Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

And the brown-eyed man, tumbled from the gondola. Three others like him, all of them shrieking as they hurtled to their deaths in the waiting sea.

I swooped toward him. I reached out for him.

Shiny talons curved around his wrist; I was pulled sideways from his sudden weight.

It seemed I was a dragon, after all.

* * *

Below us, all the sea flashed bright. Brief as a comet, glittering light spreading out miles in a fantastical, brilliant bloom. Night turned by Jesse into golden day.

Then it was over. The channel plunged to purple-black again.

He lifted his face from the crook of his arm. He wiped the sand from his lids and allowed himself to breathe again, taking in the charred air, salt spray and diesel smoke blowing over him in gusts. The smoke was especially foul, caustic stinking grease that seared his eyes and made him wipe at them again.

Armand climbed out of the Atalanta. Whatever had compelled him to fall back here in the first place—that infuriating, unbreakable command from Holms—no longer held him. He leapt down the slope, skidding through an avalanche of dirt and rocks, and bounded across the beach to the other boy.

Holms had collapsed on his side, one arm still stretched out to the channel. Mandy took him by the shoulders and rolled him to his back. It was dark out here, ruddy dark. Or maybe it was just that his eyes hadn’t adjusted yet from staring at Holms when he’d detonated without warning into solid light.

“Holms. Holms! Jesse, wake up!”

Water shifted and sighed over the pebbles. Jesse was getting wet. Armand’s knees were getting wet.

“Holms, did you see it?” he persisted. He tore out of his coat and lifted Jesse enough to spread it beneath him; the wool went damp right away. “She did it! She brought them both down– bloody, bloody amazing. Holms! Did you get the sub?”

There—the smallest thing: Jesse swallowing, his eyes still closed. Mandy felt hope ignite inside him, hard and glittering as the cast of golden fire.

“You did, didn’t you? Come on, old chap. Tell me you did.”

“Did.”

“Excellent! Excellent! So let’s get up, then, eh, and go find her. Go tell her, together.”

Jesse smiled. His eyes never opened. The sea sifted nearer, pulled back. The pebbles all around them shone glassy with water.

“Jesse,” Mandy said.

The wind fell calm. The diesel smoke wafted gently away.

“Jesse.”

The sea drew back. Nothing else moved.

Mandy bent double, lowering his forehead to Jesse Holms’s shoulder. His fingers felt like rusted iron against the coat. He could not get his fingers to unlock.

“I’ll tell her,” he whispered. “I’ll tell her all that you did.”

The funeral for a hired hand is not the same as one for a marquess.

Mrs. Westcliffe was there for both. I guess that was the same.

Armand was there for both.

I attended only Jesse’s. It probably would have been politic of me to also go to the marquess’s; I had been summoned, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to go anywhere, really. I wanted only to stay in my tower, in my bed, and spend the rest of my life doing nothing more than staring up at the ceiling, watching the spiders wending around on spindly legs, weaving their opal webs.

I roused myself for Jesse. That was all.

I stood between Mrs. Westcliffe and someone else. I think it was Professor Tilbury. Most of the teachers had shown up, which vaguely surprised me. Quite a few of the villagers, as well, along with all the other Iverson employees.

I was the only student. Even Malinda hadn’t come.

Lord Armand—now the new Marquess of Sherborne—was the highest-ranking person in attendance, so he’d been given a place of honor right by the pit dug for the grave. He stood a solemn figure in stylish black, almost directly across from me. Whenever I glanced his way, he was staring at me. Lots of people were staring at me, frankly, but his was the only gaze that stung. So I tried not to look at him.

I also could not look at Hastings. If I looked at Hastings, stooped over his cane, I began drowning in a shame so deep and profound it made me tremble, and Tilbury would eye me uneasily and pat me on the arm.

It was my injured arm, too. It was bandaged up, but you couldn’t see the bandages beneath the peacoat, so he didn’t know.

Mrs. Westcliffe wouldn’t glance at me at all. I think she no longer knew quite what to make of me. Was I an accidental heroine, as Armand had publically insisted, or was I something much different: a conniving slum girl who had taken advantage of her beloved Reginald’s weakness and largesse?

There had been no disguising what the duke had done that night, or what he’d meant to do. Despite our initial intent to spirit him away and cover the whole thing over with darkness and lies, two burning dirigibles—visible for miles along the coast, I’d heard—were impossible to disguise. They’d woken everyone in the castle, everyone in the village, likely every single person all the way to Bournemouth. Woken them right up to the war.

And then we had been found, Armand and Jesse and me, there on that beach of broken stones.

And the duke had been found, because two minor children suffering bullet wounds, one of them dead, could not be explained away with any of the dubious, unsteady excuses that had come to me at the time.

Eventually, even the German I’d saved had been found. I’d left him in a cove of brutal surf and steep cliffs on every side. I suppose he could have tried to swim for it–I would have–but he didn’t. By the next afternoon, a shepherd boy had heard his shouts and he’d been hauled up the cliffs and confined to an empty pigeon house, the sole survivor of his doomed mission.

Gone cracked, though, from the ordeal. Ranting in perfect English about dragons and a young woman who could fly.

No one believed him. A few people swore the airships had suffered lightning strikes, although the night had seemed so clear. A few more vowed they’d spotted them off the bluffs and fired at them, and that had brought them down.

