Yet Mariselle couldn’t help but recall those rare individuals blessed from birth with hair in shades that defied nature’s ordinary palette. Unusual colorsthat marked them as touched by old magic. Individuals like the High Lady and her son, Prince Ryden.
“Remarkably,” she mused, “I find I don’t entirely hate it.”
“It is rather … dramatic,” Tilly offered.
“Precisely the word I would have chosen.” Mariselle reached for the teapot. “My mother, however, will have several other choice words, none of which are suitable for polite company.” She lifted the teapot lid and sniffed. “Is this the new blend? The duskmint-vanilla?”
The fragrance transported her instantly back to The Charmed Leaf, where she’d first savored its bewitching combination of cool mint and sweet vanilla. The taste had lingered in her memory afterward, prompting her to inquire if Tilly might locate some for her private collection.
“Indeed it is, my lady,” Tilly replied with a hint of pride. “Not the easiest treasure to unearth, but I managed to find a supplier.”
“How wonderful. Thank you, Tilly.”
After Tilly departed, Mariselle cradled the delicate porcelain cup between her palms, savoring both the warmth and the fragrant steam as her mind turned over the morning’s complications. The hair was a problem, certainly, but not her most pressing one. The Dreamland project waited for no one, not even victims of magical practical jokes. And after her mother’s thinly veiled ultimatum the previous evening, Mariselle felt time slipping through her fingers. Lady Brightcrest had made it painfully clear: if Mariselle couldn’t soon produce something of value to leverage against the Rowanwoods, her mother would accelerate her search for a practitioner willing to sever the soulbond.
But she was tantalizingly close to being able to attempt a test dreamscape. A simple one, nothing too elaborate, but enough to prove that all this work wasn’t for nothing. She merely needed to enchant a few more of the dream core’s crystals. An evening’s work, perhaps several. That was all it would take before she could walk through Dreamland not merely in her mind, but with her own two feet.
Well, that wasn’tallit would take. Evryn needed to finish reconstructing the lumyrite-embedded framework. And there was the matter of the protective wards. She was still determining precisely how to weave them. But the wards weren’t strictly necessary for a brief experimental foray. A quick testwouldn’t leave her in the dreamscape long enough for nightmare entities to attempt crossing over.
With no social obligations cluttering her evening calendar, tonight presented the perfect opportunity to advance their work. With any luck, Petunia and Evryn would be free too. She reached for the middle drawer of her vanity and withdrew her hand mirror, turning it this way and that as she examined its surface with a sigh. It appeared the restoration spell she’d applied days prior had not yet fully taken hold; faint lines still traced the path of each individual shard from when it had shattered. It seemed the enchantment required more time to mend completely.
With a small sigh, she returned the mirror to its velvet-lined compartment and closed the drawer with a gentle click, then reached past the side of her vanity and pulled the silver bell-cord that would summon one of the household pixies. Then she quickly penned a note to Petunia requesting her presence in the greenhouse as soon as possible. For Evryn, however, she crafted their customary coded message. A seemingly innocent lover’s note that would appear to anyone else as mere sentimental drivel:
My dearest, the nightveil orchids we discussed remind me of your eyes when you smile. Perhaps I shall dream of them tonight. Yours in tender affection, M.
She had just finished when a faint tap at her door signaled the arrival of the pixie. She crossed the room and opened the door to find the tiny blue-tinged creature on the other side. The pixie froze mid-hover, its wings stuttering in shock as it registered her transformed appearance. It emitted a piercing chime of surprise that made Mariselle wince. She fixed it with a withering stare that brooked no comment on matters beyond its station.
“Please take this directly to Lady Petunia next door,” she instructed the pixie, handing over the first note. “And place this one in the hollow stone by the front gate for the messenger pixie service to collect on their morning rounds. Thank you.”
With the pixie gone, Mariselle dressed quickly, deciding not to wait for Tilly’s return. She struggled with the buttons at the back of her day dress, then resorted to a minor fastening charm that coaxed them into place—an unladylike shortcut her mother would never have approved of. “Magic is no substitute for the proper dressing skills of one’s lady’s maid,” she’d say. But Lady Clemenbell wasn’t here right now.
