Chapter 19
Someone has laid out a feast, but I'm the only one here to eat it.
The dining room glows with candles nobody lit for me specifically—they light them every night, the whole staffed ritual of it, whether I come down or not.
Tonight the long table is covered end to end: roast something under a silver dome, bread still warm enough to fog the platter, figs and cheese and a wine I won't drink because I don't drink anything in this house I didn't watch get poured.
At my seat, propped against a glass, a card with loopy handwriting.
Enjoy, Calypso. I regret I can't join you—house business keeps me out late. The kitchen is yours. —L.V.
House business. At night. I file it with all the other things I file, and I sit. I pick at food I have no appetite for, alone at a table set for what feels like a thousand.
I get half a fig down before something hits me.
Warmth. Out of nowhere, flooding up under my sternum—not the slow build of my magic but something softer, worse, an ache with a shape to it. An intense feeling of loneliness. Of missing someone. Of yearning.
I'm sitting alone in Leopold's dining room missing someone so hard my chest hurts, and I have no idea who.
I put the fig down. Go still. Run the check I've run a hundred times this week. What lit this feeling? Where’s the source of it?
Is it my emotion?
I wrack my brain but nothing makes sense. There's no reason for me to feel this way, here, now. Nothing in this room is worth aching over, but my body's aching anyway, pointed like a compass needle at the wing across the house, at a locked door, at Aamon—wanting him with a want I never switched on.
Not mine.
It’s been happening for days—catching feelings as they surface out of nowhere, running them down like escaped current. Half trace back clean. Like the dread when Leopold's step comes down the hall is mine, earned, no mystery. The other half lead nowhere I can point to.
Not mine. Not mine. Source unknown.
It’s eerie. Feeling someone else’s emotions. Yearning because someone else is yearning.
But this emotion is so strong that I can’t stop my guilt from joining it.
Emric. The empty chairs around me, any empty chair, and the boy who should still be filling one. Now I'm sitting at a table built for a hundred, in a dead man's silence, three men tangled around my life like wire—and the one who was easiest to care for is the one gone.
I press my thumb hard into the tines of the fork until it hurts, until the ache in my chest has somewhere else to go.
That one's mine. At least I still have that. At least grief, of everything I feel in this house, I don't have to wonder whose it is.
I push back from the feast nobody's eating, and I go find the source of the other thing—the yearning that isn't mine.
Aamon’s room is the one beside mine. Close enough that most nights I lie awake on my side of the wall, too aware of the man on the other. He’s like whiplash. Sometimes he’s holding me like he might fade away if he lets go, others he seems almost indifferent.
When I get to his door, I lift my hand and knock before I talk myself out of it.
Nothing.
I knock again. “Aamon?”
The door gives under my knuckles—not latched, swinging inward at the first touch—and momentum carries me a step over the threshold before I can stop it.
"Aamon?"
The room's empty. Lamp on, book open on the desk, the bed I'm not going to think about. And then, past the far door, the sound of water shutting off, and I realize a half-second too late exactly what I've walked into.
He comes out of the bathroom in a towel slung low at his hips and nothing else, and my brain simply stops.
Water still runs in dark tracks down his chest. His hair's pushed back wet and dripping, none of its usual severe order.
I have seen this man in a rolled-sleeve shirt and lost my whole train of thought.
I have never seen this. Five hundred years has built him like something out of an old painting—broad through the shoulders, cut lean and hard down the stomach, and marked, everywhere, with the faded silver of scars centuries older than anyone I've ever met and detailed runic tattoos down each arm.
There's a story in every one of them and I want to read all of them with my mouth and the thought arrives fully formed and mortifying before I can stop it.
"Sorry—" It comes out strangled. Heat floods my face. "The door was open, I didn't—you're—I'll come back."
I turn to see myself out.
I don't make it a step.
The air moves—that's the only warning, a displacement, the ghost of speed—and then he's between me and the door, close enough that the shower-heat still rolls off his skin.
