“Oh.” Kazrian felt a small, embarrassed warmth at the back of his neck. “That was all Rosavyn’s doing, truly. She was so pleased to be able to take you.” He cleared his throat. “Well, I had best be off. There is something I need to collect, and then I ought to get to The Honeycomb. To see if there is anything I can do to help Lucie before tomorrow.”
“Of course, yes.” Charlotte smiled and stepped aside. “Do not let me keep you. Oh!” she added, her brows rising in a way that suggested something had just occurred to her. “Kazrian, before you go. There is something I have been meaning to ask you.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chaos.Warm, familiar, entirely benevolent chaos. The only kind the Fields house had ever really produced. In the middle of the parlor, a structure of cushions, wooden blocks, a footstool, and what Lucie was fairly certain was one of her mother’s good shawls, had risen and was in the slow process of collapsing.
“It is acastle,” four-year-old Belle announced. “And nobody is allowed in except the pegasus.”
“I am the pegasus,” Robbie, three, clarified, in case anyone had failed to grasp the hierarchy.
“You cannot be in the castleandbe the pegasus,” said Belle. “The pegasus guards the castle. From outside.”
Robbie considered this constitutional crisis for a moment, then simply sat down in the doorway of the castle, thereby being both inside and outside at once, and looked at his sister expectantly.
“—and Ashby swears it’s the same rag stock he’s always sold me,” Theo was saying to Lucie’s father, “but I have my doubts. It takes the ink wrong. Feathers at the edges, every line, no matter how fine the nib—Robbie,notthe shawl, that is Grandmother’s—you can see it the moment you write on it, it drinks the ink like blotting paper?—”
“He’s cut it with something cheaper, then,” said Lucie’sfather. “They all do it when they think you won’t notice. You want to hold a sheet to the light and look at the fibers. If it’s gone cloudy, he’s had you.”
Lucie sat curled in the corner of the sofa with a cup of tea going cold in her hands and watched all of it, a soft smile on her lips.
It was a particular sort of contentment, the kind that came with a fizzing undercurrent, because tomorrow was the launch, tomorrow was the day, and every so often the thought of it swept through her like cold water and hot sparks at once.
Lady Rivenna had sent her home in the middle of the afternoon. “Everything is finished,” she had said. “Go home and make sure you get a good night’s rest.”
So Lucie had left The Honeycomb and arrived home to find that her mother had decided they should mark the occasion. Nothing elaborate, merely the family, gathered around the table, a good meal, and the implicit understanding that whatever happened tomorrow, Lucie had already done something worth celebrating. “You are a success no matter what happens,” her mother had said when Lucie walked through the door, pressing a kiss to her forehead, and Lucie had very nearly cried.
Through the kitchen doorway she could hear her mother and Charlotte moving about, the clatter of a spoon against a pot, Charlotte’s voice rising and falling in some story that occasionally produced an exclamation from their mother. The smell of it filled the whole house—something rich and slow-cooked, and beneath it the warm sweetness of bread.
She should have been thinking about tomorrow. Instead, in the small quiet spaces between the castle’s fortifications and Theo’s paper grievances, she found her mind drifting toward Georgiana.
She had been turning it over all day. Ever since she had come to understand what sort of man Henry Stratton truly was, she had been wondering whether she ought to say something. Whether she owed it to Georgiana to tell her what had happened. To ask, gently, whether she was well. Whether the bruise Lucie had glimpsed on her arm weeks ago, the one Georgiana had so easily explained away, had come from her brother. Whether he lost his temper often. Whether?—
But Georgiana was so terribly private. She would likely divulge nothing. And even if she did—even if Lucie asked, and Georgiana answered honestly—what then? What was Lucie to do about it? What happened behindclosed doors in the Stratton household was their own affair. Lucie had no standing to intervene, no authority to act, no?—
A knock at the front door.
Lucie’s head came up. She exchanged glances with her father and Theo, both of whom looked mildly puzzled. Clearly they were not expecting anyone either.
“Oh!” came Charlotte’s voice from the kitchen, bright and immediate. “I shall get it!”
Lucie uncurled herself from the sofa and rose, because Robbie had begun trying to relocate a cushion that formed a wall of the castle and the entire side was about to come down on his sister. “Robbie, wait—not that one. Look, if you take that one then Belle’s—Here, let me?—”
She heard the front door open and Charlotte’s warm greeting. “Oh! Good evening!”
“Robbie, sweetheart.” Lucie stretched across the structure. “There is another perfectly excellent cushion right here. See?—”
And then she froze. That voice.That voice.Low, courteous, unmistakable, apologizing for the intrusion, asking whether Charlotte had indeed said this specific hour, and?—
Lucie’s foot caught the edge of the footstool.
She went down in an ungainly tangle of skirts and cushions and startled three-year-old, one hand shooting out to catch herself against the edge of the low table where the teetering tower of unused blocks—too small, Belle had declared, before stacking them neatly on the table and pronouncing them a watchtower for the castle’s pixie sentinels—slid sideways and clattered down over her hand and wrist in a small wooden avalanche. The children shrieked with delight, under the impression this was a new and superior version of the game.
“Not at all, not at all,” Charlotte was saying. “Do come in, Lord Kazrian, let me take your coat?—”
No!Lucie scrambled upright, heart slamming, and shot a wild, panicked look toward Theo—who mouthedLord Kazrian?in confusion—and toward her father, who had risen halfway out of his seat with an expression of dawning horror that she was certain mirrored her own.No no no no?—
From the front passage came the small domestic sounds of a coat beingaccepted, of Charlotte saying something about the weather having turned, of a guestbeing made welcome in their home?—
