Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
After having spent the entire afternoon trying to coax the upstairs storeroom door to open, Kazrian had given up. For now, at least.
He could not fathom what had gone wrong between yesterday and today.
He had spent all of the previous day on it, hands pressed to the door, the lock, the handle, the wall around the door, eyes closed and magic reaching out to sense every residual snarl of enchantment that had no business being there.
It was slow work, since the lumyrite lattice did not extend up here, which meant the magic he’d manifested—the magic that made identifying any lumyrite-related fault as simple as reading a schematic—was of no use.
Instead, he had been forced to rely on the older, harder skills he’d learned over the years for sensing and diagnosing misaligned magic.
And there had been a great deal of it to feel for—tangled enchantments layered one atop another, as though someone, or several someones, had set about fixing this door over the years with every variety of magic at their disposal and only made it worse with each attempt.
But eventually he had untangled it all. The lock had clicked open, a faint golden light tracing the edges of the door, and it had swung wide. It had been most satisfying.
Lock: freed.
Door: functional.
The job: complete.
He had checked it multiple times. Opened and closed the door, walked in and out of the room, even gone downstairs, made himself a cup of tea, drunk the tea, and returned to find the door still open.
But now some unknown thing had gone wrong and the wretched door was refusing to open again. A single thread of tangled magic seemed to be holding it very tightly shut—one thread, where yesterday there had been dozens—and he could not for the life of him work out how to loosen it.
After a full afternoon of fighting with it for the second time, he had decided it was time to try fixing a different problem. With a grumble and another frustrated tug of his hair, he headed for the staircase.
Which, it turned out, produced an extra step at the exact moment his foot descended, jolting him upward and off balance. He caught himself against the wall and avoided what might have otherwise been a spectacular descent. He stood gripping the railing, eyes closed, and breathed through his nose.
The extra step. Which he had also fixed.
Thank you, building. Truly.
He straightened, kept one hand on the rail, and descended the remaining stairs with extra care. The staircase, thankfully, allowed him the dignity of reaching the kitchen floor intact.
The kitchen was quiet. The early evening light came through the side windows in long amber bands, the last reach of the sun before it dropped behind the buildings across the lane.
His grandmother had departed late in the afternoon—after informing the building at large that she found its behavior tiresome—and Lucie had left not long after. Which meant Kazrian was now alone here.
A hiss came from the direction of the hearth.
Well. Not entirely alone.
Balthazar lay on his cushion beside the hearth, and as Kazrian stepped into the room the cat lifted his head and hissed. Then, the duty discharged, he lowered his head again.
“Yes,” Kazrian said. “Good evening to you as well.”
It was, he had begun to notice, a less committed hiss than it had been. More habit than conviction. At this rate, by the time the Bloom Season arrived, Balthazar might manage nothing more threatening than a disapproving exhalation.
Goodness, would he still be here when the Season began? He had assumed not, but now it was starting to look like it.
“I know,” Kazrian said with a sigh as he moved around the worktable toward the other side of the kitchen.
“You were hoping I would be gone by now. I assure you, so was I.” He pressed one hand to the wall beside the ovens.
Those, and the cooling cabinets, were the priority.
Without them, Lucie could not work properly.
“I have no wish to make Miss Fields uncomfortable any longer than necessary, but this building …” He glanced at the ceiling as his fingers flexed against the stone wall. “This building is not cooperating.”
Balthazar blinked once. Slowly. Conveying nothing beyond profound indifference.
With one hand still pressed to the wall, his magic slowly seeping into the stones, Kazrian looked around. His eyes traced the shelves, the counters, the worktable, noting the shimmer where the lumyrite threads ran close to the surface.
“I see Evryn has not been yet,” he added when his eyes fell on a section on one side of the hearth.
“In all fairness, I did only ask yesterday, and he is wholly occupied with making certain Dreamland is ready to reopen next week.” He glanced at Balthazar.
“Or perhaps the messenger pixie I sent was not the most reliable. I shall follow up.”
Balthazar, seemingly done with this conversation, closed both eyes.
