“Balthazar,” she whispered. “You brilliant, brilliant cat.”
“Lucie?” Kazrian’s hand hovered near her arm, not quite touching. “What happened?”
She wiped her hands hastily over her face before standing. Haltingly, her voice catching in places, she told him what had happened. The tin of chocolate bees. Her elbow catching the edge. All of them scattered across the pantry floor. The enchantment reworked. New bees to be made. The molds, which she needed, which were upstairs, which were in?—
She gestured at the closed door. “It’s locked.”
He nodded once. “Of course it is.” He turned to face the door. He placeda hand flat against the wood, then tried the handle. Tested it again, with more force. Pressed his palm to the frame, his fingers splayed and his brow furrowed in concentration. She knew that expression. She had watched him wear it a hundred times over the course of the past few weeks.
“Right,” he murmured. “Right. Let me think. I have determined several successful methods during my time here, I must simply run through them all until we find the one that works.”
He shifted his hand along the doorframe an inch at a time, pausing after each movement, his head tilted as though the wood were whispering something just below hearing.
Lucie paced. To the bedroom door and back. To the study door and back.
“You did not walk all this way in the rain, did you?”
He appeared to be mostly dry, which suggested the answer was no, but there were charms for warding off rain. It was possible he’d used one.
“No, I brought one of the family carriages.” He pressed his hand to a different section of the frame. “Balthazar arrived looking like he’d been dragged through every puddle between here and there. I believe he came in through the kitchen, and someone chased him all the way to the drawing room, where he found me. It was some moments before I understood he wanted me to follow him.” A brief, distracted smile crossed his face as he traced his fingers along the edge of the doorframe. “He was greatly appreciative of the carriage on the ride back here. Sat on the seat as though he’d been traveling by carriage his entire life.”
The image nearly made her laugh despite everything. Balthazar, soaked and imperious, installed upon the velvet upholstery of a Rowanwood carriage like visiting royalty.
Kazrian shrugged out of his coat, and Lucie was already reaching for it before he’d finished the motion, without quite thinking. “Oh—thank you,” he said.
She folded it over her arms and resumed her pacing. It was warm from his body, and damp in parts, and it smelled of rain and that cool, green, foresty scent that?—
Not relevant. Not even slightly relevant. Focus.
He did something to the lock she could not see. Nothing happened. He tried something else. Nothing happened again. He crouched beside thelock, one ear nearly pressed to the wood, listening for something only he could hear.
Balthazar padded over and butted his head against Kazrian’s knee—a slow, deliberate press that became a drag along his leg. Kazrian absently reached down with one hand and rubbed his knuckles along the side of Balthazar’s cheek, and Balthazar tilted his head into it, eyes closing, and a low, rattling purr filled the corridor.
Lucie stopped pacing. She stood there, her arms wrapped in Kazrian’s coat, and felt something shift inside her chest that she could not put back. What in all the stars was happening? Balthazar, who hated everyone. Balthazar, who sparked and hissed at anyone who came too close.HerBalthazar. Andher?—
No. NotherKazrian. She had to be very firm about that.
Kazrian glanced up, perhaps noticing the silence where her footsteps had been. “What is it?”
“I … I find I have no words.”
His gaze followed hers to where his hand rested on Balthazar’s head. “Oh. That.” He looked faintly sheepish. “He … seems to have forgiven me for the crime of existing.”
“That is rather more than forgiveness, I should say.”
Balthazar withdrew from Kazrian with immense dignity, wound once between Lucie’s ankles as though to remind her that loyalties had not been reassigned, merely expanded, and then stalked to the far end of the corridor to sit and watch both of them. Lucie looked between the two of them several more times, wondering if she was the only one who seemed to think some monumental shift had just occurred.
Kazrian leaned his forehead against the door and murmured something Lucie could not quite make out, though from the tone and cadence, he might have been attempting to reason with the thing.
“Lucie,” he said eventually, and his voice had shifted into something careful, tentative. He looked at her. “Would it be … entirely out of the question … to proceed without the bees?”
She stared at him.
“I do not mean to suggest that they are unimportant. I simply mean, if the door does not yield, might the showpiece still?—”
“Of course it needs the bees!” The words came out far too loud. “Theycomplete the whole—they are the entire point—this place is calledThe Honeycomb, Kazrian, there is abeehiveat the very heart of the showpiece, it must havebees, what is a hive without?—”
She stopped. Attempted a deep breath that went nowhere near filling her lungs. “I’m so sorry.” She pressed her face into the folded coat and the scent of him flooded through her, and then she remembered whose coat it was and hastily pulled it away from her face. “You are being entirely reasonable and I am being—I should not have?—”
