Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
The study was warm with late afternoon light. Lady Rivenna sat behind the desk with a ledger closed in front of her and a cup of tea at her elbow.
I will not cry, Lucie told herself as she stood on the threshold. I will not cry. Because this was surely it. A week of reprieve, and now the dismissal. She had known it must come; she had merely not known when.
Balthazar trotted ahead of her through the doorway as though he owned the room, tail up, and Lucie followed. Lady Rivenna looked up, and her gaze went first, and pointedly, to the cat.
“Cat,” she said.
Balthazar regarded her for a long, insolent moment, then flicked his tail and crossed to the armchair in the corner, sprang up onto the cushion, and settled himself with his back deliberately toward her.
Lucie took the chair across the desk, sat with her hands folded in her lap, and waited for it to begin.
“I have had quite enough of this brooding,” Lady Rivenna announced. “We are going to talk about the thing. All of it. Now.”
Lucie blinked. Her throat went dry. “I—I thought I had a choice. You said, the other morning, that I had a choice, whether to speak of it or—”
“You do. And so do I, and I am choosing to speak. You may sit there and listen, if that is more to your taste.”
There did not seem to be any answer to this, so Lucie gave none.
“Very well. My grandson. And the girl who works in the kitchen of my confectionery.”
Lucie’s face went hot.
“You are expecting, I imagine, that I ought to be scandalized. Horrified. Perhaps overcome and in want of a fainting couch. To clutch my pearls and call for the smelling salts and inform you that a Rowanwood cannot possibly, and so on, and so forth.”
Lucie said nothing, because that was, in fact, precisely what she had spent the week waiting for.
And yet, now that Lady Rivenna had said it aloud in that dry, unimpressed voice, the picture would not quite assemble itself.
She tried to imagine Lady Rivenna requiring smelling salts and found that she could not.
She rather doubted Lady Rivenna had needed smelling salts a day in her life.
She was not a woman who was shocked by things; she was a woman who arranged for things to shock other people, and then watched while drinking her tea.
Which meant, Lucie thought slowly, that perhaps the revelation in the garden had not shocked her at all.
“What you are perhaps not expecting,” Lady Rivenna went on, “is that I have known for years.”
“You—” Lucie heard the words, but they did not reach a part of her mind that could process them. “What?”
“You and Kazrian have felt this way about one another for years, and I have been aware of it for almost as long.”
Lucie wondered distantly if she might be the one who required the smelling salts, because the room seemed to tip very slightly, a sensation like a carpet being yanked from under her feet, and she had to put her hand on the arm of the chair.
“Years,” she repeated.
“Mm.”
“But—” Her mind was scrambling now, casting about among a hundred small remembered moments and finding, to her horror, that every one of them looked entirely different in this new light.
“But then you—all this time, you—” She could not seem to finish a single sentence.
“You cannot possibly approve of this. You cannot. I am merely—”
“You are about to say something that I suspect I shall not care for.”
“I am human.” The word came out cracked. “I work in the kitchen. I have no magic, and I—I am nothing—”
“You are not nothing,” Lady Rivenna said firmly.
“Do not let me hear you say that again. I have known it since you were a girl, when I noticed you hiding in the back of your mother’s shop with your sister, creating some elaborate something-or-other out of a great heap of ribbon offcuts.
I saw something in you then, and I asked your mother if you might come and work in my tea house kitchen. ”
“Now.” Lady Rivenna sat back. “Having settled that, we may proceed to the substance of your brooding, which is not whether I will have you. What troubles you now is whether the rest of them will. Whether there exists, anywhere in this town, a version of the future in which Lord Kazrian Rowanwood and Miss Lucie Fields might stand up together and not be torn apart for it.”
It was so exactly the shape of the question that had lived in Lucie’s mind for a week—for years, in fact—that she could only look up, wordless.
“Yes,” said Lady Rivenna, watching her. “Quite so.” She tilted her head. “Tell me. Do you know what happens at the Opening Ball each Season, for those young fae who are ready to make their debut?”
Lucie blinked at the turn. “I—I suppose I know the general shape of it. Vaguely.”
“Then tell me the general shape of it.”
