Chantress Alchemy by Amy Butler Greenfield Page B

back. Nobody knows much about her.”
    “I met her last night,” I told him. “Well, not met , exactly. Apparently we knew each other when we were children.”
    “Apparently?”
    “Well, I don’t remember her. But then I don’t remember lots of things, you know. She says I spent a whole summer with her when I was seven.”
    “And you have no way of knowing if you really did?” Nat shook his head. “That’s not good.”
    “It could be true, I guess. She said she comes from a Chantress family. I guess that’s why my mother brought me there. But they don’t have magic anymore.”
    “That’s what she says, yes. But who knows what the truth is.” Nat’s anxiety for me was plain in his eyes. “Think about it, Lucy: she could know more about Chantress magic than anyone else here, barring you. Maybe she knows enough to interfere with it in some way. Don’t let yourself be fooled by her—or by anyone else. Keep to yourself, if you can. I won’t be able to visit you in the day, but at night I’ll try and watch over your door.”
    I thought about how he’d been standing there in the darkness outside my room this morning. “Were you keeping watch last night?”
    He looked abashed. “I couldn’t sleep, so I came down,” he admitted. “And there was this, too.”
    It was growing light now, light enough that I could clearly see the snowdrop he held out to me, fluttering like a tiny white dove on a slender green branch. “For you,” he said. “For Valentine’s Day.”
    I forgot my fears in a rush of surprised delight. The first man you meet on Valentine’s Day will be your sweetheart, Sybil had said, but I hadn’t remembered it till now. “Oh, Nat. It’s beautiful.”
    I reached to take it from his hand, then stopped. There was something wrong in his expression, something painful. He had the eyes of a man who wants what he cannot have.
    “Nat?”
    He wrapped my fingers around the snowdrop. “The letters. The visit. I said I would explain.”
    What could the explanation be, to make him look like that? My hand tightened around the flower.
    “It started after you left last summer,” Nat said. “Wrexham and his cronies on the Council wanted to know where you’d gone. At first the King wouldn’t say, but eventually they convinced him that your whereabouts were a state matter, and he agreed they should have a voice in any decisions he made about you. It was about then that Sir Barnaby became ill and had to resign. I was away at the time—I’d been out in the countryside for weeks, learning as much as I could about the blight—but when I got back, I found myself up in front of Wrexham and his handpicked committee, being questioned about my letters to you and my visit to Norfolk and . . . other things.” His face reddened.
    “They had no right.” I was angry on his behalf. Angry on mine.
    “But that’s just it,” Nat said. “The King has decided they do have the right. The right to decide who gets to visit you, who can send letters to you, who can communicate with you in any way. And more than that—”
    “There’s more ?”
    “Much more.” The flush on his cheeks deepened till it looked like a burn. “Lucy, they get to decide who you marry.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
HEARTS AND FLOWERS
    I was so shocked, I nearly lost hold of the snowdrop. I was seventeen, it was true, but I had imagined that marriage was still some years away for me. And I had always assumed that when the time came, I could marry whomsoever I chose.
    Nat wouldn’t meet my eyes. “It’s a matter of state, they say. And Lucy—they’ve told me quite plainly that I’m not on the list of candidates.”
    I stared at him, dumbfounded. Had Nat told the Council he wanted to marry me? Or had they interrogated him simply because of his letters? I didn’t have the heart to ask. If there was to be talk of marriage between us, this was not how I wanted the conversation to run.
    Nat’s cheeks were still an angry red. “I don’t