Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
The sun had barely cleared the rooftops when Lucie neared The Honeycomb.
It was little more than a line of gold along the upper stories, catching the chimney pots and the weathervanes and the trailing ivy on the bookshop’s wall while the cobblestones below remained in cool blue shadow.
The florist next door was already awake—or rather, the florist’s enchanted window display was, its blooms shifting lazily through their morning rotation, petals unfurling in vibrant colors.
Lucie let herself in through The Honeycomb’s back door and stepped into the kitchen.
The hearth was burning low and steady, the sprites having done their work before dawn, and the warmth met her with its usual welcome.
Balthazar was on his cushion near the hearthstones, though he was not asleep.
He was sitting bolt upright, ears pricked sharply forward, his tail wrapped tight around his paws.
Then she saw why.
Kazrian was on the floor against the far wall, near the doorway to the main part of the shop.
He had folded himself down into the corner where the lumyrite ran close to the surface, one knee drawn up, his sleeves pushed to his elbows.
One hand was pressed flat to the wall, and he was sitting still, head tilted faintly toward the stone as though listening to something.
He had not noticed her. Apparently she’d been quieter when entering than she’d thought. Or perhaps—and this was more likely—Kazrian was so absorbed in his work that he’d forgotten the rest of the world existed.
As she watched, his fingers flexed against the wall. A slow, searching movement, feeling for something beneath the surface. Then his hand slid a few inches along the stone and went still again.
His hands had not changed.
The thought surfaced before she could catch it.
Everything else about him had—shoulders, jaw, voice, duly noted and filed under Unwelcome Observations, Do Not Revisit—but his hands were just as she remembered them.
Long-fingered, deft, unhurried. The same hands that could twist the seized back plate off a music box could also handle the most delicate mechanism without breaking it.
She had always loved watching him work. The steadiness, the focus, the way he would forget everything around him when his attention narrowed to the thing beneath his fingers.
He used to bring broken items to tinker on at the tea house, sitting at the small table near the window, and Lucie had spent more hours than she would ever confess watching those hands at their—
“Good morning,” she said on a deep inhale.
He looked up, startled, and the listening stillness broke.
“Lu—Miss Fields.” He pushed his sleeves higher as he got to his feet with that new ease of his.
“I was just examining the lattice to find where it meets the older enchantments. The junction points are where most of the trouble seems to originate.”
He continued on, explaining something, but Lucie did not hear him because her gaze had slid down and she had become, for some absurd reason, wholly and stupidly occupied with his forearms.
She was aware that it was an absurd thing to notice.
Since when, she demanded of herself, had a forearm become a thing over which a sensible woman might lose her train of thought?
But there it was—another item for the unwelcome and steadily lengthening list of ways in which Kazrian Rowanwood was no longer the boy who had left.
The back door swung open.
“Ah,” said Lady Rivenna, stepping into the kitchen with one glove already half removed and the other following in brisk succession. “We are all here early. Excellent. There is no time to waste.”
Lucie’s stomach dropped. Lady Rivenna was no stranger to early hours—she had run The Charmed Leaf Tea House for decades—but she did not generally arrive this early.
Lucie had not put the kettle on. She had not laid out the tea things.
She had not even put on her apron. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen like someone who had wandered in off the street and forgotten why.
“Lady Rivenna! I am so sorry—your tea is not yet ready. I only just arrived, and I—”
“And I have told you,” Lady Rivenna said, hanging her cloak on the peg behind the door, “that you need not wait on me hand and foot, dear girl. We employ other staff for such things.” She motioned vaguely at the kitchen pixies, who were already at it, two of them darting toward the cabinet where Lady Rivenna’s preferred blend was kept, and three more converging on the kettle with an air of cheerful urgency.
Dear girl. Lady Rivenna had called her that since her first week at The Charmed Leaf.
Henry had once commented—lightly, with a laugh and a grin, as he commented on most things—that Lucie was a grown woman, not a girl, and wasn’t it silly the way fae always found a way to be just a touch condescending toward humans?
But Lucie had laughed right back and told him she didn’t believe Lady Rivenna meant it that way.
