Two days later, Tarran was back on his feet and in the tower laboratory, experimenting away. This time, though, he had Aoife help him with his work.

"Again," he commanded, gesturing towards another small section of grass in a terra cotta pot.

"You want me to continue killing your potted plants?" Aoife deadpanned, resting her elbows on the worktable. For the last hour, she'd been trying to figure out some way to stop her magic from automatically reacting when she touched something living. Unfortunately, none of their strategies had worked, and she'd simply become discouraged and killed a small army of potted plants in the process.

"We need to figure out how your magic works. If it's reaching out without your consent, we need to figure out how to stop it."

"I just suck the life out of things. It's not as complicated as you seem to believe," Aoife said with a heavy sigh.

"... Say that again," Tarran said slowly.

"I kill things?"

"No, no. You said you suck the life out of things," he said again, picking up speed with every word. "What if that's the trick?"

"Explain."

"I was wrong," he whispered. "I was so, so wrong, and we've been approaching it the wrong way. It's not your magic reaching out, it's life being drawn to you."

"I'm... a... magnet?"

"You're a magnet," he confirmed, a grin spreading across his face. "All this time I thought you were controlling death, but you're not- you're controlling life!"

"Please don't mock me," Aoife said softly, a hint of bitterness in her voice. "I kill things. Nothing more."

"But you could do more!" Tarran grabbed her gloved hands in his excitement, and she nearly jumped out of her skin, pulling away quickly. "That's got to be why you heal so quickly. That's why you survived the nightmare wolves. That might even be why your potions are so strong when you don't use anything more than basic ingredients."

"What if you're wrong? I could kill something trying to save it," she insisted.

"What if I'm right?"

There was a long pause. Aoife bit her lip, considering. On the one hand, it made sense. Any scrapes from training were always gone the next morning. Any attempt to harm herself in the past had ended in utter failure. On the other hand, if Tarran was wrong, it could be dangerous for her and anyone around her.

"If you're right, we need to come up with some way for me to test it."

"I think it's best we start with plants," Tarran said thoughtfully. "If you can drain the life out of a plant that's still rooted in a pot and then put the life back into it, that would be real progress."

"You forget that I don't know how to do that," Aoife reminded him. "I don't even know how to consciously control what I can do."

"Then we'll work on that first. The first goal is to try and see if you can touch something without affecting its life force at all. Elina didn't need to wear gloves, so clearly they aren't necessary once you've obtained a certain amount of control," he said.

"Excellent. How?" Aoife pressed.

Tarran opened his mouth.

Closed it.

"I don't know," he admitted, "but we'll find out together. The best way for us to start is to work plant by plant and see what you're able to touch and how fast it works."

"You want me to kill more things?"

"Aoife, it doesn't happen every time you touch something, correct? It can't have always happened to you or everyone around you would be dead."

Aoife blinked. He'd managed to hit a nerve, though he obviously hadn't intended to do so. She was constantly afraid she would cause the deaths of everyone around her; that was the whole point in the gloves in the first place. Just in case.

"It's not every time, and it requires skin contact," she admitted. "I'm not going to walk around and test out my abilities on people, though! It's dangerous!"

"Plants. We start with plants," he said again. "After that, we can move on to animals and human subjects. You have to be willing to try, though."

"... How is this helping you?" Aoife asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

"Come again?" Tarran's eyebrows raised as he looked at her from across the room.

"How is this helping you?" she tried again. "You said that you would help me learn to control my powers if I helped you with your own experiments, but I haven't done any of that thus far, and I don't like the idea that I'm being used."

Tarran looked at her for a long moment, seemingly weighing his options. His lips were pressed in a thin line and his eyes narrowed, very much the picture of someone who didn't want to speak, but Aoife didn't plan to give him a choice. He seemed overjoyed about the breakthrough in her magic, but that only made his motivations seem all the more mysterious.

She didn't think he was a bad person, but she didn't trust him, either. Not yet. Tarran had too many secrets in too many places for trust to be a real part of their relationship just yet. He seemed... ethereal. Distant. Almost verging on human, but not quite there. She didn't think he'd made a deal to help her with her magic out of the kindness of his heart. It was more likely that he had his own motivations, and she was tired of not knowing what they were.

