Three days.
She drew a breath that did not quite reach the bottom of her lungs. Thishad become rather a habit of late, this elevated breathing, all of it happening too high in her chest. As though her body had decided, sometime in the past fortnight, that there was simply not enough time to draw a full breath, and had quietly adopted a more economical method.
She drew one now, deliberately, all the way down, and surveyed the structure before her.
The framework Kazrian had built was a beautiful thing. Silver wood from the Shaded Lands, pale and faintly luminous, shaped into a broad pedestal, large enough to conceal the central spindle and the honeycomb beehive that would be assembled within. Above it, curved panels of silver wood rose and tapered inward, forming a graceful narrowing structure. Those were the pieces she would cover, on the day, with dozens of marzipan flowers, tiny leaves tucked between.
There were mechanisms Kazrian had put together with a combination of craftsmanship and magic: the spindle that would make the whole thing turn, the panels near the top that would release outward at her signal to reveal the beehive rising from within. And there were the confections still to be layered over the framework: the spun sugar and the honey light, the little chocolate bees spiraling out as the honeycomb rose.
They were standing outside, in the area just beyond the back courtyard. It was here that Lady Rivenna intended to host the launch. The open stretch of ground behind The Honeycomb, where the lane’s flowering trees arched overhead and the light came through dappled and golden in the afternoons. On the day of the launch, furniture from The Charmed Leaf would be brought over and arranged beneath the branches: tables dressed in white linen, chairs with cushions, and the whole of it transformed by Iris, who had offered to decorate the space.
She had been here only the day before. She and Lucie had stood outside together, Iris motioning with her hands, pointing here and there with the confident sweep of someone who could see the finished picture already assembled in her mind. Paper birds and butterflies flitting among the branches, strings of tiny golden faelights wound through the lower boughs, garlands of trailing flowers.
“And I will use honeysuckle somehow, somewhere,” Iris said, “because that feels fitting for a place named The Honeycomb. It will all come together beautifully.”
And Lucie, standing in the empty space and seeing it all begin to take shape in her mind, had felt a quiet swell of excitement begin to outshine her nerves. She could picture it. For the first time, she could truly picture it, and it was going to be lovely.
“You can place your hand here,” Kazrian said, “at the back, to channel magic into the structure.”
She nodded. “Yes. Good.”
She would be using her ring, of course. Out here in the garden, there was no lumyrite lattice. Which reminded her?—
“Oh,” she said aloud, because the thought had surfaced from the constant churning inventory that ran beneath everything else she did, the endless list that woke her at night and followed her through the day. “I must have the new stone fitted into my ring. Your grandmother organized it for this afternoon, I believe. To be collected tomorrow. I had quite forgotten.”
She lifted the rose-gold band from where it lay against her chest and looked at the lumyrite set into it. The crystal had gone dull and clouded, its magic all but spent. “I have had this one for quite some time, but it is very nearly finished now.”
“I could take it for you,” Kazrian offered. “Then you need not go yourself.”
“Oh—you do not need to trouble yourself with?—”
“It is no trouble.”
She opened her mouth to protest again, then stopped herself. “Thank you,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes. “That would be very helpful.”
It had been a fortnight since That Afternoon. That was how she had come to think of it, capitalized in her own mind, a significant dividing point: the timebeforeKazrian understood what had truly happened when she rejected him three years ago, and the timeafterhe had assembled the pieces and realized what she had done.
Because he would have. She had no doubt of that. She knew with bone-deep certainty that Kazrian now understood the truth: she had loved him, and she had lied about it and said that she did not.
But he had come in the next day and said nothing. And she had said nothing. And the silence had been so careful and so complete that she had dared to hope that he had listened when she told him it was all in the past.
Since then they had been … professional. Polite. Courteous to the point ofexhaustion. They did not argue. They did not hold one another’s gaze for longer than a passing moment. And he was careful not to come too close, always maintaining a deliberate distance that was slightly further back than necessary. It was easy to guess the reason: he had spent three years believing his attention had been unwanted, that he had pressed where he had no right. And now, though he knew that had never been true, he seemed unwilling to risk the mistake again.
There had been the hearts, though. Two of them.
The first had appeared beside a tray of almond tuiles she had left out to cool. She had insisted Kazrian try one, and he had said it was the best thing he had tasted in a very long time. The second had appeared beside the row of Twilight honey light bottles she had collected that week. Kazrian had tasted a piece of marzipan infused with it and declared it might be his favorite variety of all the honey lights he had sampled. Later that day, when she’d come to clean up the worktable, she’d found a single heart in the confectioner’s sugar, alongside the bottles that were still lined up.
Two simple hearts. The only callbacks, in all this careful fortnight, to anything that had been before. The same hearts they had drawn to thank Orrit for a fine batch of scones, or merely to tell him, without words, that he was appreciated.
That was all it was now. Lucie told herself this firmly and with great conviction. Just Kazrian saying he appreciated the tuiles. Telling her he enjoyed that particular honey light. A fond, familiar gesture carried forward from a shared past that was, in all other respects, firmly behind them. Nothing more.
And through all of it—the careful distance and the polite exchanges and the hearts she refused to examine too closely—they never spoke of Henry. Not once.
Henry, for his part, had been visiting less frequently, and when he did appear, it was with a peculiar instinct for timing that ensured Kazrian was never there. Lucie was grateful for this. It seemed he had finally taken her at her word—all those weeks ofso much to do before the launch, Henry, truly I cannot spare a moment—and was holding himself in reserve until afterward. Which was thoughtful of him. Considerate.
The Honeycomb, at least, had been largely cooperative. The building’s eccentricities had quietened to something approaching civility, as thougheven the old magic in the walls understood that now was not the time for mischief. The staircase no longer produced its extra step. The storeroom door upstairs had locked itself only once within the past fortnight, and Kazrian had managed to coax it open by the following day. They had moved more supplies in there in recent days, to make room in the storage-bedroom for the growing collection of launch-related items.
As for the high shelf in the kitchen, Kazrian appeared to have accepted defeat. It was always going to offer up some quirk or other, and as long as it did not interfere with the confections, Lucie could live with that.
