Heart of Light by Sarah A. Hoyt

like that on their first night in Cairo, with no reprieve. As though Emily must retire before the real conversation, the truly interesting things could happen.
    Which Emily felt was true, as she came into the hushed atmosphere of her bedroom.
    The pink velvet spread on the bed and large pillows with broad printed roses that seemed to choke the life out of the room with their untamed vitality. Lace on the window, woven tightly and small, doubtless served as much to keep flies out as to provide decoration.
    Emily frowned at the large mirror mounted atop the elaborately draped vanity. But for her knowing she was married . . . She tore off her elaborate hat and her lace gloves and tossed them on the bed. He mustered more enthusiasm for his old school fellow than for his newlywed wife.
    And at this, a thought of Peter's starkly planed face, of his aquiline nose, his vivid green eyes made Emily draw breath in hastily, before removing every thought of him from her mind.
    Curse Peter Farewell. She'd thought to find an ally in him. Though never confessing it—not in such terms—she had toyed, in the very back of her mind, with asking Peter if he knew of any impediment to her union with Nigel. Did he know of some school sweetheart, some woman without dowry and disapproved of by the Oldhalls, who languished in a home far away and left Nigel forever with a broken heart?
    She looked toward Nigel's door.
    Memories of every plot of every novel that, unknown to her father, she had read in the privacy of her room came to haunt her. She should know what secrets hid in Nigel's heart.
    He was downstairs, somewhere, with Peter Farewell, having their port and their cigars and discussing those things both of them deemed too arcane and strange for what they imagined to be her childlike, female mind.
    Let them, because while they were there, Nigel's trunks were in his room, alone and unprotected.
    From her vast experience of the male soul—gleaned wholly from such novels as she managed to sneak here and there—Emily knew it for a sure fact that no man was ever without a token of his love: a picture of his beloved, a betraying lock of hair, a piece of jewelry, letters or some other fetish.
    She took a deep breath then opened his door.
    His room felt cold—not physically, which might well be impossible in Cairo, but a spiderweb touch upon the senses, like an uninhabited place. As well it should, since Nigel had not so much as looked at it yet.
    His bed was covered in heavy brown velvet, which also covered his window in thick folds. Someone, presumably a maid, had lit the magelights by the bedside. They burned white and pale behind the jutting hurricane glass. By their cold light, Nigel's travel trunks loomed huge and intimidating—brown leather, strapped down, each half as large as his bed, each with a vast rounded top like a fat belly—heavy, portentous and daunting.
    Emily opened the trunk straps and pulled the trunk lid up. Within were mounds of clothes, carefully laid. Too carefully laid—shirts and cravats and coats lay precisely disposed. These had surely not been set into the trunk by Nigel's hand. The way these clothes were laid, carefully folded in exact, symmetrical lines, spoke of a professional hand. Nigel's valet.
    The idea of Nigel's having entrusted his heart's token to a valet made Emily smile as she stepped over to the next trunk. It was also too carefully packed.
    The next trunk, Nigel's last, was guarded with magical spells. Emily could see the energy of them, running in little sparks along the straps. It tingled on her fingers when she approached.
    She'd heard once, long ago, that nonmagicians or those of very small magic couldn't see magical locks. But they could feel them, much more so than magicians. There would be a burning upon the skin, a scream in the soul. Although Emily only felt a tingle, she was not so foolish as to imagine that meant she was immune to them. On the contrary, she knew that if she continued and