Then she set the lemon on the worktable and went into the pantry, where she found a small tin of dried chamomile flowers. She tipped a handful into her palm, then carried them across the kitchen and placed them gently on the misbehaving shelf.
She stepped back and waited.
For a moment, nothing. The little dried flowers sat where she’d put them, pale yellow against the dark wood, perfectly innocent. Then the shelf gave what she could only describe as a shudder, and the chamomile launched into the air in a single burst, scattering across the kitchen like confetti.
Lucie looked down at them and let out a long breath that was meant to be a sigh. Itwasa sigh. Mostly. But somewhere underneath it, something small and traitorously glad stirred. Because a shelf that still threw things was a shelf not yet fixed. And something not yet fixed meant Kazrian could not leave.
She collected the dried flowers from the floor and set them on the worktable—the right height now, theperfectheight—and went back to her florentines.
Chapter Thirteen
After having spentthe entire afternoon trying to coax the upstairs storeroom door to open, Kazrian had given up. For now, at least.
He could not fathom what had gone wrong between yesterday and today. He had spent all of the previous day on it, hands pressed to the door, the lock, the handle, the wall around the door, eyes closed and magic reaching out to sense every residual snarl of enchantment that had no business being there. It was slow work, since the lumyrite lattice did not extend up here, which meant the magic he’d manifested—the magic that made identifying any lumyrite-related fault as simple as reading a schematic—was of no use.
Instead, he had been forced to rely on the older, harder skills he’d learned over the years for sensing and diagnosing misaligned magic. And there had been a great deal of it to feel for—tangled enchantments layered one atop another, as though someone, or several someones, had set about fixing this door over the years with every variety of magic at their disposal and only made it worse with each attempt.
But eventually he had untangled it all. The lock had clicked open, a faint golden light tracing the edges of the door, and it had swung wide. It had been most satisfying.
Lock: freed.
Door: functional.
The job: complete.
He had checked it multiple times. Opened and closed the door, walked in and out of the room, even gone downstairs, made himself a cup of tea, drunk the tea, and returned to find the door still open.
But now some unknown thing had gone wrong and the wretched door was refusing to open again. A single thread of tangled magic seemed to be holding it very tightly shut—one thread, where yesterday there had been dozens—and he could not for the life of him work out how to loosen it.
After a full afternoon of fighting with it for the second time, he had decided it was time to try fixing a different problem. With a grumble and another frustrated tug of his hair, he headed for the staircase.
Which, it turned out, produced an extra step at the exact moment his foot descended, jolting him upward and off balance. He caught himself against the wall and avoided what might have otherwise been a spectacular descent. He stood gripping the railing, eyes closed, and breathed through his nose.
The extra step. Which he had also fixed.
Thank you, building. Truly.
He straightened, kept one hand on the rail, and descended the remaining stairs with extra care. The staircase, thankfully, allowed him the dignity of reaching the kitchen floor intact.
The kitchen was quiet. The early evening light came through the side windows in long amber bands, the last reach of the sun before it dropped behind the buildings across the lane. His grandmother had departed late in the afternoon—after informing the building at large that she found its behavior tiresome—and Lucie had left not long after. Which meant Kazrian was now alone here.
A hiss came from the direction of the hearth.
Well. Not entirely alone.
Balthazar lay on his cushion beside the hearth, and as Kazrian stepped into the room the cat lifted his head and hissed. Then, the duty discharged, he lowered his head again.
“Yes,” Kazrian said. “Good evening to you as well.”
It was, he had begun to notice, a less committed hiss than it had been. More habit than conviction. At this rate, by the time the Bloom Seasonarrived, Balthazar might manage nothing more threatening than a disapproving exhalation.
Goodness, would he still be here when the Season began? He had assumed not, but now it was starting to look like it.
“I know,” Kazrian said with a sigh as he moved around the worktable toward the other side of the kitchen. “You were hoping I would be gone by now. I assure you, so was I.” He pressed one hand to the wall beside the ovens. Those, and the cooling cabinets, were the priority. Without them, Lucie could not work properly. “I have no wish to make Miss Fields uncomfortable any longer than necessary, but this building …” He glanced at the ceiling as his fingers flexed against the stone wall. “This building is not cooperating.”
Balthazar blinked once. Slowly. Conveying nothing beyond profound indifference.
With one hand still pressed to the wall, his magic slowly seeping into the stones, Kazrian looked around. His eyes traced the shelves, the counters, the worktable, noting the shimmer where the lumyrite threads ran close to the surface.
