Spindle (Two Monarchies Sequence Book 1) Read Free Page A

itself.
    “Wizard.” His eyes were still unfocused, and Poly could see his magic pushing at the thorn hedge. A little louder, she repeated: “Wizard?”
    “Luck.”
    “Pardon?”
    “Luck,” he repeated, pushing her aside to prowl further along the hedge. “It’s my name. Use it. I’m not a wizard.”
    “Luck, then,” persisted Poly. She’d put a lot of effort into being invisible at the castle, but it was quite another thing to be ignored on sight and without effort. “There isn’t a gap in the hedge magic anymore.”
    That made his eyes focus sharply on her, and she saw with some interest that they were deep green instead of gold as she had first thought. He said: “Can you see the hedge magic?”
    “Of course!” Poly said, surprised. She had thought that everyone could see and touch magic as easily as they saw and touched water.
    “Interesting!” he said, and promptly turned his back on the hedge to gaze rather disconcertingly at her. Poly found that she preferred being looked at as though she wasn’t there. The way Luck was looking at her made her think of the way Wizard Timokin used to look at his dissection specimens: interesting, but just a specimen after all.
    Luck’s magic grew immensely, surrounding her, and Poly felt her hair rising and spreading out tendrils to meet it. Gold threads mixed with the silky black threads of her hair, joyfully twining together with a buzz that startled her, and Luck gave a short, sudden yelp.
    “What did you do?”
    “N-nothing,” Poly stammered.
    “Yes, you did,” contradicted Luck, frowning. “What have you done to my magic? It’s gone all peculiar.”
    The force of his magic became narrower, more subtle; probing at her memories, her thoughts. Then it was sliding, cold and precise, into her consciousness.
    Poly gasped and slapped at the magic. Luck yelped again, this time in pain, and snatched the tendrils back into himself.
    “Stop that!” His magic, which was swirling angrily about his person, now bore a slightly brownish tint.
    “You’ve no business poking at my mind,” Poly said fiercely. She knew that she had hit back harder than the offence warranted.
    “Why is it that every time I touch you, you slap me?” wondered Luck.
    “I didn’t slap you,” Poly protested, flushing. The way he managed to construe everything as her fault was off-putting. “I kicked you, and it was because you kissed me. I don’t go around just kicking people, you know.”
    “It wouldn’t surprise me,” Luck remarked. “Nothing about you would surprise me. You’re a horribly violent princess.”
    Poly, gasping at the unfairness of it, took far too long to think of a reply.
    At last, she said sourly: “My name is Polyhymnia. You might as well call me Poly if we’re being so informal.”
    She didn’t want to secede the title of Princess until she knew why Luck was addressing her by it, but it was jarring to hear the title every other time he spoke to her.
    Luck blinked. “Huh. Alright,” he said, and added: “Stay still, I want to try something.”
    He did something tricky with his gold magic and Poly found herself imprisoned in a closed spell circle.
    “Let me go at once!” she demanded, hot and cold by turns with anger and fear. It wasn’t the first time she had been captured in a spell circle: the Princess had been fond of using them to carry out punishments. Living with the princess had taught her very quickly that rugs on the floor were best travelled around rather than over, and that one’s bed should always be thoroughly inspected unless one actually liked being strangled by one’s bedclothes or snuggled in the clammy embrace of a faintly smirking selkie who was just as surprised to find himself in bed with a human girl but by no means as unwilling.
    Therefore, it was with something approaching terror that Poly saw a golden tide flood Luck’s eyes. His magic gathered strength with truly horrifying speed, and a great, pulsing mass of power hurtled