He was never going to sleep. He knew that with absolute certainty. He was going to lie here, rigid and sleepless, for the entire duration of the night, because every part of him was tuned to her with a precision that made all his careful diagnostic work on the lumyrite lattice look like guesswork by comparison.
Find something else, he firmly instructed himself.Find something else to think of.
And so his mind returned, mercilessly, to that horrifying image from earlier—her breath hitching, her hands at her neck reaching for a ring that was not there, the terror in her voice when she had gasped outI can’t—I can’t breathe?—
His own chest tightened at the memory. He had crossed the room before he’d even made the decision to move, pulling the signet ring from his finger as he went. Because her ring was what she always reached for to steady herself, and now her ring was gone.
After the ring, his mind had reached for the next thing, and the next, racing through everything he knew, every approach that might reach her, while the rest of him held steady and spoke gently and did not let her see that he was terrified.
It had been frightening the first time, too. Theonlyother time, if what she’d told him was true. He had been fifteen. Lucie had been working at The Charmed Leaf for only a few weeks, and he had known her forprecisely that long, but already she’d become the thought his mind returned to whenever it was left unattended.
He had gone looking for her in the pantry, drawn by nothing more than the simple, aching wish to see her, and had found her instead pressed against the shelving with her hands clutched at her chest, her hair loose and tangled from where she had evidently been pulling the pins from it, gasping for air that did not seem to be coming.
He had not known much at fifteen. He had known considerably less than he liked to think he knew. But this he recognized, because Aurelise, who felt everything just a little too deeply, sometimes experienced what their mother called ‘a fit of nerves.’
And Kazrian, in the way his mind could never leave a problem alone, had spent those early episodes with his sister quietly working out what helped. A careful process of trying one thing and then another until he realized he needed to ground her in something physical. Something that pulled her attention out of the spiraling dark and back into the solid, tangible world.
Standing there in front of Lucie, he had reached for the nearest thing, a tin of tea leaves, and pressed it into her hands. He told her to feel it. Was it hot or cold? Smooth or rough? Could she count the edges? He hadn’t been sure if she’d even heard him, but then he watched her shaking fingers trace around the rectangular lid, then down the sides, then around the base.
“Can you try to breathe with me?” he’d asked, the same way he’d asked tonight. He drew a breath, slow and deliberate, held it for several counts, then let it go. Drew another. Held it. Let it go.
She had not been able to match him. Not for a long while. She had turned away from him entirely, gripping the tin, and gasped out, “I can’t—I can’t?—”
And so he had done the only other thing he could think to do, the thing that had always helped to settle his sister. He had gently gathered Lucie’s loose, tangled hair back over her shoulders and begun, with hands far steadier than he had felt, to braid it. Slowly, methodically, counting his breaths aloud as he worked, over-under, over-under, over-under.
He had been distantly, mortifyingly aware, even as he did it, that this was a wildly improper thing for a boy to be doing to a girl he barely knew, and he hadbeen terrified his grandmother might walk in at any moment. But it had worked for Aurelise, time and again, and he had had nothing else to offer, so he had kept braiding, and kept counting out loud with his slow breaths, and hoped.
When she had finally quieted, her breath still uneven but no longer clawing, he had stepped back at once, hands dropping behind his back, and begun stammering out an apology. For the impropriety of it. For touching her hair like that. For—well. All of it.
“No,” she said. Her voice was raw, scraped thin, but it was a voice, and she was breathing. “No, don’t—thank you. I thought … it felt like I was dying.”
He had asked her, gently, what had happened.
It had come out of her in pieces. His grandmother had asked her to demonstrate something in front of the tea leaf reading guests that evening—something new, something Lucie had only just learned from Mama Saffron, and the thought of failing at it, of embarrassing herself in front of a room full of fae, of somehow reflecting badly on the tea house and on her own family, had felt like far too much to bear. She had come into the pantry to calm herself, had taken her hair down meaning only to re-pin it more neatly, and then the panic had arrived and she had abandoned the hair and everything else entirely.
He remembered thinking, afterward, that it was not fair. He had been fifteen and had never once worried about his place in the world. Everything he could ever need or want lay before him, already assured—his name, his family, his future. And here was a girl of fourteen, barely a month into a new position, already carrying the weight of her entire family’s standing on her shoulders. Already certain that a single mistake of hers could unravel everything her parents had carefully built.
She still carried it. Kazrian saw that now.
I need everything to be perfect.
Everything will fall apart if it is not.
“Kazrian?”
He drew a slow breath. “Yes?”
“May I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“The Shaded Lands. What is it like there?”
He considered the question for a moment, relieved to have something to turn his mind toward that was not simplyher.
“It is … peaceful,” he said. “Notquiet, of course, but it lacks the busyness we have here. The gossip birds and the carriages and the market and the balls and other endless social events. Even in the quieter seasons here, one is always surrounded by other people and their opinions. The Shaded Lands are not like that. The forests are silver, and the light moves differently, and the colors in the sky shift throughout the day. The stars are different, and the seasons blend into one another. People ride pegasi, as they do here, but they ride dragons too.”
“Dragons?!” Lucie propped herself upright on one arm, and Kazrian’s gaze went automatically to her, because what was he meant to do? Continue staring resolutely at the ceiling?
