“Maybe you won’t be away from your family on Christmas,” he finally replied. “As you said, there’s plenty of time. Twelve days. By then, your father will have relented, and you’ll be—”

“No,” she cut him off. “No, he will not relent. Not with the family’s reputation at stake.”

At Giles’s side, she shifted. The nearby branch of candles cast warm gilt on her face; the moonlight left her skirts and neatly half-booted feet silvery-cold. “Never mind that. It’s all right. If I do not return to London, then I . . . then I will be somewhere else.”

“Nicely reasoned,” Giles said.

One of her feet kicked against his shin in what was surely not an accident.

“As it is almost Christmas,” she said in a tone of frightening cheer, “shall we look for a special star in the sky?”

“What, as though we’re Magi following it?” Giles shook his head, rocking it upon his folded-up forearms. “Sorry, princess. I wouldn’t know a special star from an ordinary one.”

“But would you follow a star? Or—a dream? If you were permitted to have one?” Her laugh was low and a little bitter.

Giles considered. “Following a star is no wilder than some of my father’s other schemes. He’s tried making paper not only from rags, but from wood pulp—what a disaster that was. And remember, we came to England solely because of a fortune that no one thinks exists anymore except for him. So if I’m willing to follow a whim that isn’t even my own, why shouldn’t I follow a star?”

“Because you don’t believe in it.” Her voice was low and soft. “You wouldn’t follow a star on your own. You wouldn’t be here on your own.”

Her words sounded like a criticism, echoing within his hollowness. There’s nothing you want. Those dreams are all borrowed from someone else. You don’t have any of your own.

Maybe he didn’t anymore. He’d let them go when his wrists grew painful; the first of many things that would inevitably slip from his grasp, just as illness had taken everything from his mother.

But it wasn’t as though he’d done nothing with his life. He had made himself instead into the family’s valet, bootboy, governess—and Richard’s dutiful son, who could manage the accounts of a paper mill or design a new setting for an ancient jewel.

“If,” he answered, “I am willing to come along so a person of conviction doesn’t have to be alone, isn’t that worth something?”

“I suppose, if you do so for the sake of providing company.”

Not if you do it out of mistrust. This remained unsaid. Did she think it, though? It was such a grimy thought that he shied from it himself. “If I can’t tell a special star from an ordinary one, maybe I’ll treat them all like they’re special. Or are we even talking about stars anymore?”

“We were never talking about stars,” she sighed.

They lay on the woven surface, simply looking at the moon. Now that he had seen it through the telescope, to Giles it seemed closer, the shape of a grin tipped sideways. Hanging just out of reach, as though if he stretched out his hand he could capture the whole of it. Appearing so much smoother and brighter from a distance than it did when one looked at it closely.

Well. A lot of things were like that.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Audrina shiver. “Are you cold?” he asked.

“I am fine.”

“Liar. Your sleeves are like little puffy flowers. They can’t possibly be warm, especially when you’re lying on a library floor.”

He rolled to a seated position and began the tedious process of easing off his coat. The snug cut made it difficult to accomplish on his own, but he succeeded by working one sleeve down over the heel of his hand, then sitting on sleeve and hand alike to pin them in place as he eased out of the rest.

Throughout, Audrina watched him from her reclining position atop the shawl. The set of her mouth was grave—as though Giles was something to be looked at through a telescope, considered, then turned away from again.

“Here you go.” He shook the coat out, ready to lay it over her like a blanket.

But somehow, in reaching over to cover her, he forgot to draw back again. Somehow his eyes caught hers, dark in the low golden firelight, and he forgot to do anything at all.

Poised on one elbow, his other arm spanning her body, he drank her with his eyes, with his breath, with a soft sigh of wanting.

After a few long seconds during which he couldn’t quite seem to get himself to move, the solemn line of her mouth curved into a smile. And then she captured his face between her palms, pulling it to hers.