He reached the study door and did not knock.
She was seated at the larger of the two desks, silver hair immaculate, a ledger open before her and a cup of tea steaming at her elbow, and she didnot startle when the door swung open. She merely lifted her eyes to him over the rim of her cup, took an unhurried sip, and set it down.
“Kazrian,” she said. “You look as though you have swallowed something disagreeable. Do sit.”
“I would rather stand.”
“How ominous.” She closed the ledger. “Well. Out with it, then. I find suspense tedious at my age.”
He had rehearsed this. He had rehearsed it a dozen ways coming up the stairs, and every rehearsal deserted him now, so that what came out was only the bare bones of it, flat and quiet.
“I felt your magic in the lattice at The Honeycomb.”
Something moved behind her eyes and was gone. “Did you indeed.”
“The night before last. When I was—in the storeroom. There is a ‘signature’, for lack of a better word, present at certain points in the lumyrite lattice that has no business being there, and it is yours.”
“Well, Kazrian, I do spend a great deal of time in the building, as you may have noticed.” She spread one hand, all innocence. “Whose magic would you expect to find there, if not mine?”
“In the lumyrite lattice? Only Evryn’s, Grandmother.Only Evryn’s.”
Lady Rivenna regarded him for a long moment. Then she folded her hands upon the closed ledger, very composed, very grand, and said, “I have not the faintest notion what you are talking about.”
“Do not. I sense faults, Grandmother. It is what I do. And the presence of your magic within certain lumyrite threads running through that building is, unmistakably, a fault. All this time I have been repairing the symptoms, when I ought to have been looking for the source.”
“Kazrian, I am an old woman with no aptitude whatsoever?—”
“Oh, do not try that with me. I suspect you would find you possess an aptitude for anything you set your mind to.”
For the first time, she did not answer at once.
“You almost hurt people,” he went on, and now the quiet was cracking, the thing beneath it pushing up through the composure he had walked in with. “That is what you have to understand. That is why I am standing here. The hob began heating itself without warning or explanation. A kitchen pixie was burned.Luciewas burned, Grandmother. That is what your meddling has?—”
“I did not touch the hob.” The words fell out of her, sharp and immediate, and Kazrian watched the exact instant she realized she had given herself away. The smallest flicker crossing an otherwise unshakeable face.
“So you did do it,” he said softly.
“I admit to nothing.”
“You just did.” He lifted his arms wide, then let them fall heavily to his sides. “Why?Why would you—it makes no sense, none of it. You are the one who summoned me here torepairthe wretched building, and now I discover?—”
“Because you love her,” she said, her composure cracking open to reveal something fiercer and rawer beneath it. “Because you had done everything I asked, and done it far too quickly, and you were about to vanish back to the Shaded Lands, because I know you, Kazrian. You had no plans to stay for the remainder of the Season, despite my—and your mother’s—wishes. So I gave you a reason to stay. To have more time with her.”
For several seconds, Kazrian could not produce a single word.
The room had tilted. Everything he had marched up here holding—the anger, the certainty, the careful architecture of his accusation—hung suspended, and through the middle of it ran one thought, over and over.
She knows.
“You—” he managed, and stopped. “How do you—that is?—”
His grandmother looked at him with an expression of such profound and weary patience that it very nearly folded into pity. “Good gracious, Kazrian. I have known for years.”
“Years,” he repeated faintly.
“Since you were a boy and could not carry a tray past Miss Lucie Fields without walking into a doorframe.”
He thought of Rosavyn then, telling him she knew he had loved Lucie for years. He pinched the bridge of his nose and drew a long breath through it. “Good stars,” he muttered. “Does the entire family know?”
