He takes his weapon from his pocket as he approaches her.
She turns and looks at him, wearing an expression he cannot read. She lifts her hand and rests her palm against the side of his face.
He can tell where her heart is before he strikes. He doesn’t even have to look away from her eyes, the motion is so well-practiced it is almost automatic, a skill so honed he doesn’t have to think about it though here and now the not thinking bothers him.
Then it is done, one of his hands pressed against the neckline of her gown and the other against her back to keep her from falling or pulling away. From a distance, viewed through the window, it would appear romantic, the long thin needle piercing her heart a detail lost in an embrace.
He waits for her breath to catch, for her heart to stop.
It does not.
Her heart continues to beat. He can feel it beneath his fingers, stubborn and insistent.
She continues to look up at him, though the expression in her eyes has changed and now he understands. Before she had been weighing him. Now he has been weighed and left wanting and her disappointment is as obvious and evident as the blood running down her back and through his fingers and the still-beating heart beneath his hand.
She sighs.
She leans forward, leans into him, pressing her drumming heart against his fingers and her breath, her skin, all of her is so impossibly alive in his arms that he is terrified.
She reaches up, casual and calm, and removes his mask. She lets it fall to the ground as she stares in his eyes.
“I am so very tired of the romance of the dead girl,” she says. “Aren’t you?”
Dorian wakes with a start.
He is in an armchair in the captain’s quarters of a pirate ship upon a sea of honey. He tries to convince his mind that the Manhattan hotel room was the dream.
“Did you have a nightmare?” Eleanor asks from across the room. She is adjusting her maps. “I used to have nightmares and I would write them down and fold them up into stars and throw them away to be rid of them. Sometimes it worked.”
“I will never be rid of this one,” Dorian tells her.
“Sometimes they stay,” Eleanor says, nodding. She makes a change to the gold silk and collapses the maps again. “We’re almost there,” she says, and she goes out to the deck.
Dorian spends another breath in a remembered hotel room before he follows her. He takes the knapsack she has given him containing a few potentially useful items, including a flask full of water though Eleanor claims he spent enough time in the honey that he shouldn’t be hungry or thirsty for a while. There is a pocketknife and a length of rope and a box of matches.
She somehow found a pair of boots that fit him, tall and cuffed and quite piratey. They are almost comfortable. Along with his star-buttoned coat he looks like he walked out of a fairy tale. Maybe he did.
He goes out to the deck and freezes in his boots at the sight in front of him.
A dense forest of cherry trees in full bloom fills the cavern, all the way up to the edge of the river. Twisting tree roots disappear below the surface of the honey while stray blossoms fall and float downstream.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” Eleanor says.
“It’s beautiful,” Dorian agrees, though the single word cannot capture the way the sight of this long-beloved place is tearing at his heart.
“I won’t be able to stop long with this current,” Eleanor explains. “Are you ready to go?”
“I think so,” Dorian says.
“When you find the inn tell the innkeeper I said hello, please,” Eleanor says.
“I shall,” Dorian tells her. And because he knows he might not have another chance he adds: “I know your daughter.”
“You know Mirabel?” Eleanor asks.
“Yes.”
“She’s not my daughter.”