Free The Wizard's Daughters: Twin Magic: Book 1 by Michael Dalton Page B

It would, as the saying went, have been a square peg in a round hole.
    And if they had somehow truly matched, the cube should have done nothing, much as it had done nothing when testing Ariel and Astrid. Instead, it had exploded. So a match, no.
    He returned to his chair and tried to get some rest. Whatever had happened, keeping Ariel and Erich apart from now on was likely a good idea.
    For a number of reasons.
    ♦ ♦
    Walther was not the only one lying awake that night.
    Ariel had returned to her bed in tears, though they were tears of embarrassment rather than sorrow. She had humiliated herself in front of Father and Erich, and destroyed Father’s favorite invention.
    How could she have been so stupid? Of course Erich could not have been her match. What had she been thinking?
    She was not sure she could face Erich again, not after the things she had been imagining about him, not after coming to his room nearly naked in the middle of the night the way she had.
    Erich was not a child. She was sure he had done those things in the book with other women. For her to appear at his room like that would have no doubt given him thoughts about her she desperately wished now she had not spawned.
    They were thoughts she could not help thinking herself, now.
    Erich’s arms and shoulders were so hard they seemed to be carved of wood. She thought about his story about his swordmaster, about the things he had made Erich do to strengthen them. Erich wore long shirts, and Ariel had not seen him bare-chested before tonight. It was a sight she had not prepared herself for.
    Her body ached thinking of him, and she wanted it to stop.
    ♦ ♦
    Erich’s thoughts were not far from Ariel’s. He was more concerned at first that the night’s events had ended his employment with Walther, but he kept returning to the memory of Ariel entering his room.
    For the smallest of moments when he realized who it was—he did not look for the freckle but he knew instinctively that it could only be Ariel—he thought she had come to visit his bed.
    Then she had beckoned him out. He was still completely baffled as to what had happened, why the cube had exploded, what on earth Ariel had been trying to do, but clearly she had had something on her mind that concerned him.
    What had she been trying to test? She had not asked him a single question.
    That nightdress had been so translucent.
    Well.
    He had been wondering since he arrived in their household what the girls’ bosoms looked like under those matching dresses they wore, and he now had his answer. The man who married them would receive a bounty indeed. Were it him, he thought he would likely spend a substantial portion of each day in bed playing with their breasts, pushing them this way and that to watch them spring back into place.
    Thinking this way made him realize how long it had been since he had been with a woman. Months. That barmaid in Limburg, before all the unpleasantness there. Since then, his purse had been too light for whoring.
    He groaned and rolled over, trying to sleep.

14.
    The incident with the resonance cube cast a pall over the household for several days. Ariel told Astrid as little as she could about what they had done, but it was enough for Astrid to suspect where Ariel’s thoughts had been going.
    Walther visited briefly with Erich after waking the following afternoon.
    “Ariel can be impulsive, and I do not blame you for that, but should she approach you with a similar idea in the future, I would request that you do nothing until speaking with me.”
    Erich, meanwhile, did what he could to avoid the girls, which was not difficult because they seemed to be avoiding him as well, Ariel especially. Walther finished Fortitude late the following night, slept again until noon and, after ascertaining that everything with the automaton was in order, found Erich out on the doorstep.
    “I need your assistance with the final task to activate Fortitude.”
    Erich did not try to conceal his