Magdala wondered if she’d made a terrible mistake, asking him to help. “What if I made you a list?”
“Why don’t you leave me alone and let me clean my own room in my own way?”
“It’s not your room,” she said. “It’sourroom now, and so I should have some say in how it is cleaned.”
“Some say, yes. Some. A minimal amount.” He considered her for a moment. “Large tasks turn my brain to mud, and so I focus on small pieces of the task and then, bit by bit, work my way through the large task. It works for me, alright? Leave me be.”
Sighing, Magdala gathered an armful of laundry and tossed it into its designated basket. Asherton flipped through a pile of dusty books.
“Come here, Mags,” he said. “This might be of interest to you.”
Her curiosity piqued, Magdala dusted off her hands and stood over him. He patted the floor beside him. She hesitated. She was getting too comfortable with him; his countenance was too open today, unguarded. She liked it better when he flinched at her every move.
Slowly, she settled beside him. Asherton lifted her hand and turned it palm-up, then he dropped a flower in her palm. It was paper-thin, shedding a fine purple dust. An electric warmth shivered to her elbow.
“It’s a Magdala flower,” he said.
“They only grow on the heath,” Magdala breathed. “How did you come by this?”
Asherton paused, then ran his fingers through his hair. “My brother grew up in the Wildlands. He sent me this book, and I found the flower inside. His birth mother—or the woman we suspect was his birth mother—was Russuli, and so he spent the summers with her, on the heath.”
“Oh.” Her heart ached for him and for this lost brother who haunted him, a shadow in the corner. “Have you been to the Wildlands?”
“No.” He touched the flower gently. “But he used to talk about it. He said that Wildlanders have a magical connection to the land …”
“We do,” Magdala said eagerly. “When I touch this flower, I feel its magic. Our connection to our homeland is that deep.”
He tilted his head and studied her. “So why did you leave?”
Picking her words carefully, Madgala said, “My father and mother were very different people. He was born to a different class, and though he was Russuli, he’d never lived in his homeland. My mother missed home. She had magic, and he did not.”
“And you didn’t inherit her magic?”
Magdala tilted her head from side to side. “She says I have a second sight. But I am skeptical. When my mother left my father and went home, my father wanted me to stay with him. I was only allowed to spend summers with her.”
“But when you were grown?”
“My father’s business was failing. He couldn’t put food on the table. I took over laying stone for him, and then, when Huxley found me, I joined the royal guard.” Her gaze roved over the room—her room—with its familiar moldings and carved bookshelves. “I don’t know which side of me I belong to. Both. Neither. I don’t know.”
With a melancholy smile, he said, “It’s hard, being torn between two bloodlines. Maybe”—he leaned toward her, his shoulder bumping hers—“you don’t need to be either of those two people. Maybe you are something wilder and more undefinable than your mother’s daughter or your father’s savior.”
Her eyes met his. They reminded her of a forest just brushed with autumn. That forbidden spark in her chest flared again, and for an instant, he reminded her of home.
Maybe, she thought, he, too, was more than a cursed prince who stole her father’s house. Maybe he was something wild as well. And maybe it was his wildness that lit that spark in her—the spark whose brightness attracted her like a moth to a candle and drove her away like a woman recently burned.
For the first time, she recognized where she and Asherton overlapped. They were flotsam washed ashore on Elegy, seeking somewhere to rest.
The spark burned brighter, a flame, and Magdala pulled away from him. He was too close, his body too magnetic, his eyes too knowing.
“I’m going to go and clean downstairs and leave you to this chaos.” She held the flower out to him.
“You keep it,” he said.
“No, it was your brother’s.”
Asherton lifted one shoulder. “It belongs with a Russuli, and my brother is gone. Let its magic find a home.”
Chapter 21
