Ghostlight (The Reflected City Book 1) by Rabia Gale (i can read with my eyes shut TXT) 📗

Guardian, one of the twelve magicians charged with keeping watch on the country’s magical borders. Now she held her position only because they could find no one to replace her.

Due to her age, the Duchess hadn’t been expected to make it to Lumen for the Vernal Rites. Trey hadn’t been surprised, though, when she had put in an appearance. The Duchess had an iron will, something he’d realized when she’d been his advisor at Holyrood.

With a wry smile, Trey went in search of Arabella.

He found her outside the assembly rooms, in a small courtyard of paved stone, a quiet pond, and winter-hardy plants. The decorations here were sparse—the magic-made lights in the two stunted trees were already dying out.

She stood in one corner, head tilted up to a night sky faintly washed with stars. To his sight, she glowed with a pearly light that showed her features in fine detail—the dark arch of her eyebrows, the even white teeth biting down on her lower lip, the blush-tint of her fingernails as she clasped her hands in front of her chest.

“I never knew until now how much I missed the stars,” she said as he joined her. “At night, back in Umbrax, you can see them so clearly. Here, the light and the smoke interfere with the sight.”

Trey glanced at the sky. “At Whitecross Abbey, which is only twenty miles from Lumen, the view is very fine. Although I was too interested in realms other than the celestial to pay it much heed.”

“Hmm. The cycles of nature rule life in Umbrax more completely than they do here,” Arabella said thoughtfully. “The dance of constellations through the seasons, the waxing and waning of the moon, the rise and fall of tides. I don’t even remember when the moon was last full. I used to be mindful of such things, not so long ago.”

He was much more interested in her than in the moon. Had she lost substance? There was a more airy quality about her, all light and cold and aether. He felt the Shadow Lands breathing nearby, almost-doorways lurking in the dark corners of the courtyard, rippling on the pond’s surface, tangled in the thin twigs of a scraggly bush.

“What are you doing out here, Arabella?” he asked, voice rougher than he intended. In her bare feet and shapeless dress, she looked different, almost fey.

“Trying to remember,” she said, whisper-soft. “She said I could fish them out myself, you know. So I came here, to where it’s quiet, to see what came up from the depths of memory. If there was a full moon… and if I had rosemary… that would help.”

Arabella’s shimmering substance spun out from the hem of her dress and from her hair hanging in a braid down her back. She was diminishing faster than he had expected, as if bringing her here had only hastened the process.

The only things he could do to stop her decline were all against the rules—not Winter’s fussy regulations, but the laws set down by others like him throughout Vaeland’s history.

He had been a thoughtless idiot and flouted them once. He knew better now.

But still. Trey looked into Arabella’s distant eyes and pale face and couldn’t let her go without a fight.

Music drifted through the long glass windows—a waltz just striking up.

“Shall we dance?” He held out his hand to her.

Arabella’s smile was slight, but the amusement kindling in her eyes made her look more like her old self. “I’m not as gauche as all that, sir. I haven’t been given permission to dance the waltz by the patronesses.”

“They’ll never know.” Still, he held out his hand, and she laid her own on it. Her fingers were cold and fragile in his clasp, as if they would dissolve to mist at the merest pressure. He guided her out to a clear space in the courtyard. Her dress changed as he did so, becoming something more in fashion, but in the hues of the night sky, blues and silvers bleeding into each other across the folds. The bodice was sprinkled with a thousand points of light, like miniature stars. Some burned white, others tinted blue and red.

She had no idea, he thought, that she was doing this. What had the Duchess said? Arabella Trent could unlock her own memories. She must have some sort of gift or fey blood in her, if even half the stories he’d heard about Umbrax were true.

“You will look very odd, dancing by yourself, if someone should chance to come onto the balcony and look down,” Arabella remarked as they faced each other, his arm around her waist, her midnight-gloved hand in his. He was heartened by the laughter in her face. Even her voice, with that edge of teasing, sounded like the Arabella he knew.

But then, was the Arabella he knew the real one?

“I shall risk it,” said Trey, pushing his fancies away. “If nothing else, it will add to my reputation for eccentricity, which is to my advantage. I could do with fewer invitations to supper parties.”

“And fewer chances of being cornered by determined misses ready to extract your guineas for worthy causes.” She dimpled at him, following his lead with an easy grace.

“Exactly.” He grinned at her. Arabella seemed embarrassed, for she dropped her gaze to stare studiously at his cravat which, he knew, was well-tied for once. “You dance very well,” he said to the top of her dark head, her hair now coiled up and threaded through with a silvery headpiece, delicately formed into the shape of some creeping plant.

Again that flash of a pleased smile. “Oh, no. I’ve had lessons for months with Charlotte, and I’m convinced the dancing master thinks I’m as clumsy as an ox in a buttercup field.”

“Man has no idea what he’s talking about.” Trey twirled her around with expert ease. She followed his lead, her face aglow. “I expect he’s old and crotchety and bandy-legged.”

“With a wrinkled neck like a chicken’s,” Arabella confided. “I’m