“Oh, I—I met the man yesterday. He was at The Honeycomb in the afternoon. I was merely … wondering whether there might be some manner of … understanding between himself and Lucie.” He chose his words with the same care he might use when handling something fragile and unfamiliar. “They seemed … well acquainted.”
“I have heard of no formal courtship. But the man does pay rather a great deal of attention to her.” A beat. “Whether Lucie returns it in equal measure, I could not say.”
Kazrian nodded and said nothing.
Our Lucie.That was what Henry Stratton had said.Our Lucie, as though she belonged to him and his sister, to the Stratton family.
Kazrian looked out at the still surface of Mirror Lake and reminded himself that he had no claim on Lucie. She was not—and never had been—his. If she had found someone who made her happy, he should wish her well.
He did not feel like wishing anyone well.
A breeze stirred the new leaves along the path. Rosavyn continued playing with the ribbon, wrapping it around and between her fingers,loosening it, then looping it again in patterns that appeared to serve no purpose beyond occupying her hands.
“Mother would scold you for that, you know,” Kazrian said.
Rosavyn did not look up. “I am a grown spinster of three-and-twenty. Mother cannot scold me over anything.” She unwound the ribbon and let it trail through the air behind her. “Besides, she is not here, the park is nearly empty, and I shall fidget if I wish.”
The breeze gusted, and the ribbon slipped free. It caught the air in a flash of blue, spinning away. They both turned?—
Just as a hand closed around the ribbon. The hand belonged to a gentleman Kazrian did not recognize, though this was hardly remarkable, given the length of time he had been away from Bloomhaven. The man was perhaps a few years older than the two of them, with an open, pleasant face and brown hair the wind had already gotten the better of. He stood holding the ribbon and looking faintly surprised at his own reflexes.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, and collected himself into a bow. “I saw the ribbon and my hand rather acted of its own accord. I hope I have not overstepped.”
“Not at all,” Rosavyn said warmly. “You have rescued my ribbon from a truly undignified fate. I am in your debt, sir.”
He smiled and held the ribbon out to her. “I ought to introduce myself, since I have now handled your property without invitation. Lord Tobias Grayfield.” He gave a small, self-deprecating laugh. “I am new to Bloomhaven, I confess. My family has not previously had the means for travel here, but circumstances have improved of late, and I thought I ought to see what the Bloom Season fuss was all about.”
Kazrian registered this with interest. Not many in society would volunteer such a thing. Families who had risen in standing tended to treat their former circumstances the way one treated an inconvenient relation—acknowledged when necessary, never introduced willingly. Grayfield had offered the information as freely as if he were remarking on the weather.
“Well,” Rosavyn said, accepting the ribbon, “you have arrived before the Season, which means you have the luxury of seeing the park without the entire population of Bloomhaven parading through it.”
“Is that what happens?”
“Oh, quite. It becomes a procession. Everyone in their very finest,walking at a pace deliberately calculated to suggest they have nowhere particular to be, while silently cataloguing everything about everyone else.”
Grayfield’s grin widened. “That sounds utterly exhausting.”
“It is one of the great pleasures of fae society,” Rosavyn said dryly. “You will adore it.”
Our Lucie.Was that why she had been so reluctant to share details about Henry when she’d accidentally mentioned his name? Was there a courtship she did not want Kazrian to know about? Perhaps she was sparing him, the way one spares a person whose feelings are too plainly written to pretend one cannot read them. Which meant he had not hidden those feelings—tiny, insignificant feelings, he reminded himself—nearly as well as he had thought.
He pressed the mortifying thought down and tried to attend to the conversation happening in front of him. Grayfield was asking about the elderfae tree—which was visible from where they stood, its massive branches reaching above every other tree in the park—and Rosavyn was explaining its significance.
They were, he noted, getting along rather well for two people who had known each other for less than three minutes. There was a rhythm to their exchange, an easy back and forth, the kind that happened when two people simply fit. He remembered that rhythm. He had once had it with Lucie. That effortless current of conversation where neither of them had to think about what to say next, where the words simply came and landed and sparked the next ones. Before he had said too much and done too much and turned the easiest thing in his life into the most fraught.
They parted from Grayfield not long after. He bowed, said it had been a genuine pleasure, and expressed a hope that he might encounter them again once the Season commenced. He directed this last remark primarily at Rosavyn, who smiled and said she rather thought he might.
Then she laughed—a bright, startled sound, as though she had only just realized—and said, “Oh, goodness, I have been dreadfully rude. I never introduced myself. Rosavyn Rowanwood.” She gestured in Kazrian’s general direction. “And this is my brother, Kazrian.” An afterthought, if ever there was one. Grayfield took it with good humor and bowed to each of them before they parted ways.
They were some distance down the path before Kazrian spoke.
“Well. He seemed extremely taken with you.”
Rosavyn’s head turned. “Oh. Do you think so?”
“Indeed. I do not think he looked at anything else for the duration of that conversation.”
A beat of silence. Something flickered across her face—surprise, then a quick, bright pleasure she did not quite manage to suppress—before she laughed and shook her head. “That is very flattering, Kazrian, but I assure you, his interest will vanish the moment he discovers I am the ‘unmanifested Rowanwood daughter.’”
