Page 57 of Deals & Dream Spells
Lady Nirella’s face became as still as carved marble. “I won’t speak of it.” Something in her expression—a fleeting shadow of old pain—made Mariselle fall silent.
“The bond must be broken,” her grandmother continued after a moment. “And itcanbe broken, despite what romantic nonsense is written in those novels you think I don’t know you read.” She squeezed Mariselle’s hands, a small smile finding its way onto her lips. “One day, my dear, you will thank me. When you are free to marry someone you truly love. Someone worthy of the remarkable young woman you’ve become.”
The tenderness in her grandmother’s voice brought a lump to Mariselle’sthroat. “I’ve missed you,” she said suddenly, impulsively pulling her hands free of her grandmother’s grip and throwing her arms around the older woman.
Lady Nirella hesitated for only a moment before wrapping Mariselle in a tight hug. “You should visit more often, dear,” she said, her voice slightly gruff. “I’ve missed you too.”
She released Mariselle and straightened her shoulders. “Now, I suppose I had better go and speak with your mother.” A sigh escaped her, heavy with the weariness of one who had survived countless familial storms and now faced yet another with resigned fortitude. “It seems, for once, that we are in agreement over something.”
Chapter Seventeen
The ridiculous pageantryof the Bloom Season had provided Evryn with enough satirical material to fill a dozen notebooks, not just the one currently balanced on his knee as he lounged in the window seat of Windsong Cottage almost two weeks after the surprisingly enjoyable tea with Mariselle at Rowanwood House.
A gentle breeze through the open window stirred the trailing vines that adorned its frame, their leaves tickling his ear and momentarily drawing his attention from the page. He shifted his position slightly and turned a few pages back to the start of his notes, crossed out the titleThe Bloom Season, and replaced it withThe Relentless Parade of Vanity. That suited his purposes far better.
He lifted his quill as his eyes drifted from the notebook to Mariselle sitting cross-legged on the cottage floor, dressed in her riding gear, that startling blue braid tumbling carelessly over one shoulder. Her hands hovered above the dream core, fingertips occasionally twitching as if playing an invisible instrument. Her face was a portrait of fierce concentration, brows drawn together, lower lip caught between her teeth.
He found his gaze lingering on that blue hair more often than he cared to admit. It had been at least ten days since his bracelet’s enchantment had activated, transforming her golden locks to that vibrant azure, and her hairshowed no signs yet of returning to its original shade. Surprisingly, she hadn’t seemed particularly bothered by it. Even more surprisingly, Evryn had found he rather liked it. It suited her somehow—bright and unexpected, like the flashes of genuine passion he’d glimpsed beneath her carefully maintained facade.
Evryn dragged his attention back to his notebook with more effort than should have been necessary. The society matrons’ desperate machinations to secure matches for their daughters provided particularly fertile ground for mockery. He cast his mind further back, to the evening of that ridiculous art auction, where Lady Whitewing’s strategic deployment of her niece’s décolletage had been nothing short of tactical warfare.
He scribbled another observation, his quill scratching satisfyingly across the parchment. The work was a welcome distraction from the bone-deep exhaustion that had settled into his limbs over the past ten days or so. Multiple nights of painstaking magical labor, reconstructing the broken sections of the original Dreamland frame, melding fragmented lumyrite back together until his fingers cramped and his eyes burned.
Mariselle had been noticeably frustrated by the amount of time it had taken him—longer than she’d estimated apparently—but he’d finally completed the task earlier this evening. He’d confirmed there were no remaining breaks in the structure by using the same incantation he’d employed to visualize the underground lumyrite network. The ride on Cobalt had been blissfully solitary—Mariselle too engrossed in her precious dream core to request joining him, thank the stars. Without the distraction of her pressed against him, he’d been able to focus entirely on the task at hand.
And what a sight it had been. The lumyrite pattern of the completed frame stretching out below him, glowing with ethereal brilliance against the shadowy ground. Fully intact now, the skeletal structure hummed with potential.
Of course, it still looked nothing like what he imagined the original Dreamland had once been. There was no covering on the frame, after all. Mariselle had mentioned a grand tent of some sort. Had she given a moment’s thought to where this magical tent would come from? Who would manufacture it? What it would cost? Probably not. She’d been consumed with the dream core, hunched over it night after night—sometimes with hercousin’s assistance, sometimes on her own—imbuing it with who knew what kind of potentially catastrophic magic.
But Evryn’s part was done. The frame had been restored. His obligation fulfilled. Earlier this evening, he’d asked—quite reasonably, he thought—if he could leave. There was still time to join his friends for the evening race through Westhollow Woods. He’d overheard Crispin boasting to Fin while at the Rowanwood Masquerade the other night—a most welcome respite from Mariselle and her Dreamland schemes—about some new modifications to his saddle that would supposedly give him an edge. Evryn had been looking forward to witnessing the inevitable humiliation when those modifications failed spectacularly.
But Mariselle had said no. With infuriating casualness, she’d informed him that she needed his help with ‘something’ when she was done. What that ‘something’ might be, she hadn’t deigned to specify. So here he remained, prisoner to her whims yet again.
He’d turned to writing instead. Perhaps it was foolish, considering he was in the presence of the very woman who had stolen his previous manuscript and was currently blackmailing him with it. But she already knew his secret. Already possessed ample evidence against him. What further damage could be done if she glimpsed this latest work?
And he was tired, dammit. Tired and irritable and in desperate need of the particular comfort that only came from the scratch of quill on parchment, from the satisfaction of crafting perfect phrases. So he wrote, his characters coming to life on the page.
“Yes!”
Evryn started at Mariselle’s sudden exclamation of triumph, his grip tightening involuntarily around his quill. She had sprung to her feet, hands raised above her head in a most unladylike display of exuberance.
“Has something momentous occurred?” he inquired dryly. The dream core on the floor appeared entirely unchanged to his eye, yet Mariselle beamed at it as though it had performed some remarkable feat.
“Oh, I wish you were Petunia!” she exclaimed wistfully, clasping her hands beneath her chin.
Evryn wasn’t entirely certain how to respond to that statement. Was he meant to feel slighted at being an inadequate substitute for her cousin?
“My most sincere apologies for failing to be your beloved cousin,” heremarked. “If you’ll recall, I did request permission to leave earlier this evening.”
“Don’t be silly,” Mariselle said, dropping back to her knees beside the dream core. “You’re not going anywhere yet. I still need you. I merely meant that Petunia would properly appreciate the significance of what I’ve just accomplished.”
He almost made a snide comment about whether it involved dream essence extraction, the paltry magic she’d displayed at her debut, but thought better of it. Their verbal sparring had become almost comfortable in its predictability, but that particular barb felt unnecessarily cruel.
And there was also …I still need you.
The offhand comment stuck in his head, though he knew, of course, that she hadn’t meant it in any significant sense. Perhaps because it wasn’t something anyone ever said to him. He wasn’tneeded. Not the way his older brother was.
He shook himself from his thoughts, and turned back to his notebook. Mariselle was focused on the dream core again, and he found it easy to lose himself in his writing once more.
