Tradition satisfied, we return to a quiet afternoon of doing our own thing. In my case, I track down an unused candleholder and obtain my dad’s permission to use it for a magic thing. When he inevitably asks what that involves I reply vaguely “You’ll see.” Given the time of year it is, that’s probably a strong hint of what I’m up to, so he asks no further questions.

  That done, I start experimenting. The first step in converting a spell to an enchantment is to get familiar with the spell and the exact parameters you want, apparently. I know the light-spell well: it’s the first spell I learnt, and I’ve cast it countless times in the last few months. I do so again now, using as little magic as I can and keeping the ball of starlight-silver light cupped in my hands so that it doesn’t disturb my dad’s reading.

  Now for the trickier part. There’s nothing fundamental in the light-spell that says the light has to be tied to my hands. It’s just that that’s the natural way of visualising it, and the way I believe the spell works. But a necessary step towards making the enchantment is tying the light to the object I want to enchant, which is not my hands. (That makes me wonder if it’s possible for a person to be enchanted. I make a mental note to ask Edward. And then another one to only do that at a time when I don’t have any plans for the next hour.)

  I turn my cupped hands upside down and lower them until the ball of light is almost resting on top of the candleholder. Then I lift my hands away and think of letting go. The light still stubbornly clings to my hands and comes away from the candleholder with them. I sigh.

  After a few more failed attempts, I find myself wishing I had someone else to work with on this. Preferably Edward, but really anyone who knows more about magic than me and could tell me what I’m doing wrong or advise me on getting around my mental block. But instead I’m here on my own, with no help but a page of Edward’s writing and some densely written textbooks.

  The light is not connected to my hands, they’re just a convenient way of holding it, I tell myself. But see, here’s this candleholder, its very purpose is to hold light. Wouldn’t that be just as convenient? Couldn’t I carry that just as easily?

  I imagine myself walking through a dark forest alone, bearing my silver light held not in my hands but in this candleholder. Wouldn’t it give me the same courage? Wouldn’t it light my path just as well? It’s surprisingly hard to make myself believe something, I realise.

  Perhaps if I dismiss this spell, and try casting a new one directly onto the candleholder, that would work. I try it, and the new spell… fizzles? There’s a flash of light for a second and then nothing.

  “Are you okay there?” my dad asks.

  I guess I neglected trying to hide the light a little there. “Yeah. Fine. It’s just light. Nothing dangerous.”

  “Is experimenting with magic ever not dangerous?”

  “Not this,” I explain. “It’s dangerous if you’re using a lot of power, or doing it while close to a Malaina episode, or… I don’t know, meddling with hyperspace or trying to cast spells on yourself? But this is fine.”

  He laughs. “Should I be concerned by the fact that’s actually reassuring?”

  “Everything is completely fine,” I reply teasingly. But I realise that he’s reassured because he trusts my judgment. And I like the feeling that gives me. Maybe it’s that little boost of confidence that means when I try again, the spell works smoothly and the ball of light sits neatly atop the candleholder.

  I smile, and experiment with the brightness. I can adjust it just the same as ever. It works. I’ll need to finetune the brightness for the actual enchantment to be as high as I can get it without requiring more magic than can be drawn from the ambience. But there’s no reason I can’t just try the enchantment and then redo it later if that doesn’t work.

  At least, I hope there’s not. What happens if an enchantment requires more magic than it can draw from the ambience? I know that when a similar thing happens with a spell, that can get very dangerous indeed.

  Wasn’t there a mention of this somewhere in Edward’s letter? I skim through it again, and I find it: Don’t worry about drawing too much magic. At your level you won’t be capable of making an enchantment that can draw from the ambience at anything close to dangerous levels. Classic Edward: from someone else, that would be an insult. But he’s just stating facts, so I can’t hate him for it.

  And it does answer my question. At least I don’t have to worry about the candleholder being destroyed by too much magic now. But I decide I’ve made enough progress on this project for the time being. Mostly because the yearning to read Georgiana’s diary is becoming unbearably strong.

  Just until dinner time, I tell myself. Then I’ll do some enchanting. I slip into my grandmother’s room to exchange the textbooks for the diary. She’s sewing my dress. That almost makes me feel guilty enough to go back to working on the enchanted light. Almost.

  The diary is very different from any other history book I’ve read. Because it’s so real. There’s no speculation from a historian writing centuries later, no knowledge of what’s to come. Just a seven-year-old girl living her life and writing about it.

