“He has magic,” Kazrian said. His eyes tracked the faint sparks still jumping along Balthazar’s stripes.
“Yes. Though we do not know how he came to possess it.” She stroked Balthazar’s back again, and the cat pressed closer to her side without takinghis eyes off Kazrian. “He permits Georgiana’s company, mostly through indifference. And he and Lady Rivenna have reached a sort of … understanding. I believe they consider themselves equals on some level far above the rest of us, and have reached a mutual agreement not to destroy each other.”
That earned a brief, quiet sound from Kazrian that might have been a laugh.
“But he dislikes most people,” Lucie continued, stroking Balthazar’s fur as the cat continued to pace. “He absolutely loathes Henry, in fact, and?—”
“Henry?” Kazrian repeated.
“The upstairs!” Lucie said immediately, suddenly and acutely aware that she had said a man’s name with an ease and familiarity that implied a degree of acquaintance she was absolutely not prepared to explain. “I should show you the upstairs. There is quite a lot to see up there, and it would be terribly remiss of me not to—shall we?”
She was already moving toward the staircase near the back door. It was narrow and wooden, its steps worn smooth by decades of the apothecary's comings and goings. Lucie climbed them carefully, having learned that it was precisely when one felt most confident of one’s footing that the staircase chose to remind you otherwise.
“Do take care,” she called over her shoulder. “The extra step has a talent for?—”
A thud. A muffled oath. The sound of a boot catching on something that should not have been there.
Lucie spun around. Kazrian had stumbled two steps below her, one hand braced against the wall, the other gripping the narrow railing.
“—for appearing in exactly the spot you’ve just decided is safe,” she finished. “I’m so sorry. I should have warned you sooner.”
“No, no, that was—entirely my own—” He straightened and adjusted his coat. “It is not the first time a set of stairs has caught me off guard, and I suspect it will not be the last.”
Something warm and treacherous pressed against the inside of Lucie’s chest. Because she remembered this. She remembered him walking into things. The boy who could take apart a music box with the precision of a master clockmaker but who somehow could not navigate a doorframe without clipping his shoulder on it. He’d grown into himself in so manyways, yet her confectionery could not help but bring out this small clumsiness in him again.
Notherconfectionery, she had to remind herself. That was a dangerous thought that crept its way into her mind far too often. She could not allow herself to get too comfortable here. It was Lady Rivenna’s confectionery, and Lucie’s time here could come to an end at any point.
She turned away quickly and continued up the stairs.
The upper floor was a short corridor with three doors. Lucie gestured to each in turn. “Lady Rivenna uses this first room as her study,” she said, indicating the door on the left, which stood ajar. Through the gap, a writing desk was visible beneath the window, stacked with correspondence and ledgers, a teacup balanced on a saucer at the corner. “She works from here when she’s on the premises. Which is often.”
Kazrian peered in. “That does not surprise me in the slightest.”
“At the far end—” Lucie walked him down the short corridor to the second door, which she pushed open. A modest room, largely taken up by crates of surplus supplies. Sacks of sugar and flour stacked against one wall, boxes of paper wrapping and ribbon, jars of vanilla and rosewater that would not fit in the kitchen cabinets. A bare wooden bed frame leaned against the far wall beneath the window. “Lady Rivenna plans to convert this into living quarters eventually. For whoever will ultimately own The Honeycomb once it is properly established. For now, it is where I keep everything I might need regular access to, because the actual storeroom?—”
She turned to the third door, directly across the corridor from Lady Rivenna’s study, and placed her hand flat against it.
“—only opens on Thursdays,” she finished. “Lady Rivenna has been gathering things for the living quarters. Cushions, linens, small items of furniture. And since none of it is needed on any particular schedule, it all goes in there. Six days locked away does no harm to a stack of pillowcases.” She dropped her hand. “We’ve all simply learned to plan around it.”
Kazrian studied the door with eyes slightly narrowed. “Fascinating,” he murmured. “There must be a cyclical element in the residual magic. A temporal pattern keyed to the old enchantments. If it’s interacting with the lattice at all, I may be able to?—”
He caught himself. Looked at her. “Forgive me. I tend to …” He made a vague gesture. “Get ahead of myself.”
“Not at all,” Lucie said. “That is precisely why you are here.”
Another silence. The awkwardness began to gather again, that careful, courteous, agonizing awareness of each other that neither of them seemed capable of either acknowledging or escaping.
She clasped her hands in front of her.
He put his hands behind his back again.
“Perhaps,” she began, seizing upon the first thought that presented itself, “you might like to wait for your grandmother in her study? You would be quite comfortable there, and I’m certain she will not be long.”
She fervently hoped that this did not sound as much likeplease stay up here so that I may go downstairs and attempt to recover the use of my vital functionsas she suspected it did.
But Kazrian latched onto the suggestion with immediate eagerness. “Yes. Excellent. That’s—Yes. I shall do that. I’m sure you have a great deal to be getting on with, and I have already taken far too much of your time.” He stepped back, toward the study door, and then paused and winced slightly. “And again—I truly am sorry about the … whatever was on that tray before I knocked everything askew. The golden—the small?—”
“Caramels.”
