Chapter 7 #3
“I left food on the back step for over a week,” Lucie continued, reaching for the crushed pistachios and letting a few fall into her palm, examining the color.
“Every morning the dish was empty. I never saw him. Then I moved the dish inside—near the hearth, with that cushion beside it.” She brushed the pistachios back into the jar.
“Another week, and still I did not see him. And then one morning I came through the door and there he was. On the cushion. Not asleep, just … waiting. Watching me. Deciding.”
“What did you do?”
Lucie shrugged. “I said good morning. As though it were perfectly normal. And then I started working.”
“And he decided to stay.”
“Yes.”
She opened a tin of dried lavender and held it to her nose, breathing in its scent. Perhaps this was not so terrible after all. They could do this—hold a conversation that did not trip over itself with courtesies and averted gazes. Perhaps the trick was simply to have something else to talk about.
“And the name?” Kazrian asked. “Sir Balthazar Grimwhiskers?”
Lucie smiled to herself. “I tried several names that seemed fitting for a cat. Buttercream. Nutmeg. Whiskers. He appeared to be profoundly offended by them all.”
“I can imagine.”
“Then Georgiana left a novel on the counter one afternoon—she reads during her lunch—and he climbed on top of it and refused to move. Georgiana had mentioned a character named Sir Balthazar Grimley, so I tried Sir Balthazar Grimwhiskers, on the theory that a cat who found Whiskers beneath him might tolerate it in a more distinguished form.” Lucie shrugged and lowered the lavender tin to the table. “He seems to have accepted this.”
After a pause, Kazrian said, “You speak to him as if he understands you.”
Lucie glanced up. “Because he does.”
There was a beat of silence in which Kazrian appeared to consider this, and then accepted it with a nod. “Because of the magic?”
“I believe so.” She picked up a cinnamon stick and rolled it between her fingers.
“Whatever happened to him before I found him—someone did something to him. The coloring, the sparks, the intelligence … none of it is natural. He was hurt by someone with magic, and now he does not trust magic.” She set the cinnamon stick down.
“You may notice that he will sit on the countertops but never the worktable. That is because the lumyrite lattice does not run through the countertops.”
“Ah.” Kazrian’s gaze fell to the worktable surface, then moved to the counters, and Lucie guessed he was filing away this new piece of information the way he filed everything away.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “He chose well,” he said. “The Honeycomb, I mean. And … you.” Then he inhaled deeply and turned his attention to the wall where his hand still rested. “And yes, I was—following a specific line of lumyrite to find … ah, yes. I shall … get back to that.”
And just like that, the almost-ease dissolved back into stiffness, as though someone had pulled a thread and drawn the whole thing shut.
Lucie pressed her lips together to contain a smile at his retreat—the determined pivot back to professionalism, the sudden fascination with the wall—and returned to her own work.
They settled again, each on their own side of the kitchen.
This time she managed to find her way deeper into the sketching, and time began to move the way it always did when she was truly absorbed—uncounted, unhurried, marked only by the scratch of her pencil and the slow shifting of light through the windows.
She was busy sketching a sugar-glass structure, something like a cage of threads with honey light woven through, which she imagined might be able to turn slowly, when she realized she needed her copy of Valienne’s Confections of Light and Form.
She turned toward the shelf that housed her reference books, just above the row of honey light bottles, and stopped.
Kazrian was working on that very stretch of wall, his hand pressed flat to the stone beneath the lowest shelf.
She considered turning back immediately, but turning back would be conspicuous, and besides, this was her kitchen, and they would have to learn to work around each other.
If she needed the book, she would get the book.
What followed was a small, exquisitely courteous disaster.
She asked if she might just—so sorry—reach past him for a moment, and he offered to retrieve the book for her, and she assured him it was no trouble, she could manage on her toes, and then they were both reaching for the same shelf at once, and Kazrian, of course, had it in hand before she had so much as brushed the spine, and when he brought the book down they were standing considerably closer than either of them had planned.
And there was a scent she did not recognize.
Something cool yet woody, like forest and …
something else. A scent that had never belonged to this kitchen before, and—
“Here.” He handed her the book, and she took it, and instead of the perfectly simple thank you that the moment required, what came out of her mouth was: “Did you—get taller?”
Kazrian blinked. “I … do not believe so.” He paused, his gaze shifting for a moment to something behind her, before he added, with the barest hint of a smile, “Perhaps you have gotten shorter.”
Ah. The stool. That was what he’d been looking at.
She hugged the book to her chest and said, “It is the worktable, not me. I am of perfectly average height.”
The smile strained harder at his lips. “Of course.”
“You are the one who is abnormally tall,” she insisted, peering up at him and hugging the book tighter.
“Indeed. And the table, apparently.”
“The table is perfectly adequate when accessed with a stool.”
The table was, in fact, slightly too low when accessed with a stool, but that was considerably better than slightly too high without one, and neither of these facts was any of Kazrian Rowanwood’s concern.
“So, it is only me then.” He was smiling now, a proper smile, and she saw a hint of the boy who used to warmly tease her, back when she would blush and smile and tease him right back.
“Indeed. Only you.”
She was fighting a losing battle with her own smile now, and then a small laugh slipped free, because this was likely the most ridiculous conversation this kitchen had ever seen. If Balthazar was still present he would have turned his back on them both with an air of profound suffering.
Something turned over in Lucie’s chest. A warm, aching thing she had not given permission to surface. Kazrian gazing down at her like that, the smile she could not keep from her face, the ease of it, the terrible, treacherous ease, as though three years and a realm had never stood between them.
He had felt it too, she could see. His smile faltered, the brightness dimmed, recognition surfaced a half beat behind hers.
“Thank you. For—the book.” She turned back to the worktable and stepped up onto her stool.
Behind her, she heard him move away, further along the wall and back to the professional distance they had so carefully constructed.
She pressed her pencil to the page and found that every thought she’d had about the showpiece had vacated her mind entirely.
It was a good thing Kazrian would be done with the repairs before the Season even began. She did not think she could handle his presence longer than that.