Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
For a moment Lucie could only stare, her mind refusing the plain evidence of her own eyes, turning it over and over and finding no place to set it down.
What was he doing here? He had not been invited.
Of course he had not. And after saying goodbye to Georgiana this morning, Lucie had believed she would never see Henry Stratton at The Honeycomb again.
But even as the shock of it was still reverberating through her, the cold understanding was already assembling itself behind it, because she knew him. She knew how this must have happened.
He would have arrived at the edge, slipping in during the bustle and movement of the guests walking around while they admired the various confections and sampled and asked questions.
He would have drifted at the margins and when he brushed an elbow he would have begged pardon with that warm, unhurried charm of his—Forgive me, I did not see you there, but tell me, is that one of the dark chocolate and mint caramels?
I confess I have heard the most extraordinary things.
What did you make of the florentines?—and no one would have questioned it.
Why would they? He was human, yes, but so was Lucie’s own family, somewhere among these very tables.
And Henry had a particular gift for behaving as though he belonged somewhere, and so you believed that he did.
And so here he stood, and no one was any the wiser.
Lucie watched with mounting dread as Henry, scratches entirely absent from his face, leaned in.
A small movement, just a shift of his weight, a dip of his head, the particular inclination of a man lowering his voice to say a thing not meant to be said too loudly.
And Lord Featherlock, who had been smiling, was no longer smiling.
A line had appeared between his brows. He drew back a fraction, the way one draws back from a bad smell, and said something, and Henry answered, close and unhurried, and though Lucie could not hear a single word, something cold began to uncurl in her chest.
And then both men turned their heads and looked directly at her.
The cold went through her all at once, sharp as a blade.
Lord Featherlock’s gaze rested on her only a moment—assessing, faintly appalled, the look of a man reconsidering something he had just been told—and Lucie stood pinned beneath it, unable to move, unable to breathe, her heart slamming so hard it hurt.
What are you doing, Henry, what are you doing?
Then Lord Featherlock’s gaze moved past her. To someone else. To—
Lucie followed his eyes.
To Kazrian.
No. No no no no—
She knew with a certainty that flooded her body like freezing water exactly what Henry was whispering about.
Now all anyone will know you for is this.
She never would have guessed that he would come to her launch and spread the rumor himself. But she had underestimated him. She had underestimated what he would do when he could not have what he wanted.
“The Rowanwood son! The confectioner girl!”
Lucie’s breath caught. Her gaze swung wildly about.
And there—a gossip bird. Not in the trees, where any sensible creature with a shred of discretion might have perched.
The wretched, brazen thing had landed on the back of one of the vacated chairs.
It ruffled its iridescent feathers, threw back its head, and shrieked.
“The Rowanwood son and confectioner girl! Locked in a room! Alone! All the night through!”
The words came out garbled, half swallowed, running together in that dreadful broken cadence the birds always used. But clear enough.
The garden went quiet.
Then two more dropped out of the branches, one to the back of a chair and one to the edge of a table, and they took up the same cry, overlapping, each shrieking its own mangled version of the same story until the words tumbled over one another into a single hideous chorus.
Lucie could not move.
Her mind was already working, already trying to convince her that everything would be all right.
They are gossip birds. No one believes gossip birds.
They garble everything. By tomorrow it will be about some other girl and some other man entirely, and no one will remember a word of it.
And that was true. It was perfectly, reasonably true, and if it had been only the birds, she might even have believed it.
But Henry was here. Henry had told Lord Featherlock first. And a gossip bird shrieking a rumor was one thing—a scrap of noise one would likely tut at and dismiss.
A gossip bird confirming a rumor was something else entirely.
Lord Featherlock’s version—Henry’s version—would be moving through Bloomhaven before the day was out.
Lucie stood at the center of the garden with the golden light coming soft through the leaves and the faelights glowing between the branches and her whole beautiful, perfect afternoon crumbling silently into ruin around her, and she could not move so much as a finger.
