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“Even knowing I could lock you into it without your will?”
“Even so, because I know you would never harm me, not even at your darkest.”
“We don’t know that,” he cautioned.
She snorted, a most unladylike scoffing snorfle. “We do know that,” she assured him. “I bet when you were all in a rage after our big fight last night, you were still feeling bad about breaking the dishes.”
He frowned at her. “They were expensive dishes, and we don’t have that many.”
Her face lit with her laughter, and she stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “See? I’m not at all worried about you breaking me.”
“Nic…” he groaned, untangling her from his arms.
“We’ll start slow,” she promised. “You’ll be in control, and you decide what we do.”
“I’m not sure that’s the best—”
She shook her head, a slow and emphatic side to side. “You control the magic, so that’s how it has to be. I’ll help you with the horses, and we’ll go in together. This will be fun.”
Aroused, more than a little terrified, and darkly excited, he resigned himself to facing his sinister self.
“Once we raisethe entire manse,” Nic commented, peering unhappily at the flooded tunnel, “we’re going to dry out this tunnel.”
“I offered to carry you,” he pointed out.
“And immediately noted that the water is only ankle deep,” she replied tartly. “As if you don’t know perfectly well that I am congenitally incapable of backing down from a challenge like that.”
He chuckled, no doubt as she intended, as she flashed him a sunny smile. “At least your boots were already wet?”
She waded through the shallow water, holding up the skirts of her gown and screwing up her face in disgust. “That is not the positive you’d think. When are you going to magically waterproof my boots?”
“You should add that to your lists. Then I’ll know when it appears on my schedule.”
“You laugh, but I’m going to do exactly that.” They’d reached the end of the round tunnel, the lantern giving off a meager circle of light. Gabriel stared at the pinch of the stones that finished the tunnel at an apparent dead end, Nic’s determined banter fading as the trepidation crawled along his nerves.
Shooting him a stern look, Nic held out a preemptory hand. “Open the door, Gabriel,” she said gently enough, but clearly unwilling to let him back out.
With a sigh, he took her hand, recognizing that it was indeed growing easier to accept taking her magic. Proving a point to himself, he only drew on a small amount, just enough to trip the ancient enchantment on the door, rewarded by Nic’s approving smile.
The first time they’d opened the arcanium, he’d had his eyes closed, kissing her to blend their magic, still awkward with their partnering and going on instinct. This time, he observed as his moon magic sifted into the cracks between the stones, the grinding was less pronounced, and the swirling motion of the stones as they spiraled open to make a portal almost liquid.
Nic stepped through, tugging on his hand, but he paused on the other side of the threshold, touching the stones with curious fingertips. “What are you noticing?” she asked with quiet curiosity.
“I’m wondering… the stones moved almost like water. Do you suppose that they could be some sort of solidified water magic?”
She gave him such a pleased and proud smile that he nearly preened. “Now you’re thinking like a wizard. And like a Phel. It makes sense to me that you’d guard your greatest secret with a lock that combines moon and water magic. Surely those don’t occur in concert outside your bloodline, certainly not in any strength. Now we have an idea of how your ancestors stabilized the foundation of the manse, too.”
“By changing water to rock?”
Shrugging cheerfully, she nodded. “Why not? And then, over time and without a wizard to maintain it, the enchantments frayed and the rock turned to water again, slowly sinking those wings.” Dropping his hand, she carried the lantern into the arcanium.
“I thought you said the transformations were permanent, like the moonlight to silver.”
“I think they can be. It depends on what forces are going counter to that state. If you melt the silver, maybe it turns back into moonlight. It’s your magic. You figure it out.”
He took a few steps backward, observing closely as the door spiraled shut again, burnished silver on this side, gleaming before the domed room fell into shadow too deep for Nic’s lantern to fully illuminate. Beyond the arched glass panels inset in silver frames that formed the walls of the submerged room, the lake water was black with night. Even the great lens of the window at the centerpiece of the curved ceiling was dark, allowing no moonlight through. Too overcast for it.
“No moonlight tonight,” he commented.
