“You think I’ve broken a treaty?” Rolling over, he stared up at me from the floor where he’d landed atop a pile of crumpled cravats and coats. “Are you mad?”
“Harwood,” said Wrexham quietly, “I think you’d better read this list before you go any further. I’d like your opinion on it, if you please.”
“Hmm.” I twitched it out of his hand and frowned as I read impatiently down it. One method after another...and another...and another... “But these are contradictory,” I said. “They would never work together.”
“Of course not!” Luton snarled. “None of them worked in the first place, as you’d know if you knew anything about weather wizardry outside of the meaningless nonsense that’s babbled at the Great Library and—”
“Clearly, something worked,” I said to Wrexham, ignoring the continued snarling from the floor beneath us. “But if it wasn’t any of the methods on this list...”
With a whisper of a spell, Wrexham raised his head. Every piece of paper in the room lifted itself carefully from beneath piled clothing and books and flew in a shower like white, fluttering snowflakes through the air to his waiting hands.
Luton crossed his arms, settling himself into his position on the floor with what looked like grim satisfaction. “There’s no use in looking through those,” he informed us. “Not unless you want to batter at your own heads as much as I’ve battered at mine these past few days. I’m nearly there, though, or I could be—if I could ever get uninterrupted time to bloody think in this madhouse!”
Wrexham shuffled through the pages, his frown deepening.
I didn’t even try to read over his shoulder. Instead, I met the furious, trapped gaze of young Luton.
I knew that fury all too well. I recognized it with every instinct in my body...and it sent a sick certainty sinking through my gut.
My shoulders sagged as I gave in to reality.
“You didn’t cast this snow spell after all,” I murmured. “Someone else did, didn’t they? And it’s driving you wild that you can’t even understand how it was possible.”
“I will work it out,” Luton gritted through his teeth. “Damn it! If one of those hidebound traditional idiots can do it despite everything we were ever taught, then so can I. And when I do, everyone at the Great Library will have to admit that they were fools about me and about weather wizardry! If I could only...”
But I didn’t wait to find out what he only needed in order to accomplish the impossible. I’d made more than enough of those statements myself, this past year, to learn the true value of all of them.
I turned for the door, unable to speak.
Wrexham lingered a little longer, his voice steady as I closed my cold fingers around the door handle. “In your professional opinion, Mr. Luton, could a magician who isn’t a weather wizard have done this?”
Luton’s bark of laughter was ragged with frustration. “Do what the Great Library claims to be impossible, you mean? What every weather wizard who’s trained all their life could never manage, even working en masse? You really are mad, aren’t you?”
No, he wasn’t. But we were rapidly running out of options...
And my own time was running out.
13
After two endless months in which the rest of my life had seemed interminable, my final days of freedom slipped away with dizzying speed. I had never written so many letters as I wrote in those few days, pouring all of my fury and despair into my arguments—to the Great Library itself, and to every newspaper and every magician I could think of who might be swayed by the thought of those magical girls and the education they so richly deserved.
But I didn’t post any of my letters. Not yet. Any such flurry of activity would have alerted my sister-in-law to the fact that trouble was brewing—and she was safely distracted at the moment, between assisting in Lady Cosgrave’s preparations for the solstice and planning my own projected wedding.
I saved all of my letters in a closed drawer in the little dressing table in my room, along with more notes addressed to my closest relatives, placed on top where they could be most easily discovered. I might not be sharing the news of what was coming with Jonathan and Amy, but there were some truths that I had to write down for them anyway, for them to read in the aftermath.
Heartfelt thanks had to be given. Heartfelt apologies, too.
...And there was one more relative I still had to address. I couldn’t write any given name atop that particular note, but I signed it in my most elegant handwriting, with love from your aunt Cassandra, and I gritted my teeth to keep my jaw from trembling as I sealed the folded paper with one decisive stamp.
It was past midnight on the night before the Winter Solstice. There was no time left for tears.
I might have wasted the last two months of my life in bleak despair, but I wouldn’t waste another moment of it now.
Wrexham opened his door even before I’d finished tapping my fingers lightly against it. The still and silent corridor was dimly lit at this time of night, with only a few fey-lights left glowing to aid guests in their nighttime perambulations. Still, my fiancé was fully dressed in his evening attire, with dark stubble creeping across his lean brown face.
“You’ve had a new idea?” he whispered urgently. “Or—”
“Shh.” I slipped inside and locked the door carefully behind me. A brace of candles stood atop the desk in the far corner, and I could see a pile of books set nearby; he’d obviously been poring over them when I arrived.
“We have to be quiet,” I whispered. “I don’t want Amy and Jonathan to be embarrassed by anyone discovering me here.” I’d created enough social challenges for my family without adding any more to my list at the very end.
Nodding, Wrexham whispered a spell that hummed through the air before closing us in a protected bubble. “No one will overhear us,” he said in his full voice. “So tell me: what have you discovered?”
Fury and panic and despair had mingled so intensely within me over the past few days that I’d often felt as if I might explode from the sheer force of them. But as I looked at him now—my brilliant, driven fiancé, his eyes shadowed from the nights he’d spent fighting to find a way to save me—warmth filled my chest and washed all the rest away.
I’d thought I had lost everything four months ago. I had been so wrong. And realizing that in this past week was the most bittersweet gift that I could ever have been granted.
So: what had I discovered?
“That I have no more time to waste,” I said with soft conviction, and I started toward him.
Wrexham frowned uncomprehendingly as I pulled off my evening gloves and let them fall to the floor. “What do you mean?” he said. “Are you—mmph!” His eyes flew wide open with rare shock as I cut him off...and not with words.
I loved talking with Wrexham more than almost anything in the world.