"The human lands are cursed," he finally said, heaving a sigh.

Aoife blinked.

"I'm sorry?"

"The human lands are cursed," Tarran repeated curtly. "Are you unable to hear?"

"What... how could they be cursed?"

"The curse originates from the Faerie forest, and it's spreading outwards into the human lands. It's slow, and it will take generations of humans for the Queen's plan to be fulfilled, but the Fae have generations to wait. Our life spans are three to four times longer than a human on average, and the Queen will live even longer thanks to the magic in her crown."

"What does the curse do, exactly?"

"Think, Aoife. Think. Have you ever been close to the Faerie forest?"

"I lived right on the border of the forest as a child, close to the southern part of the forest."

"Close to the Fae settlement," Tarran said. "What did you see there as a child? Why did you leave?"

"The village was dying. They said the crops wouldn't grow anymore and that the land was infertile-" she cut off suddenly, realization dawning in her eyes. "That's the curse?"

"Yes."

"They said it was me," she said, dazed. "They said it was my fault that the crops were dying, that I had some kind of evil magic that drained the life from our village. I had to run with my sisters..."

"I can, at the very least, assure you that it was not your fault," Tarran said firmly.

"So the curse... it's causing crops to die?"

"It's a curse on the land itself. The Queen placed a slow-spreading curse on any human-inhabited land to make the crops wither and the water dry up. She meant to force the humans out and kill them slowly, reclaiming the land that was ours before the war and more besides."

"How do you know this? How is it that you are privy to this information, but no one else is aware of the curse?" Aoife asked suspiciously.

"A very small amount of luck and a great deal of misfortune," Tarran said. "To put it bluntly... the curse is... It's tied to me," he admitted, wincing.

"It's what, now?"

"It's a complicated mess, that's what it is," Tarran grumbled, turning to fish around among a stack of papers.

"And yet you're here now? Helping the humans?" Aoife pressed, glancing down at the documents in his hand. She couldn't read quickly enough to tell what they were, but it seemed like pages of notes all in the same scribbled handwriting.

"Are you nothing but a compendium of questions tucked inside a small body?" he asked grumpily.

"You should be used to it by now, I'd think."

"I have my own reasons for helping the humans, not the least of which is that the Fae Queen has gone completely out of her mind with vengeance. Placing a death curse on the land isn't doing anyone any good, including the Faeries. It's blind rage, not a calculated revenge plot, though she certainly did her best to put me at the center of it."

"But why cast something like that in the first place?"

"Anger. Grief. After all the death and destruction of the Fae Wars, the humans claimed large sections of our land for their own- a fact which you are aware of, no doubt. I believe she originally intended to place a curse on only the human occupied lands that previously belonged to the Fae, but it isn't easy to be that precise with a spell that covers so much ground, and her anger drove it out of her hands very quickly. It's already starting to spread into the Fae forest, little by little. It's slower there, of course, because of the innate magic of the forest, but it's spreading. In a hundred years, in two hundred years... all this will be barren land."

"So it's not just about the human lands."

"No," he confirmed. "It isn't. It's about saving our world as a whole before the magic that created the curse spirals out of control."

"And you think I can help you?"

"I..." he paused. "I don't know."

Aoife blinked. "Then... why am I here?"

"Truthfully, I was just hell bent on finding a cure before my leg of the curse inevitably kills me. I saw you and I wanted to help you before then, as a favor to your grandmother. Gods know I owe her more than you can imagine. I used my experiments as an excuse so I wouldn't have to tell you more than you were ready to know."

"Oh," she said, lowering her gaze. She didn't know how to feel about the idea that she was a charity case. Something in that implication stung far more than she thought it should, like a knife twisting in her chest that confirmed all her fears.

"But... I would not turn down help, if you are so inclined," he said gently, very carefully laying a hand on her fabric-covered shoulder. "I find that I am genuinely invested in your safety and learning in a way that I did not expect."

A tiny spark of hope flared in her chest, and Aoife couldn't help but smile up at him, renewed determination in her eyes. Tarran had brought her back into some semblance of a real life rather than living like she was wandering among shadows. She wanted to help him, not just as a repayment of a debt or in return for what he'd done for her.

