3. Brynn
brYNN
I’ve been standing at the matchmaking desk for eleven minutes, and Marguerite still won’t look at me.
“Just unmatch us,” I say. “It’s a clerical thing. A glitch. You delete one line of code, or whatever the magical version of code is, and we both go back to pretending last night didn’t happen.”
Marguerite taps the air above the registry. Threads of silver light unspool between her fingers. She’s been doing this for three centuries and she has never once looked rattled.
She looks rattled now.
“Brynn.”
“That’s my name. I used it a lot growing up.”
“The records won’t open.”
I lean over the desk. The registry is a sheet of black glass that usually shows compatibility data in neat glowing rows. Right now it shows nothing. Just a smear of color that won’t hold still, like oil on water.
“That’s not supposed to happen,” I say.
“No.”
“Try mine specifically. Brynn Fairmont. Assistant, fourth-year, terrible at filing.”
She tries. The glass shudders. Symbols bleed across it, the same ones I saw in the mirror before it exploded. Old ones. Curved like hooks. Then the whole panel goes dark and spits out a single line in letters that pulse like a heartbeat.
PAIRING LOCKED.
“Locked,” I repeat. “Locked by who?”
“I don’t know.” Marguerite’s voice drops. “I built this system. I should be able to override anything in it. I can’t override this.”
Cold shivers slide down my spine. My magic stirs under my skin, the way it’s been doing for weeks now, restless and wrong. I press my palm flat to my thigh and tell it to settle.
It doesn’t.
“Okay.” I straighten up. “Okay, that’s fine, that’s not terrifying at all. I’ll just avoid him for the rest of the week. Different wings. Different schedules. The resort’s enormous. We never have to breathe the same air.”
The registry chimes.
We both look down.
A reservation card materializes on the glass, gold script on black.
brEAKFAST FOR TWO. THE OBSERVATORY TERRACE. 8:00. B. FAIRMONT. L. VAN ALSTEIN.
“I didn’t book that,” I say.
“I know.”
“I would never book that. I’d rather eat a compatibility mirror.”
The glass chimes again. A second card slides into place beside the first.
LUNAR RIDGE EXCURSION. STABLES. 10:00. B. FAIRMONT. L. VAN ALSTEIN.
“That one too,” Marguerite says, very quietly. “I’m guessing.”
“You’re guessing correctly.”
Somebody’s doing this. The thought lands flat and certain in my chest. The mirror, the bond, the locked records, the convenient little reservations placing me next to the one annoying man in this resort who looks at me like I’m a stain on his marble. None of it is an accident.
I just don’t know who. Or why it’s choosing me.
“Marguerite.” I keep my voice light, because if I don’t keep it light I’ll do something embarrassing. “Be honest. Am I in trouble?”
She finally meets my eyes.
“I don’t know what you’re in,” she says. “But I’d go ahead and eat breakfast. You’ll learn more sitting across from him than hiding from him.”
“That’s not an answer. Somebody locked those records, and I want to know who.”
“And you will. Leave the registry to me.” Her hand settles over mine on the desk, warm and steady.
“I found you eight years ago. A scared girl with a magic flare she couldn’t hold before I ever put you on my staff.
You’ve done a great job as my assistant these last four years.
Pulling at a lock like this from the wrong end gets people hurt.
Let me work on it. You go live your week. ”
It’s good advice. It’s the kind of thing she’s always said to me, and I’ve always listened, because I trust her and she’s never once steered me wrong.
So I nod. And I let it go.
Great. Wonderful. Love that for me.
He’s already at the table when I get there. Of course he is.
Leo Van Alstein sits with his back to the railing and the whole valley spread behind him, mist still clinging to the pines. He doesn’t stand when I arrive. He just watches me cross the terrace like he’s deciding whether I’m worth the calories of being annoyed.
“You’re late,” he says.
“I’m fashionable.” I drop into the chair across from him. “There’s a difference. Mostly the difference is that I’m prettier.”
A muscle ticks in his jaw. The ghost of where a smile would go if he were a different person.
“I didn’t arrange this.”
“I know. Neither did I. The system’s locked and somebody’s playing with our schedules.” I unfold my napkin so I have something to do with my hands. “So we have two options. We sit here in furious silence and waste a perfectly good pastry basket. Or we figure out who’s doing it.”
He studies me. His eyes are dark blue this morning. Not silver. I’ve decided not to think about what makes them go silver.
“You think someone’s interfering?”
“I think the records are locked by magic that our three-hundred-year-old matchmaker can’t crack. I think that should worry you more than it’s currently appearing to worry you.”
Something shifts behind his face. Just a flicker. He didn’t know the records were locked.
