“It would …” She hesitated, glancing down and then back up. “It would truly not be an imposition? On your family, I mean?”
“Lucie.” He said her name without thinking, and once it was out, he decided not to correct himself. “Evryn and Mariselle would be delighted. And there is no one in all of Bloomhaven who would enjoy showing you and Charlotte through Dreamland more than Rosavyn.”
The smile finally won, and it made Kazrian’s chest ache in a way that was entirely unhelpful. “Well,” she said. “If Rosavyn truly would not mind …”
“She will not mind at all. And if I am wrong, you have my full permission to blame me entirely.”
Lucie laughed and shook her head. “Very well, then. Yes. I should … I should very much like that.”
“Excellent,” he said. “Then I shall speak to Rosavyn this afternoon, and she’ll send a messenger pixie with all the details.” He paused. “You will enjoy it, I promise.”
“I believe I will.”
They stood for a moment in the gap between the stalls, and Kazrian was suddenly aware that neither of them had moved to leave. Lucie appeared to realize this at the same instant, because she adjusted her basket against her hip and straightened.
“Well. I ought to find that piping nozzle.”
“And I should—” He gestured vaguely with the bag. “Components.”
“Yes.” A pause. “Thank you, Kazrian. For the … for all of that.”
“Of course.”
She moved past him and into the crowd, her basket on her arm, and Kazrian watched her go until she paused at a stall and leaned in to examine something.
He turned and walked the other way. The bag knocked gently against his hip as he moved through the market, and he felt, for the first time since arriving in Bloomhaven, that he was truly looking forward to the evening ahead.
Chapter Sixteen
Lucie had stepped into a dream,and she had not even had to fall asleep to do it.
That was the first coherent thought she managed, and it was not very coherent at all, because the moment she passed beneath Dreamland’s entrance—an archway of nothing she could name, which shivered apart into a thousand golden butterflies as she walked under it and rained down behind her as harmless sparks—the ceiling simply stopped being a ceiling. It became a sky. And not the ordinary night sky she had left behind outside. It was an impossible sky, washed in pinks that melted into lavender and deepened into violet, with clouds that moved like paint stirred slowly through water, and somewhere far up in all of it, stars.
Lucie stood quite still and forgot, for a moment, how to do anything else.
She had heard about Dreamland every Season since it had reopened several years earlier. She had heard about it the way one hears about the far continent, or the bottom of the sea. As a place that existed, certainly, but not for her. Dreamland was for the fae, and for the sort of humans whose wealth was so comfortable it never needed to be considered at all. It was not for the daughter of a dressmaker and a woodworker, no matter how fine the pieces they crafted.
And yet here she was.
Beside her, Charlotte let out a long, wondering exhale that was not quite a sigh and not quite a word. It expressed exactly what Lucie felt.
Rosavyn stepped between them, slid her arm through Lucie’s, then caught Charlotte’s on her other side, so that the three of them stood linked in a row. “Isn’t it extraordinary? I should have brought you both here years ago. Thank goodness for Kazrian and his occasional excellent ideas.”
“Only occasional?” Lucie murmured, gaze still tracing the watercolor sky.
“I refuse to encourage him. He is insufferable enough as it is.”
Then she laughed, squeezed Lucie’s arm, and drew the three of them forward.
A short distance behind them came Kazrian and Theo. Lucie did not turn to look. She was being very disciplined about not turning to look. Charlotte had whispered just before they’d come in that Theo had worked himself into a quiet anxiety about the whole arrangement.
A fae lord, he’d told her. Worlds away from them. They’d have nothing in common. It would be dreadfully awkward. Charlotte had assured him that Kazrian was nothing like whatever sort of fae lord Theo seemed to be imagining, and Lucie was glad Charlotte had said so. She agreed entirely.
They walked on along a path of pale, luminous tiles that chimed faintly underfoot, each note different, so that their footsteps played a wandering melody. There was, Lucie discovered, no walking through such a place at any reasonable pace, because every few steps something demanded to be stopped for.
“Oh,” Charlotte kept saying, helplessly. “Oh, look at that. Lucie,look?—”
“I am looking. I have not once stopped looking.”
