From the kitchen, her mother’s voice carried through the house. “Who was it, darling? A messenger pixie?”
Lucie opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
“Lucie?” Charlotte was coming up the path, a wrapped parcel under one arm. She stopped. “What is wrong? Lucie, are you crying? What is it? What has happened?”
Lucie held out the letter. Charlotte took it, and Lucie watched her sister’s eyes move down the page, watched her mouth fall open by degrees, watched the parcel slide forgotten to the crook of her elbow.
“Oh,” Charlotte breathed. And then, louder, pressing a hand to her own chest, “Oh!” She looked up, eyes shining. “Lucie! These are good tears!”
Lucie nodded, not trusting her voice.
“You must go.” Charlotte seized her arm. “To the masquerade. Lucie, you must. We have dreamed of it since we were girls!”
“I cannot possibly?—”
“Heaskedyou to!”
“I—I do not have a gown, Charlotte. Or a mask. And I could not use one of the masks already delivered to Rowanwood House. The enchantments laid into them are the sort not safe for a human body.”
Charlotte stared at her. Then a smile broke across her face. Slow, incredulous, almost pitying. “Lucie. My sweet, precious, entirely hopeless darling.”
“Stop it.” Lucie snatched the letter back and smacked her with it.
“You seem to have forgotten,” Charlotte said, catching her wrist and pulling her toward the door, “that there is someone in this very house who is perfectly equipped to help with exactly that.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
The ballroomof Rowanwood House glittered like a galaxy someone had coaxed indoors, and Lucie stood in the doorway and could not, for a moment, make her feet go any further.
For years, she had imagined this. The music, the masks, the enchanted glow of a hundred faelights turning everything to gold. She had imagined what the gown might feel like, the weight and the drape of something made for a world she was not part of.
And now she was here, and the whole of it shimmered and glowed and swept and turned, and it waseverything. It was every last thing she had ever imagined.
She smoothed her hands down the front of her gown—carefully, because it was the finest thing she had ever worn, and some part of her half believed it might dissolve if she gripped it too hard. It was gold. A deep, warm, honeyed gold, the silk catching the light and giving it back richer.
“It was meant for Lady Fawnwood,” her mother had said, smoothing the fabric across the bed. “She commissioned it last Season. Gold silk, with the overlaid embroidery I spent so long working on. She never collected it. Refused it, in fact, over some trifling dispute about the neckline that I suspect had rather more to do with the bills she could no longer pay than with any genuine objection to my stitching.” Her gaze had shifted to Lucie. “It has been sitting in the back of the shop ever since. Nearly finished. Wanting only the final alterations, and an owner who deserved it.”
Go on, Lucie told herself now.Step inside.
So she did, and it swallowed her, and it was wonderful, and she drifted a few steps into the great glittering churn of it with her heart going far too fast, taking in the arched windows draped with trailing vines and pale golden flowers, the long tables where crystal glasses caught the faelight, the couples turning past her close enough to stir the air?—
And then she saw him.
He was standing near the edge of the floor, not dancing, a dark and quiet still point in all that motion, and he was already looking toward the doors as though he had been looking toward them for some time.
His eyes found hers.
And everything inside her lit up like honey in the sun.
Kazrian knew her at once.
It should not have been possible. She was masked, as every guest was masked, and the ballroom was a glittering confusion of enchanted faces and borrowed forms. But Kazrian had looked across a room of hundreds of people and known beyond the smallest shadow of a doubt that the woman standing at the far edge, one gloved hand pressed to her collarbone, was Lucie Fields.
The gown first. Rich gold against the warm brown of her skin, almost glowing, as though she had been dipped in some of her own honey light. Her shoulders were bare, and the line of her neck above the gown’s edge was?—
Do not lose the capacity for rational thought in the first three seconds.
And then the mask. He could see it clearly now as he moved closer. Cream and gold, with delicate filigree edging, and there, worked along one side of the upper curve in meticulous detail?—
