CHAPTER 5
Eight Years Ago
IT SEEMED TO TAKE BRIONY LONGER than the others to acclimate to the cold of Bomard. When the young people of Evermore had arrived in the spring for their first year of shared education, Briony had assumed that spring meant warmth and breezes and crisp-smelling trees. That was what spring was in Evermore.
In Bomard, spring was merely the end of winter. Snow was still melting, and heavy furs were still worn. Outdoor activities were limited. Briony and Rory had visited Bomard with their father plenty of times on official state business, but never this far north. Here, carved into the side of the mountain range that protected Bomard from the realms across the sea, the Bomardi school was crystallized in snow.
Briony longed for the warm breezes in Evermore. She pulled her cloak more tightly closed and tapped her fingers across her face, encouraging her blood to magically warm under the surface.
“Careful,” Rory said, moving behind her at their shared breakfast table. “I saw Simon Leatherby trying that last week, and he ended up giving himself a fever.”
“I’m careful,” she said, teeth chattering. She sent a yearning glance at the
dying fire. “Do you think they’re toying with us? Giving the Eversun heir only three logs per day?”
Rory sat across from her, wrapping his fingers around his warm cup of tea. “Yes. I think they’re hoping to laugh at our weakness. Maybe they want us to beg for it.”
Briony rolled her eyes. “Well, we’ll just have to remember this next year when we’re home. Perhaps we’ll weld all their windows shut so they can just swelter.”
Part of the treaty that had kept Evermore and Bomard peaceful for five hundred years was that the youth of both countries would be schooled together, in alternate countries, for the last five years of their magical education. Next year, the Bomardi would be schooled near Evermore’s temperate lakes, but this year it was Bomard’s turn to host.
While there was certainly a divide between those who practiced mind magic and those who practiced heart magic, the basic principles were very much the same. It was the source of the power and the connection to it that differed. For a heart magician, lifting a rock into the air started in the muscle.
For a mind magician, it started at the source of movement—the brain. Heart magicians felt a pulsing vein of magic in their chest, while mind magicians felt a thread between the eyes, tying their mind to the outside world.
Briony had always been taught that the Eversun mind magic was an evolved technique: Mind magicians did not tire as quickly as heart magicians, and the Bomardi didn’t have the patience for mind magic. Heart magicians could accidentally deplete their magic, yes, but it took less training to get strong results the first time. Consistency was the friend of the mind magician.
“Let’s just be happy that there are private rooms assigned to the Rosewoods,” Rory said.
“I don’t know what good it does us. At least in the dormitories, there’s more body heat.” Briony reached for her teacup and heated the liquid to scalding. They’d been in Bomard for a month, and she was the last Eversun still shivering in the classrooms.
She stared at Rory from across the small table laid with fruit and bread as he shoveled food into his mouth. He was a full head taller than her now and
had been eating twice as much. Now, a few months shy of seventeen, they were finally looking less alike. He had put on muscle during a winter of training with the infantry, and she had spent the season broadening in all the places she wished she wouldn’t. It had taken only one glance at Larissa Gains’s cinched waist and delicate wrists upon arriving in Bomard for Briony to realize that perhaps a winter spent reading and eating honeyed pastries wasn’t doing her any favors.
“Shall we go?” Rory asked, popping one more biscuit into his mouth.
Briony swallowed down the last of her tea, letting it burn her tongue. She grabbed a wool scarf from her wardrobe, hating the cool weight of it across her neck before it acclimated to her warmth.
She followed Rory down to the grand hall on the first floor, where the year one students were taught every morning from nine till noon. The year twos were the floor above, and the year threes were the floor above that, and so on, with the dormitories above those. The private suite for the Eversun heir was at the very top, in a turret. Rory and Briony were ten minutes late to the first day of lessons, and the Bomardi tutors had been incredibly unpleasant about it. Father had sent a letter the next day instructing Briony to focus on her brother’s timeliness.
On the seventh floor, they picked up Didion from the boys’ dormitories, and on the sixth, Cordelia joined them.
“How many logs for the fire do they give your dormitory?” Briony asked Cordelia as they linked arms.
“Wait! I’m coming!” a voice called from behind them.
Briony and Cordelia groaned. They pasted on smiles and turned.
A girl with bright-green eyes and hair as yellow as straw stumbled to
catch up.
“Good morning, Katrina,” Briony said.
