“—inmoments, Mother, and he does not mind in the least. Hesaidso, you heard him?—”
“That is not the point!”Their mother caught herself, glanced at the wall, and lowered her voice again. “The point, Charlotte, is that a young man of his station does not simply turn up at a home like ours. Unannounced. To tinker with a lathe. It is not—people do not—this is simply not how the world works, and you know that perfectly well.”
Through the wall, Lucie could hear the low murmur of two men’s voices. And beneath the argument in the kitchen, beneath her mother’s fury and Charlotte’s blithe defiance, something in Lucie was straining toward that sound.
She heard herself say, “Excuse me a moment,” and neither of them appeared to notice, so wholly were they locked into their standoff, and Lucie slipped out of the kitchen and down the back passage, quiet as anything, to the workshop door.
It stood ajar.
She stopped just short of it and looked through the gap.
Her father was bent over something on the workbench, and Kazrian was bent beside him, the two of them shoulder to shoulder, and they weretalking. Not the careful, formal exchange of a fae lord and a human craftsman, but the quick, overlapping, half-finished talk of two people who had found, unexpectedly, that they spoke the same language.
But that … that was not the lathe, Lucie realized. Their heads were inclined over something small—the little rosewood box Lucie’s father had been working on, she realized, the one with the sliding dovetailed lid he had fretted over. Were they finished with the lathe already? They must be.
Her father was turning the box in the light, gesturing with his free hand, and Kazrian was nodding, saying something back. She caught fragments.
“—came off the blade cleaner than I dared hope.”
Kazrian leaned in, pointing. “I see how tight the joint sits. No glue?”
“No, none at all, only the fit.”
“Remarkable. That is fine joinery indeed.”
Her father’s pleased deflection was too low to hear, and then he was saying something about “a great many ruined offcuts” and Kazrian was laughing in response. She heard him say the words “workshop” and “Shaded Lands” and then her father was pointing to something else across the room.
They moved to a different machine, and Kazrian crouched down, heedless of the sawdust. He reached in among the workings, and began, with those careful hands of his, to feel for something at the machine’s heart.
“Ah, yes, you are right,” he said, his expression brightening. “But it is so small. How in all the stars did you know?”
And Lucie’s father laughed and shrugged and said something about working with machinery for a lifetime and simplyknowingwhen a thing was not right.
“Just another minute,” Kazrian said, “and I’ll have this one fixed too.”
And Lucie’s chest ached.
It ached so swiftly and so completely that she had to press a hand flat against her breastbone to keep from making a sound. Becausethis. This, right here. This was the thing she was not allowed to have.
She stepped back from the door, pressed her back against the wall of the passage, out of sight, and closed her eyes.
In some other, kinder arrangement of the world, this would simply have been their life. Kazrian in her father’s workshop on an ordinary evening, the two of them bent over some mechanism or other, her father’s laugh and Kazrian’s questions and sawdust on both their sleeves.
And she would be in the kitchen, and they would come through when they were done, and they would all sit down together, and then she and Kazrian would walk home to their own home, some warm, quiet, impossible place that existed only in the part of her mind she was not supposed to visit.
Stop.
She breathed in. She breathed out. She felt the tears come, hot behind her closed eyelids, and she pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and stood very still until they subsided.
Stop it. Everything is going to be fine.
She straightened. She smoothed down her dress. She composed herexpression into something that did not look as though a small, essential part of her had just cracked quietly open and shown her everything she could not have.
Then she walked back to the kitchen.
By the time her father and Kazrian emerged, wiping their hands, the lathe pronounced “better than the day it was made”—her father’s words, delivered with a delight that put a fresh and complicated ache in Lucie’s chest—the table was laid and the stew was steaming in its pot, and Charlotte, who had clearly been waiting for precisely this moment, said, before anyone else could draw breath:
“Oh, but you must stay and dine with us, Lord Kazrian!”
