“Do take note, Kazrian,” Rosavyn said, bright with amusement. “In ourday, unauthorized scone removal was grounds for immediate kitchen exile. Now she is leading the expedition herself.”
Kazrian shook his head as he trotted past with Coralie still bouncing on his back, a smile tugging at his mouth. His grandmother—terror of Bloomhaven society, a woman who barely softened for her own grandchildren—had, it seemed, been utterly conquered by the very smallest members of the household.
“Are you not meant to be showing me around The Honeycomb, Grandmother?” he called after her. “You said we would begin this morning.”
He meant it lightly, but beneath the ease of the morning and the familiar rhythm of his family’s voices and teasing, there was an impatience he could not quite set aside. He had come to Bloomhaven for a purpose, and the sooner the work was done, the sooner he could leave. With any luck, he might even have The Honeycomb functioning properly and be back in the Shaded Lands before the Bloom Season began.
“Yes, yes, all in good time,” his grandmother called back, Emeric settled contentedly on her hip as she made for the kitchen door. “A scone is the more pressing matter at hand.” She paused between the herbs and flowers and looked back. “Sit for a while, Kazrian. Spend some time with your brother and sister. It has been an age since you were all together.”
“I spent the entirety of last evening with Rosavyn,” Kazrian pointed out as he turned and lowered Coralie from his back onto Jasvian’s lap. “And it has been all of four months since Jasvian and his family visited the Shaded Lands.”
“An eternity,” his grandmother said, walking away.
“She has a point,” Rosavyn said. “Four months is an age when there are small children involved. Emeric could barely speak a word the last time you saw him. Now he’s unearthing weaponry from beneath the furniture.”
“Naturally,” Kazrian replied. “What do you think he and I spent our time doing when he visited? I showed him all the best hiding spots.”
Rosavyn laughed and threw a grape at Kazrian. He fumbled it, nearly lost it, and closed his hand around it at the last possible moment.
“And look at that!” Rosavyn added. “Did I not say so, Grandmother? His reflexes have improved along with the rest of him. Do you remember how he used to walk into things?”
But their grandmother, having reached the kitchen doorway, ignoredthem both. Kazrian threw the grape back, and Rosavyn, who had half turned while calling across the garden, did not see it coming. It caught her neatly on the forehead and bounced onto the ground.
Kazrian bit back the laugh that threatened to burst from him at the sight of her magnificently unimpressed expression. “At least I can aim.”
He stepped around the chairs before she could retaliate further and followed his grandmother’s path toward the kitchen. “The Honeycomb is just at the end of this street, is it not? Might I go ahead and begin looking around?”
He did not follow her inside—he had resolved not to set foot in the tea house today, and most especially not its kitchen, and he saw no reason to abandon a perfectly sound strategy now. He stopped a few paces from the open doorway and waited.
“Ah, yes, perhaps that would be better,” his grandmother’s voice floated back from somewhere within. “You’ll find it easily, in between the bookshop and the florist. It is open, so you may let yourself in. I may be some time yet, I’m afraid.”
Kazrian turned back toward the garden and raised a hand in farewell to the others. “I shall see you all this evening, then? Grandmother mentioned you are hosting family dinner.”
“Yes,” Jasvian said. “Evryn and Mariselle are coming as well.”
“Do be careful at The Honeycomb,” Rosavyn added sweetly. “I’m told the place adds stairs where there ought not to be stairs. You and unexpected architecture have never been the best of friends.”
Kazrian only smiled, shook his head, and started back along the garden path around the side of the tea house. He had every intention of walking past the kitchen windows again without stopping. He had managed it on the way in. There was no reason he should not manage it on the way out.
But his feet slowed as he drew alongside the glass, and before he could instruct himself otherwise, he looked.
The kitchen was warm and bright and familiar in a way that pulled at something in his chest. Two kitchen pixies darted past the window in a blur of blue-tinged light. Orrit was at the central worktable, wiping the surface clean with a cloth nearly as large as himself. Emeric was perched on one of the side counters, legs swinging contentedly, while Kazrian’s grandmother arranged a scone on a small plate beside him.
Kazrian stepped closer to the glass.
He told himself he was simply looking. Taking stock of a room he had once known well. Noting what had changed. But his gaze moved past Orrit, past the hearth, past the copper kettles and the ovens, and found the far end of the counter—the stretch of surface just beyond Lissian’s tea brewing station, where a certain recipe book had sat for years. A thick volume bound in soft brown leather that had become battered and worn as time passed, its spine cracked, its cover marked with rings from teacups and sticky fingerprints from a hundred batches of confections.
Lucie’s book. The one she had filled, page by page, with everything she had learned from Mama Saffron and everything she had invented on her own. It had lived on that counter for almost as long as Kazrian had known Lucie. It had become as much a fixture of the kitchen as Orrit himself.
The book was not there.
Which meantshewas not here. She had taken her book and gone. Married? Moved away? Begun a different life in a different kitchen? It did not matter. He had asked not to know, and now he did not know, and that was precisely as it should be.
Kazrian turned from the window and walked on.
The feeling in his chest, he told himself, was relief. It was not disappointment. It was certainly not the slow, hollow turning of a gear deep within his own workings, reaching for a counterpart that had been removed.
It was relief. He was sure of it.
