A Drop of Night(78)

“To be unhappy?” I ask. “To be cruel?”

The butterfly man does not move, and it is impossible to tell if he is pondering my words.

“Change out of your finery,” he says, drifting out of the room. “Follow me. Your name shall be the strongest shield, your skin the hardest iron. To harvest the precious material inside your veins would require your death. I do not think they would kill their own children.”

My head throbs. The door stands wide now. The lights in the hall are blazing.

Bernadette and Charlotte are crawling over the floor. Delphine is clinging to my skirts. Jacques is gone. And suddenly I feel as though I am standing at a crossroads under a fierce blue sky, and on one hand there is a girl lying in the dirt, weeping and unable to move. It is her right to weep; she has been lied to and betrayed, locked away in solitude, and I see the darkness under her flesh; her own veins are treason against her. The other road is empty, stretching away, because that girl has already gone far down it, running fast and desperate.

“Aurélie,” Charlotte says. “What will we do?”

I stare at the open door. “We will go, of course,” I say. And I dash to the heap of clothing. I help my sisters change. Now I dress myself, slipping the rough woolen skirt over my head. It smells of lye and dirt, the stench embedded so deep in the thread, it has become a part of it. I reach the doorframe and see the butterfly man far down the passage, his back turned, waiting for us.

“Follow me,” he says over his shoulder, and I lift Delphine up and hurry the others in front of me. We follow him down the hallway, the chandeliers passing overhead like watchful, glittering spiders.

We come to the corner. The butterfly man is gone, but I still hear his voice, crawling through the arteries of the palace, flooding every passageway and chamber, flowing like putrid water up the walls.

“Go now,” he whispers, and I leave the girl in the road, leave her to weep and mourn. “Run far with your precious cargo and do not let them catch you.”



I’m pretty sure Lilly’s lost it. She’s laughing hysterically, crying simultaneously, swooping her free arm in circles like some kind of demented windmill.

“I found them! I found you! We’re getting out, Anouk!” She screeches it at the walls and the chandeliers: “We’re getting out!”

The screaming is not a good idea. Someone’s going to hear. Or something. But I’m laughing, too, running as fast as I can in my Pilgrims-R-Us nightgown, and I feel like I could run forever. Everything’s crazy. Everything’s awful, but I’m alive and Lilly is, too, and Jules and Will are, too.

“Where are they?” I shout, and we skid around a corner, into a room that seems vaguely familiar—a spinet I recognize, a portrait of the woman in the red dress, only she’s smiling kindly here, and her eyes are cornflower blue, and she looks a bit like me. It’s somewhere we trekked through before. Maybe somewhere near the library.

“I’ll show you. I think they’re knocked out, but they’re still alive. Hayden must have just hid them and gone to look for us. I don’t know what happened to him, but he is not on our side. Better hope he doesn’t come back until we’re gone.”

We slam through a door, into the salle d’opéra. A vast theater. Red seats curve like rows of bloody gums. Gilt figures extend up every armrest and pillar, mermaids and cherubs and bundles of pikes wrapped in thorns. I glance up. The ceiling is one huge butterfly, translucent and ghostly, spreading its massive wings over a stormy sky.

“How long were you on your own?” I ask her.

“I don’t know. Awhile. It was fine, though. The trick is to get off the main floor plan of the palace. There are servants’ passages everywhere and spy holes—”

Lilly points to a pillar in the far wall, crusted with gilt leaves and shield. “See that pillar over there? There’s a door in it and a glass hallway like the one we ran down when we first got here. I think it’s the emergency exit. Maybe the one Perdu meant. We’re getting the boys and we’re getting out through there.”

I think of Lilly on her own, fighting her way through the palace while the rest of us were busy getting captured and falling out of chandeliers.

“Lilly?”

“Yeah?” She’s not listening, just running, dragging me up some steps and along the rippling midnight-blue curtain.

“Thanks for coming back.”

“Duh,” she says, and we stop, right at the center of the stage. We turn and face the theater. At the back of the theater, the silhouette of a huge figure is growing against the frosted panes of the doors. A hand is placed flat to the glass. Behind it, I see more shapes, tall, dark shadows.

“Point your toes,” Lilly says urgently. “Hold your breath and keep your arms in.”

“What?”

“You know how to swim, right?”

“What?”

The doors at the end of the salle d’opèra burst open.

Lilly stamps a tiny wire prong sticking up through the boards. And the floor drops out from under us.

I scream so loud it’s like my throat is ripping. We’re falling like bullets into the dark, wind whizzing in my ears––

“Point your toes!” Lilly shrieks, and a second later I’m burbling, plunging into black water. It’s shockingly, painfully cold. I’m gulping it, sinking. But Lilly’s got hold of my arm and she’s kicking upward, pulling me with her. We break the surface.