And she kept going.
The change happened gradually, which was the way a lot of healing worked. It didn’t come in dramatic transformations or sudden reversals, but in small increments that accumulated so quietly that you almost didn’t notice them until you looked up one day and realized the patient you’d been treating for so long wasn’t the same person who’d first come under your care.
Roslyn noticed this on the ninth morning while she was conducting the first healing session of the day. She had her hands at Malachi’s temples, and she was tracing the network of void scarring that radiated outward from the center of his magic when she detected something different about the face beneath her fingers.
The gray pallor that had underlaid his complexion was finally fading. It wasn’t gone, not by a long stretch, but the undertone of his skin had shifted from its previous ashen quality to something almost warm, a living color that told her his circulation was finally catching up with what her magic had been doing to his energy channels. The bones of his face, which had been so sharp during those first days that she’d been able to trace the outlines of his skull through the skin, were beginning to fill in as the calories she’d been putting into him took hold. His cheeks still had a hollowed quality, and his collarbones still stood out too prominently through the open collar of his shirt…he’d grudgingly abandoned the waistcoat during healing sessions, although it went back on the moment she was finished…but the overall effect was clear enough.
He was going to be a very handsome man when this was over.
And all right, she’d understood that, in an abstract sort of way, ever since that first evening in the study, when the lamplight had caught his face, and she’d filed the observation away before she could truly acknowledge it. But recognizing his handsomeness in the abstract was one thing. Having it confirmed twice a day at close range with her hands on his skin and her magic moving through his body in ways that left nowhere to hide — that was something else altogether, and she didn’t appreciate it.
Not one single bit.
If asked, Roslyn would have said she’d never been the kind of person who confused simple proximity with attraction. After all, she’d spent her entire professional life touching people, whether she was taking pulses or palpating abdomens or pressing her hands to foreheads and chests and the tender spaces behind ears, and she’d never forgotten the clinical context of what she was doing. Patients were patients. The body under her hands was something to be assessed and healed, and the boundary between professional contact and personal response had never once given her trouble.
It was giving her trouble now, though, and she was fairly certain the problem wasn’t Malachi’s face.
No, it was his hands.
She noticed them most during their evening sessions, when he sat in the study, and she worked on the scarring around his heart. During those sessions, he talked about his collection intensely, almost passionately, expounding on the one subject that could fracture his composure without him even realizing it. His hands moved when he talked about the artifacts. Those movements weren’t wild, weren’t the expansive gestures of someone who was waxing just a little too enthusiastic. Instead, they had a precision that was almost musical, his fingers tracing shapes in the air that corresponded to the objects he was describing. When he explained the astrolabe’s containment protocol, his right hand turned in a slow arc that mimicked the instrument’s rotating rings, and when he described the glass jar of weather-working, both hands curved inward, cupping the air as though the jar was resting between his palms.
They were the hands of someone who’d spent years handling delicate things with extreme caution, and the tenderness in those unconscious gestures was so at odds with the controlled, formal man who made them that Roslyn found herself watching his hands when she should have been monitoring her own magic’s progress through his system.
She stopped that. Or at least, she tried to.
The bigger problem, though, the one she couldn’t resolve by redirecting her attention to something less fraught, was that the healing itself was changing her relationship to him in ways she hadn’t expected. Her gift didn’t simply repair damage. It also required her to understand the patient from the inside, to trace the patterns and pathways of their magic so thoroughly that she could feel where the system wanted to go and help it get there. After nine days of twice-daily sessions, she knew Malachi’s magic better than she knew anyone’s except her own. She knew the deep channels that ran closest to the center of his magic, where the void scarring was thickest and where her magic had to work the hardest, and she knew the secondary pathways he’d worn smooth through decades of warding work. The healing work had allowed her to recognize the places where his magic was elegant and efficient, as opposed to the places where it felt almost brute-forced, raw power compensating for a lack of finesse that seemed to indicate he’d taught himself most of what he knew without any real outside help.
Which, of course, he had. Witches and warlocks didn’t learn their craft in school or academies of magic, no matter what a lot of movies and books might say. They learned from others in their clans who might have similar gifts, and they had all the support that community provided. He hadn’t spoken about his past very much, but Roslyn knew, from the few things he’d let drop, that Malachi had been banished from the Van Horn clan when he was only twenty. Everything he’d built since then — the wards, the containment protocols, the entire intricate system that kept one hundred and two dangerous objects safely restrained — he’d built alone through trial and error, with no one to teach him…and no one to catch him if he got it wrong.
