CHAPTER 37
I knew myself before her. With her, I know myself better. But if there were ever an after her, I’d become a stranger to myself.
—EDMUND PREW
The rattlesnake bite, ironically, gives Edmund and me the cover story we need.
His swollen hand explains why it took so long for us to reach the top of Brass-Spire Ridge and why we arrived together on one horse.
Charlotte, Jack, and Dickie buy the excuse without a hitch.
But I know that Edmund and I can’t keep pushing it.
One disappearance when the five of us are together is normal; two is a coincidence; three starts to look like a pattern.
Yet in the days that follow, the noise in my head quiets until all I can hear is the wild echo of my own happiness.
It feels as though a part of me has been awakened, one Vivian always promised would be, though I could only ever imagine the experience through her words.
Now, falling headfirst into it, I move through my days buoyed by air, sailing to class like a drunken butterfly, laughter spilling out of me without warning.
Each time I catch sight of Edmund, my heart swells with an addictive pain, stretching to make room for feelings that grow larger and more unruly with every passing day.
At first, we find each other only in the narrow slivers of time we can steal.
Edmund catches my waist and pulls me into him for a brief, breathless moment before we follow the others from his suite.
Another time, after the others have drifted out of the music room, I lean down from the top of the piano, where he’s playing, and kiss him, dissolving the melody into a discordant tangle of notes.
His eyes never leave me now. Even across the first-year Lecture Hall, they find me, shining above his smile like stars turned blue.
But looking isn’t enough. Even the touches we steal begin to feel like distance, always cut short by the need to remain unseen.
So, less than a week after the horse ride, Edmund and I make plans to meet in secret.
We choose the forest paths, places few students wander, and always after 7 p.m., once we’ve logged our locations out of the Grandmaster Map.
The timing works in our favor. With exams less than two months away, Charlotte, Dickie, and Jack are consumed by studying, leaving our late nights unnoticed.
We meet for the first time on one of the lesser-known paths, where the trees grow dense and tangled as the trail climbs the western edge of campus.
I take a hoverboard, cutting through the low-citizen zones, while Edmund approaches from the opposite direction through the high-citizen zones.
I stash my board in a thicket off the trail, with barely enough time to smooth my dress and tame my hair before I see him racing up the path from below, a heavy rucksack strapped to his shoulders, filled with gear for the climb we planned.
Every few strides, he stops to scoop something from the ground, then breaks into a run again, so fast it looks like he’s trying to outrun his own shadow.
My hands tingle at my sides, impatient. I start down the path toward him, aware only of him and the sound of my own laughter as I leap into his arms, wrap my legs around his waist, and press kisses to his face—his cheeks, his mouth, his eyes, his forehead, his jaw.
The contact of his skin with mine is like a charge, pulling me so deeply into the rush that it takes several seconds before I notice the flash of color clenched in his hand.
“What’s that?” I ask, breathless.
I lean forward to see over his shoulder. It’s a bundle of wildflowers he’s gathered on his run to me, half the petals crushed and scattered by our kiss.
Edmund laughs. “Not much anymore. They’re not pretty enough to give you.”
I hold out my hand. “If you give them to me, that’s what will make them pretty.”
He smiles and places the wildflowers in my palm.
I rest my forehead against his, clutching the flowers to my chest as he carries me up the path. At the top, he shrugs off the rucksack of climbing gear and lets it fall to the ground, where it remains untouched for the rest of the night.
Our first escape together opens something we can’t close again.
Whenever we manage to slip away from the others without drawing suspicion, we return to the forest, wandering so often and so far that the paths begin to feel as familiar as the hallways of Waldsten Mansion.
I always loved the forest as a child, the one place where I could roam freely, away from listening ears, security cameras, and drones.
But now I love it for a different reason.
I love the forest because it gives me him.
Most of what Edmund and I do together is sport-related—climbing, hiking, wandering the ridgelines—but I dress each time as if we’re headed for a night out at the Lotus Lounge.
I style my hair in loose curls, keep my makeup light so it doesn’t smear when he kisses me, and wear long, flowing dresses that bare my shoulders and pool around my hiking boots as I walk.
And he notices, every thought plain in his eyes.
