by S. L. Prater
Doyle leaned out the window and presented a gold summons at the gates of the palace. His actions barely registered with Marnie. She didn’t catch the familiar press of bodies crowding around their car. Her reverie didn’t break until Blade Guard Raif pulled open the door to the motorcar. He extended his arm to her. She took it, brow furrowed, feeling lost.
“Where am I going?” she whispered to Doyle, but the priest was busy with his horse.
Raif answered for him. “You’ve made your emperor nervous. He insisted you be brought to him as soon as you finished with your assignment.” He touched the silver armband on her wrist. “I take it things went well?” He didn’t smile, but there was warmth in his eyes.
She groaned in response. Her legs were so heavy, Raif had to hug her to his side to escort her. They moved through the palace, her arm around his shoulder, past the braziers and the conservatory, and down the marble halls. Her faculties were not yet fully her own. Her ankles were especially weak, refusing to hold her up. A piercing headache was building behind her eyes. It promised to be particularly painful.
Her stumbling steps tripped them twice, but he caught and steadied her each time. They trudged on, and he never complained. If he was bothered at all, he kept it to himself, his face placid.
Raif guided her to the library with the dusty books and the red velvet furniture. With some help, she settled into the settee.
“I’ll let Lord LaFontaine know you are here,” he said, and then he was gone.
Marnie hadn’t caught the folded bedding in the corner during her first visit—a quilt stacked neatly on a feather pillow—or the small mountain of wadded up papers covered in scribbled equations in a familiar, rushed handwriting. There was more dust than before. Staff was either not paying attention to this room or being told to ignore it.
This space was more than a library. She would wager her savings Bran slept here. His mind was a busy place. He always struggled to find peaceful sleep because of it. This room full of books was likely his favorite respite in the palace, a bedroom more like the one to which he was accustomed.
Marnie heard footsteps and hushed voices in the hall just outside the door.
“Does she look well?” Bran’s voice.
“She’s alive.” Raif’s voice. “But I wouldn’t call her well.”
Bran entered first, in a rush. She meant to stand to receive him, but the ground was moving under her feet again, and her ankles suddenly felt boneless. Exhausted, scared—seeing flashes of a demon’s foul tongue, a traumatized little girl, a grisly diseased hand—tears returned to her eyes. They poured fresh down her cheeks, and her nose ran.
“Close the door on your way out,” Bran ordered the blade guard.
Raif swallowed uncomfortably. His face was pink beneath his freckles. He obliged in a blink, closing the doors with a clatter in his haste. The sound of the lock being thrown was loud in Marnie’s ears.
Bran crossed to her in two of his long strides. He lowered onto his knee and gently covered her hands with his larger ones. His cold touch felt nice on her scored skin. He examined her injuries, running a cool finger over her blistered knuckles and across the tear in her knee.
“But I forbade you from getting hurt,” he said softly.
She started to explain herself, but the words caught on a fresh sob—cutting the demon tongue, the boy she terrified, the knife in her boot. She hid her face in Bran’s shoulder, tears soaking into his shirt. He wrapped her up and sat down on the settee, pulling her against him. She went willingly, melting into his side. He kissed her hair.
When she fumbled again trying to explain, to share the burden, he squeezed her arm. The knot in her throat was so heavy, she could not swallow it down. She gave up trying to speak, leaning into his comforting touches instead. The magic on his skin was more easily placed now. He smelled like an autumn night: cider, rain, and fallen leaves. It soothed her.
“You are the bravest person I know, Marnie Becker. I am in awe of you.” His eager breath stirred her hair.
Bran talked about nonsense for a time, offering whatever distraction came to him. When he ran out of nonsense, he described his breakfast in excessive detail, wiping Marnie’s cheeks with his sleeve as tears resurfaced.
He shared his most recent meeting with the council. Goats had dominated the discussion, he informed her, ending in a debate about how to keep area flocks with enough healthy females to repopulate the herds after slaughter. Marnie pretended to snore, and he chuckled.
Then he recited an old poem about passing ships he was surprised he still remembered by heart from his grade school days. Marnie again pretended to snore, and he chided her.
“Hmm, what else can I tell you . . . ?” he thought aloud, tapping his chin. He recounted the last time she had been too intoxicated to stand on her own. At age fifteen, she had snuck too much wine during a busy manor party. Bran had followed her outside because she hadn’t looked well, ignoring her when she shouted at him to leave her be. “You made it as far as the stables and then vomited spectacularly all over a horse.”
Marnie laughed.
“I like that sound,” Bran said. “Your laughter, I mean. When you’re this upset, I worry I won’t hear it again.”
She cleared her throat. “You make it sound like I’m this upset often.”
“Mm. No. Not often.” He rubbed his thumb across her neck, dipping low to follow her spine. When she shivered, he smiled.
Marnie laid her head on his shoulder, and they sat together in comfortable silence. He played absentmindedly with her hair, twirling and un-twirling chocolate strands between his long fingers. When the sun began to dip and the shadows in the room grew longer, Bran left her to start a fire in the hearth between his desk and the bookshelves. She felt his absence. Her body cooled. The ache in her heart sharpened.