The more time they spent together, the more she realized that she genuinely liked him. Stubborn as he was, he was also kind and intelligent and endearingly grumpy. He was a friend, and she wanted to help him.

"How do we break it?"

"There is... a long shot of a way to break the curse, but it's wrapped in a riddle with specific conditions. I have it written down if you want to look."

"You might have to read it with me a few times," she admitted.

"Faerie curses are tricky. They're about the engineering of the words as much as anything, and I've been looking for every loophole that I possibly can. ­­At this point, I would almost rather my own death than watching and waiting while this curse spreads, but..."

He trailed off, placing a scroll on the table in front of them, slowly unrolling the parchment to reveal a block of ornate text. The parchment shimmered in a way that parchment really should not be able to do, half translucent and reflecting the light slightly. She couldn't make out the text, unfortunately. The scrawl was too elaborate to pick out letters.

Tarran turned to her as he unrolled the note, looking almost ashamed. "Well, to tell you the truth, I'm not so altruistic that I'd like to die. I'd really rather not. I should probably be willing to sacrifice my life for a greater cause, and I am if need be, but..." He frowned, trailing off.

Aoife snorted out a laugh. "I think that makes sense. I would like for you to stay alive, too, for the record." She placed her gloved hand over his without thinking much about it, and he stiffened, but did not pull away, clearing his throat before he spoke again.

"Call me selfish, but I would very much enjoy spending a little more time on this plane if I can, and I'd like to see through this trouble with the Queen until the end. I can't do that if the curse eliminates me before she wakes."

"... She's asleep? Seriously?"

"The curse was so taxing on the High Queen that it put h­er into a state of suspended slumber. It's taking nearly all her magic to sustain it and she doesn't care. The only thing that could change her mind about that, I assume, would be my death," Tarran said with a sigh. "At that point, the curse will break on its own and she'll come back to wreak vengeance in a more direct way."

Aoife squinted down at the strangely shimmering scroll. "What... does it say?"

Tarran cleared his throat and slowly began to read. "This curse will eat away at your heart and your magic, draining life from stolen Faerie lands and rendering your immortal body weak over time. To break the spell, someone you have harmed, someone who owes you a debt, and someone who loves you must exchange their life for yours of their own free will. Death for life. Balance restored."

"It doesn't describe the effects of the curse very well," she muttered.

"That's true, but it doesn't need to. Curse scrolls are part of the balance of casting, and they need only detail how to break the curse, not every specific detail of its casting. It's a pain, sometimes literally, but this is what we have to work with, and for the spell to properly lock the conditions to break it must be written on one of these."

They stood in front of the scroll for a long moment, staring down at it. Aoife wasn't trying to read it any more so much as taking in the scrawled handwriting.

"Why does she hate you so much?" Aoife whispered, shaking her head. Whatever she was expecting, though, it wasn't what came out of his mouth.

"I killed the Queen's husband."

His voice was heavy with grief and shame, eyes squeezed shut as he spoke.

"You killed the Fae King?" Aoife hissed, shocked.

"No, I killed the Queen's husband," Tarran corrected, opening his eyes as he stared off into the middle distance, looking at memories that Aoife couldn't see. "The Fae Court is a strict matriarchy, and he was never made Consort because he disliked the implications of the title, though he did participate in politics and Court affairs... His name was Silas. He was like my brother." The last sentence came out as a whisper.

"Then why...?" She couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence.

"During the Fae Wars, the human side liked to use explosives on the battlefield. Throw them from a distance and you remain out of reach of quite a bit of Fae magic. Pack them with iron shards and you have the power to stifle a Fae's magic," he explained. Tarran bit his lip, like he was trying to find the least painful way to talk about it, but Aoife's thought process caught up faster than he could speak.

"He was hit," Aoife breathed, understanding dawning like a crashing wave. She regretted speaking as soon as she saw the look on his face. His eyes were hollow as he nodded, gazing off into the battle scene of a long-dead past.

