“And the marzipan flowers.”
“Lucie.”
“Mm?”
“Sleep.”
Another breath of laughter. “Yes. All right.”
The rain was loud enough now to block out the soft rhythm of her breathing. But he allowed himself, finally, to turn his head. Just slightly. She was curled toward him, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, and in the dim light he could see the shape of her. He watched as the small shifts of her body went still, and the rise and fall of her shoulder grew slower.
She was asleep.
He let his own body loosen then, the rigidity of his arms and shoulders releasing into the cushions. His hand, which had been clenched at his side for what felt like an age, uncurled. He shifted carefully, just enough to let his other arm drop over the edge of the cushions and rest against the floor. The extra space helped. His eyes began to close.
He let his mind drift the way it always did at the edge of sleep, loose and unfocused, snagging on small things.
And then it snagged on something … unexpected.
It came through his hand resting on the floor. The sensation of something, barely there, the way a note of music might travel through a wall from a distant room. His magic, even now, even half asleep, was doing what it always did: reaching out through any surface that touched the lattice, feeling for faults, reading the system the way his lungs read air.
And somewhere in the lumyrite lattice threaded through the kitchen below, he could feel something. Not a fault, precisely, but his magic read itas such because it was not meant to be there. A presence. Not a something but a someone. A signature.
The recognition hovered at the edge of his mind, not quite assembling. He reached for it, tried to draw the connections, and felt the shape of an idea begin to form, distant and improbable and half mad.
But he was not fully awake. Sleep was pulling at him now, heavy and insistent. The idea did not complete itself. It sat at the back of his mind, unfinished and waiting, as Kazrian fell asleep.
ChapterTwenty-Five
The last ofthe light was going amber-rose high on the kitchen walls when Lucie set down her cloth and let herself do the thing she had been saving for the very end of the day: she went to the enchanted list and reviewed every item she had listed that morning and found—with a satisfaction so complete it was very nearly disbelief—that every last thing upon it had been done.
In addition to a dozen small tasks, the chocolate bees were finished, a full second batch of them, enchanted and resting obediently in their tin. The honeycomb beehive stood assembled in all its intricate golden glory, moved to the front of the shop where nothing could knock it over—the shop was closed tomorrow, the day before the launch. And she had even managed an additional batch of candied violet creams, because Lady Rivenna had observed that there would almost certainly not be enough on the day.
Lucie rinsed and hung the cloth, tidied the last of her tools into their drawer, and hung her apron on its hook, and to anyone watching she would have appeared entirely present, entirely composed, a young confectioner attending to the ordinary close of an ordinary day. Her mind, however, was somewhere else entirely.
Upstairs. In the dark. On a pile of cushions, with the rain still falling.
There was never anyone else.
Her hands stilled on the edge of the worktable. She closed her eyes, just for a moment, and let the warmth of it move through her again. That aching, bittersweet bloom in her chest that had not faded since the words had settled into the dark between them. All she had wanted in that moment was to fold herself into him entirely.
She had not, of course. She had only allowed herself to curl as near to him as she dared, and fallen asleep dreaming of him with the sound of rain and thunder closing over them both.
They had agreed this morning, awkwardly, both of them talking at once and then both stopping at once, in that fumbling, stumbling way they had adopted since he returned, that they need never speak of it again. That no one else need ever know. It had been a very sensible agreement, and Lucie intended to honor every word of it. But she had also, in the quiet and secret recesses of her mind, gone over the whole of it multiple times.
She crossed to the hearth, where Balthazar lay on his cushion beside the now lumyrite-free stones.
“Good night,” she told him, and leaned down to brush her hand gently over the fur between his ears. He permitted it. He even, after a moment, tilted his head a fraction into her palm. “And thank you again. For bringing Kazrian here last night to help me.” She straightened and gave him a look. “Though I still suspect you had something to do with the storeroom door closing moments after we stepped inside.”
Balthazar blinked at her slowly, confirming nothing.
She gathered her shawl and basket and went to the back door. Her hand closed around the handle. She did not open it.
She stood there with her fingers curled around the cool metal, and then, quite without deciding to, she tilted her head forward and let her brow come to rest against the door, and a smile spread across her lips that she could not have controlled if her life had depended upon it.
Because the morning was running through her head again, from the beginning.
Waking slowly. The memories of the night surfacing before she had even opened her eyes, rising up soft and warm out of sleep. Then opening her eyes to the first light of morning, not yet golden, and seeing him.
