17
BENEATH THE BLADE OF WORDS
ERIC
She’s quiet beside me, but her awareness is a second engine in the quiet of the car. It’s been thrumming at the back of my mind since the door shut and the tyres hit gravel. The road, because of course, swerves this way and that, and it feels more like I’m leading a horse-drawn carriage down to Gretna Green or something to wed my damn lover.
I don’t try to fill the hush, just drive. Because that’s what she asked me to do, isn’t it? The clock on the dash clicks over to 4:01, and the moorland is wet charcoal stretched out for miles. I’d appreciate the bland view more if there wasn’t something better in my peripheral vision.
The locket gleams at her throat, a strobing reminder of everythingoffabout this godforsaken duchy. She sits angled towards the window, knees drawn to her chest. It drags my eyes to the sliver of bare skin above her waistband. To the pink lace of her underwear still peeking over.
I’ve never hated denim more, yet my heart gives an appreciative beat.
I try again, with obsessive compulsion, to assign her a font, as though branding her will return some semblance of control tome. After spending seventeen days with her, I was certain I had figured her out.
Baskerville.
What else could it be?
But then I catch her scaling a fucking wall, and the font no longer fits. Francesca, at this moment, exists purely as a disruption to every system my brain understands. I can barely recall the box I initially built for her as I sat furious in my room with a stack of information on Sheffolk.
She should’ve been easy enough to parse: nobleman’s daughter, public tragedy, dead fiancé and heir of expectation tethered to a castle built by witches and haunted by ghosts. But sheisthe ghost, and yet she’s simultaneouslyhere, seated next to me and very much real.
I misjudged her, and the thought is irritating.
There’s wit under that grief, and spaces between her words that tell me she’s entirely composed of undiscovered punctuation, written by a ghostly hand that was never concerned with rules. She makes no sense to me yet complete sense in her own terms. Half her meaning is hidden between sentences.
And still—still—I want fluency. I want to hear her speak and know exactly what she means. If she lets me close enough to learn even one sentence of her, I know I’ll remember it forever.
“Is it surrender,” I start, “if I ask if we can forgo the daggers in our words for once?”
“Tired of bleeding?”
“I want a truce,” I correct softly, flicking the indicator and guiding us onto a narrower road at her instruction.
She stares at me, waiting for me to mock her. When I don’t, she lowers her legs and shifts slightly to face me. “I don’t know how to speak without them, not to strangers.”
I huff out a chuckle. “Same, but I’m willing to try if you are. I’ll be in Sheffolk for fuck knows how long. C’mon, even knivesbegin to rust, Lady Francesca. Give it a bit more time, and we’ll both be bleeding out from something as stupid as tetanus. Foaming at the mouth and stuck in poetic rigour mortis.”
The locket lifts and falls with her every breath, testing the weight of trust. “Bold assumption that you haven’t already contracted it. You’ve been tense since you first arrived. Though, I’d prefer you with lockjaw. For obvious reasons.”
Amusement tugs at my mouth. Dangerous girl. “Yet you still requested my company this morning and when you visited your aunt. Strange behaviour for someone allegedly repulsed by my voice.”
I wait for her to grab onto the mention of Delphine and maybe explain the full reasoning behind that trip.
She chooses to tease. “Call it medical morbid curiosity.”
I keep my voice flat, fighting against a smirk. “Do you realise that, medically speaking, lockjaw would freeze my mouth open? So really, I’ll just be grinning at you permanently. Possibly the most polite I’ll ever be.”
She laughs, another real one that catches her by surprise. The sound fills the car like smoke, and suddenly my lungs forget how to work. I turn my head just in time to watch her hand cover her mouth too late, but I catch the crooked little half-smile there.
“Permanent grin,” she mutters to herself, shaking her head. “You’re impossibly infuriating.”
“And you’re laughing,” I point out, taking another turn down a winding road. “That rather defeats your argument, doesn’t it?
She doesn’t grace me with a response, but she doesn’t pick up a blade either. I take the win. The quietude lasts for about ten more minutes, though no longer tense, before she speaks again. “You know, I Googled you the other day.”
“Did you now?”
