“I could not speak for all of them.” A pause, and then: “But I should be astonished if it were fewer than four. Hm, perhaps five.” Another pause. “No, I would put it at six, I should think.”
He was, for several moments, too horrified to speak.
Six.He ran the arithmetic against his will—Aurelise, of course, alwaysAurelise; Rosavyn, plainly; his grandmother; and that made three, which meant there were three more family members who?—
No.No. He would not be turned. He had come up these stairs for a reason, and the reason had not stopped mattering simply because the ground had opened beneath his feet.
He straightened and cleared his throat. “That is not why I am here.”
“Is it not?”
“You endangered people, Grandmother. That is the matter at hand, and you will not distract me from it with revelations about how spectacularly I have failed to hide my own—” He caught himself. “This was a dangerous game. You cannot gotamperingwith a lumyrite lattice as though it were a flower arrangement to be nudged into a pleasing shape. Lucie could have been hurt far worse than she was. A malfunctioning oven very nearly came down on top of me the first week I was here. I could have been crushed?—”
“That one was entirely The Honeycomb’s own doing. The oven. The cooling cabinets. The shelf and that darned storeroom door. Every wretched thing that was wrong when you arrived.” She spread one hand. “That was before I touched anything, Kazrian. Those faults were genuine. The building is old and temperamental and its magic did not agree with the lattice Evryn laid in, exactly as I told you when I summoned you. I did not fabricate the reason to bring you here. I merely saw it as an opportunity.” A small, dignified pause. “I did not tamper with a single thing untilafteryou confirmed that you had repaired it all.”
“That does not make it any better!”
She drew a breath and let it out slowly, and when she spoke again, something had shifted in her face. Not much, but enough. “I did not know about the hob,” she said, and the dryness had gone out of her voice. “I did not know about the pixie or Lucie getting burned.” Her hands folded and unfolded on the ledger. “I did not intend for anyone to be hurt. For that, I am sorry. Truly.”
“Ah, well, as long as you are sorry about the hob.”
“Kazrian—”
“And did you intend for the two of us to be locked in the upstairs storeroom together for an entire night?”
The effect was immediate and, in any other circumstance, would have been deeply satisfying.“What?”
“The storeroom door. Two nights ago. It sealed itself the moment we stepped inside and did not open again until the following?—”
“You spent thenight—” She had gone quite pale, and then quite a different color entirely. “The two of you? Alone? Kazrian Rowanwood, who else knows of this?”
“So that alarms you. That, of all of it.”
“Whoknows?”
“No one,” he said. “Fortunately. No one at all, save a single gossip bird, which appears to have kept its own counsel thus far, and which we must both hope continues to.” He watched her hand press flat against her collarbone. “And you do not get to sit there wearing your scandalized face, Grandmother, when it was entirely your doing.”
“I will wear whatever face I wish, Kazrian.”
He raked a hand through his hair. “This isabsurd. Do you not see how absurd it is? You should be sorry for all of it. Not merely the hob and the burns, though stars know that is enough. You should be sorry that you did any of it at all. That you decided, without a word to me, to take my life and Lucie’s and rearrange them like—like furniture. Why could you not simply haveaskedme to stay?”
“You would not have.”
Her words landed with the flat finality of a door closing, because they were true. “So instead you forced the two of us together.”
“I gave youtime.” Her voice sharpened, rising to meet his. “That is all I gave you. Time and proximity and the chance to stand in a room with her long enough to discover whether there was anything still alive between you, or whether three years had finally put it to rest. I did not tell you what to feel. I did not tellherwhat to feel. I opened a door and I left the two of you to decide, for yourselves, whether to walk through it.”
“And you unearthed a reason to bring me homenow, instead of at some other point within the past three years, because …”
He let the sentence hang there, unfinished, waiting for her to complete it.
She did not. Instead she gave him a level, pointed,catch-up-childsort of look, the one that meant she considered the answer entirely obvious and was waiting to see how long he would take to arrive at it.
It took several more moments of internal calculations.
And then he got there.
“Henry Stratton,” he said quietly.
