“Why, Mrs. Seabury.” The king’s face lit into a startlingly open and amused smile of his own. “Our old nemesis. You always did know how to speak your truths, didn’t you?”
She’d been the oldest member of the Boudiccate for as long as I could remember...but for an instant, as Mrs. Seabury grinned at the elven king, I could almost see the fiercely sparkling young woman she had once been.
...A woman who, perhaps, had not been as different from myself as I’d always imagined.
“We would,” said the elven king, “be honored indeed to welcome you into our ancient halls. And we shall expect you to join us there by the next moonfall at the latest.” He bowed, with deep respect, and turned away. “To the hunt.”
A chorus of eerie beauty answered him as every elf-lord spoke as one. “The hunt!”
Snow swept upwards from the ground to surround them...
And they were gone, leaving the rest of us behind in a cold, clear day.
My limbs were suddenly trembling in long, shivering waves. Laughter and tears crowded together in my throat, until it was impossible to distinguish between them.
The magical bubble around us disappeared with a snap. “No need for that anymore!” Lord Cosgrave dusted off his hands. Letting out a puff of disbelieving laughter, he shook his head. “Well...well. Indeed.” He turned to his wife. “Now to the feast?”
“Now to the feast,” Lady Cosgrave agreed in a shaking voice. She rested one hand on his arm for a long, shuddering moment before straightening and assuming her usual regal demeanor. “And then...then we all have much to discuss. Including...” She gave Mrs. Seabury an exasperated look. “A new member of the Boudiccate to appoint on extremely short notice, apparently, as we’re being abandoned by our oldest member.”
“Ha!” Mrs. Seabury snorted and turned toward the house, waving her walking stick for emphasis. “A fine muck you’ll all make of it without me, I wager! But I’ve no time for this nonsense. I’m off to eat!”
A new member of the Boudiccate. My gaze flew to my sister-in-law.
But at this utterly crucial political moment, she was, for once, ignoring all of her friends and colleagues to hurry toward me across the snow. “Cassandra.” Amy flung her arms around me, her firm, rounded belly pressing hard against mine. “Cassandra, you sweet, absurd fool. You could have reclaimed your magic after all! How could you say no to that?”
I pressed my cheek into her soft, crinkly dark hair, breathing deeply as the last waves of shock and fear and regret and relief shivered through me, leaving me emptied out...and finally free.
“I have everything I need right here,” I whispered.
Something hit me hard in the stomach, and I jerked backward. “What—?!”
Amy’s eyes brimmed with tears, but she beamed as she rested one hand on her belly. “Apparently, your niece wanted to be a part of this conversation.”
A choke of laughter escaped my throat as I took that in.
My niece...whom I would actually meet, myself, in person, after all.
A new generation was unmistakably beginning.
Jonathan grabbed me for a rough hug, mussing up my hair. “Don’t worry,” he growled, “she’ll meet you soon enough. And then we’ll have two lots of trouble in this family!”
“Oh—!” I shoved him off, grinning. “I was never the troublesome one in our family. If you only remembered...”
But the words dried up in my throat as the semicircles parted and Wrexham strode toward me at a near-run, tall and lean and full of so much focused intensity—all for me, forever, after all—that I didn’t even try to stop myself.
In full view of the assembled members of the Boudiccate and every magician in the house-party, I lunged forward and threw myself directly at him.
His lips were cold and perfect. His arms locked me close...and home, for the rest of our lives, after all.
“Hopelessly compromised,” I heard Jonathan say behind me, with satisfaction. “I daresay they’ll have to get married this week to make up for the shame of it!”
But I had far more important things to rise to than my brother’s teasing.
When Wrexham finally pulled back, he kept his firm hands around my waist and grinned down at me, his lean, dark face alight with unleashed happiness. “‘Important work,’ eh?” he asked.
Most of the Boudiccate had disappeared by then. The magicians were still milling around, of course, discussing various details of the near-confrontation with an inordinate amount of hand-waving and noisy debate over exactly which spells would have worked best if they’d only been called for...
...but I ignored them all to grin up at my fiancé with pure joy.
“I do,” I said. “I’ve finally found a new vocation to replace my first one.”
It was true.
Nothing would ever be quite the same as practicing magic myself...but I’d finally realized that there was one moment in the past week, after all, when I’d felt every bit as deep a satisfaction as I ever had when casting a spell...along with that singular feeling that I’d thought I’d lost forever: the certainty that this was what I was meant from birth to do.
Generations were shifting, and not only in my family. It was time for my own goals to shift, too.
“Oh, really?” Wrexham cocked one eyebrow. He’d been watching me ever since we first met, and I’d been watching him, too—so I knew exactly that look of sizzling anticipation in his face. It meant he thought he had puzzled out the answer to a particularly tricky problem before I had.
Ha.
His smirk of satisfaction confirmed it. “It’s young Miss Banks,” he said, “isn’t it? You’ve come up with a new strategy to get her into the Great Library, along with all of those other young women like her.”
“Not anymore.” I shook my head without regret. “Amy was right,” I admitted. “There would be so much resistance to that from the Great Library, the Boudiccate and more. I would need to spend all of my days playing politics, and it would still take years for the Great Library to finally fling their doors open. That’s far too long for the girls who need training now...and I was never meant to be a politician.”
For once, that thought didn’t even make me grimace. I knew exactly who I was, now, and I no longer needed confirmation from anyone else to believe it.
“I am a magician,” I said firmly, “and you were right: losing the ability to practice my magic didn’t take away any of my knowledge from the last twenty years of study. So...” I looked around, including my brother and sister-in-law in my gaze as they stepped up beside us, a warm circle of family and support that I knew I would be able to count on forever.
“What would you all think,” I asked, “if I started a new school of my own?”
Jonathan’s bushy eyebrows shot upward. “A magic school, you mean? For girls? As an alternative to the Great Library?”
Not an alternative, I thought with deep satisfaction. A competitor.