Of course, now that I actually wanted to talk to my ex-fiancé, the impossible man was nowhere to be found. I’d already looked in four different parlors and the glasshouse by the time I finally gave in, sucked in a deep breath, and pushed open the door to Lord Cosgrave’s library of magic.

It was a surprisingly small and cozy room with a crackling fire and a large bay window, and four months ago, it would have looked blissfully enticing.

Now, I had to force myself to step through the doorway, bottling down every unhelpful emotion and keeping my eyes focused on my goal.

Wrexham wasn’t there, but my brother was, sitting bent over a small yew wood table with Miss Fennell. Their two velvet-upholstered wing chairs were closely drawn together, and a long piece of parchment sat on the table before them.

“...So you see, this symbol—that line that looks so accidental, following along from the end of the word? As if the writer only forgot to lift her quill in time? That is the symbol for ‘beware,’” Jonathan explained. He was clearly absorbed in his lecture and just as clearly hadn’t noticed my arrival, even as I walked steadily towards him across the carpet. “Of course the ambassadress knew the elves would read her correspondence and diaries, so she had to code her warnings.”

Miss Fennell nodded vigorously, her eyebrows furrowed with concentration. “So what she actually meant, when she let her pen trail after his name...”

“Was that he was virulently anti-human and shouldn’t be trusted.” Jonathan nodded. “Elves may be famously prohibited from telling direct lies, but that’s never stopped them from conveying the most blatant falsehoods through a bit of careful phrasing. And one doesn’t become an elf lord without learning that skill!

“That was one of the reasons it took so many months to negotiate our final treaty. Our diplomats, you see, had to hammer down the exact details without either offending the elves with any perceived insult—and some elf-lords, like this one, were so furious at the cease-fire that they were more than ready to take offense—or finding ourselves committed to wildly different agreements than we’d thought we were accepting.”

A prickle of discomfort ran down my skin at those words. Different agreements than we’d thought we were accepting...

I’d stepped into my own agreement so easily, I hadn’t even felt the noose slipping around my neck.

Miss Fennell grinned widely. “I say, this is rather fun, isn’t it? I’d better sharpen my wits before I play this game!”

The word tore itself from my throat: “Don’t!”

It was far too brusque an interjection, and it fell into their conversation with the weight of a rock crashing through a window. They both blinked up at me, wide-eyed.

“Cassandra?” Jonathan glanced around at the rows of glass-encased bookshelves, as if reminding himself of where we were. “What are you doing here?”

It was a reasonable question, I had to admit. I hadn’t entered our family’s library of magic for nearly four months now, and I’d refused to keep any of my old magic books in my room anymore. I didn’t even like walking past the library in our house anymore, and Jonathan had caught me more than once taking ridiculously elaborate routes to avoid it.

The fact that he’d never so much as raised an eyebrow in response was a sign of how thoroughly my older brother understood me.

I wasn’t about to discuss the matter with him now, though, especially not in front of an outsider. Instead I looked straight at Miss Fennell. “Miss Banks will not be happy if you’re tricked and trapped in the elven court. Moreover, she urgently requires your help right here if she’s to have any hope of succeeding in her own goals—for both your sakes—with the odds stacked so heavily against her. If you truly care for her, you won’t abandon her now!”

Miss Fennell’s brown eyes narrowed, and I braced myself for a return blast in her foghorn voice. When a woman planned to rule the world, she didn’t often take well to direction.

After a long moment, though, she shrugged. “Hmm,” she said. “I’ll take that under advisement.”

Well. I blinked.

Her fiancée wasn’t the only one full of surprises.

Jonathan was frowning at me, though, his attention well and truly stolen from the parchment in front of him. “What’s happening now?”

I sighed. “I’m looking for Wrexham,” I told him. “But I beg you will not make anything of that! Just let me know if you’ve seen him anywhere, will you?”

“Aha.” Jonathan’s frown eased. One corner of his mouth twitched.

I pointed threateningly at him. “Not one stray word, Jonathan!”

“I saw Wrexham,” said Miss Fennell calmly. “Not half an hour ago, he set out with one of the other magicians to inspect the knot garden for Lady Cosgrave. How long does it take to check the spellwork in one of those?”

“I...don’t know,” I said slowly. Garden spells had never been my specialty—nor Wrexham’s, for that matter. Why on earth had he been assigned that particular duty? “Thank you, though.” I turned toward the door, trying my best not to take in any of my surroundings as I moved.

It was no use. The glass on the bookcases glinted tauntingly around me in the light from the bay window. I knew what the books inside would feel like. I knew the treasures that they held.