“It’s starting to warm up, isn’t it!” Katrina said, voice perpetually a bit too loud. Briony frowned, suppressing a chill. Katrina’s eyes popped wide. “I forgot my notes!” She turned and ran back toward the dormitory door.
Briony glanced at Rory and Didion as they continued on, descending the next set of stairs already.
“I suppose we can’t just leave her now,” Cordelia said dryly.
Briony sighed in agreement. Her father had foisted a friendship with Katrina Cove upon Briony a year ago, despite the two of them having nothing in common. Katrina was the daughter of a peace treaty marriage. She’d been raised in Bomard for her first fifteen years, but after her mother’s death, her father returned home to Evermore with her. There was nothing wrong with Katrina, strictly speaking, but she was loud, clumsy, and talked about how happy she was to be back in Bomard daily as Briony seethed and shivered.
Cordelia and Briony waited for her and watched the rest of the early risers leaving their rooms, starting to pack the stairwell.
Briony’s bones shook as a draft seemed to breeze by them.
“Still cold, your grace?”
The air in her chest seemed to frost over. She didn’t need to turn to see who had spoken. There were only a handful of people who felt the need to poke fun at the Rosewood royalty.
Toven Hearst and his pack of Bomardi boys were descending from the seventh-floor dormitories.
Briony had suffered more slights and humiliations in the past month at the hands of Toven and his friends than she had in her entire lifetime. They called her “princess” or “your grace.” They threw purple roses at her in the hallways, the symbol of the Rosewood crest. They swept into low bows when she entered a room. For someone who’d spent the first sixteen years of her life instructed not to outshine her brother—to be plain and unnoticeable—it was mortifying. Briony had sobbed into her pillow for the first week, wondering if her own people thought she was as snobbish and condescending as the Bomardi claimed she was.
Briony tilted her chin up and waited for them to pass without a glance in their direction.
“Oh stones, the chill has gotten her hearing as well,” said Liam Quill, a handsome dark-haired boy with copper skin whose arrogance ruined his looks.
“Hey, Princess!” a thick voice said. “I know what will warm you up.”
Briony’s nose scrunched, and she spun to face them as they howled in
laughter. The lewd one was Canning Trow. He was three years older than them and had no business talking that way to a sixteen-year-old, in Briony’s opinion.
She glared into his wide and leering face as they passed.
“No, haven’t you heard?” A high-pitched voice came from the girls’ dormitory. “Her brother keeps her warm enough. That’s why they share a suite.”
Larissa Gains glided toward the pack of boys. A flowery scent somehow preluded her arrival instead of following it, and her thick sheets of blond hair swayed hypnotically in time with her hips.
The boys’ laughter rang from the stairwell as they descended. Toven Hearst hung back with a sharp smirk in her direction and waited for Larissa to grab his arm before following her down the stairs.
Briony had learned from a very young age that as a woman in the Rosewood line, the most valuable thing she could learn to do was smile when
she’d rather scream.
Cordelia, on the other hand— “What an absolutely depraved thing to say!” she yelled after Larissa.
Briony grabbed her wrist, trying to shush her, but Cordelia continued. “And you can’t even say it to her face!”
Larissa paused on the top step and called back, “I did say it to her face, I just find it so hideous to look at directly.” She winced dramatically and flounced down the stairs.
Toven threw his head back and laughed deep in his throat. “You’re so bad,” he said, the sound disappearing with him as he followed.
Briony closed her eyes and took deep breaths. Cordelia grumbled next to her.
“Where the fuck is Katrina?” Briony hissed.
“Here! Sorry!” Katrina linked arms with both of them and dragged them to the stairs. “Did anyone else have troubles with the assignment?”
Briony let herself be dragged. There was a bottleneck in the circling stairwell, as there always was if the younger students waited too long. They quickly caught up behind Toven and Larissa, and Briony slowed Katrina
down. As the stairs twisted, Toven looked up and smiled smugly up at them.
Briony frowned at her shoes. The draft was back in the stairwell again, and she had to focus everything in her to keep from full-body shivering.
“It’s a shame we don’t have royalty in Bomard,” Larissa said to Liam Quill, loud enough for them to hear. “I’d have liked to be a princess.”
“Our rulers follow a bloodline,” Cordelia said briskly. “Yours follow wealth and power. Completely up to chance.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Toven said, his voice drifting up to her ears. “My father’s the richest man in Bomard—actually the entire continent of Moreland—and he’s only eighth in line for the Seat.”
