Chapter 9 #2
Kazrian registered this with interest. Not many in society would volunteer such a thing.
Families who had risen in standing tended to treat their former circumstances the way one treated an inconvenient relation—acknowledged when necessary, never introduced willingly.
Grayfield had offered the information as freely as if he were remarking on the weather.
“Well,” Rosavyn said, accepting the ribbon, “you have arrived before the Season, which means you have the luxury of seeing the park without the entire population of Bloomhaven parading through it.”
“Is that what happens?”
“Oh, quite. It becomes a procession. Everyone in their very finest, walking at a pace deliberately calculated to suggest they have nowhere particular to be, while silently cataloguing everything about everyone else.”
Grayfield’s grin widened. “That sounds utterly exhausting.”
“It is one of the great pleasures of fae society,” Rosavyn said dryly. “You will adore it.”
Our Lucie. Was that why she had been so reluctant to share details about Henry when she’d accidentally mentioned his name?
Was there a courtship she did not want Kazrian to know about?
Perhaps she was sparing him, the way one spares a person whose feelings are too plainly written to pretend one cannot read them.
Which meant he had not hidden those feelings—tiny, insignificant feelings, he reminded himself—nearly as well as he had thought.
He pressed the mortifying thought down and tried to attend to the conversation happening in front of him.
Grayfield was asking about the elderfae tree—which was visible from where they stood, its massive branches reaching above every other tree in the park—and Rosavyn was explaining its significance.
They were, he noted, getting along rather well for two people who had known each other for less than three minutes.
There was a rhythm to their exchange, an easy back and forth, the kind that happened when two people simply fit.
He remembered that rhythm. He had once had it with Lucie.
That effortless current of conversation where neither of them had to think about what to say next, where the words simply came and landed and sparked the next ones.
Before he had said too much and done too much and turned the easiest thing in his life into the most fraught.
They parted from Grayfield not long after. He bowed, said it had been a genuine pleasure, and expressed a hope that he might encounter them again once the Season commenced. He directed this last remark primarily at Rosavyn, who smiled and said she rather thought he might.
Then she laughed—a bright, startled sound, as though she had only just realized—and said, “Oh, goodness, I have been dreadfully rude. I never introduced myself. Rosavyn Rowanwood.” She gestured in Kazrian’s general direction.
“And this is my brother, Kazrian.” An afterthought, if ever there was one.
Grayfield took it with good humor and bowed to each of them before they parted ways.
They were some distance down the path before Kazrian spoke.
“Well. He seemed extremely taken with you.”
Rosavyn’s head turned. “Oh. Do you think so?”
“Indeed. I do not think he looked at anything else for the duration of that conversation.”
A beat of silence. Something flickered across her face—surprise, then a quick, bright pleasure she did not quite manage to suppress—before she laughed and shook her head.
“That is very flattering, Kazrian, but I assure you, his interest will vanish the moment he discovers I am the ‘unmanifested Rowanwood daughter.’”
Kazrian said nothing. There was nothing he could say that she would believe.
Aurelise had told him of the way it happened every Season.
The shift in a young man’s expression when he learned that Rosavyn Rowanwood, for all her name and wit and warmth, had no magical manifestation.
As though everything else about her ceased to matter in the face of that single absence.
Rosavyn wound the ribbon loosely around her fingers again and seemed to gather herself. When she spoke, her voice was lighter, and the hurt had been tidied away behind the bright, careless ease she wore like armor.
“No, no, dear brother. There is no hope of a match for me. It is a match for you we are securing this Season.” She nudged him with her elbow, her smile sharpening. “Grandmother and Mother have made this abundantly clear, and I, for one, intend to enjoy every excruciating moment of it.”
Kazrian suppressed a groan and decided not to tell her he intended to be gone before the Season began. “Thank you for that, Rosy Posy.”
A bark of laughter escaped her. “Do not start that again! Shall I call you Kazzy Wazzy?”
He snorted before he could stop himself. “Now that is truly terrible.”
“It is what you deserve,” she declared, and lunged for him with the ribbon stretched between both hands as though she intended to throttle him with it.
He dodged—barely—and she pursued him several steps along the path before they were both laughing too hard to continue, stumbling along the gravel like children, the sound of it carrying across the near-empty park and startling a pair of pixies from the branches overhead.
They walked on, still laughing, and the morning was bright, and for a little while the weight of all the things they could not fix—his heart, her magic, the Season bearing down on them both—felt light enough to carry.