“Marnie,” he said over his shoulder, stoking the fire, “I admit I’m terribly curious about your day, but we don’t have to talk about it all right now. Why don’t you try to sleep?”
Feeling ready, stronger, she shook her head. She could do this. She waited until he was seated beside her. Then she began by describing the interrogation and her first meeting with Faceless, briefly distracted by the way firelight danced across Bran’s cheek and lightened his eyes. They were more golden than brown.
He was beautiful.
He had always been beautiful to her.
Instead of telling him so, she described the priest’s ritual, the incense, and the oils, the spirit shapes, and the fear of being caught. When she described Jack storing her mother’s memories in his boot and hiding them as urine, Bran boomed with laughter.
“I like that sound too,” Marnie said. “Your laughter, I mean.”
Bran brushed her hair out of her face as she described the demon knife. She closed her eyes and took a steadying breath, letting his touch melt more of her distress. Calmed, she described Glint. The parsonage. Addie. The demon with the red skin. She told him about the diseased limb, anger bubbling up in her anew, threatening to bring back her tears.
Bran was glaring down at her boot when she finished. She fetched the folded knife out from beside her ankle. She showed it to him, balanced in the center of her palm. It seemed insignificant in her slight hand, although the ruby gleamed an angry red.
“Can they hear us now?” He lowered his voice.
“Of course they can. Spirits and demons can always hear us whenever they want. That’s how demons learn ways to manipulate us and how spirits hear our prayers. We are never alone.”
“And it clings to you? I can’t stand that. It has tricked you, Marnie. It could only have terrible plans for you now. We have to get rid of it.”
She beamed at him, her gray eyes wide and watery. “Oh, but that’s the best part. I only thought it tricked me, and the faceless one was happy letting me believe that. I’ve learned something new this time around, something it hoped I wouldn’t decipher . . .”
“What? Tell me already. You’re torturing me.�
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“I’m a street witch unlike any other. I don’t just make deals with demons.” Her smile widened. “I trap them.”
His brow pinched. He bent low, examining the knife more closely.
“Don’t touch it, just in case,” she said.
Bran flinched when she closed her hand over the folded knife and tucked it back into her boot.
“I didn’t make a bargain. Do you see? It didn’t agree to enter the blade and then leave when it was free. I put it in the blade. I didn’t even mean to, just like when I ride magic sometimes. I sent Faceless into this knife in a moment of passion, like I sent us into that tree. Now it won’t leave because it can’t. It’s very crowded in there too. They’re tearing each other apart, I think, trying to overwhelm the other.”
“Will they destroy each other?”
“That would be extremely convenient but unlikely, unfortunately. Usually, ethereal will destroy the physical, and vice versa, but not each other. I’m stuck with the two of them a bit longer.”
She reached over and cupped his cheek with her uninjured hand until his worried eyes softened. “It will be all right. I’ll find a way to rid myself of them just like I found a way to imprison them in the first place. They can’t hurt anyone in there.”
“But surely an alchemist like you has a hypothesis?”
“I don’t know anything for certain.” Marnie thought on the question for a time, chewing on the inside of her cheek. “I know there is only so much finite space in the silver of the knife, and I can’t help but wonder what would happen if I added more.”
“Add more demons? That sounds extremely dangerous. Look at your hand.” He showcased her blisters and inflamed skin.
“Or something else ethereal, like a poltergeist. Maybe?” She tapped her chin. “The blade would rupture for sure, I think, and hopefully the demons with it. Brother Doyle agreed to help me, but as much as I’m growing to like the priest, I have to be careful with him. For my mother’s sake. He wouldn’t understand her part in this. She didn’t want to hurt anyone. She was tricked, just like the poor Glint girl, Addie. Mother had no idea she could be used to hurt others.”
Bran squeezed her good hand, settling her. “Doyle never needs to know. No one ever needs to know.”
He laced his fingers with hers. Marnie felt his touch, sweeping over her knuckles, all over her body. Their eyes locked, his questioning and earnest, hers cautious. He leaned closer, resting his forehead against hers. Her breathing spiked.
Bran closed his eyes, his expression suddenly pained. “Be with me, Marnie.”
Her heart pinched and then began to pitter-patter out of control. “Please, Bran. We’ve had this fight already. It was a spectacular one, remember? I don’t want to relive it. Not ever again. I am your companion. Loyal to you always. I’ll serve you faithfully the rest of my life, I swear. That has to be enough for you, for both of us.”
“Before you left for the academy . . . there was more I wish I had said then. That argument replays itself in my head over and over. It tortures me.”
“More to say? Before or after I threw things at you?”
“Not at me. Your aim couldn’t be as terrible as all that. I think you just needed to break things. I understand. I wanted to break things too.”
“I did,” she gushed. “I want to now just thinking about it. So let’s stop having this conversation before it turns into a fight.”
They fell silent, foreheads touching.
“It won’t be like it was for your mother.” His voice was quiet, careful. “I don’t have any living family to squabble with.”
