“If you—” He stopped. Made himself say it. “If you did all of this. If you schemed and tampered and maneuvered to give the two of us the chance todiscover whether there was still something between us, then that would mean …”
His grandmother regarded him, pursed her lips, lowered her teacup, and made ago onmotion with her hand.
“That would mean that you …” His voice had dropped almost to nothing. “That you wouldcountenancea match. Between us. Between a Rowanwood and a—” He could scarcely say it, this thing he had not permitted himself to hope for in three years. “You wouldsupportit.”
Lady Rivenna looked at him for a long moment. Then she sighed. “Kazrian. My darling boy. You are, without question, the most intelligent of my grandchildren. You can take apart a mechanism no one else in the United Fae Isles can even comprehend and put it back together improved. And yet I have known garden gnomes with a finer instinct for what is happening directly beneath their own noses.” She shook her head slowly. “It has taken you the entirety of this conversation to arrive at the one fact that actually matters.” She sat back. “Of course I support the match.”
The ground did not merely shift then. It gave way entirely.
Kazrian had to reach out and set a hand on the back of the chair beside him.
Because he had always believed, even in his most hopeful moments, even on the night he had danced with Lucie in the tea house kitchen and told her plainly how he felt, that if it were ever to happen at all, they would have to fight for it. Every soul in both their lives would stand against it. His family would never permit it; her family would suffer for it; society would not bear it.
And now his grandmother—the silver-haired architect of Bloomhaven’s social order, the woman who had spent the whole of their childhood instructing them in precisely what was proper and what was not, who had sharply reminded him, every Season without fail when he had bordered on being too familiar with the human girl who worked in her kitchen,That is Miss Fields to you, young man—that she had brought him here for the express purpose of discovering whether he still loved Lucie Fields and whether she still loved him in return.
That she wasforit.
“But … why?”
“Why?” She looked at him as though that were the most absurd question. “Why not?”
“Because … it is not done.”
“Yes, well, that is a very poor reason indeed. Kazrian, dear, perhaps you should sit down.” She motioned toward the armchair. “You have gone the color of a fish.”
He did not sit down. He was not certain his legs would consent to bending on command. He stood gripping the chair, staring at his grandmother, and felt his mind quietly and efficiently fitting every piece into its new position.
“There is … a very great deal still in the way,” he said at last, hoarsely. “Her family. Their history with … her aunt. Society itself?—”
“Of course there is a great deal in the way.” His grandmother reopened her ledger—which, Kazrian noted distantly, was almost certainly not hers at all, but Jasvian’s, or perhaps Iris’s, and their grandmother was reviewing things she no longer had any business reviewing and forming opinions about them regardless. “There is always a great deal in the way. That is what the way ismadeof. Now. I have tea house business to get on with, and you, I imagine, have a young woman waiting on you to help her finish assembling a great many marzipan pieces on that framework you so cleverly constructed for her.”
“She … she will not let me touch it,” he said faintly. “She insists on doing the final preparations.” Though she had also said something about how his hands had always been so good with delicate work, and then turned hastily away and said something else entirely in a tone that suggested she was trying very hard to pretend the first remark had not happened.
“Ah. That does not surprise me. Well, I am sure you will find other ways to make yourself useful.” His grandmother did not look up. “You may leave the door ajar on your way out. That is all.”
He did not remember deciding to go, or the door under his hand, or the narrow stairs, or Mrs Spindlewood’s polite murmur as he passed through the main floor in a daze, moving through the warmth and the coiling steam and the bright chatter of a tea house full of patrons, all of it washing over him like sound heard from underwater. He was aware only of the single vast thing turning over and over inside him, too large to hold, and of a feeling he had not permitted himself in so long that he scarcely recognized it at first.
Hope.
Maybe, said a traitorous voice inside him, the one that sounded like the boy who had asked Lucie Fields to dance with him.Maybe. Just maybe.
There was only one thing to determine now: if she still loved him in return.
This is all in the past, she had said.None of it matters now.
But then there had been the cushions on the floor, andI am glad you are here, and she had wanted to know if there had been anyone else, and the way she had curled her body toward him, and the fact that she had accepted the signet ring he’d pressed into her hands and hung it on the chain around her neck.
Which reminded him, he recalled abruptly—he must collect her lumyrite ring today. She would need it tomorrow, and he had promised to fetch it.
He stepped off the weathered stone steps in front of the tea house into the late morning air, his mind a thousand miles away?—
—and very nearly walked directly into someone.
“Oh!”A small, startled step back. A swish of skirts, a shawl, a face he knew well. “Kazrian!”
“Charlotte—Mrs Turner—I beg your pardon.” He caught himself and stepped back. “Forgive me, I was not looking.”
“Not to worry at all!” Charlotte laughed. “I am glad I have caught you, actually. I wanted to thank you again for Dreamland. It was quite possibly the most spectacular thing I have ever experienced. Theo will not stop talking about it either.”