Whatever it had been, everyone seemed certain of two things. It had not been a dragon, and it had not been the poor, tormented Duke of Idylling.

We’d had to give him up. To his credit, Armand had led the authorities straight to him, and apparently in the nick of time, too, as he’d been coming ’round. So no one else got shot.

I was in the hands of the local physician by then, who turned out to be the bespectacled man from the birthday party, the one chatting up Miss Swanston. He didn’t seem to mind that I’d fallen mute, just like I’d been as a child. Other people talked and talked at me, but I had nothing to say.

Let silver-tongued Mandy come up with his crafty mesh of facts and fabrications. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t react, not even when the bullet was fished from my arm.

I was still back on that beach, you see. I couldn’t leave it. I couldn’t leave Jesse.

Over the next few days, Sophia had visited enough times that I knew all the school gossip, which included a variety of tales: That Jesse and I had been lovers, and the duke had discovered us on the roof. That Armand and Jesse had been lovers, and I had been jealous enough to inform the duke. That Jesse and Armand and I had been lovers, and the duke had tried to murder us all… .

Armand’s official story was this:

He had discovered what his father intended that night and had raced to the castle to stop him. By pure chance he’d come across Jesse walking the grounds and had enlisted his help. He’d thought, Armand had explained bleakly to Mrs. Westcliffe when they were alone, that he could trust Holms. That perhaps there’d be a chance to hush it all up still, allow the family to deal with the situation privately. And that—although he was deeply mortified to admit it now—even if Holms had wanted to tell, he would be unable. Mute, you know. Simple.

But Holms had proven stalwart and valiant. When Miss Jones had shown up to discover them in the castle hallway, because she’d heard a suspicious noise and had feared for her schoolchums’ safety, they’d had to bring her along. She’d wanted to run straight to the headmistress, of course, but Armand had persuaded her not to. How he regretted that decision now!

The duke had fired his guns at them all. They’d retreated, thought to go to the automobile to fetch a doctor and the sheriff, but they’d stumbled the wrong way and fallen down the slope to the beach instead. All three of them. And there, noble Jesse had died.

Fact. Fiction. Likely because so much of it had happened, and because Armand’s red-eyed, stoic distress seemed so genuine, the adults around us had accepted it as truth.

Mostly.

I think if I hadn’t been discovered wearing only Armand’s coat as I knelt next to Jesse’s body, Mrs. Westcliffe might have found the whole thing easier to swallow.

Yet the official version ruled the day. And here we all were basking in it, breathing fresh sea air, warmed by the generous spring sun. Burying a hero. A far, far greater hero than anyone standing around me at his funeral would ever suspect.

Somewhere in deep-blue briny waters, a U-boat rested, filled with live torpedoes and solid-gold men.

I thought I better understood Rue’s letters now. I understood her warnings about the pain that would come with my Gifts.

I understood my sacrifice.

I listened to the vicar speak. I listened to the breeze. The birds. The sea. I watched the first handful of dirt land on Jesse’s coffin and thought with absolute sincerity, Wish it were me.

...

I waited until Aubrey’s funeral to steal away. It wasn’t long to wait, only a week, so I made myself tolerate it.

I paid attention to my spiders. Their remarkable webs.

Due to a loss of blood, I’d been excused from attending classes, although the professors had made an effort to extend their best wishes for my recovery, mostly by assigning me homework. It’d been piling up on the bureau. I knew I should at least inspect it, but it bored me. Everything bored me.

Let them kick me out of Iverson if they wanted. Perhaps I’d fly to the moon to live.

Lora-of-the-moon. That would be me.

I itched where I was healing. The wound to my wing was a phantom itch somewhere in the vicinity of my shoulder blade; unlike with my arm, no bullet hole showed there in my human form. But that particular itch was especially maddening, because I could not scratch at it. It was always present.

The following Saturday morning, the castle emptied. I got up to watch them all go, all the ebony girls, all the teachers, most of the help. Sophia had told me the formal ceremony was to be held at Tranquility, which had a completed chapel and nice, virgin grounds for its first grave. They would be burying an empty casket.

The duke, regretfully, would be unable to attend.

I wondered briefly if his madhouse was anything like mine had been, and found that I couldn’t wish Moor Gate even on the man who had killed my true love.

I dressed–Blisshaven’s clothes, not Iverson’s. I walked like I knew what I was doing and where I was going, which was true, and I left the fortress.

It was an easy journey through the forest. The day was sublime, the kind of day reverently described in those sweeping, romantic histories of England that populated the castle library. Shafts of sunlight broke through the green canopy of trees, daubing yellow along wildflowers and butterflies and once even a rabbit, half a primrose in his mouth, staring at me with his ears high and straight.

I could smell the coming summer still, just as I had my first evening here, as I’d stepped from the train. It was warmer and lusher now, less a tinge in the air than a sultry blossoming. It traveled across the sea and laced through these woods. It slipped up my arms and neck and face and kissed me with the faintest hint of bitter salt.

Summer in the woods. Summer on the isle. I imagined it all so … full of life.

Jesse’s cottage stood deserted. I’d wondered if Hastings had come by yet—surely he had—or had thought to maybe move into it now himself from his loft above the stables. Seemed like it be would nicer than living over horses.

I knocked on the door, in case. No one answered.