Page 133 of Down Comes the Night

Golden sunlight warmed Una’s eyes like honey. “You’re not leaving me. You’re doing your job.”

Una held out her hand, but Wren couldn’t take it. Una had been her first love. Her best friend. Her wholeworld.It was too much to walk away from. She hardly knew who she was without her. Wren shook her head. “So much has changed already. I’m afraid.”

“It doesn’t have to be forever,” she said firmly. “You can always come back. I love you, Wren. No matter how far you go, that, at least, won’t change.”

“I love you so much.” Wren threw her arms around her, breathing in the familiar woodfire scent of her hair. “And thank you for—for everything.”

“Don’t thank me yet. You only have about an hour and a half to catch him.”

“I can work with that,” Wren breathed. “Help me pack?”

“Of course.” Una bowed her head. Her hair curtained her face with shining darkness. When she looked up again, her amber eyes were glittering and her cheeks were wet with tears. With forced disgust, she said, “How do you manage this all the time? I feel ridiculous.”

“You’re not,” Wren whispered. “It’s not ridiculous.”

Una grinned at her, raw and unguarded and sad.

It was the most beautiful thing Wren had ever seen.

CHAPTER FORTY

Agreeing to take the royal carriage, in retrospect, might have been excessive.

It was a three-ton, silver-gilded monstrosity. Luminous gas lamps crowned each corner of the roof and shone on the elaborately painted phases of the moon on the solid black cabin. Between the front wheels, their spokes glittering silver in the sunlight, was a sterling statue of the Goddess, her three faces serene and imposing.

Eight white horses pulled it down the cobblestone streets. It lurched like the hulking beast it was, like a boat tempest-tossed. As if anxiety hadn’t soured Wren’s stomach already. She pressed her forehead to the window and watched her breath condense on the glass, the same color as the fog thickening the air outside. Four footmen in their finest livery and four Guardsmen leisurely walked in formation beside the coach, for it crawled along from its sheer weight and the heavy flow of traffic.

“Make way!” the coachman called ahead of them. “Make way!”

Another driver was barking expletives as a man shepherded a small family of goats across the street. Even the horse drawing the carriage beside them snuffled impatiently.

Wren could relate. High above them, the clocktower read 3:45. In twenty minutes, Hal would board a train to Vesria. Although she was certain she could get a letter to him eventually, the prospect of all of this fanfare, all of this nervous hope, amounting to nothing…

Wren bit off a hangnail, her spine tingling at the sting. “How far are we to the station, sir?”

“Another mile yet, my lady.”

At this rate, it’d take them another thirty minutes to go that far. That settled it. She could run a mile in ten minutes, even with her suitcase weighing her down. “Thank you for the ride! I’ve got to go now.”

“My lady?”

Wren opened the door to the carriage and launched herself out. Her knees absorbed the impact. She nearly crumpled at the pain—none of her wounds wereentirelyhealed—but she was fueled by desperation. All of her attendants gaped at her, but she only weakly lifted a hand. “Sorry for the trouble!”

She ran faster than she ever had. Her lungs, still healing from the poison, burned with the effort. She dodged through the crush of traffic and over the slurry of rainwater and urine and ale. She wove through people making their way home from work and darted past the pubs serving honeyed liquor, past the market stalls in the square filled with early springtime produce, past women with woven baskets spilling with wildflowers and berries. All around her, winter had begun to give way. Tentative new growth budded on the trees, and the faint sounds of birdsong filtered through the air.

The clocktower tolled four times, each chime echoing in her skull.

Five minutes left.

The train station loomed over her, its steepled glass ceiling supported by iron beams. As she shoved through the front gates, elbows and shoulders and briefcases jostled her from every angle. Butall she could feel was the wild, giddy race of her heart. All she could see was platform two ahead of her like the bright, guiding glow of a lighthouse.

Wren tumbled onto the platform, just in time for a train on the opposite side of the tracks to whir by. The clatter of its wheels rattled her bones. The gust of wind left in its wake whipped her hair across her face and filled her nose with the ashy smell of creosote.

She was here. She’d made it.

But her relief was quickly chased by dread. There were so many people, all drab and nondescript in dark hats and dark coats. They gathered in clusters like drifts of thick, black fog. How was she going to find Hal like this? What if he’d changed platforms? What if he’d already left on an earlier train? What if she never saw him again? What if—

But then, though faint, she felt the tug of the tether.