Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
“Who is Henry Stratton,” Kazrian said, “and what is honey light?”
Beside him, Rosavyn stopped walking and turned, gravel crunching beneath her boots. “I beg your pardon?” she said just as one of Elderbloom Park’s mischievous pixies alighted on her shoulder and tugged her earlobe. She swatted it away.
“Henry Stratton. He was at The Honeycomb yesterday. And honey light. He mentioned it as though it were something I ought to know, and I find that I do not.”
Rosavyn blinked at him. Around them, the morning air was cool and carried the green, rain-washed scent of damp grass.
Elderbloom Park before the Season was a different place from the one Kazrian remembered—the wide gravel paths nearly empty, the great elderfae tree presiding over a quiet expanse of grass.
In a few weeks the whole of fae society would be here every morning, promenading and assessing and pretending to do neither, and a man could not walk ten paces without being obliged to bow to someone.
For now there was only the rustle of leaves and the distant bubble of enchanted water and his sister, regarding him as though he had asked her to explain the sun.
“Has Grandmother told you nothing?” Rosavyn asked.
“Grandmother tells me a great many things. The state of the ovens. The exact temperature at which she would like her study maintained. The names of every eligible young lady whose family will be arriving for the Season, which I have asked her repeatedly—”
“Kazrian,” Rosavyn interrupted. “Where do you think the name The Honeycomb came from?”
Kazrian hesitated. He had not, in fact, thought about this particularly hard. He had assumed it was decorative. A name. Confections and honey, a neat enough association. It had not occurred to him that it might refer to something specific.
“Oh, brother dear.” Rosavyn was trying not to laugh. “It is literally named for Lucie’s honey light.”
He had been working in that kitchen for days. He had pressed his hands to its walls and catalogued every quirk the building possessed, yet he had entirely missed this apparently significant thing the place was named for.
Rosavyn was watching his face, and whatever she saw there made her laugh outright. “Oh, this is wonderful. You truly don’t know.”
“I have been somewhat occupied with the structural integrity of the building.”
“Of course you have.” She patted his arm.
“Well?” Kazrian pressed. “What is this honey light?”
“It is Lucie’s signature,” Rosavyn said as they began walking again.
She had a ribbon in her hands, a loose length of blue satin, and was winding it idly around her gloved fingers as they went.
“A magical component she infuses into her confections. She discovered it some years ago, when she was still at The Charmed Leaf. It was soon after you left, I believe. I remember her going on about it for weeks. There is a great glass honey jar that sits on the counter, and when the morning sun comes through the window, it falls through the honey and turns gold. She called it honey light, and then she got it into her head that she might do something with it. Capture it, somehow. Use it.” Rosavyn shrugged, a graceful lift of one shoulder.
“And she did. Grandmother helped her research similar concepts, and Lucie experimented until she figured it out.”
Experimented. Figured it out. After he had left.
He turned this over in his mind, and the ache it left behind was an odd, illogical thing.
A sense of loss for something that had never been his to lose.
But he could picture it so clearly: Lucie standing at the counter with the light pouring through the honey jar, turning that light over in her mind the way he turned a broken mechanism over in his hands and thinking, What if?
It was exactly the sort of problem that would have fascinated him. The sort of thing he would have wanted to help her with, to sit beside her and puzzle through, attempt after failed attempt, until it finally worked. But he had been a realm away and known nothing of it.
“I do not know the exact magic involved,” Rosavyn continued. “I am not certain anyone does but Lucie.”
Kazrian wanted to know. He wanted to understand. Every detail, every step. Not only because understanding things was the way he processed the world, but because this experiment, this discovery, was Lucie’s. And he had always wanted to understand every part of her.
“What does it do?” he asked.
“That is the fascinating part.” Rosavyn’s face brightened.
“She weaves the honey light into her confections, and it gives them … qualities. Feelings. You might eat something and feel the warmth of a happy memory, or the comfort of arriving home after a long time away. Another might give you a quiet sort of courage. It is really quite remarkable. Have you not tasted anything of hers since you returned?”
He had not. The very notion felt … presumptuous.
