Chapter 8
By the time the evening bell rang, I had decided two things.
First, I wasn’t eating the stupid apple.
Second, Kieran Marsh was going to explain how it had gotten into my locked room.
The east kitchen smelled like onions, yeast, and dough rising in the cloth-covered bowls on the counter.
Rev was there, standing at the long table with her sleeves rolled up and both hands in a bowl of dough. She looked at me, then at the apple I held in my hand like an accusation.
“Don’t look at me. I’m not responsible for him.”
“Where is he?”
“Good evening to you too.”
“Good evening. Where is Kieran?”
Rev pulled one hand out of the dough and pointed upward with two floury fingers.
“Clock tower, probably.”
“I thought the clock tower was off-limits.”
Rev frowned.
“Since when?”
That stopped me more effectively than Hale had.
“Hale said it wasn’t on my tour.”
“That’s very different from off-limits.”
“He said I wasn’t allowed there.”
Rev considered that, then went back to folding the dough.
“Instructor Hale has his reasons for the things he says. That doesn’t make them rules.”
“So there isn’t a rule.”
“There are rules about the west door, the lower archive, the old basins, the faculty corridor and the kitchens after nine, and touching anything in Aldric’s office.”
“But not about the clock tower?”
Rev shook her head, box-braids swinging. “There is no rule about the clock tower.”
I looked toward the dark corridor beyond the kitchen.
Interesting.
Unhelpful, but interesting.
“How do I get inside without Hale seeing me?”
Rev sighed like my survival had become one more chore assigned to her without proper notice.
“Narrow side door behind the tapestry of some dead Council man pointing at a star.”
“Specific.”
“He looks like he just ate a sour lemon. You’ll know him.”
“Thank you.”
“If you fall down the stairs and die, don’t come back and haunt my kitchen.”
I didn’t answer. I was already headed for the clock tower.
The halls were mostly empty when I left. A few voices came from behind closed doors. Somewhere below, a bell marked the half hour.
No one stepped into the corridor to stop me.
Wherever Hale was, he wasn’t here now.
The tower stair was behind the tapestry exactly where Rev had said it would be. The painted Council man did, in fact, have quite the sour puss.
The handle had no lock, the door no sign, nothing official enough to quote if someone wanted to punish me for entering it.
I turned the handle, and it opened.
The stairway behind the door went up, narrow and dark, the stone worn down the center. Empty brackets marked where sconces had once been, and a thin gray light came from somewhere above.
I climbed with one hand on the wall.
Halfway up, the stone under my palm changed.
Warm.
I stopped.
Another hand settled on the wall above mine.
It hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“Slow,” a voice said. Above me, just above me. “The next step is shorter than the others. You’ll roll an ankle.”
“Kieran?”
“Hello, Astra.”
His other hand lifted toward my hair, then stopped before it touched me.
“Your hair is caught on the stone.”
It was. A strand had snagged where the wall had split in a thin seam. If I moved, it would pull.
“May I?”
The question was quiet enough to belong to the dark.
“Yes.”
His fingers took the strand free and tucked it behind my ear. They stayed there for one breath, no longer, and then they were gone.
I realized I had stopped breathing.
He let go.
His hand returned to the wall beside mine, close enough for heat, not contact, and the space he left there felt as deliberate as the touch had been.
I finally exhaled.
“I’ve been looking for you,” I said.
“That sounds promising.”
“It isn’t. You left an apple on my bed.”
“I did.”
“After getting into my locked room.”
A pause.
“Yes.”
“That’s the part I came up to discuss.”
“The lock?”
“The part where you decided my room was a place you could enter when the door was locked.”
His hand stayed on the wall beside mine.
“I suppose I shouldn’t have done that. I was trying to get your attention.”
He gave me an apologetic smile. His teeth were straight and white, and in the dark of the clock tower stairwell his eyes shone even brighter green.
The stair was dark between us. Above, the wind moved through whatever waited at the top.
“I wanted to ask you to come up here with me,” he offered. “I tried several times.”
“You did?”
“Twelve times, to be exact.”
I stared up at him.
“In person?”
“In my head.”
“So you couldn’t work up the nerve to ask me in person, but you went with breaking into a locked room? Very brave.”
A laugh escaped him, warm and bright.
He looked down the dark curve of the stair instead of at me.
“You’re right. I shouldn’t have gone into your room.”
He said it simply, with the apple-boy performance stripped away.
We stared at each other for a moment, then:
“You know,” he said, “most girls would be flattered by a midnight apple.”
“It isn’t midnight.”
“I was trying to make it sound romantic.”
“You broke into my room.”
“And failed.”
“At being romantic?”
“At several things. Including being romantic.”
I should have stayed angry.
Unfortunately, he was two steps above me, contrite and ridiculous, with his green eyes bright in the stairwell gloom, one dark lock fallen across his forehead, and his mouth doing a very poor job of not smiling.
The tower stair smelled suddenly of autumn apples.
Him.
My mouth watered.
That was deeply unfair.
I took a deep breath.
“If you go into my room again without asking, I’m throwing the next apple at your head.”
“Fair.”
“I’m serious.”
“I can tell.”
I took the shorter step, then the next, and climbed past him.
He climbed behind me.
When I stepped out, the sky around me was open.
I hadn’t seen the sky from outside the building since the quad on my first day. That sky had been dusk-going-dark. This one was full night: no clouds, a moon my wall-facing window had hidden from me, and more stars than the city had ever let me see.
They were the same stars I had grown up under.
They looked different from here.
Beyond the north wall, a darker shape rose where the grounds should have ended.
At first I thought it was another part of Zenith Hall. Then the moon caught the edge of it: stone, narrow windows, a roofline too sharp to belong with the other academy buildings.
“What is that?”
