Lucie exhaled.
She gave it another moment, just to be certain, and then returned to the kitchen. The florentines still needed to go into the tin, and there was flour to wipe from the worktable, and then she could focus on completing the High Lady’s cherry blossom petit fours. She crossed to the worktable, cloth in hand, and reached for the dusting of flour still scattered across the surface from the ginger biscuit dough.
Her hand stopped.
There, at the edge of the flour, drawn with a single fingertip, was a heart.
Chapter Fifteen
Kazrian acceptedthe cloth-wrapped bundle from the metalworker on the other side of the stall and nodded his thanks, then tucked it into the bag at his side. He stepped back from the stall and into the press of the market, adjusting the bag’s strap against his shoulder.
He had not visited this part of Bloomhaven much, perhaps a handful of times as a boy, following Evryn through the crowd. It sat well south of the lane where The Charmed Leaf and The Honeycomb stood, in a part of town where the flowering archways gave way to plainer store fronts and the streets were narrower, the buildings closer set. The market itself filled a broad cobbled square, its stalls packed close under colorful canvas awnings, and the noise was considerable.
Kazrian rather liked it.
The Season was in full swing now. The Opening Ball was behind them—a glittering blur of formality and too many introductions and his grandmother and mother watching him from across the Solstice Hall ballroom—and tonight was the opening of Dreamland. Kazrian was expected to be there, which was no sacrifice at all. Dreamland was extraordinary, and he had not visited since the Season Aurelise had debuted. He was eager to see how the attractions within had changed.
But that was tonight. This morning, the market had his attention.
A fruit and nut vendor’s stall sent the rich, warm scent of roasted nuts through the air, mingling with the sharper tang of metal from the stall he’d just left. A woman at a flower stall held up a bunch of pink hyacinths, turning them this way and that, while her companion shook her head and pointed instead at a bundle of orange tulips. Two children darted past Kazrian’s knees, shrieking, and just beyond them a woodworker had laid out an array of carved spoons and small boxes.
There was an energy here that the grander parts of Bloomhaven did not possess. Less refined, perhaps, but more alive. Kazrian walked on, his thumb hooked beneath the bag’s strap on his shoulder, weaving between a pair of women carrying baskets and a man rolling a handcart stacked with bolts of linen. The pathway between the stalls curved gently, and as he came around the bend he slowed, then stopped.
Lucie.
She was standing at a spice merchant’s stall a short distance ahead, half turned from him, holding something up to the light. It was thin and dark, and as Kazrian watched, she brought it to her nose, inhaled, and then laughed at something the stallholder said.
Warmth bloomed in Kazrian’s chest. He had not expected to see her today. The Honeycomb was closed. It was his grandmother’s one immovable decree—one day each week, no work, no exceptions, no matter how close the launch—a policy born from decades at The Charmed Leaf and the hard-won knowledge that one must take regular rest instead of working until one dropped from exhaustion.
He was grateful for the rule, for Lucie’s sake more than his own. He could see what the weight of the work was doing to her, even if she would have denied it to her last breath. She managed a remarkable number of things on any given day at The Honeycomb. The batches and timings, the deliveries and orders, planning for the launch—and she managed them well.
But Kazrian saw the moments she thought no one was watching. The way she would pause in the middle of the kitchen, taking swift and silent stock of everything around her: the ovens, the cooling cabinets, the pixies, the progress of a dozen tasks that all needed doing at once. The way she checked that enchanted list that always had rather too many items on it. The way she would close her eyes for the space of abreath, as though steadying something inside herself before pressing on.
He did not wish to speak to his grandmother about it. The thought had crossed his mind—more than once, in truth—but he had set it firmly aside each time. To go behind Lucie’s back would be to suggest that he did not believe her capable of managing on her own, and he did believe it. She was more than capable. He only wished she did not push herself to the point where—how had she put it? Where her thoughtsscatteredentirely and she could barely breathe.
They had not spoken of it again after that morning. The morning she had pressed her palms to the worktable and tried in vain to slow her breathing, and he had been desperate to help but knew it would not be welcomed. All he could think to do was tap out that slow, steady rhythm and hope that she would notice.
She had. And then Kazrian had opened his mouth and offered assistance, and she had not taken kindly to that.
In the days since, she had seemed perfectly well, and Kazrian had not raised the subject again, sensing that to do so would be to shine a light on something she preferred to keep in shadow. Instead, he did what he could.
He tidied the worktable when she was occupied elsewhere and unlikely to notice and frown at him for it. He kept the building’s more persistent quirks from interfering with her work. He made her tea when the pixies were too busy with other tasks. Balthazar had pointed out her preferred blend—a nudge of his paw against the correct tin, a look of weary patience at Kazrian’s failure to already know this, and then a further prod of a lemon and a tin of dried lavender—as well as her favorite cup. It was, Kazrian suspected, as close to a bond of trust as he would ever achieve with the cat.
Someone bumped his shoulder in passing, muttering an apology, and Kazrian remembered where he was. Lucie was lifting another of the dark, slender things, turning it between her fingers, and the late morning sun found the side of her face and lit her skin warm bronze.
Kazrian realized he was staring.
He rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand and looked deliberately at the awning of the nearest stall, which was selling, he noted with great interest, absolutely nothing he could identify in his current state of mind.
When he looked back, Lucie was slipping her paper-wrapped purchase into the basket on her arm. She turned from the stall, and her gaze moved easily along the lane—and landed on him.
Her face broke into a smile. Kazrian smiled back. He could not have prevented it if he’d wanted to.
They walked toward each other, meeting in front of a flower seller’s stall where buckets of roses and sweet peas crowded the pavement in a tumble of pink and cream. The scent of them hung in the warm air between the two of them.
“Good morning,” Lucie said. The smile had settled into something gentler but was still there, still warm. “I did not expect to find a Rowanwood in this part of town.”
“Nor I a confectioner. And yet here we are.” He gestured to the bag on his shoulder. “I had some parts to collect. For the mechanism on your showpiece structure.”
