“No.” He shakes his head. “I love being close to you. I just need…”
“To know that it’s real.”
Swallowing, he meets my eyes. “Yes.”
“I need that, too,” I admit. “I want to know that after the magic fades, you’ll still chooseme.”
Rowan touches my arm, quietly affectionate, offering gentle reassurance, understanding my fear.
“We need to break the bond,” I say, finally acknowledging that Rowan is right. We can’t continue like this forever.
“I don’t know if it will work, but I have a theory that I’d like to try. It’s overly simple, but sometimes mages overcomplicate magic, making things more difficult than they need to be. It’s worth a shot.”
“Okay,” I say, resigned. “What do we need to do?”
“Let’s go see Ansel, and we’ll talk about it together.”
Ansel is justas excited to see us as usual. The sorcerer looks up from his bench when we walk into his workshop, scowling.
Personally, I believe it’s a friendly sort of scowl. We’re annoying, certainly, but part of him likes us despite that.
“You’re not even knocking these days?” he says, his tone as flat as the diagram that’s spread out on the bench in front of him. He’s handsome in a sharp, haughty sort of way, with his dark hair and green eyes.
“We did knock,” Rowan says.
And I add, “Three times.”
“You left the door unlocked.” Rowan gestures toward Ansel’s project. “So we decided to come in and make sure you didn’t fall victim to one of your spells.”
Ansel rolls up his diagram with a put-out sigh. “You know all about that, don’t you?”
Ignoring the jab, Rowan walks to the workbench. “How do you feel about depleting your magic and trying something stupid?”
Ansel perks up, his interest piqued. “How stupid?”
“Only a little.”
The light leaves the sorcerer’s eyes, making me think he would prefer to attempt somethingwildlystupid. “What do you have in mind?”
“I’m going to siphon some magic into an amulet. While I’m connected, I want you to draw from it and see if you can spot the link between Kit’s magic and mine.”
Ansel looks intrigued. “What do you want me to do if I can?”
“I’d like you to try to unweave it.”
“Sounds too easy.”
“I agree, but it’s a good place to start.”
“I have a question,” I say. “Why must you siphon your magic into a holding amulet for Ansel to work with it?”
“We can’t access someone’s magic directly.” Ansel takes a peppermint from the bowl on the workbench and untwists the wrapper. “I can only attempt to manipulate it through a connected cache.”
“Okay… But why can’t Rowan siphon his magic into a cache and then manipulate it himself?”
“Once the cache is disconnected from my magic, it’s no longer tied to us,” Rowan answers. “Whatever I do to it won’t affect us. It wouldn’t sever our link. The best I could do is separate our magic in the sample.”
“You can’t manipulate the cache while you’re hooked into it?”
