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Asra steals into the shop that morning well before sunrise, the sound of his weary footsteps traveling despite his best efforts to be quiet.
It’s not the noise that wakes Lystra—though vials clattering on the shelves don’t help—but the pull of his magic wound tight in her chest, like the most welcomed tether. Clipped conversations with Faust waft from below while he sets his bag on the table, taking each creaking step up with caution. Asra’s there, hovering in the doorway for a moment before sliding across the room and under the covers. “I know you’re awake.”
Lystra smiles, eyes still closed. “If you broke something downstairs, you need to buy it. I’ll tack it on to your rent.”
That earns her a laugh, light and airy and wholeheartedly Asra. She feels him shift beside her, settling comfortably against the goose feathers with the sharp smell of sage and myrrh clinging to him. Lystra opens her eyes and unfurls his fingers in her own, leaving a ghost of a kiss lingering in the center of his palm. The trip went fine. Muriel is doing well. He even had time to get bread before the stall officially opens—
“That’s cheating,” Asra notes, posing one crooked finger under her chin and gently tilting her face towards his. “The bread was a surprise.”
It’s not a difficult spell to conjure, but a complicated and boundary-less one that results in snatching snippets of someone’s train of thought. It’s a parlor trick, Asra had told her the first time he’d shown her, one for half-baked illusionists and the fortune-tellers at the markets, because it required the barest physical contact. The stronger the connection, the more a person could get.
“It’s not cheating if you taught it to me,” she says, “Master.” They had left the titles behind, especially since Asra insists that she is just as capable—if not more—of a magician than he is. But Lystra enjoys throwing it in now and then, probably too much, only to watch his nose scrunch up, or a heated blush crawl up the length of his face. “I’m glad you’re home,” she says in more ways than one, her voice dropping to a serious pitch. Asra allows his touch to speak, knuckles grazing her cheek before cradling her face.
“What is it you want to ask me?”
The corners of his mouth flare up into a smile when she pulls back in slight surprise. Asra gestures to where he once held her chin and Lystra all but bites her tongue to keep her from rolling her eyes at him.
The spell works both ways.
Words are easy with Asra, they’ve always been, but she struggles to ask, “Why did you make the deal with the Devil?”
The very mention of it resurrects a memory: Lystra and Nadia in her balcony for tea after the public announcement of Nadia’s engagement to Portia.
Love can cause people to go to great lengths, Nadia had told her, inhaling the scent of oolong over her cradled mug, but grief will take them one step further.
Lystra is familiar with the way grief surfaces in Asra like a wave crashing against the shore. Every about him goes taut, eyes darkening. Asra shakes his head once, reigning himself into the present; when he speaks, there’s a deep splinter in his voice.
“I did it because it was unfair,” he starts, looking at Lystra through a curtain of curls. “It was unfair to leave you on your own when you were right to stay. I should have stayed. There’s no use in dwelling on what we could’ve done together. What we could’ve prevented—“
But Asra finds himself thinking those things all the same. Lystra has caught glimpses of it, as though he’s trapped in the space between a dream and a nightmare.
“I missed you,” he says, quieter this time. “Your half-filled teacups weren’t lying around the shop anymore and you won’t believe how big this bed is without you.”
Asra pauses, peering down at her. “I had already lost a part of my heart, so giving a piece of it up felt no different.”
She could have him in this very moment, sink her lips into the crook of his neck and show him the things words fail to express. Instead, Lystra steadies herself above him, caging Asra’s hips between her thighs. He leans back with a breath of comfort, trailing his hands from her knees to the curve of her back.
“Am I still the same person you fell in love with?” she asks, ignoring the distracting patterns Asra marks underneath her tunic.
“No,” he says almost immediately, tilting his head with amends. “But I don’t expect you to be.”
Asra’s hands wander higher, fingertips outlining the shape of her ribs. “I didn’t bring you back to be the same person. To be here for me and only me—“
Lystra will lose her breath if he moves any higher. He smiles as if the thought is loud and clear in his own head.
“I brought you back to give you a second chance. You get to decide what to do with it.”
Asra stills, resting his forehead against her own. When she kisses him with the lightest brush of her lips against his, there’s magic, in the literal sense, pooling between them and a quiet certainty, as though a sliver of his heart had found hers.