  Most of it is very mundane, descriptions of lessons or games or meals. The language alone is enough to make it interesting, though. The young Georgiana was a lover of words, and would often try out big fancy words she liked in sentences. Sometimes there are notes that she’s unsure of the spelling, or later corrections along the lines of my tutor says that’s not what this means.

  She doesn’t show any discomfort with her tutor reading her diary. Though then I suppose she wouldn’t do that exactly because she knew he would read it. I wonder if there are things she leaves out because of that. I hope that at some point he stops and she can write freely. She just seems so real to me already.

  And there are little titbits of history scattered throughout the days. How once the King forgave her father, she was able to resume her social life. Apparently the noble children of the time were a tight-knit little group, and what she describes seem to be genuine friendships unconstrained by politics.

  It’s a little grim to read that and know that those friends would find themselves on opposing sides of the Second Civil War only a decade or two later.

  I don’t recognise all the names of her friends, so I take notes to try and piece together who belongs to which family and will go on to do what. I definitely recognise the King’s son, Charles, though. She calls him Charlie, and he calls her Georgie.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  It seems like a lot less than two hours when I’m finally dragged back to reality by my growing hunger. I set the diary down and poke my head into the kitchen to see that my grandmother is cooking shepherd’s pie. It smells delicious already. My dad says that it was always his favourite when he was a child, so I’m in for a treat.

  I force myself not to go back to the diary, to put it neatly back on the shelf and find somewhere to store my notes. There’s less than a page so far, but I’m sure they’ll grow quickly.

  I find myself with a span of ten minutes and not much to do with them. Maybe I should have kept reading a little longer, but now I’ve stopped I can’t very well go back to it. I just sit and think about Georgiana. One of the things that’s surprised me is how close she was to her father. Felix Blackthorn is undoubtedly one of history’s villains – hardly the worst of them, but there’s no doubt he unjustly usurped the throne – and yet he’s also a doting father who clearly adores his daughter.

  It reminds me uncomfortably of the current generation of Blackthorns. If Lord Blackthorn does seize the throne, then it’ll be Edward who’s in the impossible position Georgiana found herself in.

  Thankfully food is ready in time to distract me from those grim thoughts. And it’s every bit as good as my dad said it was. I resist the urge to say that this would be a good enough birthday present on its own.

  Once the meal is over, I’m summoned to my grandmother’s room for a dress-fitting session. Well, not entirely, it turns out. While she does need to check that she has the fit right and doesn’t need to make adjustments, it’s also a pretext to be somewhere my dad isn’t.

  “I promised you answers, I think,” she says.

  I say nothing. I’m slightly scared that if I say the wrong thing she’ll change her mind about giving them to me.

  “Promise me that you’ll never share what I’m about to tell you with anyone.”

  Nothing could possibly go wrong with promising that. It’s not like my life already feels like a delicate balance of keeping everyone’s secrets from everyone else. “I promise.”

  “Good. I suppose it begins with your grandfather’s death, which was a month or two before your father introduced me to – that woman. He’d been ill for two years before that. I took care of him. I was devastated when he died, of course, and I missed him terribly. But… after the first few weeks, I realised I felt free.”

  I blink.

  “I’d given up so much of my life to raising my son and taking care of my husband that I’d almost forgotten I could do things for myself as well. And – stars, I wanted to. I wasn’t in my right mind at the time. Mad with grief and giddy with newfound freedom and questioning so many things.”

  I don’t quite understand, so I just keep listening.

  “I was so consumed with all that, I didn’t have it in me to go through the motions of civility with my son’s girlfriend. I think it hurt, seeing them so young and so in love and wondering what would happen when they grew old. And – it didn’t help that we took an instant dislike to each other. I could – oh, it’s hard to explain, especially so many years later, but I could almost see her judging me for the state of the house – I hadn’t cleaned properly, couldn’t face it – and for being old-fashioned, and – it felt like everything I did, at the time.”

  I suppose I can imagine some of what she must have felt. Like her life had fallen apart, and now she was trying to pick up the pieces and build something new. I was lucky, I think, to have been able to escape my old life so soon after Falling. I can’t imagine what would have happened if I’d tried to go back to Genford after that.