Marnie sucked in a breath through her teeth and leaned away. “No, it won’t be the same. The LaFontaine Estate is greater than the Becker one, and now you’re the Emperor of Kings.” She rolled her eyes at him. “It will be so much worse for us. For me. I pose a threat to the entire empire because I’m a witch, they will say. The constabulary and the Cloth would—God, I don’t even want to think about what they would do to me. Over my dead body would I let anyone strip me naked for their tests. My mother spent 12 days in a cell during hers. How many more days would they keep me—”
“Never!” Bran’s expression turned fierce. “I wouldn’t let them imprison you or touch you, not ever.”
“If the church had me imprisoned, you wouldn’t be able to stop them, and you know it! You have no say over what the Cloth does about magic!” Marnie shook her head to free her mind of an image of blade guards and watchmen killing one another in the streets because of her, Bran and Jack dying trying to free her from a cell or the gallows.
They glowered at each other in heated silence.
His stubborn expression slipped, just subtly, just enough to temper his eyes and tug his mouth into a short-lived frown. The sorrow in his face softened her. She laid a hand on his knee.
Bran’s eyes could have bored holes into the fingers that trailed his kneecap.
“There is only one compromise.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “One you refuse to even entertain.”
“Mistress.” He spat the word. He trapped her hand with his, stilling her wandering fingers. “You’d have me keep you a secret, like a sin, something distasteful.”
Marnie’s head fell back. She groaned at the ceiling. “Yes, like a sin, you stubborn fool! That sounds perfect to me!”
“I want a partnership with which to face the world. A secret affair is not a partnership, and you would cheapen yourself.”
“Ugh! I knew you’d say that. I knew it because we’ve already had this fight!” Marnie tore her hand free of his and buried her face in the arm of the settee. “Only in your eyes would I cheapen myself,” she said into the cushion.
“I won’t do that to you.”
“Do what?” Marnie sat up, glaring daggers. “To the aristocracy, I’m the disgraced child of a domestic servant and her master’s heir. To the church, I’m a witch full of dangerous natural magic. You can’t sully my reputation any more than I have naturally.”
He was quiet for a time, his lips pressed tightly together. When he finally spoke, his voice was gruff, full of emotion. “You don’t see yourself accurately. You deserve so much more than clandestine meetings.”
“Clandestine sounds enjoyable to me.” Marnie touched his hand, fingers circling his knuckles, looping over his nails. “As long as you didn’t court me formally, everyone would look the other way; even the Cloth would fuss only a little. No one feels threatened by the emperor’s choice of mistress. That’s just fodder for the tabloids, but the moment you publicly court me . . . You can’t do that to me.”
“Secrets are not enough for me.” He linked his fingers with hers, holding them still. “It will never be enough for me. It should not be enough for you.”
She resisted the urge to stomp her foot at him. “I told you not to bring this up again, begged you to leave it alone, but you didn’t listen, and now we’re both frustrated and I really want to take one of my boots off and throw it at you!”
He blinked at her, unmoved. “Did you go to the academy in Acheus to get away from me?”
She tried to pull her fingers away from his. He held steadfast.
“I went to the academy so I could become a licensed alchemist. I went—still, I mean, I still go to the academy—for that.” Marnie closed her eyes, rubbing her forehead.
“You could get your license easily in the capital and in less time. Did you choose Acheus to get away from me?”
She slumped down farther into the cushions, gnawing her lip, too aggravated to form words. Her fingers in his felt like fire.
“Yes, to get away from you,” she relented. “I was sure you were going to do something foolhardy, make things between us official and public and get us both killed.”
“It didn’t work though, did it? My feelings for you are still just as strong. You are precious to me. Here now, so close to you, alone—it’s unbearable.”
“I love you, too,” she said grumpily.
Bran’s
smile was crooked. “We are inevitable.”
“One of us will break.” She met his eyes, determination tightening the muscles of her jaw. “It won’t be me. You won’t leave this alone, so you’ll soon see.”
Bran kissed her fingers. “I won’t pretend to the world you mean nothing.”
“You will if you want to be with me.” She sat up and scooted in closer until their thighs pressed together. She stared at his mouth.
He licked his lips. His fingers tightened around hers.
“You will break first,” Marnie said, oozing confidence. “You haven’t been able to keep your hands off me since I returned. You’ll see things my way soon enough.”
Bran released her fingers and hurriedly changed the subject back to goats and poems about ships. She yawned and rubbed her heavy eyes, a gloating smile on her face.
***
At some point Marnie had fallen asleep, tucked warmly under Bran’s arm, head on his shoulder, watching the fire. When she opened her eyes, she was stretched out on the settee, her face on a feather pillow that smelled like him, a light blanket tucked around her. A testament to the change in time, the sun was up, gushing red and yellow rays through the long library windows.
Breakfast waited for her. Trays were laid neatly on a cart pulled up against the arm of her seat. Pastries, bread, bacon, sausage, and a variety of eggs and butters sat beside a steaming kettle of coffee. She attacked the bacon like a hungry wolverine, wondering what time it was. With her free hand, she poured herself a mug.
She shoveled food into her mouth, slurping coffee, until her stomach hurt. The morning paper had been rolled neatly under a plate of figs. It dropped off the cart when she shifted the plates around.
