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“You won’t let anyone else into the house, not even servants, and you never have guests. You got flustered by a large grey hen waddling into the kitchen. Tell me you aren’t afraid to trust anyone.”

His eyes flashed. “I have been living perfectly well with my current habits for many years. I have kept Skymallow safe.” Without you flashed unspoken between them.

“Yes, you’ve done a fabulous job of finding your name by yourself!” she said, exasperated with him. “And I haven’t been living perfectly well this whole time, or have you forgotten this isn’t actually about you?”

The fur on his tail fluffed out, an echo of the same emotion churning through the bond between them.

He hissed in a long breath, forcibly calming himself.

“My apologies, Your Highness,” he said, every syllable frosty.

“I have not forgotten what I’ve cost you, and I intend to keep my promises.

I came to tell you that I have found the ritual we were searching for. ”

“Oh.” She sat back, feeling much like a punctured balloon.

He raised a supercilious eyebrow. “Do I have your permission to move on from the subject of diviners, then, or shall we waste further daylight on it?”

She gave him a flat look. “All right; I’m sorry. I should have given you the chance to explain before interrupting. We can revisit the subject of diviners later.”

A spark of surprise twisted through her, quickly stifled, as if he hadn’t expected her to apologise.

She pretended not to have felt it. “How do we begin?”

“For a ritual, we need the spell-room.” He gestured towards the far end of the library, and she rose to follow him. “Rituals help gather and concentrate power so that less raw magic is needed,” he explained as he walked.

Lamps set into the walls flared to life when Mal opened the door. The spell-room was circular, with no windows, and it smelled of dust and stale air. Gisele halted on the threshold, frowning down at the tips of her feet, where a circle of gold—of bloody course—was inlaid into the floor.

Mal cocked an ear, sensing her hesitation, and she carefully masked her expression and stepped across the gold without touching it.

“What next?” she asked.

With a rueful smile, he bent and traced a finger over the floorboards, showing her the thick layer of dust. “Sweeping. I haven’t used this room in far too long.”

A wall cupboard swung open, revealing jars of interesting substances and a variety of cleaning tools, including brooms. Mal availed himself of one.

“The house can sweep its own floors,” he explained, “but it’s better for a siden’s health if its inhabitants at least occasionally put some of their own energy into its maintenance, especially in a relatively young one like Skymallow.”

“You let it do the breakfast dishes,” she observed, picking up a second broom.

“ Some maintenance doesn’t mean all of it. I loathe washing dishes,” he admitted.

“So do I,” she agreed and felt his spurt of surprise.

“I was under the impression that princesses did not generally wash dishes.”

She began sweeping the dust out of the circle, highly conscious of that ring of inlaid gold.

“Normally that would be the case,” she admitted as the bristles shush-shushed against the wood.

“But Mother thought it best I be prepared for any eventuality. What if you were after a housekeeper, in the end? Or lived in a cave with no modern amenities? In fairness to her, that’s also the same reason I know how to start a fire, make camp, and navigate in thick forest, all of which did truthfully turn out to be useful skills in making my way here. ”

He seemed at once shamed and fascinated by this disclosure. “That’s how you learnt dagger-wielding too, I assume?”

“Oh, that wasn’t specific to me; all royals learn basic self-defence, even the women—I had the same instructor as Boern, though separate lessons, of course.

” At his blank expression, she added, with rising incredulity.

“You know, my twin brother? You don’t know, do you?

Had you been assuming you’d bargained for the heir to the throne? ”

He swallowed, clearly sensing thin ice. “I was not aware you had a twin brother, no,” he said carefully, “but I also hadn’t thought about it in those terms. I have no interest in Isshia’s succession, but aren’t you still the eldest?”

“I have two brothers: Boern and Seyfert, who’s eight years younger.

Sons take precedence over daughters—in Isshia, at least—so you’re out of luck twice over.

If Boern had been born five minutes earlier, it would be him sweeping your floors right now.

” She imagined Boern doing so with straight-backed dignity, but the image filled her with an odd, wistful sadness rather than amusement.

He tilted his head. “Is he much like you?”

The question took her aback, being accustomed as she was to being the less-important, less-useful twin. Nobody had ever made the comparison the other way around before.

“We have the same colouring,” she said eventually. “Well, except for our eyes, of course.” Boern’s were both blue. “I don’t know how much alike we are apart from that. We’re not close; we were kept apart as children in case you mixed us up and collected the wrong one.”

He pulled himself straight, offended. “There is no possibility I would ever confuse you with anyone else, and I’m inclined to believe I bargained for the better twin, unless your brother is also skilled in the arts of poisoning, blackmail, and research.”

This was such an outrageous yet strangely flattering thing to say that she could only gape at him, broom held loosely.

“Enough nattering, though, or I’ll begin to think all your grand claims of housekeeping prowess are inflated,” he said loftily, as if it had been her causing this distraction.