After confirming that every thread of the lumyrite running behind the ovens hummed exactly as it ought to, Kazrian crouched and pressed his palm to the floor beside the oven’s base. On his cushion, Balthazar lifted his head.
“I am not going beneath them again,” Kazrian said. “You have my word.”
Balthazar’s ears remained skeptically angled, but he did not hiss.
The enchantment Kazrian had removed—the old floor-polishing magic that had been tangling with the lattice—was still gone. It had not somehow reassembled itself in the days since, which was a relief, because at this point Kazrian would not have been entirely surprised if it had.
Good.
He rose and crossed to the cooling cabinets, pressing his hand to the walls there, listening to the magic flowing through it. The enchantment here was clean as well.
He exhaled and stepped back. So the essential things—the instruments upon which Lucie’s work depended—remained sound. She could continue with her work, at least, while Kazrian contended with the building’s more theatrical complaints.
Which brought him to the shelf.
The one that had, until recently, confined its objections to items of a blue nature, and which had now apparently decided it did not like yellow.
As far as Kazrian had been able to determine, the shelf’s hostility was the residual side effect of an old dust-repelling enchantment.
Someone, at some point in the building’s long history, had laid a charm intended to keep the shelves clean, and when the charm had degraded, it had left behind a faint, purposeless impulse to reject, which it had then decided to direct at all things blue.
Kazrian had been certain he’d removed it entirely.
He placed his hand against the wall beside the shelf, fingers spread, and let his magic seep slowly into the stone. Then he waited, patient and still, as he listened to the hum of the lattice moving through the walls.
His gaze drifted, almost of its own accord, to the worktable.
Lucie’s recipe book was there, still open to the page with the sketch they had worked on earlier, the framework drawn in two hands—his precise lines and her looser, more expressive ones layered over and between each other. Something squeezed in his chest at the sight of it.
His attention had been torn the entire time between the genuine pleasure of the work and the devastating nearness of her.
The way she leaned over the sketch with her lower lip caught between her teeth when she was concentrating.
The brush of her fingers whenever she took the pencil from him.
The faint scent of something warm and sweet that clung to her always.
He could have remained all day at that table with her.
“She is remarkable, is she not,” he said quietly. His hand remained on the wall, his magic still reaching through the stone. Balthazar did not open his eyes, but one ear rotated in Kazrian’s direction. “But you already know that,” Kazrian added with a small smile.
The kitchen was very quiet. The amber light had deepened to copper, and in the stillness Kazrian could hear the faint, rhythmic tick of his father’s watch in his waistcoat pocket.
“Would you dislike me even more, Balthazar,” he said, “if you knew that I sometimes find myself wishing I could stay?” He was quiet for a moment, his fingers pressed to the stone, his magic moving slowly through the wall.
“I know I should not. I know she does not want me near. And yet I find myself caught up in … in her. In simply being near her. I find myself wishing that my work here would not come to an end.” He exhaled.
“You needn’t worry, though. I would never intentionally prolong the work simply for the sake of feelings that are not returned.
I would not do anything that would harm the launch or the operation of this place.
Whatever is going wrong now is not my doing, and I shall endeavor to fix it as swiftly as possible. ”
A thread pulsed beneath Kazrian’s hand.
He went still. There—in the lattice running through the wall beside the shelf. A single thread of lumyrite, pulsing brighter than the others. It was not damaged, exactly. More … agitated.
He frowned. The shelf’s original misbehavior had been unrelated to the lumyrite lattice, so this appeared to be a new problem. Had he perhaps inadvertently caused this? In smoothing one problem, had he introduced a new one elsewhere?
He closed his eyes and let out a long, slow breath through his nose.
Well. At least he knew what it was now. And unlike the storeroom door, which had defied him with a stubbornness that bordered on the personal, this was a problem that should, in theory, be simple to fix. All he needed to do was smooth out the irregularity in that particular thread of lumyrite.
He settled his hand more firmly against the wall and began. As he worked, his eyes drifted to the worktable again, and this time the memory that surfaced was less pleasant.
Henry Stratton, arriving in the doorway.