Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
The guests were nearly all assembled, the lumyrite ring was on her hand, ready to be used, and her body had begun once more to do the high, fast, shallow breathing that came from somewhere just beneath her collarbone and would not be reasoned with.
Lucie stood just inside the doorway of The Honeycomb kitchen, half hidden by the frame, peering out at the garden.
Balthazar sat at her feet, and when Lucie glanced down, she found him surveying the scene with that slow eyes-half-closed blink of his, as though the entire affair were so far beneath him that he could not even bother remaining awake for it.
Somehow, this made her feel a fraction less anxious.
She looked out again at the tables beneath the trees.
The fae ladies were beautiful in their gowns of pale silk with flowers trailing from the hems—tiny rosebuds that had not yet decided whether to open, sprigs of jasmine, and thread that shimmered faintly with its own enchantment.
The fae lords were no less striking, immaculately turned out in their fitted coats.
Every so often a jewel caught the dappled afternoon light—at a throat, at a wrist, in the head of a cravat pin—and sent it scattering.
And moving among them, gracious and glittering and entirely in her element, was Lady Rivenna.
She stood near the entrance Iris had constructed—a graceful arch of woven branches and trailing honeysuckle—receiving each guest as they arrived with a word, a nod, an inclination of her silver head.
And then, with the smooth efficiency of one who had run Bloomhaven’s most successful tea house for decades, she handed each of them off to Rosavyn.
Rosavyn, who was magnificent.
Lucie watched her sweep a pair of elderly fae matrons toward their table, one gloved hand resting lightly at an elbow, her whole face alight with the particular warmth that made strangers into confidants inside of a minute.
She was saying something, and both matrons laughed, one of them actually pressing a hand to her chest. She was just a touch too forward, was Rosavyn.
Just a fraction past what propriety strictly allowed, speaking too freely, treating a person as though they had been friends since childhood.
And Lucie could see they adored her for it.
And yet not one of them—not a single laughing matron among them—would have permitted a son of theirs to marry her.
Because she had not manifested. Because all that warmth, all that wit, all that effortless grace that could charm a garden full of people amounted to precisely nothing in the eyes of a society that measured a woman’s worth by whether or not magic had seen fit to claim her.
Rather like a society that measured a woman’s worth by whether she possessed any magic at all. And if she did not, if she was merely human, then it did not matter how much a fae lord might love her.
But Lucie had made her peace with that, and now was not the moment to dwell on it.
This is it, she thought. It is finally happening.
The thing she had been working toward since before the Season had even begun.
Since the day Lady Rivenna had first spoken of leaving The Charmed Leaf and building something new, and asked Lucie to come with her.
Every early morning, every scorched attempt, every late afternoon with her hands sticky and her back aching and her mind churning through lists that never ended—all of it had been pointed here.
She could do this. She could.
And once today was done, life at The Honeycomb would settle into its proper rhythm at last. She could see it already, laid out before her.
The warm honey light spilling gold across the counters each morning, the pixies at their work, no Henry Stratton lingering about, and Rosavyn’s bright presence just one room over.
A friend. A real friend, right here in The Honeycomb with her.
And the quiet joy of making the things she loved, day after day after day.
It would be a good life. It would be enough. Even without … him.
Her gaze moved on across the tables, seeking out the faces she knew. She recognized many of them from her years at The Charmed Leaf, the regular patrons and the occasional ones, the fine ladies whose orders she had filled and whose particular preferences she had learned by heart.
Then she paused. Among the silks and the jewels and the pointed ears, there were human families seated at several of the tables.
She recognized them, too—faces she knew from The Charmed Leaf, where Iris had worked so steadily to make humans welcome alongside fae.
But the last time Lucie had seen Lady Rivenna’s guest list for today, it had included only the finest fae families of Bloomhaven. She must have amended it since.
She was still looking.
Still moving from face to face. Still pretending that she was merely taking stock of the guests, and not searching, quietly and helplessly, for one particular dark head among them.
For him.
