She glanced down, but he hooked his finger under her chin and tilted her face up.
“Stay with me,” he said. “Forever. We could be together in secret, and no one will ever know.”
Her chest tightened, a rib-cracking pressure. “We can’t,” she said. “It would never work.”
“Why?”
“Because my father hates you. Because you’re the king and I’m nobody. It’s not allowed.”
“No one needs to know.”
“What if there’s an heir?” she asked. “What if we have a child?”
He sighed. “That would be a complication.”
Someone cleared their throat and Magdala jumped, then pressed her palm to her forehead. “Zephyr,” she growled. “Stop sneaking around!”
“If I was an assassin, I could have justpop, popkilled you both,” he said sharply.
“I don’t think …” Asherton began, but Magdala stood and gathered her clothes.
“No, he’s right,” she said. “It won’t happen again. I’m going to check the grounds.”
Zephyr cast his eyes heavenward. “Youths,” he groaned.
Chapter 31
Magdala sat on the bank of the pond, chewing a piece of pond grass and watching Asherton as he stood waist-deep in the brown water, his arm down the throat of a giant yellow iris. Dragonflies buzzed around his head and a salamander sat on his shoulder. Magdala was content, all dreams of ancient birthrights forgotten. She had abandoned her professional guard attire when a heat wave struck them three weeks ago, just after their incident with Algie. Now, she let the sun freckle her shoulders and her cedar-scented ringlets frame her face. She’d spent so much time in the sun in the months since she arrived at Elegy, her face was a constellation of freckles, which Asherton told her he was determined to memorize, like a map of the sky.
Once Magdala realized that Asherton responded well to routine, she began writing a list of daily tasks and setting it on his nightstand every morning. Asherton carried out the chores to perfection, without complaint. If he was a complex code, Magdala was the first person ever to crack it—and she marveled that no one had realized before that structure helped him remember ordinary tasks amid the tumult of creativity and ideas in his ever-active mind. He wasn’t messy or stupid or undisciplined; he was distractiblebecause there was always something more interesting to think about or do than the laundry or the dishes. And Asherton’s mind moved so fast, it made Magdala dizzy.
Even the eggs made sense to her now. If he ate the same thing every day, he didn’t have to make a decision about what to eat.
As Asherton had predicted, Magdala had stopped wearing shoes. She’d also learned how to feed the carnivorous plants in the greenhouse and how to call the ducks in from the pond by quacking loudly. Asherton watched her practicing this skill with a wide grin, and she wondered if he was playing games with her as revenge for all the spiders she’d made him kill when they cleaned out her mother’s old shed in the woods. It was, as she’d expected, full of animal bones (and a few human ones as well). She assured Asherton they were for her mother’s magic, but he just wrinkled his nose and squashed another wolf spider.
Asherton liked making bread (he said he enjoyed working on it, then waiting until it was ready, then working on it again). Zephyr was only good with fish. When the strawberries ripened, all three of them labored for three days in the kitchen, their fingers stained red, as they capped and diced, reduced and canned the fruit. Peaches came next. Zephyr made dandelion wine, and Asherton learned to slow-smoke meat, and Magdala kept her bread lame sharp so she could cut designs into the sourdough loaves.
The kitchen was clean, the laundry line full, the floors swept. Magdala sent money home to her father with brief,vague messages. Now that he could afford medicine, his chest had eased and Magdala’s guilt with it.
Magdala was learning to swim. Asherton was a patient teacher and, haunted by the slip in the cave, they both kept their hands to themselves. Magdala sparred with Asherton in the ballroom. He was deadly with a knife, and they were evenly matched. With a sword, he outmatched her, which annoyed her immensely, and she took to practicing alone on the long, humming evenings.
Anton was almost as tall as Asherton now, and no less terrifying.
Even though Magdala weeded the vegetable garden, Elegy was still wild. As it was meant to be.
“Hold his jaws open,” Asherton said to Zephyr.
The old man struggled to pry the iris’s jaws wider. “Come, Miss Devney,” he said. “All hands on deck.”
Magdala stood and brushed off her pants, then waded into the water. Asherton smiled at her and said, “Reinforcements look promising.”
The sun shone on his bare chest, his biceps were tight, and he was the sunlight dappled on the water, he was the warmth of summer, he was the wind that whistled over the heath.
Her heart rose to him, and in so doing, it broke again. Every day, when she awoke and he smiled at her from his bed, her heart cracked, and as she muddled through from dawn to dusk, she endured a thousand breaks and fissures.
Sometimes, when she addressed him, she found the Russuli word ‘MoCrida’ on the tip of her tongue, and she would bite it back like bile.
Gripping the iris’s slippery, toothless gums, she dragged its mouth open. Asherton turned his body and jammed his head and shoulders down its throat.
