Courting Magic (Kat, Incorrigible #4)
Stephanie Burgis
For my niece Freya, with love
CHAPTER ONE
1809
There were a great many things I would do for my older sisters, from engaging in scandalously magical battles to suffering through an unbearably tedious fitting for new gowns.
Agreeing to find myself a husband, however, was definitely a step too far.
Unfortunately, they had me trapped.
“Don’t move, Kat!” Elissa instructed me as her favorite modiste’s assistants bustled about, tutting ominously to each other about my angles and sticking lethal-looking pins perilously close to my skin. “Madame Fontaine likes a very exact fit for all her gowns.”
“Then perhaps she should be the one who wears them,” I muttered.
“Shh!” Elissa threw a worried glance at the assistants. “We are extremely fortunate that she’s agreed to take you on at all.”
“Don’t waste your breath, Elissa,” drawled our sister Angeline. She sat in a nearby armchair, flipping through fashion books. “I’m sure even Kat will learn the value of patience once she’s been stabbed by a pin a time or two.” She looked up from the book on her lap to give me a smile of creamy self-satisfaction.
I narrowed my eyes at her. If Angeline had any idea how much patience I’d had to learn in the last five years of my training to become a magical Guardian…
But I was eighteen years of age now, no longer a child, and I knew better than to utter the word magic in front of strangers. Our family had been shunned by Society for decades after our late mother’s witchcraft had been publicly uncovered. If anyone ever realized that all four of her children had inherited her powers of witchcraft—and that I had inherited a second, even more powerful and secretive magical legacy—then Angeline and Elissa would be ruined, and their husbands and children with them.
I had no intention of allowing that to happen.
But that didn’t mean I was going to be an easy target. Angeline and Elissa might still think of me as a child to be ordered about, but I hadn’t spent all of my time in the last several years training to protect good society from malevolent magic-users. I had also spent three perfectly splendid summers with our aunt in Edinburgh, learning both outrageous witchcraft and social confidence. Our aunt, la Marquise de Cherbignac, had never met a social situation she couldn’t master. Watching her had been most educational.
So I smiled back at Angeline instead of rising to her taunts, and I said, “I shouldn’t like to waste such an important modiste’s time, that’s all. If you think of how few balls I’ll be attending back home in Yorkshire…”
“Ha!” Angeline slapped her book shut. “You can’t wriggle out of this any longer. You should have made your début last year, and you know it. If Elissa hadn’t been breeding again…”
“Angeline!” Elissa’s pale cheeks flushed as she darted an anguished glance at the modiste’s assistants. “Really!”
She might as well have saved her breath. Angeline, despite being the only one of my siblings without any children of her own, had always been utterly shameless in the way she discussed women’s confinements. She didn’t pause for even a moment at Elissa’s rebuke.
“You said you couldn’t come out in Society until Elissa was ready to serve as your cosponsor,” she reminded me, her dark eyes penetrating. “I still don’t know how you managed to cozen Stepmama into agreeing when I could have perfectly well brought you out on my own. But you’ve used up all of your excuses now. Like it or not, it is time for you to enter Society…and more than time for you to finally start thinking like a grown woman.”
Aargh. The condescension in her voice was so palpable, it made my skin burn. I gritted my teeth and counted to twenty in seething silence. Anything I’d said out loud just then would only have proven Angeline’s point.
The most astonishing thing was, I had actually spent the last six months missing my sisters and looking forward to seeing them again. It really was like some mysterious and alarming new type of magic, the way I forgot, every single time we were parted, just how irritating they could actually be.
“Now, Kat.” Elissa laid one hand on my arm, stroking gently. “What Angeline means to say is, you know how we’ve looked forward to introducing you to Society. And why shouldn’t you enjoy it, too? There are so many interesting, eligible young men in town this season. You’ve always spent so much of your time…studying…” Her gaze slid sideways to the modiste’s assistants again as she uttered the euphemism we’d agreed on for my Guardian work. “Why shouldn’t you allow yourself a bit of fun for once?”
“Studying is fun for me,” I said impatiently. “Truly, Elissa. Look at me!” I spread out my arms, shaking her off. “You know I’d be a disaster in proper society. I’m not cut out for it.”
“Nonsense,” Angeline snapped. “You have a delightful dowry, courtesy of both of our husbands’ generosity. You’re perfectly pleasant to look at. And considering how much time you’ve spent running wild across the hills of Yorkshire, I expect you’ll be an excellent dancer, too. You’ll find a fiancé in no time.”
And there we were, back to the most aggravating point of all. “I will not be married off to some tedious young man just to make everyone else happy!”