The self-taught patches in his magic were everywhere, once she knew what to look for. She’d found workarounds where an actual mentor might have shown him a cleaner technique, as well as redundancies where he’d layered protections because he hadn’t been confident that the first one would hold. There were even a few places where his solutions were actually better than the conventional approach, inventions born of necessity that a warlock who knew only his clan’s magic would never have thought to try.
She had to admit it was pretty impressive. It also seemed deeply lonely, the magical equivalent of a man who’d built his house with his own hands because nobody would sell him one. He’d made it sound and functional and even beautiful in places, but he’d never had anyone who could walk through the rooms and let him know what he’d gotten right.
Obviously, Roslyn didn’t tell him any of this. Some of her reticence came from the simple fact that he hadn’t asked, and some stemmed from her lingering anger about the amber sphere. Well, all right, if she was going to be completely honest with herself, she was still furious on some level. Five days of healing erased in forty seconds. She’d spent the two days following his “solution” rebuilding what he’d destroyed, working longer sessions than she should have because the damage to his magic was worse the second time around, scar tissue forming over scar tissue in a way that made each subsequent repair more delicate and more draining. He’d submitted to the extended sessions without complaint, which was as close as he came to an apology, so she’d accepted his compliance without acknowledging it. It wasn’t quite forgiveness, but she figured it was somewhere in the neighborhood.
They were, she thought, both a little too skilled at communicating through the things they didn’t say rather than the ones they did.
She also suspected that offering praise to Malachi would only make him suspicious of her motives. He didn’t seem to be a person who knew what to do with kindness. It was something she’d understood about him from the beginning but which was becoming harder to ignore the more time she spent inside his magic.
On the tenth morning, Roslyn felt something strange happen. She was in the kitchen, washing the breakfast dishes and thinking about nothing in particular. Well, to be specific, she was thinking about whether there was enough rice left in the pantry to last another week. It was the kind of mundane worry that had become the background noise of her captivity, something she could fix on rather than thinking about what was going on in the world outside, what her parents and the rest of the clan were doing to find her…or, even more complicated, exactly what she felt about her extended time here in this house, in Malachi’s presence.
Then a ripple passed through the house’s ambient magical field. It was subtle, easy to miss if you weren’t attuned to the specific frequencies of the objects behind those closed doors. But because she had plenty of time on her hands when she wasn’t attending to Malachi, she’d been passively keeping note of the collection in the house since her first night there.
So she recognized the bone dice’s vibe immediately.
The fidgety, restless energy she’d been sensing from the East Gallery since her arrival had changed. It was no longer contained, no longer held within the careful boundary that she’d felt surrounding each artifact on the shelves. It had expanded somehow, pushing outward in slow, rhythmic pulses that she could feel through the floor and through the walls, even through the water running over her hands in the sink.
She turned off the faucet and stood very still.
The pulses were affecting the environment. She could feel it in the small, almost imperceptible ways that probability appeared to be shifting in the immediate vicinity of the East Gallery. It was a kind of low-grade wrongness in the way things were happening, as though the normal rules that governed cause and effect had developed a slight wobble. The sensation was hard to describe in concrete terms and was more like an instinct, a healer’s awareness that something in the body of the house had gone seriously out of whack.
Quickly, she dried her hands on the towel by the sink and made her way down the hall toward the study, where Malachi was supposed to be resting between sessions. She hadn’t made it even halfway before she heard the door of the East Gallery open.
He was already there, telling her that he must have felt it even before she did. It was his collection, after all, warded with his magic, and a breach in one of the containment fields would register on his senses the way a cardiac alarm would register on hers. When she reached the Gallery’s doorway, he was standing in front of the shelf where the bone dice sat, his expression a mixture of worry and something that looked almost like curiosity.
The dice themselves appeared simple enough, just six small cubes of yellowed bone, each one carved with symbols she didn’t recognize, arranged in a neat row on the shelf. But she could feel the probability-warping field they were generating, a sphere of influence that extended roughly a dozen feet from the shelf and was growing by the minute. Within that sphere, the normal distribution of random events had been disrupted. Those were small things, for now; she sensed it in the way the dust motes in the room were drifting in patterns that defied air currents, and in the faint, rhythmic clicking sound the dice made against the shelf, as though they were vibrating at a frequency just below audibility.
“Go back to the kitchen,” Malachi said without turning around.
