The Courtship of Julian St. Albans by Amy Crook

let it go to voicemail.
    ~ ~ ~
    After a nice, long bath and another short talk
with Lapointe, Alex got himself ready to give himself over to the care of his
true first love — magic.
    The spelled cufflink set was a good first gift,
but once he started with something so precious and magical, it wouldn’t do to
go back to anything mundane. Alex didn’t have any of Julian’s hair, but he had
the love note which he’d yet to answer, and that would do for the next gift he
had planned. He wasn’t sure if he’d have enough time during the Courtship
itself, though he already had plans to beg a lock of hair from young Julian,
should he make it far enough to owe more gifts and have time between events to
make them.
    This time, Alex was creating something that was
both simpler and more complex — a potion of heart’s ease. Alex felt that it
was appropriate, at least while he was still in the first stage of the layered
Courtship, to do what he could to both acknowledge and soothe Julian’s grief at
losing his parents, and then his lover not a year later.
    Alex had a feeling everyone else would treat it
as gauche to bring up, and he intended to stand out with kindness when he knew
he couldn’t compete in other ways.
    The first thing Alex did was to spend several
minutes in the centre of the room letting go of his own heartaches as best he
could. Years of magical training had blunted some of the bitterness he felt
toward his family, but today it was as fresh and black as ever, and he had to
lighten that up as much as he could before he could make something that would
truly help Julian’s grief.
    He sang his own personal meditation mantra, not
so much words as tones given form through the shape of his mouth, something
that grounded him and helped him to push away the feeling that came with
knowing that his family didn’t particularly like him. The feeling was mutual,
but he was too self-aware not to know that it was partly out of self-defence.
Flora and Fauna could both be quite kind, Victor strong and Henry unfailingly
cheerful even in the face of tragedy.
    But they didn’t like him, so he didn’t like
them, and there were barbs in their words to each other, meant to tear the soft
places of their hearts.
    Deep breaths between each clear, pure sound
helped him to let go of today’s fresh wounds, to let them heal over, to take
his triumphs in having made Fauna admire his cleverness in gift choices, in
making Flora acknowledge that his sense of personal style wasn’t utterly
hopeless.
    When he was done, he had a small store of
shining moments of goodness to add to his personal collection, and he felt he’d
eased his own turmoil enough. He continued to hum, tunelessly now, as he
gathered up the ingredients for the potion.
    Heart’s ease had to be brewed in a cauldron of
silver, over a heat too low to damage the soft metal, a fire fed with fresh
lavender and rosemary. He poured out nine drams of tincture of heartsease,
smelling the violet-tinged water like a fine fragrance.
    Finely chopped lemon thyme was weighed and
sprinkled over the burbling liquid, adding its own healing and purification,
not to mention love. Then he dropped in a cracked but insect-free piece of
amber for calming and harmony, watching as it sank to the bottom of the small
cauldron, its rich colour blunted by the violet tinge of the tincture.
    He struck the first tuning fork against the
cauldron, causing them both to ring, and he could feel the magic beginning to
rise. When next he looked, the amber had begun to melt like honey, though the
fire wasn’t nearly hot enough to have such an effect, and the bits of thyme
seemed to be dissolving into the potion as well, giving it a cloudy blue-green
tinge. Alex was patient, holding the tuning fork over the cauldron until its
tone had died out almost completely before he set it down and moved on.
    Next he sprinkled finely powdered jade over the
potion and then added a few drops of cedar oil and a sprig of