He stopped in front of her, not too close—he was still so careful about that—and slowly, carefully reached out and brushed the back of her hand with his fingers.
Her breath caught.
Then his fingers slid between hers, and closed, and he squeezed her hand gently. Reassuringly. His gaze held hers all the while, steady and warm and impossibly certain. And if she had been worried, a moment ago, about the strange high breathing and her body’s refusal to draw air properly—that was nothing. That was nothing at all, compared to what was happening now in the center of her chest, where her heart seemed to have decided it would beat entirely out of rhythm and see how she liked it.
“Remember what we spoke of,” he said quietly. “What we planned together. If any step should go wrong—the spun sugar, the light, the release—you already know what you may move to instead. We accounted for all of it. There is no mistake you can make that we have not already made a way through.”
She looked at their joined hands. At his, so much larger than hers, folded around it with such care.
Outside, from somewhere beyond the kitchen wall, came the steady, unhurried sound of Lady Rivenna’s tread upon the paving stones, drawing nearer, coming round toward the back door.
They stepped apart. Not quickly, with the guilty haste of two people caught, but with a kind of quiet reluctance.
The door opened, and Lady Rivenna walked in. “Lucie. Everything is very nearly ready.”
“Lady Rivenna—” Lucie could not help herself. “The High Lady. Did you know she was coming?”
“Ah.” Lady Rivenna folded her gloved hands before her. “Yes. I did rather more than know it, in fact. I invited her.”
“You—”
“I did not tell you,” Lady Rivenna went on smoothly, “because I had no wish to heap a further weight upon you when you were already carrying a considerable one. And then Her Grace sent word that she would be unable to attend, so there seemed no earthly point in mentioning it, troubling you over a guest who would not come.” She glanced back toward the garden. “But it appears she has changed her mind.”
Lucie stared at her.
“Take it as the compliment it is, my dear.” A small, dry curl of satisfaction touched the corner of Lady Rivenna’s mouth. “She sampled the cherryblossom petits fours we sent her, and evidently she found them accomplished enough that she could not, in good conscience, absent herself from the official opening of our little confectionery. One does not lure the High Lady across half of Bloomhaven with anything less than genuine excellence.”
Lucie opened her mouth, found she had nothing to say to that, and closed it again. “And my parents?” she managed at last. “My sister?”
“Ah.” Lady Rivenna had, at least, the grace to look faintly caught out. “Yes. Much the same reasoning, I confess. I wished them to see what you have accomplished here. It seemed to me a thing your family ought to witness with their own eyes.” She paused. “But I did not know whether the knowledge of their presence would settle you or unsettle you. And so, in the end, I chose to invite them and say nothing—and requested that they say nothing too—so that you might give yourself wholly to the preparations, and not spend these last days fretting over the particular terror of disappointing the people you love best.”
Lucie looked down at her hands. And then, with a rare and unguarded honesty, offered to the one person before whom she most wished to appear composed and capable and entirely without cracks, she said, “It is not only them I do not wish to disappoint. I do not wish to disappointyou.”
For a moment Lady Rivenna said nothing. Then she stepped closer, and there was something in her face that Lucie had not often been permitted to see. The sharpness set aside, the grandeur laid down, and beneath it something gentler and unmistakably fond.
“You could not possibly disappoint me, dear girl. Not if the entire structure were to collapse before our eyes, and we were reduced to flinging bottles of honey light bodily over the assembled guests.” She lifted one shoulder in the smallest and most elegant of shrugs. “We should simply inform them that it was all part of the performance. And they would believe us, because I would say it, and I am extremely convincing.”
A startled laugh broke out of Lucie before she could stop it.
“There,” said Lady Rivenna, pleased. “That is better.” She drew back, and the grandeur settled once more about her shoulders. “Now. We are very nearly ready to begin. I shall return to the garden and say my piece, and when the moment is right, I shall call you out. You have only to wait, and tobreathe, and to remember that you have already done the difficult part. What remains is merely the showing of it.”
She returned to the garden, and the event began.
Lucie stood just inside the doorway once more—Kazrian a steady presence at her shoulder, Balthazar sitting sentinel at her feet—and watched through the gap as Lady Rivenna took her place before the assembled guests and lifted her hands. The garden fell silent.
She was born for this, Lucie thought. Every eye in the place turned toward her at once, and she held them without the smallest visible effort, as though the attention of dozens of people were merely her natural element, the air she had always breathed.
She welcomed them. She thanked them for coming. She spoke of The Honeycomb, of how it had come to be, this small new venture born the day she had at last stepped back from The Charmed Leaf and chosen to begin something new. She spoke of it with warmth and wit, and drew a ripple of laughter here, an appreciative murmur there, and all the while the garden hung upon her words.
“Everything you will taste this afternoon,” she said, “and everything you see displayed upon these tables, carries some manner of enchantment within it. Some small magic, woven into the making. A meringue that giggles upon the tongue. A custard kiss that warms in the palm of your hand.” A pause, precisely weighted. “But the signature of this house—the thing some of you have already begun to know us for—is our honey light.”
A stir of interest moved through the tables.
“For those unacquainted with it,” Lady Rivenna went on, “honey light is not a flavor, though it is delicious. It is not a scent, though it is lovely. It is a feeling. A warmth. It is the particular golden contentment of a thing remembered fondly, a sunlit afternoon with nothing pressing on one’s attention, a warmth toward the person seated beside you, a moment in which one was, however briefly, entirely at peace. Our highly skilled confectioner has found a way to bottle that light, to weave it into her creations, so that to eat them is to be given back, for a moment, a small measure of one’s own happiness.”
Even Lucie, who had made the stuff with her own two hands and knew exactly how much honey and how much labor went into every bottle, felt her chest go warm at the way Lady Rivenna described it. As though it weresomething out of a story. As though it were the most wondrous thing in the world.
Perhaps, she thought, it was.
