Chapter Twenty-Eight
The week unfolded with a surprising ease, as far as Rhys was concerned. Unsettling ease, which felt more like slotting into a place that had always been meant for him rather than visiting a new venue at which to ply his craft.
It wasn’t that he had never managed to feel comfortable away from home. Certainly not. He had always been comfortable with drifting.
It was more that this grange house had started to feel familiar in a way that he had never experienced outside of Starling’s Rest. It was that the borrowed bedroom where he shared the nights with Seph Boswell had begun to truly feel like his own. Like a place that he should get to keep.
And further, the pattern of the evenings, of the easy banter over dinner and the displays of talent in the ballroom afterward, had begun to feel like the way life was supposed to be lived.
It had burrowed itself so well under his skin that he wasn’t certain he remembered what things had been like before this, or how they were meant to be after.
A lot of it was Seph herself. He knew that.
Here in Lewes, they were far removed from all of the lingering ghosts that lurked around Brighton, all the reminders of how they’d gotten things wrong. This bedroom had only ever been theirs. This house was full of people who had never known them as anything other than a unit.
Perhaps it was that.
Perhaps that was all it was.
He had expected that they would do little else but explore one another in this place, day and night.
If he had been asked, prior to this, how he would use such an opportunity, he absolutely would have answered in the vein of keeping Seph naked and under him as often as possible.
He would have been aghast at the suggestion he’d use the opportunity for anything else.
But the work had overtaken them in many ways.
The gathered performers and the warmth of Merlin for as long as they’d have him here on this plane had drawn them into their orbit.
And even in the nights, though they certainly had been exploring one another and what it meant to be one thing, they often simply held one another and talked.
They talked until they slept, and they slept in peace, not simply pleasure.
He did not want this to end.
He did not want to leave this place and have to stop calling her his wife.
That second night, she had rolled atop him, bracing her hands on his chest, and he had looked up at her in wonder as she’d pulled his clothes away, as she’d touched and tested and taken, learning how to lead the dance of their union.
It had been incredible, gazing at her from flat on his back, feeling nothing but the driven choices of her own desire.
He had taunted her a few times now about how easy it would be to pick the locks on her shop, but Rhys had finally come to contend with the truth of the matter. He did not want to pick the locks.
He wanted a key.
It was perhaps the scariest desire he’d ever harbored, secretly and burning, deep in his chest.
“Palm reading,” Nini was explaining over luncheon, just past the halfway point of their tenure here, “is especially clever. You hold them at the wrist so you can feel when the pulse quickens. I never liked doing it because my fingers aren’t long and it was always awkward, but I’ve seen it mastered many times. ”
“But they didn’t touch us to tell our fortunes,” Master Yuri argued, waving a bit of chicken on the end of his fork as he recalled last night’s performance; the old woman and the child, and the things they’d known.
The impossible things they’d known. Or guessed.
“They used … oracle items. Those cards.”
“Ah, yes, the cards were interesting,” Madame Ivanova said, leaning down on her hand. “I’ve seen Le Tarot before, but it did not look like that. There is a deck you can buy in Marseilles, for both the game and the divination.”
“It is the Visconti-Sforza deck,” Merlin interjected from his spot at the head of the table. “Very old. Incomplete. From the time of the Medicis and Borgias.”
“Italian, are they?” Yuri said with clear disapproval. “Typical.”
Rhys turned to look at the mentalist, who had, some nights ago, managed to move items without touching them, on clear glass, which precluded the use of lodestones. He had also managed to melt and twist metal and split wood, from a distance.
“At least they have the good manners to let us speculate in the aftermath, free of their company,” he said to the Russian. “They never much join us, do they?”
Everyone murmured in agreement, shaking their heads and frowning.
“Have we made them feel unwelcome, you think?” Nini asked, tapping her spoon on her plate. “I don’t think we have been rude.”
“Elders and children are often more delicate than we are,” Seph reasoned, her hair glinting in the afternoon light, casting golden prisms on her white-and-pink collar. “Or they are shy. Or they simply don’t like to socialize. Who can say? But no, I don’t think anyone has been rude.”
“Not exclusively to them, anyhow,” Father Wheeler said mildly and with his eyes on his own food, which still managed to make Master Yuri go a bit red about the ears.
It made Merlin chortle softly, into his napkin, a sound that got smiles out of everyone. Even Yuri.
“It is my turn tonight,” Nini said, grinning. “Are any of you brave enough to volunteer?”
“Would it matter if we weren’t?” Rhys mumbled, making the mind-reader grin and quirk her head.
“I’ve been told,” she said wryly, “that it’s rude to rummage around in minds that didn’t invite me.”
“And yet,” said Seph, matching her tone, “we keep finding you there.”
Later, after they had all separated to attend their respective rehearsals and personal errands, Rhys found that the shoes he had ordered had finally arrived.
There was a neat, paper-wrapped parcel in front of the doors to the master suite, and seeing it made his heart drop just a little lower because it meant the passing of time had been real.
He picked up the package carefully, rotating it from one side to the other, and heard his new shoes clatter against the delicate gold-and-blue slippers he’d chosen for Seph. At least now he’d get the pleasure of giving them to her.
He pushed the door open, bracing himself to cut the thing open, and found her, once again sat in the center of the bedchamber, her skirts flared out around her in a circle.
This time, she was surrounded by thin, pale-colored paper in strips and snips and a pile of carefully created butterfly shapes next to a pair of glinting, silver scissors.
He appeared to have walked in just as she was placing something in her mouth.
“Seph?” he said, blinking a few times at the scene and then at her smiling face. “I thought you were attending Merlin this afternoon?”
