The Deepest Night (14 page)

We had about another hour before the sky would begin to catch fire. Armand knew it too (to be fair, he had a watch). With his compass in hand he pointed the way we should go, and I veered north, following the invisible path he’d set for us.

The sea gave way to bumpy, broccoli-topped forests, quilted patchworks of fields, and somewhere over the tip of France I had my moment of grace: Only a few weeks ago I’d been the outcast charity student seated on a stage before some of the most wealthy and powerful people of the kingdom, but now I, Eleanore Jones—a girl without a true home or a past or even a middle name—was on my way across enemy lines to save the life of a man I’d never met. Because I could.

And
that
was power.

I was proud of it. Pride was a sin; I’d been told that over and over again at Blisshaven, at Moor Gate, even during services at Iverson.
Pride
is
a
sin, Eleanore, especially in a woman. Women must be modest and meek. Only the meek shall thrive.

I doubted meek would get me to Prussia. It was pride curled up warm inside me, ticklish and pleasing, and if that made me bad, so be it. I planned to thrive just fine without bloody meekness.

We located a rickety, leaning barn in a pasture, exactly as Armand had predicted, and settled down tight with our blanket amid mounds of sweet-smelling hay. I fell asleep right as the giant had his way and the night cracked apart, letting in the morning sun.

Everything had gone so smoothly.

I should have known it wouldn’t last.

Chapter 21

I was asleep. It was quiet and dark. Then I was awake, and it was quiet and bright.

But it was raining wood all around me. A plank struck me hard and silent on the arm; hay swirled everywhere in a straw storm, sticking to my hair, my eyelashes. Where there had been a roof overhead before—surely there had been one?—there was now only a gray cloudy sky.

Armand was standing above me, impassioned, his lips moving, but he wasn’t making any sound. It was the most curious thing.

He reached down, hauled me upright. He grabbed the knapsack and pulled me with him toward the open doors of the barn, which hitched back and forth and back and forth as though a brutal wind had them in its grip.

I began to cough on the hay. Again, no sound.

Breaking free from the walls of the barn, I realized that everything was bright because it was daylight still, and I was deaf because a bomb had just carved a crater only feet from our shelter. It was a sizeable crater, too, deep enough to prevent a man from climbing back up should he fall in. Singed rocks and dirt formed spokes around it, a black smoldering starburst.

Armand had my hand still. We were running for the woods at the edge of the pasture when the next shell went off, farther away but still near enough to send us both to the ground.

We scrambled back to our feet. The woods beckoned, hardly sufficient protection from falling bombs but surely better than the fallow, open land we sprinted through.

We reached the first trees as the third bomb hit, and this time I was able to grab a trunk instead of falling down.

The forest around us trembled. Birds screamed from far away, and suddenly I could hear again, and Armand was yelling, “Come on! Come on!” and dragging me deeper into the shadows.

I don’t know how long we ran. Until I had a stitch in my side and I refused to keep going. I pulled free of him and bent over, puffing. The ground smelled of mulch, and my boots were covered in grass and dust, and I was
so
ruddy glad I’d had the sense to go to sleep fully clothed in Jesse’s old shirt and trousers.

Ashes began to drift down around us, soft and serene as snowflakes.

“This—” Armand was out of breath as well. “This should do.”

Another bomb, not near. The birds screamed and screamed.

I slithered down to the ground, legs out, and pressed my palms over my eyes to hide from the ash-laced light.

“Where are we?” I asked from around my hands.

I felt him sit beside me, the solid thud of the knapsack plopping down.

“Belgium. Far past the front. I thought the fighting would have moved on by now. This area was secured months ago.”

“Apparently not,” I said, as a new sound reached us:
pop! pop! pop!

Gunfire.

I lowered my hands. Armand wasn’t actually sitting; he was coiled back on his heels in his black leather duster, ready to spring up in a second. He looked lean and sharp and feral, even with the hay in his hair.

So pale. His gaze glittering.

And his heart, his heart—

“Steady on,” I warned him. “Stay calm, all right?”

“I am entirely calm,” he said, and beneath the trees’ groaning and the gunshots and the screaming, he sounded it. “You?”

“Of course.”

“Your eyes are glowing.”

“Merde.”

I covered them again, rubbing hard. Everything smelled of ashes now. My mouth tasted of it, mixed in with dust and grit. I realized that the screaming I’d thought was birds had been going on for too long and was too high-pitched. It was people. Children, mostly. Women, too.

