The movement of the wind, the slosh of the river, the thrum of the army behind us,him—it all pulled at me. I had to block it out. The world dimmed behind my eyelids.
“All right,” he murmured, stepping closer. “Think of your mind as a house. Right now your house doesn’t have a roof, doors, or even shutters on the windows.”
“So complimentary…” I grumbled.
He huffed out a restrained laugh. “All of that must be sealed to keep the wrong things out.”
“And what are the wrong things?” I asked, not opening my eyes.
“Anything not yours.”
I nodded to show that I understood.
“Start by framing the roof. Allow the tendrils of your magic to extend beyond its normal boundaries. Remember, you aren’t losing your magic, you’re shifting its location within your body.”
For most mages, myself included, the feeling was that their magic stemmed largely from the area around their heart. So what Emrys was suggesting wasn’t an absurd idea. I did what he said, imagining it as a golden light extending from my heart up my neck and across my mind.
The results of my first try were splotchy in places, but the basics were all there. My perception of Emrys’s bonfire of emotions instantly lessened. The emotions of Catrin and the guards, waiting patiently fifty feet off, had all but disappeared.
I stood there, reveling in the relative quiet for a long moment. If I’d known how to do this years before, my life could’ve been much more pleasant. Back in Caervorn, I’d been rejected—for, I thought, being a mageliving in the outer ring, but now I wondered ifIhad been part of the problem.
If I hadn’t had to walk through life constantly avoiding everyone else’s emotional turmoil, I probably could’ve formed true friendships. I probably could’ve experienced happiness.
When I finally opened my eyes, my astonished gaze met Emrys’s intense stare.
“You’re smiling,” he all but whispered, a tiny lopsided smile of his own quirking the edges of his lips.
Something unspoken passed between our gazes, our smiles—it was as warm as the summer breeze through the reeds.
“Good,” he whispered once more. I thought it would be a nice, soft moment between us until I noticed that he’d shut himself off from me again. “We should probably get back before Nisien hears of our time spent alone and decides you’ve betrayed him.”
Without another word, he turned toward the horses, evidently expecting me to follow.
“Prince Emrys!” Anger blazed within me. How could he so completely disregard the tender moments we’d shared? Had they meant nothing to him? “Please allow me to make something clear.”
He turned around, expression carved from ice once more.
“Nisien has no claim on me. There’s no romantic connection between us,at all.”
The ice he’d been carved from started to melt before my eyes. “But I saw you kiss him.”
I made a very unladylike sound. “Now I know why you snarl all the time.”
His lips quirked upward at the corners.
Except I wasn’t done yet. “It meant nothing!”
I expected him to huff away, saying nothing like normal.
But he grinned. “Understood, Lady Isca… If that’s the case, then let us return before my captains worry I’m shirking my duty to ravish you amongst the reeds.”
I sucked in a surprised breath, now grinning myself. “Was that a joke, Lord Prince?”
His jaw worked, and the knot in his throat bobbed, swallowing whatever he’d been tempted to say. But the returned smolder in his eyes gave away the truth of what he wanted even before his walls came back down.
***
The remaining hours of the day crawled by, filled with the slow trot of too many horses. We rode through forests where the trees pressed in close and the sky was little more than a memory, through fields where farmers stopped their work to wave, past tiny hamlets and villages.
