My hands slowed and the mist curled between us, thin and half-formed, coiling around my fingers like something living. It took everything I had to hold my focus on the working rather than on the way he was watching me. Not to mention he was standing so close. Close enough that we could...
The magic kept stuttering, kept losing its shape because the warmth coming off him seemed to be the only thing I was aware of. That and his eyes hadn’t moved from my face.
“Focus,” he said.
“I am focusing.”
“Then focus harder.”
Iwasfocusing harder. In fact, I was focusing with everything I had: trying to change his features into someone no one would recognize. It was strange, but I was finding it difficult to remember what a face looked like when it wasn’t his.
“Guin.” He said my name the way he always said it: like it was a complete sentence. “You should have known… even if I tried to be subtle about it… I’m sure I wasn’t.”
I smiled up at him. “You were.”
The cleft in his chin seemed even deeper as he gazed down at me. “Still… You should have known how I—”
“—I hoped.” The words came out small. “I hoped you did. That you felt something—” I stopped. Started over. “But I didn’t let myself believe it. I... I thought the feelings were only on my end.”
His hand came up slowly in a motion that had no urgency in it, no demand. Just his fingers, warm and certain, curving around my wrist like a question he already knew the answer to. The mist between my palms went perfectly still, all that restless coiling energy suspended, as if the magic itself had decided to hold its breath.
The space between us had shrunk to nothing, which was strange because I didn’t remember either of us moving. His eyes dropped to my mouth at the same time that mine lifted to his.
“Corvin,” I whispered.
The air between us went thick and still as my pulse beat hard in my throat. Every thought I’d had in the last five days: the wet dungeon, the cold stone, the skull moth, Arthur’s hands around my jaw, Lance...
All of it dissolved into Corvin’s face, which was tilted down toward mine, his thumb tracing a slow arc across the inside of my wrist.
He was going to do it. After so many fucking years of careful distance, of sidelong looks, of words that stopped just short of admitting what they truly meant. After countless training episodes and arguments that ended in silence because neither of us could say the real thing. After Lance had shattered my heart and I wondered if I’d ever feel anything again, I felt something now.
I felt something… now.
Corvin’s head dipped a fraction, barely a breath’s worth of movement. His fingers tightened around my wrist as his eyes lifted from my mouth to my eyes, and something in them, something raw and long-held, made my chest pull tight.
I stopped breathing entirely.
The mist curled between us, forgotten. Wraith shifted behind Corvin as if to remind us this wasn’t the place or the time, but neither of us looked away from each other.
And then Corvin stepped back. One clean step, one deliberate step. One step that cost him to take. A moment later, his hand fell away from my wrist.
“Shelter first,” he said, but his voice had gone a little rough. “Everything else after.”
My chest did something complicated: a tight, twisting sensation that started beneath my ribs and worked its way up into my throat. But he was right, and I knew he was right, and I hated that he was right.
“Yes.” I turned back to the work.
The illusion settled over Corvin in layers, the way frost spreads across still water: slow at first, then all at once. His proud, straight nose softened and broadened, losing the sharp aristocratic line of it. The high planes of his cheekbones flattened and rounded, and that strong jaw blurred, grew jowly, ordinary. His brown hair lightened by slow degrees until it faded to the dull, unwashed color of dirty straw, hanging limp against a brow that no longer belonged to anyone remarkable.
The fine cut of his traveling clothes rippled and shifted, dissolving into rough-spun wool the color of dried mud, patched clumsily at both elbows and fraying at the collar. Even his posture changed, the glamour dragging his shoulders into the particular defeated slope of a man who’d worked himself old before it was his time.
When the last thread of the illusion settled into place, a tired, unremarkable farmer stood where Corvin had just been. He was now the kind of man a person’s gaze slides right past.
He looked down at himself.
“Adequate,” he said, in Corvin’s voice, which was deeply wrong coming from that face.
“Adequate?” I repeated with a shake of my head.
