Without so much as a word or a look exchanged between us, Wrexham and I were suddenly side by side, the thick sleeves of our greatcoats brushing against each other as we jointly faced my accuser. The massive troll loomed behind us, and my head still ached with the grinding echoes of its roar, but there was no question of which danger was more urgent.

Neither of us would dare turn our back on the troll’s master.

I wished now that I hadn’t released my lantern, shattered though its glass sides might be. Flung in his icily carven face, the iron frame might have won us a moment’s grace just when we most needed it to escape. But it lay useless in the snow ten feet away...and picking it up again now, in the elf lord’s presence, could be construed as nothing but an intention to attack.

He smiled unpleasantly as he looked us up and down. “Well? Not so quick to make any promises now, are you? I believe you’ll find your earlier promise binding, though, under the terms of our nations’ treaty. And those who rashly break their bargains with the elves—”

“No one has broken anything,” said Wrexham. His voice was calm, but a thread of steel ran through it. “I am an officer of the Boudiccate, and if a crime has been committed here—”

“If?” The elf lord gestured sweepingly, and the snowflakes scurried to get out of his arm’s way. “This storm is no act of nature. Someone has been meddling with the land’s own magic, and we will all feel the damage soon enough.”

“And you simply assume it was a human who did it?” I demanded. The injustice of that, at least, was enough to break the eerie spell of his presence. “How do you know it wasn’t one of your own people?”

His upper lip curled. “The laws in our kingdom utterly prohibit any such atrocity of nature, which torments our pets and endangers our hunts to the damage of all. It is our kingdom, not your nation, which is most harmed by this unnatural storm. Any observer with a shred of logic would tell you that one of your own mages—always so prone to risks and wild experimentation—must be the ones directing all of it. Your current mishmash of various tribes may claim to restrict their experiments, but when you leave a squabbling group of human women in control...” His eyes narrowed with sudden, dangerous interest, and his voice dropped as he stepped closer to me.

An icy chill pierced the bubble of my spellcast warmth, making me shiver.

“Take yourself as an example, woman,” he murmured, his white eyes fixed on mine. “There’s the scent of magic running through your bones, though your people claim to restrict its use to men. How...very...interesting. You, too, have been meddling where you don’t belong, haven’t you?”

I stiffened, fury simmering in my blood, but Wrexham spoke first. “Careful,” he said softly. “Your king may choose to treat his own nation’s ladies with disdain, but ours has been governed well by them for centuries. You would not wish to offend the Boudiccate.”

“Indeed, I can see just how frightening a force they must be, when their rules can be broken with such impunity.” The elf lord laughed, a jingle of broken bells. “And those who call themselves men but choose to submit themselves to such rulers...but then, I’m not looking at a born lord, am I?” He flicked Wrexham with a dismissive glance. “You’re one of the Boudiccate’s vagabond upstarts, aren’t you? Promoted far beyond your station, with no real understanding of your betters...”

If he couldn’t see Wrexham’s strength, he was a fool, and there was no point in taking offense at any of his jibes. I drew a deep breath and spoke with forced composure, drawing on the memory of my mother’s old political negotiations. I’d been forced to observe them only too often as her unwilling apprentice in the years before she’d finally given up on me. “Our weather wizards can barely predict whether it will snow or rain with any accuracy,” I told him, refusing to lower my gaze as I spoke the humiliating truth. “You must know we haven’t any magicians who could manage the weather itself and summon a storm like this one.”

The elf lord’s smile could have cut through frost. “Oh, I don’t believe for an instant that any of you could ever manage it. No, I think you were—as usual—playing with forces you couldn’t possibly hope to control.”

The accusation struck hard and close to home. My throat clenched. For a moment I couldn’t speak.

“You should have known you could never manage it...”

Wrexham’s shouted words from months ago hung in the air like frozen breath.

I did not turn to meet his gaze when I felt him glance at me. I couldn’t—not if I wished to control my expression in front of our common enemy.

