Chapter 3 #3
She turned away quickly and continued up the stairs.
The upper floor was a short corridor with three doors.
Lucie gestured to each in turn. “Lady Rivenna uses this first room as her study,” she said, indicating the door on the left, which stood ajar.
Through the gap, a writing desk was visible beneath the window, stacked with correspondence and ledgers, a teacup balanced on a saucer at the corner.
“She works from here when she’s on the premises. Which is often.”
Kazrian peered in. “That does not surprise me in the slightest.”
“At the far end—” Lucie walked him down the short corridor to the second door, which she pushed open.
A modest room, largely taken up by crates of surplus supplies.
Sacks of sugar and flour stacked against one wall, boxes of paper wrapping and ribbon, jars of vanilla and rosewater that would not fit in the kitchen cabinets.
A bare wooden bed frame leaned against the far wall beneath the window.
“Lady Rivenna plans to convert this into living quarters eventually. For whoever will ultimately own The Honeycomb once it is properly established. For now, it is where I keep everything I might need regular access to, because the actual storeroom—”
She turned to the third door, directly across the corridor from Lady Rivenna’s study, and placed her hand flat against it.
“—only opens on Thursdays,” she finished.
“Lady Rivenna has been gathering things for the living quarters. Cushions, linens, small items of furniture. And since none of it is needed on any particular schedule, it all goes in there. Six days locked away does no harm to a stack of pillowcases.” She dropped her hand.
“We’ve all simply learned to plan around it. ”
Kazrian studied the door with eyes slightly narrowed. “Fascinating,” he murmured. “There must be a cyclical element in the residual magic. A temporal pattern keyed to the old enchantments. If it’s interacting with the lattice at all, I may be able to—”
He caught himself. Looked at her. “Forgive me. I tend to …” He made a vague gesture. “Get ahead of myself.”
“Not at all,” Lucie said. “That is precisely why you are here.”
Another silence. The awkwardness began to gather again, that careful, courteous, agonizing awareness of each other that neither of them seemed capable of either acknowledging or escaping.
She clasped her hands in front of her.
He put his hands behind his back again.
“Perhaps,” she began, seizing upon the first thought that presented itself, “you might like to wait for your grandmother in her study? You would be quite comfortable there, and I’m certain she will not be long.”
She fervently hoped that this did not sound as much like please stay up here so that I may go downstairs and attempt to recover the use of my vital functions as she suspected it did.
But Kazrian latched onto the suggestion with immediate eagerness.
“Yes. Excellent. That’s—Yes. I shall do that.
I’m sure you have a great deal to be getting on with, and I have already taken far too much of your time.
” He stepped back, toward the study door, and then paused and winced slightly.
“And again—I truly am sorry about the … whatever was on that tray before I knocked everything askew. The golden—the small—”
“Caramels.”
“Caramels. Yes. They looked … they looked as though they would have been very good.”
“It is perfectly all right. They were only a test batch.”
“Still. I am sorry.”
“Well … thank you.” She gave him a brief nod, fully intending to calmly walk past him, and then somehow, mortifyingly, could not seem to convince her feet to move.
“Well,” he said. “I shall … see you. Downstairs. Later. Presumably.”
“Yes,” she said. “Presumably.”
She stepped past him—thank you, feet—and did not look back. She descended the stairs, which had the decency not to produce their extra step this time, crossed the kitchen, and came to a stop near the worktable.
Her heart was beating so hard she could feel it in her fingertips.
Kazrian was here. He was actually here. In this building. And he was going to be here every day, working in her kitchen, fixing the very infrastructure she depended on for her craft, and she was going to have to stand beside him and speak to him and exist in the same room as him.
She could manage this. She had managed far more difficult things. She was, in fact, excellent at managing things.
She looked across the kitchen.
Balthazar was standing upright on the counter, his fur settled, his ears pricked sharply forward, and there was a question burning behind those too-intelligent eyes.
Lucie exhaled. She shut her eyes.
“Yes,” she whispered. “He is the gentleman I told you of.”
She opened her eyes, took another breath, and pressed both palms flat against her midriff. “This is fine. This is fine.” She nodded to herself. “This is fine.”
Then she backed up until her spine met the closed pantry door behind her. She tilted her head back against the wood, shut her eyes, and groaned.