He didn't touch me. Didn't need to. He just put himself there, deciding in the space between one breath and the next that I'm not leaving.
I suck in a sharp breath and then regret it when our chests bump.
"You came to my door," he says. Level. Quiet. Water slides down his throat and I watch it go and hate myself for watching. "You don't get to knock and run, Calypso. Whatever brought you here—say it."
My pulse is somewhere north of reasonable. I make myself look at his face and not the rest of him, which is its own act of magic.
“Are–are you sure? I can wait for you to–”
“Cal,” he cuts me off.
I swallow thickly, squeezing my eyes shut to try and clear out my scrambled brain.
"I think something's wrong with me." The word comes out and I hear how it sounds, but I don't take it back. "I've been feeling things that aren't mine. Feelings that show up with no reason, no source, and when I trace them they lead—" I stop.
His brows knit as I point to him.
"They lead to you. And in training, when you put your magic against mine, there's almost no line anymore. I can't find where you stop and I start. So I asked Nellie and her mom had an idea of what it might be."
His expression doesn't change, but his thumb presses into the center of his opposite palm. The small gesture makes his bicep pop and my mouth waters.
"Tell me the word," he says.
I swallow and look away. "Tethered?"
Quiet. When I make myself look back, something's moved behind his eyes—not surprise. Recognition. He knew before I said it.
"She said when two magics link," I go on, because it's easier to talk than to stand here under that look, "the link stops caring which side a thing started on.
What's owed and what's felt come through the same channel.
That I'd feel things that weren't mine and not be able to tell the difference.
" My voice holds. Barely. "So. Is that what this is? Did you do something to me?"
He doesn't answer right away. He reaches past me—slow, deliberate, giving me every chance to flinch back—and pushes the door shut. The latch clicks. Whatever this is going to be, he's decided it isn't going to be overheard.
"Yes," he says. "That's exactly what it is."
The floor doesn't drop. I thought it might. There's just the cold, clean click of a thing I already knew locking home.
"The mirroring." His voice stays level, but he's using the level now, leaning on it.
"Every time I've set my magic against yours to check your control or help you channel, it's accrued.
Months of it. No one intends a tether—it isn't a technique, it's a consequence.
But I've suspected for weeks. Before you did. "
"Weeks." Something in me goes hot and sharp. "You've known for weeks that I might be walking around feeling things that aren't mine, and you didn't tell me?"
"No."
"Why."
And here's where I expect the apology. The careful phrasing, the Aamon who cracks a door open and then eases it shut before I can get through. I've been in this exact moment with him before. The moment where he decides to push me away instead of let me in.
He doesn't do that. He does the opposite.
But how do I know it's real, I think, and I don't say it, because saying it would make it true.
"Because I wasn't going to hand you a reason to explain it away.
" He says it evenly, but there's an edge under it now, something with teeth.
"You'd take the word tether and you'd use it to decide none of it was real.
That whatever you feel when you look at me is just leakage.
Bleed-through. Someone else's signal in your chest." He crosses his arms over his chest. "So let me save you the trouble of the theory, Calypso.
If you don't know how you feel about me—if you truly can't tell your own heart from mine—then you should go back to your room.
Right now. I mean that. I am the last person on this earth who will ever make you stay somewhere you don't want to be. "
It knocks the breath out of me a little. "That's not—I didn't come here to be—"
"I'm not finished." He closes half the distance, and his voice drops, and it isn't cold, it's the furthest thing from cold.
"The tether can carry a feeling. It cannot invent one.
It has nothing of its own to give—everything crossing it started in a person first. And you felt something for me before our magic ever touched.
You know you did." His eyes hold mine, steady, merciless in their patience.
"The first time I corrected your stance and you forgot how to breathe.
The morning you argued with me about the historiography just to keep me in the room.
You flushed every time I stood too close and you filed it under problems and moved on.
That was months before the tether. That was you. Just you."
And—he's right.
I deflate a little bit.