“I was,” she said, beckoning him closer. “I was. Watch this!”
He closed the door behind him, setting the parcel aside, and drifted toward her as she took up three little butterflies in pale blue, yellow, and pink and showed them to him, one side, and then the other.
She palmed them, folding each in half and then rolling their centers so that they were more accurately shaped like the insects they resembled.
Then, humming a little to herself in evident excitement, she drew her other hand back from the palm where they rested, and all three began to lift, fluttering gently in thin air, following the urgings of her hands and sway of her body.
He watched, his jaw going slack as he slumped to the floor, while she made these little paper butterflies flit and flutter and sway in the air.
She giggled, her eyes sparkling as she watched his face, and then passed her hands over, under, and around the hovering butterflies to demonstrate that they truly were magically afloat.
He began to smile, giving her a little round of applause as she stifled more giggles and urged her little paper bugs back to the carpet, where they settled softly, one by one.
Then she reached into her mouth again and appeared to mime removing something. The miming continued around her fingers until finally, she stretched her arms out to the sides, sighing in contentment.
“This is one of Merlin’s tricks,” she said at last, gesturing to the butterflies. “He tore this single page out of his book of illusions for the express purpose of being turned into one of my magic kits. He wants me to sell it at the shop.”
“He wants that?!” Rhys exclaimed, surprise swelling to bafflement in his chest. “He wants you to tell his secrets?”
“Just this one,” she said, sighing softly.
“To let people discover the delight of astounding their friends. It is simple and inexpensive and very clever. I can make the kit with just a few stacks of paper and shaved fishing wire. I will put his name on the boxes and do demonstrations when the high season comes again, in the summer. Shall I teach you?”
He nodded, watching in helpless, dazed awe, thick in the mire of his infatuation as she showed him how to wrap the thin, clear twine around two fingers and then anchor one end between one’s teeth.
“Butterflies are perfect for this because no one will become suspicious as you bend and twist them around the threads,” she said, wrapping his fingers for him and placing two of her cut-outs in his palm.
“He did say that sometimes he anchors the thread behind a till or table depending on the day and the frequency of performance. I suppose a bit of adhesive would manage that. But for us, tonight, it’s the teeth. Ready?”
“Ready,” he said, opening his mouth as she dropped the twine in and using his tongue to anchor it.
He pretended to concentrate very hard, and one by one, used his powers of mental magic to raise the three butterflies from the carpet, forced to control his urge to grin at her theatrical gasps and applause.
It really was a very good trick.
“You should use the tissue paper in the external packaging,” he told her, stroking the scraps. “It looks very vernal.”
“What does that mean?” she asked softly. “‘Vernal.’”
“‘Spring-like,’” he said, chuckling. “Like autumnal.”
“Oh,” she said, smiling a little. “What’s the word for ‘summer-like’? Shouldn’t the kit be summer-like, given when I’ll have the most customers?”
He screwed up his brow, thinking. He knew this one. Didn’t he?
“It sounds like festival,” he recalled, tapping his temple. “‘Aestival’? Yes, I think that’s it. It has that combined letter, the ‘a’ and the ‘e.’”
“Hattie called it a ‘ligament,’ didn’t she?” Seph said, leaning back on her hands. “Like the cords holding our arms and legs together.”
“‘Ligature,’” he corrected, crawling over her angled body and kissing that clever mouth. “But I think the root meaning is the same.”
She kissed him back, her fingers curling into the carpet, and sighed happily, resting her forehead against his.
“Rhys,” she said, opening her eyes, so very close to his own, close enough that their eyelashes tangled.
“Do you want me to stop selling the tricks you consider yours? The Healing Rope and the Vanishing Coin? I know I shouldn’t have done it in the first place. ”
He pulled back, surprised that she had offered, and examined her face. He looked into those odd, two-toned eyes of hers, gold and blue, just like the shoes in the box behind him.
“No,” he said. “If the likes of Merlin can share his wonders, what business do I have, trying to put a bushel over ours? Besides, you taught me some of those tricks. I didn’t invent them. I certainly didn’t patent them, like Harcourt announced the other day.”
She reached up to cover her mouth, stifling a giggle at that revelation. “I still can’t believe you tried to sue me,” she confessed. “I didn’t know you could patent a magic trick. Did you?”
He shrugged. “I suppose I could’ve figured it out,” he grumbled, crossing his arms and rolling his eyes.
“Ruby has a huge folio of her patents and loves to lord them around. It’s why she prints the ingredients of her scents on the bottles.
It’s like a challenge to anyone who would dare to attempt reproducing her genius. ”
“I like Ruby,” Seph said. “She’s scary.”
“She is,” he agreed. “Sometimes.”
She nodded, looking utterly content. Glowing.
She eventually sighed and slapped her knees, pushing herself to her feet to clean up the mess she’d made, and she only smiled to herself softly when he scrambled to assist, bunching up tissue paper debris in his fist and looking around for a bin to deposit it in.
“Rhys,” she said as she moved the scissors from the floor to the nightstand. “What’s the word for ‘winter-like’? That’s the only one I’m missing now. And it will be winter soon.”
He grinned, turning to her with his handfuls of color. “‘Hibernal,’” he said confidently. “My favorite. Do you know what that means?”
“That we hibernate?” she guessed. “Because it is cold and dark and wet and windy?”
“That we hibernate,” he agreed. “And spend all winter together, shielded from those things. In bed.”
“Something to look forward to,” she said, floating forward to take the rubbish from him. “Isn’t it?”
He paused, a little click of tension releasing in his chest and flooding outward, warm and relieved and no longer angry that time was passing, after all. “Yes,” he said to her. “Something to look forward to.”