Lady Rivenna’s attention turned at once, and Kazrian smiled to himself, recognizing the quiet, coordinated campaign that had just drawn the conversation away from Rosavyn and marriage and manifestation.
His gaze traveled along the table, and he was struck by how near to perfect the evening was. It was missing only two people: Aurelise and Ryden. He loved the rest of his family, of course, this loud, teasing, infuriating table of them, and he was truly glad to be back among them in a way that had taken him rather by surprise. But the gathering felt incomplete without the person who knew him best in all the world, and the person who had become as close to him as a brother.
It remained an unlikely thing—more proof that people did not make sense—the friendship Kazrian had formed with the prince over the past three years. The two of them could hardly have been more differently made. Ryden was all charm and impulse where Kazrian was patience and pattern and the long, slow turning over of a problem.
And yet somehow, a whole realm away in a foreign land of silver forests and strange pastel skies, with no one watching and nothing to perform, Kazrian and Ryden had found between them a great deal more to bond over than anyone would have guessed—pegasi, dragons, the simple joy of crafting something with one’s own hands, and the fact that each had recognized in the other someone who was, in his own particular way, a little apart from the world he had been born into.
“Kazrian,” Rosavyn said from beside him, interrupting his thoughts, “you have not yet told us what you discovered at The Honeycomb today.”
Kazrian blinked. A pair of startled hazel eyes surfaced in his mind, andthe way they had lit up when she began explaining the lumyrite threaded through almost everything in her kitchen, and the moment she had given him a tentative smile, and the quiet, devastating realization that he still wanted to kiss her, even after all this?—
“Misfiring magic,” he said abruptly.
“Well, yes.” Rosavyn laughed. “We are all aware of that. Did you discover the source of all the various problems? To be perfectly honest, I would not have been surprised if you’d arrived at dinner this evening and announced you’d fixed the entire place already.”
Kazrian gave an awkward laugh. “Ah, no. I believe it may require slightly more work than that.” He reached for his wine. “I have determined the source of some of the difficulties, but did not have time to repair much today. I suspect it shall not take terribly long. A week, perhaps. Possibly a little more.”
And then he would return to the Shaded Lands. He kept this thought to himself, for he had no wish to hear his grandmother take the opening and attempt, once again, to convince him to stay and find a wife, or to remind him that she and Kazrian’s mother had beensodelighted that he would be here this year for the Rowanwood Masquerade.
But the thought sat there all the same, quiet and final. A week. Perhaps a little more. Then he would leave again, and the young woman with those hazel eyes and those soft lips and the small, private smile she reserved only for him?—
No. Not for him. The smile was part of the many things he had misread. He had arrived at this conclusion during his first months in the Shaded Lands, turning the evidence over and over in his mind until the verdict held, and he had to remind himself of it now.
He would leave Bloomhaven behind, and the young woman who had never actually felt anything for him would once again be but a memory.
Chapter Seven
The sun had barely clearedthe rooftops when Lucie neared The Honeycomb. It was little more than a line of gold along the upper stories, catching the chimney pots and the weathervanes and the trailing ivy on the bookshop’s wall while the cobblestones below remained in cool blue shadow. The florist next door was already awake—or rather, the florist’s enchanted window display was, its blooms shifting lazily through their morning rotation, petals unfurling in vibrant colors.
Lucie let herself in through The Honeycomb’s back door and stepped into the kitchen. The hearth was burning low and steady, the sprites having done their work before dawn, and the warmth met her with its usual welcome. Balthazar was on his cushion near the hearthstones, though he was not asleep. He was sitting bolt upright, ears pricked sharply forward, his tail wrapped tight around his paws.
Then she saw why.
Kazrian was on the floor against the far wall, near the doorway to the main part of the shop. He had folded himself down into the corner where the lumyrite ran close to the surface, one knee drawn up, his sleeves pushed to his elbows. One hand was pressed flat to the wall, and he was sitting still, head tilted faintly toward the stone as though listening to something.
He had not noticed her. Apparently she’d been quieter when enteringthan she’d thought. Or perhaps—and this was more likely—Kazrian was so absorbed in his work that he’d forgotten the rest of the world existed.
As she watched, his fingers flexed against the wall. A slow, searching movement, feeling for something beneath the surface. Then his hand slid a few inches along the stone and went still again.
His hands had not changed.
The thought surfaced before she could catch it. Everything else about him had—shoulders, jaw, voice, duly noted and filed underUnwelcome Observations, Do Not Revisit—but his hands were just as she remembered them. Long-fingered, deft, unhurried. The same hands that could twist the seized back plate off a music box could also handle the most delicate mechanism without breaking it.
She had always loved watching him work. The steadiness, the focus, the way he would forget everything around him when his attention narrowed to the thing beneath his fingers. He used to bring broken items to tinker on at the tea house, sitting at the small table near the window, and Lucie had spent more hours than she would ever confess watching those hands at their?—
“Good morning,” she said on a deep inhale.
He looked up, startled, and the listening stillness broke. “Lu—Miss Fields.” He pushed his sleeves higher as he got to his feet with that new ease of his. “I was just examining the lattice to find where it meets the older enchantments. The junction points are where most of the trouble seems to originate.”
He continued on, explaining something, but Lucie did not hear him because her gaze had slid down and she had become, for some absurd reason, wholly and stupidly occupied with his forearms.
She was aware that it was an absurd thing to notice. Since when, she demanded of herself, had aforearmbecome a thing over which a sensible woman might lose her train of thought? But there it was—another item for the unwelcome and steadily lengthening list of ways in which Kazrian Rowanwood was no longer the boy who had left.
The back door swung open.
“Ah,” said Lady Rivenna, stepping into the kitchen with one glove already half removed and the other following in brisk succession. “We are all here early. Excellent. There is no time to waste.”
Lucie’s stomach dropped. Lady Rivenna was no stranger to early hours—she had run The Charmed Leaf Tea House for decades—but she did not generally arrivethisearly. Lucie had not put the kettle on. She had not laid out the tea things. She had not even put on her apron. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen like someone who had wandered in off the street and forgotten why.
