“You are notnothing,” Lady Rivenna said firmly. “Do not let me hear you say that again. I have known it since you were a girl, when I noticed you hiding in the back of your mother’s shop with your sister, creating some elaborate something-or-other out of a great heap of ribbon offcuts. I saw something in you then, and I asked your mother if you might come and work in my tea house kitchen.”
“Now.” Lady Rivenna sat back. “Having settled that, we may proceed to the substance of your brooding, which is not whetherIwill have you. What troubles you now is whether the rest of them will. Whether there exists, anywhere in this town, a version of the future in which Lord Kazrian Rowanwood and Miss Lucie Fields might stand up together and not be torn apart for it.”
It was so exactly the shape of the question that had lived in Lucie’s mind for a week—for years, in fact—that she could only look up, wordless.
“Yes,” said Lady Rivenna, watching her. “Quite so.” She tilted her head. “Tell me. Do you know what happens at the Opening Ball each Season, for those young fae who are ready to make their debut?”
Lucie blinked at the turn. “I—I suppose I know the general shape of it. Vaguely.”
“Then tell me the general shape of it.”
“A young lord or lady is—presented. To society.” She groped for it. “They perform their manifested magic. Their particular skill, whatever it is. Before everyone. Before the High Lady herself.”
“Correct. They stand before the whole assembled cream of Bloomhaven, and before the High Lady, and they show what they can do.” She let that settle. Then she tilted her head and fixed Lucie with her steady, unblinking gaze. “Do you know what you did at the launch of The Honeycomb?”
It took Lucie a moment. And then it took her another, because surely—surely she could not mean?—
A small, incredulous laugh escaped her before she could stop it. “That was in no way the same thing.”
“Of course it was not thesamething.” Lady Rivenna waved this off. “It was better.”
“It was not?—”
“Foryou, it was better.” She leaned forward slightly. “Consider it honestly. At a debut, a young lady stands in a crush of a dozen others, each waiting a turn, each performing in their little moment before the attention moves along to the next. You had no such competition. There were no other debuts. There was no one else for them to look at. Every eye in that garden was uponyou, and upon the thing that only you had made.” A pause. “And I will tell you what makes it more impressive still. Those young lords and ladies are displaying a magic they werebornto. It arrived in them unasked. Whereasyoupossess no magic at all. None. And yet you stood in that garden and you showed them a thing of genuine wonder, a thing you built with your own two hands and your own stubborn mind out of nothing but honey and light and experimenting until you did not fail. It was, I would argue, as near as a human girl has ever come to standing up and manifesting a magic of her very own. And they watched it, they tasted it, and theylovedit, Lucie. Every one of them. Just as I knew they would.”
“But that does not mean …” Lucie shook her head. “They may have seenme, but they are still fully aware that I am human.”
“Of course. But now you are a person with a face and a name and a gift, and you are the one who made the thing they cannot imagine doing without.” She sat back.
Lucie turned it over. And there was something in it, some enormous generous thing—that Lady Rivenna had arranged the entire event aroundher—but there was also a small snag that would not lie smooth.
“But that still—” She frowned, feeling her way. “That does not feel quite right. They may value me now, because I can make a thing they have decided they cannot do without. But that is not the same as valuingme. It does not mean they think any better of humans than they did before. It only means they have found one particular human useful.”
“Well, more thanuseful. That is why I wanted you there to engage with them afterward. I heard from more than one of them how charming they found you, how warm and bright and altogether delightful you were in person.”
“Oh.” Lucie’s face grew warm again.
“But yes, what you have pointed out is entirely correct. It is not fair, and it is not right, and it will not overturn a single deeply held prejudice by tomorrow morning.” She spread one hand. “But you cannot demand the wholesale remaking of a society and all its cruelties inside of a single afternoon. That is not how change moves. It is slow and stubborn, and it comes one grudging inch at a time. It began with Iris, who decided she would teach a tea house full of fae to sit across a table from humans and think nothing of it. And it continues with you. This is one more inch.”
The light through the window had shifted while they spoke, sliding a little further across the floorboards, warming toward the gold of late afternoon.
Lucie sat with everything Lady Rivenna had said and found, slowly, that she could believe a certain amount of it. She could, if she squinted, imagine some narrow future in which the fine families of Bloomhaven might come, in time, to tolerate her. To accept her, even, the way one accepts a curiosity, a marvel, a thing that has proven itself too singular to turn away.
“The fae families—” Lucie shook her head. “I could almost believe what you say. That in time, perhaps, some of them might come round. But my own people—” Her throat tightened. “The lane where I grew up. The human families I have known my whole life. They are already turning from us. From my family. And they do not even know, not truly, what has passed between Kazrian and me, only what the birds shrieked. What will it be like if we were to actually—if there were amarriage? If I married up and out of my own place entirely? They would say I abandoned my own. They would not let my family forget it.”
She spread one hand, an unhurried gesture. “Perhaps some of them will feel that way. Perhaps some of them will not. There were humans among our launch guests, if you recall.” Her brows rose, and the look she directed at Lucie was full of quiet, deliberate meaning. “They saw the same thing everyone else saw.” A beat. “They saw Mr Stratton. One of ‘their own,’ as you might put it.”
Lucie groaned and covered her face.
“You think it a catastrophe still,” Lady Rivenna said, “but I am starting to wonder if he may have done you a favor. Everyone there, fae and human alike, watched a human man threaten you, and then watched a fae lord put himself between you and that man to protect you. Whatever they may havethought about the impropriety of Kazrian’s arm around you, there was no mistaking who the villain of that scene was.”
Lucie sat back and tried to marshal her thoughts, but they would not hold still long enough to be marshaled. They spun and doubled back on themselves—if I did this, then they would think that, and if I did that, then what would become of my family?—each thread she reached for unraveling into several more before she could take hold of it.
“It is all rather … a lot,” she heard herself saying.
“It is.” Lady Rivenna leaned forward, resting her clasped hands upon the desk. “And please understand me, Lucie. None of this was to force your hand. Not yours, not my grandson’s, not society’s. I have spent my whole life seeing the way people might fit together. Patterns, connections and possibilities. Arranging the furniture so that a thing whichmighthappen has room to happen, should the people involved choose it. But I did not decide anythingforyou. All I did was make a space—and a chance—for everyone to look at you differently. To look at you at all. What is done with that now, by you, by Kazrian, by anyone else in this town—that was never mine to determine. It was only ever yours.”
Lucie sat there, turning all of it over—the launch arranged like a debut, the guest list that had included human families among the silks, the High Lady nodding, every last carefully placed piece of it—and she saw, at last, the whole intricate architecture of what Lady Rivenna had built.
