Page 86 of The Trick of It

“Oh,” she said, smiling a little. “What’s the word for ‘summer-like’? Shouldn’t the kit be summer-like, given when I’ll have the most customers?”

He screwed up his brow, thinking. He knew this one. Didn’t he?

“It sounds like festival,” he recalled, tapping his temple. “‘Aestival’? Yes, I think that’s it. It has that combined letter, the ‘a’ and the ‘e.’”

“Hattie called it a ‘ligament,’ didn’t she?” Seph said, leaning back on her hands. “Like the cords holding our arms and legs together.”

“‘Ligature,’” he corrected, crawling over her angled body and kissing that clever mouth. “But I think the root meaning is the same.”

She kissed him back, her fingers curling into the carpet, and sighed happily, resting her forehead against his. “Rhys,” she said, opening her eyes, so very close to his own, close enough that their eyelashes tangled. “Do you want me to stop selling the tricks you consider yours? The Healing Rope and the Vanishing Coin? I know I shouldn’t have done it in the first place.”

He pulled back, surprised that she had offered, and examined her face. He looked into those odd, two-toned eyes of hers, gold and blue, just like the shoes in the box behind him.

“No,” he said. “If the likes of Merlin can share his wonders, what business do I have, trying to put a bushel over ours? Besides, you taught me some of those tricks. I didn’t invent them. I certainly didn’t patent them, like Harcourt announced the other day.”

She reached up to cover her mouth, stifling a giggle at that revelation. “I still can’t believe you tried to sue me,” she confessed. “I didn’t know you could patent a magic trick. Did you?”

He shrugged. “I suppose I could’ve figured it out,” he grumbled, crossing his arms and rolling his eyes. “Ruby has a huge folio of her patents and loves to lord them around. It’s why she prints the ingredients of her scents on the bottles. It’s like a challenge to anyone who would dare to attempt reproducing her genius.”

“I like Ruby,” Seph said. “She’s scary.”

“She is,” he agreed. “Sometimes.”

She nodded, looking utterly content. Glowing. She eventually sighed and slapped her knees, pushing herself to her feet to clean up the mess she’d made, and she only smiled to herself softly when he scrambled to assist, bunching up tissue paper debris in his fist and looking around for a bin to deposit it in.

“Rhys,” she said as she moved the scissors from the floor to the nightstand. “What’s the word for ‘winter-like’? That’s the only one I’m missing now. And it will be winter soon.”

He grinned, turning to her with his handfuls of color. “‘Hibernal,’” he said confidently. “My favorite. Do you know what that means?”

“That we hibernate?” she guessed. “Because it is cold and dark and wet and windy?”

“That we hibernate,” he agreed. “And spend all winter together, shielded from those things. In bed.”

“Something to look forward to,” she said, floating forward to take the rubbish from him. “Isn’t it?”

He paused, a little click of tension releasing in his chest and flooding outward, warm and relieved and no longer angry that time was passing, after all. “Yes,” he said to her. “Something to look forward to.”

Part IX

The Decoy

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Seph had been having trouble falling asleep.

She suspected that mind-bending stimulation between the dinner table and the bedroom, night after night, was not ideal for drifting off into an unburdened sleep.

Sometimes, Rhys would seem equally discomfited, and they would pass an hour debating how what they’d witnessed that night had been done, but afterward, or often without any deliberation at all, he seemed to slip right into the abyss without much effort.

For a boy who used to be unable to sleep at night, Rhys seemed shockingly restful.

He claimed it was because she was beside him.

And she hoped that it was.

Her routine had become listening until his breathing deepened, and then, once she was certain he was fully at rest, slipping out of bed and into the adjoining bedchamber to read or practice or simply stare out the window at the priory ruins below, illuminated in the moonlight, until she felt she could fall asleep.

Tonight, she raised the flame on the lantern and moved toward her props trunk, which had been nestled in the corner of the spare room, unmolested, for some days now. Most of the contents of the trunk were scattered around the room in their rehearsal space, behind the black velvet panels they’d be using for their set in a few days’ time.