Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Kazrian stopped just inside the front gate of Rowanwood House and paused.
He stood with his hand resting on the iron, the moonglow essence from Mr Clave a small weight in his coat pocket, and regarded the house.
The front garden was bathed in the low amber light of early evening, the kind of light that softened everything it touched, that gilded the climbing roses along the front wall.
And standing there, Kazrian realized he was not yet ready to face his mother and his grandmother and whoever else might be inside. His mind was still too disordered.
He turned instead along the side of the house, where a path ran beneath the windows and led around to the gardens at the back.
They were generous for a town house, though nothing compared to the great sprawling grounds of Rowanhill in the country, where a person could walk for an hour and meet no one.
Near the house the garden kept its manners: stone-edged beds and clipped borders, a small fountain murmuring to itself, climbing roses held to a pergola in obedient rows, and the luminous white blooms that only opened at dusk.
But it all loosened the further one went.
The gravel gave way to grass and the order frayed pleasantly into something the gnomes had clearly given up on.
There were old pear trees and roses gone slightly wild and sweet peas climbing wherever they pleased, all of golden and soft at this hour.
Kazrian wandered among it all without seeing any of it.
What I did or did not feel.
You are still a fae lord and I am still human, and that is the end of the story.
Except it was not the end of the story. That was the difficulty.
It turned out he did not even know what the story was.
For three years he had carried a version of it folded up small and tucked away where he need not look at it too often.
A version in which he had been the one at fault, the one who pressed where he was not wanted, who read warmth into simple courtesy and mistook a girl’s careful kindness for something it had never been.
A story that made sense. He had built the whole thing carefully, the way he built everything, and he had believed it would hold.
And then, in the space of an afternoon and a handful of words, the whole construction had come quietly apart in his hands.
That is not what happened.
I always had a choice.
His hand went to his waistcoat pocket. The watch was warm from being close to his body, and he turned it over between his fingers without opening it, barely registering the habitual motion. His feet carried him deeper into the garden.
He already knew what picture would emerge when he allowed himself to examine the pieces Lucie had given him.
Some part of his mind had already assembled it.
The part that could not leave a puzzle unfinished, that had never been able to look at scattered components without seeing the whole they were meant to form.
But understanding what it meant was one thing. Looking at it directly was another, and he was not entirely certain he could bear to.
He walked on, hands in his pockets, his gaze fixed on nothing. He was so far inside his own head, in fact, that he did not see what lay across the path in front of him until he had already tripped over it.
Specifically, a foot.
He went down in an undignified sprawl, half catching himself, half not, and ended up across a pair of legs, his palms slapping the cool grass beneath the pear tree as a startled grunt punched out of him.
“Stars, Kazrian!” Rosavyn propped herself up on her elbows. She had been lying flat on her back beneath a pear tree, a book open and face-down across her stomach, her skirts blending with the dappled shadows so thoroughly that she might as well have been part of the garden itself.
Kazrian extracted himself from her legs with as much dignity as the situation allowed, which was almost none. “You are lying in the path.”
“I am lying in the grass, which is a perfectly reasonable place for a person to lie. You are the one not looking where you are going.” She paused. “Did you truly not see me?”
“You were lying in ambush.”
“I was lying in peace. Which is a state of being I value enormously and which has now been disrupted by your enormous feet.”
Kazrian sat back on the grass and rubbed his knee where it had hit the ground, while Rosavyn dragged herself upright. She settled with her back against the trunk of the pear tree and regarded him.
“I have ruined your solitude,” he said.
“You have.” She did not sound particularly troubled by this. “I was having a perfectly acceptable evening watching two flower pixies stare lovingly at one another in the tree up there, and now I shall have to hear all your troubles.”
“What troubles?”
“The troubles that are written all over your face.”
“My face is not—”
“It is your brooding face. It is quite distinct from your puzzling face. A touch more jawline, considerably less forehead.”
“That is the most ridiculous—”
“Oh, sit down.” She patted the grass beside her. “You’re already on the ground. You may as well be on it on purpose.”
