Book 17: A Proposal and a Promise

Posey

The fawn is all legs in Aris’s arms as he walks her out of my alchemy room, where she’s been bouncing across the floorboards for the last hour, jumping on any flat surface and threatening to lose her life repeatedly around everything hard and sharp.

Heat pours from my fingertips. I smooth a length of silver flat, the molten metal reflecting red against the granite, when Aris returns in a huff, sweaty, new bruises on his forearms when he rolls up his sleeves.

He tsks, giving me an incredulous look before easing into his resigned seat at my worktable–the only stool strong enough to hold his impressive stature and weight. “You may have been right.”

“About what?” I tease, picking up the tools I need to begin etching the strip of silver.

“That our darling daughter is a wild animal a