Lady Rivenna continued toward the stairs without another word and disappeared. Her footsteps ascended—the staircase, from the sound of it, did not produce its extra step—and a moment later the study door closed above them.
The air changed.
Not in any way that could be measured or named. Simply that the two of them were now alone in the kitchen, and the fact of it pressed gently against everything.
“Well,” Lucie said.
“Well,” Kazrian said.
She stood and tied on her apron with perhaps more focus than the task required, then turned and found Kazrian facing her with his arms crossed awkwardly over his chest—do not focus on his forearms, Lucie Fields—clearly waiting to speak to her.
There followed a brief, excruciating exchange of courtesies about who would work where, and whether she needed the counter he was standing near, and if his work on the far wall would disturb her, and whether she would rather he started with the cooling cabinets if they were the priority, and no, truly, it was no trouble at all, and please, wherever was most convenient, and by all means?—
They ran out of courtesies at approximately the same moment and retreated to opposite sides of the kitchen, him to his position on the floor by the far wall, and her to the pantry door.
She consulted her enchanted list. The caramels—the cardamom-rose batch she had been perfecting—were complete. She had redone them yesterday afternoon and they had been perfect. She had won the bet and the blueberries had been hers, much to Balthazar’s profound and unblinking displeasure. So that was finished.
Next on the list was a confection she and Lady Rivenna had decided months ago would be part of the launch offerings but which still neededwork. But now there was also the showpiece to think about, and perhaps she ought to begin with that. Sketch out some ideas, at least, while the notion was fresh.
She murmured to the pixies hovering near the spice cabinets. “The vanilla, please. And the jar of crushed pistachios. Oh, and the orange blossom—the smaller tin.” To the two brownies currently tidying the lower shelves: “Would you fetch the saffron threads from the pantry? And the cinnamon bark. The whole sticks, not the ground.”
The faelights positioned about the room dimmed, brightened, then dimmed again. Lucie paused and glanced up.
“Apologies,” Kazrian said from across the kitchen, one hand still pressed to the wall. “That was me. I am still mapping all the connections in this place. I did not realize the lattice ran through the lighting as well.”
“No harm done,” Lucie said. She looked toward the window where the first true rays of morning were beginning to pour through the glass, golden and warm, falling across the counter and through the honey jar in a slow, bright spill. “The sun will be strong enough soon that they will dim themselves.”
She continued gathering items. A bottle of rosewater from the shelf, a dish of candied ginger left over from yesterday, a small pot of dark chocolate she had tempered as a test and never used. She wanted variety. She could think better when she could smell and touch and taste combinations while she worked out ideas in her head.
She carried everything to the worktable, set it all down in a loose arrangement alongside her recipe book, and pulled out the stool.
Kazrian, who had been asking whether she had noticed anything amiss with the faelights because he could sense something wrong in their enchantment, paused mid-sentence. She stepped up onto the stool, glanced over, and caught him watching her. He looked away and continued speaking.
“You, ah, haven’t noticed anything? About any of the faelights?”
“Oh. Yes, there is one in the main part of the shop that will not illuminate no matter what Lady Rivenna does to it.”
Kazrian nodded and returned his attention to the wall.
Lucie opened her recipe book to a clean page near the back andpretended, with tremendous dedication, to be wholly occupied with the showpiece.
For a while, the kitchen held them both in its own quiet industry. The scratch of her pencil across the page as she made notes about flavor combinations and sketched ideas for impressive spun sugar designs. The small taps and low murmurs of Kazrian’s hands and voice as he worked along the wall, coaxing the lattice and the building’s old magic toward some kind of agreement—or at least, that was what Lucie guessed he was doing.
Eventually, she surrendered the pretense that her attention was not continually drifting across the kitchen toward a certain fae lord and turned her gaze toward Balthazar instead. He had relocated from his cushion to the chair Lucie had used earlier, where he sat with his paws tucked beneath him and his gaze fixed on Kazrian with unwavering suspicion.
“How was your night?” she asked him, tapping the pencil against her chin.
One ear rotated toward her. The other remained trained on the intruder. From the corner of her eye, Lucie saw Kazrian look up, likely wondering if she was speaking to him.
“Are you … oh. Forgive me.”
Lucie looked at Kazrian, then back at Balthazar, who had narrowed his eyes even further. “That bad?” she asked him.
Both ears flattened briefly, before Balthazar flicked his tail very precisely in Kazrian’s direction.
“He was not here during the night, Balthazar,” Lucie said in a low tone. “He arrived this morning. You cannot hold him responsible for disrupting a sleep he was not present for.” She made an idle note in the margin of her page—forearms—tracing over the looping letters several times, and added, “You are simply in a mood.”
Balthazar turned his head and gave her a look of such withering dignity that she nearly laughed.