She was about to protest when she caught the way his eyes were sparkling, provocative with mischief. A strange moment of connection , not magic but mundane, hummed in her chest. She sucked in a breath and looked away.

She wished he wouldn’t keep doing this, revealing little hints of personality, prompting her to share pieces of herself before she could help it.

The part of her that had been kept at arm’s length from everyone for her entire life drank in the attention, and she knew that was dangerous even as she revelled in it.

When they’d swept all the dust into a pile, the floorboards moved once again in that alarmingly organic way, swallowing it.

“What does Skymallow do with the dust?” she asked.

“Puts it outside or uses it as raw material for its own construction projects,” Mal said absently, rummaging through the cupboard for materials.

With some irony, she watched him pull out a chalk stick and proceed to draw two circles on the rapidly-becoming-less-clean floor, filling the space around them with symbols and occasionally going back to the spellbook for reference.

“Now I see where all the dust came from,” she said.

He smiled and folded himself cross-legged within the largest chalk circle. A chalk line connected it to a smaller one. His tail echoed the shape of the circle, curling neatly around him.

He looked up at her expectantly. “Place your comb in the small circle and come sit beside me.”

She did so, lowering herself next to him with far less grace and her muscles protesting the hard floor. “What next?”

He held out his palm. “Hold my hand and imagine your magic flowing freely between us. You don’t need to do anything for the ritual; I’ll be directing the power. Our bond should make this part easier.”

This sounded both vague and unsettling, but she gingerly placed her hand in his.

The intensity of connection hadn’t lessened, but she was braced for it, trying to contain her own feelings on this side of her imaginary door.

Perhaps he was too, because no emotion came through this time, only the touch-taste-smell complexity of his magic.

His fingers curled around hers, and heat spooled through her, rushing towards their point of contact. It was pure instinct to slam a barrier down in its path.

His expressive eyebrows expressed, and she let out a deep breath and tried to imagine the magic flowing smoothly from her to him. Her magic. Fae magic.

It was surprisingly difficult to let that rush of power flow freely.

A large part of her mind protested the idea that she had any magic at all, withdrawing instinctively whenever the magic started up, objecting to this alien thing moving in her.

Every time it began to work, she tensed and it slammed to a halt once again.

“Relax,” he said, his voice low and soothing.

“Ah yes, I’ll just do that, then!” she bit out, as the magic stop-started jerkily for the tenth time.

He shuffled around so that they were facing each other and took her other hand with his.

His mismatched eyes held hers. “You are safe here, I promise. Your magic is safe. Your magic is feeding into a spell you want to make work. I want that too. Trust me to help you in this ritual we build together. Focus on that and remember that the worst that can happen is nothing.”

She didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust anyone . But that wasn’t going to make this spell work, and he was right. Nothing truly was the worst thing; hadn’t she spent her life experiencing that? And they did both want the same thing here. Perhaps she could trust in that.

This time, when she felt the magic begin to flow once more between them, her body automatically tensing in response, she closed her eyes and focused on the comb in her mind’s eye. That’s what this is for , she thought. Let it happen .

At first it was only a sluggish trickle, but it grew easier to hold the connection as more magic swept through her.

Heat suffused her limbs. Malediction began to murmur to himself in a language she didn’t know, and she was intensely aware of his presence, not just through their joined hands but through the magical sense of him in the room, hot metal and old books, the flick of a lion’s tail.

Floral notes of jasmine joined the chorus this time. That was new.

She was aware as well of the metal of the circle inlaid in the floor, containing the growing power within.

When she opened her eyes, the circle was glowing, as were the chalk lines of spellwork.

Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, and through her hands she could feel Malediction’s heart beating too, the magic pulsing in time with them.

The comb began to vibrate, the gold flecks in the wood glittering like Malediction’s fae eye, burning gold like that day in the palace, liquid and twisting?—

The gold was twisting, she realised with distant horror, but the magic was a torrent now, pulling them both along with it, uncontrolled as the gallop of a runaway horse.

Tendrils of thinnest gold rose up from the flecks in the comb and spread, forming a glowing tree-structure in the air.

It grew rapidly, until a dome of wire-thin golden branches had formed above them, stretching the whole width of the circle.

When the webbing growth reached the edge, the metal inlaid in the floor rose up to meet it, the liquid running along the connection, thickening the golden branches.

The scent of burning metal grew strong enough to choke on, and one glance at Malediction’s face was enough to tell her that this wasn’t at all what was supposed to be happening.

She snatched her hands back.

“No, don’t—” He reached for her, but it was too late.

Everything got very confused. There was an explosion of hot metal, and the air was full of smoke. Malediction moved with shocking speed, his body covering hers. The house shuddered with a sound like wood smashing.

They… fell?

All the breath pushed out of her lungs with the impact, and she lay for several gasping breaths, disoriented and spluttering. The air was clear of smoke, though she could still taste it. She was lying on a large, soft bed. Malediction was lying on top of her.