One evening, as we move through the forest, we come upon a stream cutting across the path, with a thick fallen branch spanning the water. I slip off my boots and cross it barefoot, savoring the familiar prickle of bark beneath my feet.
“You coming?” I ask.
Edmund studies the branch, then shakes his head and grins. “No. With your weight, it creaks. With mine, it’ll crack.” He steps down instead and wades into the stream until the water reaches his waist.
“Suit yourself.” I smile and gesture toward the horizon, where the sky’s brilliant colors are slowly burning out. “But I have the better view.”
“No, you don’t.”
The sudden quiet in his voice makes me turn.
He’s stopped midstream, motionless, as though a patch of quicksand has caught him.
His stance is open, unguarded, and his eyes are fixed on me, yet drifting, too, as if he’s aware of every shift of air that brushes my skin, lifts my hair, and stirs my dress.
In that moment, I think he’d hand over his Blood Ring without hesitation if I asked for it. But I never would. In this one small way, in this rare imbalance where I stand higher than he does, I want to protect it.
“What do you have there?” he asks.
I tighten my grip on the Florence Engine in my pocket, suddenly aware I’ve been fidgeting. “Your gift.” I pull out the orb and show it to him. “I use it every day.”
Edmund’s head tilts, curiosity softening his expression. “What do you see when you use it?”
I laugh, then narrow my eyes. “You’re not allowed to ask me that.”
“Why not?”
I think of what the Florence Engine used to show me, from raging ocean storms to daffodils bursting into flame until they blackened and withered.
But lately, the images have changed, reshaping until they show me my own happiness, every color and angle of how Edmund makes me feel.
“I’ll tell you,” I say, “if you tell me why you don’t waltz. What you’re saving it for.”
He stirs slightly in the water, though his eyes don’t leave me. “I’ll tell you,” he says. “But only after I’m free.”
A sudden, stabbing pain cuts through my chest as Irene flashes through my mind, a reminder that even if Edmund is mine, he’s still engaged to her. “You really think it’s possible? That she’ll be convicted as a Blue?”
“Everything’s possible.”
“Everything?”
“Sure,” he says. “If you want it badly enough. You don’t think so?”
The certainty in him, the brightness of his belief, draws a smile from me even as grief flickers behind it.
I think of fencing, how fiercely I want to return to it, how I would give anything to feel a saber in my hand again, and how far out of reach it still feels.
“I want to believe that,” I say. “But sometimes it feels like certain things are too far away, like trying to touch the bottom of the ocean.”
Edmund rubs his eyebrow, considering for a moment. Then he looks up at me and smiles. “If something’s too far away, I’ll bring it to you.”
I smile back, unable to hold on to any sadness in the face of that kind of hope, like fire burning in water. “Then I’ll wait, Edmund. And I’ll remind you to tell me when you’re free.”
“You won’t have to remind me.”
He wades toward me and extends his hand. I climb down to him, held to his chest by only one arm, yet I feel so secure that if we stood at the edge of a cliff, I’d have the fearlessness of a bird that knows it can fly straight over it.
The following days blur into hours that might as well be seconds, all spent in the privacy the forest offers us. When I’m with Edmund, I recognize the sound of my laughter more clearly than my own voice. Nothing exists beyond the ways I already know him and the ways I still want to.
He never arrives empty-handed. Each time, he brings me something he gathers on his run—a feather from a mountain bird, a shard of pale quartz, a smooth stone threaded with a natural vein—as if, piece by piece, he’s bringing me the whole world.
Somewhere along the way, it strikes me that since the night we first kissed, he hasn’t called me Miss Waldsten.
In fact, he hasn’t called me by any name at all.
My name now lives between us, held back like a promise, making me wonder whether, when he finally says Loredana, he’ll be saying much more.
Within a few weeks, we edge beyond the forest and toward the ocean.
We learn where the cliffs break into secret coves, where the rock folds inward and the water lies sheltered from passing eyes.
We jump from jagged outcroppings into the cold blue below, kissing each other as wildly as the foaming spray when we surface.
Sometimes we swim through narrow inlets where the stone walls rise high on either side, sealing us in with nothing but salt and sky.
Other nights, we wade into tide pools tucked beneath overhangs, where the water stays warm and still… sometimes, too still.