“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Lady Cosgrave stood in the front hall with one hand pressed dramatically to her forehead, while her husband and two other men I recognized as competent magicians pulled on greatcoats and hats with grim frustration on their faces. Two more of Angland’s finest politicians stood beyond our hostess, dressed in their finest fairy-silks, waving their glittering, elven-made fans in disapproval, and wearing their most supercilious expressions as they watched their husbands prepare themselves for the wintry weather. These ladies were dressed to rule, not for outdoor management, and this was clearly not the entertainment they had planned.
“Just find them, please,” Lady Cosgrave told her own husband, in a tone that had been strained to breaking point. “And when I get my hands on that child—ah!” She broke off as she finally spotted us standing in the doorway of the foyer. “Amy! And Mr. Harwood, of course, and Cassandra, too. How wonderful to see you all. But—”
“But what’s amiss, Honoria?” Amy hurried forward to take her hands. Anyone who didn’t know my sister-in-law well would never guess at how ill she must still be feeling even now that we were out of the carriage—but, being Amy, her attention was focused purely on our hostess and her expression was filled with genuine concern. “Have we come at a poor moment?”
“Oh, no, hardly. In fact…” Lady Cosgrave sighed and traded glances with the other two members of the Boudiccate who stood behind her. “Well,” she said, “we could certainly use another member for our search party. We’ve just had a spelled message to alert us that my young cousin’s party has been lost in the snow. She was traveling with a group of friends whose carriage was confiscated—can you believe that anyone could be so foolish as to forget to pay their taxes before such a journey, at this time of year?—and the tyrants at the toll station turned them out to find their way here without a single gentleman to accompany them on their way.”
“By foot in this weather? Without a magician in the party?” Jonathan raised his eyebrows. “Good Lord.”
“I know you can’t help us with the magical aspect, Mr. Harwood,” Lady Cosgrave said. “But hardly anyone is here yet to help because of this dreadful snowstorm. So if you wouldn’t mind being a pair of extra eyes for the search…”
Amy only gave the slightest fraction of a wince. But it was enough.
“My brother will be far too busy to help,” I told our hostess firmly. “Amy needs rest after our journey, Honoria, even if she doesn’t wish to admit it. She needs to lie down and be looked after for a good hour now, and Jonathan should be the one to look after her, for all of our sakes. But I can take his place, I promise you.”
“You?” Her eyebrows arched. “But, my dear…”
“Cassandra!” Amy said. “You know—!”
“You needn’t worry,” I told them both with a snap in my voice. “I won’t be fool enough to cast any spells of my own.” I might still be battling despair every day, but I wasn’t—anymore—at that bleak point where I’d consider risking my life for that brief satisfaction. “But Jonathan couldn’t have cast any in the first place, could he? So why shouldn’t I take his place in this search party, if no magic’s required for it?”
Jonathan snorted, and Lady Cosgrave’s eyebrows rose even higher, but it was my sister-in-law, of course, who was officially the head of my family…and there were very few people who knew me as well as she did, nowadays. So after looking into my eyes for a long, fraught moment, Amy blew out her breath. “Very well,” she said. “But please: be careful.”
“Of course,” I said, and gave her a wry smile. “Haven’t I spent the last few months learning how to do just that?”
Amy would never be so disloyal as to deliver any retort where outsiders could overhear it. But her expression spoke the words almost as clearly as Jonathan whispered them a moment later, in the ancient Densk that he and I had used for years as a secret language, as he arranged his heavy greatcoat around the shoulders of my hooded pelisse and I stepped into a pair of Lady Cosgrave’s own tall, fur-lined boots:
“That’s exactly what worries us.”
My family loved me. And I was more grateful than words could ever acknowledge for their protection. It would not even be too gross an overstatement to say that it had saved me after the events of four months earlier.
But as Lord Cosgrave pushed open the front door and the four members of our search party stepped out from the safety of the heated manor house into the wild and whirling snow, I finally tasted something I hadn’t experienced in months of being cosseted and consoled for my loss at every turn:
Freedom.
Cold, bracing air filled my lungs. Jonathan’s greatcoat draped me in warmth.
I stepped forward and smiled as snow kissed my cheeks.
“Miss Harwood.” Lord Cosgrave cleared his throat as he passed me a lantern. “If you wouldn’t mind…”
“Of course.” My smile tightened. The other men avoided my eyes.
I knew them all, of course. I’d been the only woman in a group of men more times than I could count in my adult life, until all lingering discomfort—at least on my part—had worn away entirely. There was a time when every magician in the country had known my name after I’d first fought my way into their ranks, aided by the power of my own family name and by Jonathan and Amy’s staunch support. The newspapers, naturally, had found it all hilarious: The lady who thought she was a magician.
But if Jonathan could bear the caricatures they’d done of us—the Harwood Horrors; siblings born to the wrong sexes?—so could I. And I’d won the grudging respect of my peers, by the end.
So they all knew exactly how I’d fallen four months earlier.
It took every ounce of my strength to stand still now, with my chin held high and a cool expression stitched onto my face, as Lord Cosgrave moved in a slow circle around me, chanting the spell of protection from the elements.
It was only what he would have done for Jonathan, I reminded myself—and Jonathan had lived all his life without the ability to work magic. Not every man could do spellwork, of course, even in our elite cohort, just as I couldn’t possibly have been the first woman to be born with that natural ability. I was only the first to be bold enough, brash enough and—most of all—lucky enough, in our modern era, to finally break free of the roles we’d all been assigned centuries earlier, and win a public space for myself that others might follow.
But Jonathan was different.
I would never know the full truth of how my brother’s school years had gone—although I had my suspicions—but I knew exactly how he interacted with the other men of our cohort now. If it were Jonathan standing here in my place, they would all have been laughing as the spell was cast for his protection, and he’d have been making the most jovial remarks of all as the four of them grinned at each other in utterly complicit masculine conviviality.
Now, the soft hiss of the snow was the only sound outside the tightly-closed-up house apart from Lord Cosgrave’s monotonous chanting. My jaw tightened as he mispronounced the second word in a row, but I restrained myself, with an effort, from correcting him. As he finally completed the circle, the spell clicked shut, and a warm, dry circle formed around me.
…Almost dry, anyway. There was a sliver of a leak just behind my neck. Icy water trickled down my hood.
I could have told him exactly how to re-cast the spell with more clarity and precision, to avoid any such leaks in the future.