He shook his head. “Why wouldn’t you want any of them? All of them? Doesn’t matter to me, as long as you know I’m here for youtoo.”
“You don’t think it’s strange? I don’t know if I could ever just decide between you.” I paused. “I wouldn’t wantto.”
“It’s always been all of us,” Ky said. “That’s how we’re at our best. Maybe it makes more sense likethis.”
My thoughts drifted to those images I’d seen carved inside the stone tower. The witches with their multiple consorts. Maybe it hadn’t been strange to some distant ancestors of mineeither.
But those consorts would still have been witching men, wouldn’tthey?
The tension in my throat came back. I wanted to burrow my head in the crook of Ky’s neck and drown myself in the musky, minty smell of his skin, but that wouldn’t change what wastrue.
“I don’t think I can have any of you,though.”
He pulled back a little farther so he could more easily meet my eyes. “Why not? You said before that this marriage isn’t so easy to get out of—what’s really going on,Rose?”
My instinct was to deflect and change the subject, like I’d always had to when we got close to any witching subject. I stopped myself before those words could comeout.
I’d told Seth. I’dshownSeth. Maybe not in extended detail, but enough. The guys all knew at least alittle.
Ever since I was a little girl, my father, Meredith, every tutor had drilled into me that a witch never showed her magic, never talked about her magic, with the unsparked. But my guys were more thanthat.
“Kiss me again,” I said, “and I’ll showyou.”
Ky looked a little puzzled, but not enough to stop him from lowering his mouth to mine. I tipped my head, my lips sliding against his, the shiver of that pleasure racing down into my chest and making that glimmer of a spark flare a littlebrighter.
When Ky drew back, I curved my arm, summoning up that hint of power. Then I twisted my wrist and cupped my fingers. One of the pebbles he’d gathered lifted off the ground and flew into myhand.
Ky’s eyebrows rose. He stared at the pebble on my palm and then at me. A grin broke across his face. “Amazing,” hesaid.
His appreciation emboldened me. “I’ll be able to do a whole lot more than fling around stones,” I said. “But only… I’ll lose every chance I have of coming into my power if I don’t take a consort in the proper ceremony by the time I’m twenty-five. Which is two months from now. And I need a consort who comes from a family line that shares that kind ofpower.”
Ky was silent for a moment. I could almost see his thoughts darting by behind his curious eyes. He knew how to put the pieces he hadtogether.
“I helped you do that somehow,” he said, motioning to the pebble. “Like this consort of yours would? But I’m not—I’m justordinary.”
“You,” I said firmly, “are anything but ordinary. But you’re not… You’re not mykind.”
“Are yousurethat’s what you need?” Ky asked. “If it could work a little bit with someone likeme…”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But that’s what I’ve always been taught. And if I ignore what I thought I knew, and it turns out I’m wrong… There’ll be no way to get back mymagic.”
Chapter Twenty
Rose
Dad’s library had at least thirty volumes on witching history and folklore. Not one of them contained any mention of a witch taking an unsparked partner as consort. Or taking more than one consort at the sametime.
I frowned as I slid the last one back into theshelf.
“You know I hold books in high esteem,” Philomena said, strolling around the bookcases. “But noteverythingcan be found inone.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “If iteverhappened, you’d think someone would have told a story aboutit.”
“Hmm.” Phil fluttered her fan. “It depends on who was writing up those stories, and how much they wanted anyone to know, don’t you think? That’s your specialty, isn’t it—organizing and archiving? Choices are made, and not always by people who want the full story told. It horrifies me sometimes, the amount of truth that was written out of the texts of mytime.”
My stomach knotted. She had a point. Every book cautiously published and distributed for the witching community had to go through a rigorous vetting process by the Assembly. And of course the stories collected were edited by the collector. What I’d done with those I’d gathered for my own modern history project was simply removing repetitive bits, but that was because authenticity mattered to me.And the stories I’d gathered were accounts committed to paper, possibly already edited by the teller or by those who watched overus.
I couldn’t say any of the other witching people involved in our record keeping or governance had an agenda to keep information like this secret… but I couldn’t say they didn’teither.