Near the house the garden kept its manners: stone-edged beds and clipped borders, a small fountain murmuring to itself, climbing roses held to a pergola in obedient rows, and the luminous white blooms that only opened at dusk. But it all loosened the further one went. The gravel gave way to grass and the order frayed pleasantly into something the gnomes had clearly given up on. There were old pear trees and roses gone slightly wildand sweet peas climbing wherever they pleased, all of golden and soft at this hour.
Kazrian wandered among it all without seeing any of it.
What I did or did not feel.
You are still a fae lord and I am still human, and that is the end of the story.
Except it was not the end of the story. That was the difficulty. It turned out he did not even know what the story was. For three years he had carried a version of it folded up small and tucked away where he need not look at it too often. A version in which he had been the one at fault, the one who pressed where he was not wanted, who read warmth into simple courtesy and mistook a girl’s careful kindness for something it had never been. A story that made sense. He had built the whole thing carefully, the way he built everything, and he had believed it would hold.
And then, in the space of an afternoon and a handful of words, the whole construction had come quietly apart in his hands.
That is not what happened.
I always had a choice.
His hand went to his waistcoat pocket. The watch was warm from being close to his body, and he turned it over between his fingers without opening it, barely registering the habitual motion. His feet carried him deeper into the garden.
He already knew what picture would emerge when he allowed himself to examine the pieces Lucie had given him. Some part of his mind had already assembled it. The part that could not leave a puzzle unfinished, that had never been able to look at scattered components without seeing the whole they were meant to form.
But understanding what it meant was one thing. Looking at it directly was another, and he was not entirely certain he could bear to.
He walked on, hands in his pockets, his gaze fixed on nothing. He was so far inside his own head, in fact, that he did not see what lay across the path in front of him until he had already tripped over it.
Specifically, a foot.
He went down in an undignified sprawl, half catching himself, half not, and ended up across a pair of legs, his palms slapping the cool grass beneath the pear tree as a startled grunt punched out of him.
“Stars, Kazrian!” Rosavyn propped herself up on her elbows. She hadbeen lying flat on her back beneath a pear tree, a book open and face-down across her stomach, her skirts blending with the dappled shadows so thoroughly that she might as well have been part of the garden itself.
Kazrian extracted himself from her legs with as much dignity as the situation allowed, which was almost none. “You are lying in the path.”
“I am lying in thegrass, which is a perfectly reasonable place for a person to lie. You are the one not looking where you are going.” She paused. “Did you truly not see me?”
“You were lying in ambush.”
“I was lying inpeace. Which is a state of being I value enormously and which has now been disrupted by your enormous feet.”
Kazrian sat back on the grass and rubbed his knee where it had hit the ground, while Rosavyn dragged herself upright. She settled with her back against the trunk of the pear tree and regarded him.
“I have ruined your solitude,” he said.
“You have.” She did not sound particularly troubled by this. “I was having a perfectly acceptable evening watching two flower pixies stare lovingly at one another in the tree up there, and now I shall have to hear all your troubles.”
“What troubles?”
“The troubles that are written all over your face.”
“My face is not?—”
“It is your brooding face. It is quite distinct from your puzzling face. A touch more jawline, considerably less forehead.”
“That is the most ridiculous?—”
“Oh, sit down.” She patted the grass beside her. “You’re already on the ground. You may as well be on it on purpose.”
Kazrian considered protesting and found he had not the energy for it. So he moved to the trunk of the pear tree, lowered himself to the grass, and sat back.
The relief of it was immediate. His shoulders dropped. His spine found the solid curve of the tree and settled there. Nothing required of him, for a moment. No face to arrange. No sentence to decode. Just his sister in the grass and the evening assembling itself around them in shades of gold and green.
