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Given such a clear opening, I can hardly avoid the topic now.
“Is being born with magic the only way to get it?” I ask.
His eyebrows shoot up. “Not what I was expecting. But then it’s you we’re talking about, so perhaps I should’ve known to expect the unexpected.” His arm is wrapped around my back, and now it’s his fingers that brush against the skin of my shoulder. “Everyone here is born with some kind of magic,” he says. “High Fae and Low. You can accumulate more powers beyond those you were born with, but as far as I know, the potential is in your blood from the beginning.”
“And what about humans?”
The hand on my shoulder stills. Then he says the words that Destan didn’t feel the need to.
“Why do you ask?”
There it is, the guarded note in his voice I didn’t want to hear, and yet which I absolutely expected. It still throws me, making my own words seem silly and stilted to me when I answer him.
“I’ve noticed some strange things happening recently. When I’m around the gold, it’s behaving in…odd ways. Like…maybe I’m affecting it?”
“Well, that is why I brought you here, after all, to change the gold.”
“With metallurgy and science. But now I’m wondering if these things are happening because of magic.” I don’t voice the question actually going through my head, afraid it’s too ridiculous to speak aloud: Could I have magic?
He’s silent for a moment, and I feel the muscles beneath me tense.
“Magic is the living, breathing force that sustains Faerie. All things are affected by it in some way. Who knows what errant charm or spell might be working on the gold? Even this palace has its secrets; ancient enchantments that wake up every few centuries and cause problems.”
I deflate when I realize he’s letting me down easy. He knows what I’m getting at, and he thinks it’s nonsense. He doesn’t have the heart to tell me my idea is delusional—stupid human wishful thinking. In a world where everyone holds this power over me, why wouldn’t I imagine myself somehow tapping into it myself?
And still a part of me snags on his wording. It feels so indirect and evasive, like so much of what he says—like so much of his kind. Is there a possibility that, while not actually lying, he’s also not being entirely truthful with me?
Of course it’s possible. The delusion would be forgetting who Ruskin is. He may have told me his true name, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s an open book. I sit up, the sheets sliding from me, and reach for my clothes. I need distance. Space to collect my thoughts. When I’m with Ruskin, he’s all I want to see, to think about—filling up my senses like a drug. I need a clear head to deal with this, and that’s something I can’t find in his bed.
Ruskin lays a hand on my back.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I say, my voice forcedly breezy. “I just realized I left something out in my workshop. An experiment that will spoil if I don’t put it away properly.” I turn and lean down, my hair skimming his chest as I kiss him.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say, and pad from the room, wondering how the kiss can still feel so perfect, so inviting, when the cloud of my doubts hangs over us.
Chapter 28
If Destan can’t give me answers, and Ruskin won’t, I’ll just have to go looking myself. I’m all the more determined the next day, when I sit down at my workshop and reach for Cebba’s ring, and it happens again—the metal twitching when I get near it. I bend down beside the worktop and watch the gold carefully, focusing my gaze as I did on the knife handle the day before.
It takes more effort now—maybe because I’m not in survival mode—but under my stare the gold slides an inch across the table. I reach up and grab it in excitement, and fascinated joy lances through me as the metal softens under my hands, the surface becoming improbably warm to the touch—but not hot, not burning. Just flexible, relaxed into whatever form I wish it to hold. Gold is hardly a tough metal, but it’s certainly not as malleable as clay, which is how the ring feels now, allowing me to push and pull it into different shapes. It only lasts for a minute or so, then the gold cools in my hands once again. The strange focus I held in my mind at that moment slips away, eluding me like a name on the tip of my tongue.
I give the ring one last tug and it freezes into the shape it pretty much was before: a solid hoop. The only remaining sign of my hands on it is a slight divot in one side which I didn’t quite smooth out.
“Even magic has rules. Maybe it seems strange and chaotic to human eyes, but there’s patterns in it—connections.”
Maidar’s gruff voice swims up from my memory. He was always remarkably patient with the questions I often plied him with at the market back in Styrland. I think he secretly liked our conversations, appreciated that I wanted something from him other than a spell or charm. Sometimes he’d ask me things about the human realm in return. Bizarre things that to me seemed utterly boring but appeared to intrigue him no end: like how our property law works, or what exactly measles are.
What these chats exposed, however, was that he had a hunger for knowledge too. He’d sometimes even trade me for books from Styrland, but I found those hard to get hold of, so he didn’t ask for them often. I’m sure he could give me answers about where this magic might be coming from—how I’m channeling it. Like he said, there’s rules to it, and it’s not springing up out of nowhere. It was from him that I learned the rule I referred to when asking what Cebba used to cast her curse, about fae not being able to make something from nothing.
I set the ring down and poke my head out of the workshop door. My attempt to find Maidar failed once before, but I know more about Faerie now, and there’s ways to contact him that don’t involve running off to the Unseelie Court myself. I look both ways down the corridor, scanning for Halima or some other staff member Ruskin might have watching me in her stead.
He probably thinks I haven’t noticed the couple of guards he keeps lurking around my quarters at night. I don’t necessarily blame him, I’ve admittedly had some close scrapes recently, but it still bothers me to be monitored all the time. The corridor looks clear right now, though, and I quickstep down to one of the towers. It’s not far from my room, so I’m not too worried about running into any unfriendly High Fae again, especially not now I might actually have an unexpected weapon at my disposal.
I can hear the caws before I reach the top of the tower, but it’s only when I near the upper steps that it’s joined by a flurry of beating wings, making the air dance around me as I emerge into the aviary. This isn’t some extravagant exhibit intended to display exotic animals. No, every bird here has a blue-black sheen to their feathers, and dark, intelligent eyes: ravens.
I watch them settle on their perches or hop from one spot to another, their heads cocking as they examine me. It took me a few days to notice these creatures gliding about the palace. At first, I assumed they were just local wildlife making the most of the many open-air spaces offering places to roost. But then Destan had pointed this tower out to me and explained they have a specific purpose—this is how the fae sent their messages.
