Kazrian said nothing. There was nothing he could say that she would believe. Aurelise had told him of the way it happened every Season. The shift in a young man’s expression when he learned that Rosavyn Rowanwood, for all her name and wit and warmth, had no magical manifestation. As though everything else about her ceased to matter in the face of that single absence.
Rosavyn wound the ribbon loosely around her fingers again and seemed to gather herself. When she spoke, her voice was lighter, and the hurt had been tidied away behind the bright, careless ease she wore like armor.
“No, no, dear brother. There is no hope of a match for me. It is a match foryouwe are securing this Season.” She nudged him with her elbow, her smile sharpening. “Grandmother and Mother have made this abundantly clear, and I, for one, intend to enjoy every excruciating moment of it.”
Kazrian suppressed a groan and decided not to tell her he intended to be gone before the Season began. “Thank you for that, Rosy Posy.”
A bark of laughter escaped her. “Do not start that again! Shall I call you Kazzy Wazzy?”
He snorted before he could stop himself. “Nowthatis truly terrible.”
“It is what you deserve,” she declared, and lunged for him with the ribbon stretched between both hands as though she intended to throttle him with it. He dodged—barely—and she pursued him several steps along the path before they were both laughing too hard to continue, stumbling along the gravel like children, the sound of it carrying across the near-empty park and startling a pair of pixies from the branches overhead.
They walked on, still laughing, and the morning was bright, and for a little while the weight of all the things they could not fix—his heart, her magic, the Season bearing down on them both—felt light enough to carry.
Chapter Ten
The rain had setin over Bloomhaven that afternoon. A soft, companionable sort of rain that pattered against the windows and gentled the light to pewter. Inside The Honeycomb’s kitchen the hearth sprites were dancing among the flames, coaxing them higher and brighter against the cool, damp afternoon, and Balthazar was curled on his cushion beside them.
At the central worktable, Lucie was rolling marzipan. She leaned her weight in, lifted, turned it a quarter, rolled again. Then she held it up to the window. Not thin enough. A petal had to be near translucent if she meant to enchant it open, and this marzipan was destined to become flowers—dozens of them, small and delicate, blooming across the showpiece while it turned. She lowered the marzipan and rolled again.
It would have been a great deal easier to concentrate without the distraction of what she considered a deeply precarious arrangement on the other side of the kitchen.
Kazrian was lying on the floor. Directly beneath the ovens. Which he had raised a short distance off the floor with an enchantment he’d assured her was “entirely safe” and “extremely common in this line of work.”
Entirely safe.She would remember that when she was explaining to Lady Rivenna how her grandson had been flattened.
After their day off, Kazrian had spent three days working on the ovens, much to his frustration. He had thought the repairs would take a single afternoon. Then a full day. Then he had begun muttering to himself in a way that suggested the ovens were winning, and Kazrian was not accustomed to losing arguments with inanimate objects.
Eventually he had discovered that part of the lumyrite lattice connected not only to the backs of both ovens but ran beneath them as well, threaded through the stone floor where it had tangled with the residual magic of an old floor polishing enchantment, and the two were refusing to cooperate. Which meant, apparently, that the only way to access both the lattice running through the ovens and the conflicting enchantment beneath them was for Kazrian to get under the ovens themselves.
Three days of this. Three days of Kazrian beside—and now underneath—the ovens, and Lucie moving between the worktable, the counters, and the cooling cabinets, the two of them working around each other with a rhythm that had begun to feel almost practiced. She would not use the wordcomfortable. But it was as close to comfortable as possible when working in close proximity to the man she was not supposed to still be in love with.
Her hands froze on the rolling pin.
No.Definitely not still in love with. Where had that ridiculous thought come from? She had merely retained certain … complicated feelings. Feelings that happened to include an awareness of his voice, his hands, and the way his brow furrowed when a problem refused to yield to him. But that was proximity, not love. That was simply what happened when you shared a kitchen with someone for hours on end.
She resumed rolling with somewhat unnecessary force.
“Have you had any more ideas for the launch?”
Lucie startled and pressed down too hard, tearing through the edge of the marzipan. “What was that?”
“The showpiece.” Kazrian’s voice came from beneath the oven, slightly muffled. “Have you had any more thoughts?”
“Oh. Yes, actually. I have been refining the concept.” She lifted the rolling pin and smoothed the tear at the edge with careful fingers. “I think I have a clearer picture now.”
“Would you … tell me?” A pause. “If you would like to, that is.”
She hesitated, and then found that she wanted to.
She described the framework first—a structure that would turn slowly, driven by an enchantment she’d already been working on for the shop’s window displays. Over this framework she would spin sugar into impossibly fine threads, a web of glistening filaments that would catch the light and settle over the structure as it turned. And then the dozens of marzipan flowers, each one enchanted to bloom in sequence, unfurling petal by petal while the whole thing spun. They would come from … somewhere. She had not decided that part yet. And there would be beams of honey light woven through, so that the entire piece glowed amber and gold. And the honey light would serve an additional purpose, of course. It would be infusing the qualities of whichever variety she decided to use into the marzipan flowers.
“And then,” she said, and she could hear the excitement building in her own voice despite her best efforts at restraint, “I would like the entire structure to open. The sugar threads, the flowers, the framework. And inside—rising up from … somewhere—a beehive. A structure made of honeycomb candy, with little chocolate bees enchanted to fly out and circle the display.”
She paused. She had not described the full vision aloud yet, and saying it made it feel terrifyingly ambitious.
“And then … well, at the end, each guest will receive a plate with all the pieces. Everything from the display, artfully arranged, of course.”
