“Why are you out here?” he asked.
Rosavyn let out a sigh that seemed to involve her entire body. “I am hiding from Mother.”
“Ah.” He glanced sidelong at her. “What has she done?”
“What has shedone. She has developed an enthusiasm, Kazrian. A fervent, unshakeable enthusiasm that I fear may be terminal.” Rosavyn picked at the grass beside her knee. “It concerns Lord Tobias Grayfield.”
Kazrian’s brows rose. “The gentleman from the park.”
“The very same. It seems the man has been—according to Mother—paying me a rather remarkable amount of attention.” Rosavyn tilted her head back against the tree. “Every time I walk through the front door, she is there. Did he call today? Did I see him at Dreamland? What did he say? Was he attentive? Did he seem sincere? And I cannot—” She pressed a hand to her brow. “I cannot bear the weight of her hopefulness, Kazrian. It will end the way it always ends, and I will have to watch her be disappointed, and it will be worse than if she had simply never hoped at all. I would much rather we discussedyou.” She turned, fixing him with a look. “Why are you hiding in the garden with your brooding face on?”
He looked away, drew a long breath, and let it out slowly. “Can we simply … sit? For a time?”
Something in his voice must have told her what his words did not, because she watched him for several long moments and then said, “I suppose we can.” She settled more comfortably against the tree and let the evening close gently around them.
Kazrian leaned his head back. Closed his eyes. And in the hush of the garden, as the light turned slowly from gold to rose, he allowed himself to go back.
It had been evening then, too. She had been working late at The Charmed Leaf for some reason he could no longer recall. There was some reason the place required cleaning later than usual, but it had not seemed important at the time, and it had certainly never been important since.
He was supposed to be at the Rowanwood Masquerade, the great annual ball of enchanted masks and hidden identities that his family hosted every Season. His grandmother had had a specialized craftsperson add additional enchantments to her mask this year, a commission delivered to the tea house earlier that day, and it was only that evening she had discovered she’d left it there.
Kazrian had offered, perhaps a little too quickly, to go and retrieve it.
In his memory, the light was dim and warm, the kitchen of The Charmed Leaf gone soft and golden at the edges. He could not have said whether there were pixies about that night, or whether the hearth sprites had been awake and bright in the embers or curled down asleep. Those details had gone. What remained was Lucie, and the gold light on her, and the small space of kitchen between them.
They had talked about the masquerade. She had asked after it the way she always asked after the parts of his life she would never be invited into—curious, warm, a little wistful. Her mother made the masks every year, and they were delivered to Rowanwood House days in advance so the enchantments could be laid into them. Magic that changed a person’s attire and physical attributes.
She thought it must be wonderful, she said, to spend a whole evening as someone else. To set one’s own face down for a few hours and be no one in particular.
Kazrian had been feeling brave that night. An earnest, headlong almost-nineteen, with his whole heart sitting too near the surface of his skin, and he had heard himself say, “Come with me. You can wear a mask too. Not an enchanted one—I do not believe they are safe for humans. But an ordinary one. You need not reveal yourself.”
She had only laughed at him. “That is quite out of the question. But you ought to go. You are missing it.”
And he had looked at her across that small space and said, “I am exactly where I want to be.” And then, gaze still holding hers: “Will you dance with me?”
Her expression suggested she did not think he was being serious. “Here? In the kitchen?”
“Yes.”
She had laughed and told him she did not think it advisable.
“Why not?”
“Well … there is hardly room.”
He had smiled at that. “It need not be a sweeping waltz.”
And he had pressed, gently, and she kept refusing, kept finding reasons—the lack of space, the hour, the sheer impropriety of it all. And this—this was the part he had returned to a thousand times. She had saidno, and he had not let it lie, and his mind, for three long years, had always stopped at exactly this point, because this was where his body ought to have stopped. He should have stepped back and bowed and let her be.
But now, after what she had revealed earlier—You did not make me do anything. I always had a choice—he allowed himself to look again at the rest of the memory. He saw the dark flush of color in her cheeks. The way she could not stop smiling. The way her hands were clasped behind her back—a small, contained, careful gesture—and yet her body was already swaying, side to side, an unconscious answer to a music that had not yet begun to play. She had wanted to dance.
He had taken her hand at last. He remembered the exact moment of it. Her hand was warm and small, and his fingers had closed around hers as though they had been designed for precisely this purpose. His other hand had come to rest just below her shoulder blade, and they had been standing so close that he had wondered, with a kind of distant astonishment, whether he might simply stop breathing altogether.
They had never danced before. Of course they had not. When, in all the time they had known each other, would there ever have been an occasion for a human serving girl and the son of one of the oldest fae families in the Isles to dance together? And so it had not happened, until that night, in a kitchen with no one to know.
Kazrian could not stop looking at her, and she had not looked away either. And they were so close it was nearly unbearable, and the small foolish music in his own head had carried them through the simplest of steps—two, three, turn—whatever could be contained in the narrow compass of the kitchen.
“I want to do this every day,” he had told her. “Every night. With you.”
