by Eden Reign
Jackson lifted his gaze. Though he had understood all along that Wilcott wished for him to come to Blazenfields mostly to arrange this moment, the girl’s appearance had never made much of an impression on his thoughts. She had a pretty, doll-like face with a porcelain complexion and small, rosebud lips. Catlike green eyes studied him beneath blonde hair streaked with amber, which she wore in a heavy braided arrangement garnished with green velvet ribbons. “Master Coal,” she murmured, offering a tiny curtsey. Most men would no doubt have found her a perfect vision.
Jackson felt nothing at all. She was not Manda. Her eyes could not soothe his soul; her hands could not caress away his pain.
“Miss Blazen,” he said, giving her a formal bow. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”
“Isn’t she a beauty, Jackson?” Wilcott had risen, too, and he stepped to Jackson’s side and slung one arm over his shoulder, though the reach was exceedingly awkward given their drastically different heights. “Leah, my dear, would you pour us both some tea? Jack, cream? Sugar?”
“Just a bit of lemon,” Jackson said, feeling adrift.
Wilcott pulled him over to the windows while Miss Blazen prepared tea. “To conclude our little discussion, Jackson. There are ways—simple ways—you could earn the trust of the Brotherhood. And then I could teach you everything I know. You’d be … family.” The smaller man turned and faced away from the window, beaming at his daughter. “And she’s a lovely girl, after all, isn’t she, Jackson?”
Jackson followed his gaze as Leah bent over the tea, squeezing lemon. Her face was as still as a mask, with so little response to her father’s match-making that it seemed she not only expected it, she accepted it.
Had Jackson been a typical fullmage, born and bred, this sort of arranging would have been the only approach to settling a marriage. Firemages married other firemages, just as fullmages also married among themselves. The same was true of Nanu and Akwa. Any other son of a firemage High Family would feel only pleasure at the prospect of an appropriate wife like Leah Blazen; she was pretty, she was refined, she was clearly well-trained. What firemage wouldn’t want her as a wife?
Jackson Coal, that’s who. She did not move him. Her smile seemed false and fixed as she lifted the teacup and sent him a questioning glance. Everything about her was too careful. She had none of Manda’s natural ease. Where Manda seemed to flow through life with the adaptability of water, this girl, with her tight braids and her wide hoops and her stiff motions, seemed hampered. Restrained. Controlled. Controlling, even.
Even the expression on her face looked painted on, as though to hide something beneath.
“I have a book upstairs that Jackson might like to examine,” Wilcott said loudly, patting Jackson’s back in his irritating, patronizing way.
Jackson steeled himself not to twitch. Could magemarks be sensed through touch? Merciful Rivers.
“I’ll just leave the two of you to get to know one another for a moment, shall I?” Wilcott continued as he veered for the parlor door.
“Your tea, Master Coal?” Miss Blazen smiled, her lips stretching unnaturally over her teeth.
“Thank you.” Jackson took the cup from her hands. She rather brazenly let her fingertips touch his.
He snapped his hand away, sloshing the tea into the saucer. He stepped backward to avoid spilling the hot liquid onto her, and slammed into the divan with his foot, so hard his eyes watered. “Thank you,” he said again.
“Master Coal, do have a seat.” Her tone implied that he might break the entire room if he didn’t.
He sat. She faced him from the same wing chair her father had occupied.
“Father says Coalhaven is very prosperous,” Leah Blazen began, setting down her own teacup with irritating finesse. “I would so like to see it. At the Brotherhood’s Winter Ball last year, I heard Maeve Sand telling Vivienne Cinder that Coalhaven was the rich—the prettiest plantation in Arcana.” She picked up a tiny spoon and attacked her tea with it, as though to stir away her small blunder.
“It is lovely,” Jackson said, “and fortunately untouched by the war. What happened here at Blazenfields? I noticed the scorched fields when I arrived. I do hope you were never in any danger.”
She dropped her spoon into her teacup, the tiny thing entirely submerged. They both stared at it for a moment before she retracted her hands and folded them in her lap. “Oh. The fire. Yes. Well. You know, with the war on, there was always a bit of danger, wasn’t there?”
Jackson raised his brows. “Here? At Blazenfields? But all the fighting was to the south, down in Savana. Chalton wasn’t burned anywhere except for an explosion at the Brotherhood Headquarters.”
