Chapter 7 #2
“Wonderful,” said Lady Rivenna. “I intend for the demonstration to take place outdoors. The area beyond the courtyard—that rather uninspiring patch of grass and trees—will be transformed for the occasion. I have already spoken to Iris, and she is quite taken with the idea. Tables and chairs will come over from The Charmed Leaf, and Iris has plans for the trees and the table settings. You need not concern yourself with any of that. Your task is the confection itself. Iris and I shall manage the rest.”
“That sounds lovely,” Lucie said. “Please do thank Iris for me.”
“Of course.” Lady Rivenna rose from the table.
“Now, I shall be in the study. I have correspondence that requires my attention, and I trust the two of you to manage admirably without supervision.” She paused in the act of gathering her things and looked at Lucie with an expression that was all command and no request. “You will stop for luncheon at a sensible hour. I shall know if you do not.”
Then she paused on her way to the stairs and looked toward the hearth.
“Cat,” she said.
Balthazar, still on his cushion, narrowed his eyes and gave a flick of his tail.
Lady Rivenna continued toward the stairs without another word and disappeared. Her footsteps ascended—the staircase, from the sound of it, did not produce its extra step—and a moment later the study door closed above them.
The air changed.
Not in any way that could be measured or named. Simply that the two of them were now alone in the kitchen, and the fact of it pressed gently against everything.
“Well,” Lucie said.
“Well,” Kazrian said.
She stood and tied on her apron with perhaps more focus than the task required, then turned and found Kazrian facing her with his arms crossed awkwardly over his chest—do not focus on his forearms, Lucie Fields—clearly waiting to speak to her.
There followed a brief, excruciating exchange of courtesies about who would work where, and whether she needed the counter he was standing near, and if his work on the far wall would disturb her, and whether she would rather he started with the cooling cabinets if they were the priority, and no, truly, it was no trouble at all, and please, wherever was most convenient, and by all means—
They ran out of courtesies at approximately the same moment and retreated to opposite sides of the kitchen, him to his position on the floor by the far wall, and her to the pantry door.
She consulted her enchanted list. The caramels—the cardamom-rose batch she had been perfecting—were complete.
She had redone them yesterday afternoon and they had been perfect.
She had won the bet and the blueberries had been hers, much to Balthazar’s profound and unblinking displeasure. So that was finished.
Next on the list was a confection she and Lady Rivenna had decided months ago would be part of the launch offerings but which still needed work.
But now there was also the showpiece to think about, and perhaps she ought to begin with that.
Sketch out some ideas, at least, while the notion was fresh.
She murmured to the pixies hovering near the spice cabinets.
“The vanilla, please. And the jar of crushed pistachios. Oh, and the orange blossom—the smaller tin.” To the two brownies currently tidying the lower shelves: “Would you fetch the saffron threads from the pantry? And the cinnamon bark. The whole sticks, not the ground.”
The faelights positioned about the room dimmed, brightened, then dimmed again. Lucie paused and glanced up.
“Apologies,” Kazrian said from across the kitchen, one hand still pressed to the wall. “That was me. I am still mapping all the connections in this place. I did not realize the lattice ran through the lighting as well.”
“No harm done,” Lucie said. She looked toward the window where the first true rays of morning were beginning to pour through the glass, golden and warm, falling across the counter and through the honey jar in a slow, bright spill. “The sun will be strong enough soon that they will dim themselves.”
She continued gathering items. A bottle of rosewater from the shelf, a dish of candied ginger left over from yesterday, a small pot of dark chocolate she had tempered as a test and never used.
She wanted variety. She could think better when she could smell and touch and taste combinations while she worked out ideas in her head.
She carried everything to the worktable, set it all down in a loose arrangement alongside her recipe book, and pulled out the stool.
Kazrian, who had been asking whether she had noticed anything amiss with the faelights because he could sense something wrong in their enchantment, paused mid-sentence. She stepped up onto the stool, glanced over, and caught him watching her. He looked away and continued speaking.
“You, ah, haven’t noticed anything? About any of the faelights?”
“Oh. Yes, there is one in the main part of the shop that will not illuminate no matter what Lady Rivenna does to it.”
