bedroom, after. The green one." Down the hall from Richard's room, connected by a side door to the third-floor library. A pair of three-hundred-year-old elms screened the windows. Richard cocked his head at an angle and arched his eyebrow at her—a silent question.
Garrett forced one narrow smile before she left.
* * *
Richard left her before teatime, brushing her emerald necklace aside to plant a final, lingering kiss on her sorcerer's tattoo. Garrett stretched against the velvet coverlet on the canopied bed and closed her eyes just for a moment as the door to the library closed behind him. When she opened them again, the sky blazed crimson through sheer cream lace curtains, and she swore; she had wanted to speak to Henry before Sebastien arrived. She rose and dressed quickly, wincing as she yanked a comb through unfashionably short hair, and turned back just as she was leaving to snatch up her dark velvet sorcerer's carpetbag and the envelope with the scrap of dress in it. She took the servant's stair because it was faster and scandalized a chambermaid in the process, but arrived at Henry's suite before the red sun dipped under the horizon. She knocked, and the Prince in his dressing gown opened the carved door so quickly he must have been waiting.
She had thought that Richard's touch fresh on her skin would make it easier. She looked into Henry's smile and cursed herself for a fool. You're too old for lovesick, Abby Irene. Same refrain. It never helped. "Ready for the spell, your Highness?"
"Of course."
He shut the door behind her and locked it, came to her and laced his fingers through her hair tight enough to hurt when she stepped away. Almost as much as stepping away from the warm smell of musk and lemon peel that surrounded him hurt. She did it anyway. "Henry."
"I adored you," he said.
"It's not beyond Phillip to have you killed if you become an embarrassment, you know."
"Is that treason, Lady Abigail Irene?"
"It's fact," she said coldly. She turned up a gaslamp and lit a candle from her bag: an old one, translucent wax lumpy with bits of shattered quartz and pungent with rosemary needles. She set it on the cherrywood dresser and looked up at him. "Did you get what I asked for, your Highness?"
Wordlessly, he handed her a snippet of thick white linen. She recognized it: a bit of the hem of the shirt he had worn to the ball. She drew a silver spoon and an ordinary nail-scissors from her carpetbag and clipped a corner of the blue dress fabric, rested both in the spoon, and held it over the candleflame.
"Don't you need to cast a circle?"
"The smoke must move freely," she answered. She looked up at him; the rising moon cast a copper light through the eastern window, a little less
full than the night before. It touched Henry's cheek with color as it had
Sebastien's. "Let's watch."
Garrett knew the smoke would rise in two distinct streams, parted by still, unbreakable air, and drift about the room aimlessly as a bored kitten. The inverse principle of similarity would make the two smokes irreconcilable, unless the natures of the two fabrics—manufactured half a world apart—had been fused into a single whole by some act of violence.
The streams rose pure and red-lit by the rising moon, conjoined as if they were one thing.
As they were. Garrett dropped the spoon into the candle, snuffing the flame. She snapped a glance over her shoulder at Henry, but the Prince simply watched her, a frown drawing the corners of his mouth down. "What have you done?" she whispered.
"Nothing," he said, waving a hand to disperse the stream of smoke that coiled around his throat like a noose. "This is some trick. Nothing. Tell me you believe me: have I ever lied to you?"
She shook her head and blew the smoke away. "You never have," she said, and when the pooled wax had hardened, she swept her tools into her bag. "You should dress for dinner, your Highness. We'll have guests."
* * *
The tension at the long table all but soured the meat and wine, glittered off the silver and crystal like the gaslight from the chandeliers. Sebastien had arrived with a wry smile on his face and a fresh rose in his buttonhole fifteen minutes before service. He sat on Garrett's left and flaked his fish aimlessly across his plate with a heavy silver fork. She drew a great and secret amusement from watching the