She sat still on her chair, her face taking on a frozen cast. Jackson had been finding her unreadable, but as her emotions were pricked, Leah Blazen tightened—like a bow being drawn and then freezing at the fullest point of the draw, the arrow suspended at the verge of its deadly trajectory. What happens when the arrow finally flies?
“Some of our croppers joined the Levelers,” she said tightly. “They set fire to the fields when they left. Vile creatures.” She lifted her head, and for the first time, the curtains of control drew away from her eyes. Their green depths blazed. “Master Coal, how did you do it? How did you live for so long among them?” Her narrow shoulders shuddered.
“Among whom?”
“Why, mundanes of course.”
Jackson had to reel in his feelings. He had to keep the goal of the magemark secrets in mind. He inhaled deeply. “They are humans, just as we are,” he said blandly. “It was not such a trial as you imagine.”
“Just as we are! Indeed, they are not! We are as different from them as—oh—as a noble thoroughbred is from a rustic farm nag. Really, Master Coal, have you no pride?”
Jackson gave up on the tiny tea cup whose minuscule handle he couldn’t grasp in his too-large fingers, setting it on the table. “Some say I have too much, Miss Blazen.”
Only then did she flush. “Well, it is an odd sort of pride, then.”
“Indeed, an odd sort of pride.” Feeling desperate, Jackson plunged recklessly into his only desired topic of conversation. “Miss Blazen, do you share your father’s research interests?”
Her lips pursed, and her eyes widened. “Research? Why, what research do you mean, Master Coal?” Her face stilled again.
“Magemarks.” He watched with helpless fascination as his bluntness drove her to greater heights of frozen distress.
She stared out the window. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“My daughter prefers the lighter side of our powers.” Wilcott Blazen stepped back into the parlor, a leather-bound book in hand. “She makes beautiful firehearts. Did you show him one, Leah?”
Miss Blazen rose with almost mechanical precision and turned toward the mantel. She took down a large walnut chest and set it on the coffee table. When she opened the chest, Jackson could see several of the hearts, which were a traditional winter gift among firemages. They were made from a substance like porcelain, cast entirely from fire-power and then left to harden and age over several months. Each heart had a hole in the top where the firemage would infuse the inert material with power when the time for gifting arrived. Every firemage child learned to make them, but Jackson had never seen ones so intricate as these. The hearts were about the size of one of Miss Blazen’s hands, wrought in a crimson substance in a complicated filigree-like pattern, coated in a glassy glaze.
Miss Blazen brought one out, lifted it, and allowed her eyes to blur. The heart began to glimmer within like an ember, sending red light beaming from the empty spaces in the filigree pattern. She exchanged a tentative glance with her father before holding out the fireheart to Jackson.
“For you, Master Coal.”
Jackson could do nothing but take the gift, though inner instinct warned him against it.
The fireheart fell into his broad palms, oddly cool to the touch. “Thank you, Miss Blazen.”
&nbs
p; The girl’s green eyes tilted as a wide smile broke her mask-like face. “Open it, Master Coal.”
All it took was one tiny prod from his power, and the heart burst open in a shower of red, orange, and yellow light that flickered like flames. A pleasant warm rush rained over Jackson, almost pleasant enough to distract him from the biting sensation that struck his right wrist, reminding him of a similar impression he had felt in the past … a burrowing ember, digging beneath his flesh like a nesting chigger, tunneling, writhing, growing.
He slapped the bare skin of his right wrist where a glowing ember from the opening fireheart had landed.
“Master Coal? Are you all right?”
He blinked. Leah Blazen’s bright eyes gazed into his. “I—I’m sorry. You must forgive me, Miss Blazen. Since the war, I sometimes have these moments …” he trailed off. He didn’t want to tell her that. Why had he said that?
“Do not trouble yourself, Master Coal. Becoming a bit befuddled is a common reaction to my firehearts. Come, I’ll show you to your room. Father says you will stay with us for some time.”
His wrist stung, but he ignored the discomfort. He let the pretty young woman take his arm and lead him to the parlor door. His feet felt unsteady beneath him, and his head was spinning with a dizzy, full sensation. “I do feel that I could use a quick rest,” Jackson said blearily. “The carriage ride must have tired me more than I thought. I—I feel strange.”