They didn’t belong to me, nor I to them anymore. But that didn’t stop the longing that tightened around my chest like a vise as I finally let my gaze fall across them.

I had to clench my hands into fists to stop myself from following their magnetic pull and opening one of those glass doors as I passed.

Just one look...

If I only tried a minor spell...

I took a deep, ragged breath as I yanked my gaze away from them. Focus.

Wrexham.

Danger.

Elves.

“So who was the untrustworthy elf lord in that document?” I asked my brother, ragged desperation creeping into my voice.

I had to hear Jonathan’s steady voice in my ears to cover up the whisper of poisonous temptation.

Just one small spell might not kill me, no matter what the doctors say...

“Eh?” said Jonathan, looking back up from the parchment. “Oh, that was Lord Ilhmere, unsurprisingly. I’ve read more than once about him, I can tell you. Powerful fellow, high up in the court for centuries on end, and one of the nastiest in battle too, apparently—especially when it came to human prisoners. Absolutely despises us as a species, you see, and he’s brilliant at twisting his words, so according to all of the various ambassadresses, he’s not to be trusted by an inch.”

“How very...useful to know,” I said through clenched teeth.

The library door closed with a satisfying thunk behind me as I strode outside.

* * *

It wasn’t difficult to find Wrexham once I knew where to look. I spotted him as soon as I left the house, emerging from the knot garden beside a thin, stooped older man I didn’t recognize. The snow was falling thicker than ever before me, turning them into featureless silhouettes in my vision, but I knew the moment that he recognized me.

He stopped walking with a nod to the other man, who shrugged and continued forward, brushing past me a moment later on his way back into the house. But Wrexham didn’t move. He remained, waiting, at the entrance to the knot garden.

The message was unmistakable. This time, I would have to come to him.

Drawing an icy breath through my teeth, I pulled my hood more tightly around my head and started forward, hunching my shoulders against the snow.

Wrexham didn’t speak a word of greeting as I joined him in the archway. But he murmured a quick spell under his breath, and the snow fell away from me, almost exactly as it had done under Miss Banks’s spell earlier this morning.

...Almost, but not quite. This time, I wasn’t enclosed in my own bubble of warmth. I was enclosed within his, which had opened up to wrap around us both.

The heavy snowfall, which had filled my vision only moments earlier, receded into a soft, nearby hissing in my ears, almost as distant as the house and everyone else in the world right now. Only Wrexham stood before me in the warm, spellcast circle, his dark eyes deeply shadowed in his lean brown face. Apparently, he hadn’t slept well either.

Standing this close, I could almost feel his breath. All I had to do was lift a hand to touch him...

I pushed the hood off my head, shaking off the last, melting flakes of snow that had clung to it. “Inspecting the knotwork spells?” I said, and wrapped my gloved fingers around my cloak to avoid temptation. “When did you take an interest in gardening spells, pray tell?”

He shrugged. “They’re surprisingly interesting, actually. But I have to admit, they weren’t my focus.” As I raised my eyebrows, he nodded toward the house behind me. “That was Lord Hilbury, you see. He wanted to take a look at the knotwork, to compare it to the patterns on his estate.”

“And you came along because...? Oh!” I swiveled around, but it was far too late. Hilbury was long gone, and the doors stood solidly shut before us. “Hilbury the weather wizard, you mean.” He was one of the two weather wizards I hadn’t met with, yet, according to the list that Lady Cosgrave had given me earlier.

Which meant...

Something painfully sweet unfurled in my chest. I turned back to my ex-fiancé and shook my head at him. “Wrexham...when are you finally going to see sense and give up on me?”

I’d been watching this man—either openly or covertly—for almost all of my adult life, from the moment I’d stepped into my true self at the Great Library and seen him for the first time. I’d seen him laughing, I’d witnessed him absorbed in his work, and I’d felt the staggering intensity of his focus in every aspect of my life.

But I’d never seen true desperation on his face before today, nor heard his voice as ragged as it sounded now. “Never.” Tipping his hands upward in a gesture of defeat, he stepped back, giving me more space within the spelled circle...but still not separating his own bubble from mine. “You can leave me any time you want,” he told me. “You can break my heart again and again, and I won’t even try any more to change your mind. Last night was my last attempt. But if you think I’m going to simply stand by and let you be taken by the elves without making a single move to help you...”

His lips curved into a pained smile that made my chest hurt. “I can’t,” he said. “I just can’t do it, Harwood. I’m sorry.”

