A groan of pure anguish ripped from his mouth. “What? Why?”
“Shh.” I propped myself up on one elbow to look down at him. I had important things to say before I could allow myself to be distracted. “There are some people,” I told him carefully, “who think that I can be a tad...dictatorial from time to time when I’m making decisions for your sake. And...some people have pointed out that I don’t always take the time to ask you what you actually want before I do it.”
His eyes narrowed; one long, clever finger trailed distractingly down my neck, slipping gently beneath the edge of my bodice. “Harwood, if you imagine I don’t want this...”
I captured that dangerous, stray finger and held it. “Wrexham,” I said, “I have an idea to solve all of our problems—with your career and with our marriage, to bring us more time together. But I don’t want to tell you what to do. So I need to ask first: what do you want next? Truly? Without worrying about what I need.”
My husband’s dark eyebrows arched as he watched me for a long moment in silence. Then he said slowly, “Other people have said, from time to time, that I have a tendency to keep too many of my own thoughts private. So...you can hardly be blamed for not knowing what I’m thinking, if I’ve never said the words out loud.”
“But I want to know,” I said, “and it’s safe to tell me. Truly.”
“I know.” He sighed, propping himself up on the bed beside me. “And you know I didn’t form that habit because of you. But when it comes to our marriage...” His gaze was raw with unhidden emotion. “I couldn’t bear to risk losing you. Never again.”
“Not ever.” I held his gaze. “No matter what you want, I swear I won’t hold it against you. Even if it conflicts with my dreams, I know we can sort it out somehow, working together.”
“Well...” His eyes lowered, long eyelashes shadowing his lean brown cheeks. “I have had an idea of my own,” he said. “But if it diminished one of your dreams... I couldn’t bear it if you said yes only because—”
“Wrexham.” I nudged his shoulder gently. “Just tell me!”
He took a deep breath, looking down at the sheets between us. “I’m not like you.” His voice was quiet but steady. “I love magic itself, but I never dreamed of fame and public acclaim as you did. My dreams were exactly what you grew up taking for granted. A family all collected in one place. Enough money for everyone I love to be safe. A home full of people whom I love.”
“And you don’t think you can have that now?” A half-laugh startled out of me. “Look around at this house! What do you think I’ve been designing for us here, if not that?”
As his eyes flashed back to mine, the sheer vulnerability in his expression stopped my breath. “But this school is your dream,” he said softly. “And you never invited me to share in it. Not even once. I kept hoping that you would, in time, but—”
“Oh, for—!” A half-sob fell from my throat as I sat up straight, staring down at him in disbelief. “Of course I never asked you to work at Thornfell. How could I? I was afraid you would feel that you had to agree—and then you’d lose your own future and all of your dreams. You know you’d be slashed from the Great Library’s register of alumni if you worked here—just as I was, and Luton, too. How could I be the one to ask you for that?”
He frowned up at me. “But—”
“I want you to have everything you want,” I said firmly. “The fact that this school started as my dream doesn’t mean it has to belong only to me forever. It’s already being shared by all of my students. And do you have any idea how badly I could use a second professor of magic? Then I wouldn’t have to teach every class but weather wizardry and run myself ragged every day! To have another magician I could truly trust here—much less someone who could teach my students, from experience, the real, practical work that an officer of magic does—”
“So you are inviting me to work here with you and build this dream together after all?” My husband’s lips began to curve as he rose to meet me eye-to-eye, one hand settling gently on my closest shoulder. “Is that what you’re saying to me, right now, Harwood? And was that your idea for how we could solve things tonight, even before I told you what I wanted?”
“Well, of course it was! But I was afraid you would only agree for my sake, so...” I shook my head ruefully. “Oh, my love. Have you ever noticed that both of us are good at understanding magic but rather hopeless at understanding other people?”
Wrexham looked at me for a long moment, as intensely as if he were memorizing every detail. Then: “No,” he said firmly. “I’m afraid you’re wrong, Harwood. Completely wrong, in fact. Entirely mistaken.”
“I am?” I blinked.
His eyes glittered dangerously in the candlelight. “We are both good at magic,” he told me, “and we will run an excellent school together.
“However...” My husband’s lips curved into a triumphantly wicked grin as he gave my shoulder a sudden, gentle push and tumbled me, off-guard, onto my back on the mattress of our bed.
My breath caught as I lost my balance. Wrexham shifted fluidly above me, caging my shoulders between his arms. His dark gaze blazed into mine, fierce with joy and wonder—and all mine, forever, with no more horrible, endless separations forced between us.
