Chapter 31 Taera #2
Nikolai follows my gaze to his black silk sheets, all mussed from where we were sitting on them. “Ah.”
“I can’t believe—” I whisper.
“Taera,” he says, firmly, “no one sleeps in this bed but me.”
I stare at him, waiting for the words to register in my mind.
“Yes, I spend nights with sources,” he says. “I need their magic, but I never bring them here. This space is mine, and mine alone.”
“But—but I’m here.” I blink at him.
“You’re the exception.” He smirks. “I can assure you, if I were trying to get you into my bed, you would have noticed.”
I let out a long breath. “I just… assumed.”
Awkwardly, and ashamed, I shuffle back to where I was seated before. Nikolai settles back at my side, our linked hands resting between us.
He studies me. “The idea really bothers you.”
I stare down at my toes, scrunching and unscrunching them. “I’ve never been with someone like that,” I say.
“No sexy baker boys in your village?” Nikolai teases, and I grimace.
He arches a brow.
“No,” I mutter. “And I don’t have time for that stuff, anyway.”
“You don’t have time for pleasure?” His low chuckle brings my blood rushing back up to my cheeks. I glare at him, but he looks genuinely curious.
“I—even if there were someone, I’d never know how to—or how to ask, or…” I flush deeply, then remember what Clarice said. “My village is… backward about those things.”
There’s only a slight smile on his lips.
I make myself breathe evenly. Why did I tell him any of this?
“Well, if you ever want to try…” He winks.
“No!” I yelp. “I mean—that’s very well for some people, but I’m not the kind who would be interested in doing that with you.”
“False.”
I stare at the marble, and humiliation floods my entire being. It has to be lying. I would never want that… right? With him? I squirm.
“I don’t know why it—” I stammer, unable to endure his heavy green gaze.
“You aren’t the only one interested.” Nikolai grins, amusement dancing in his eyes.
Interested in sex magic? He can’t possibly mean interested in me; the idea is ludicrous, and I blush again just thinking about it. I squeeze my eyes shut. My own desert-damned face is going to be the death of me.
His voice carries over barely suppressed laughter. “But I was going to say, you could always ask Annie to show you sex magic. I’m sure she’d be happy to.”
“Annie does it?” My brows shoot up.
He chuckles. “She’s the only one who comes close to what I can do.”
My insides flutter, little sparks jumping down my arms. I need to stop talking about this with him. I attempt to focus back on Annie. Is he implying that Annie might be interested in me? Romantically?
I blink. I’ve never seen two women together in the village. Or two men. The idea hadn’t occurred to me until I saw the two second years kiss in the labyrinth, or heard Nikolai mention he’s kissed all sorts of folks… It feels daring to talk about.
“I’ve never… thought about a woman like that,” I say.
“If the illusionist is good enough, that won’t matter,” he replies, a mischievous glint in his eyes. “But if you prefer my magic…”
I squirm, all hot and shivery at the same time. This conversation is dangerously delicious to some dark part of me. I’m afraid to acknowledge my own reactions, even after the marble explicitly exposed me. I loathe this magician, but I also desire him. He’s as insidious as the desert.
But I’ve resisted the desert all my life. I know how.
I know that each step I let myself take, the next step will be twice as tempting.
I won’t give him that.
“We didn’t eat lunch,” I blurt. “Are you hungry for supper?”
Nikolai’s laughter is pleasant and rich. “Good idea.”
He tugs me off the bed again and to the door, where a shadow appears.
“A little of everything,” Nikolai instructs, and the shadow drifts away.
That’s how it works—with illusory servants to cater to our magician whims? Is the food even real?
I don’t have the energy to care. Too much has happened today already.
I trot back to the bed with Nikolai; involuntarily, my thoughts catch—like a rabbit in a trap—on the idea of sex magic.
If a magician can wear any face, any body they like… my mind flits involuntarily to Nikolai’s various kissing partners, trying to imagine what they might have wanted. My breathing shallows, both intrigued and horrified. Then a terrible realization crashes over me.
“That’s why you smelled wrong,” I whisper.
“What?”
I clap my free hand over my mouth. “Nothing.”
“False.”
Nikolai levels a look at me, expectant, unblinking.
I squirm. “The nights you came back late and you smelled different. You were… with sources.”
“That’s rather perceptive of you, to notice how I smell,” he says slowly, but nods once. “I needed a lot of magic when we returned to the Halls. You weren’t easy on my amulets.”
“Your amulets?” I ask. This is the kind of information I need.
“Amulets store magic,” he says, “for conduits.”
It makes sense. How else could he be covered in illusions all the time when he’s not touching a source? But it doesn’t seem fair for conduits to carry around magic and be able to use it. “What about sources?”
“Sources use talismans, like that bead.” He points to my wrist. “They’re analogous to amulets, but they store illusions instead of magic.”
It all makes sense, except for one thing.
“Then why do sources and conduits bother working together?”
He shrugs. “Some magicians do think that the exchange of magic should be purely transactional. Sasha, for instance.”
A thousand more questions rise to my lips, and I can’t decide which one to ask.
Nikolai chuckles. “Here,” he says, tugging me to my feet again. I follow him to his desk, where he pulls out a thick dusty book that I didn’t see before. “This is my first-year textbook.”
Settling back into our positions on the bed, Nikolai hands me the book. I flip it open but can’t make any sense of the unusual characters. “What language is this?”
“Sorry,” he says, placing his free hand on the open page. The lines start to squirm and twist, and then the text untangles into words I can read, clear as the desert sky.
Introduction to Basic Practice in Magic.
I’m morbidly fascinated.
We clasp hands to stay in contact, and Nikolai pulls out his own mysterious book from the labyrinth. I try to take a peek, but he tilts it away from me, so I reluctantly focus on my own book.
I skim the history at the beginning for anything I can glean about this place. Instead, it rambles on about powerful magicians through the ages. And the scant mentions of the Halls of Glass makes me scowl.
“There’s no mention of how the Halls of Glass were created,” I mutter.
Nikolai chuckles, glancing up. “That’s because we know fuck-all.”
I frown. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Those are topics of ongoing research,” he says. “How the desert protects the Halls, why the two are connected, what the fuck the labyrinth is for.”
I don’t know whether to be smugly satisfied or deeply unsettled that the magicians don’t know these things, either.
“You can skip to the section on sources,” Nikolai murmurs, returning to his own book. I sneak a glance at the page he’s studying, but it’s a mess of indecipherable symbols. Maybe it takes magic to read.
After glancing through the next few pages of my textbook, I decide he’s right and flip forward to Basics: The Beginner Source, where I begin reading in earnest. I never expected my first real opportunity to study from a book—a real, printed textbook, not just an assortment of handwritten notes—to be learning magic.
When dinner arrives, Nikolai sets the platter like a picnic in the middle of the bed. I stuff myself full of bread and soups and meats, then dive right back into reading.
I don’t think about sleep. I don’t let myself consider the unspoken questions closing in on us as the darkness falls.
Sleeping in Nikolai’s room is one thing. Sleeping in his bed, with him, is another entirely. But the idea that I’m the first other person to sleep here gives me the smallest shiver of smug excitement. I can’t fully snuff it out.