Leah Blazen smiled her wide cat smile and led him to a guest room on Blazenfields’s second floor.
Days passed in a blur. Inside, Jackson knew something was off. He’d rise and go down to the Blazens’ dining room, where a morning spread would await him. He’d sit and inhale a substantial helping of fried ham and grits and wonder why he was eating so much. His body longed for work. There were activities he ought to be doing—occasionally, he gave a vague thought to his indigo crop, but then it would flit out of his mind as quickly as it had arrived. Nothing seemed to stick in his head; his memory was like a wet, slippery sheet of glass.
The Blazens distracted him, especially Leah, who insisted that he take her into Chalton almost every day for shopping or to stroll along the riverwalk, where Jackson ran into fullmages he hadn’t socialized with in years, such as the Camellia Twins, Everett and Elizabeth, to whom Leah waved and sunnily beckoned.
Everett had fought with the Brotherhood, of course. But he and Jackson and Lige had gone to school together before Jackson had left home. He was now a slender man more akin to Lige than Jackson, with dark hair and eyes that matched those of his twin sister, Lizzie.
“Jackson,” he said. “It’s been years. I’m glad you’re … back.”
Jackson noticed the sideways glance Everett and Lizzie exchanged, but the significance slipped along the glassy surface of his mind like everything else did these days.
Leah burbled into the growing silence. “Jackson has been visiting Blazenfields. But we do hope to go to Coalhaven soon.” She tugged on his right arm and squeezed his wrist, where the heart-shaped sting he’d had for days still itched. “Don’t we, Jackson? At Coalhaven we could host a ball. You’d come, wouldn’t you, Lizzie? And, of course, you as well, Everett.”
“A—a ball?” Jackson stammered. “At Coalhaven?” Such a thought had never crossed his mind. There was some reason, some very good reason, he should not. But the pressure of Leah’s hand on his wrist pulled at him, the itch of the sting there irritated, and all concerns fled. “Of course we’ll have a ball,” he said. “Brilliant idea, Leah.”
She beamed, first at Jackson and then at the Camellias. “It will be the event of the year. Everett, Lizzie, I’ll be sure to have an invitation sent to your parents’ plantation. Of course I’ll be helping to organize the ball, since there is no current mistress of Coalhaven.” She smiled sweetly and hauled Jackson along the riverwalk away from the Camellias. “So lovely to see you!” Leah called over her shoulder.
Jackson, dazed, also cast a look at the twins as he and Leah continued away. Everett whispered to his sister behind his gloved hand, and Lizzie replied behind her fan.
“A ball!” Leah exclaimed. “Oh, Jackson, I do hope you’ll let me write the guest list. I like Everett and Lizzie Camellia, but I cannot stand that greasy Easterly attorney everyone fawns over. And I simply cannot endure Daniel Lake. He’s so dour. The worst sort of guest at a festive ball. No, let’s stick with the younger set.”
Jackson nodded obediently at her enthusiasms, unable to bring himself to care which names decorated a guest list.
Giddy with excitement, Leah insisted they walk all the way up to the Railway House, passing the blackened, burnt-out crater where the Brotherhood Headquarters had once stood. Jackson froze, unable to move as he stared at the crater. His heart battered at his ribs, sweat dripped down his torso, and a terrible slithering sensation wriggled up his spine. Phantoms flitted in front of his eyes: ash, steaming bricks, singed magnolia petals. A burning yellow paper exuding indigo smoke. But again, the significance, the meaning of what he saw eluded him. He simply could not grasp why the crater upset him so.
“Do you miss him?” Leah asked, putting her tiny gloved hand on his arm.
“Who?” Jackson asked, still caught in the trance the crater had induced. Lige. I miss Lige. Lige is dead because of me. Nausea rose in his throat as shadowy memories scrabbled at his slippery mind.
Do you know what you really are, Jackson? A killer, a filthy vermin.
“Your father.” Leah tilted her bonneted head at the explosion site.
“Of course,” Jackson said dazedly, squinting to dispel the unwanted visions. A gnawing distress chewed at his insides. Something wasn’t right. There were large blank swathes in his mind, places he could not touch. Memories he needed, but could not recall. He shook his head and continued on the walk, with Leah clutching his right arm and wrist the whole way.
