That smirk again. “Don’t fish for compliments.”
I didn’t comment but gave him a knowing smile as I turned my magic on myself. It was easier, going in, like stepping into familiar water. I let myself shrink inside the glamour, let my hair darken and shorten, let my face round and soften into something boyish. Soon, I had the appearance of a young boy: eleven, perhaps twelve years old. A peasant’s son with muddy boots and a gap between his two front teeth.
When I looked up at Corvin, he was staring down at me with a grin.
“Stop it,” I said, in the boy’s voice, which was higher than mine and flat.
“Stop what?”
“Looking at me like that.”
“How am I looking at you?”
I didn’t answer but shook my head and then reached up and took Wraith’s reins.
“He’s not going to let you attempt your water magic on him,” Corvin warned.
“Alright then, you do the honors. But do so before you fall over.”
Corvin led Wraith into the darkness underneath the nearest tree, darkness that was still managing to fight off the light of the encroaching morning. He looked up at the dawning blue sky which was fighting to make it through the leafy canopy and shook his head, as if he was worried his shadows wouldn’tcome at all. But then he pressed two fingers to the base of Wraith’s neck, just where the horse’s mane thickened. Wraith stood perfectly still for him, even as Corvin’s shadows rose up and out of him. They came much slower than I’d seen them in the past, and I could see the effort it cost him. It was in the slight tightening around Corvin’s eyes, the way his jaw set a fraction harder. What should have taken a breath took three. The darkness that usually moved immediately for him came in thin, reluctant threads instead, weaving through Wraith’s gleaming black coat in slow passes.
It worked, but barely. The black drained out of Wraith, fading through to the dull, patchy gray of an old farm animal well past its useful years. Wraith’s strong, proud neck drooped as his flanks hollowed.
Wraith turned his head and looked back at Corvin with one dark eye.
“He’s annoyed,” I said.
“He’ll live.” Corvin straightened, but not all the way. “Let’s go.”
The tavern crouched at the end of the lane like something that had given up trying a long time ago: sagging eaves, shutters hanging at wrong angles, a painted sign so weathered that the goat on it had been reduced to a vague suggestion of horns and spite.
Corvin led Wraith around the back of the tavern to the stable. Then he rejoined me, and we walked up the old cobble walkway to the front of The Old Goat Inn.
He didn’t touch me again, but he stayed close. Close enough that his arm brushed mine on the narrow walkway up to the tavern, once, and then again, and neither of us moved away.
The keeper of the Old Goat Inn was a small, suspicious woman with red hands and no interest in conversation, which suited us perfectly. Corvin paid in coin. The farmer’s voice hetried was passable, but I did most of the talking, the boy’s vowels coming fairly easily. The woman looked at us once, decided we were nobody worth remembering, and handed over a key.
The room waited at the top of a narrow staircase that creaked under every step we took, each board announcing us in a different pitch. The ceiling was so low, Corvin had to angle his head slightly when he crossed the threshold. There was only one window with a wooden shutter that didn’t close all the way, leaving a blade of cold air cutting through the gap. The bed was pushed hard against the far wall and was nothing more than a thin mattress over a wooden frame. It looked like it had survived two wars and one flood. Someone had swept the floor recently enough that the dirt was piled only in the corners. Not clean, exactly, but close enough to be honest about it.
I took a seat on the edge of the bed with my hands in my lap, listening to the sounds of the tavern below: voices, the knock of a cup on wood, someone laughing at something.
Corvin latched the door behind him and then stood with his back against it for a moment. He just stood there like he was remembering how to be still. I could read the tension between us, the anxiety.
I looked at him, and he looked at me, and neither of us said anything. But looking at him in his current state, as an old man, didn’t appeal to me, so I released the glamour of my magic. The farmer dissolved, and Corvin came back through him, the real angles of his face reassembling themselves, including the line of his jaw and the proud cut of his nose. The amber of his eyes caught the dim light and made me swallow hard.
Then I let the boy go too. The magic moved through me in that particular way it always did, as a cool rush starting at the crown of my head and flowing downward, like water finding its own level. My hair lightened, the dirty brown leaching out strand by strand until the silver-white reasserted itself, falling inwaves past my shoulders. I could feel my face unknotting itself from the boy’s blunt features, my cheekbones rising, my jaw narrowing, my own planes and angles returning to me.
Corvin’s gaze moved over me briefly, then away as if he couldn’t look at me. I didn’t understand why.
“An hour,” he said, shrugging off his riding coat and draping it over the chair. “No more.”
“That’s not enough sleep.”
“I know what I need.”
“Clearly you don’t.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed beside me and pulled off one boot. Then the other. He set them side by side with the automatic neatness of a man who’d been a soldier for a long time.
