2
A CUP AND A CURTAIN
The king’s lapdog had arrived, and he was snarling.
Mostly about the damn nickname.King’s lapdog.The upper ten thousand of British society—the rich, titled, and magically gifted transcendent ton—could not have christened Temple Grant, Baron Knightly with a more humiliating moniker.
His ire also rode a wave frustration.He’d been hunting for a wife for a fortnight.He should have found one already.
And that frustration boiled dangerously inside a ballroom, pressed tight by the crush of people inside of it—every inch, every skirt, every cursed face glamoured beyond recognition.Not a single one of the dancers, musicians, servers, and peers amassed at the Duke of Morington’s London home could see how their blinding, waving illusions layered over dimmer reality.They could only see the top layer, the shallow, glittering surface skimmed from their dull imaginations.
But Temple could see all the way down to the grimy core of reality.And every glamour hiding it.
The ladies’ gold-threaded gowns—a mirage.The gentlemen’s handsome profiles—lies.The chandeliers floating unmoored near the ceiling, casting light through gold and diamonds—fake.He could see beneath the enchantments to the dusty brass and melting candles of their reality.He could see the very chain that hung them, tethered them.The Duke of Morington was quite good at glamours.No one else would see the crumbling wealth.
Temple could, though, and every bit of it made his head ache and his contempt flare high.But he couldn’t sail out the doors and leave England’s upper crust with nothing but a curse and a rude gesture.His family had already suffered enough because of him.Thiswas his atonement,thishis only means of providing for mother and father, sisters and brothers.His actions alone had brought them low, abandoned and despised.He would lift them up again.
Even if it meant being compared to a pooch curled up on a velvet-clad lap.
Even if it meant—he tugged at his too-tight cravat—marrying.The king demanded it.He said it would help Temple and his family better navigate the new world they belonged to.It would give them the necessary connections to survive in a social class they’d only recently joined.All that true, but it was also a means of controlling his new Royal Alchemist more than anything.
The ladies around the edges of the dance floor scowled at him over the tops of their fans, and their men pushed their noses up.Not a soul wanted a laboring man among their number, an alchemist who wore no gloves and could bend metal with his bare hands.
Their magic was so much more refined, pretty.Temple’s skill not magic at all.So they said.
What a cock-and-bull story.
His skill, his work, his—yes—magic, made the world go round.Coaches were traveling faster than ever because of alchemists.Factories were producing more and quicker.Alchemists working with iron and copper and silver were pushing boundaries.Astronomers were discovering new stars with the lenses ground by alchemists.Yet they still had to bend a damn knee to the preening transcendent ton.
Because that lot had been divinely chosen, giventalentby God.Their ability to cast glamours was passed down from father to son, a blessing in their very blood.Mere illusions.Useless.Like those who cast them.
The king at least had an interest in progress, reviving the hundred-year-abandoned title of Royal Alchemist and bestowing it upon Temple.The position paid well.And Temple needed the money; his family needed it.If only King William hadn’t also given him another title.Baron Knightly.For his services to the crown.
Services?
Betrayal.That’s how the other alchemists saw it.
From left and right, whispers lashed at him.The irritating echo of tittering laughter glanced across his skin like arrows.
The king’s lapdog.
Whomever had thought up that odious little nickname should be shot.By Temple.It might relieve his ire a bit.But if he protested it even a little bit, other whispers would follow—alchemist brute, dirty beast, earthbound animal.
Bloody insulting, as was everything about Temple’s new life—a title he didn’t want, forced to take a wife, paid only for those inventions the king demanded.Neither his work nor his life were his own anymore.
But at least it kept his family safe, kept their bellies full.
He was a shaft of iron hammered too thinly into a curve.He was damned close to breaking.
If he could find one unmarried lady with a bit of a backbone, he’d be done.Marry her, bed her, continue to please the king.But the women dancing and laughing and sighing and gossiping behind lace fans tonight were terrifying.They had teeth.Not at all the same as backbone.His own ma owned a steel spine.His sisters, too.They should be here alongside him, should be wading through the glittering waters with sharp-toothed fish in fine,realsilks.But no one would invite them.Invitations came only for him and only because of the king.The Grants were still alchemists, after all, no matter what they’d sacrificed to help the king.
His skin feeling the prick of a thousand razor blades, Temple pushed through the center of the ballroom and right through double doors at the back.He entered a dimly lit hallway.No glamours here to change the dripping candles into glinting, light-giving diamonds.Good.Better the honesty of steel and wax and flame.He could breathe again at least.
Where was the library?He needed silence.Just a sliver of it before rejoining the unceasing waves, the sharp-toothed fishes.The king was rumored to make an appearance tonight, and Temple—an obedient lapdog—was still having to prove himself.Being a rogue alchemist made people… wary.Even if he’d gone rogue against his own people.Perhaps precisely because of that.
Every door along the right side of the hallway was locked.The locks had been fashioned of wood, so he could not pick them with his alchemy.The first door he tried on the opposite side of the hallway gave way, revealing what he’d been looking for.The library—a breath of silence before rejoining the crush.Irritation and frustration drained from him in a rush, leaving him hollow and clean as he ambled farther into the room.Books lined every wall but for the windows, which were closed by dark, heavy drapes.Low couches and spindly chairs were grouped near a dying fire, and on the table next to those, a decanter waited, glinting, filled with something lovely and amber.
Yes, please.Just the thing to fortify himself with before returning to the ballroom.