“Eat,” he says, and pushes the basket two inches toward me. “We have a horse problem at ten.”
“We have a lot of problems. The horse one’s pretty low on my list.”
But I take the pastry. It’s still warm. He poured my coffee before I sat down, I realize. Black, then the little jug of cream set beside it like he wasn’t sure how I take it.
I don’t say anything about that. I just drink it.
I do not ride horses.
I want this on the record. I’m a city witch. The closest I get to nature is the dream gardens, and those are climate-controlled.
So when the stablehand brings out a creature the size of a small building and tells me her name is Pomegranate, I take a polite step backward.
“She’s gentle,” the stablehand says.
“She’s enormous.”
“Both can be true,” Leo says behind me.
He’s already mounted. He looks irritatingly correct up there, reins easy in one hand, like he was assembled in a factory that only makes men who are good at things. The lunar ridge trail winds up behind the stables, pale and steep, and the convergence light makes the whole sky look bruised.
I get my foot in the stirrup. I get exactly that far.
“Use the other foot to push,” Leo says.
“I know how legs work.”
I don’t, apparently. I end up half-draped over the saddle with my dignity somewhere down the hill. And then his hand is on my back, steady, not grabbing, just there, and he tips me upright like I weigh nothing.
The bond does its thing. A pulse, low and warm, right through the contact.
He goes very still.
So do I.
“Stop,” I say, annoyed.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re doing the brooding, still thing. I can feel you thinking from over here.”
He pulls his hand back. Says nothing. But the warmth doesn’t leave my spine for a long time after.
We’ve been climbing for an hour when I see it.
A boy. One of the junior stable staff, maybe sixteen, leading a limping pony down a side path with his face all twisted up trying not to cry. The pony’s favoring its left front leg. The boy doesn’t know what to do. You can see it.
I expect Leo to ride past. Men like him always ride past.
He doesn’t.
He’s off his horse before I’ve finished the thought, crouched in the dirt in his thousand-dollar everything, running one hand down the pony’s leg with a gentleness I haven’t once seen him use on a person.
“Stone bruise,” he says. “Here. Feel.”
The boy crouches next to him, hesitant.
“You’re not in trouble,” Leo says. Quieter now. “Animals get hurt. The job is noticing fast, and you noticed fast. That’s the whole job.”
The boy nods. His chin stops wobbling.
Leo talks him through it. How to pack the hoof. Who to tell. He doesn’t rush. He doesn’t perform it for an audience, because he’s forgotten I’m an audience. For three full minutes the Ice King of Van Alstein Global is just a man kneeling in the mud teaching a scared kid how to be less scared.
I sit on my enormous horse and I feel something tip over in my chest that I don’t have a name for and don’t want.
When he stands, he catches me looking.
“What?”
“Nothing.” I look at the sky. “You’ve got mud on your very expensive knees, that’s all.”
“You’re staring.”
“I’m appreciating the view. The valley. Not you. The valley behind you, which you’re blocking, kind of rudely.”
He smiles. Just the ghost of one. And this time I watch for the silver and it isn’t there, it’s just him, looking up at me with the wind moving through his blond hair.
Oh, no!
Grumpy I can handle. Grumpy is easy. Grumpy I can banter into the ground.
But, this is worse. This is the part nobody warns you about.
I kind of like him. Fuck!
The light changes while we’re still on the ridge.
It happens fast. The sky goes the color of a deep wound, then darker, and the wind picks up out of nowhere, cold and full of static. Pomegranate stamps and tosses her head. Below us the resort lights flicker.
Leo’s already scanning the horizon, and his whole body has changed. Coiled. Alert.
“What is that?”
“Lunar storm.” He swings up onto his horse in one motion, his eyes still fixed on the dark line building over the valley. “Building early. It’s not supposed to hit for two more days.”
A horn sounds from below. Long, low, a warning note I feel in my teeth. Then another. Down at the resort, light begins to gather at the base of the grounds, a pale shimmer creeping up the air like something getting ready to close.
“Leo.” My magic is screaming now, clawing at the inside of my skin. “Leo, what happens when that thing finishes?”
He looks at me. And for the first time since I met him, Leo Van Alstein looks like the situation is out of his control.
“When the dome seals, no one leaves,” he says. “Not until the storm breaks. And we do not want to be on the wrong side of it when it does.”
He wheels his horse toward the trail. The order’s already in his voice.
“So ride,” he says. “Now!”
The wind howls.
The shimmer climbs higher behind us.
And somewhere far beneath the resort, so deep I shouldn’t be able to feel it at all, something enormous turns over in its sleep and opens one ancient eye.