“Oh! That sounds fascinating!” I said eagerly, and Elowin smiled proudly.
“I keep telling him you can’t breed a potato,” Aldian said. “Put two of them in a candlelit room, and nothing happens at all. They don’t have the parts for it!” He shrugged. “I suppose this is why I’m a prince and not a scholar.”
“Yes,” Elowin said. “Lucky for all of us.”
If Aldian had a reply, and I was sure he did, he didn’t get the chance to use it because at that moment Rowan entered the room.
“Hello, Aldian,” she said and leaned down and kissed his cheek. Then her gaze slid to where Elowin and I were still holding hands. “Oh good! You figured it out.”
“Rowan,” Aldian said. “Make me a tunic? I’m going to need one that shows off my new tattoo.”
“Show me,” she said briskly, and Aldian happily displayed his dragon, flexing his chest muscles to make it dance. He seemed like a very different elf than the noble prince I’d met earlier at the Ceremonial Pavilion. He was relaxed and laughing and, although it seemed ungracious to even think it, a bit of an idiot?
I was no longer offended by Aldian’s refusal to marry me. Elowin had explained that it wasn’t personal and that Aldian didn’t want to marryanyone. That was probably for the best. Besides, he wasn’t the elf for me.
Elowin wrapped an arm around my shoulder and I leaned into his side. I fitted against him perfectly. When he pressed a kiss to my temple, a single tiny butterfly appeared and vanished in a shower of sparkling dust a second later, and I tilted my head back and smiled up at him.
I didn’t want, or need, a prince to marry.
I just wanted someone who gave me butterflies.
EPILOGUE
ELOWIN
Six months later
Winter lay in a thick white blanket over the city of Emberleigh, and the tip of my nose and my fingers were frozen by the time I walked home from the university to the palace. The palace grounds were expansive, and I entered through one of the side gates, waving at the guard on duty in the gatehouse. I passed the barracks and the parade ground and stopped a moment to talk with Teon, who was exercising Rainsilver in the snow. Both of them breathed out steam.
Then I followed the path through the bare winter trees to the cottage that was tucked away at the back of the palace grounds. Light shone from the windows and smoke rose from the chimney.
Delight at being home again quickened my pace, and I pushed open the front door and stepped into the warmth of my little home. I hung up my scarf and coat, took my bootsoff, and detoured briefly into the sitting room to leave my bag of books there. Then I followed the smell of fresh baking bread through to the kitchen. The faint sound of a lute floated in from outside, although what the tune was I couldn’t say. The player possessed far more enthusiasm than skill.
I opened the door to the back garden.
Sparrow was sitting on the small patch of grass in the middle of the flourishing garden beds, wearing only a loose pair of pants. He had his back to me as he strummed his lute and hummed tunelessly, and an array of gleaming silver-and-gold bird tattoos fluttered their wings against his skin in the sunlight. I could feel the faint heat of his magic from where I stood at the back door, and as I moved closer to him, it grew as balmy as a summer’s day. My skin tingled as it warmed. I picked a snow pea as I passed and popped it into my mouth.
Sparrow heard me coming and shuffled around to face me with a smile, setting the lute aside.
“I love your hair,” I said.
He beamed, turning his head from side to side so that I could see the shaved halves of his head were different colors. Bright green on one side and bright pink on the other. He had a short mane of hair down the middle still, in his natural brown, and he wore it so that it stood up in soft spikes. His ears were lined with silver rings that matched the ones in his nipples. Since coming to Emberleigh, Sparrow had embraced the idea of self-expression in whatever forms took his fancy, and I certainly wasn’t complaining about it.
“I think I’ll try purple and blue tomorrow,” he said. He had exchanged a box of fresh lettuce for a charm that changed the color of his hair whenever he felt like it. The rate he was going, the charm’s magic would run out in a week, but he was having fun with it, and it wasn’t as thoughhe couldn’t do another swap soon. The bed full of lettuce was looking fantastic.
He made to get up, but I waved him back down. I sat beside him, wiggling my toes in the sweet-smelling grass.
“How was your day?” he asked, leaning into me as I put an arm around him.
“Cold,” I said. “Very cold.”
“I know!” he exclaimed. “I went to visit Teon earlier, to take them some blueberries, and I shivered the whole way.”
“I hope you kept some blueberries for us.”
“Of course.” He pressed a kiss to my cheek, and I felt the tickle of magic before a bright blue butterfly appeared. It fluttered in front of us for a few seconds and then dissolved into glitter. The glitter hung in the air briefly before the breeze stole it away.
Sparrow’s magic had grown stronger since he’d come to live with me at the cottage. He could keep the entire garden warm now, instead of just a tiny patch of it. Our shared sympathetic magic was stronger too. Last night as we’d cuddled in bed, instead of butterflies, a tiny green finch had appeared on the curtain rail and hopped up and down for a few minutes before disappearing again. Then afterward, we’d both ignored the cute little mouse in the corner because we’d assumed we’d conjured it, and this morning there was a corner missing from the block of cheese in the kitchen. It was a particularly fine cheese too—Sparrow was a far better cheesemaker than his mother had ever been. Tonight I’d have to remember to set a trap and release the mouse into the garden when I caught it. It wasn’t as though it would suffer because it was winter. In Sparrow’s garden, it was summer all year round.
