Chapter 20
Anton slept with Madgala again that night. Three times, she rose and tossed him onto Asherton’s chest. Three times, she found him curled against her, one leaf resting on her neck. In the end, she gave up and slept fitfully, dreaming of arborial ghosts with ivory teeth.
When she awoke, Magdala knew Asherton was gone before she glanced at his empty bed.
Seething, Magdala pushed Anton onto the floor, dressed, and ran barefoot down to the kitchen, where she found Asherton stirring eggs in a chipped porcelain bowl—once a Devney family heirloom. Cracked eggshells riddled the counter, oozing on the scarred wood.
“Before you shout at me,” he said, “I just came down to the kitchen. And Zephyr is up already, so I’m not really alone.”
“At least wake me up,” she grumbled, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
“You were sleeping so peacefully, I hated to wake you.”
She dropped into a chair at the scrubbed wooden table. Asherton pointed to a pot of tea in a flowered cozy, and she poured a cup.
“Scrambled, fried, or poached?” he asked.
“Eggs again?” Magdala set her teacup down with a clink. “We’ve had eggs for every meal for four days.”
“It’s all we need, really,” Asherton said. “Eggs and fish and an occasional handful of berries. Chicken now and then. Mushrooms once, but that backfired. It was fun for an hour or two, but then Zephyr made me throw up, which was not fun.”
Magdala rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Could you at least mix something into the eggs? To make them taste like food?”
Asherton scowled. “Like what?”
“Tomatoes, cheese, mushrooms?”
“What kind of mushrooms?” he asked suspiciously.
Magdala threw her hands up in frustration. If she was going to be trapped here for at least another three days, she refused to eat the same meal nine more times.
“Clean off the counter,” she ordered. “You’re a messy cook.”
“I was going to do it later …”
“NOW!”
“I’m sorry, am I confused?” Asherton said, setting down his bowl of eggs. “Because I thought that I was the future king of Allagesh and you were working for me.”
“Clean the counter,” Magdala gritted, “or I will poison your disgusting eggs.”
Asherton frowned. “I was going to clean it anyway.”
Laughing sardonically, Magdala snatched a basket from the bare pantry and marched down to the garden.
With some tenacity and good luck, Magdala excavated a tomato vine, some purple peppers, and a basil plant almost big enough to hold a bird’s nest. In the woods, she uncovered a patch of mushrooms (not poisonous) huddled under a decaying log.
Upon returning, she found Asherton leaning against the clean counter, his arms crossed over his chest. “Where did you get those?”
Magdala took a knife from a drawer. “Sit,” she ordered.
Asherton chuckled and Magdala glanced away. He had perfect white teeth, and when he smiled, something odd tickled inside her chest. Indigestion.
Asherton sat, and she lay the knife and tomatoes in front of him. “Slice these.”
He lifted the knife like he meant to cut someone’s throat.
Magdala grabbed his wrist. “Have you never cut a vegetable before?” she asked, incredulous.
Asherton’s brow pinched. “They left that bit out of my military school education.”
With a persecuted sigh, Magdala pulled a chair next to his and sat beside him. When she lifted the knife, he leaned away from her.
“I’m far too hungry to kill you right now,” she said.
He flashed her another acid reflux-inducing smile. “And too tidy to do it in the kitchen, I suspect.”
“Very true.” Magdala demonstrated how to cut the tomato. Awkwardly, Asherton mimicked her, but the troublesome vegetable shot out from under the blade and rolled onto the floor.
Magdala groaned. “It’s hopeless,” she said. “You can remove a man from royalty, but you cannot remove the royalty from the man.”
“Find me one other prince who knows how to cook!” Asherton cried defensively. “At least I can make eggs.”
“Oh, I have had your eggs, and they are nothing to brag about.”
Asherton got up, and she thought he was going to storm out of the room, but instead he snatched up the tomato and slammed it on the table, then he leaned toward her, his eyes blazing. “Teach me,” he said in a tone that sounded more like fight me.
Magdala slapped the seat of his chair. “Sit.”
He obeyed her, his jaw tense. He jogged his knee up and down—he didn’t seem to like sitting still. It shook the table, and Magdala clamped her hand down on his leg. “Pick up the knife like I showed you.”
He did, and she closed her hand over his, then took his other hand and pinched his fingers on the tomato. A shiver ran through her, which she blamed on the open door. “Hold it tight, now, and just slice downward. Like so.”
A clean slice dropped onto the countertop, and Asherton tilted his lips down thoughtfully. “And what is the purpose of this?”
“Cut it into evenly sized chunks and you will see.”
The instant Zephyr and Asherton took their first bites of her golden omelets, Magdala realized she had made a mistake. Zephyr shut his eyes, chewing reverently, and Asherton inhaled his portion in two minutes, then held up his plate. “I don’t suppose you could make more?”
“I’m not the cook,” she mumbled.
Asherton leaned back in his chair and gestured around the room. “Then who is, Devney? Either you cook, or we eat plain eggs three meals a day again. It’s up to you.”
“I wasn’t born knowing how to do this!” Magdala cried. “I learned because I care about the taste of my food! I also care about the state of the house I live in. You two”—she pointed at them with her fork—“can learn just as easily.”
“Learn what?” Asherton asked, looking threatened.
“To cook and clean.”
“It’s a very big house. I begin tasks, but … it’s a very big house,” Asherton said.
