Grace said nothing. It had been two years, but she sometimes missed the approval her mother had once shown her in Paris. When they had returned, Tatiana had forbidden Grace to tell Jesse the details of their activities, and Grace had not needed persuasion. She didn’t want Jesse to know what she had done. He might have thought she was a terrible person, and Grace couldn’t bear that. She knew Jesse would never compel someone’s will, even if Tatiana bade him to. But there was no comparison to be made. Tatiana would never have lifted a hand against her boy, and she would never have willingly infused him with sorcery, either. Tatiana had different rules for her son and her daughter. There was no point in questioning them.
Tatiana looked out the window at the manor walls. “The thorns have overgrown the gates. We can barely open and close them without cutting ourselves to ribbons. It’s badly needed.”
Grace was taken aback. Her mother did not normally act familiar with the idea that a house needed to be maintained, or even repaired when broken. Grace knew that the hated Herondales had come to stay at their own family manor, not too distant, for the summer, and that there were a boy and a girl, both near her age. They’d come in summers before, and Tatiana had always forbidden her to meet them. “I thought you didn’t want us to have anything to do with them,” she said carefully.
Tatiana smiled. “I want you to bring the boy, James, under your spell.”
That was even more puzzling. “What do you want me to ask of him?” What could her mother possibly want with James Herondale?
“Nothing,” said Tatiana, looking shrewd. “Nothing yet. Simply make him love you. It will amuse me.”
After all her mother’s curses and fussing over the family, Grace half expected something monstrous to come loping over the horizon with the name Herondale. James turned out to be an entirely normal boy, however, much more friendly and easy than the boors she’d met in Paris, and not too bad to look at either. And though she knew it was only in service of her mother’s orders, she was starved for company, and James seemed to welcome hers. It was nice to have someone to talk to who was not a ghost. Soon they were chatting every evening, and she could tell that James was shirking on his briar-cutting duties in order to extend the number of days he would be needed at Blackthorn Manor.
Was it her power? She wasn’t exactly sure. She had asked nothing more of James than that he visit her, and he was willing, but she thought he might have done so without any ensorcelling at all. He must also be lonely, with no friends nearby, and he had a kind soul.
At one point she said, casually, “Will I see you here tomorrow night?” It was the sort of question she’d asked a dozen times before.
James frowned. “No,” he said. “I am summoned to a reading tomorrow night, of the latest installment of my sister’s ongoing masterpiece about Cruel Prince James.”
“Oh?” said Grace, not entirely sure what this meant.
“Evidently,” James said, his mouth quirking on one side, “in this chapter the Cruel Prince James tries to keep the Princess Lucie from her true love, the Duke Arnoldo, but he falls into a pig bog. Riveting stuff.”
Grace pouted—an expression she hadn’t used with James before, but she had much practice from her time in Paris. “But I’d so like to see you,” she said in sorrowful tones. She leaned toward him. “Come see me tomorrow night anyway. Tell your family my mother has threatened you, and you have to work or risk her wrath.”
James laughed. “Tempting as that may be—I’m so sorry, Grace, but I really must be there, or Lucie will fashion me into a large hat. I’ll see you the day after next, I promise.”
Grace waited until the very end of the summer to speak to her mother about the situation. James and his family had already left for London. It was so strange to think of them as the same Herondales her mother railed against; to go by James’s descriptions, they seemed to resemble Tatiana’s sworn enemies not at all. She had been fairly certain what was happening for a few weeks, but she had decided to give it the season. “My power wasn’t working on James.”
Tatiana’s eyebrows went up. “Is he not fond of you?”
“He is fond of me, I think,” Grace said. “But sometimes I’ve made requests—unreasonable requests, things he wouldn’t ordinarily do, to see if I could make him. And I can’t.”
Her mother had a sour look. “The crowned heads of Europe come at your beck and call,” she said, “but the son of a Welsh mud farmer eludes your grasp.”