“Right, right. Control my heart. Easy. I’ll just bottle up twenty-one years of emotions. Problem solved.”
Esther twirled a strand of her too-perfect honey-blonde hair. Her maids had put it in a half-up style, adorned with ruby hairpins that they claimed made her amber eyes ‘pop.’ She didn’t know what that meant. She just sat there, as always, while the maids prattled on about their clothing choices to each other, excluding her. They never spoke to her directly.
“Let’s begin,” Basil said, pretending not to hear her. “We’ll start with drying this towel. Fire is just concentrated heat. So. Calm thoughts. Gentle heat. No explosions.”
He handed her the damp towel, which dripped faintly onto the rune circle she stood in, a precaution her first tutor had insisted upon when she was ten, though it had flooded the entire second wing of the castle. It took weeks to fix all the water damage.
Now, this room had so many runes encrusted in it that almost any disastrous lesson could be contained.
Almost. Their previous lesson had proven that no matter how protected a room was, there was always a way for Esther to dismantle it.
Esther carefully picked up the damp towel with two fingers, as if it were a deadly weapon. “Okay. Calm thoughts. Gentle heat. Minimal explosions.” She closed her eyes and pictured serenity: a still pond, a clear sky, a woman who didn’t want to scream into a pillow.
The towel twitched. Gold static sizzled. Steam curled up from the corners. Basil’s left eye started to twitch in sync.
“Steady,” he cautioned, taking a significant step back.
“I’m perfectly steady,” Esther lied.
The towel hissed.
Then,whoosh!
A jet of water shot forward, splattering Basil full in the chest. Luckily, it didn’t look boiling.
“Princess!” he sputtered, dripping, his robes clinging to him in a way that made him look like a drowned terrier. Not all men were attractive when wet, it seemed.
“In my defense, the towel is dry now,” Esther said sheepishly, holding it out to her mentor. She tried, and failed, to hide the twitch at the corners of her lips.
If only it had ended there, but no. The towel flopped from her hands and, of course, came to life.
“Bad towel! Stop that!”
It didn’t stop.
It slithered across the floor like a deformed snake and wrapped around Basil’s leg like an affectionate pet.
Basil pinched the bridge of his nose and muttered something about early retirement. Esther could have sworn she saw more hairs turning gray right before her eyes.
The door burst open. “I heard a splash!”
“And the loud one returns,” Basil groaned. “This isn’t good for my blood pressure.”
Lucy surveyed the chaos: the towel, the puddles, Basil’s soaked robes, and his twitching eye. “You drowned your tutor again, didn’t you?”
“It was an accident,” Esther said, her face flushed from holding back laughter.
Basil wiped his glasses. “Princess, please. I beg you, breathe before you bring something to life. How do you even manage to do such high-level magic by accident?”
Lucy grinned, leaning against the doorframe. “Progress! Last week we lost a chair.”
“Is that why you have a net prepared?” Basil asked, his voice full of exasperation.
“I’m always prepared!” Lucy puffed out her chest, proud of her vigilance. “Speaking of which, I brought the new book you wanted.” She pulled the rectangular, brown paper-wrapped item out of her apron pocket.
Esther’s eyes lit up. “You found it?”
Lucy smirked. “Straight from the underground steamy book club: Proper Etiquette for Improper Thoughts.”