“Now,” Lady Rivenna said, turning to the small table near the back door. “Sit, both of you. I wish to discuss the state of affairs, and I dislike conducting business while people loom.”
The state of affairs. Right. Lucie resisted the urge to glance at Kazrian and instead joined Lady Rivenna at the table, trying to look as though she had been ready for this all along.
Kazrian, after a brief assessment of the available seating and his own dimensions, leaned against the central worktable instead. Lady Rivenna narrowed her eyes at him, then seemed to decide this was not a battle worth fighting.
“The repairs,” she said. “Kazrian. Where do we stand?”
“Ah, yes. The lattice itself is sound. Evryn’s work is excellent.
The trouble is the points where the lumyrite runs too close to the existing enchantments that have been embedded into The Honeycomb.
Where the lattice meets the older magic, they quarrel, and the kitchen equipment is caught in the middle.
That is why the ovens spike and the cooling cabinets frost over.
But the conflict is predictable once you understand its pattern, and I can resolve it, or remove the older enchantments that are no longer necessary. I estimate no more than a few days.
“The other troubles—the shelf that will not tolerate anything blue, the sealed door upstairs—those appear to be older problems. Magic that soured or grew stubborn long before the lattice was installed. They are not lumyrite faults, so they will not answer to my magic as readily, but I’ve been listening to them, and I believe I can coax them into better behavior if I spend more time understanding what they want.
But the kitchen equipment, at least, will be fully functional before then. ”
“The timeline, then?” his grandmother asked. “The repairs will be complete before the intended launch?”
“Oh, certainly, yes. I shall be done well before the Bloom Season begins. I am quite confident of that.”
Lady Rivenna nodded, satisfied, and something in Lucie’s chest loosened by a degree. Excellent. That would give her plenty of time before the launch to focus without Kazrian around.
Lady Rivenna turned her gaze to Lucie. “Now. The launch.”
This was firmer ground, and Lucie straightened. The launch was scheduled for three weeks into the Bloom Season, deliberately timed so that society would be fully arrived and settled. Not so early as to be lost in the noise of opening festivities; not so late as to be an afterthought.
Lady Rivenna had begun sending out select invitations to certain patrons who were already in Bloomhaven, granting them early access to The Honeycomb on specific days, and this had produced exactly the effect she’d intended.
People talked. People who had not been invited wanted to know why.
The strategy would sharpen as the Bloom Season commenced and the great families of the United Fae Isles began arriving—more invitations, more carefully chosen names, the doors opened to more of the right people at the right moment.
And by the time the grand launch happened, with its own carefully curated guest list, everyone in Bloomhaven would want to be there.
“Now, I have been giving more thought to the specifics of the launch event itself,” Lady Rivenna continued, “and I would like you to include a demonstration.”
Lucie blinked. “A demonstration?”
“A performed showpiece, shall we say. Something the guests can watch you create. Magically spun sugar drawn into fine threads, something that moves, something alive. Add in chocolate, perhaps, or light caught in sugar-glass.” She waved one elegant hand.
“The particulars I leave to you. You are the artist. But the goal is simple: Impress them.”
Lucie’s throat tightened. “Of course,” she said, even though her heart rate was already climbing.
A performance. In front of those people, with no kitchen door to hide behind, every fae eye in the room watching a human confectioner attempt to be extraordinary, the entire launch riding on whether her hands held steady under their eyes.
And beneath that—the part she tried harder to press down—the memory of the first time Lady Rivenna had asked her to demonstrate something.
Years ago. At The Charmed Leaf. No warning at all—just Lady Rivenna’s voice saying I should like you to show them tonight, and Lucie had calmly agreed to it while inside she—
She blinked and very purposefully did not look at Kazrian, but she couldn’t help wondering if he remembered it too.
Her hand rose to the chain at her throat. Her fingers found the ring strung on it, closed around it for the space of a breath, and then she made herself let go.
This was fine. She had five weeks still—two until the Opening Ball of the Season, and then another three. She would plan it in careful steps. She would be ready.
“I shall start sketching ideas,” she said.