Twenty-five

“SO YOUR CANE FUNCTIONS AS A CONDUIT?” I ASK. We spent the last few days dissecting what Lord Benton’s defection might mean, but until Finn can get more information, it’s an exercise in madness. He’s been teaching me about magic, instead.

“Mmm.” Finn nods, checking over the sequence I’ve copied out of one of his father’s books of magical knowledge. I’m beginning to grasp the specific language of magic. It’s a lot like mathematics. A shorthand way of expressing much larger concepts. Though I can now look at most of the spells and understand what they accomplish, I can’t do any of it. I don’t know how to feel about that, but I do enjoy researching and learning. Though both Finn’s and Eleanor’s lack of knowledge about the history of magic—where it came from, how it started—annoys me a great deal and makes me reconsider my distaste of studying history. I may have to delve into this instead.

“The cane is a shortcut. I do the work beforehand and funnel it into the cane, and then when I need something quickly I can pull it from there. It is impossible to memorize every spell. I consult my books constantly, with only a handful of spells I can manage without advance preparation. The cane makes me far more capable of pulling up magic at a moment’s notice.”

“Like tapping a menacing fellow on the head to make him forget he wanted to harass me?”

“Yes, exactly like that.”

“I had a knife, you know.”

He smiles. “I did know. It was the first thing I liked about you.”

“Show me something.”

“What would you like to see?”

“Anything. Dazzle me with your boring, practical Alben magic.”

Sir Bird preens next to me, tucking feathers into place with a low noise in his throat almost like he’s talking to himself. A slow smile spreads across Finn’s face as he rubs his knuckles—black and blue with several bruises from Sir Bird’s beak.

“Let’s see,” he says, flipping through his father’s book. “Here! I’ll need some water in a shallow bowl . . . ink . . . yes, I think this is everything.” He gathers the items, then reads over the entry several times, eyebrows knit in concentration. Dipping his pen in the ink, he whispers strange words while writing on the surface of the water. The ink drips down, elongating the form of the symbols that still hover where he wrote them. I recognize one—change. But the rest I haven’t learned yet.

Then, without warning, he lifts up the bowl and dumps the whole thing onto Sir Bird.

Only instead of getting wet, as the water washes over his body, Sir Bird’s feathers turn . . . blue.

Bright, brilliant, shimmering blue.

Squawking in outrage, Sir Bird hops and flies around the room, frantically shaking his feathers. He lands on the desk with a scrabble of clawed feet, then begins trying to bite off the color.

“Ha!” Finn says, pointing at his knuckles. “Now you’re black and blue, too!”

I can’t help but laugh at my poor, panicking bird. Not to mention the ridiculous pettiness of Finn’s magic show. Picking up Sir Bird, I stroke his feathers and speak softly to him. “Hush now. I’ll make him fix you. You’re still very handsome, but blue isn’t your color, is it?”

He caws mournfully, still pulling at his own feathers.

“Finn.”

He puts his hands behind his back, trying to look innocent. “What? He deserved it.”

“He’s a bird. You can’t really find this much satisfaction in revenge against a bird, can you?”

His voice comes out just a tad petulant. “He started it. Besides, I made it temporary. It’ll wear off within the hour.”

“There now.” I kiss Sir Bird’s head and set him on my shoulder. “You’ll be back to yourself in no time.”

“Tell him to stop pecking at me.”

“Perhaps you deserve it. But you’re right—magic can be used for things that are petty and ridiculous, instead of just boring.”

His smile is soft and sadder than I anticipate. “We used to use that one on each other. My dad would dye my mother’s hair pink, then she’d make his green, and I’d pester them until they made mine as red as the flowers in that painting. It’s always been one of my favorite tricks.” He clears his throat. “It’s quite in vogue with society, as well. You’d be hard-pressed to find a noblewoman with her own true hair color.”

“I didn’t notice much blue at the symphony. Just brown and blond.”

“Well, they have to make the spell boring somehow. They are Alben, after all.”

I laugh, then lean over to study the spell to see if I can work out how it was all accomplished. “So you could use any ink lying around?”

He nods. “It would have been brighter still if I’d had blue ink, though.”

“Interesting. So the quality and type item you use influences it. What about the sugar that Lord Downpike uses? I’ve been wondering. Could he use any sugar or must he spell it beforehand?”

“He uses it as a reagent to focus and release magic he’s stored up. Similar to what I do with my cane, but he keeps the spells in his own body. They lose less potency, but it’s a far greater risk should something go wrong. And I can’t imagine the strain it must be, nor what it must feel like.”

I flex my fingers, noting how much the pins and needles have faded. “He’s not a man afraid of pain. But you do store some magic in yourself.” I gaze significantly at his hair and he smiles.