Two more weeks passed before Wilcott Blazen pulled Jackson into his office, waving a leather-bound book. “So, my boy,” he said. “What do you think? You seem to be getting on with Leah. She says you’ve even spoken of throwing a ball for her at Coalhaven. Are you ready to speak your mind to me?” Wilcott pushed the book across the desk. “I’ve this choice volume for you if you are.”
Jackson peered down at the book, perplexed. “What’s this?”
Wilcott chuckled. “My girl’s got you fixed good, doesn’t she? She has a talent, I’ll hand her that, a real talent. What’s that, Jackson? It’s a book. My own treatise on magemarks.” Wilcott placed his palm flat on the book and pulled it back toward himself. “But it seems your interest in it has waned. Not to worry. I must confess, though, my interest in Coalhaven has not. So, what do you say, Jackson?”
Jackson was in a state of profound confusion. He wanted the book, but he had no idea why. He reached for it, but Wilcott pulled it away, his usually jovial face hardening. “Now, Jackson. We have an arrangement, you and I. You want the book, but there’s what I want, too.”
“Leah,” Jackson murmured. “You want me to marry Leah.” As he spoke the words, everything inside him rebelled. He pushed to his feet and dug both hands into his too-long hair that Leah kept insisting he cut. “I—I can’t.”
The expression on Wilcott’s face told him that had been the wrong thing to say. “I mean … that is … I couldn’t ask for her hand in good conscience until she has—ah—seen Coalhaven for herself.”
Wilcott’s round face glowed. “There’s no problem in that, Jackson. We’ll go for a visit immediately! There’s nothing my wife and I would like more than to spend a bit of time at Coalhaven with Leah and yourself. And there’s that ball to be planned! Let me tell Leah. She’ll be so pleased.”
As Wilcott departed, Jackson collapsed into the chair beside the desk. This was wrong. It was all wrong. It wasn’t Leah’s hand he wanted caressing his face, running through his hair. Not those lily pale hands. The ones he wanted were darker, olive in tone, slender but strong. Manda’s hands. Manda! Grey! A furious, conte
ntless panic rose in Jackson’s throat. He needed to see them. He needed to get back to Coalhaven.
“Jackson!” Leah cried, gliding across the study in her wide hoop skirt. “Is it true? We’re going to Coalhaven? Oh, I’ve dreamed of this! I’ve already written up a prospective guest list for the ball, though of course you can amend it as you see fit.”
Jackson nodded weakly. His back and neck itched, as did the little area on his wrist that had been stung by an insect, leaving a red, heart-shaped mark that alternately swelled and retracted. He scratched at his wrist, trying to figure out why the thought of Leah and Wilcott Blazen at Coalhaven turned his blood to ice. Grey, a sweet female voice whispered in his mind. You must protect Grey.
Leah captured his arm and rubbed the exposed sting on his right wrist, easing the itch of the heart-shaped swelling. “Oh Jackson, I know I’m going to love it there.”
Jackson felt as though Leah had submerged him in warm honey. His mind was viscous and thick. He blinked into her bright green eyes and suddenly understood his panic.
Leah didn’t know about Grey. He ought to tell her.
Jackson smiled, pleased he’d finally fit the disparate pieces of discomfort together in his mind. He wished he felt less bleary. “You’ll be able to meet my ward. He’s there at Coalhaven with his governess.”
Leah squeezed his wrist, hard. “Your ward?”
“Yes, my ward. I am the guardian of a little boy named Grey. He lives at Coalhaven. I’m sure he will be pleased to meet you.”
Leah dropped his hand, backing up a step. Jackson didn’t feel any better having told her about Grey. In fact, he felt worse. He rubbed his temples. Much worse.
Leah cleared her throat. “Well, that’s—an interesting development. Who knew you had a little boy? You’ve been keeping secrets.”
Jackson’s smile had a manic tinge. “You’ll like him, Miss Blazen. The boy, he has spirit. Indeed, he’s quite indomitable. Gave me all kinds of trouble when I first picked him up after the war. But his governess, she’s been a miracle, a blessing of the Wells. You’ll love them both.” As I do. Jackson flinched at his own thought. He grabbed the back of the chair for balance.