16. Unexpected Visitors #4
“Love is supposed to be the greatest joy,” her father said. “I wouldn’t know. You see, I’m alive, and I intend to stay that way. And if you, too, wish to live a long life, daughter, you’ll avoid it as well.”
“Fascinating,” Bran said slowly, thoughtfully.
“A potion impacted a glamour, and you believe that the glamour, passed from father to son, has remained corrupted, compromised. And you believe its poisonous effects are triggered by positive emotion. Love.” He squeezed his arm around Guin’s shoulder. “Thoughts, Guin?”
Yes, but she couldn’t form them quite how she wanted to.
The entire thing sounded… scientifically plausible, especially considering how Bran’s glamour reacted to conflagration of heat and potion in the potion shop fire.
“It is only… the connection to an emotional trigger doesn’t make sense.
” When it was a vague supernatural threat, it made more sense.
But now… She shook her head. It throbbed.
“That’s right.” Bran squeezed her shoulders again. “And the problem of the potion impacting a glamour, you have decided, is fixable.”
Guin clutched at her husband’s words. They seemed to offer an anchor in a sea she’d always been drowning in. If the curse was a product of a potion… She knew better than most how those worked.
“Do you have any other reason for being here other than to upset my wife?” Bran asked, each word cool and clipped and decidedly dangerous.
Her mother dropped to her knees at Bran’s feet. “You have to keep her here. You cannot let her leave. It will kill her.”
“If there’s one thing I excel at, madam,” Bran said, “it’s keeping my wife alive.”
“Get off your knees, woman.” Guin’s father yanked her mother up by her arm as he passed toward the door. “Take our warning seriously, Braxton. Or you’ll find yourself dead before you sire an heir.” He glanced at Guin, his face softening with distant affection as he dragged her mother out the door.
“Fucking Jupiter,” Guin heard herself say.
“My thoughts exactly.” Bran glanced at her for a long, hard moment then pulled her to her feet. “Off to bed with you.”
“The curse is in my blood,” she said as he half carried her up the stairs.
“There is no curse. It is interesting about the glamour, though.” He dragged her through his bedchamber and into the bathing chamber and turned on the water. Holding tight to the pipe, his hand started to glow, heating the metal and the water that flowed through it.
“Exactly. It makes sense now, how it happens. It’s less of a curse and more of a corruption of the light and blood that connects one generation of Pottingers to another. No wonder they insisted I never speak of it. To do so would be to admit women carry talent, too. High treason in their day.”
Bran snorted. “A curse conveniently triggered by being happy. I don’t trust that.”
“Doesn’t sound trustworthy.”
“Glad you see that.”
She swayed on her feet, exhaustion and revelation making her a weather vane during a storm. Her brain was too muddled to unravel all the threads. Bran roamed around the bathing chamber, gathering what she needed—soap, a towel, bathing oils, and lotions.
No idea how he knew exactly what she needed, but he always did.
She turned, giving him her back. “Help me?”
He set about undressing her, strong fingers brushing against oddly chilled skin, making her shiver, making her quake deep inside. When she was down to her loosened corset, his hands disappeared, and she heard footsteps toward the door.
No risk.
“Don’t leave,” she said.
He stopped.
She dropped her shift and stepped into the tub, turning off the water and sinking into it up to her chin. “Don’t leave.”
His shoulders rose then fell, and he turned back around, found a shadowed wall and leaned against it. He’d not lit any candles, and there was only one window high up—circular stained glass.
She couldn’t see him very well, but the glamour was gone.
He was large, his black clothes doing more than the shadows to hide him.
But a bolt of green light from the window above fell over his eyes.
They were the greenest thing she’d ever seen.
As green as spring, as green as things that had been dead coming back to life.
He stayed there, silent, as she bathed, and silent, as she stepped from the tub and rubbed herself dry with a clean linen. He only moved after she slipped into her wrapper and made for her bedchamber. When he was behind her, at his bedchamber door, one single word from her lips stopped him.
“No.” She looked over her shoulder.
He looked over his.
The darkness stretched between them, shadows turned green and gold like the stained glass above them.
“I need you,” she said. And then she stepped through the doorway into her bedchamber and wasn’t surprised when he was behind her, then in front of her, pulling the blankets back just before she slipped beneath them and stretching out beside her on the bed without a sound.
She slept. Because she needed to and because she looked forward to what came after she awoke.