“I haven’t refreshed that in weeks.”

“Hmm. I don’t quite believe you.”

He raises a single eyebrow and both corners of his lips at the same time. “You think I can’t be this charming without magical aid?”

I exhale a laugh, steering the conversation from this increasingly large, unspoken thing between us. “Maybe he’s got the right idea, though. You should expend that energy on a more important spell in case you ever need it. But the magical knowledge of his that we’ve gathered because of Sir Bird—can’t he have just stored the spells before? So it doesn’t matter that we have his book.”

“Once broken, the connection between Lord Downpike and the spells in this book cannot be restored. If Downpike was storing any of the spells in Sir Bird, he lost them.”

“Good boy,” I murmur, nuzzling Sir Bird with my cheek. “I won’t let nasty Finn dye you ever again.”

Finn and Sir Bird exchange jealous glares. Finn breaks eye contact first, returning to the sheet I was working on. “Now, look here.” He points to one of the symbols I’ve copied. “If you shifted that one place to the right, instead of dousing flame with water, you would light water on fire. Change one variable and you change the entire equation.”

“Is that why there’s so little innovation?” I haven’t told him about Eleanor’s trick. Finn informed me early on that everyone sticks to the magic they’ve been instructed in. I’ve started to wonder about switching things around, though—combining and reimagining some of the more complex spells.

“It’s safer. A slight change in any stage could have unintended results. That’s why most of the gentry hardly bother with magic at all. They learn the basics as is required of all of us to defend Albion, but other than that they leave it alone.”

“Why are you different?”

He sighs, shoulders slipping down as though bearing a greater weight. “Because someone must be paying attention.”

“To what?”

“To everything. My parents entrusted me with a great deal of knowledge; they did not do it so I could live a privileged life of ease.” His voice gets that heavy distance it always does when referencing his family.

“Mmm, yes, because the homes and wealth and carriages and galas and symphonies are such a burden.” I cannot hide my smile, and Finn sits back, noticeably more at ease.

“You’ve forgotten what a great deal of work it is to be so handsome and charming.”

I look pointedly at his hair. “Perhaps you could show me the equation and methodology behind that one. I should very much like to understand how much effort you’ve put into it.”

“It truly was essential when I came to the city without knowing a soul. I had to get invitations to dinner and dances and social engagements somehow. I used to put more stock in its effectiveness, until a certain someone proved resistant.”

“Why was it so important? You don’t seem to enjoy any of your social engagements.”

“I was looking for someone. If no one is willing to talk to you, you can’t get much information. Then I caught wind of Lord Downpike’s warmongering, and that overtook everything else. I keep a constant watch on the moods of the important families—whether or not they would support aggression against the continental countries and the Hallin line.”

“So your charm was a tool.”

“Effective enough, until you. You know, I’ve been reading more of your father’s book in an effort to better understand where you come from.”

“But he’s wrong on—”

“No, no, meaning everything he says I dismiss entirely. But there’s one chapter about the Melenese language I found fascinating. Is it true you have fifteen different words for love?” He leans forward, his lips a challenge, like he wants me to ask why he would bring such a thing up.

I refuse to rise to his bait. “Yes. It’s much clearer, really. There’s a word for the first blush of youthful love free of desire. For longing to be with someone so much you would rather throw yourself to the tides than be without them. For the stale but steady relationship between faithful members of an arranged marriage. For how to feel about someone you thought was everything but ended up never feeling the same way about you. For the poison left over when you love someone and it ends so badly you cannot release the feelings. For the love between a mother and her children, a father and his children, a grandmother and her progeny, the love between two dear friends, the love that is the first building block of a lifelong affair. There’s even a word for a love so devastating nothing before or after is ever seen the same.”

“Beautiful,” he says. “But I counted only eleven.”

“I’m not as fluent in Melenese as I’d like. Alben took even our ability to love from us.”

“That is a tragedy beyond expression,” he says, and at first I think he is teasing but there is no curve to his lips, no dance to his eyes. The air between us is charged with something unquantifiable either in math or magic. I can’t look away and I don’t want to. But I remind myself that we are unchaperoned, and I am a lady, and there are rules to this sort of thing.

I slap myself in the forehead, startling Finn and Sir Bird, who flaps away to the other end of the room. “What is it?” Finn asks.

“I’ve just now remembered something very important.”

“Yes?”

“I’m not an Alben woman.”

He frowns, confused. “You’d forgotten that?”

“A great many people have tried to make me, from the time I was small.” I smile, admiring the line of his jaw and the curve of his mouth, and let myself feel whatever I want to feel, even if I cannot remember the exact word for it.

He narrows his eyes. “Is everything all right?”

I throw my arms around his neck and kiss him full on the mouth.