I pushed away the heap of papers enough to clear some room before us, and set the book down in front of me. After a moment, without a word, he went and took another volume off the shelf: a narrow black book, whose cover glimmered faintly where he touched it. He opened it to a spell covering two pages, written in crisp letters, with a diagram of a single flower and every part of it attached to a syllable of the spell somehow. “Very well,” he said. “Let’s begin.” And he held his hand out to me across the table.
It was harder to take it this time, to make that deliberate choice, without the useful distraction of desperation. I couldn’t help but think about the strength of his clasp, the long graceful lines of his fingers closed around my hand, the warm callused tips brushing my wrist. I could feel his pulse beating against my own fingers, and the heat of his skin. I stared down at my book and tried to make sense of the letters, my cheeks hot, while he began to cast his own spell, his voice clipped. His illusion started taking shape, another single perfectly articulated flower, fragrant and beautiful and thoroughly opaque, and the stem nearly covered in thorns.
I began in a whisper. I was trying desperately not to think, not to feel his magic against my skin. Nothing whatsoever happened. He didn’t say anything to me: his eyes were fixed determinedly on a point above my head. I stopped and gave myself a private shake. Then I shut my eyes and felt out the shape of his magic: as full of thorns as his illusion, prickly and guarded. I started to murmur my own spell, but I found myself thinking not of roses but of water, and thirsty ground; building underneath his magic instead of trying to overlay it. I heard him draw a sharp breath, and the sharp edifice of his spell began grudgingly to let mine in. The rose between us put out long roots all over the table, and new branches began to grow.
It wasn’t the jungle of the first time we’d cast the spell: he was holding back his magic, and so was I, both of us letting only a thin stream of power feed the working. But the rosebush took on a different kind of solidity. I couldn’t tell it was an illusion anymore, the long ropy roots twisting together, putting fingers into the cracks of the table, winding around the legs. The blossoms weren’t just the picture of a rose, they were real roses in a forest, half of them not open yet, the other half blown, petals scattering and browning at the edges. The thick fragrance filled the air, too sweet, and as we held it, a bee came hovering in through the window and crept into one of the flowers, prodding it determinedly. When it couldn’t get any nectar out, it tried another, and another, small legs scrabbling at the petals, which gave way exactly as if they could bear the weight of a bee.
“You won’t get anything here,” I told the hovering bee, and blew at it, but it only tried again.
The Dragon had stopped staring over my head, any awkwardness falling before his passion for magic: he was studying our twined spells with the same fierce intent look he bent on his most complicated workings, the light of the spell bright in his face and his eyes; he was hungry to understand. “Can you hold it alone?” he demanded.
“I think so,” I said, and he slowly eased his hand from mine, leaving me to keep up the wild sprawling rosebush. Without the rigid frame of his casting, it half-wanted to collapse like a vine with its trellis gone, but I found I could keep hold of his magic: just a corner of it, enough to be a skeleton, and feeding the spell more of my own magic to make up for its weakness.
He reached down and turned a few pages of his book until he came to another spell, this to make an insect illusion, as diagrammed as the flower one had been. He spoke quickly, the spells rolling off his tongue, and made half a dozen bees and set them loose on the rosebush, which only confused our first bee-visitor further. As he made each one, he—gave them to me, with a kind of small push; I managed to catch them and hook them into the rosebush working. Then he said, “What I intend to do now is attach the watching spell to them. The one the sentinels carry,” he added.
I nodded even while I concentrated on holding the spell: what could more easily pass unnoticed in the Wood than a simple bee? He turned to the far-back pages of the book, to a sheaf of spells written in his own hand. As he began the working, though, the weight of the spell came heavily down on the bee illusions, and on me. I held them, struggling, feeling my magic draining too quickly to replenish, until I managed to make a wordless noise of distress, and he looked up from the working and reached towards me.
I grabbed back at him just as incautiously with my hand and my magic both, even as he pressed magic on me from his side as well. His breath huffed out sharply, and our workings caught on one another, magic gushing into them. The rosebush began growing again, roots crawling off the table and vines climbing out the window. The bees became a humming swarm amid the flowers, each of them with oddly glittering eyes, wandering away. If I had caught one in my hands and looked closely, I would have seen in those eyes the reflection of all the roses it had touched. But I had no room in my head for bees, or roses, or spying; no room for anything but magic, the raw torrent of it and his hand my only rock, except he was being tumbled right along with me.