Then her eyes landed on a table near the edge of the garden, and every other thought went clean out of her head.
Her parents. And Charlotte.
They were here. Her mother sat very straight in a chair that was finer than any they owned, in her best dress, her hands folded in her lap.
Her father beside her, looking across the gathering at Kazrian’s silver wood framework with frank, curious interest. And Charlotte, twisting round in her seat to whisper something, her whole face bright with delight.
Lucie had not known they were coming. No one had told her they were coming.
She stood there with her hand pressed to the doorframe and could not for the life of her decide how she felt about it.
Whether it steadied her to have them here, the people who loved her regardless of enchanted confections and fine fae ladies, or whether it doubled the weight of everything, because now there were more people here who meant something to her that she might fall on her face in front of.
And then—
Oh, stars.
What?
No!
A ripple of turning of heads went through the garden, and beneath the flowering archway, in a gown the color of water silvered by moonlight, swept the High Lady herself.
Lucie’s grip on the doorframe tightened.
“I cannot do this,” she whispered to Balthazar.
“I cannot. Look at them, Balthazar. Look at her. The High Lady. And I am—I am nobody. I am a human girl who makes sweets. I have no magic of my own, no name, no—nothing. I am going to walk out there in front of the High Lady herself, and something will go wrong, and I will ruin this place before it has even properly begun, and—”
“You are extraordinary.”
The voice came from somewhere behind her, across the kitchen. Quiet, low, and so certain that it stopped the breath in her throat.
“It does not matter in the least what happens today,” Kazrian said. “You always will be.”
Lucie closed her eyes for a moment. Drew one breath, slow and deliberate, in through her nose and out again. Then she turned around to face him.
He stood on the other side of the worktable, and he was looking at her the way he always did—as though she were the only thing in the room worth seeing.
“I thought you would be seated outside by now,” Lucie said. “With the rest of the Rowanwoods.”
“You are to remain here in the kitchen,” he said, moving around the worktable and coming toward her, “until my grandmother has welcomed everyone and calls you out. Is that not so?”
“It is.”
“Then I shall wait here as well.” He said it simply, as though it were the most obvious arrangement in the world. “With you.”
He stopped in front of her, not too close—he was still so careful about that—and slowly, carefully reached out and brushed the back of her hand with his fingers.
Her breath caught.
Then his fingers slid between hers, and closed, and he squeezed her hand gently.
Reassuringly. His gaze held hers all the while, steady and warm and impossibly certain.
And if she had been worried, a moment ago, about the strange high breathing and her body’s refusal to draw air properly—that was nothing.
That was nothing at all, compared to what was happening now in the center of her chest, where her heart seemed to have decided it would beat entirely out of rhythm and see how she liked it.
“Remember what we spoke of,” he said quietly. “What we planned together. If any step should go wrong—the spun sugar, the light, the release—you already know what you may move to instead. We accounted for all of it. There is no mistake you can make that we have not already made a way through.”
She looked at their joined hands. At his, so much larger than hers, folded around it with such care.
Outside, from somewhere beyond the kitchen wall, came the steady, unhurried sound of Lady Rivenna’s tread upon the paving stones, drawing nearer, coming round toward the back door.
They stepped apart. Not quickly, with the guilty haste of two people caught, but with a kind of quiet reluctance.
The door opened, and Lady Rivenna walked in. “Lucie. Everything is very nearly ready.”
“Lady Rivenna—” Lucie could not help herself. “The High Lady. Did you know she was coming?”
“Ah.” Lady Rivenna folded her gloved hands before her. “Yes. I did rather more than know it, in fact. I invited her.”
“You—”
“I did not tell you,” Lady Rivenna went on smoothly, “because I had no wish to heap a further weight upon you when you were already carrying a considerable one. And then Her Grace sent word that she would be unable to attend, so there seemed no earthly point in mentioning it, troubling you over a guest who would not come.” She glanced back toward the garden.
“But it appears she has changed her mind.”
Lucie stared at her.