"He saved my life. Pushed me out of the way. A shard still caught me, but it wasn't enough to kill me, and I was able to rip it out." His hand moved almost unconsciously up to the left side of his collarbone, where she'd seen the long scar on their first day of training. "Fae heal quickly. I tried to pull out the shards that I could, but his wounds were closing too quickly. I can't imagine how immense the pain must have been. By the time the wounds were closed, my hands were covered in his blood and he was screaming."

"Iron trapped in a body that way is like poison to Fae, especially full Fae. It drove him mad- from the pain, or the interaction with his magic, or both. I don't know. All I know is that he looked me in the eye and said, 'Tell her I love her, and put me down.'" Tarran blinked and shook his head, his eyes finally focusing on the room in front of him again. "Initially, I refused, but... he wouldn't have survived. We'd already seen the iron poisoning take effect. He would have turned on friend and foe alike, and with magic as powerful as Silas's was, it would have been catastrophic. I... I ran my sword through his heart, and I stayed till he died."

Aoife tentatively reached out and placed her hand on top of his. She wasn't quite sure how to offer physical comfort, having squashed all instincts that had anything to do with touching people for so long, but she wanted him to know that he wasn't alone. If she couldn't ease his pain, then she could at least bear it with him.

"Words are like ashes," she murmured. Tarran slowly turned to look at her, brow furrowed slightly in confusion. "I heard Lizzie say it once, when one of the kitchen girls lost her father. She said it meant that they're useless sometimes, that there's nothing to say that can ease the pain."

"She sounds wise."

"What does the curse do?" she asked after a pause.

Tarran looked at her for a long moment, seemingly deciding just now much he wanted to reveal, before he sighed. Brushing his hair aside, he reached for the collar of his tunic, pulling it to the side so she could see the skin of his neck and down to the place over his heart...

Where his Mark turned from shining silver to an inky black stain.

Her eyes widened in shock. Could Marks turn colors? Well, clearly they could, but what happened after that?

"When all of my Mark turns black, I will lose any sanity than I have left to iron madness, and then I will die," he said matter-of-factly, readjusting his clothing.

"Wha- what do we do?" Aoife whispered, glancing back and forth between his now-concealed skin and his clear, gray eyes. "How long do you have to break it?"

"Staying at the estate helps to stave it off. Going away from here makes me physically weaker as the curse progresses. Using my magic also makes my curse accelerate, though there's little I can do to get around using it on a regular basis."

"So I was right!" Aoife said suddenly, pulling back a little. "You have been getting sick- stupid, rotten wizard!" Aoife punctuated each word with a punch to his shoulder, not hard enough to do real damage, but enough to make her point.

"Ow, ow- hey!" Tarran batted her hands away. "It's rather rude to hit a dying man."

"You're not going to die. I'm not going to let you die," Aoife said firmly.

"Thank you for the sentiment," he said, rubbing his arm, "but we all have to die at some point.

"As long as I don't go into Fae territory, the curse won't accelerate beyond a workable speed, even away from the estate. I should at least have enough time to figure out how to stop the Queen's curse."

"And what's going to stop her from just cursing us again after you fix that, huh?"

"Her blood magic isn't strong. She won't be able to re-cast a curse like that for weeks, possibly months after she finally works out that it's been broken."

"In other words, you haven't thought that far ahead," Aoife deadpanned.

"I wouldn't say that," he grumbled, but a dull blush spread at the tips of his ears. He really hadn't thought that far.

"Are there other options besides... Well... Would it even do any good to...?" Aoife trailed off, but it was obvious what she meant.

"Killing her would halt the spell, but not reverse what has already been done, and it would be difficult to kill her in the first place, to say the least."

"Is it insensitive to suggest beheading?" she mumbled, feeling oddly hollow.

"You are an idiot," Tarran mumbled, a little sharply. "And you obviously find that option appalling, though in all seriousness I believe it has a moderately high chance of success."

"The Queen is immortal, right? So she's immune to poison and any wounds would probably heal like mine do."

"That's correct. Her immortality isn't from her natural magic, though. It comes from her crown, which draws life energy from the Fae forest itself and channels it into her body." "Even tucked away in her glass coffin, she's practically invulnerable even if we could make it past layers and layers of Faerie guards watching over her."

"So we just have to break it ourselves," Aoife said firmly.

"You... make that sound rather simple."

"I'll figure it out."