“Can you stand?” he asked her. The ground had turned into a river of mud beneath them, and she was eager to get out of it. She nodded, accepting his help up, and gingerly tested whether or not she could bear to put weight on her leg. Her hands stayed on his bare shoulders as she looked up into his face.
“All right?” he asked, his voice still sounding odd to her ears. Etta nodded again. Standing was easy; speaking was not. “Do you want to walk?”
She nodded, hugging her arms to her chest.
Nicholas nudged them forward, but a thought spun in Etta’s mind, and she tugged him back. “Wait—we should take it—”
“It?” he repeated. “The snake?”
“Yeah.” Etta shook off the last bit of shock blanketing her mind. “What if…what if we need to eat it? Shouldn’t we take it with us?” Thinking about this further, she added, “Maybe not the head, though.”
Flanked by a curtain of green that glowed vibrantly, even in the silver overcast light, with rain pouring down over his face, his shoulders, the scars that crisscrossed over his chest, Nicholas blinked and started to laugh. He tilted his head back, catching the rain across his face; and when he finally leaned down to kiss her, the sweetness of it lingered on his lips.
It seemed to end before it even began. He pulled back, looking equally abashed and afraid, studying her face. Her hands itched to smooth the lines of worry away from his forehead, from around his beautiful, dark eyes. But he wasn’t the type to like being soothed—she knew that—and she also knew that this concern was more than just stupid eighteenth-century propriety. They were beyond that now.
She set her shoulders back, meeting his gaze with a challenge. “You call that a kiss?”
One corner of his mouth quirked up. “We haven’t the time for a proper one, pirate. Now tell me, where precisely are we?”
AT SOME POINT BETWEEN THE TIME WHEN NICHOLAS HAD LEFT to…to do whatever it was that required him to be shirtless…and her finding the Buddha statue’s decapitated head, a suspicion had begun to take root in the back of her mind. And as she’d walked, glimpsing the dark peaks of the temple in the distance, she’d had a single moment of relief at having been right before the anger began to pump through her again.
New York.
London.
And now, Cambodia.
It was too much to be a coincidence. She’d taken out the letter, rereading the first clue they’d been able to ignore, as it came before the passage in New York: Rise and enter the lair, where the darkness gives you your stripes. It must mean the Taktsang Palphug Monastery in Bhutan, called the Tiger’s Lair or the Tiger’s Nest, where her mother claimed to have gone into one of the caves to meditate on what to do with her life. Which now seemed, in a word, unlikely.
Her mother had told her how to decipher the letter. She’d told her any number of times, under the guise of bedtime stories, about her life and adventures—she’d even painted the scenes, hanging them on the wall of the living room in the correct order, which made Etta feel like an idiot for not making the connection right away. Each clue had been carefully disguised to hide the reality of her life as a traveler; each was hiding in plain sight.
Now Etta was sure that the painting of the British Museum hadn’t been meant to lead her to the museum, but to the painting’s other subject: Alice. And Etta was willing to bet that, if she double-checked, she’d find that her mother’s supposed first apartment in the city, the one she’d painted to show a glimpse of the lights of Midtown East through one of the windows, was in the same location as the Dove Tavern.
Are you listening, Etta?
Etta, are you paying attention?
Let me tell you a story.…
Rose had planted the seeds, watered them again and again by repeating the stories over the years. She had given Etta what she needed to find the astrolabe; Etta only had to make the connection.
Etta had never been to the Tiger’s Nest, let alone Bhutan, but she knew someone beside her mother who had.
She and Nicholas walked side by side, her eyes trained on the ground, his on the path in front of them, until more of the dark stones and statues rose out of the foliage and marked their path forward. From her mother’s apparently half-true stories, Etta knew that both cities—Angkor Wat, and their present location, Angkor Thom—had, in her time, been largely cleared of the jungle’s ever-reaching overgrowth to allow for tourists to explore the spread of temples and structures. But whatever year or era they were in, it was clear it was after it had been abandoned by the Khmer Empire, but before it had come to the attention of Western civilization.
“We’ll need to swim,” Nicholas said, the first words he’d uttered in nearly an hour. They’d come upon what Etta thought might have been part of the moat that surrounded the remains of the grand city. The moat had naturally filled up with earth and wildlife over the years, but with the rain lashing down around them, the water level was high enough that they couldn’t wade their way across.
“No, my mom talked about some kind of a bridge…at the southern gate, I think,” Etta said. She doubted it looked anything like the modern causeway that existed in her era, but it was worth finding, to avoid whatever was living in the moat.
To fill the silence and stop thinking about the way the rain made the trees rattle like angry snakes, Etta asked, “Where did you travel with Julian?”
“Here and there.”
All right. Julian was still off-limits, and she wouldn’t press him, not when it was clearly still painful. But Etta was incredibly curious about that sliver of time in his life.
“I think you were close to getting on the right trail to the astrolabe,” she told him. “I’m not sure if you were in the right year, but I’m almost positive the first clue refers to the Tiger’s Nest. And that’s where Julian died, right?”
Nicholas ran a hand back over his short hair and nodded.
Etta’s fingers twisted around one another. “It’s my mom’s fault, isn’t it? Everything. You traveling with him, his death…”
“I can forgive your mother for doing what she believed to be right, even if her methods were questionable and a damned pain,” he said, “but if we trace the blame back to its roots, there’s only Ironwood at fault.”
Always Ironwood.
“I’m not sure where or how to begin,” he said, holding a branch out of her way. Nicholas searched for the words. “Julian and I were sent to Bhutan because the old man had found records that a monk once sighted a young blond woman in one of the meditation caves—one who never emerged from it again. We thought for certain it would be another fruitless trip. Over the years, the search took us everywhere from Mexico to India, to what I think you’d know as Alaska…?”
Etta nodded.
“It’s not…it’s not such an easy thing to discuss,” he said, his low voice drowned out for a moment by the cracking of thunder. “For a time, I was blind to the real role I was playing. I told myself I wasn’t there as Julian’s servant, but as a brother; a friend and protector. I think he did see me as a confidant, but…I’m afraid I’ve too much pride. The realization that I was actually there to play valet festered in me. Made me resent him. Just before he died, I told him that I didn’t want to travel any longer—I wanted out of the trap of servitude again. Ironwood had promised me status if I returned to the arms of the family—promised me wonder, adventure, all the things that sound exciting to a boy of fourteen. But I was never given freedom. I was issued orders. I did not receive the full training, or the locations of all of the passages, you see—I wonder now if Ironwood feared I’d escape through them and somehow disappear.”