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closet while someone wore this ingenious, if imperfect glamour of her?
    The distress he began to feel was in no way assuaged by the fact that he couldn’t understand it himself. She was a guest, one of the dozens of people, hundreds , who regularly scuffed her ladyship’s floors and dirtied her ladyship’s linens and consumed her ladyship’s food every year before returning to their own homes and entertainments. She shouldn’t concern him beyond the services he was required to render. She shouldn’t be able to distract and torment him like an unreachable itch.
    A familiar warmth prickled behind his eyes. I could peek. Just once. No harm done . Frederick closed his eyes, but that heat remained, spread, until it felt like a caress against the back of his head. One little look, just to see. You’d be doing your job. A servant is meant to anticipate their mistress’s needs. Just once, to stop the itch. Not long enough to cause the Gray.
    He shouldn’t be caring this much. He took a deep breath, tried to will the gnawing, angry curiosity back into the cold place. Back under the snow.
    “I do think something should be done about Trinidon’s poor,” he heard Charlotte coo. “Poverty is such a dreadful state.”
    Scales-curse it , Frederick swore inwardly. His eyes snapped open, and heat flared behind his eyes. Not all at once, just a trickle of warmth, a slight application of power, as shifting tones of color materialized in his vision as he stared at Charlotte. Outwardly, she displayed an image of confident coyness, but now Frederick saw flickering shadows swirling about her, mist-gray, bruise-blue, sickly yellow. And, for a brief moment, shimmering rust.
    The colored spectrum of emotions that now danced across his vision was something Frederick had never been taught, a language he’d always known and would always remember, even after a decade of suppressing it. And what Frederick saw beneath the shaky mask Charlotte displayed in public was a girl supporting herself on unsteady columns of stress, sadness, and deep uncertainty. But with a glimmer of courage. A far cry from the girl who danced across carpets and cast apples at footmen.
    She turned her head, and an accident of angles and timing sent her gaze careening into his, shocking them both with sudden eye contact. Her eyes widened, the air around her blooming turquoise in surprise, and a shamed Frederick pulled his power back, returned it to the cold place with such mental force it shot an unpleasant jolt up his spine, threatening a headache later. That was no matter, just as long as he could pull it back. Lock it up behind snow and stone and steel before it could damage Charlotte’s shifting tones, before the dark side of his magic emerged.
    Charlotte, unaware, kept her eyes on him for a moment longer, blinking slowly. One eyebrow inched upward. Then Lady Tamsin tapped her arm with her fan and Charlotte turned away, breaking the spell. Freed, Frederick let his gaze drop to his polished pumps, breathing slowly to calm the sudden excited beat of his pulse. He shouldn’t have used his power. It hadn’t told him a damn thing—or at least anything that was any of his business.
    …
    Those eyes. Charlotte had never expected to see those eyes again. Not in that way , anyhow. Seeing them in the carriage on the way to Charmant Park had seemed to her like an intimately rare occurrence, like spotting a unicorn foal in the wild, or a hermit crab after abandoning its shell. Seeing something naked and new, before it learned to protect itself.
    She never thought she’d get another chance, even when Freddy had been assigned as her personal footman. When one looked at a footman one tended to notice the gleam of the bright brass buttons, the hands clothed in crisp white gloves, the top of the pale powdered wig as the servant bowed. And, on occasion, the sturdiness of his calves.
    There was absolutely no reason in the world to notice a footman’s eyes. And yet, when Charlotte