“We’ve got to fly out of here,” I said shakily. “Right now.”

“Too late, waif.”

“No, it’s not! We’ll fly fast. We’ll be up and gone before they—”

“Eleanore. We have company.”

I dropped my hands a second time, and the pair of women standing before us screeched and skipped back.

One turned and fled, vanished at once into the depths of the woods.

The other went to her knees, gaping at me. She crossed herself and began to babble in French.

“Your eyes,” explained Armand, in that same calm voice.

“I can’t control it!”

The woman began to creep toward me, her hands up in prayer. She was speaking so rapidly I had no hope of catching any of it. Her clothing was ragged and her eyes were bloodshot and her skin the exact color of the ashes floating between us. As soon as she was near enough she grabbed at my sleeves, my hands, and brought them up and buried her face in them.

I felt it then, what she wanted. I felt it as sure as I felt her tears and her hot breath on my fingers and the deep, dire desperation that had given her the strength to approach a demon girl in the woods and beg for help.

I felt her desperation, and it was the heaviest thing I’d ever known.

“One of the men from the village killed a German soldier last night,” translated Armand, toneless. “He did it to stop the soldier from raping his daughter-in-law. But now the Germans are retaliating.”

“They’ll shell everything,” I whispered. Her breath was so hot, fluttery hot and frantic. It felt like I’d trapped a sparrow in my hands.

“Yes,” he said.

She lifted her face. She was younger than I’d first thought. Probably a mother to one of those screaming children.

“You’ll have to leave.” I tried to find the words in French. “
Se
cacher. Se masquer
. After this. All of you. For as long as the war lasts, you’ll have to hide like animals, because if they do this for one man, they’ll never rest if it’s all of them.” I swiveled about to find Armand. “Will you tell her?”

He looked at me, at her, and then at the trees. Slowly he shook his head.

“Armand,” I pleaded.

“She thinks you’re an angel.”

I laughed, and felt my own tears well up.

“She thinks you have some holy power to end this,” he said. “And you don’t. You don’t, Eleanore.”

“It’s not holy,” I agreed. “But it’s something.”

“It’s your
life
,” he said through his teeth. “And I won’t let you imperil it for
this
.”

I disengaged my hands from the woman’s, climbing to my feet. She sagged in place and watched me without blinking.

“Not for
this
,” I said to him. “But for
your
cause, it’s fine.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant. This is our path, Mandy. This is where we’re supposed to be. You know I’m right, because you’re the one who charted it for us. Didn’t Jesse insist we leave last night? He knew we’d end up here. We’ve been tapped on the shoulder by the stars themselves. Gifted with powers we don’t yet fully even realize and have done nothing to deserve. Do you truly doubt what has to come next?”

He still wouldn’t look at me. I went to him and wrapped my arms around him, resting my forehead to his chest.

Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom—

The sparrow now was his heart. I covered it with one palm.

“ ‘All beasts must have courage.’ I’m not an angel of any sort. But what am I if I refuse this woman? What am I then?”

“Only all that I love,” he answered finally, low.

“Thank you.” I stepped back. “I’ll see what I can do to earn that.”

He spoke a few words to the woman, who answered in her raspy babble.

“It’s not a large company,” Armand interpreted. “The village is small and starving, so most of the soldiers moved on last month. Only a core group left. Rifles. Bayonets. Cannons. They plan to execute the remaining menfolk within the hour.”

“Find the rest of her people,” I told him. “Tell them they’re going to need to hide.”

He arched a brow at me, a right proper lordling once more. “I rather imagine they already know.”

“Good. I’ll be right back.”

And this time, for the first time, it was I who kissed him on the cheek.

Then I Turned to smoke, and the woman cried out (
“Un miracle!”
), and I swept over the top of the forest to find the source of all those shells.

She vanished in a spiral of pearly gray, gone from his view so quickly it was as if she’d never been there. It felt, oddly, as if a part of him had ripped away with her. As if he’d lost an arm or a leg or an eye.

An old saying from his childhood popped into his head:
In
the
twinkling
of
an
eye.

That’s how it was. Lora was gone from him in the twinkling of an eye. He might never see her again.

“God will protect her,” said the woman, crossing herself again.

“No, I was supposed to,” Armand replied, but in English, so she wouldn’t understand. He looked back at her now, trying not to hate her, her bony emaciation and her tear-streaked horsey face and the damned sprigs of daisies printed on her dress that might have once been pretty but were now just dirty and brown.