“A young lord or lady is—presented. To society.” She groped for it. “They perform their manifested magic. Their particular skill, whatever it is. Before everyone. Before the High Lady herself.”
“Correct. They stand before the whole assembled cream of Bloomhaven, and before the High Lady, and they show what they can do.” She let that settle. Then she tilted her head and fixed Lucie with her steady, unblinking gaze. “Do you know what you did at the launch of The Honeycomb?”
It took Lucie a moment. And then it took her another, because surely—surely she could not mean—
A small, incredulous laugh escaped her before she could stop it. “That was in no way the same thing.”
“Of course it was not the same thing.” Lady Rivenna waved this off. “It was better.”
“It was not—”
“For you, it was better.” She leaned forward slightly.
“Consider it honestly. At a debut, a young lady stands in a crush of a dozen others, each waiting a turn, each performing in their little moment before the attention moves along to the next. You had no such competition. There were no other debuts. There was no one else for them to look at. Every eye in that garden was upon you, and upon the thing that only you had made.” A pause.
“And I will tell you what makes it more impressive still. Those young lords and ladies are displaying a magic they were born to. It arrived in them unasked. Whereas you possess no magic at all. None. And yet you stood in that garden and you showed them a thing of genuine wonder, a thing you built with your own two hands and your own stubborn mind out of nothing but honey and light and experimenting until you did not fail. It was, I would argue, as near as a human girl has ever come to standing up and manifesting a magic of her very own. And they watched it, they tasted it, and they loved it, Lucie. Every one of them. Just as I knew they would.”
“But that does not mean …” Lucie shook her head. “They may have seen me, but they are still fully aware that I am human.”
“Of course. But now you are a person with a face and a name and a gift, and you are the one who made the thing they cannot imagine doing without.” She sat back.
Lucie turned it over. And there was something in it, some enormous generous thing—that Lady Rivenna had arranged the entire event around her—but there was also a small snag that would not lie smooth.
“But that still—” She frowned, feeling her way.
“That does not feel quite right. They may value me now, because I can make a thing they have decided they cannot do without. But that is not the same as valuing me. It does not mean they think any better of humans than they did before. It only means they have found one particular human useful.”
“Well, more than useful. That is why I wanted you there to engage with them afterward. I heard from more than one of them how charming they found you, how warm and bright and altogether delightful you were in person.”
“Oh.” Lucie’s face grew warm again.
“But yes, what you have pointed out is entirely correct. It is not fair, and it is not right, and it will not overturn a single deeply held prejudice by tomorrow morning.” She spread one hand.
“But you cannot demand the wholesale remaking of a society and all its cruelties inside of a single afternoon. That is not how change moves. It is slow and stubborn, and it comes one grudging inch at a time. It began with Iris, who decided she would teach a tea house full of fae to sit across a table from humans and think nothing of it. And it continues with you. This is one more inch.”
The light through the window had shifted while they spoke, sliding a little further across the floorboards, warming toward the gold of late afternoon.
Lucie sat with everything Lady Rivenna had said and found, slowly, that she could believe a certain amount of it.
She could, if she squinted, imagine some narrow future in which the fine families of Bloomhaven might come, in time, to tolerate her.
To accept her, even, the way one accepts a curiosity, a marvel, a thing that has proven itself too singular to turn away.
“The fae families—” Lucie shook her head.
“I could almost believe what you say. That in time, perhaps, some of them might come round. But my own people—” Her throat tightened.
“The lane where I grew up. The human families I have known my whole life. They are already turning from us. From my family. And they do not even know, not truly, what has passed between Kazrian and me, only what the birds shrieked. What will it be like if we were to actually—if there were a marriage? If I married up and out of my own place entirely? They would say I abandoned my own. They would not let my family forget it.”
She spread one hand, an unhurried gesture.
“Perhaps some of them will feel that way. Perhaps some of them will not. There were humans among our launch guests, if you recall.” Her brows rose, and the look she directed at Lucie was full of quiet, deliberate meaning.
“They saw the same thing everyone else saw.” A beat.
“They saw Mr Stratton. One of ‘their own,’ as you might put it.”
Lucie groaned and covered her face.