There was a moment of silence, then Mia shrugged. “And I don’t get paid enough to kill awesome people. Oh dear, look at you running too fast for me to catch you. And now you’ve disappeared into a maze of alleyways where you’ll never be found. What a terrible shame.”
They lifted their heads then to regard her with surprise, and she grinned in return. The flight window snapped shut.
“Home,” Alice said dreamily, looking at Daniel again. “Where is that?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “Shall we find out?”
She nodded. Daniel lifted her hand, kissed it, and her tranquil layers dissolved in a great, possessing rush of joy.
Thank God she’d never before known it was possible to be so happy, or she would have been miserable wanting it.
“Alice, my wonder,” he said against her hand.
“Daniel, my love,” she answered, smiling.
And she put her arm around him, bringing him close to her side, roses and thorns and all. Together they left the shadow of the A.U.N.T. house and went into the pirate’s cottage, and from there flew away to get their books.
EPILOGUE
heavens—hearth—home
- Sixteen Months Later -
A wuthering breeze swept through the dreaming midsummer’s night, but not even its chill offered persuasion enough to send the three women down from the roof. They sat in a row along the ridgepole: the pirate, the witch, and the spy. And staring out at the limitless horizon, they sighed.
“Forever is so beautiful,” Alice said.
“Yes,” Cecilia and Charlotte agreed in unison.
A star to the north was flinging off shoots of light as if it could not contain itself. Alice wanted to reach out, pretend to touch it, but decided that doing so would be too strange while in company. She tapped her fingers discreetly on the roof instead.Herroof, with its brown tiles sloping above white walls and linen-curtained windows. Her house. She patted it with a fondness that was secretly an adoring, almost obsessive love she never admitted to anyone, not even Daniel—although of course he would know, just by looking at her.
This little bungalow had taken them all over the British Isles in the past year and a half since they left A.U.N.T. Evading the agency’s lawyers and assassins, teaching countesses how to fight off jewel thieves, selling bank managers security against the threat of pirates (and then going to dinner with those same pirates, because it was, after all, just business). Trying again and again to find peace.
They even had employees. Agent Mia Thalassi defected to them in exchange for a fast cottage and the secret of Daniel’s special choke hold, and two of Frederick Bassingthwaite’s chambermaids were on the payroll as inside informants, feeding them secrets from both the piratic society and A.U.N.T. (and doing their laundry every Monday).
They had ghosts too: the children they once were, still haunting them faintly in the background of their selves. Sad-eyed little Alice, held together by alphabets and poetry fragments. And young Daniel, who had learned so thoroughly not to flinch that, even now, he never noticed when he accidentally burned a finger, and was confused when Alice cared about it. But she did care, and he knew the right poems to whisper when she needed them, and every day the ghosts grew a little fainter.
Alice still had not learned how to fly the house. She swore that the magic persisted in overwhelming her—but really, secretly, she just liked to watch Daniel at the wheel. He was so masterful, more than once she’d made him land the building so he could express that mastery in a more horizontal fashion than flying generally allowed.
(Although there had been that one time, half a mile above the Shetland Islands, when she’d stood leaning forward against the open flight window, the wind caressing her face, and Daniel had...)
“Ahem,”she said, shifting uncomfortably on the roof. Cecilia and Charlotte glanced at her, but luckily the darkness hid her blush.
That particular day had been, according to Alice’s calculations, when William was conceived. Or perhaps that evening. Or later thatnight. After discovering her pregnancy, they’d given up any lingering notion of peace. They lived now with their hearts forever exposed in the shape of a small, squirmy, brown-haired baby with eyes like tarnished silver and a seemingly endless capacity for emotions. They lived frightened—enchanted—in love.
But oh, how they lived.
“It scares me sometimes,” she said, gazing out at the darkness, “when I think how long I spent alone, trapped in a life other people made for me to suit themselves. The fear I might go back there still grips me every now and again, you know?”
“I know.” Charlotte tucked her knees up closer against her heart. “Me too.”
“I took all the clocks out of my house when I first married,” Cecilia said. “I couldn’t bear the tick, reminding me of the long, peaceful afternoons and quiet nights in my aunt’s house. But Ned was always running late for burglaries, and then I needed to keep track of Evangeline’s routine, and there’s the fact our housemaid, who took over when Pleasance got her own battlehouse, suffers from recurrent bouts of amnesia (we suspect she’s a lost princess, although she does make an excellent lamb stew). So I brought the clocks back again. Besides, quite frankly, I could do with a peaceful afternoon every once in a while.”
Charlotte chuckled. “Yesterday Alex took the twins to visit with my mother so I could have time to do some reading. I just sat and stared into the middle distance andluxuriated.”
Cecilia smiled sympathetically, but Alice had to look away, hiding the sudden pallor of her face.
“What is it?” Charlotte asked, nudging her with a shoulder. Alice laughed silently, becauseof coursethe witch had noticed. She rather thought she could lock herself at the back of a closet, covered entirely by a blanket, and whisper that she had a headache—and within the hour Charlotte would arrive at her doorstep with a willowbark remedy.