Kazrian nodded and returned his attention to the wall.
Lucie opened her recipe book to a clean page near the back and pretended, with tremendous dedication, to be wholly occupied with the showpiece.
For a while, the kitchen held them both in its own quiet industry.
The scratch of her pencil across the page as she made notes about flavor combinations and sketched ideas for impressive spun sugar designs.
The small taps and low murmurs of Kazrian’s hands and voice as he worked along the wall, coaxing the lattice and the building’s old magic toward some kind of agreement—or at least, that was what Lucie guessed he was doing.
Eventually, she surrendered the pretense that her attention was not continually drifting across the kitchen toward a certain fae lord and turned her gaze toward Balthazar instead.
He had relocated from his cushion to the chair Lucie had used earlier, where he sat with his paws tucked beneath him and his gaze fixed on Kazrian with unwavering suspicion.
“How was your night?” she asked him, tapping the pencil against her chin.
One ear rotated toward her. The other remained trained on the intruder. From the corner of her eye, Lucie saw Kazrian look up, likely wondering if she was speaking to him.
“Are you … oh. Forgive me.”
Lucie looked at Kazrian, then back at Balthazar, who had narrowed his eyes even further. “That bad?” she asked him.
Both ears flattened briefly, before Balthazar flicked his tail very precisely in Kazrian’s direction.
“He was not here during the night, Balthazar,” Lucie said in a low tone.
“He arrived this morning. You cannot hold him responsible for disrupting a sleep he was not present for.” She made an idle note in the margin of her page—forearms—tracing over the looping letters several times, and added, “You are simply in a mood.”
Balthazar turned his head and gave her a look of such withering dignity that she nearly laughed.
From the far side of the kitchen, Kazrian spoke. “Have you any ideas yet? For the showpiece?”
“Oh, ah …” Lucie quickly scratched out the word forearms. “A few. Nothing fully formed. I have been considering your grandmother’s suggestions—the spun sugar, the chocolate, the light.
Whether something delicate and intricate would serve better, or something grander, more theatrical.
Different flavor pairings, different structures …
” She traced shapes on the page as she spoke. “I am still turning it all over.”
“I am certain you will come up with something magnificent.”
Their eyes met, and for one unguarded moment she was not in this kitchen at all. She was in the tea house pantry, years ago, the walls pressing close and the air thinning to nothing, a pair of hands finding hers in the dark and holding on—
She looked down at the page and drew another few lines through the now entirely hidden forearms. Kazrian said nothing more, and she was grateful to him for letting the moment pass.
She kept her eyes on her page but she was aware of him moving along the wall, his hand following some invisible line that traveled above the hearth and toward the other side of the kitchen where—
Balthazar hissed, rising into a sharp arch, magic crackling in brief, bright sparks along his fur.
Kazrian halted, though he appeared less startled this time than the first. He regarded Balthazar with a respectful wariness. “He still does not seem happy with my presence.”
“He will come around,” Lucie said, with more confidence than she felt. “He simply needs time.”
“You said his name is Balthazar?”
“Yes. Sir Balthazar Grimwhiskers.”
Kazrian smiled. “I know little of him, yet that seems fitting.”
Balthazar looked affronted at the sheer presumption of a stranger having an opinion about his name. He dropped from the chair in one fluid, disdainful movement and stalked out of the kitchen toward the front room.
“How did he come to be here?” Kazrian asked, his attention still on the doorway through which Balthazar had vanished.
“I found him.” Lucie uncorked the rosewater and held it beneath her nose, breathing in the scent. “Around the time Lady Rivenna and I were first settling in here. He was in a back alley off the main lane. Pressed against a wall, thin as anything—you could see his ribs.”
She set the rosewater down, made a note—rose and saffron? or rose and pistachio?—and continued. “I crouched down and spoke to him. Just … normally. Told him where I worked, that there was food, and a hearth, and no one would bother him. Then I left.”
“And he followed you?”
“From a distance.” She smiled at the memory. “I pretended not to notice.”
Kazrian’s hand was still pressed to the wall, but his attention was no longer on the lattice. He was watching her with that quiet, focused look of his, the one that made her feel as though nothing else in the room existed but whatever she was saying.