Heart pounding in my palms, I place my arms round him. I catch the scent of soap, but also lingering smoke from the runway. Perhaps it’s saturated into his very skin. Together, we dance in our little corner, and though the slow waltz is easy to keep pace with, I have to remind him again what to do. He’s distracted and still nervous. To think he can perform those fabulous breathtaking stunts in the air but be so perfectly helpless with his feet on the ground.
“I think I’m starting to get the hang of this,” he says, bumping into me again.
“I hope you haven’t been practicing.”
“With who?” His grin appears for a moment. “Cyar?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Those pretty girls in Thurn.”
He pulls me even closer. “Are they?”
The sudden nearness of his lips distracts me momentarily. He makes me want so much more, and I’m desperate to learn what kind of kiss he’d give me. But not here. Not in front of all these people. I step back to give us space. “What’s the first thing you’ll do when you’re home?” I ask instead, as if he hasn’t just set me breathless.
He thinks. “Be alone for a while. Everywhere I go, I’m always with someone else. Morning, afternoon, night. It’s tiring.”
“And then?”
He glances over my shoulder. “And then I’d like to fly for an afternoon. No one after me. No targets. Just for the joy of it, not any other reason.”
“And once you’re back on the ground?”
“Then I’ll probably sit there, realizing how much I’d rather be with you.” His gaze is serious.
He recaptures the polite distance I’ve put between us, and I’m sure my cheeks are glowing pink. I feel the many eyes on us—hundreds of them, bejeweled, tipsy with wine, laughing through the night. We must look very strange and romantic, the princess and her handsome, common pilot. But once upon a time, many of them saw my father do the same. They watched him love a woman who didn’t belong, watched him give his crown to her, and a sense of rightness moves through me, all the way to my fingertips draped across the back of Athan’s neck. His skin is warm, his uniform rough, and his lips are close enough to my face I can feel his breath there. I rouse courage for the words I want to say.
But first.
“Tell me again there will be no war.”
“No war,” he says, glancing over my shoulder for the hundredth time. He really doesn’t need to worry so much. We dance a moment in silence, before he pushes me back gently from him. “No, I’m not going to lie about this.” There’s a new heaviness in his voice, but his hand briefly brushes the skin along my neck, delicious fire. “In truth, I don’t know how the League will rule. I’d rather plan for the worst.”
I stop waltzing. “You’re the one who said you didn’t like reality, that you preferred to dream. Do we need to flip a coin for this now?”
“Ali, that was—”
“And yet here you are. You made it to my masquerade, didn’t you? The League won’t rule against a sovereign kingdom. You know this. They won’t. So tell me what it is you’re truly afraid of.”
He doesn’t speak for a long moment. Then he says, very quietly, “Sometimes I’m afraid that no one—not a single person—will notice that I don’t belong here.”
In this place, alone together in the corner of the dance floor, surrounded by too much unknown, too much unspoken, I know what he means.
“Here” is this uniform, this ugly thing that sends him to battle.
“Here” is a world where the League might surprise us all and announce war.
“Here” is anything that goes against his desperately gentle nature.
I bring myself closer yet, looking into his face, fervent, at the light freckles and sun-dusted skin pulsing with life, into his grey eyes that seem as weary and layered as the sea. I can’t imagine him harmed. “You can be expected to do and be many things, Athan, but know this—you don’t always have to be brave.”
He looks like he wants to kiss me.
I know he does, then his gaze is torn away again.
“Look at me,” I insist, and he does. “This is important. I’ve known you hardly more than a summer and yet it feels like it might as well be a thousand days. I feel like I know all of you, and I want us to have a chance. I don’t care how long it takes. I’ll escape and meet you somewhere. Anywhere. I’d wait a thousand days for you if you promised you felt the same. A thousand days, don’t you believe me? You simply have to stay alive. Promise me that.”
He looks down at me, not smiling. Oh, I wish he’d smile at a moment like this! I’m trembling to have admitted all of it. I know I sound childish and desperate and willing, but it’s true as the sun, starting here and ending there, certain to follow the same path.
He slips the mask off his face, resting it above his forehead. “I have to tell you something.”
“Tell me.”
“It isn’t easy to say.”
“It’s all right.”
His eyes dart beyond me, arms tensing round my waist, distracted again.
“Tell me what?” I ask, confused.
I’m about to turn and see what he’s staring at, the thing that’s apparently more enthralling than me, when he grips me by the shoulders and holds my gaze fiercely with his own. “That I’ve missed you more than anything,” he says in a breath. And then his lips are on mine, sudden and warm and overwhelming, like a dream, like everything I’ve imagined. But it’s all so wrong and unexpected that I push him off me.
My face is aflame behind my mask.
“What are you doing?” I whisper, mortified.
He appears briefly hurt, and then a blistering crack shatters the moment. I wince with the sharpness of it, my hands gripping him, still pushing him away. Then another crack, and another.
The room splinters to chaos.
Screams and shattering. Limbs falling, scrambling. A table overturned.
I’m still frozen, but Athan grabs me, yanking me from our lonely corner of the floor, dodging panicked faces. The mask covers my peripheral vision, and I tear it off in time to see a guard fall with red seeping from his chest. He stumbles right into me on his way down, eyes strange and distended. I turn and see others crumpling. Scarlet stains on satin and silk. But Athan drags me between the narrow side doors, and the harsh thrum of bullets fades to bursts behind us. Awful screams.
We hurtle down the stairs, recognition clawing through my terror. It’s the same way I took him weeks ago on our tour. I want to grab at something, beg him to go back, but he’s sprinting us through the maze of halls, then pushing the library door open.
My father’s library.
He has me by the wrist and it hurts. “Stop, stop,” I say more as a gasp. “Reni!”
He ignores me and shuts us inside, pulling me before the wide windows. Outside, propellers are already growling into the night sky, the glass trembling as they pass above the palace. It’s far too many aeroplanes at once.
What the stars is happening!
Athan points his sidearm at the window. “Can I?”
I look at him, wide-eyed. “Yes?”
He fires, glass imploding, and the sudden sound forces a cry into my throat. But it doesn’t get out. There’s a desert inside me, sucking away my voice.
Before us, a few feet down, is the dark lawn and the gardens beyond. He gestures for me to jump, and there’s no other choice but to do it. My gown tangles round my legs. Muddy earth soaks my knees, and the scalloped lacing turns brown. I stand quickly and trip, but Athan’s hand grabs me again, helping me up.
We run for the dark edge of the forest, keeping to the shadowy gardens. The hangar to our left is lit by floodlights and shouts, and a plane flashes close overhead, black swords glinting from the bottom.
Safire.
Once in the woods and hidden by leafy darkness, breathing hard, Athan says, “We’re safe here for now.” He kneels beside me on the cold, wet ground.
I nod numbly, smelling the sweet pine, the smoky trail of aeroplanes, and stare at my ruined gown. A gaping tear mars the delicate fabric where I tripped. Blood is speckled on the bodice from the wounded guard.
Stars, I’m going to be sick.
I feel gentle hands on the sides of my face. “I’m taking you away from here, Ali. You’ll be safe, I promise.” When I don’t respond, he says, “Cyar’s coming. He’s going to help.”
I peer up at him, confused. “How does Cyar know where to find us?”