Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chaos. Warm, familiar, entirely benevolent chaos.
The only kind the Fields house had ever really produced.
In the middle of the parlor, a structure of cushions, wooden blocks, a footstool, and what Lucie was fairly certain was one of her mother’s good shawls, had risen and was in the slow process of collapsing.
“It is a castle,” four-year-old Belle announced. “And nobody is allowed in except the pegasus.”
“I am the pegasus,” Robbie, three, clarified, in case anyone had failed to grasp the hierarchy.
“You cannot be in the castle and be the pegasus,” said Belle. “The pegasus guards the castle. From outside.”
Robbie considered this constitutional crisis for a moment, then simply sat down in the doorway of the castle, thereby being both inside and outside at once, and looked at his sister expectantly.
“—and Ashby swears it’s the same rag stock he’s always sold me,” Theo was saying to Lucie’s father, “but I have my doubts. It takes the ink wrong. Feathers at the edges, every line, no matter how fine the nib—Robbie, not the shawl, that is Grandmother’s—you can see it the moment you write on it, it drinks the ink like blotting paper—”
“He’s cut it with something cheaper, then,” said Lucie’s father. “They all do it when they think you won’t notice. You want to hold a sheet to the light and look at the fibers. If it’s gone cloudy, he’s had you.”
Lucie sat curled in the corner of the sofa with a cup of tea going cold in her hands and watched all of it, a soft smile on her lips.
It was a particular sort of contentment, the kind that came with a fizzing undercurrent, because tomorrow was the launch, tomorrow was the day, and every so often the thought of it swept through her like cold water and hot sparks at once.
Lady Rivenna had sent her home in the middle of the afternoon. “Everything is finished,” she had said. “Go home and make sure you get a good night’s rest.”
So Lucie had left The Honeycomb and arrived home to find that her mother had decided they should mark the occasion.
Nothing elaborate, merely the family, gathered around the table, a good meal, and the implicit understanding that whatever happened tomorrow, Lucie had already done something worth celebrating.
“You are a success no matter what happens,” her mother had said when Lucie walked through the door, pressing a kiss to her forehead, and Lucie had very nearly cried.
Through the kitchen doorway she could hear her mother and Charlotte moving about, the clatter of a spoon against a pot, Charlotte’s voice rising and falling in some story that occasionally produced an exclamation from their mother.
The smell of it filled the whole house—something rich and slow-cooked, and beneath it the warm sweetness of bread.
She should have been thinking about tomorrow. Instead, in the small quiet spaces between the castle’s fortifications and Theo’s paper grievances, she found her mind drifting toward Georgiana.
She had been turning it over all day. Ever since she had come to understand what sort of man Henry Stratton truly was, she had been wondering whether she ought to say something.
Whether she owed it to Georgiana to tell her what had happened.
To ask, gently, whether she was well. Whether the bruise Lucie had glimpsed on her arm weeks ago, the one Georgiana had so easily explained away, had come from her brother.
Whether he lost his temper often. Whether—
But Georgiana was so terribly private. She would likely divulge nothing.
And even if she did—even if Lucie asked, and Georgiana answered honestly—what then?
What was Lucie to do about it? What happened behind closed doors in the Stratton household was their own affair.
Lucie had no standing to intervene, no authority to act, no—
A knock at the front door.
Lucie’s head came up. She exchanged glances with her father and Theo, both of whom looked mildly puzzled. Clearly they were not expecting anyone either.
“Oh!” came Charlotte’s voice from the kitchen, bright and immediate. “I shall get it!”
Lucie uncurled herself from the sofa and rose, because Robbie had begun trying to relocate a cushion that formed a wall of the castle and the entire side was about to come down on his sister. “Robbie, wait—not that one. Look, if you take that one then Belle’s—Here, let me—”
She heard the front door open and Charlotte’s warm greeting. “Oh! Good evening!”
“Robbie, sweetheart.” Lucie stretched across the structure. “There is another perfectly excellent cushion right here. See—”
And then she froze. That voice. That voice. Low, courteous, unmistakable, apologizing for the intrusion, asking whether Charlotte had indeed said this specific hour, and—
Lucie’s foot caught the edge of the footstool.
