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
CHAPTER 37
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.
One evening, we’re lying together on the sandy shore of a hidden cove when Edmund begins to shift beneath me, as if he can’t find the right position. I’ve noticed it before—the way his body never quite settles—but now, sitting in his lap with my back against his chest, I feel every small movement carried straight into me. It makes me wonder whether it isn’t only stillness that bothers him but the silence that comes with it.
“Edmund,” I say. “Does it bother you when things get too quiet?”
He looks down at me, as if I’ve caught him mid-thought. “I wouldn’t say I dislike it,” he replies after a moment. “I’m just used to noise… a lot of it.
When things get too quiet, I don’t always know what to do with myself.”
I tilt my head back to meet his gaze. “What kind of noise?”
“Parties, mostly. My father threw parties all the time when I was growing up. Even during school hours at home, there was music, people, and shouting.
After a while, we couldn’t focus without it. Sometimes a single party went on for weeks.”
Though his voice stays even, the light in his face dulls, as if it’s being pulled inward. I know then that the parties he’s talking about aren’t the kind I grew up with. “What were the parties like?”
Edmund gives a small, dismissive shrug. “They made Rosamund, Richard, and me grow up fast.”
The picture is vivid enough that I don’t press further. It makes me think of the silence Mom and Dad gave my sisters and me when we were young, the kind that left room for imagination and creativity. They broke it only when we wanted it filled.
“What’s your favorite song?” I ask, lifting my hand to brush his face.
He grins and runs his thumb across my mouth. “Why? You planning to sing for me?”
I laugh. “I’m not sure that’s a sound you’d want to hear.”
Edmund looks out over the water, considering, then says, “We Who Fell in Love with the Sky.”
I curl my fingers around his, still resting at my lips, surprised. It’s a military song, often played during the Shield War, but it’s romantic too—in the way it’s romantic when soldiers finally come home, lay their heads in their loved ones’ laps, and let themselves rest.
I draw a breath, startled by the flutter of nerves in my chest. Then I shape my mouth and begin to whistle, smoothly and carefully, coaxing out the notes as best as I can remember. The sound carries into the cove, thin at first, then steadier, lifted and returned by the stone walls until it feels larger than us both.
Beneath my back, I feel Edmund ease, the restless tension leaving his body like a fist unclenching inch by inch. He presses a kiss to my neck and folds his arms around me, holding me so close it’s as though he’s fixing himself to the sound as much as to me.
Every memory we make feels like a jewel I tuck away in my mind, something to turn over when we’re forced apart by lectures or by time spent with Charlotte, Jack, and Dickie. One jewel comes from a stormy evening when I realize Edmund has positioned himself upwind of me, his body braced to shield me from the rain. Another comes from the day I cut my foot on a submerged rock while swimming, and he carries me on his back for the long three-mile walk home, moving carefully, as if a misstep might cause me more pain.
But the brightest jewel of all comes from the day we go kayaking. It’s shortly before sunset, and the water is empty and wide, the campus shoreline still close enough to see the striped sun chairs on the sand. Edmund tells me I’m not allowed to row unless I want to.
I don’t want to.
Instead, I turn in my seat to face him and let myself watch as he paddles us farther out: the steady flex of his arms, the rise and fall of his chest, the soft grunt that escapes him when the current resists.
He digs the oar deep and pulls through a firm stroke, then looks up and grins when he sees me staring. “What’s that look?”
I lean back, trailing my finger in a slow circle through the water. “I was
just thinking it’s been ten minutes since you kissed me.”
“It’s been ten minutes since I started wanting to.”
“Then why haven’t you?”
He taps the side of the kayak with one oar. “If I lean that far, we’ll flip.”
“So?”
“So, what?”
I laugh and flick seawater at him. “So, let us flip.”
Edmund’s eyes narrow, sparking. Then he leans forward, and the oars slip from his hands. I hear the splash at the same moment his hands close around my waist. As the kayak tips and the world turns, he says in my ear, “I’ll be right back.”
Before I can ask what he means, I hit the water, surprised by its warmth as it closes over me. I’m under only a moment before I surface. I expect to see Edmund’s head break the water nearby, maybe hear his laughter.
But he’s gone.
A minute passes, then two. I turn slowly in the water, more curious than worried, until five minutes slip by and unease settles in. I dip beneath the surface, my eyes stinging with salt, but I see nothing apart from cloudy blue.
When I come back up, a hand closes around my leg.
Edmund bursts through the surface in a spray of water, his breath heaving, his hair slicked back from his face. For a moment, he looks feral, as though he’s surfaced from somewhere deeper than the ocean.
“Edmund,” I say, startled. “Where did you go?”
He lifts his hand proudly, revealing a fistful of dark sediment.
I arch an eyebrow, then laugh. “Is that mud?”
His smile widens. “Yeah. From the ocean floor… so you can touch the bottom.”
Edmund drops some into my open palm, and when his gaze lifts to mine, it’s so ardent and consuming that it feels as if he’s loving me without laying a hand on me. I close my fingers over the mud, and for a moment, I can only stare at him, stunned. Then a rush of emotion breaks through, so overwhelming that I can’t explain what I feel for him, even if I try.
Instead, I say quietly, “It’s been fifteen minutes now since you kissed me.”
Small waves lap against us as Edmund moves closer. He lowers his hand toward the water, about to wash away the mud, when I catch his wrist, lift his hand, and press it to my cheek. He swallows, momentarily still, before his
fingers curl and he spreads the mud across my skin. A soft breath escapes me, cut short when he cups my chin and takes my mouth with his. I curl my fingers into his soaked shirt and kiss him back with the full force of what I feel.
