If We Were Villains: A Novel

Three days later I was alone in the Tower, getting ready for the masque and our truncated performance of Romeo and Juliet. The costumers had dressed us in a style they described as “carnevale couture,” which as far as I could tell adhered to no particular time period but called for a lot of velvet and gold embroidery. I checked my reflection in the mirror, turned from side to side. I looked like a musketeer, but a particularly flamboyant and well-funded one. The half cape they’d given me was slung over one shoulder and tied with a sparkling ribbon in the middle of my chest. I tugged at it self-consciously.

James and the girls had already gone (except Wren, who as far as we knew was still bedridden in the infirmary), and I had only a few minutes to spare. I tried to pull my boots on standing up, but quickly toppled sideways onto my bed and finished the job from there. My mask sat on the nightstand, watching me with hollow eyes. It was a beautiful, enchanted sort of thing—crisscrossed with lines of gold and painted with diamonds in shimmering blue and black and silver. (As they’d been measured and made for us by the art students and wouldn’t fit anyone else properly, we’d been told that we could keep them.) I tied the silk ribbon behind my head with fumbling fingers, muttering my first lines under my breath, then took one last look at myself and hurried down the stairs.

Alexander was in the library, but at first I didn’t even recognize him and he startled me so badly that I stumbled backward. He looked up from where he was crouched over a fine line of white powder on the coffee table. His keen eyes watched me through two deep holes in a green and black mask, wider and less delicate than mine, tapering to a sharp devilish point at the end of his nose.

“What are you doing?” I asked, more loudly than I meant to.

He twirled the tube of a ballpoint pen between his fingers and said, “Just getting a bit of a buzz before the ball. Would you like to join me?”

“What? No. Are you serious?”

“I am more serious than my custom; you / Must be so too.” He bent his head over the table and sniffed hard. I turned away, unwilling to watch, furious with him for some elusive, incoherent reason. I heard him exhale and looked around again. The line was gone, and he sat with his hands on his knees, his head tilted back, eyes half closed.

“So,” I said. “How long has this been going on?”

“Are you going to scold me?”

“It would be well warranted,” I said. “Do the others know?”

“No.” He lifted his head again and watched me with unnerving intensity. “And I expect it to stay that way.”

I glanced at the clock, mind whirring. “We’re going to be late,” I said, shortly.

“Then let’s go.”

I left the library without waiting to see if he would follow. We were on the trail, halfway to the Hall, when he finally caught up and fell in step beside me.

“Are you going to cold-shoulder me all night?” he asked, so casually that I was sure he wouldn’t care if I did.

“I’m considering it, yeah.”

He laughed again, but the sound had a false ring to it. I moved impatiently forward. I wanted to get away from him, lose myself in a press of people I didn’t know and avoid thinking about it for another few hours. The cape hung heavily on my shoulders, but the cold crept underneath, gnawing at my skin through the thinner layers of my shirt and doublet.

“Oliver,” Alexander said, and I ignored him. He could barely keep up with me, lungs working hard to convert the frigid air to something breathable. Snow crunched under our feet—brittle and icy on top; soft, dense powder underneath. “Oliver. Oliver!” The third time he said my name he grabbed me by the arm and wrenched me around to face him. “Are you really going to be a twat about this?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. Look.” He was still holding my arm, too hard, fingers crushing down through the muscle until they reached bone. I gritted my teeth, almost sure he didn’t even realize he was doing it, unwilling to acknowledge the more troubling possibility that he did. “I just need an extra little kick to get me through exams. I’ll be clean when you see me in January.”

“You’d better be. Have you even thought about what’ll happen if Colborne finds that shit in the Castle? He’s just looking for a reason to tear this whole thing open again, and if you give him one, I swear I’ll kill you.”

He stared at me, mask to mask, with a wary, suspicious look I didn’t quite recognize. “What’s gotten into you?” he said. “You don’t sound like yourself.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not acting like yourself.” I tried to drag my arm out of his grip, but his fingers were locked around my bicep. “You’re smarter than this. I’m not keeping any more secrets for you. Get off me. Let’s go.”

I tore my arm free and turned my back on him, plunging forward into deeper snow.