“I’ve had enough of both of you,” she continued. “You can let the grounds return to nature or whatever rot, but I have to live in this house, too. When you’re done eating, we’ll start cleaning.”
Asherton smiled. “I thought you weren’t the maid.”
“I’m not.” She took another bite of her omelet. “You’ll be cleaning, too, and if you don’t, I will make one serving of supper tonight and eat it all myself. I warn you, there will be pie, and it will be the best thing you’ve ever smelled.”
Zephyr looked panicked. “A little scrubbing never hurt anyone.”
“If I’m going to help you with your chores, you’ll have to help me with mine,” Asherton said.
Magdala smiled. “Excellent. Begin with the bedroom.”
“Alright then.” Asherton sprang up. “No time to waste.”
Magdala spent a blissful hour in the garden, weeding around the tomato vines.
When she returned to the bedroom, Asherton was sitting in the center of the floor, rooting through a box of bleached animal bones.
If he was attempting to clean, he had failed.
The room was twice the mess it had been before.
“What are you doing?’ Magdala demanded.
“I’m cleaning,” he replied. “I found these years ago in an old shed in the woods.”
Magdala peered at them and wondered if the shed had been her mother’s workshop when she lived on Elegy. She would have needed somewhere to hide away with her crates of spines, femurs, and knucklebones.
“If you’re cleaning, why is it worse?” she asked.
“Trust the process,” he said with a charming smile.
“Why don’t we start with just the dirty clothes?” she suggested.
“I did, but when I reached for a shirt under the bed, I found a box of letters, and when I opened that, I realized that they were out of order, so I had to find the second box—and while I was doing that, I found some discarded books and realized I needed to organize the bookshelf, and as I was sorting through the books …”
“Your Highness, you just need to put the clothes in the wicker basket.”
“I’ll circle back to it.”
Magdala wondered if she’d made a terrible mistake, asking him to help. “What if I made you a list?”
“Why don’t you leave me alone and let me clean my own room in my own way?”
“It’s not your room,” she said. “It’s our room now, and so I should have some say in how it is cleaned.”
“Some say, yes. Some. A minimal amount.” He considered her for a moment. “Large tasks turn my brain to mud, and so I focus on small pieces of the task and then, bit by bit, work my way through the large task. It works for me, alright? Leave me be.”
Sighing, Magdala gathered an armful of laundry and tossed it into its designated basket. Asherton flipped through a pile of dusty books.
“Come here, Mags,” he said. “This might be of interest to you.”
Her curiosity piqued, Magdala dusted off her hands and stood over him. He patted the floor beside him. She hesitated. She was getting too comfortable with him; his countenance was too open today, unguarded. She liked it better when he flinched at her every move.
Slowly, she settled beside him. Asherton lifted her hand and turned it palm-up, then he dropped a flower in her palm. It was paper-thin, shedding a fine purple dust. An electric warmth shivered to her elbow.
“It’s a Magdala flower,” he said.
“They only grow on the heath,” Magdala breathed. “How did you come by this?”
Asherton paused, then ran his fingers through his hair. “My brother grew up in the Wildlands. He sent me this book, and I found the flower inside. His birth mother—or the woman we suspect was his birth mother—was Russuli, and so he spent the summers with her, on the heath.”
“Oh.” Her heart ached for him and for this lost brother who haunted him, a shadow in the corner. “Have you been to the Wildlands?”
“No.” He touched the flower gently. “But he used to talk about it. He said that Wildlanders have a magical connection to the land …”
“We do,” Magdala said eagerly. “When I touch this flower, I feel its magic. Our connection to our homeland is that deep.”
He tilted his head and studied her. “So why did you leave?”
Picking her words carefully, Madgala said, “My father and mother were very different people. He was born to a different class, and though he was Russuli, he’d never lived in his homeland. My mother missed home. She had magic, and he did not.”
“And you didn’t inherit her magic?”
Magdala tilted her head from side to side. “She says I have a second sight. But I am skeptical. When my mother left my father and went home, my father wanted me to stay with him. I was only allowed to spend summers with her.”
“But when you were grown?”
“My father’s business was failing. He couldn’t put food on the table.
I took over laying stone for him, and then, when Huxley found me, I joined the royal guard.
” Her gaze roved over the room—her room—with its familiar moldings and carved bookshelves.
“I don’t know which side of me I belong to. Both. Neither. I don’t know.”
With a melancholy smile, he said, “It’s hard, being torn between two bloodlines. Maybe”—he leaned toward her, his shoulder bumping hers—“you don’t need to be either of those two people. Maybe you are something wilder and more undefinable than your mother’s daughter or your father’s savior.”
Her eyes met his. They reminded her of a forest just brushed with autumn. That forbidden spark in her chest flared again, and for an instant, he reminded her of home.
Maybe, she thought, he, too, was more than a cursed prince who stole her father’s house. Maybe he was something wild as well. And maybe it was his wildness that lit that spark in her—the spark whose brightness attracted her like a moth to a candle and drove her away like a woman recently burned.
For the first time, she recognized where she and Asherton overlapped. They were flotsam washed ashore on Elegy, seeking somewhere to rest.
The spark burned brighter, a flame, and Magdala pulled away from him. He was too close, his body too magnetic, his eyes too knowing.
“I’m going to go and clean downstairs and leave you to this chaos.” She held the flower out to him.
“You keep it,” he said.
“No, it was your brother’s.”
Asherton lifted one shoulder. “It belongs with a Russuli, and my brother is gone. Let its magic find a home.”