Some small, confused part of her mind tried to make sense of this ridiculous turn of events. Had Henry followed a gossip bird here? Had he already intended to come and somehow rounded up the birds on his way? Was it a hideously awful coincidence that they had shown up at the same time?
But none of that mattered because the end result was the same. The story was out, shrieked across a garden full of the finest families in Bloomhaven, and there was no gathering it back.
A piercing squawk. A hiss. And then a streak of gray shot out from beneath the serving table and Balthazar hurled himself at the first bird.
It got away from him—a strangled cry, a frantic clatter of wings—and flapped up and away, and the other two scattered after it.
In moments, all three were gone into the bright afternoon sky.
But it was too late. It had been too late from the first shriek.
The whispers had already begun. All around the garden, heads turning, voices dropping low—the fine fae ladies leaning toward one another behind gloved hands, the murmurs spreading table to table like a stain soaking through linen. Looking at her. Looking at Kazrian. Looking back at her.
And Henry. Henry met her eyes across the length of the garden and arranged his face—his face he had got someone to heal—into something soft and sorrowful, his brows drawn up at their inner corners, his mouth set in a line of gentle, wounded disappointment.
As though he were quite as grieved as anyone to have learned such a thing of a young woman he had thought so very lovely.
The breath climbed high into the top of her chest and lodged there, thin and fast and shallow, and would not go down.
Not now. Please. Not now, not here, not in front of—
“He is lying!”
Charlotte’s voice. Charlotte, on her feet, one arm flung out and her finger leveled straight at Henry across the tables. Panic tightened its grip on Lucie’s chest.
No, Charlotte, don’t—
“He laid his hands on my sister—he hurt her—because she refused his attention, and now he means to ruin her for it!”
The garden went dead silent.
And then Kazrian moved.
Lucie’s attention snapped to him as he started across the grass.
The guests fell back before him, people moving, chairs shifting, clearing a path without seeming to decide to, as though no one wished to find themselves standing in the way of the terrible thing that had come into his face.
He was looking at Henry. Only at Henry. And Lucie had never in her life seen that expression on him, on the boy who liked to know how things worked, the man who had stood in the dark and counted breaths with her.
Away to the side, movement. Lady Rivenna, gathering her skirts, starting toward Kazrian with unusual haste. But she was on the far side of the gathering, tables and guests and yards of grass between them, and she would not reach him in time.
Lucie’s gaze careened between the two of them: Kazrian, crossing the garden with that dreadful purpose.
Henry, not retreating, not so much as shifting his weight to go.
If anything he had squared himself, lifted his chin, drawn his shoulders back into the posture of a man bracing to receive a blow he fully intended to be seen receiving.
A martyr, arranging himself for the audience.
And in the space of a breath Lucie saw the whole of it unspool before her, saw exactly how it would end.
Kazrian would strike him, and the story that went out from this garden would no longer be about a locked storeroom door.
It would be about the fae lord who had struck a human man in the middle of a garden party.
It would be about a Rowanwood’s temper, his want of control, striking a man who had only spoken the truth.
Perhaps he was the one who had hurt the girl.
A fae lord who could not master himself, who put his hands where he ought not.
And Kazrian’s standing, his family’s name—all of it would be kindling, and Henry would be the one holding the match, nursing his bruised jaw and his righteous expression and saying, I only tried to warn them.
She did not think past that. There was no time to think past that.
Her body simply flung her forward.
She ran across the grass, past the staring faces, past the shocked ladies, and she reached him and caught his arm with both hands and stepped into his path, planting herself in front of him.
“Look at me.” Her voice came out cracked and desperate, pitched for him alone. She got a hand flat against his chest, gripped his arm with the other, dragged at his attention with the whole of her will. “Look at me, please—”
His gaze came down to her. Storm-gray and blazing, his jaw set, his breath coming hard.
“Stop. Please. Do not do it.” She held his eyes and would not let them go. “He is not worth it. He is not worth it. The only person who will end up ruined is you.”