The kitchen held its breath for a moment longer.
“Well, ah, I shall add the ribbon to the list before I forget,” Georgiana said, moving to the enchanted list on the pantry door and lifting the quill from the air. Then she was done and turning back toward the doorway and the front of the shop.
And then it was only the two of them.
Lucie and Kazrian.
She could not look at him. The silence stretched between them. The wrong kind of silence, careful and full. Then she blinked and remembered she had at least four hundred things to do, and she was hugging a bag of flour.
“I, ah—the pantry,” she said, already moving toward it.
“Of course,” Kazrian said quietly, as though her words made perfect sense. “I shall take the box upstairs, so it is out of the way. And then … the hob.” He nodded toward the top of the stove. “It is still heating up on its own. I shall come back down and see to it.”
“Thank you,” Lucie said as she disappeared into the pantry, where she finally put the bag of flour down, closed her eyes, and exhaled a long, slow breath.
This was fine, she told herself. This was all perfectly fine. Henry cared for her, and caring meant wanting to be near a person, and of course it stung to be toldno, I am far too busy, only to see that person out for the evening with someone else. Anyone in his position would be upset. She could hardly fault him for it. She merely wished it was not a matter requiring her attentionright now. Once the launch was behind her and Kazrian had finished his work and gone, everything would settle back into its proper place. She was certain of it.
Chapter Eighteen
The warmth had not come back.The atmosphere had been off all day—something in the air between himself and Lucie that Kazrian could not quite name, though he knew precisely where it had come from. The careful ease they had built over recent weeks, the steady, hard-won rhythm of two people learning to work alongside one another, had retreated. In its place was something brittle and watchful.
And the source was Henry Stratton.
There had been a fraction of a second during which everything had appeared normal. Kazrian had come in, his gaze sweeping the room, cataloguing the state of things as he always did. And then his mind had caught up with what his eyes were seeing: Henry’s hand. Lucie’s arm. The negligible distance between them. And Lucie, moving away from Henry so swiftly she had practically fled to the far counter, the bag of flour clutched to her chest like a shield.
Kazrian had set the box down. He had been civil. He had smiled, because that was what one did, and he had navigated the conversation with the sort of diplomacy that came from years of watching his grandmother manage people she would rather have set on fire. He had covered for Lucie when Henry had said, with that pleasant, pointed warmth of his, that he understood Kazrian’s grandmother hadforcedLucie into visiting Dreamlandthe night before, because Lucie’s brief, panicked look had told him he needed to.
She had lied. Or rather, she had allowed Henry to believe a version of events that bore only a passing resemblance to the truth, because Henry, Kazrian had very quickly come to understand, was not pleased that she had been there. Or rather … was not pleased that she had been there with someonewho was not him.
Even after Henry left, the wrongness had lingered.
Lucie had disappeared into the pantry, Kazrian had taken the box upstairs, and when they had both returned to the kitchen, neither of them had spoken of it. They had simply continued, as though the morning were any other morning, as though nothing at all had happened.
Except it did not feel like any other morning. It felt like the first day Kazrian had arrived at The Honeycomb, when she had barely looked at him and he had not known where to put his hands.
The hob, at least, gave him something to do with them. He turned his attention back to it. The oven itself, mercifully, was in perfect working order. Whatever temperamental impulses the building harbored toward its occupants, it had apparently decided, after Kazrian’s initial repairs, that sabotaging the baking was a step too far. The enchantments held steady, the heat distributed evenly, and the lumyrite threads running through the iron pulsed with the quiet, rhythmic hum of magic doing precisely what it was meant to do. Kazrian was grateful for that, at least.
The hob on top of the oven, however, was another matter. It had taken to heating itself without provocation. No command, no touch, no activation of the enchantment that governed it. It would simply grow hot, silently and without warning, which was more than a little dangerous.
Two days ago, one of the kitchen pixies had landed on it, and the shriek had been instantaneous and terrible. Kazrian had crossed the kitchen in a few quick strides, scooped the pixie up, and taken it straight to the basin. He’d conjured cool water from the tap and applied an additional enchantment to the burn salve—which he’d located in the drawer Balthazar had suddenly and insistently begun pawing at—before his mind had entirely caught up with his body. For that, he could thank three years of befriending a prince whose hobbies involved creatures that breathed fire.
He crouched before the oven now, one hand on the iron casing, hisfingers spread wide, his magic attempting to determine if everything was truly fixed now. The lumyrite threads running through the iron were steady. No erratic pulse, no variation in temperature. He moved to the wall and pressed his palm flat against the stone, reaching deeper, past the surface and into the lattice. The threads there hummed evenly beneath his touch, just as they had two days ago when he had fixed this particular problem. And then the irregularity had returned. It reminded him, unpleasantly, of the thread that made the shelf misbehave.
He returned to the front of the oven and held his hand above the hob again, testing. Still cool. For the moment, at least. He had several more diagnostic enchantments he could apply to be certain.
Behind him, Lucie was working on something delicate. Something that involved a rolling pin, a sheet of marzipan, several small bowls of unidentifiable ingredients, and some dark things Kazrian suspected were vanilla pods. Two kitchen pixies hovered close, one holding a tiny sieve aloft, another with a spoon larger than itself.
For the most part, Kazrian had not been watching her, but he could not help looking over every now and then.
On the surface, this was the same arrangement they had maintained for weeks. Kazrian at his work, Lucie at hers, the two of them occupying the kitchen in a shared quiet that had, until today, felt almost companionable. A remark here. A question there. A cup of tea left wordlessly by one for the other.
But beneath the surface, something simmered that neither of them was willing to name.
Lucie made a small, frustrated sound. Kazrian looked around to see her shaking a slender glass bottle, tilting it toward the light, then lowering it to the worktable. “The moonglow essence is nearly finished,” she said, more to the room than to him. “I had not realized it was so low. Mr Clave is the only supplier who carries it.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “I shall have to leave early this afternoon to get some more.”
“I can collect it,” Kazrian offered, “if you write out the order. I am going that way this afternoon.” He was not going that way, but it would be no trouble.
“Oh. Thank you.”