My eyes were wet, but there was no snow to excuse it anymore. As my vision blurred, my voice blurred too, turning croaky and raw. “I don’t want to be saved by you again,” I told him. “Don’t you understand? That’s not what we were to each other. I was supposed to be your equal! We were partners!”

“And you think we can’t be anymore?” His brows furrowed. “Is that what this has really been about, all this time? You think I want to somehow control you now? Or look down on you?” He shook his head in apparent disbelief. “Have I ever acted as if I think less of you just because you can’t cast spells of your own anymore?”

“Oh—!” I glared at him, dashing the stupid, useless tears away with one gloved hand. “Of course I don’t think you want to control me. I’m not a fool! I know you, remember? You’ve always cared for people who are weaker than you. That’s why you’re so good at the work that you do for the Boudiccate—and why you think you have to stay with me, too, for my sake. But I don’t want to be your pity-object! I can’t bear it. I—”

“You,” said Wrexham with furious precision, “are a fool.”

“How dare you!” I reached out and yanked him toward me by his coat collar, glaring up at him ferociously. “I am every bit as intelligent as you, and you know it! I was just as good at magic until I lost it, and I was just as good at—”

“You still are!” he bellowed directly into my face. “You idiotic woman! How can you not see that? You know more about magic than most magicians five times your age! Your research and the articles that you published changed the way that magicians all across the nation cast their spells. You’re the single most impressive person I have ever met, and none of that changed four months ago. None of it!”

I let go of his coat, lurching backward as if I’d been slapped. “Everything changed.” The words burned against my tongue like poison. “If you can’t even see that—”

“The only thing that changed for me,” he gritted through his teeth, “was that you finally realized I wasn’t good enough for you.”

“What?!” I gaped at him in genuine confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“One moment,” he said, “I was coming to meet the love of my life, after three whole weeks that we’d been forced to spend apart. The next moment, I was watching you nearly die, and I couldn’t do a single thing to stop it! Then when you finally woke up and discovered what you’d lost, you realized you didn’t want to marry me anymore. Well—why should you?”

He let out a humorless laugh, his face tight. “Even that damned elf-lord could tell I wasn’t born into my rank. All I’ve ever had to recommend me is my magic. No ancient family name, no great estate, no connections...the only thing that ever drew you to me was your own magic. Once that was gone, and you could see clearly...”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Something was rocketing around my head, some great revelation that I couldn’t yet glimpse, but there was no way to capture it with my heartbeat thundering in my ears and Wrexham filling all of my vision. “You know I never cared about family or connections.”

“Only because you had all of that already!” He closed his eyes as if he couldn’t bear the look on my face. “Cassandra, your own mother was a member of the Boudiccate. When we met, I didn’t even have a first-hand set of student robes! Do you really imagine, if you hadn’t been a magician yourself, that you would ever have bothered to take a second look at me?”

As I looked at him then, the dam that I’d locked so firmly inside myself two months ago finally broke wide open. “Wrexham,” I said unsteadily, “you idiot. I haven’t been able to take my eyes off you ever since the day we first met!”

His dark eyes flashed open. His chest rose and fell with his ragged breathing.

I said, “I was trying to save you, you ridiculous, impossible man! That’s why I fought so hard to push you away! I didn’t want you to be chained to me forever just because of an old promise that you made before my magic was broken!”

“Then we’ve both been idiots,” he breathed, “because I swear, Harwood, you nearly broke me. I’ll beg you on my knees, if that’s what it takes. Don’t ever abandon me like that again!”

Unbidden, my own words to Miss Fennell rang in my ear. “If you truly care about her, you won’t abandon her...”

I was a fool, after all, almost beyond comprehension. But I wasn’t yet too much of a fool to learn from my own mistakes.

The snowfall might be thick, but it wasn’t all-concealing. I darted a quick look at the house behind us, full of dangerously un-curtained windows, and then another look into the privacy of the knot garden before us. Just a few more steps, and we would be safely hidden...

No. I was thinking the wrong way again after all.

I drew myself up to my full height and lifted my chin proudly. “Wrexham,” I said to my ex-fiancé, “prepare to be thoroughly compromised, if you please.”

He blinked twice, rapidly. Then his lips curved. “Do you promise?” he asked. “There’ll be no getting out of it this time, you know.”

Oh, I knew. But I didn’t bother answering him in words.

Instead, I grabbed hold of his strong, wonderfully familiar shoulders for balance, jumped up on my tiptoes, and kissed him soundly in full view of every window in Cosgrave Manor.

It was time to stop hiding for good.