Mariselle twisted her transformed blue locks into a serviceable chignon, securing it with two enchanted pins that immediately tightened and adjusted themselves to hold every strand in place. She examined her reflection with a critical eye, then cautiously opened her door and peered into the hallway.
Evasion was now the priority. Her mother and Ellowa would be taking their breakfast in the sunroom, no doubt dissecting the previous evening’s gossip, and her father was probably already locked away in his study with his endless correspondence. That left the rarely used west lounge as her escape route—a chamber with worn velvet settees and bookshelves crammed with generations of eclectic reading material. Mariselle had always favored its cozy, comfortable disarray, but Lady Clemenbell had declared it ‘hopelessly provincial’ and ‘unsuitable for anyone worth impressing’ years ago.
Mariselle slipped through the corridors, pausing at corners and ducking behind elaborate crystal flower arrangements whenever a servant appeared. At last, she reached the west lounge, pushing open the heavy oak door with a sigh of relief. To her surprise, the usually dim chamber was flooded with morning light, the heavy velvet curtains pulled back and windows flung wide. The unexpected brightness momentarily dazzled her.
“Mariselle Brightcrest. How extraordinary that you should appear precisely when I was inquiring after your whereabouts.”
Mariselle froze, one hand still on the doorknob. That voice—cultured, commanding, and utterly unmistakable—belonged to the one person in her family more formidable than her mother.
“Grandmother,” she said, turning slowly to face the diminutive woman seated in a wingback chair beside the bookshelf. “What a … delightful surprise.”
Lady Nirella Brightcrest raised a single eyebrow. “Is it? I find it rather surprising that you’ve been in Bloomhaven for at least a fortnight and have yet to come and visit me. Particularly given the fact that you’ve apparently formed asoulbondwith none other than a Rowanwood. Did you imagine I wouldn’t wish to be informed that the decades-old feud between our families was being bridged by my own flesh and blood? Or perhaps you thought I was too decrepit to attend the engagement celebration of my own granddaughter.”
Mariselle’s stomach dropped to somewhere in the vicinity of her silkslippers. “Grandmother, it—it all happened so quickly. The High Lady—it was less than a day’s notice—and you so rarely attend social events these days?—”
“And now,” her grandmother continued, her gaze traveling upward, “you appear to have transformed yourself into some sort of exotic water nymph. How very innovative of you.”
Despite herself, Mariselle felt her lips twitch. Her grandmother, whose hair had been a sophisticated shade of pearl pink for almost as long as Mariselle had known her, was hardly one to judge. “It was not entirely intentional, Grandmother.”
“Few of life’s most interesting developments are.” Lady Nirella gestured imperiously to the chair opposite her own, her eyes never leaving Mariselle. Despite her age and the regal stiffness of her bearing, there was something in her gaze that still sparkled. Sharp, watchful, never missing a thing. “Sit. Explain yourself.”
Mariselle hesitated, her blood turning to ice as a memory surfaced—the elegantly penned signature of Lady Nirella Brightcrest flowing across the bottom of that fateful contract she had discovered at Windsong Cottage. The elaborate charade of the ‘soulbond’ might fool society, might even deceive her parents and the High Lady, but her grandmother? If anyone could see through this fabricated connection to what the marking on Mariselle’s hand truly represented, it would be the woman who had negotiated the original agreement with Valenrik Rowanwood.
Mariselle crossed the room on legs that felt suddenly wooden, her heart performing a frantic, uneven rhythm. Conflicting emotions warred within her—genuine pleasure at seeing her grandmother after so long, tangled with mounting dread. Unlike most of Bloomhaven’s elite families who retreated to country estates when the Bloom Season ended, Lady Nirella maintained her residence at Bloomhaven’s edge year-round, which meant Mariselle hadn’t seen her since last Season.
She lowered herself into the indicated chair, forcing her breathing to remain steady. “I was going to call upon you,” she said, arranging her skirts. “This weekend, in fact.”
