Roman trembled as he unfolded the paper. It looked creased, worn. There were smudges of dirt on it, but he was so relieved that he couldn’t think straight. He didn’t wonder how this impossibility had happened, since his typewriter was still in the parlor and not his room. He didn’t wonder why this letter looked so tattered, and he read as if starved for the words:
I’ll return most likely when the war is over.
I want to see you. I want to hear your voice.
P.S. I most certainly don’t have wings.
Roman froze.
He knew these words, intimately. He had read them, over and over. He had carried them in his pocket; he had borne them in the trenches. Iris had both tossed these words at him in the infirmary, and then breathed life into them on their wedding night, giving the ink her voice.
This was an old letter. A letter she had written to him weeks ago, and one he had believed to be lost.
“How?” he marveled aloud, sitting back on his heels. His knees twinged in protest, but the pain turned into crackling static when he heard footsteps. When he saw a figure emerge from the lavatory.
Roman gazed up at Lieutenant Shane. Wide-eyed. Unable to breathe. Clutching Iris’s letter to his chest like it was a shield.
Shane held up a stack of paper. Worn and crinkled and full of typed words. He threw the letters down; they spread across the rug. White as apple blossoms, as bone, as the first snowfall.
Shane’s voice was pitched low, but his accusation burned through the air.
“I know you’re the mole, correspondent.”
{38}
By Invitation Only
“What do you mean?” Roman asked.
He knew he sounded dense, but he was struggling to breathe. To think his way through this unforeseen encounter, one that could end either with him tortured and hung from his father’s gate or with him coming through the night with the most unlikely of allies.
Shane stepped closer, his boots crinkling the letters on the rug. Roman winced but didn’t break their stare. He didn’t move or cower when the lieutenant reached into his pocket, but it was only to procure another folded sheet of paper.
He held it out to Roman, daring him to take it.
Swallowing, Roman accepted.
This paper was crisp, fresh. But he could see the inked words within, and he unfolded it to read:
This is a test to see if the strike bars E & R are in working condition.
EREEERRRRR
E
“You find this incriminating?” Roman asked, but it felt like ice had lodged in his stomach. “I type these messages out occasionally before I start work, because the strike bars E and R often get stuck, and I don’t want to—”
“Don’t lie to me, correspondent,” Shane said in a clipped voice. “And don’t take me for a fool. I know you’ve been exchanging letters by way of enchanted typewriters and wardrobe doors. With someone you call E., who looks to be, in fact, Iris Elizabeth Winnow. A journalist championing Enva’s cause.”
The sound of Iris’s name broke through Roman’s fear like an axe in a frozen pond. Anger stirred his blood, making his skin flush hot. If Shane had all the old letters as well as the newer ones, then he had a good deal of knowledge that Roman would prefer he didn’t have. The main piece being that he had identified Iris, which meant Roman needed to play a different game.
He dropped his clueless guise.
“What do you want?” Roman asked.
“I want your confession, in writing.”
“What confession? That I fell in love with someone before Dacre found me?”
“I want to know everything you typed to Elizabeth … no wait, sorry. To Iris E. Winnow about the Hawk Shire assault.”
“You have no proof that I was the one who tipped them off.”
“So certain, are we?”
Roman was silent, wondering why Shane sounded so confident. He only had half of the puzzle. He only had Iris’s letters, and the one that Roman had typed with all the information on Hawk Shire? He had asked Iris to burn it.
Shane withdrew another letter from his pocket.
Roman braced himself as the lieutenant read, “‘I do agree to what you ask, but only because you seem to have stolen the words from my mouth. You are in a precarious position—far more than me—and giving up Dacre’s movements and tactics is something I dread to ask you to do, even as it feels inevitable.’” Shane paused, glancing at Roman with a cruel smile. “Is that enough to jog your memory?”
Cold sweat began to seep through Roman’s shirt.
It was his own fault that Shane had found such an incriminating letter. Roman was supposed to destroy them after reading, leaving no trace of his and Iris’s correspondence. He had tried, gods how he had tried. He had lit a match and held it to the edge of one of the letters, but he hadn’t been able to watch it catch flame. And so he had hidden them beneath a loose floorboard.