Liam scoffed. “Richest only if you count properties and holdings across the sea—”
“Which we do,” Toven said patronizingly. “We all do.”
There was only one more staircase to take, and then they’d be free of them. Briony squeezed Cordelia’s elbow, begging her to hold her tongue a little while longer.
“Katrina, dear, I don’t know how you survived leaving us,” Larissa said.
“You must prefer Bomard to Evermore.”
Katrina looked between them all, unsure how best to respond without insulting anyone. “Well, I do miss it—”
“Of course you do. I prefer Bomard to Evermore any day,” Larissa said.
“At least in Bomard they abolished patriarchal succession. A woman could never be ruler of Evermore. Despite how high and mighty they may act...”
Her eyes drifted up Briony’s embroidered wool dress to her face.
“I’d be pretty full of myself, too, if I had gold running through my blood,”
Toven said.
Briony kept her expression blank, even though the energy around them crackled.
When they finally turned into the classroom, a long hall with tapestries on one side and large windows on the other, they found it unrecognizable. Three dozen towering pine trees lined the center of the room, seemingly sprouted up overnight. Needles littered the bases of the trunks as wide as a human chest.
Briony found Rory and Didion staring up at one tree and wandered over to
join them.
“Are we...climbing the trees?” Didion asked.
“No, Mr. Winchester.” The long-suffering voice of Tutor Amelia came from behind them as she walked to the front of the classroom. She was a brusque woman in her forties who didn’t seem to enjoy teaching all that much.
Didion blushed and pulled out his notes.
As Briony smiled at Didion’s embarrassment, a chill crested over her shoulders, and her breath shuddered in her chest. She burrowed further into her cloak and scarf.
Toven Hearst came to stand at the tree next to theirs, and Finn and Liam joined him.
“Positively balmy in here, wouldn’t you say, Finn?” said Toven conversationally.
Briony frowned. So he’d seen her shiver.
“Makes me want to strip down,” Finn said.
“Wish I had some of those Eversun fabrics about now,” Toven said, shedding his cloak dramatically and tossing it to the side of the room. “The silks.”
She sent a glare his way and found him rolling up the sleeves of his shirt as if it were a warm summer’s day. The veins under his pale skin seemed to strain.
“Absolutely,” Finn agreed. “And I’d do anything for an iced glass of fairy wine. So cold, it could crack the glass.”
Briony turned back to the front, waiting for Tutor Amelia to begin. She tucked her chin into her scarf, blowing hot air into the fabric and letting it
warm her lower face.
Rory frowned at her. “You’re cold?”
“You’re not?”
She felt that draft again. And suddenly it clicked.
Briony’s neck snapped to look at Toven. He was rolling up his other sleeve, his mirthful eyes on her. The fingertips of the hand by his side were rotating in infinitesimal circles.
He was the one sending a breeze her way. She was cold because of Toven Hearst.
Briony’s eyes lit on fire. She watched Toven’s lips turn up in a smirk.
“Comfortable, your grace?”
She flushed in anger, but despite that, her body shivered without her permission.
She heard Finn cover a laugh with a cough.
Briony ripped off her scarf and followed Toven’s lead, defiantly shucking off her cloak and tossing it to the corner of the room. The air hit her in a rush, breezing over her uncovered arms and shoulders, but she grasped the thread of magic between her eyes and began pulling on the heat in her blood with rotations of her fingertips, warming her against the chill.
Now that she knew what was affecting her, she could counteract it nicely.
Tutor Amelia called for attention. Briony faced forward, but she could still feel Toven’s eyes on her.
“We are going to put last week’s lesson into practical use today,” Tutor Amelia said. “As we know, all magic is done with gesture. From your early schooling, you may have learned simple magic that brings objects to you or pushes them away, but that is rudimentary at best. Last week we identified the original eight magical gestures, which are—?”
A dozen hands shot into the air. Briony’s stayed by her side, even as Rory’s palm shyly lifted.
She knew the answer, but this was part of the deal with her father. She was allowed to receive good marks, but never better than Rory. She couldn’t outshine him in class. If Rory was struggling, it was her duty to make sure he succeeded. No matter how.
“Mr. Rosewood.” Tutor Amelia turned to the chalkboard.
