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“Even if you won’t give the tiffe a chance, at least come with us to the wedding,” Eudoria interrupted, holding a lightly wrinkled hand up to stop me mid-sentence.

“Really? You’re going to that?” It seemed a waste of time.

She fixed me with her terrible seer’s gaze. “I need a break. And you do, too. Both of you.”

Kalcedon shrugged and glanced my way, as if to say, why not. But I shook my head.

“I’ll stay here, thank you.”

We had a few more minutes of silence after that, and I felt satisfied that I’d won. I wouldn’t be forced to parade down to Missaniech and pretend I was a part of something that would never want me back. Better yet, I’d have the tower and its books to myself. But at last Eudoria sighed.

“I do worry about you, you know,” she said quietly. “What happens when you don’t become anything, Meda? What happens when the power you’re throwing your life away for is too far away for you to reach?”

My face burned as I swirled the snails around in a dish of water to rinse them.

“Good thing I’ll never have to find out,” I told her, and that was the end of that.

Chapter 5

They left the next day a little after noon. Kalcedon had a basket of fruit and a pouch of seeds to give to the couple. He set it down by the front door and puttered about, waiting for Eudoria to emerge from her room.

I had never seen him dressed like this, in an embroidered bright-blue shirt with a white stone dangling from one ear. I wasn’t even sure where he’d gotten the finery—magic, perhaps—but it suited him.

“You should come.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“It would be better. If you were there.”

“You know you don’t have to go, either,” I told him, glancing up from the stone bowl of seeds I was crushing into oil, an ingredient for Eudoria’s written scrying. It bothered me that he could be so careless with his time, when he had so much more potential than anyone.

Kalcedon stopped in front of the mirror by the door, fiddling with his hair. He shrugged, not looking at me.

“If you put half the effort into it that I did, you could really make something of yourself.”

“So?”

“You could change everything.” I said the words quietly. I was half afraid he’d actually do it. Witches were hardly common; ones with measurable power or training even less so. But the tower would feel empty without him.

Kalcedon gave me a heavy-lidded look.

“Not the things worth changing,” he said.

Eudoria emerged from her rooms just then with a silk shawl around her shoulders. When she saw me, she audibly sighed. I pursed my lips and ground the heavy stone pestle hard against the bottom of the mortar bowl.

“If you change your mind, you can always…” Eudoria began.

“I won’t. Have fun. Don’t hurry home.” I bent further over the bowl, as if to make a point. She left with another sigh, beckoning Kalcedon along with her. He picked up the basket of fruit and followed her without so much as a goodbye.

I had never finished a chore so quickly. The moment the door closed I ground the rest of the seeds with a wild frenzy, scraped everything into the waiting bottle, and washed the bowl. I scrubbed my hands twice to make certain no oil remained.

Then I raced up the coiling stair to the workroom at the top, and the row of bookshelves there. Some, especially those to do with shields (a favorite subject of mine), Eudoria had given me permission to read if I handled with care. Others, she had forbidden me to even look at.

It wasn’t that they contained terrible spells; curses or plagues that made blood rain from the sky. What would it matter if they did? I was no Kalcedon. No; the forbidden books were forbidden because they were old and of immeasurable value, from before the Ward and the weakening of bloodlines.

“They’d be pointless to you in any case,” she’d told me, when I’d once begged.

“I want to know what they say.”