Around us, the sun finally sets, leaving darkness where I know Edmund is the only one who can see. But I don’t need sight for a touch like this. I slide my hands over his face, smearing the last traces of mud along his jaw and into his hair, guided by the rhythm of the water and the steadfast certainty of his hold. I rest my forehead against his, close my eyes, and as I catch the scent of mud on his skin, I share his hope—not just for my own future but for ours.
Over the next few days, that hope spreads, taking root and growing as large and untamed as my feelings for him. If we could, we’d spend every night together, dissolving into the forest or the ocean until the world forgets us. But there are evenings when we’re forced to stay in—nights given over to studying or to Charlotte, Jack, and Dickie—and those are the hardest. What we feel leaks into glances held a second too long and into hands that brush beneath the table. By mid-April, hiding it becomes nearly impossible, like trying to disguise fireworks at dusk.
One Thursday evening, after dinner in Edmund’s suite, Jack and Dickie push back from the table and head toward the sauna in the private spa.
Charlotte swivels in her seat to watch them go, her expression thoughtful, as if weighing whether to follow. As I wait, sipping my wine and hoping she will, Edmund leans across the table and tops off my glass. His smile is drifting, almost hazy, though he hasn’t had a sip. Wine, I recently learned, is the one alcohol he doesn’t like. But he always keeps a bottle here for me.
I smile back, thanking Edmund once with words. Then, again, by sliding my leg beneath the table and lightly brushing my bare foot against his calf, drawing a low breath from his chest.
His hand drops to catch my foot, but his elbow clips the wine bottle instead. It topples, spilling a sudden splash of red across the tablecloth.
Edmund doesn’t glance at the stain; he doesn’t even notice the Pinkie rushing in to clean up the mess. Usually, when he looks at me in public, there’s restraint in his eyes, a promise of later.
But right now, there is no later.
For a single, reckless moment, I think he might give in completely: sweep me up, carry me to his jet, and take me with him into the sky, the one place
where our world has no written rules.
I glance back at Charlotte, who’s just ordered herself a fresh Gibson, clearly deciding not to follow Jack and Dickie.
“You wanna play pool?” she asks me, her eyes skimming the table as if
searching for something.
“Sure,” I say.
“Great.” She nods, still distracted. “Think I left my lighter in my purse.
I’ll grab it first.”
Edmund sits straighter, his hands flat against the table, unmoving, until Charlotte disappears into the foyer. The instant she’s gone, his chair scrapes back with a squeal of wood. He rounds the table in two strides, grips the arms of my chair, and pulls me toward him.
I press my fingers to his mouth and warn, “I drank wine.”
“I know.” His grin spreads beneath my fingertips. “But I like you more than I don’t like it.”
I let my hand fall, and he leans down to me, pinning me to the chair with his kiss until my toes curl against the floor. My hand runs along the warm muscles of his back, my neck arching as his thumb presses into it, holding me there. After a moment, he breaks away, his chest rising and falling fast, leaving my lips parted, and my fingers tangled helplessly in the thick, pomaded waves of his dark hair. He glances over his shoulder toward the doorway; Charlotte’s heels click closer, but still faintly. Edmund turns back and kisses me again, this time gentler, like a touch meant to soothe the wild beating of my heart. When he finally pulls away, his smile tilts wide, streaked with my lipstick.
“Edmund.” I gesture at my lips. “Your face.”
He grabs a napkin from the table, still smiling as he wipes it clean, then strides out through the opposite door. I watch him go, hurriedly rubbing the rest of the lipstick from my own mouth before Charlotte steps in with the emerald-studded lighter in her hand. She stops short, scanning me with a keenness that, for a brief, terrifying moment, makes me wonder if she
suspects.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, my nerves taut.
“Nothing. You just… look different.”
“What do you mean?”
Charlotte’s mouth curves. “It means I’ll have what you’re having.” She reaches for the half-empty bottle of wine, takes a swig, and we head off
toward the pool table.
I stop wearing lipstick after that.
What doesn’t stop is the daze: the deep, dizzying happiness that keeps me awake at night, sweating in a mist of dreams, my finger tracing the shape of my lips, still warm and bruised from Edmund’s kisses. I never knew it was possible to feel like this, or to want someone so completely. Every time he touches me, it’s with all of himself, restrained because he knows he’s my first, yet with the kind of passion that makes me wonder if he wants to be the last.
The days stretch on, golden like the skin of students tanning along the beach. April winds down, and the daylight lingers longer in the sky, glittering over blooming gardens and sun-drunk courtyards. With only four weeks left before summer break, Edmund and I turn our focus more intently toward exams. Between attending lectures, studying, and the long nights we spend together, the lack of sleep begins to catch up with us.
One night, in the back seat of his hovercar on the ride home to the dormitories, Edmund falls asleep with his head in my lap.
My eyelids burn with the need for rest, but I keep them open, unable to look anywhere but at him. I comb my fingers through his hair, and he stirs faintly, enough for me to notice a fresh scratch at the base of his neck. The sight of it strikes like a knife to my heart. I trace the wound carefully with my fingertip, the gentlest touch I can manage, and the surge of protectiveness that follows is so fierce it makes my eyes sting. My hand drifts up, knuckles grazing his cheek, mapping the familiar lines of a face I know without effort or thought.
When I look at Edmund now, it’s no longer only with desire or even need.
Blue or not, there will never be another. He’s the one I’ve been walking toward all my life without knowing it. Even if the law says there can be no future with him, I now understand there can be no future for me without him.
I rest my head against his, my eyes finally closing as I feel his heart beating beneath me and his warm breath brushing my face. Sleep circles in, but before I drift off, I tell myself it’s finally time.
Time to tell Dad I’m in Edmund Prew’s entourage.
