrick—because no amount of gin he ever offered would be worth the bruises he left.

And never drink so much that you regretted your morning. The teachers were particularly short-tempered before noon. They weren’t likely to go soft on anyone lethargic, even if you said you were feeling off.

I had measured out my sips, my kisses, savoring the one while pretending I was someone else for the other, and in all my years there, I never went to bed intoxicated.

It was disheartening to discover myself so quickly affected by Jesse’s sweet red wine, but at least I knew the cure. I couldn’t risk the Sunday tea—especially after I’d glimpsed Armand in there, his blue eyes like flames—so I retreated to my room and slept.

By breakfast the next morning, aside from a dull ache in my forehead and a fuzzy coating on my tongue, I was more or less hale again.

Drákon.

I whispered it to my mirror-self before dressing, watching her face, her eyes, round black pupils, purple-gray irises shrunk into gleaming rings.

“Drákon,” I said aloud, and the girl in the mirror slowly smiled.

Even now I don’t think any lingering consequences of the wine were responsible for what happened that Monday. I think it was just something that was bound to be: Jesse’s all-knowing stars casting their own directions for the unruly path of my life.

...

“All right, then, ladies. Let’s be off,” commanded Professor Tilbury.

Tilbury was our history professor, potbellied and aged and with a voice that reached dangerously close to a squeak whenever he tried to raise it. He stood before us with his back to the large slate that had been fixed to the wall of our classroom. A single word, Iverson, had been chalked across the slate, with a long, uncharacteristic flourish of a tail completing the n.

We sat two by two in assigned rows, because the history classroom was crammed up short against the southern edge of the castle, which meant it was very narrow and unexpectedly lofty.

My chair was next to Lillian’s in the far back. From our shared desk, Professor Tilbury looked like a white-bearded gnome against the slate.

He surveyed the lot of us; no one had moved. “To your feet, young ladies! Today is a most special day indeed. Today we will enjoy a walking tour of the history of our own fortress.”

Beatrice and Stella, directly ahead of me, exchanged eye rolls.

“Sir,” said Mittie from the very front, in her most piteous tone, “isn’t it cold out for a walk? We haven’t even our shawls.”

It had dawned another overcast day, with a brisk spring wind blowing spray in fitful spurts across the channel, rattling the windowpanes. Still, pug-faced Mittie was far from any danger of freezing. She just liked to whine.

Professor Tilbury must have heard every whine before.

“The majority of our tour will be within the castle walls, Miss Bashier. If you didn’t need your shawl for this chamber, you will not need it for the rest of them. However, if you truly feel a shawl is indispensable to your attire, you may fetch it now. The rest of us shall await you here. Naturally, any amount of time taken from the scheduled class period by your absence shall be made up by all of you at its conclusion.”

The hour after history was luncheon. Even Mittie wasn’t stupid enough to push matters that far.

I arose from my chair, glad to be doing something besides sitting and scratching down notes, anyway. One by one, the other girls did the same.

Confident that he had made his point, Professor Tilbury offered us what, for him, passed as a smile. He had blocky yellow teeth.

“Excellent. Let us begin at the beginning. Do any of you know what this room used to be?”

None of us did.

“Iverson’s original keep was constructed by the conquering sons of Normandy. It was ruled by barons who commanded the wealth of the ports and all the fertile lands nearby.” Someone tittered at the word fertile; Tilbury forged on. “Therefore, this fortress, even from its inception, was home to a powerful, prosperous lord and his family. It also would have been home to all his knights and servants and their families, as well. A castle this size might have had several hundred people living inside it, and that is before we even begin to consider the livestock.”

“How primitive,” sniffed Caroline.

“Primitive, mayhap, but necessary. So imagine you are that powerful lord who controls this castle, if you will. Where do you go for your privacy? Where do you retreat with your family to escape the everlasting noises and smells and demands of the general populace?”

A word came to me, a word from the past. It bobbed up from the blank ocean of my memory, untethered.

“The solar,” I said.

Professor Tilbury angled his head to find me standing in the back. “Yes, Miss Jones. Very good. The solar. Solar as in solaris, a place of the sun. Note our tall southerly windows, the near-constant light. Castles such as Iverson typically included a construct like this for the exclusive use of the ruling family, built above the ground floor so that the baron might observe the workings of his people below.”

“It’s terribly small for a family,” doubted Stella, looking around.

“Correct, Miss Campbell. The solar of Iverson is no longer in its original configuration. It was partitioned off, probably sometime in the late seventeenth century. The remaining portion of it,” he gestured toward the wall with the slate, “was converted into private quarters for the dukes and duchesses of Idylling.”

We all pricked up our ears at that. The conjugal room of all those dukes, just beyond our slate? Only a layer of stones—and perhaps a secret tunnel—between us and a marital bed?

Malinda and Caroline jostled each other, snickering. Pale Lillian had blotches of pink spreading up her throat.

“If you please, sir,” said Sophia sweetly, covering the snickers, “who stays there now?”

Likely Mrs. Westcliffe. She might not be a duchess or even a baroness, but there was no question about her rule.

Yet the professor surprised me.

“No one,” he answered, curt. “No one has occupied those quarters in years. They are locked off.”

“Why?” asked Mittie.

“It is the wish of the current duke. And that is all I know on the subject, so kindly don’t request that we venture into them. We will not. However, there are many, many other fascinating facts about Iverson to explore. Come along.”

He led us out of the room, talking all the while. I hung at the back of the crowd, as usual. I’d found I liked skulking behind the rest of the girls. It gave me the opportunity to disguise myself in their shadows. To the teachers I appeared proximate enough to be part of their group. The truth could be glimpsed only in the shifting, untouched space that stretched from the hems of their skirts to mine, never closing.

Good enough.

Everyone has a favorite something, and on that day I discovered that Professor Tilbury’s was castles. The eight of us trailed behind him in our sluggish, uneven line, but he was so enraptured with his subject he never noticed our dragging feet; he practically danced a wee gnome dance ahead of us.

We learned about great halls and granaries, moats and bowers. A buttery was not, as might be assumed, a place where butter was produced. But the kitchen hearth might, as would be assumed, be large enough to roast a pair of oxen for the great lord’s pleasure, should the need arise.

Oxen. We snaked only briefly through the kitchens, disrupting the hectic rhythm of the workers there, to their silent, tucked-chin displeasure. I saw Gladys arranging forks and white doilies on trays. Almeda was fussing over a cabinet of linens, snowy starched piles folded and stacked one atop another, towers of white.

A stink of blood and fried onions hung hot in the air. One entire counter was heaped with oozy plucked chickens; a sweaty brown-haired girl of about twelve was the plucker. Sticky bits of feathers dotted her apron and arms.

Everyone stopped what they were doing as we passed, dropping into half bows or curtsies, which my classmates regally ignored.

Only Gladys lifted her eyes to mine when I walked by. Her mouth hardened, taking on a scornful slant. I could tell exactly what she was thinking: Just you wait, governess.

It shamed me for some reason. I don’t know why. My world was a hidden blossom of gold and Jesse and the promise of searing magic, but through no fault of her own, stick-skinny Gladys would likely only ever be what she was right this minute. A servant.