Page 23 of Love & Letter Charms
He rounded his desk, dropped into the chair, and reached for the bottommost drawer. A single brush of his fingers across the spelled brass lock was all it took. A faint shimmer of light, a brief hum, and the drawer slid open soundlessly, revealing a hidden stack of letters and a wooden box engraved with delicate roses and twisting thorny stems.
He lifted it carefully, running his thumb along the familiar engravings as he had so many times before. His heart performed that particular skip it always did when he checked for a letter, hope and dread warring in his chest.
He opened the lid.
Empty.
The disappointment that flooded through him was both expected and somehow still crushing. He set the box carefully before him and sank back in his chair.
The box had been a gift from Master Glendale—officially titled Royal Instructor of Magical Theory, but in truth, so much more than that. He had crafted the pair of boxes when Ryden was sixteen, allowing them to exchange letters while Ryden attended the Bloom Season in Bloomhaven and his beloved tutor remained behind in the Shaded Lands. Every complaint about court tedium, every observation about the ridiculousness of social conventions, every moment of loneliness—his tutor had been there, if only in written words.
Then Ryden had forgotten the box at Solstice Hall when they’d returned home. A simple mistake, but by the time he’d realized, it was too late. The following year he’d searched everywhere, but the box appeared to have vanished, and none of the Solstice Hall staff could tell him what had happened to it. That Season had been particularly difficult to endure, with his magic showing signs of manifesting and no confidant to share his mounting fears.
Then, just days after Ryden returned home, Master Glendale had died in his workshop. A magical experiment gone catastrophically wrong. A sudden, senseless tragedy, devastating in a way Ryden hadn’t been prepared for; the man was barely any older than Ryden’s mother.
And after that … well, other events had unfolded that same terrible week, but Ryden had learned to carefully step around those particular thoughts.
He had kept his mentor’s version of the box among his most precious possessions after that, a tangible reminder of someone who had seen him as more than a future High Lord. As more than … a mistake. The box traveled with him everywhere, sometimes left in his trunk, but its presence nearby was a comfort he couldn’t quite explain.
Then, one night last Season, he’d heard a familiar hum he couldn’t immediately place. It had taken him embarrassinglylong to remember that sound, to scramble through his possessions until he found the box vibrating with new magic. Inside had been a letter from someone who thought she was writing to no one.
By then, nearly seven years had softened the edges of his grief. What surged through him wasn’t sorrow but startled wonder. Who could possibly have found the box’s twin after all this time? Who now held the other half of this forgotten connection?
Despite his curiosity, he’d considered not responding. She was young—seventeen or eighteen from what she’d written about her recent manifestation—while he was twenty-four at the time. But something in her words had reached past every wall he’d built, straight to the core of him where his deepest fears resided, carefully hidden from everyone else.
No one mentions how frightening it can be when magic suddenly flows through you like a river breaking its banks. No one speaks of the paralyzing fear that comes with being unable to control one’s newly manifested power.
She had seen him. Without knowing him, without even believing he existed, she’d somehow seen straight to his heart. So he had responded, keeping things mostly light and gently teasing, the same way he did in person, and soon he had forgotten he was corresponding with someone who had scarcely outgrown her girlhood.
Now, he lifted the bundle of letters from the drawer. The papers were softened at the edges, some of the ink slightly smudged from repeated handling. He spread them before him like a map to somewhere better than here, his fingers instinctively finding the ones he returned to most often, their creases deeper than the rest.
Last night I committed the grievous social error of fleeing my mother’s midwinter soirée to hide in the kitchens. Cook took pity on my obvious distress and allowed me to assist with the honey soufflé. I managed to get more honey on my sleeves than in the mixture, and later found myself walking alone through the garden (because of course I could not return to the gathering covered in honey), licking the sticky sweetness from my fingers lest I become a walking invitation to every wasp within a mile radius. Imagine me explaining that particular tragedy to my family. ‘No, it wasn’t the crowd that overwhelmed me, but rather my inability to properly measure honey without wearing it.’
He smiled despite everything, hearing her voice in the words—self-deprecating but clever, finding humor in her own disasters.
Then another reply, one or two letters later:
I KNOW you intended to make me blush with that absolutely improper comment about honey and fingers. You’ll be terribly disappointed to learn I remained completely composed while reading it.
Well, perhaps I colored slightly.
(Fine. My lady’s maid entered and asked if I had a fever, so I suppose your mission was accomplished after all.)
Oh how Ryden loved knowing that his words could make her blush. The thought of her cheeks flushing pink sent a warm current through him, a sensation equal parts sweetness and exhilaration.
Then he shuffled through the stack until he found the letter that never failed to leave him breathless:
Sometimes I watch my family, so confident in their paths, and wonder how they learned to walk so surely while I’m still stumbling over my own feet. Metaphorically speaking, of course. It’s as if we’re all performers in the same play, only everyone else received their scripts in advance. I alone seem to be improvising every line, watching others recite with perfect confidence what I’m still struggling to discover.
I keep waiting for the moment I’ll find myself in a scene with someone where the dialogue flows naturally, where neither of us needs to search for words because they come as easily as breathing. The way it feels with you in our letters.
The way it feels with you in our letters.
Ryden had read that line so many times, and every time it made his heart contract in a way that was so intense it bordered on pain.He rubbed a hand over his face.
Stars above, he was hopelessly, completely enchanted by a woman he’d never even met. And tomorrow he would have to begin courting other women, smile and charm and pretend interest while his heart belonged to someone known only as L.
He couldn’t bear it.