“Push, pull, throw, smash, tear, lift, drag...” Rory cleared his throat and glanced down at his notes.
He was forgetting the one gesture that Briony (and Toven, actually) was currently using. Briony paused the circling of her fingers that gathered the warmth in her blood and tapped into the thread behind her eyes again. With a
curl of her finger, she pulled the words on Rory’s page into new shapes, new letters.
She watched him focus on the ink she was manipulating. “Gather,” he said, finishing the list. Briony released the ink, allowing it to return to the form it was before. Rory sent her the briefest of smiles in gratitude.
“Very good.” Tutor Amelia wrote the first eight on the chalkboard. “And Vindecci identified two more with the advent of mind magic. What are they,
Miss Rosewood?”
“I don’t know, Tutor Amelia.”
The older woman dropped her arm from where she was adding the word gather to the bottom of the list on the chalkboard. She turned, and the classroom held its breath.
“Two gestures. Not on this list,” she said, pointing to the board.
Briony felt her skin heat, and it had nothing to do with the warming charm she was employing. She shook her head and stared again at Rory’s notes, knowing exactly what would happen next. She twitched her finger and
dragged the ink around the page again.
“One of them, Miss Rosewood?”
The letters rearranged. R...E...
“Mr. Rosewood, can you assist your sister? She seems to have slept through last week’s lessons,” Tutor Amelia said disdainfully.
Rory looked down at his notes, following the letters she manipulated.
Even in the early years of their education at home, she’d helped him in maths and history like this. When they were very young, he used to say that they were answering the questions together, as a team. This spirit of teamwork continued at school now.
“Reach,” Rory said, looking up from the moving letters on his page.
“Mr. Hearst? The final gesture added?” Tutor Amelia turned back to the board.
Briony lifted her gaze, watching the word reach added to the list. The pause before Toven spoke caused Briony to look over at him.
He was leaning against the nearest tree trunk, arms crossed and eyes narrowed on her.
No. Not on her. On Rory’s notes.
He glanced up at her with suspicion in his gray gaze and answered silkily, “Penetrate.”
Briony tore her eyes away, cheeks burning.
“Excellent. Please take note, Miss Rosewood.” Tutor Amelia clapped her hands. “Today we are giving a practical application to the gestures. Step one is carving words or designs into the wood. Step two is cutting off the branches. And the more advanced step is cutting the trunk down, as with an ax.”
Cordelia grumbled, “Wasteful. These poor trees.”
“They were destined to become your firewood, Miss Hardstark,” said Tutor Amelia. “We in Bomard don’t consider our warmth ‘wasteful.’”
Cordelia pursed her lips against the laughing whispers of their Bomardi classmates.
“Now, four to a tree,” Tutor Amelia instructed.
Briony inched closer to the tree to her right, but unfortunately, Rory, Didion, Katrina, Cordelia, and herself made five. They shuffled, looking around for an empty spot. When Briony turned backward, Toven Hearst, Liam Quill, and Finn Raquin were smirking at her from their tree.
“Oh, Briony, dear,” Finn said in a sugary-sweet voice. “We have room for one here.”
Briony sighed and resigned herself to separating from her friends.
“Begin by choosing which of the gestures best suits your task,” Tutor Amelia said. “You are to draw your initials into the tree trunk. First from a close distance. Then from a farther one.”
Briony stood two feet from her tree and frowned at the bark. Just beyond the trunk, she could see Toven Hearst doing the same. Finn was to her left, Liam to her right.
Push, pull, throw, smash, tear, lift, drag, gather, reach, penetrate. Which one?
“Once you’ve chosen a gesture, call upon your magic. The vein in your chest for heart mages. The thread in your mind for mind mages.”
She imagined a knife in her mind’s eye. She placed it against the bark and
dragged. The first line of the B eased its way into the bark. It was faint, but it was there.
Briony smiled at her success on the first try. The joy was short-lived, as she glanced past the trunk and found Toven narrowing his eyes at her. She tilted her chin up and refocused on carving the curves of the B.
She’d just gotten the basic outlines of it and was beginning to go over the letters again when she heard Liam huff in exasperation to her right. She glanced at his side of the tree, finding not even the first line of the L.
Briony quickly searched behind her. There were no letters carved yet into the tree Rory, Didion, Cordelia, and Katrina were working on.
All around her, classmates were glaring at their tree trunks. Some of them even had veins popping out in their temples in their concentration.