Kieran followed my gaze.
I was expecting a joke. It didn’t arrive.
“Something you don’t want to talk about tonight.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he said. “It’s me trying very hard not to ruin the best part of your evening.”
“The best part?”
“You came looking for me. I’m trying not to waste it.”
I should have asked pressed him harder.
But then Kieran smiled, and the air still smelled like autumn apples, and I let the question go.
Kieran came up behind me.
“This is where I come,” he said.
“To do what?”
“Breathe.”
The wind moved over the roof and took a loose lock of his hair with it.
I had the sudden, almost irresistible urge to reach out and tuck it behind his ear, same as he’d done to me.
I kept my hands where they were.
“I talk too much downstairs,” he said suddenly.
“In the kitchen the other night, you mostly let Rev do the talking.”
“That is because Rev is the only person who talks more than me, which is why we get along so well.”
I looked at him.
The joke thinned before it became a smile.
“People expect it from me,” he said. “The talking. The apples. The part where I act like nothing matters and everything is a game.”
“And up here?”
His gaze moved over the roof, the open sky, the dark line of the school below us.
“Up here, no one needs me to be anything but what I am.”
That was the first honest thing he had said all night that didn’t come wrapped in charm.
“And you wanted me to see it?”
“I wanted you to know it was here.”
“Hale told me I wasn’t allowed.”
Something dark flashed in Kieran’s expression.
Only for a second.
Then the smile came back, lighter and less convincing.
“Did he now?”
“Yes.”
“And you came anyway.”
“I asked Rev. She said Hale has his own reasons for things.”
“Excellent choice.”
“You look pleased.”
“I am trying very hard not to enjoy this for the wrong reasons.”
“Is it working?”
“No.”
The air still felt warmer than it should near him. The moonlight shone on his face. Smooth, dark skin. Moonlight brightening his eyes.
His Pull was here on the roof with me. Some clean-wind edge that had grown sharper since the corridor.
An apple sat on the ledge beside him, already bitten once.
“You brought one for yourself?”
“I do occasionally eat my own food.”
“And here I thought they existed only as an invitation for bad decisions.”
“Several uses,” he said with a shrug.
He looked out over the roof and didn’t fill the silence between us.
Then the wind shifted.
He reached for the apple with his right hand and stopped halfway there.
A catch. A flinch he killed almost before it existed.
But I saw it.
His fingers curled once, hard, and for a second the cloth at his right shoulder glowed faintly green-gold from underneath.
Then it was gone.
“What’s wrong with your shoulder?” I asked.
His hand stilled.
“Let’s not talk about that tonight.”
“That’s a very Zenith Hall answer. Sounds like something Juno would say.”
“It’s the only answer I can give without ruining the part where I’m trying to be brave.”
The wind moved between us. The apple sat on the stone ledge beside his hand.
“What are you being brave about?”
“You.”
He stepped closer.
The Pull doubled at the half-step, and then the half-step closed, and green apple and sun-warmed stone were at my mouth before his mouth was.
“I want to kiss you,” he said.
“Are you asking?”
“Badly, it would seem.”
“Then ask better.”
He looked at my mouth.
Then my eyes.
“May I kiss you?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
His mouth came down.
Mine came up to meet his lips.
The wind gusted around us, cold and sharp with apple, but his body near mine was warm.
I hadn’t been kissed in two years.
I had forgotten the first shock of it: the heat of another mouth, the small helpless catch of breath, the way a body could go still and reach at the same time.
Kieran kissed like he had talked himself out of this a hundred times tonight and failed on purpose.
One hand stayed on the stone beside me.
The other lifted toward my waist, stopped, and closed on nothing.
I kissed him harder, lacing my fingers through his and pulling him closer.
His breath broke against mine.
The Pull rose between us, orchards and riverstone, autumn wind off the clock tower. It filled my mouth until I couldn’t tell what was magic and what was him.
When he pulled back, he did it slowly.
Like stopping took effort, and he made the effort anyway.
He looked at my mouth once more.
Then he made himself look at the apple on the ledge.
I understood.
If he kept looking at me, he would ask for more.
He didn’t.
I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that.
Kieran was very good at words when words could stand between him and the room.
Up here, after his mouth had been on mine, he seemed to have misplaced them.
For a while, neither of us said anything.
Then his breath caught.
His right hand went to his shoulder before he could stop it.
“Kieran?”
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s glowing.”
His smile came back too late.
“Rude of it to interrupt our moment.”
“Was it the kiss?”
The smile failed.
“That is one of the questions I was hoping not to answer tonight.”
My hand closed around the stone edge.
“Because the answer is bad?”
“Because the answer is complicated, and I would rather keep the taste of you in my mouth than give the complication a name.”
Below us, somewhere in the building, a bell rang.
Kieran looked toward the stair door.
“What?” I asked.
“Warning bell.”
“For what?”
“Lights-out.”
I hated how quickly the roof became a place I would have to leave.
“I guess I should go.”
“You should.”
Neither of us moved.
The wind came up again, cold enough to make my eyes water, carrying the scent of him.
“And you’re not going to explain that,” I said.
“Not tonight.”
“Tomorrow?”
His mouth tipped into something like a smile but not quite.
“Tomorrow will bring what it will. If anyone asks, you came up here to tell me not to go into your room again.”
“I did.”
“It’s a good story.”
“It’s even partly true.”
His eyes stayed on mine.
“That’s usually the safest kind.”
The second bell rang below us.
He stepped back first.
I hated him a little for being able to.
Then I went down the stairs.
Inside, I closed the door and stood with my back against it.
I had gone up to tell Kieran not to enter my room again.
I had done that.
I had also let him kiss me on a roof Hale had warned me away from, with no one watching and no one writing it down.
My mouth still tasted like green apple.