But I felt a core of unbreakable ice building up inside me, shoving aside the softer, warmer—weaker—feelings that had been creeping furtively back into their old familiar places in the last half hour of forced proximity.

I would not make myself so vulnerable again.

“If it was a human,” I told the elf lord, ice coating my words, “then we will find him. You may depend upon it.”

Wrexham stirred beside me. “Harwood—”

“Fine,” I snapped, without sparing him a glance. “I’ll find him myself, then. I was the one to make the binding promise. I should be the one to fulfill it.”

“Indeed you must,” said the elf lord, “or pay the price. And the promise that you made, as I recall, was hardly so narrow-minded as only to protect my pet if the malefactor happened to be human.”

I frowned. “But—”

“You can’t be serious!” Wrexham’s voice was a near-snarl, his shoulders hunching as if he were having to force himself to stay in place. “You know none of us are allowed into your private halls. How can you possibly expect her to hunt for a criminal there?”

“Oh, I certainly don’t.” The elf-lord laughed. “But then, I never forced her to make that foolish promise, did I?”

In that moment, he was every man who had ever laughed out loud in disbelief when he’d heard that I wished to learn magic and every woman who had ever raised her eyebrows in pity...or whispered afterward, when she’d thought I couldn’t hear, that she’d always known this would come of it in the end. The blood was thundering in my ears as I glared at him, and the snow swirled wildly around us, as if it could sense the raw disorder in my chest, where every one of my scabbed wounds had been torn wide open and exposed to the pitiless cold air.

“I will keep my promise,” I told him, enunciating every word with precision.

The elf lord tipped his head to the side, as if preparing another verbal stab.

Wrexham spoke first, though, his voice so steady that anyone who didn’t know him well might have missed the thread of deadly fury running underneath his words. “She has another promise that needs keeping first. We’ve been sent out to search for a lost party of guests. Before any of us can begin another mission—”

“Oh, them?” The elf lord shook his head sadly. “Poor little lost lambs. You people are careless, aren’t you? Do you know they weren’t even carrying any iron with them on their journey?” His glance shifted and lingered for one, visibly amused moment on the frame of my broken lantern, lying uselessly on the ground nearby.

Sudden panic gripped me as I followed his gaze. Horror stories were still passed down, after all these centuries, about the vicious games that the elves had once loved to play with unprotected humans, before the last, most devastating war had finally bought us the hard-won treaty between our nations. The elves wouldn’t dare break that treaty now, after so long—would they?

But if Miss Fennell’s party had broken one of the treaty’s more obscure rules in some way, without realizing...

I didn’t need to understand the finer details of elven politics to know, without a fraction of a doubt, that the elf lord in front of me would leap at the opportunity for punishment.

“What have you done to them?” I breathed.

Every inch of my body ached to cast a spell that would banish the smugness from his face. But it would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed that left me lying broken in the snow—and at his mercy—afterward.

“I?” The elf lord raised both eyebrows in haughty reproach. “Why, I couldn’t lay a finger on them, under the terms of our agreement. Our noble king would never hear of such a thing.” His lips twisted into a sneer. “Wasn’t it fortunate, then, that I found you, little meddler, as a reward for my good behavior?”

I sucked in a breath. Wrexham started forward.

The elf lord lifted one hand and clicked his fingers.

The spellcast bubble around me burst, and snow hurled itself against me, flinging wet, choking handfuls of flakes into my face until I had to bend over, gagging and coughing, covering my nose and my mouth with my hands. My ears were half-covered by my hood, but it wasn’t enough as the snow and wind buffeted me. It wasn’t nearly enough. And then...

I could just make out the muffled sound of Wrexham’s voice somewhere in the distance, loud and agitated. But in my head, a slithering, unwelcome invasion, I could suddenly hear the elf lord’s own piercing whisper:

“You have one se’ennight from the completion of your first mission to keep your promise to my pet, little meddler. But when you fail, I’ll be waiting here to exact your payment—and this time, no one from my nation or yours will be able to deny me. Oh, I’ve been waiting such a long time to play my favorite games again.”

