Page 66 of Connor and the Dragons

I cleared my throat, watching as he poured us all glasses of amber liquid from a decanter. “Focus work, mainly. Years of it before I was allowed to try anything.” I turned my glass, but didn’t take a drink. “My master had me work with water first, then we spent a winter in the mountains, because you can’t understand what’s stored in ice by reading about ice.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s an enormous amount of held-back energy stored in a frozen thing. Once you feel that, you stop thinking of ice as the opposite of fire.”

“Ah, that’s very good. I had not thought about it that way.” He said it while looking at Kess. Harrowgate didn’t know, did he? My job was to look like a man pleased that his property was admired, but I wanted to haul Kess into my lap and bite a mark into his throat where Harrowgate would have to look at it.

“I have wanted to meet you for quite some time,” I said, meeting Harrowgate’s eyes. “Someone in my travels told me your mastery of light is impeccable, but I still did not understand how you were able to turn it into a tactile thing until I saw it happen.”

“I suppose it’s the same as your ice. You are manipulating the energy, and the energy is a thing.” He spoke with a slow boredom, and his eyes didn’t light up until Kess adjusted his hood, a habit he’d developed to make sure his ears were covered. I fiddled with the aetherwoven bracelet at my wrist, and caught Harrowgate’s eyes dropping to it.

“Is that elven magic?” he asked.

I laughed and shook my head, quickly trying to come up with a lie. “I believe I was hoodwinked. I purchased it from a shop before my travels, a talisman of protection, they said, but I don’t believe there is any true magic to it.”

“And still you wear it?”

“Well, I’d feel foolish if it turned out to be real just as I came to actually need it, wouldn’t I?”

Harrowgate chuckled. “Good man. You do have a point.”

Behind me a woman orgasmed loudly, and nobody in the room reacted.

Harrowgate leaned in. “Do you think your consort would appreciate a lesson in light magic?”

I hesitated. “I’ll admit I’m careful with my boys. But I will consider it. Perhaps you could tell me more about your magic and how you came to discover the erotic uses for it.”

“Now that I can do. It is perhaps a little like ice on your boy’s skin. I was fascinated by the tactile applications of magic for kink.”

Kessrin shifted closer to me, and I nodded along, idly petting Oallian as Harrowgate talked about himself, and I peppered in appropriate questions to keep him going whenever he slowed down. The man loved to brag, and soon began speaking of the treasure trove of magical artifacts in his cellars, where he’d found documentation of various kink techniques.

“It must be fascinating to have all of those relics,” I said.

“Honestly? It’s more of a chore. Some of the books are fantastic, of course, but most of it is useless junk. My family is charged with saving every defunct portal entrance in the history of the kingdom. Do you know how often portals just blink out of existence? At least every twenty years or so.”

I laughed. “Imagine all the space you’d have if you didn’t have to store all of that!”

“I could have another ballroom, that is for certain. Portals can only exist when there is a specific alignment between worlds, and of course, we all know that alignment shifts over time. Some ancestor of mine convinced the council that the shift will come back around at some point, and that it’s better to be ready.”

“But how would you even know?” I asked.

“Exactly! I have a stack of mirrors in my basement a mile long, and somehow I’m supposed to be checking each site on an annual basis to see if the portal has become active again. Not likely.”

I made a sympathetic noise and pretended to take a sip of my beverage. “An impossible feat.”

“It is my inheritance and my curse.”

“Could a man buy one?” I asked it lightly, with the glass up, as though it had only just occurred to me. “For a folly. I have always wanted something enormous and useless in a garden.”

Harrowgate laughed with his head back, the first honest sound he had made all night.

“A man could try. They are consecrated objects, Mr. Liang. Numbered and catalogued and inspected, and the numbering goes back to the founding. The Order would have my name off the rolls and my house off the register inside a month, and then they would send somebody to take the mirrors anyway, and I would have neither the ballroom nor the credit.”

I already knew. I had read the wording myself back at the lodging house, by lamplight, with my bracelet off. Entrusted to the keeping of House Harrowgate, as are all such objects. I had only wanted to hear him say it out loud, because there was a version of this evening in which the answer was a number, and I had been carrying that version around all day like a coin in my shoe, and now I could put it down.

Somewhere behind me a man was getting fucked so hard I could hear the slaps of bodies between the moans, but Harrowgate’s attention returned to Kess.

“Your companion has said almost nothing all evening.”