Page 9 of The Mask Falling

A tiny sound drew me back to the present. Warden—Arcturus (it would take a while to get used to that)—had placed a small object beside me.

“A gift.”

It was an oblong parcel, neatly wrapped in newspaper. “Arcturus—” I sat up. “You didn’t have to get me anything.”

“I was under the impression that a gift was traditional on the anniversary of a womb birth.”

“Womb birth. Great.”

The parcel was heavier than I had expected. I opened it with care to reveal an ornate box. A moth gleamed on its oval lid, fashioned from smoked glass, perched on a bell-shaped oat blossom. I remembered telling him once that it was my favorite. In the language of flowers, it meantthe witching soul of music.

I turned a gold key on the side of the box. The lid opened, and a figurine of a bird—a ring ouzel, black with a pale breast—emerged from inside. It beat its tiny mechanical wings and whistled like a living thing.

“Arcturus,” I said softly. The artistry of it was exquisite. “Where on earth did you get this?”

“Originally, it was one of my snuffboxes. Now it is a boîte à oiseau chanteur.”

A songbird box. “It’s beautiful.” I looked at him. “Wait, you made it by hand?”

“A modest conversion.”

Even the underside of the lid was stunning, painted to resemble a poppy field. He moved to sit beside me and turned the key the other way. The bird stopped moving, and instead, the box played music. As I listened, I had a muted recollection of my grandfather restoring a harp in his workshop, singing in his pebbly voice. An air about a long-lost soulmate.

A hollow ache stretched out within me. It started in the chambers of my heart, in a place that reached eternally for Ireland. I imagined Arcturus working on the music box while the Ranthen watched over his shoulder, wondering why he was squandering time on a trifle.

He had made me a memory I could hold. I leaned up and placed a soft kiss on his cheek.

“Thank you.”

“Hm.” He lifted his wine in a toast. “To you, Paige. And the next twenty years.”

“Sláinte.” I touched my cup to his glass. “May they be significantly less horrific than the first.”

We drank. I rested my head against his shoulder, and we watched the stars until dawn painted the horizon.

****

The days of waiting for contact from Domino wore on. So did the long crawl of my recovery. After two weeks, my bruises had gained more earthen tones, but I was still weak as a haystalk.

My mind was just as slow to mend. Time refused to blunt the edges of the memories. I could no longer sleep through the night. Sometimes I relived my father’s death, saw the open bottle of his body. Sometimes I would get so cold that my fingernails turned gray. More than once, Arcturus checked on me in the night and found me next to the radiator, enveloped in a blanket.

It was the dark that got to me the most. I had never been able to sleep well with a light on—yet without one, I couldn’t convince myself that I had ever left the pitch-black cell. I had meant to die there, and a part of me had.

The sedative, at least, was out of my system. Now it was a rattling cough that kept me up at night. That and a sharp pain in my chest, on the right side, when I took too deep a breath.

At first, I had watched the news every night—to make sure Scarlett Burnish was still alive, to keep one eye on London—but it made me itch to get back to the streets. Never more so than when the news offered glimpses of Georges Benoît Ménard, the Grand Inquisitor of France.

He was said to be a fanatic, his bloodthirst unrivaled among the leaders of Scion. Certainly he sent hundreds of people to the guillotine each year. His spouse, Luce Ménard Frère, had come to London as his representative in December. Other than that, I knew very little about him.

Arcturus did his best to distract me. He taught me chess, which I enjoyed even though he always won. I could still wipe the floor with him at cards, having spent years in and out of the gambling houses of Soho. I taught him the finer points of cheating as well as fair play.

“There is little honor in duplicity,” he pointed out one night.

“None,” I agreed, “but if everyone is duplicitous, honor is a disadvantage.” I threw down another card. “And whoever said there’s honor among thieves was talking absolute shite.”

In the colony, he had been named my keeper. In London, I had been his queen and his commander. Now we were just two fugitives, each with no power over the other. At last, we were on level ground.

I liked spending time with him. It had taken me months to fully admit it to myself, but it brought a smile to my face to see him each morning. I had worried we might run out of things to say within a few days, yet we never did. Sometimes we stayed up talking all night.

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