  “So… I did not play nice. And… it escalated, I suppose. I didn’t think she was right for him. I heard her one day telling your father he needed a new wardrobe, because his suits just weren’t professional enough for wealthy clients. I’d hand-sewn those suits, and they were as professional as you could get. It felt like she’d punched me in the face. He tried to explain what they meant to him, but she just wasn’t listening. I tried to talk to her about it, after. I meant to just tell her to listen to him and not try to change him. But… I don’t know which one of us started it, really. We fought. It was ugly. And by the time it was over we both knew we couldn’t ever peacefully coexist in your father’s life.”

  It seems so small. But small things can be important, because sometimes it’s about what they mean to people. “And… after that?”

  “Lift your arms, would you?” She curls her tape measure around the top of my chest. “After that, she went running to him and told him all the cruel things I’d said. He just wanted us to get on, and he asked me to apologise to her. I didn’t take that too well, as you can probably guess. So then I fought with him as well. I said I never wanted to see him married to her. And… and he just said okay, and walked out. And we didn’t speak again for seventeen years. I was alone. I was free.”

  She’s sounded calm for most of the story, as if she was retelling something that had happened to someone else. But her voice cracks as she describes how my father responded to her ultimatum. I can tell it still haunts her. I’m not surprised.

  “Did… did you regret it? Do you?”

  “I… don’t know. It’s hard, trying to set aside all the grief and pain and confusion of that time and see it rationally. If it had happened at any other time in my life, I never would have acted that way… but that doesn’t change that she was in the wrong just as much as I was. It doesn’t change that she was a poor match for my son.”

  She removes the tape measure, and I lower my arms. “Did you ever think about – trying to reach out to him? Afterwards?”

  “Not at first,” she says. “I spent another few weeks in a haze of grief, and then I realised that I had to go out and face the world if I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life like that. I signed up to volunteer with the Temple, distributing food to the needy. That’s how I met Sierra. She… we’d both recently lost our husbands. We were both trying to work through the grief and find out who we were without being married. That was how it started. Those things in common. We quickly became friends. And then, eventually…”

  It falls into place in my mind. Two now-unmarried women living together. To keep each other company. Oh, I have no doubt that there are women who really do that just for the companionship and friendship. But there are many others who do it as a polite fiction, because they know the disapproval they’d face if they told the world the truth.

  “…more than that,” I finish.

  “Yes,” she agrees. “So much more.”

  I twist around to look at her and see the smile on her face as she says those words.

  “But anyway – to return to your question – after a year or two, by the time I’d healed, it felt like I was a completely different person. Working, volunteering, living with the woman I love. I was… happy. And I… selfishly, I didn’t want to reopen old wounds.”

  “I – I’m sorry if I’ve done that by asking you about this.”

  “It’s okay. I chose to give you answers. And I knew what I was doing, coming back here. But it would have been – so much worse, trying to be civil to that woman – I would never have wanted her to know about Sierra. And I supposed – my son was an adult. He didn’t need me any more. Probably didn’t want anything to do with me after I’d said so many hurtful things to the person he loved. Would you believe I never knew I had a granddaughter? Not until – well – I saw those things in the news about you.”

  I wince.

  “He always loved the name Tallulah. Told me that if he ever had a daughter, that was what he would call her. So when I found out… I wish it hadn’t been that way.”

  “So do I.”

  “I realised – I wanted to meet you. I wanted to have a granddaughter. But I… I couldn’t do it in response to that news. You would have thought I just wanted a piece of your fame and that I didn’t care about you.”

  “Infamy,” I correct dryly. She’s right. I did think that, when I first heard she was visiting.

  “And then your father wrote, to tell me of his separation. And I knew I had to come.”

  “I’m glad you did. If you’ll let me ask one more question?” My inner Edward tells me that that counts as a question, and that the appropriate response is Yes. You just did. Now no more questions.

  Fortunately my grandmother is less insufferably pedantic than Edward is. “Go ahead.”

  “Why did you tell me all this… and not my father?”

  She sighs. “I don’t know, really. I suppose… I’m scared of how he’ll react.”

  “I don’t think it would be bad.”

  “It’s easy for you to say that. You didn’t know me before. I’m a different person to who I was seventeen years ago. Which makes me a different person to his mother.”

  “I – I know it’s not the same. But I’m a different person to who I was even a few months ago. And I’m still his daughter, and he’s still my father.”

  “That helps,” she replies. “At least a little.”

  “Are you going to tell him?”

  “I… maybe. You think I should, don’t you?”

  Selfishly, I just want to not have to hide this from my dad. “I would feel the same in your position. But… yes.”