She glanced back. Kazrian had stopped walking. He was staring at the wall just above the point where a faintly glowing thread of lumyrite ran close to the surface, his head tilted slightly, his expression shifting into something Lucie recognized from years of watching him encountermechanisms he wanted to understand. Focused. Intent. The rest of the world falling quietly away.
“Is that part of it there?” he said, almost to himself, lifting one hand and hovering his fingers an inch from the wall without touching it. “I can see it near the surface. And there as well—it branches, just here.”
“Yes,” Lucie said, turning back to face him properly. “It is woven throughout the entire kitchen. Some of the baking trays and pans as well.”
“Yes, I noticed it in the tray,” Kazrian said, looking around at her. There was a light in his eyes now, keen and bright, the look of someone who had just been handed a puzzle. “How clever. You do not have to draw from the ring you always used to wear.” His gaze dropped briefly to the chain at her neck and the ring that lay against her chest. “With the amount of baking you’re doing here, I imagine you’d have to replace the stone in that ring every few days. Far more efficient to simply press your hand to the worktable you are already using and draw magic directly from the lattice. Or not have to touch the lumyrite at all, if your confections are already sitting on a tray that possesses its own connection to the source.”
“Yes, precisely.” She was smiling at him now, the involuntary kind that came from the particular pleasure of someone understanding exactly the thing she found interesting about her own work. “Lord Evryn estimates the lattice should last a good few years before it requires replacement. And I’ve been able to test different sorts of enchantments I did not even know of before. The type of magic that infuses slowly while baking, for example, due to the lumyrite in the ovens or the baking trays. And a whisk threaded through with lumyrite distributes the magic as it blends—quite different from channeling a single concentrated amount from a ring into the mixture. The experimentation has been fascinating, truly.”
“I can imagine,” Kazrian said, his eyes bright with interest, and she knew that he meant it. Because this was one of the parts about Kazrian that she had always loved watching. The curiosity, the way he came alive in the presence of something he could learn from, the way his mind always reached for the workings of things. And because they were talking about lumyrite rather than about each other, the conversation had briefly stopped feeling as though it might shatter if either of them breathed too hard.
“The difficulty, however,” Lucie continued, moving toward the cooling cabinets along the far wall, “is the residual magic that remains in thisbuilding from the generations of magical practitioners who have lived and worked here. The old magic and the new lattice do not always agree.”
“Ah, yes. My grandmother has relayed her frustrations to me.”
Lucie allowed herself a laugh. “Frustrated is a considerable understatement. And I confess I have not been entirely immune to it myself. The cooling cabinets cannot be relied upon to hold a steady temperature. The oven sometimes decides, entirely of its own accord, to change its temperature mid-bake. There is a shelf on that side of the kitchen”—she pointed—“that refuses to hold anything blue. Crockery, fabric, flowers. If it’s blue, it ends up on the floor. The kitchen pixies have learned to avoid it, though one of them forgets approximately twice a week.”
Kazrian’s gaze followed her pointing finger, then swept the kitchen with a new kind of attention. She could practically see him mapping everything she had mentioned.
“The staircase to the upper floor occasionally adds an extra step while you are walking up or down,” she went on. “Not always the same step. We have all tripped multiple times. And there is a small storeroom upstairs that only opens on Thursdays. Every other day, the door simply will not budge.”
“Fascinating,” Kazrian murmured.
“In any case,” Lucie said, clasping her hands together and adopting what she hoped was a businesslike tone, “Lady Rivenna has engaged someone with expertise in lumyrite magic to come and sort it all out. Someone who can work with both the lattice and the building’s existing enchantments and find a way to make them cooperate. She mentioned it several weeks ago, and I have no doubt this person will?—”
She stopped.
A thought had arrived, belated and blinding, and she could not fathom how it had taken her this long to reach it.
She looked at Kazrian.
He looked back at her, and there was a faintly sheepish quality to his expression.
“And … I am only just now realizing,” Lucie said slowly, “that she meantyou.”
Kazrian cleared his throat. “Ah. Yes.” An awkward laugh escaped him. “That would be me.”
“Of course! I do not know how I—I should have realized—that makesperfect … sense.” Stars, she could have sunk through the floor with embarrassment. Of course it was Kazrian. The boy who had always wanted to know how things worked had manifested a magical ability to fix anything as long as it contained lumyrite. Sheknewthis. Why had she not drawn the plainly obvious line from one fact to the other?
“So you will be … here,” she said. “Working. In the kitchen.”
“I expect so, yes. That is where most of the lattice infrastructure is, so that would be the logical—” He caught himself. “That is, if it is not an inconvenience. I would not wish to interfere with your work. I can certainly arrange my hours around yours, or work in the evenings, or?—”
“No, no, it is no trouble at all,” Lucie said swiftly. Too swiftly. “We shall manage perfectly well.”
They looked at each other. The silence returned, heavy with everything neither of them was saying.
Lucie broke first, reminding herself that the tour was safe territory, and they had best stick to that. “Shall I show you the rest? There is the back courtyard, and the upstairs as well.”
“Oh, yes. Thank you.” Kazrian moved closer, his hand trailing absently along the countertop. “I should like to see?—”
A hiss split the air. Balthazar erupted from his patch of sunlight into a bristling arch, ears flat, and struck at Kazrian’s hand with claws and a sharp crack of magic that leaped from his purple-blue markings like a spark from a struck flint. Kazrian snatched his hand back.
“Oh!” Lucie was between them in an instant, one hand on the counter beside Balthazar, the other reaching instinctively toward Kazrian before she caught herself and pulled it back. “I am so sorry. Balthazar,enough.”
The cat was on his feet, hackles raised, pacing the length of the counter at Lucie’s side. She ran her hand along his back, murmuring to him, feeling the static prickle of magic against her palm.
“Do not take it personally,” she said to Kazrian, who was standing very still with his hand held carefully at his side. “He does not trust most people. He has had … a difficult start. Before I found him.”
