She wanted to draw her legs up onto the chair and wrap her arms around her knees and make herself as small as the enormity of all this made her feel. She did not, because one did not curl up like a child in Lady Rivenna’s study, but she promised herself later, when she was home. She stared at the edge of the desk without truly seeing it, her thoughts turning and turning.
“I find I am even more confused than ever. I do not know what to do. To … to tell him I love him still, or to send him away a second time. And if I do break his heart a second time, will you dismiss me from The Honeycomb? Because that would be the natural thing to do. Or it would become awkward beyond bearing—for you, for Rosavyn, for the whole family—to have me still turning up every morning after I had refused him. It would be easier if?—”
She glanced up at Lady Rivenna, and the sound of her own voice caughtup with her all at once. “Oh goodness, I am saying this all aloud. Forgive me—it is—I am merely trying to think my way through every?—”
“And there it is,” said Lady Rivenna softly.
Lucie frowned. “There is … what?”
“I have been turning over, for some weeks now, precisely when I ought to tell you a certain thing. But you have just made it plain to me that the moment is now. Because I cannot have you sitting there believing, even for an instant, that in order to keep this place, you must choose my grandson. That the two are bound together in such a way that to refuse the one is to forfeit the other.” She shook her head. “That will not do. We must take The Honeycomb off the scale entirely, so that whatever you decide about Kazrian, you decide it freely, and for no reason but your own heart.”
Lucie tried to follow and found she could not. “I believe, my lady, that you have only intensified the confusion.”
“Dear girl,” Lady Rivenna said, “The Honeycomb was only ever intended for one person.”
The sentence sat between them, and Lucie could not for the life of her see what it had to do with Kazrian, or with the figurative scale The Honeycomb apparently sat upon, or with any of the rest of it.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that when I chose this building, and fitted the kitchen and the front area, and commissioned the lumyrite lattice, and selected the name, and planned all the details of what this place would become, I did so with one person in mind.” She held Lucie’s gaze. “You.”
“I … believe I still do not follow.”
“The Honeycomb is yours, Lucie.”
Something swept through her—a strange, flooding rush, half cold and half scalding—and her heart gave a single hard knock against her ribs and then began to pound. “But …” Her voice came out sounding strange. “That is … that is not done. One does not simply—Lady Rivenna, you cannot give an entire establishment to a girl who works in your kitchen. It … it is simply not done.”
“It is now.” The words were calm and unyielding. “It has, in fact, already been done.”
“What?”
“The papers were drawn some time ago. The details have been arranged.Of course, if you do notwantThe Honeycomb, that is another matter entirely. I shall certainly not force it upon you. But it is yours to decide what to do with. If you wish to build it further and sell the place, that is entirely your prerogative.”
“Sell the—it is not—” Lucie could not even begin. Her hands had come apart in her lap and one of them had risen to her chest, pressing flat against the ring hanging from its chain. “I cannot accept this.”
“Well, as I said, you are not required to keep it.”
“No, I do not mean—” She broke off, because what Lady Rivenna had told her was so vast and impossible that her mind kept sliding off the surface of it.“Why?”The word escaped her, raw and bewildered. “Why would you do this?”
Lady Rivenna raised an eyebrow. “Why would I not?”
“Because … I am not family. I am not fae. I am not worth?—”
“If you are about to tell me you are notworth it, Miss Lucie Fields, I shall have to return your attention to the beginning of this conversation when I told you, very firmly, that you arenot nothing.”
Lucie’s mouth hung open for another few moments before she remembered to close it.
The older woman’s expression softened. “I told you I saw something in you, Lucie, and I meant it. I wanted to give you a chance. And I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I could. The wealth. The influence. The means to build something and place it in the hands of someone who would make it extraordinary.” Her voice was steady, but something had shifted in it. Something warmer, something almost tender, held carefully beneath the composure. “It seemed only right. It seemed, in fact, the very least I could do.”
Lucie could not speak. Her vision had gone blurry, and she realized, distantly, that she was crying after all. The tears slid down her cheeks and she did not wipe them away.
The Honeycomb is mine.
It was too large to hold. It was too much to take in all at once, and her mind kept trying to make sense of it and finding that it would not fit inside any of the shapes she had built for her life.
She had always believed that what she had here was borrowed. The kitchen, the worktable, the copper pots and the honey jar, the pixies and thebrownies and the hearth sprites, the smell of sugar and vanilla and the quiet hum of the lumyrite. All of it belonged to Lady Rivenna, and Lucie was permitted to use it, to work within it, to pour her heart into it, but it was neverhers. She was the girl in the kitchen. She was the hands that did the work. And one day, when Lady Rivenna no longer needed her, or when the situation with Kazrian made things too complicated, or when the world shifted in a direction that left no room for a human confectioner in a fae establishment, she would lose it all.
And now Lady Rivenna was sitting calmly behind her desk telling her that The Honeycomb was hers.