Tutor Amelia was circling them, coming closer to Briony’s tree.
Briony turned back and quickly pushed the bark back together, healing the tree and hiding her initial. Tutor Amelia approached them, standing over Toven’s shoulder.
“Barely there, Mr. Hearst, but it is there. Very good,” Tutor Amelia said.
“Work on the H now.”
Briony’s brows rose. Of all of them, Toven was making progress? It shouldn’t have been a surprise really. The Hearst family had an incredibly powerful bloodline. Every few generations, a Hearst would manifest a powerful gift—some strength or skill that others worked years to build.
Toven’s father, Orion, could split his casting endlessly: Normally, a magician could only cast one spell per hand, but Orion Hearst could split one magical gesture into two spells.
As Tutor Amelia came around the tree, tutting at Liam’s lack of progress, Toven smirked proudly at Briony.
Maybe Toven Hearst would manifest a skill for chopping down trees, Briony thought petulantly. He’d make a fine lumberjack. She almost snorted at the image of Toven tasked with such menial work.
Her gaze flicked to his exposed forearms again before refocusing on the bare bark of the tree as Tutor Amelia came to stand beside her.
A heavy sigh came from their instructor. “Pay better attention in the
theory lessons, Miss Rosewood, and perhaps you’ll have progress.”
“Yes, Tutor Amelia.”
Briony stared at the spot in the bark where she’d hidden her B. As the older woman walked away, Briony’s eyes were drawn to gray ones on the other side of the trunk. Toven had knit his brows together, staring at her as if she were a rock stuck in his boot.
“The first person to carve two even initials on their tree will receive the top marks for today’s lesson and the month,” Tutor Amelia announced. “Mr.
Hearst is leagues ahead of everyone else so far.”
The class groaned, but Toven was still watching her.
Briony looked away from him, turning to see how Rory was coming along. No progress. She sighed. Their father wouldn’t be happy to hear that Rory was bested by a Bomardi for the first month’s marks.
Briony faced forward, staring at her tree trunk but relaxing her gaze.
There was a vein in her chest thumping with unused magic. She imagined a string between herself and Rory, connecting their hearts, connecting their magic.
It wasn’t the first time she’d amplified him. He’d been unknowingly accepting a push of her magic for years—during lessons, when healing from injuries, in rare boyhood brawls. She couldn’t remember how she’d done it the first time, and it wasn’t like there were a lot of people in Evermore whom she could ask about this kind of magic. This had to be a kind of heart magic that she assumed came from a bond with her twin.
She pumped her magic on a string to Rory’s heart. And waited.
She heard a gasp from behind her.
“Oh wow,” Rory whispered. “I did it.”
She glanced at his tree. She wasn’t sure what gesture he was using, but there, in the bark, was a perfect R.
Didion craned his neck to see it. “Well, do it again!” he whispered excitedly.
Briony watched Rory concentrate, and now that she’d opened the connection, she felt him tug on it. The bark split apart. A matching R appeared next to the first.
She saw the corner of Rory’s mouth turn up in an amazed grin. He didn’t look to her in silent thanks this time. It was only the book studies and assignments that Rory thought he needed extra assistance in. Briony looked down at her shoes.
Didion raised his hand. “Tutor Amelia! Rory’s done it!”
The entire class turned to look at Rory and Didion’s tree. The entire class but one.
Toven Hearst’s gaze was narrowed on her.
Tutor Amelia congratulated Rory and told him to try it from ten feet away.
Briony watched as he backed up and refocused. Tutor Amelia stood at his side.
Now that Rory had felt the burst of power, even without knowing where it had come from, he knew how to draw it quickly.
R R appeared like a crack of a whip. The class gasped, and Rory’s smile was so bright that Briony couldn’t help but match it.
That morning, Rory carved an entire poem into his side of the tree while the others worked to get their initials. Overall, the Bomardi were faster at making the carvings, but the Eversuns had more precision. With practice and patience, mind magic was much more effective, but heart magic would always show strength first.
Even so, Liam Quill was the last to accomplish it. He had sweat rolling down his temples and his breath was shallow by the time he’d crossed the Q.
Not for the first time, Briony was glad she pulled on magic from the mind instead of the heart. Liam wasn’t the only heart magician who was looking worse for wear.
“Mr. Quill,” Tutor Amelia said. She placed a kind hand on his shoulder.
