I immediately celebrate by yanking off my other glove. I press my palms against my leggings, my shirt, my socks and boots, elated, ecstatic, feeling like for the first time ever, I can celebrate my own magic.
When I’m gilding my gloves, a clap sounds behind me, and I whirl around in surprise. Slade’s there, leaning against the wall of the cave, looking offensively sexy. No person should be able to look that effortlessly good in the light of dawn.
But I’m sure glad he does.
He’s wearing unlaced boots caught over low-slung pants and a wrinkled shirt with its sleeves shoved up his forearms. He’s not even wearing a coat, like he rushed out before pulling one on.
He stops clapping, his hands slipping into his pockets, while the grin on his face and gleam in his eye make my stomach flip. “Well done, Goldfinch. I knew you could do it.”
CHAPTER 41
AUREN
“Try and pull it back in,” Slade tells me.
His back is resting against the cave wall—a wall that’s now gilded in sweeping waves that mimic the veins of fluorescence surrounding us.
Argo, Slade’s timberwing, is here too, just as he has been for the last four days. He never approaches or growls, but instead keeps a keen eye on me and my gold—or acts completely bored by my presence.
My brow furrows in concentration from where I sit in front of a rock formation at the back of the cave, my gold cascading over the dark stone like a slosh of paint dripping over the top. I try to pull it back into my hand that rests on the pointed tip, but no matter what I do, the gold keeps spreading down.
“I can’t,” I tell Slade with frustration, my fingers stretched and bent over the stone, glutinous gold dripping from me.
My hand is shaky, the rest of my body tired from the strain of control I’ve been practicing non-stop for several hours already. Since Slade first followed me and saw me finally have a breakthrough with my magic a few days ago, I’ve been dragging him up here from dawn until dusk to help me practice.
I’ve learned a lot in a short amount of time. Like the fact that I can’t make new gold during the night. That power is still purely tied to the day. Yet I can control any gold around me during nighttime, just like I did back in Ranhold.
“Alright, take a break. Breathe.”
“I don’t want to take a break,” I say stubbornly, my mouth pinched as I stare at my ornery gold. “I want to get this.”
Slade drags a foot up to lean an arm over his knee, looking casually sexy from where he sits across from me. “I know you do. And you will. You’ve done amazing work already learning control. Take a breath, and then try again.”
Nodding, I relax my strained fingers and shake them out a bit as I let out a centering breath. Every day, Slade has been helping me master the new facets of my magic. I quickly realized that my confidence boost of calling up my gold-touch again was just the first step. I have so much more to learn and experiment with, and a lifetime of old habits and thought processes to undo.
Instead of suppressing my power, I’m trying to push it. To figure out exactly what I’m capable of. But I’m decidedly incapable of bringing my dripping gold back up to me yet and undoing what I’ve gilded.
But I’m determined to learn.
Slade’s been having me do things step by step. For the first couple of days, I practiced simply calling my magic to gold-touch certain things in a controlled way, and then to essentially turn it off like a spigot so I don’t gild anything I don’t want to.
It’s not easy. I struggle with both aspects. But I suppose that’s to be expected after so many years of uncontrollably gilding anything that my bare skin came into contact with. I’m still careful about keeping covered during the day, just in case.
But...a flicker of golden light lives in the back of my head with this unbelievable possibility—that one day, I can be in complete control.
It’s what spurs me on.
That I can one day walk barefoot in the sunlit grass, without the risk of spreading metallic death beneath my heels. That one day, I can bare my arms and legs to the cast of the day, with no fear of what might brush up against me. That I can eat and drink from dawn till dusk and actually taste my food, without the bitter taste of metal sliding down my throat. The possibility that I can go without gloves, that I can touch and feel and hold whatever I want, without worry, no matter the time.
I want to get to that one day so desperately.
After letting out a calm exhale, I once again stretch my fingers over the gilded tip of the short stone before me. As soon as I touch it, I call the gold to seep from my fingertips, and it starts streaming down in slow, steady drips.
“Good.”
Slade’s murmured praise bolsters me.
I reach inside of myself, looking for that effortless control that came out of me in Ranhold. If I was able to grab hold of all the gold in the entire castle, I can control this one gilded rock.
This is my power. I control it. It answers to me and me alone.
The concept of recalling the gold back to me is completely unnatural, and something that I’m fighting to figure out. Yet because of Ranhold, I know I’m capable of a lot more than I realized, either because my magic evolved, hatching from the chains I’d been wrapped in, or because this was always something I could’ve done with training—I’ll never know which. All I know is I’m going to figure this out, because I don’t want to keep living in fear of my power. I want to live in control of it.
Like liquid pouring from a glass bottle, I envision shoving a stopper in, ceasing its flow. The visual helps me ground what I’m trying to do with my magic, and I feel my power respond, the gold trickling to a stop against the rock. My hand shakes from the effort, but I hold on, scrabbling to keep steady with my concentration. Now that I’ve successfully stopped gilding, I need to take it just one step further.
Continuing my trick of visualization, I picture someone opening the bottle and tipping it out, letting gold collect in my palm.
“Good, Auren.”
I distantly hear Slade urging me on, but my concentration is almost replaced with giddiness when I feel the gold come back up, sliding into my hand. I shove down my excitement, continuing to call more back to me, and when I have a good amount pooling in my palm, I start to picture pouring it back into my unstoppered bottle, letting it drip into that narrow opening.
The weirdest sensation comes along with it. The gold that was pressing up against my palm just...sinks back into me. It’s like dropping a piece of fabric in a puddle. Except the puddle is my moving gold and I’m the cloth.
It takes a long time, but slowly, I manage to soak it all up. When I sense the last drop disappear, I open my eyes to find that the rock is now bare of every single speck of gold.
With the biggest smile stretching over my face, I whip around to look at Slade, pointing triumphantly. “Did you see?”
His lips kick up, making the skin beside his eyes crinkle. “Well fucking done.”
With a giddy laugh, I leap up and then bound into his lap, keeping my bare hands braced against the wall behind him, arms resting on his shoulders.
Our faces are just an inch apart, chests pressing against each other, and the surge of confidence inside feels like bubbles inflating me, making me buoyant.
“Do you know what this means?” I ask.
His hands grip my waist, fingers moving in a slow draw of mirrored strokes. “What?”
“This is going to change everything,” I breathe. “If I can master this, then I can touch anything, any hour of the day. I can be casual and unrestricted. I won’t have to live in the dark anymore.”
In more ways than one.
“Because even if I gild something, I can ungild it.”
A low hum comes from his throat, and he lifts a hand like he’s going to touch my face, but I rear back, batting his hand away with my elbow. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to grab your face and kiss you.”
My stomach tightens, because that sounds like a very nice reward, but then my eyes snap to the outside of the cave. “It’s still daylight.”