Chapter 6 #3
Rosavyn’s smile did not falter, but something behind it shifted.
“You know as well as anyone at this table that a title gained through marriage carries far less weight than one earned through manifestation. I should sooner remain Miss Rowanwood than wear a title all of Bloomhaven knows was conferred upon me by a wedding ring rather than by magic. The former is at least honest.”
“A good marriage would elevate your standing nonetheless. That is simply a fact of the world we inhabit.”
“And a good marriage,” Rosavyn said, with the slow, careful enunciation one might employ when explaining something to a young child rather than to the most formidable woman in Bloomhaven, “will not present itself without my having manifested. You see the difficulty. It is rather circular.”
A clatter from across the table drew every eye. Evryn had knocked something to the floor—his knife, it appeared—and was now peering beneath his chair with an expression of tremendous interest.
“Well,” he announced, straightening. “I have at last discovered something Pinklet will not eat.” He held up a limp spear of asparagus between thumb and forefinger.
Rosavyn seized upon the diversion with visible relief. “I cannot blame him in the slightest. I have long maintained that asparagus is utterly vile.” She looked across the table at Mariselle, and at precisely the same moment, both of them said, “Asparagus mousse,” and dissolved into laughter.
At the end of the table, Iris leaned toward Lady Rivenna. “I have been meaning to ask your opinion, actually. I have been considering a new seasonal blend for the first week of the Opening, and I should so value your thoughts on the composition.”
Lady Rivenna’s attention turned at once, and Kazrian smiled to himself, recognizing the quiet, coordinated campaign that had just drawn the conversation away from Rosavyn and marriage and manifestation.
His gaze traveled along the table, and he was struck by how near to perfect the evening was.
It was missing only two people: Aurelise and Ryden.
He loved the rest of his family, of course, this loud, teasing, infuriating table of them, and he was truly glad to be back among them in a way that had taken him rather by surprise.
But the gathering felt incomplete without the person who knew him best in all the world, and the person who had become as close to him as a brother.
It remained an unlikely thing—more proof that people did not make sense—the friendship Kazrian had formed with the prince over the past three years.
The two of them could hardly have been more differently made.
Ryden was all charm and impulse where Kazrian was patience and pattern and the long, slow turning over of a problem.
And yet somehow, a whole realm away in a foreign land of silver forests and strange pastel skies, with no one watching and nothing to perform, Kazrian and Ryden had found between them a great deal more to bond over than anyone would have guessed—pegasi, dragons, the simple joy of crafting something with one’s own hands, and the fact that each had recognized in the other someone who was, in his own particular way, a little apart from the world he had been born into.
“Kazrian,” Rosavyn said from beside him, interrupting his thoughts, “you have not yet told us what you discovered at The Honeycomb today.”
Kazrian blinked. A pair of startled hazel eyes surfaced in his mind, and the way they had lit up when she began explaining the lumyrite threaded through almost everything in her kitchen, and the moment she had given him a tentative smile, and the quiet, devastating realization that he still wanted to kiss her, even after all this—
“Misfiring magic,” he said abruptly.
“Well, yes.” Rosavyn laughed. “We are all aware of that. Did you discover the source of all the various problems? To be perfectly honest, I would not have been surprised if you’d arrived at dinner this evening and announced you’d fixed the entire place already.”
Kazrian gave an awkward laugh. “Ah, no. I believe it may require slightly more work than that.” He reached for his wine.
“I have determined the source of some of the difficulties, but did not have time to repair much today. I suspect it shall not take terribly long. A week, perhaps. Possibly a little more.”
And then he would return to the Shaded Lands.
He kept this thought to himself, for he had no wish to hear his grandmother take the opening and attempt, once again, to convince him to stay and find a wife, or to remind him that she and Kazrian’s mother had been so delighted that he would be here this year for the Rowanwood Masquerade.
But the thought sat there all the same, quiet and final. A week. Perhaps a little more. Then he would leave again, and the young woman with those hazel eyes and those soft lips and the small, private smile she reserved only for him—
No. Not for him. The smile was part of the many things he had misread. He had arrived at this conclusion during his first months in the Shaded Lands, turning the evidence over and over in his mind until the verdict held, and he had to remind himself of it now.
He would leave Bloomhaven behind, and the young woman who had never actually felt anything for him would once again be but a memory.