“Excellent work, but you’ll need to rest now. Your magic will be drained soon.”
He shrugged off her comfort, a snarl on his face. “I’ll do no such thing. I intend to cut down every one of these trees!”
Briony felt the shame and anger radiating off him in waves. She glanced at his friends and found Finn chewing on his cheek in concern and Toven rolling his eyes.
“You look far too close to husking, Liam,” Toven said.
Husking was what happened to heart magicians who drained themselves.
They were alive but a husk of themselves; the magic was used up. There was no such risk for mind magicians.
“This wouldn’t be an issue if familiars were allowed in school,” Liam grumbled.
“And have bears and wolves roaming the school? No, thank you,” Finn said.
Tutor Amelia called for them to turn to the task of cutting down the tree, striking at the trunk.
“Won’t that mean there will be trees falling down in here?” Larissa said, looking pale with the drain on her magic.
“I will be very surprised if anyone can actually slice through a tree today, Miss Gains,” Tutor Amelia said patronizingly. “This lesson will test your skill as well as your aim, so please be mindful of not casting at classmates.”
Briony watched as Toven Hearst raised a hand and sliced through the air, as if an ax were in his hand. Their tree shivered.
“Excellent, Mr. Hearst.”
Liam made the same motion, but it was sloppy.
“Watch it,” Finn said. “Focus, or you’ll end up slicing me in half.”
Briony glanced at Rory, casting a tearing gesture with his hands, trying to separate the trunk from itself.
As he lifted his hands to try again, she pushed the pulse of her magic down the vein to him.
There was a mighty crack, and the room went silent. Everyone turned to stare at Rory’s tree. It had split up the middle, two halves separating from the center of the trunk outward. The class screamed as the pieces fell sideways, but Tutor Amelia slowed their descent to a soft landing.
“Very well done, Mr. Rosewood. The rest of you, spread out to another tree.”
Katrina quickly joined their tree, and Briony made room for her between herself and Liam.
“Stones, it’s so much harder to use mind magic over heart magic,” Katrina
said, pushing her hair away from her face. “It’s incredible to see how much power Rory has, though!”
Briony heard a huff of exasperation and turned to see Toven glaring at them. He swung his arm through the air, and their tree shivered again.
Liam turned to Toven and whispered, “Are you boosting?”
“You know that’s not allowed in school,” Toven replied. Then he turned his eyes on her. “Is it, Rosewood?”
Briony narrowed her eyes at the conversation. What was “boosting”? A heart magic technique?
“I’m not letting every Eversun outrank me,” Liam said under his breath.
He checked to make sure Tutor Amelia’s gaze was elsewhere, and his left
hand twitched toward Katrina.
“Liam,” Finn said sternly.
Briony watched in confusion as Katrina gasped, her hand going to her chest. Before Briony could figure out what was happening, Liam sliced his right arm at the tree, and a mark like the chop of an ax appeared in the bark.
Katrina stumbled, and Briony helped her stay upright.
“What happened?” Briony asked her.
Katrina looked at Liam, fear in her eyes as he smirked back at her.
“Nothing,” Katrina said. “Just a pain in my...stomach.”
Briony was about to ask why her hand had been at her chest and not her stomach when Tutor Amelia came over.
“Miss Cove? I thought you were focusing your education on mind magic, not heart magic. There is no reason for your body to be exhausted.”
“I...yes, Tutor Amelia. I should be using mind magic instead, my apologies.”
“Husking is a very real thing,” Tutor Amelia said. “Go rest.”
Katrina retreated to the side of the room, and Briony looked from Liam to Toven and Finn, trying to figure out what Liam had done to Katrina. She caught Larissa’s smug eyes at the tree in the center, then watched her left hand stretch toward the person at her side, an Eversun girl.
The girl gasped, and then Larissa sliced at the tree in one solid motion, the
crack of breaking bark drawing everyone’s attention. Larissa smiled as the Eversun girl coughed, catching her breath.
“Come on, Toven,” Liam said. “It’s only against the rules if you get caught.”
Liam glanced at Briony, and she saw his hand reach for her. She waited for the shock. The pain. Anything.
Liam’s brow furrowed. Briony glanced at Toven, who showed no surprise at the lack of results. He was still watching her, almost disapprovingly.
Liam tried again.