I felt his shocked alarm. By instinct I pulled him with me towards where the magic was running thinner, as though I really was in a rising river, striking out for a shore. Together we managed to drag ourselves out. The rosebush dwindled little by little down to a single bloom; the false bees climbed into flowers as they closed, or simply dissolved into the air. The final rose closed itself up and vanished, and we both sat down on the floor heavily, our hands still entangled. I didn’t know what had happened: he’d told me often enough of the dangers of not having enough magic for a spell, but he’d never before mentioned the risk of having too much. When I turned to demand an answer, he had his head tipped back against the shelves, his eyes as alarmed as my own, and I realized he didn’t know any more than I did what had happened.
“Well,” I said after a moment, inconsequentially, “I suppose it did work.” He stared at me, outrage dawning, and I started laughing, helplessly, almost snorting: I was dizzy with magic and alarm.
“You intolerable lunatic,” he snarled at me, and then he caught my face between his hands and kissed me.
I didn’t properly think about what was happening even as I kissed him back, my laughter spilling into his mouth and making stutters of my kisses. I was still bound up with him, our magic snarled up into great messy tangled knots. I didn’t have anything to compare that intimacy to. I’d felt the hot embarrassment of it, but I’d thought of it vaguely like being naked in front of a stranger. I hadn’t connected it to sex—sex was poetic references in songs, my mother’s practical instructions, and those few awful hideous moments in the tower with Prince Marek, where I might as well have been a rag doll as far as he’d cared.
But now I toppled the Dragon over, clutching at his shoulders. As we fell his thigh pressed between mine, through my skirts, and in one shuddering jolt I began to form a startled new understanding. He groaned, his voice gone deep, and his hands were sliding into my hair, freeing the loose knot around my shoulders. I held on to him with my hands and my magic both, half-shocked and half-delighted. His lean hardness, the careful art of his velvet and silk and leather lush and crumpling under my fingers, suddenly meant something entirely different. I was in his lap, astride his hips, and his body was hot against mine; his hands came gripping almost painfully tight on my thighs through the dress.
I leaned down over him and kissed him again, in a wonderful place full of uncomplicated yearning. My magic, his magic, were all one. His hand slid along my leg, up beneath my skirts, and his deft, skillful thumb stroked once over me between my legs. I made a small startled huff of noise, like I’d been shocked in winter. An involuntary glittering raced over my hands and over his body, like sunlight on a moving river, and all the endless smooth buckles running down the front of his jerkin opened themselves up and slid free, and the lacings of his shirt came undone.
I still hadn’t quite realized what I was doing until then, with my hands on his bare chest. Or rather, I’d only let myself think far enough ahead to get what I wanted, and I hadn’t let myself put that into words. But I couldn’t avoid understanding now, with him so shockingly undone beneath me. Even the lacings of his trousers were open: I felt them loose against my thighs. He could push aside my skirts, and—
My cheeks were hot, desperate. I wanted him, I wanted to drag myself away and run, and most of all I wanted to know which of those things I wanted more. I froze and stared at him, wide-eyed, and he stared back at me, more undone than I’d ever seen him, high color in his face and his hair disheveled, his clothes hanging open off him, equally astonished and almost outraged. And then he said, half under his breath, “What am I doing?” and he caught my wrists away from him and heaved us both back to our feet.
I stumbled back and caught myself against the table, torn between relief and regret. He turned away from me already jerking his laces tight, his back straightening into a long stiff line. The unraveled threads of my magic were gradually coiling back into my skin, and his slipping away from me; I pressed my hands to my hot cheeks. “I didn’t mean—” I blurted, and stopped; I didn’t know what I hadn’t meant.
“Yes, that’s patently obvious,” he snapped over his shoulder. He was buckling his jerkin shut over his open shirt. “Get out.”
I fled.
In my room, Kasia was sitting up in bed, grimly struggling with my mending-basket: there were three broken needles on the table, and she was only with enormous difficulty making long sloppy stitches in a spare scrap.
She looked up as I came running in: my cheeks still red and my clothing disheveled, panting like I’d come from a race. “Nieshka!” she said, dropping the sewing as she stood up. She took a step and reached for my hands, but hesitated: she had learned to be afraid of her own strength. “Are you—did he—”
“No!” I said, and I didn’t know if I was glad or sorry. The only magic in me now was mine, and I sat down on the bed with an unhappy thump.