The snow and wind abruptly fell away from me. In the sudden, deafening silence inside my own head, my breath came in heavy pants. Every bruise on my body ached. Slowly, painfully, I straightened, blinking the leftover wet, stinging snowflakes out of my eyes.

The elf lord was gone. My spellcast bubble was back. And Wrexham was staring at me from a few feet away, his dark eyes wide with what looked like surprise.

Or rather... Wait. His gaze was fixed beyond me. At...

I twisted, uncomfortably, to look over my own shoulder.

“Oh, I say!” The tallest of the four young women who stood clustered behind me in a rather damp-looking but festive group laughed with delight and pointed up at the troll, who stood massive and unmoving against the darkening sky. “He’s quite a big brute, isn’t he? I shouldn’t care to run afoul of him!”

I sighed, shoulders sagging, as I took in the elf lord’s parting gift. “Miss Fennell, I presume.”

Wrexham had, after all, told the elf lord that I couldn’t begin my next mission before my last one was complete...so the elf lord had completed it for me.

How terribly, terribly helpful of him.

Miss Fennell grinned as she took us in. “Come to rescue us, have you? Sent by my cousin, I assume? Very decent of you, really!”

“Indeed,” I said sourly, trying not to take in Wrexham’s expression. “Your cousin was worried about you.”

...And an hour earlier, I would have deeply relished the idea of being the one to find Lady Cosgrave’s missing cousin, without using any magic along the way.

Somehow, though, in the wake of the elf lord’s visit, it didn’t feel like quite the victory I’d hoped for after all.

* * *

There was no out-striding Miss Fennell and her friends. Young, rowdy, cheerful, slightly tipsy, and all of them apparently untouched by their experience, they surrounded us in a laughing, jostling group that—all too soon—resulted in the inevitable idea of a jolly sing-song to speed our way home.

I tried to speed my own footsteps, but it was no use. Miss Fennell looped one arm through mine and matched me step for step, heavy traveling skirts swishing about her boots, while she sang at the top of her impressively strong lungs. Wrexham had done her and her friends the basic courtesy of spelling them safety from the elements as well, so even my secret fantasy of snow falling into her open mouth was thwarted.

...Not that she could truly be considered to blame for all of this afternoon’s mishaps, I admitted sourly to myself as we marched across the snowy landscape, our party’s merry yodeling echoing loudly around the hills.

Still, so much youthful exuberance was difficult to bear with an aching body and an uncomfortable new set of regrets.

I wasn’t looking forward to admitting to Amy all that had occurred out here this afternoon. Worse yet, I could tell that Wrexham was only waiting to give me his own opinion on the matter.

That, at least, I could prevent. As he edged closer through the crowd of cheerful travelers, his dark brows bent forbiddingly, I jerked Miss Fennell forward and grasped the arm of her closest friend—one Miss Banks—with my free hand.

“There!” I said brightly. “Now we’re joined in a chain!”

“Ha! Delightful.” Miss Fennell beamed.

Her friend, a slighter girl with pale skin flushed pink with either excitement or alcohol, and what looked like fine blonde hair beneath her hood, smiled shyly at me from our newly intimate vantage point...and then her eyes widened in sudden recognition.

“Oh. Oh! Are you—? That is...”

Oh no. I felt Wrexham’s wry gaze on the back of my neck as he dropped back to wait just behind me.

There would be no escape if I released her arm now. But even my lack of answer had been too much of a hint, apparently.

“You are Cassandra Harwood, aren’t you?” she breathed. “Oh, I knew it! I’ve been so hoping to meet you. I have so many questions I’ve been dying to ask you, all about what happened to you this summer!”

Oh, damnation.

Cursing my life, my ex-fiancé and myself in equal measure, I smiled ferociously at my young interrogator and kept her arm tightly trapped in mine. “Of course,” I said. “But not right now. It’s time to sing!”

And with my ex-fiancé following every step, I sang furiously all the way to Cosgrave Manor.