“Hey!” They turned to see Rory looking furiously at Liam. “Are you boosting?” Rory hissed. “From the daughter of the king!”
“That’s rich, coming from you,” Toven said.
Rory turned his glare on him. “What are you talking about?”
Toven looked to her again, as if waiting for her to explain.
Was she boosting him? Was that what it was when she sent him her magic? But it didn’t exhaust or pain her to send her magic to Rory, like it had done to Katrina when taken from her.
“I’m hearing talk of boosting over here,” Tutor Amelia said as she arrived. “I hope we all know that the use of boosting from a human is grounds for expulsion for the Bomardi, not to mention illegal for the Eversuns.”
Briony blinked at her, shock creeping over her skin. She looked down at her boots, worrying her lip between her teeth.
The Bomardi boys muttered excuses, but as a group they seemed to stop whatever it was they had been doing. As class ended, with no one but Rory able to fully cut down a tree, Briony stayed behind with Katrina, who was almost back to full strength again.
“Katrina, what is boosting? I’ve never heard of it.”
Katrina sighed. “It’s a quick boost of heart magic, only without permission.”
Briony frowned at her, waiting for more.
Katrina continued. “Heart magic can be shared, like when a couple marries and decides to share their magic. They become heartsprings with
each other in a ceremony that’s usually incorporated into the marriage vows.”
Katrina reached for her words. “Kind of like combining your gold when you combine your families, the heart magic gets combined, making each person better, stronger. Since heart magicians grow weaker faster, it’s like an alternative to bonding to an animal familiar. Or an addition, really, as you can have both.”
“I’ve heard of spouses sharing heart magic, but that’s a mutual cycle of power, I thought,” Briony said as they reached the stairs. “Liam took something from you, didn’t he?”
Katrina winced. Her hand rubbed her chest, almost unconsciously.
“Yeah. It feels like a zap, like a sizzle of electricity. Boosting feels like that when the magic is taken from you. If he’d asked permission, or if I’d given my magic freely, it wouldn’t be painful.”
Briony’s skin tingled. She gave her magic to Rory all the time. She’d never thought of it as something that could be taken from her, only shared.
“So you can give or take heart magic without being bonded as heart...heart —”
“Heartsprings, yes. The official bond keeps the magic flowing at all times.
It’s usually tied to jewelry. My parents...” Katrina swallowed. “Even though my father didn’t use heart magic as an Eversun, he still gave it freely to my mother through their wedding rings.”
Briony glanced at her. Katrina’s face was pale with the effort of climbing the stairs, and her eyes were watery as she spoke of her parents. A pang went through Briony as she thought of what it would have been like to lose a mother that she’d known for fifteen years instead of one she’d never known at all. She supposed she and Katrina might have some things in common after all.
“It sounds like the heartspring bond is synonymous with love, in a way,”
Briony said with a smile. “We don’t have anything like it in Evermore. It’s lovely.”
“It’s not always tied to love.” Katrina checked the hall to make sure there were no eavesdroppers before lowering her voice. “There are some people in Bomard—in the woods or far from the cities—who, like Liam, don’t ask
permission. There are betrothals in the deep country that occur just for the dowry of the person’s magic. There’s no cycle of magic between the spouses, just excess for one. It’s becoming more and more common, too. There are even people kept as servants, their magic weakened by the daily drain.”
They stopped in between staircases so Katrina could rest.
Briony’s mind was whirring. “How is this allowed in Bomard? Why isn’t it illegal everywhere?” she asked.
Katrina’s brows shot up. “I mean, what do you think caused our countries to split apart six hundred years ago? We were one happy country on this continent for so long—”
“Until Vindecci discovered mind magic, and the Bomardi refused to learn it,” Briony said, reciting the history.
Katrina’s nose wrinkled. “That’s the history they taught you? Truly?
Daughter of the king?”
A boiling fury rose in Briony’s chest. She hated when she was made to feel uninformed. She pushed it down and focused on the here and now.
“I don’t understand. Does my father know what’s happening in Bomard?”
Briony asked.
“I’m sure he does. But why start another war over it?” Katrina shrugged and started to move up the stairs again. “It’s really nice of you to wait for me, by the way.”
Briony pasted on a weak smile and nodded.
She had so many questions now, but what worried her the most was she now knew she had been “boosting” Rory throughout their lives. And not only was it illegal in her country and prohibited at school...but now, Toven Hearst knew about it.
