He shook his head. “I will not be a Rogue, rootless, forced to move from place to place to stay free. It has occurred to me to go to Ilandrume and claim asylum, but asylum is not free, nor is the new name and identity I would need to get there and live in true freedom.”
“What do you mean?” I stared at him. “Asylum?”
“Ilandrume is offering asylum to Entwined—quietly, so as not to ruffle too many feathers, but word has reached me. Officially, they are doing it as an act of charity. Unofficially, it comes at a price. But Entwined and Non-Entwined reside in remarkable peace there, or so I have heard.”
“I knew nothing of this,” I said. I felt oddly gutted by the realization. There was no way Pretoria had not known something so momentous, even if it was not being publicized. “Pretoria must have kept it from me.”
“Pretoria loves you deeply,” Lewis said. “She will always do what she believes is best for you.”
“Even if that is deceiving me.”
“Withholding the truth is not deceiving, precisely.”
“Semantics.”
We fell into silence. Perhaps it was the lingering effects of the drink that led me to what I said next. Perhaps it was my unrequited and ill-advised affection for the handsome youngman across from me. Perhaps it was that strange, surreal quality that comes from the warm darkness of summer nights.
But I said, “I would go with you.”
He surveyed me, a note of hesitation in his eyes.
“Not as your fiancée—though that is a façade which we would need to maintain for the journey, perhaps. What I mean to say is, I would go to Ilandrume.”
“You are unhappy with Pretoria?”
“I am no Rogue.” I shook my head. “Well, I am, in the broadest sense—I am outside the Guild, and I am not a Separatist, so I am a Rogue. But… I am rambling. I do not want to spend my life flitting about, deprived of any honest means of supporting myself, forced to theft and villainy. This is Pretoria’s world. The Guild is Madge’s. I would like the chance to find my own.”
Lewis watched me with searching eyes. “Do you mean that?”
“I do,” I said.
There was a long, long stretch of silence.
“We would need money,” Lewis said, with a tone of reminder. “I only have limited and somewhat… unsavory means of gathering funds.”
I raised a questioning brow.
“Smuggling,” he admitted lowly. “Baffin’s Army is a strict affair and as a Guild officer I have connections.”
“I see,” I said with a sage nod. I was ill at ease with that, but I had no desire to question Lewis. “I could take a position somewhere. Perhaps as a governess, or librarian, or secretary.”
A smile brushed his lips at these suggestions, and I might have seen a flicker of affection in his eyes. I might have imagined it, too.
“Pretoria would not encourage that,” he pointed out.
“I would have to leave her to do it,” I acknowledged. “I think… It pains me, but it is time. I cannot live my life clinging to her skirts.”
“Where would you go, though?” he asked.
I stared out at the water for a span, thinking. “The place where the Guild would least expect. Back to Harrow.”
Present Day
Shadows of quavering branches danced around my feet as I plodded through damp grass and leaves in a fresh, if borrowed, shirtwaist, skirt and coat. The twilight tasted like snow, riding a night wind that bit my cheeks and pried under my scarf as I led Pretoria and Perry through the university gardens.
The city was silent, now—the silence of indrawn breaths and coming storms, of a hunter taking aim. A strict military curfew had been placed and soldiers patrolled the streets, the tromp of their boots and the occasional fist on a door the only sounds.
No one heard our footsteps, not in the streets, nor now, in the soft, damp grass of the green and its blanket of leaves.
