Chapter 2

He did not like thinking about his reputation.

He glared at the slab of stone pretending to be a sky. He glared at mounds of snow and the departed coach he’d taken up here and the mud settling onto his boots and his bag. He glared at, by implication, all of Yorkshire. And its damned magical crimes.

He watched while the approaching young man, in rapid succession, hopped over a puddle, narrowly avoided anotherpuddle, accidentally put a boot squarely into a third, waved apologetically in Kit’s direction, and for good measure laughed at himself.

Too much energy. Too many muscles. Annoying, that.

The ball of sunshine had to be some sort of estate manager or overseer for the Fairleigh lands. Awfully young for it, perhaps early twenties—which would put him five to ten years younger than Kit himself—but heedlessly confident. Clothing expensive but clearly made for walking fields or surveying drainage. Mud and slush on those boots and also on rolled-up sleeves. Nothing aristocratically pale or useless; nothing rakish and reckless and callous.

A splash of mud had reached one cheekbone. It sat there and bisected golden freckles proudly, an adornment.

The young man had freckles. This was unfair

“Hullo again,” announced the owner of the freckles, coming to a stop. He was taller and larger than Kit, plainly much nicer, and had apparently not noticed that his shirt had turned near-transparent from either exertion or general omnipresent damp weather. Kit tried not to appreciate this too much. “Would you like directions? Or are you in fact here from Bow Street, and you’ve been waiting for me, and if you are and you’ve been standing here long I’m really very sorry.”

“You have mud on your cheek,” Kit said, and then only did not put a hand over his own mouth because he had someself-control left, dammit. A stray snowflake had waltzed in to land atop the young man’s hair. It shimmered white on gold.

“Do I?” One big hand investigated. “I do. I suppose it likes being there. Oh, drat, I can’t properly shake your hand now, can I? Oh, sorry again, I’m doing this all wrong. Did I mention we don’t get visitors much? Would you like tea?”

“Tea,” Kit echoed, bemused by this onslaught of friendliness. He stretched out a wisp of intangible power, cautiously.

He ran into honeyed sweetness and the taste of ginger biscuits and the slow lazy throb of a summer afternoon, lake water and radiance; he caught breath amid Midwinter presents and peppermint creams and a brush of springtime like the fur of a baby rabbit against his hand. The universe glowed: honest as an open rose, nothing held back.

He did not trust it. Nothing was that real; no one was that forthright. Secrets, he thought. Secrets, and what better way to hide them than behind supposedly transparent cheerfulness?

“Tea,” the young man echoed right back, turning Kit’s parroting into a shared joke somehow, not mocking but affectionate, “and there might even be biscuits.” He paused, widened eyes conspiratorially, and threw in, “Which might even be chocolate.”

Those eyes were brilliant blue, Kit noticed. Bits of ocean sparkling with good humor. Gold glinting from waves.

He got irritated with himself for noticing.

More snow skittered in, chased by wind. Eddies twirled; flakes pirouetted and piled up. More on the way. Gnawing cold.

And Kit caught himself thinking, nonsensically and for no reason at all, that those freckles should be warm. Little sunny scraps of treasure-dust. Bits of light.

He said, “If you’re promising chocolate I suppose I’ll come in,” and watched the young man beam as if this answer were the key to every happy ending. Exactly what had been hoped for. A gift under a Midwinter holly-bough.

He cleared his throat. Thanked every god he could think of that his talents lay in reception, picking up and reading emotion, rather than projecting. “Is the Earl at home? I’m meant to be meeting with him. As requested.”

Of course the Earl of Fairleigh would be home. The Earl of Fairleigh never lefthome. The request for assistance had come via a desperate-sounding letter requesting aid in the matter of relentless and likely magical estate-smothering blizzards, and Sam had sighed and thrown it Kit’s way with a parting, “as Chief Magistrate I’m bloody well sending you on a bloody vacation, go to the country, get out of London, get some rest, it’s likely some locals with weather talents playing pranks in any case, you can handle that in your sleep.”

Kit, lingering in his superior’s doorway, had explained in vain that he did not need a vacation, that the country was a suspicious and abstract concept that lacked proper coffee-houses and late-night take-away pie shops, and that Alice Lake or Peter Lyon, both of whom were brand-new junior constables, could use the practice of a trip to the wilds of Yorkshire. Sam had threatened to magically set Kit’s hair on fire, and hadn’t even been smiling when he’d said it. Kit, being fond of his hair, had given in.