Kazrian considered protesting and found he had not the energy for it. So he moved to the trunk of the pear tree, lowered himself to the grass, and sat back.
The relief of it was immediate. His shoulders dropped.
His spine found the solid curve of the tree and settled there.
Nothing required of him, for a moment. No face to arrange.
No sentence to decode. Just his sister in the grass and the evening assembling itself around them in shades of gold and green.
“Why are you out here?” he asked.
Rosavyn let out a sigh that seemed to involve her entire body. “I am hiding from Mother.”
“Ah.” He glanced sidelong at her. “What has she done?”
“What has she done. She has developed an enthusiasm, Kazrian. A fervent, unshakeable enthusiasm that I fear may be terminal.” Rosavyn picked at the grass beside her knee. “It concerns Lord Tobias Grayfield.”
Kazrian’s brows rose. “The gentleman from the park.”
“The very same. It seems the man has been—according to Mother—paying me a rather remarkable amount of attention.” Rosavyn tilted her head back against the tree.
“Every time I walk through the front door, she is there. Did he call today? Did I see him at Dreamland? What did he say? Was he attentive? Did he seem sincere? And I cannot—” She pressed a hand to her brow.
“I cannot bear the weight of her hopefulness, Kazrian. It will end the way it always ends, and I will have to watch her be disappointed, and it will be worse than if she had simply never hoped at all. I would much rather we discussed you.” She turned, fixing him with a look.
“Why are you hiding in the garden with your brooding face on?”
He looked away, drew a long breath, and let it out slowly. “Can we simply … sit? For a time?”
Something in his voice must have told her what his words did not, because she watched him for several long moments and then said, “I suppose we can.” She settled more comfortably against the tree and let the evening close gently around them.
Kazrian leaned his head back. Closed his eyes. And in the hush of the garden, as the light turned slowly from gold to rose, he allowed himself to go back.
It had been evening then, too. She had been working late at The Charmed Leaf for some reason he could no longer recall. There was some reason the place required cleaning later than usual, but it had not seemed important at the time, and it had certainly never been important since.
He was supposed to be at the Rowanwood Masquerade, the great annual ball of enchanted masks and hidden identities that his family hosted every Season.
His grandmother had had a specialized craftsperson add additional enchantments to her mask this year, a commission delivered to the tea house earlier that day, and it was only that evening she had discovered she’d left it there.
Kazrian had offered, perhaps a little too quickly, to go and retrieve it.
In his memory, the light was dim and warm, the kitchen of The Charmed Leaf gone soft and golden at the edges.
He could not have said whether there were pixies about that night, or whether the hearth sprites had been awake and bright in the embers or curled down asleep.
Those details had gone. What remained was Lucie, and the gold light on her, and the small space of kitchen between them.
They had talked about the masquerade. She had asked after it the way she always asked after the parts of his life she would never be invited into—curious, warm, a little wistful.
Her mother made the masks every year, and they were delivered to Rowanwood House days in advance so the enchantments could be laid into them.
Magic that changed a person’s attire and physical attributes.
She thought it must be wonderful, she said, to spend a whole evening as someone else. To set one’s own face down for a few hours and be no one in particular.
Kazrian had been feeling brave that night.
An earnest, headlong almost-nineteen, with his whole heart sitting too near the surface of his skin, and he had heard himself say, “Come with me. You can wear a mask too. Not an enchanted one—I do not believe they are safe for humans. But an ordinary one. You need not reveal yourself.”
She had only laughed at him. “That is quite out of the question. But you ought to go. You are missing it.”
And he had looked at her across that small space and said, “I am exactly where I want to be.” And then, gaze still holding hers: “Will you dance with me?”
Her expression suggested she did not think he was being serious. “Here? In the kitchen?”
“Yes.”
She had laughed and told him she did not think it advisable.
“Why not?”
“Well … there is hardly room.”
He had smiled at that. “It need not be a sweeping waltz.”