An intimacy he had not earned back. They were still navigating the careful choreography of courtesy and averted gazes, still learning where the edges were.
He could not simply wander over and ask to taste something she had spent hours of careful work on.
“And did you not notice the bottles?” Rosavyn asked. “They are lined up on one of the shelves, all different shades of gold.”
The bottles. Yes, he had noticed the golden bottles, but he had filed them away without a second thought, assuming them to be one more enchanted ingredient among many that fell outside his particular expertise.
And now it seemed as though it was not simply an ingredient he had overlooked but rather that he had failed to notice something about Lucie.
Something fundamental to who she had become in the three years he had been gone.
And he had always noticed everything about her.
To have missed this felt profoundly, uncomfortably wrong.
Because you did not WANT to know anything about her, he reminded himself.
“And Henry Stratton,” he said, because the other question was still pressing.
He had walked into the kitchen the previous afternoon and found Henry and Lucie standing together, and the feeling that had lanced through him had been so immediate and so searingly specific that he had been forced to acknowledge something.
The something he had been pretending not to notice since the moment he’d collided with her in The Honeycomb: he still felt something for her.
A small something. A tiny, insignificant something.
But something, nevertheless.
“Ah, yes. The Strattons.” Rosavyn returned to winding the ribbon between her fingers as they walked.
“Georgiana Stratton manages the front of the shop. A very capable young woman. Grandmother speaks highly of her. Henry is her brother. He has done rather well for himself from what I understand. Commercial property, investments, that sort of thing.”
“And he visits The Honeycomb frequently.”
“He visits Georgiana, yes. Though from what I have observed, his attention tends to wander rather reliably toward the kitchen.” Rosavyn glanced sidelong at Kazrian. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I—I met the man yesterday. He was at The Honeycomb in the afternoon. I was merely … wondering whether there might be some manner of … understanding between himself and Lucie.” He chose his words with the same care he might use when handling something fragile and unfamiliar. “They seemed … well acquainted.”
“I have heard of no formal courtship. But the man does pay rather a great deal of attention to her.” A beat. “Whether Lucie returns it in equal measure, I could not say.”
Kazrian nodded and said nothing.
Our Lucie. That was what Henry Stratton had said. Our Lucie, as though she belonged to him and his sister, to the Stratton family.
Kazrian looked out at the still surface of Mirror Lake and reminded himself that he had no claim on Lucie. She was not—and never had been—his. If she had found someone who made her happy, he should wish her well.
He did not feel like wishing anyone well.
A breeze stirred the new leaves along the path. Rosavyn continued playing with the ribbon, wrapping it around and between her fingers, loosening it, then looping it again in patterns that appeared to serve no purpose beyond occupying her hands.
“Mother would scold you for that, you know,” Kazrian said.
Rosavyn did not look up. “I am a grown spinster of three-and-twenty. Mother cannot scold me over anything.” She unwound the ribbon and let it trail through the air behind her. “Besides, she is not here, the park is nearly empty, and I shall fidget if I wish.”
The breeze gusted, and the ribbon slipped free. It caught the air in a flash of blue, spinning away. They both turned—
Just as a hand closed around the ribbon.
The hand belonged to a gentleman Kazrian did not recognize, though this was hardly remarkable, given the length of time he had been away from Bloomhaven.
The man was perhaps a few years older than the two of them, with an open, pleasant face and brown hair the wind had already gotten the better of.
He stood holding the ribbon and looking faintly surprised at his own reflexes.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, and collected himself into a bow. “I saw the ribbon and my hand rather acted of its own accord. I hope I have not overstepped.”
“Not at all,” Rosavyn said warmly. “You have rescued my ribbon from a truly undignified fate. I am in your debt, sir.”
He smiled and held the ribbon out to her.
“I ought to introduce myself, since I have now handled your property without invitation. Lord Tobias Grayfield.” He gave a small, self-deprecating laugh.
“I am new to Bloomhaven, I confess. My family has not previously had the means for travel here, but circumstances have improved of late, and I thought I ought to see what the Bloom Season fuss was all about.”