“Is he truly?” Lucie asked, very quietly. She took another step closer, and lowered her voice, so that it would not carry to Iris and Rosavyn, who had both gone tactfully still a little distance off. “Is he truly a good man?”
Georgiana lifted her head.
“Not like,” Lucie said, holding her gaze, letting the weight settle beneath the words, “certain other men?”
For a moment Georgiana did not move at all. Something crossed her face, a flicker of understanding, of being seen, that told Lucie her meaning had landed exactly where she had aimed it. Georgiana nodded.
“Yes. He is. He is kind. He is—he is nothing like—” She did not finish it. She only nodded again, more firmly, as though to convince them both. “Yes. He is a good man.”
“Then I am happy for you,” Lucie said, and meant it with every part of herself that was not currently screaming about profiteroles and petit fours and an empty front-of-shop position and the most important afternoon of her life.
“Thank you.” Georgiana let out a breath. “And I am so dreadfully sorry to abandon you. I know what today means—to you, to Lady Rivenna. I know I am leaving you at the worst possible time, but?—”
“Do not spare it another thought,” Lucie said. “We shall manage here perfectly well, I promise you.”
Georgiana nodded. Then she glanced around—quickly, instinctively, checking the empty courtyard and the open door behind her—and stepped closer, dropping her voice until it was barely more than a breath.
“And … my brother,” she whispered. “Whatever promises he has made, whatever apologies he has given … you should say no.”
Lucie reached out and took Georgiana’s gloved hand in both of hers. She pressed it hard. “I will never have anything to do with Henry Stratton again. You have my word.”
Georgiana nodded. “Well, then. Goodbye, Lucie.”
Then she turned, crossed the courtyard with quick, purposeful steps, and disappeared down the lane.
Lucie stood very still, watching the empty space where she had been. Then she turned to face Iris and Rosavyn, who were speaking quietly to one another a short distance away. They looked up as she turned.
“She is gone,” Lucie said. “She has left.” She heard the tremor begin at the edges of her own voice and pressed on. “She has accepted a proposal and she is leaving Bloomhaven this afternoon, and she was supposed to be here, she was supposed to stand beside me this afternoon and greet guests and explain the confections and answer questions and—she knows everything, she knows every confection, every honey light, she knows how to talk to people, and?—”
Her voice cracked, and her breaths were coming too high and too fast. She pressed her palm over the ring lying against her chest—cool metal, hard stone—and forced a slow exhale out of her lungs.
“Lucie,” Rosavyn began.
“And even if I somehow manage this afternoon, what about tomorrow? The Honeycomb will be open—properly open—and there will be no one tending the front of the shop! Who will—who will—I cannot?—”
“Lucie,” Rosavyn repeated, louder now.
She stepped closer and reached for Lucie’s hand, the one not currently pressed to her chest. “I think it is rather clear, is it not?” One brow arched and her smile stretched wider. “The position was always meant to be mine.”
Chapter Thirty
The guests were nearlyall assembled, the lumyrite ring was on her hand, ready to be used, and her body had begun once more to do the high, fast, shallow breathing that came from somewhere just beneath her collarbone and would not be reasoned with.
Lucie stood just inside the doorway of The Honeycomb kitchen, half hidden by the frame, peering out at the garden. Balthazar sat at her feet, and when Lucie glanced down, she found him surveying the scene with that slow eyes-half-closed blink of his, as though the entire affair were so far beneath him that he could not even bother remaining awake for it. Somehow, this made her feel a fraction less anxious.
She looked out again at the tables beneath the trees.
The fae ladies were beautiful in their gowns of pale silk with flowers trailing from the hems—tiny rosebuds that had not yet decided whether to open, sprigs of jasmine, and thread that shimmered faintly with its own enchantment. The fae lords were no less striking, immaculately turned out in their fitted coats. Every so often a jewel caught the dappled afternoon light—at a throat, at a wrist, in the head of a cravat pin—and sent it scattering. And moving among them, gracious and glittering and entirely in her element, was Lady Rivenna.
She stood near the entrance Iris had constructed—a graceful arch of woven branches and trailing honeysuckle—receiving each guest as they arrived with a word, a nod, an inclination of her silver head. And then, with the smooth efficiency of one who had run Bloomhaven’s most successful tea house for decades, she handed each of them off to Rosavyn.
Rosavyn, who was magnificent.
Lucie watched her sweep a pair of elderly fae matrons toward their table, one gloved hand resting lightly at an elbow, her whole face alight with the particular warmth that made strangers into confidants inside of a minute. She was saying something, and both matrons laughed, one of them actually pressing a hand to her chest. She was just a touch too forward, was Rosavyn. Just a fraction past what propriety strictly allowed, speaking too freely, treating a person as though they had been friends since childhood. And Lucie could see they adored her for it.
And yet not one of them—not a single laughing matron among them—would have permitted a son of theirs to marry her. Because she had not manifested. Because all that warmth, all that wit, all that effortless grace that could charm a garden full of people amounted to precisely nothing in the eyes of a society that measured a woman’s worth by whether or not magic had seen fit to claim her.
Rather like a society that measured a woman’s worth by whether she possessed any magic at all. And if she did not, if she was merely human, then it did not matter how much a fae lord might love her.