“I think you’ll find, darling Harwood,” he murmured, his breath warm against my skin, “that we understand one another in an extremely vital and personal way. If, as my new headmistress, you would allow me a practical demonstration of that point...?”
Golden candlelight shone from the side table, lighting the hollows of my husband’s lean cheeks and his shining dark hair above me.
I wrapped my fingers around his shoulders and arched luxuriantly against him. Magic tingled in the air. A shining future stretched before us, full of more dazzling possibilities than I’d ever dreamed possible.
“Go on then,” I dared, and felt his breathing quicken in response. Over all these years, we had always risen to each other’s challenges. “Why don’t you prove it to me...if you can?”
He did.
Thoroughly.
What Comes Next
Thank you so much to everyone who’s read this second volume of Cassandra’s story! You’ve probably already read Volume I, but if you haven’t, you can catch up on the Harwood Spellbook by going back to Volume I, Snowspelled.
If you’d like to read the story of Amy and Jonathan’s own romance, you can read my prequel novella Spellswept (set in the Harwoods’ famous underwater ballroom).
You may not be surprised to learn that Miss Banks and Miss Fennell will jointly star in the next novella in this series. (And yes, of course they’ll get a happy ending. My heroines always do!) My working title for their story (which may or may not last up to publication) is Spelltangled, and it will be published by early 2020 at the very latest.
If you’d like to stay up-to-date with future stories in this series (and others)—and get the chance to read free tie-in short stories and win advance copies of future books!—please do sign up to my newsletter.
And if you have the time and energy to review Thornbound online, I would be incredibly grateful. Word-of-mouth makes a huge difference to the life of a series, and I’d love to keep on playing in this world for as long as possible. Thank you!
Spellswept
A Prequel to The Harwood Spellbook
In the world of the Harwood Spellbook, 19th-century Angland is ruled by a powerful group of women known as the Boudiccate—but in order to become a member of that elite group, any ambitious young politician must satisfy tradition by taking a gentleman mage for her husband.
Amy Standish is a born politician...but Jonathan Harwood is her greatest temptation. On the night of the Harwoods' Spring Solstice Ball, in an underwater ballroom full of sparkling fey lights and danger, Amy will have to fight the greatest political battle of her life to win a family and a future that she could never have imagined.
It will take an entirely unexpected kind of magic to keep
everything from crashing down around her.
Warning: this novella contains forbidden romance, dangerous magic, and political intrigue in an underwater ballroom. What could possibly go wrong?
Published first in the anthology The Underwater Ballroom Society and then republished as a standalone ebook. Both editions are available for purchase now.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my fearless and steadfast beta readers: Rene Sears, Patrick Samphire, and Jenn Reese. You guys kept me going through every stage, and I appreciated it SO MUCH.
Thank you to everyone who generously read and critiqued Thornbound despite the fact that I sent it to them at one of the busiest times of the year: Tiffany Trent, Leah Cypess, Claire Fayers, David Burgis, Aliette de Bodard, and Patrick Samphire. I am so grateful for the help!
Thank you to everyone who answered my call for help on Facebook when I needed to know more about the sounds of the woods at night: Sorrel Jones, Helen Hall, Helen Fairbank, Neil Beynon, Karen Ball, Suzanne McLeod, Emma Pass, Anthony McGowan, and Jaime Lee Moyer. Any leftover inaccuracies (that can’t be explained by fey magic!) are entirely my own fault.
Thank you to Leesha Hannigan for the gorgeous cover art, and for being so patient and flexible along the way. Thank you to Patrick Samphire for the speedy and fabulous cover design—it is so useful to be married to a wonderful cover designer! (And next time, I promise I’ll bake you vegan chocolate-chip cookies as a thank-you.)
Thank you so much to Tiffany Trent for careful copyediting, support, and friendship. Thank you to eagle-eyed early readers Melita Kennedy, Xenia Tashlitsky and Becky Browne for helping me clean up errors that I’d introduced post-copyedits.
And thank you to my older son, who forced me to break up my rewriting sessions to watch fun episodes of Kim Possible with him and told me he was sure that this book would be good. I truly appreciated both parts!
Copyright © 2019 by Stephanie Burgis Samphire
Cover art © 2019 by Leesha Hannigan
Cover design © 2019 by Patrick Samphire
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Thornbound: Volume II of The Harwood Spellbook Page 17