I couldn’t have looked any less romantic, wet, gaping like a frog and wiping my nose on my sleeve, but he was staring at me like I had hung the stars, as he sat upright and ran his hands through his hair.
I could hardly believe he was really back. The flush of life returned to his skin—and was it my imagination, or was his face a little less perfect than before? Still beautiful, but not inhumanly so.
The otherworldly quality seemed to be gone. His nose was a little crooked, as if it had been broken a long time ago and improperly set. There was a smattering of freckles across his nose and cheekbones that I had never noticed before—and the spell had made me memorize every detail of his face.
He held his hands palms up in front of his face and stared at them.
“You’re alive,” I said stupidly.
“It would appear so,” he said. He turned his hands over to examine their backs. “I feel ... different.”
“You look different,” I said. He took my hand, and even his skin felt more human—warmer, slightly damp against mine.
“Are they dead?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It worked.” The wide smile spreading across my face was almost painful.
“Millie?”
“She lived. We did it. She’s all right.”
“Are you still under the spell?” he asked.
“No.” I took a quick inventory of myself, to make sure. “No, I felt it disappear when you ... died. Or whatever happened to you. And it hasn’t come back.”
“So does that mean ...” He did not finish his sentence but instead leaned toward me, hesitantly, and I made up the distance between us and kissed him. He tasted of rain and simple human sweat, and he was warmer than he had been before.
When we parted, he smiled at me. One of his front teeth was very slightly crooked. He was no longer my sorcerer—he was just . . .
“Sylvester,” I said.
“How long was I ... asleep?” he said.
I remembered what he had done and hit him as hard as I could manage on his arm. “Why did you do that? You could havetoldme.”
He touched his arm where my punch had landed with a kind of wonder, as if he had never felt pain before. “I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “You wouldn’t have let me do it.”
“You’re an idiot. You couldn’t have done it without me.”
“I know that now.”
“Youdied.”
I glared at him, then burst into tears again. I felt his arms around my shoulders and the warmth of him against my me as he pulled me close.
It was such a relief to have him here, to have him here to be furious with. He let me cry myself out, then waited as I very unromantically blew my nose.
“What will the world look like now?” he wondered.
“Well, for one thing, there’s no king,” I said. “Unless you’re the king now that your father’s dead. I’m not sure how the people will feel about another magic-worker being in charge, though.”
“I don’t want to be king,” he said quickly. “And I don’t think I’m a magic-worker anymore.”
I saw a familiar shape wading through the puddles toward us: Da, with Cornelius on his shoulder.
“We’d better go tell him that you survived, despite your best attempts,” I said.
“And that you are all stuck with me now.”
