Chapter 7 #3
For a moment, he could only stare at her.
The proposal was unconventional — more than unconventional, it was something he’d never encountered in any theoretical text or practical manual, and he’d read most of them.
Healing magic applied as indirect ward maintenance.
It shouldn’t work, and yet the logic, when he turned it over in his mind and examined it from several angles, seemed sound enough.
The wards were extensions of his gift. They drew from the same channels Roslyn had been rebuilding.
Strengthening those channels with focused intent, directing the healing energy toward the specific pathways that fed the ward anchors, would, in theory, extend their functional lifespan without requiring direct magical expenditure on his part.
“That would require us to work together,” he said slowly. “Your magic inside my system while I direct the flow toward the ward anchors.”
She didn’t blink. “Yes.”
“The level of coordination involved would be considerable,” he continued, knowing he had to make her understand the ramifications of what she was suggesting.
“You would need to follow my lead, match my frequencies, and adjust in real time to fluctuations you’ve never worked with before.
Warding frequencies aren’t the same as biological ones.
They’re sharper, less forgiving. A miscalibration could damage the channels we’re trying to protect. ”
“I know what it would require.” She hadn’t broken eye contact the whole time, was still looking at him with that open, earnest expression.
“I’ve been inside your magic twice a day for two weeks, Malachi.
I know your channels. I know the places where you compensate and the places where you’re elegant, along with the places where you brute-forced a solution because no one taught you the proper technique. This would work.”
The use of his name — his given name, which she hadn’t used before, always defaulting to the clinical “you” or, when she was particularly irritated, nothing at all — stirred something within him, something he wished he could ignore.
Instead, he pushed away from the desk and stood, mostly because sitting felt inadequate to the moment. He almost immediately wished he hadn’t, since standing now put him in close proximity to her when she also rose from her chair.
Close proximity was, he was beginning to understand, the primary vector through which his self-control was being eroded.
“You are proposing,” he said carefully, “a degree of magical integration that is typically reserved for — ”
“For what?” she cut in, her tone now almost challenging.
He didn’t finish the sentence. The closest parallel to what she was suggesting was the sort of bond that only flared between clan primas and their consorts, where the magic of one awoke the magic of the other person, forging a connection unlike any other.
But he wouldn’t say that to her; saying it would require him to acknowledge why the comparison had occurred to him in the first place, and acknowledging that would require him to look directly at the thing he’d been carefully not looking at for the past five days.
“It isn’t a trivial undertaking,” he said instead.
Her chin lifted. “I didn’t say it was trivial,” she said carefully. “I said it would work.”
They were standing on the same side of the desk now.
This was a navigational error he couldn’t account for, since he didn’t remember either of them moving.
She was close enough that he could see the faint shadows of fatigue beneath her eyes and the slight unevenness of the collar on his white shirt where she hadn’t gotten the top button quite right, and she was looking up at him with those steady blue eyes that saw everything he tried to hide.
In that moment, his carefully maintained defenses — the formality, the distance, seventeen years of convincing himself he was better off alone — developed a crack he could feel all the way to the base of his spine.
“It would work,” she repeated, her voice softer now.
And he bent and kissed her.
It wasn’t a conscious decision, although he would later reconstruct the sequence of events and identify the exact moment when his self-control had failed, which was when she’d said his name and followed it with, I know your channels, in a voice without the slightest doubt.
In that moment, he’d realized she was right with a clarity so sharp it felt like the obsidian shard cutting through the void.
Her mouth was warm, her lips soft and lush.
Those were the first coherent thoughts that surfaced through the wreckage of his composure, followed closely by the observation that she was kissing him back with an intensity that suggested her own defenses had been under similar strain.
Then coherent thought departed entirely, replaced by the sensation of her hands clutching the front of his shirt and his own hands — those careful, precise hands that handled volatile artifacts with such tenderness — pulling her closer with an urgency that would have appalled him if he’d had any capacity left for self-assessment.
When they broke apart, they were both breathing hard, and the study felt somehow different, as if the kiss had shifted something in the room’s architecture even though nothing had physically changed.
Roslyn’s hands were still tangled in his shirt. She looked up at him, and what he saw in her expression wasn’t regret or uncertainty but something fierce and almost startled, as if her own composure had been shattered in a way that matched his.
“Well,” she said. Her voice was slightly unsteady, but her mouth — always full, now almost swollen by the kiss they’d shared — quirked a bit at one corner. “That’s going to complicate your treatment plan.”
He almost laughed. The impulse was so unfamiliar that it took him a moment to identify it.
By the time he did, it had passed, leaving behind a warmth in him he recognized, with a resigned kind of clarity, as something he wasn’t going to be able to ward against, contain, or file in a velvet-lined box on a shelf.
“Yes,” he said. “I expect it will.”