Lucie’s breath caught. Her gaze swung wildly about. And there—a gossip bird. Not in the trees, where any sensible creature with a shred of discretion might have perched. The wretched, brazen thing had landed on the back of one of the vacated chairs. It ruffled its iridescent feathers, threw back its head, and shrieked.
“The Rowanwood son and confectioner girl! Locked in a room! Alone! All the night through!”
The words came out garbled, half swallowed, running together in that dreadful broken cadence the birds always used. But clear enough.
The garden went quiet.
Then two more dropped out of the branches, one to the back of a chair and one to the edge of a table, and they took up the same cry, overlapping, each shrieking its own mangled version of the same story until the words tumbled over one another into a single hideous chorus.
Lucie could not move.
Her mind was already working, already trying to convince her that everything would be all right.They are gossip birds. No one believes gossip birds. They garble everything. By tomorrow it will be about some other girl and some other man entirely, and no one will remember a word of it.And that was true. It was perfectly, reasonably true, and if it had been only the birds, she might even have believed it.
But Henry was here. Henry had told Lord Featherlock first. And a gossip bird shrieking a rumor was one thing—a scrap of noise one would likely tut at and dismiss. A gossip birdconfirminga rumor was something else entirely. Lord Featherlock’s version—Henry’sversion—would be moving through Bloomhaven before the day was out.
Lucie stood at the center of the garden with the golden light coming soft through the leaves and the faelights glowing between the branches and her whole beautiful, perfect afternoon crumbling silently into ruin around her, and she could not move so much as a finger.
Some small, confused part of her mind tried to make sense of this ridiculous turn of events. Had Henry followed a gossip bird here? Had he already intended to come and somehow rounded up the birds on his way? Was it a hideously awful coincidence that they had shown up at the same time?
But none of that mattered because the end result was the same. The story was out, shrieked across a garden full of the finest families in Bloomhaven, and there was no gathering it back.
A piercing squawk. A hiss. And then a streak of gray shot out from beneath the serving table and Balthazar hurled himself at the first bird. It got away from him—a strangled cry, a frantic clatter of wings—and flapped up and away, and the other two scattered after it. In moments, all three were gone into the bright afternoon sky.
But it was too late. It had been too late from the first shriek.
The whispers had already begun. All around the garden, heads turning, voices dropping low—the fine fae ladies leaning toward one another behindgloved hands, the murmurs spreading table to table like a stain soaking through linen. Looking at her. Looking at Kazrian. Looking back at her.
And Henry. Henry met her eyes across the length of the garden and arranged his face—his face he had got someone to heal—into something soft and sorrowful, his brows drawn up at their inner corners, his mouth set in a line of gentle, wounded disappointment. As though he were quite as grieved as anyone to have learned such a thing of a young woman he had thought so very lovely.
The breath climbed high into the top of her chest and lodged there, thin and fast and shallow, and would not go down.
Not now. Please. Not now, not here, not in front of?—
“He islying!”
Charlotte’s voice. Charlotte, on her feet, one arm flung out and her finger leveled straight at Henry across the tables. Panic tightened its grip on Lucie’s chest.
No, Charlotte, don’t?—
“He laid his hands on my sister—hehurther—because she refused his attention, and now he means to ruin her for it!”
The garden went dead silent.
And then Kazrian moved.
Lucie’s attention snapped to him as he started across the grass. The guests fell back before him, people moving, chairs shifting, clearing a path without seeming to decide to, as though no one wished to find themselves standing in the way of the terrible thing that had come into his face. He was looking at Henry. Only at Henry. And Lucie had never in her life seen that expression on him, on the boy who liked to know how things worked, the man who had stood in the dark and counted breaths with her.
Away to the side, movement. Lady Rivenna, gathering her skirts, starting toward Kazrian with unusual haste. But she was on the far side of the gathering, tables and guests and yards of grass between them, and she would not reach him in time.
Lucie’s gaze careened between the two of them: Kazrian, crossing the garden with that dreadful purpose. Henry, not retreating, not so much as shifting his weight to go. If anything he had squared himself, lifted his chin, drawn his shoulders back into the posture of a man bracing to receive ablow he fully intended to be seen receiving. A martyr, arranging himself for the audience.
And in the space of a breath Lucie saw the whole of it unspool before her, saw exactly how it would end.
Kazrian would strike him, and the story that went out from this garden would no longer be about a locked storeroom door. It would be about the fae lord who had struck a human man in the middle of a garden party. It would be about a Rowanwood’s temper, his want of control, striking a man who had only spoken the truth. Perhapshewas the one who had hurt the girl. A fae lord who could not master himself, who put his hands where he ought not.
And Kazrian’s standing, his family’s name—all of it would be kindling, and Henry would be the one holding the match, nursing his bruised jaw and his righteous expression and saying,I only tried to warn them.
She did not think past that. There was no time to think past that.
