“I can scarcely believe that just happened!” she whispered, still clinging tight to his hand.
His grin stretched into something wide and unguarded. “Nor I. Is it possible we are dreaming?”
She squeezed his hand again. “That feels considerably real to me.”
He laughed. “And to me.” Then his smile softened. “Miss Fields,” he said, “will you dance with me?”
“Lord Rowanwood,” she said, “It would be my pleasure.”
They stepped onto the floor.
There were no masks now. No enchantments, no borrowed faces, no anonymity to hide behind. There was only Lucie Fields in a golden gown, and Kazrian Rowanwood in his dark coat, and the whole of Bloomhaven’s society watching them from every corner of the room.
Let them watch.
His hand settled at her back, hers found his shoulder, and she felt him exhale a long, slow breath.
They began to move.
It was not like the giddy whirl of the earlier dances when they had spun through the crowd in delighted, breathless secrecy. This was slower. Quieter. A thing with weight and meaning, every step deliberate, every turn unhurried, as though the music had been written for this exact moment and they were simply following where it led.
And somewhere in the slow, steady turning of it, with his hand warm at her back, his eyes on hers, and the faelight golden around them, Lucie felt something shift deep in the center of her chest. What she had wanted—quietly, desperately, for longer than she could bear to count—was finally, unmistakably, hers.
She looked up at Kazrian, and he looked down at her, and the whole vast glittering ballroom receded to a distant, shimmering hum.
There was only him.
Only this.
And Lucie Fields, who had spent her whole life being careful and sensible and exactly where she was meant to be, danced in the arms of the man she loved in a room full of glowing light, with no distance at all between them, and did not look away.
Epilogue
The morning came in gold,the way the best mornings did, shining through the glass honey jar on the counter and spilling warm light across the worktable. Lucie stood in the middle of it with flour dusted across her apron and thought, as she had thought nearly every morning for weeks now, that she could scarcely believe it was all simply hers.
Not only the shop. She meant the whole of it. The hearth sprites drowsing in the banked warmth of the fire. The kitchen pixies bickering in whispers along the high shelf. Balthazar, sprawled the length of his cushion beside the hearth, one paw twitching at whatever imperious dream a cat of his standing was entitled to. Rosavyn’s voice threading through the air from the front of the shop, bright and unhurried, telling some patron an outrageous story that had the whole front room laughing.
And Kazrian, across the worktable from her, doing absolutely nothing of use and being wholly, wonderfully present.
That was the wonder of it. Not any single piece. All of it at once, so ordinary and so lovely that it made her chest ache to hold. This was simply the morning. This was simply their life now. And she did not think she would ever grow accustomed to the plainness of that wonder.
“It has been two weeks,” said Kazrian, “and still you have not told me.”
Lucie did not look up from the bowl. She was mixing batter for ambersnaps, and it required her whole attention, or at least she was prepared to insist that it did. “I had rather hoped you’d forgotten all about it.”
“I had.” He leaned one hip against the worktable, arms folded, entirely at his leisure. “Forgotten it completely. Put it out of my mind altogether. And then you undid all that good work a moment ago by holding a small bottle aloft and announcing, with a truly excessive amount of ceremony, that you had procured genuine ambervine nectar at the Stardust Night Market. The Stardust Night Market. You reminded me yourself. You have, I am afraid, only yourself to blame.”
“The topic,” said Lucie, “is the ambervine nectar. It is a rare and remarkable ingredient and it is the only thing you need concern yourself with this morning.”
“It is not remotely the only thing concerning me.”
She reached past him for the small dark bottle in question, and he shifted as though to catch her about the waist. She danced neatly out of his reach with the bottle held high and a laugh she could not quite swallow.
“Come now.” He straightened, and there was that particular light in his gray eyes, the one that meant he had decided to be thoroughly, cheerfully impossible about something. “You three vanished. One moment I had you all in view, and the next the three of you had put your heads together and gone off giggling into the dark like a pack of conspirators, and I did not lay eyes on you again for the rest of the evening. Rosavyn will tell me nothing. I have tried. She gives me only that insufferable look and says, ‘I shall tell you when you’re older, little brother,’ which is a remarkable thing to say to a man almost two-and-twenty.”
“It is very like her.”
“Even Theo knows. Theo. I asked him directly, and he turned red and informed me he’d been sworn to secrecy and that I should discover it in due course.” He spread his hands, the very picture of a wronged man. “What is thisitI am forever being promised I shall discover?”