She went down in an ungainly tangle of skirts and cushions and startled three-year-old, one hand shooting out to catch herself against the edge of the low table where the teetering tower of unused blocks—too small, Belle had declared, before stacking them neatly on the table and pronouncing them a watchtower for the castle’s pixie sentinels—slid sideways and clattered down over her hand and wrist in a small wooden avalanche.
The children shrieked with delight, under the impression this was a new and superior version of the game.
“Not at all, not at all,” Charlotte was saying. “Do come in, Lord Kazrian, let me take your coat—”
No! Lucie scrambled upright, heart slamming, and shot a wild, panicked look toward Theo—who mouthed Lord Kazrian? in confusion—and toward her father, who had risen halfway out of his seat with an expression of dawning horror that she was certain mirrored her own. No no no no—
From the front passage came the small domestic sounds of a coat being accepted, of Charlotte saying something about the weather having turned, of a guest being made welcome in their home—
And then Charlotte swept into the living area, beaming as though she were presenting the family with a grand gift, and behind her, ducking his head slightly beneath the low beam of the doorway because he was too tall for it, stepping into the small, warm, cluttered heart of the Fields house, came Kazrian Rowanwood.
Lucie forgot how to breathe.
He was here. He was in her house. He was standing on the worn rug in the parlor she had known her entire life, beside the collapsed cushion-block castle, in his fine boots that probably cost more than the whole room’s contents together, and the only thing he was looking at was her.
And whatever he had been about to say seemed to leave him entirely, because for a moment he simply stood there holding her gaze. Then a smile broke across his face, slow, warm, and more than a little apologetic.
“Luce—Miss Fields.” A small, polite bow. “Good evening. I—your sister—”
And Belle and Robbie chose that precise moment to launch themselves at Lucie’s legs with the combined force of their small bodies—which was, it turned out, rather considerable when one was not braced for it.
Lucie pitched backward onto the sofa with a gasp and a graceless thud, the children tumbling after her in a heap of shrieking delight.
And from somewhere to the side she heard Theo saying, “Belle—Robbie—no, we do not tackle people—” and she could see Kazrian take a step forward, one hand reaching out automatically, and she scrambled upright before he could offer assistance, brushing her skirts down and tucking her hair behind her ear and saying, “I am perfectly fine, thank you, quite all right, absolutely—” while her face burned so thoroughly she was surprised the whole room did not catch light.
Stars above, she was going to kill Charlotte for this.
“Everyone,” Charlotte announced over the sounds of Theo quietly muttering stern instructions to his children about behaving, “you remember Lord Kazrian, of course. I ran into him earlier today, quite by chance, outside the tea house, and I happened to mention Father’s lathe.
The belt enchantment, or the—whatever it is that keeps …
not working. It has lumyrite at its heart, does it not, Father?
And I said to myself, why, Lord Kazrian could put that right in a moment, could he not, being so very clever with all of that.
And he was ever so gracious about it, so here he is! ”
Silence. Well, it was not quite silence, Lucie reflected, because Belle was rebuilding the castle, so there was the quiet sound of the larger wooden blocks being stacked, and Robbie had begun hiccuping.
But that was somehow worse. Lucie was quite certain that in no other home, in the entirety of his life, had Lord Kazrian Rowanwood—son of one of the most distinguished fae families in the Isles, brother-in-law to the prince himself—ever been greeted in this way.
Lucie’s father recovered first, because he was a fundamentally kind man who could not leave a guest standing in awkwardness even when the guest was a fae lord who had materialized in his home on the strength of his daughter’s meddling.
“Lord Rowanwood,” he said, and inclined his head.
“This is—that is, you are most welcome. Though I would not have dreamed of troubling you with something so trifling as a drive belt.”
“It is no trouble at all, truly,” Kazrian said.
“Though I confess I feel I have rather ambushed your evening.” He glanced around—at the collapsed castle, at the children, at the general state of the room—and there was something apologetic in it.
“Perhaps this is a poor moment. I would be glad to return another—”
“Oh, not at all!” Charlotte cut in before anyone else could speak. “No, no, you are quite welcome now, we are only just—we are ages from dinner yet, aren’t we, and Father does so hate to be without his, ah … belt. Lathe belt. Do stay.”
And that was when Lucie’s mother came through from the kitchen.