“Where are the villagers?” he asked.

“The men are being kept in the millhouse—”

“No. Everyone else.”

She nodded. “I’ll show you. This way.”

He followed her through the brush, ignoring his racing heart, ignoring how his body felt alien and sluggish. Ignoring, most of all, the constant, itchy whisper in his head that kept repeating, over and over,
Shed
this
skin. Shed this skin. Finish this life in the twinkling of an eye.

They’d set up their artillery at the end of the main road that sliced through the village, not bothering to conceal themselves or move to a safer position because, after all, they didn’t have to worry about retaliation. Half the buildings were already in flames—the source of all the ash—and what was left was a cratered disaster. A scruffy yellow dog picked its way around the pits, tail between its legs.

The soldiers weren’t firing very quickly, taking the time to laugh and chat in between loading and shooting the cannons. There were about twenty men, but only half seemed to be working. The others were standing about and sharing what looked like jugs of wine.

The screams of the children had begun to die out. I hoped it meant Armand had found them, was moving them to a safer place.

One of the drinking soldiers spotted the dog. He pulled out his pistol and took a shot; the bullet struck a wall and sent chips of plaster flying. The dog yelped and tried to run.

I’d had no firm plan. I still didn’t. But when the soldier grinned and raised his rifle this time to aim again, I materialized as a naked girl right beside him.

“Bonjour,”
I said, and punched him in the face.

I was smoke before the other men had finished whipping about, guns up. They weren’t laughing now, by God. They were shouting over each other, and the man I’d hit was shouting loudest of all.

I Turned behind them, standing against a stack of wooden crates filled with shells.

“Over here now,” I called in English, and ducked behind the crates when all twenty of them aimed their weapons at me.

“Cochon!”
I yelled, which I was almost certain meant
swine
in French.

“Menj a fenébe!”
I shouted next, and I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded insulting.

And just as they were pounding toward the crates—because, even drunk, they weren’t stupid enough to fire at them—I Turned again, stole above them, and became a dragon next to the cannons.

A dragon in daylight. I’d never done it before, but I didn’t have time to celebrate it now. If I’d glimmered by moonlight, by day I was afire, nearly too bright to behold. I lifted my tail (my lovely sharp tail!) and swiped it at the nearest cannon, flipping it over, the wheels of its base broken off, a nice big hole in its side.

I found the eyes of the dog-shooting rotter and sent him my own evil grin.

All the men screamed. About a quarter of them peeled off and pelted away. The rest began to fire.

Smoke, dragon, smoke. Two cannons gone. Three. I was Turning more quickly than I’d ever done, but still the bullets zinged by me, some bouncing off my scales. When they came thick as flies I knew I had to stay as smoke; a lucky shot between my scales could kill me.

I made myself sheer and silent and drifted over the remaining men, a natural part of the smoke-choked sky.

There was still one cannon and fifteen soldiers to go.

The problem was, now they knew what I wanted. Two men were hunched over a tall black box that emitted an unmistakable electric hum; one cranked a handle as the other shrieked into a mouthpiece.

The others had rallied around the cannon, round-eyed, fingers on triggers, scanning the sky.

“Listen to me! Listen to me, all of you!”

The horsey-faced woman was standing in the doorway of what looked to be a decrepit granary that had been long forsaken to the woods, medieval thick-cut stones eaten over with moss and wild ivy. She was holding up both arms, her raspy voice gone strident.

Armand couldn’t discern much beyond her. He had the impression of bodies crammed in the space past the doorway. Of children sniffling, old men with creaking bones, women in kerchiefs, babies squirming. The stench of fear and feces rippled out, engulfing him. He cupped a hand over his nose, then forced himself to lower it.

“We have been saved,” the woman announced, solemn now, and backed up so that Armand could take her place.

He took a step forward, straining to see through the darkness. Why was it so opaque?

Whoever was in there, they were quiet as a tomb. All he heard was breathing, theirs and his own. The rise of nervous heartbeats. An infant suckling. Blood pulsing through veins—

“Who are you?” called a woman, and as if her question had lifted the shadows from his eyes, he could see her now, see all of them, in a clear blue, almost otherworldly illumination. The darkness melted back and he was faced with close to fifty people of all ages and shapes and sizes. All of them filthy. All of them greasy with sweat.

But for one. There was one face that didn’t match any of the others. A girl in the far back, half hidden behind her grandmother, perhaps. She had long reddish gold hair and a face as white and clean as—