Five months earlier, I could have shown him myself.
Now, I nodded stiffly and held up the lantern, straining to be off. “Has a tracking spell already been set on this?”
“Ah…” Lord Cosgrave’s eyebrows beetled downwards. “We don’t have Miss Fennell’s exact direction, so—”
“Not for her, for the house,” I said. “If I should get turned around in the snow.”
He blinked, and I could actually see him remembering: unlike the rest of them, I couldn’t cast my own way home. “Oh. Right-o,” he said, and coughed.
It would have helped by an infinite amount if any of the men around me had only sniggered or had the decency to look even slightly contemptuous of my weakness.
The pity that the three of them oozed instead, as they unanimously averted their eyes from my figure, was thick enough to incite justifiable homicide. My fingers tightened around my lantern. At least Wrexham wasn’t among them, I told myself. The idea of letting him cast laughably simple magic for me while I stood uselessly by and did nothing…
The spell clicked into place, sending a tingling thrill through my skin where it touched the handle of the lantern.
There.
I strode forward into the whirling snow before I could lose my self-control entirely.
2
Thick white snowflakes swirled around me, bouncing off my spellcast bubble of protection and forming a shifting veil between me and my companions.
Now that Lord Cosgrave was no longer being confronted with the appalling social awkwardness of my presence, his instructions rang out with the natural confidence of any magician in his own territory. “We’ll need to spread out, gentlemen, to cover as much area as possible. The toll station is three miles to the north, and Miss Fennell’s party should have set off in the right direction, but the land’s rough enough that the ladies could have taken a wrong turn nearly anywhere in this weather. All the fairy passageways should be safely locked up from their end at this time of year, thank Christ, but that won’t save our guests from rabbit holes and sprained ankles—or from the cold.
“And this isn’t only family we’re worrying about now. M’wife has great aspirations for her cousin—we may be speaking of a future member of the Boudiccate, if all goes well! The chit’s full to bursting with political potential, apparently. So we’d better not lose her in a simple snowstorm, if we don’t want to lose all of our funding in the next round of government votes.
“Grant, strike northwest, would you? There’s a good man. Quentin, northeast. And Miss Harwood…” He cleared his throat, his expression mercifully obscured by the veil of falling snow between us. “If you wouldn’t mind, it’s probably best…that is, as you’ve only a magnetic compass to rely on in your search…”
“Of course,” I said tightly. “I’ll walk directly north.” The safest route…and also by far the least likely.
I would only discover the perfectly-politically-minded Miss Fennell if she hadn’t taken a single misstep along the way.
Cosgrave’s exhale of relief was only just audible over the whooshing of the winter wind between us. “Good-o. If you do come across Miss Fennell and her friends, you know, you needn’t worry about trying to alert the rest of us. Just come directly home at once. Best thing for all of you, don’t you think?”
I couldn’t bring myself to answer in words. Instead, I set forward on my assigned path, glad to let the snow whip into a cold wall between us.
Within five feet, the men’s voices behind me had turned into a low, indistinguishable rumble. Within ten, I could hear nothing but the soft, inhuman hiss of snow and wind all around me, and every muscle in my shoulders eased in gratitude at the pure relief of it.
The sky was a mix of pale grey and white. The snow rushed past my bubble of protection, leaving me dry and warm and perfectly, beautifully alone within it.
For the first time in four months, there was no one at all to witness me—or to overhear me, either. I could have screamed or raged or finally wept with full abandon for everything that I had lost through my own recklessness, and everything that would have been so different by now if only…
No. I took deep, steadying breaths and forced all thoughts of if only from my mind. I would not allow myself to be that pitiful anymore.
I had given up all of my last, desperate hopes of ever retrieving my magic two long months ago. I might never again recognize myself without my magic...but there was only one way to survive the bleak, powerless future that lay before me. I had to lock away my simmering fury, grief and fear and think only of what lay around me now, in each instant, without ever letting my mind travel to what might happen next.
So I held my lantern high before me and crossed the bare white landscape with long, ground-eating strides that stretched my skirts with every step. I breathed in deep, and I let myself glory in every hiss of snow against my borrowed boots as I strode further and further from the suffocation of the house party and everything that awaited me there.
I was free for this single, icy interlude, and I would absorb every moment of it as a gift.
The pebbles and crushed shells of the Cosgraves’ long front drive crunched beneath the snow at first, but they were soon replaced by the elegant gardens that encircled the house, framed with sculpted knotwork hedges for protection. Snow clung and glittered on the bare brown branches, all carefully maintained in their ancient patterns. This deep in the elven dales, only the most reckless landowner would fail to add such protections to her property, no matter how old and how entrenched the treaties between our twinned nations might be.
Luckily, the fairies had already made their own annual pilgrimage deep underground after Samhain, so there were no dangerous fey lights to glitter and distract me from my path across the countryside, nor mushroom circles to carefully avoid. As for the elves…well, who ever knew what the elves were doing in their ancient halls within the hills and dales of this county? Nothing that they ever cared to share with humans, that was certain. We paid our tolls to use their land and lived in peace, as we had for centuries. That was all that mattered.
Perhaps there were scholars who could have told me more of the elves’ secrets, but I realized now that I had never thought to ask in all my hard-won time at the Great Library of Trinivantium. After all, I’d grown up outside these dales, with nothing in my own daily life down south to pique my curiosity…and back then, I’d had my own magic to focus on without worrying over theirs. That, as far as I was concerned, was ancient history—and it was my brother who was the historian in our family.