But Lucie had made her peace with that, and now was not the moment to dwell on it.
This is it, she thought.It is finally happening.The thing she had been working toward since before the Season had even begun. Since the day Lady Rivenna had first spoken of leaving The Charmed Leaf and building something new, and asked Lucie to come with her. Every early morning, every scorched attempt, every late afternoon with her hands sticky and her back aching and her mind churning through lists that never ended—all of it had been pointed here.
She could do this. She could.
And once today was done, life at The Honeycomb would settle into its proper rhythm at last. She could see it already, laid out before her. Thewarm honey light spilling gold across the counters each morning, the pixies at their work, no Henry Stratton lingering about, and Rosavyn’s bright presence just one room over. A friend. A real friend, right here in The Honeycomb with her. And the quiet joy of making the things she loved, day after day after day.
It would be a good life. It would be enough. Even without …him.
Her gaze moved on across the tables, seeking out the faces she knew. She recognized many of them from her years at The Charmed Leaf, the regular patrons and the occasional ones, the fine ladies whose orders she had filled and whose particular preferences she had learned by heart.
Then she paused. Among the silks and the jewels and the pointed ears, there were human families seated at several of the tables. She recognized them, too—faces she knew from The Charmed Leaf, where Iris had worked so steadily to make humans welcome alongside fae. But the last time Lucie had seen Lady Rivenna’s guest list for today, it had included only the finest fae families of Bloomhaven. She must have amended it since.
She was still looking.
Still moving from face to face. Still pretending that she was merely taking stock of the guests, and not searching, quietly and helplessly, for one particular dark head among them.
For him.
Then her eyes landed on a table near the edge of the garden, and every other thought went clean out of her head.
Her parents. And Charlotte.
They were here. Her mother sat very straight in a chair that was finer than any they owned, in her best dress, her hands folded in her lap. Her father beside her, looking across the gathering at Kazrian’s silver wood framework with frank, curious interest. And Charlotte, twisting round in her seat to whisper something, her whole face bright with delight.
Lucie had not known they were coming. No one had told her they were coming.
She stood there with her hand pressed to the doorframe and could not for the life of her decide how she felt about it. Whether it steadied her to have them here, the people who loved her regardless of enchanted confections and fine fae ladies, or whether it doubled the weight of everything,because now there were more people here whomeantsomething to her that she might fall on her face in front of.
And then?—
Oh, stars.
What?
No!
A ripple of turning of heads went through the garden, and beneath the flowering archway, in a gown the color of water silvered by moonlight, swept the High Lady herself.
Lucie’s grip on the doorframe tightened. “I cannot do this,” she whispered to Balthazar. “I cannot. Look at them, Balthazar. Look ather. The High Lady. And I am—I am nobody. I am a human girl who makes sweets. I have no magic of my own, no name, no—nothing. I am going to walk out there in front of the High Lady herself, and something will go wrong, and I will ruin this place before it has even properly begun, and?—”
“You are extraordinary.”
The voice came from somewhere behind her, across the kitchen. Quiet, low, and so certain that it stopped the breath in her throat.
“It does not matter in the least what happens today,” Kazrian said. “You always will be.”
Lucie closed her eyes for a moment. Drew one breath, slow and deliberate, in through her nose and out again. Then she turned around to face him.
He stood on the other side of the worktable, and he was looking at her the way he always did—as though she were the only thing in the room worth seeing.
“I thought you would be seated outside by now,” Lucie said. “With the rest of the Rowanwoods.”
“You are to remain here in the kitchen,” he said, moving around the worktable and coming toward her, “until my grandmother has welcomed everyone and calls you out. Is that not so?”
“It is.”
“Then I shall wait here as well.” He said it simply, as though it were the most obvious arrangement in the world. “With you.”
