Rook(60)

He cracked a sudden half grin. “You did not have as much concussion as I thought. But how do you answer the question? How do you know what is real, and what is not?”

And wasn’t that the matter of the moment, Sophia thought wryly, eyes on his. They were the same color as that tiny bit of blue in the bottom of her candle flame. She glanced over at Orla and Benoit on the other side of the room, working with perfect understanding despite the lack of a common language, and then back to René.

“If I asked you to go somewhere with me, would you come?”

He hesitated, as she’d thought he might.

“You don’t have to, of course. But if you don’t …” She smiled. “Just think of the curiosity you will suffer.”



René followed her up the long, winding stair, out the door of the sanctuary, and onto the starlit lawns. She’d felt Orla’s surprise when they’d gone, her excuse of “getting something upstairs” evidently not carrying much weight. And she’d seen the look exchanged between Benoit and René, reinforcing their agreement that no one was to go anywhere alone. She looked at the amount of light, and then at René.

“Long way, or the short?” she whispered.

René glanced at the expanse of wall they would have to walk around to get to a door, then the distance up, questioning.

“I’ve been doing some climbing already,” she said. She didn’t choose to tell him why. “My cut hasn’t bothered me, and it’s bound tight.”

She watched him consider the presence of Mr. Halflife, but he only waved a hand. “After you, then.”

Sophia took hold of the window ledge and was up on it like a cat. She scooted across, grabbed the drainpipe, and shinnied up, using the toeholds she and Tom had placed there as children. As soon as she was off the drainpipe and on the roof, René came up after her from the window ledge, taking every other toehold. Sophia crossed the flat roof over her father’s study and started up the latticework that would get her to the more angular sloping gable below her window. She always jumped from the gable to the study roof on her way down, but gravity didn’t allow for such an easy approach from the other direction.

At the top of the lattice she got a knee over the gutter at the edge of the roof, and only just bit back a scream. A hand had come out of the darkness, very near her face. She looked up and there was René, sitting on the sloping tiles, grinning like he’d just nicked her purse. She took his hand and let him pull her the rest of the way up. When she was on her feet she looked back down to the study roof. He must be able to jump to the eaves, she thought. Cheater.

“It is good to be tall, Mademoiselle.” He was still grinning.

“Unfair, you mean.” But she smiled when she said it.

They walked carefully up the gable. Sophia crouched before her dormer window, took a sliver of metal from a small hook under the gutter, and used it to trip her latch. She pushed open both windowpanes, swung her legs through, and hopped inside, René after her. Her room was very dark, and with that slightly stale smell that meant no one had been living inside it for a few days; she hated it when a place that was hers smelled that way. She went to the mantel over the hearth—a formal thing of white marble, glowing ghostly in the starlight from the window—took the tinderbox, and put it in René’s hands.

He accepted it without comment, and she walked across her rugs to the tune of flint on steel. She knelt and pulled a wooden box from beneath the bed. By the time she had brought it to the hearth there was a small fire just kindling, the mantel candles brightening their end of the room. René held one of them up.

“This is your room?”

“Yes.” They were holding their voices low. The quiet seemed to dictate it, even though there were two levels and many layers of hallways and stairs between themselves and Mr. Halflife. She put the box on the hearth rug, settling herself down beside it. René was gazing at everything, turning a half circle with the candle, his hair coming loose from its tie. “What?” she said.

He looked down. “There are little blue flowers. Painted on the walls.”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “Did you forget that I’m a girl? Is it the breeches?”

“No, Mademoiselle, I had not forgotten.” One corner of his mouth lifted. “And that is the fault of the breeches, I think.”

Sophia decided not to ask him what he meant by that. She busied herself with the box, so her hair would hide her telltale flush. “My mother painted the walls, so I don’t want to have them changed. And the curtains are lace, too, by the way. I thought I’d point that out first and save you the astonishment.” When she peeked up, both corners of his mouth were turned up. “Sit with me,” Sophia said, “and I’ll show you what I made you climb a roof for.”


He sat on the opposite side of the box from her, as if suddenly remembering caution, setting the candle on the safer surface of the hearthstone. What had she hoped to accomplish by bringing him up here? What she wanted was to understand him, and this was only going to reveal herself. He pulled up his long legs, waiting.

She brushed the dust from the box—her room was not as immaculate as Spear’s—and opened the lid. Packed inside in soft cloth were pieces of clear glass, square, about the size of a windowpane, leaded together in sets of two. Trapped between the pieces were fragments of paper.