Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Everything had been manageable until the storeroom door.
She had not cried about the bees. She had wanted to—rather desperately, in fact—but she had not, and that was the important thing.
Nor had her mind scattered, which was the other thing she had feared.
Perhaps it was the momentum of the day still carrying her, the satisfied hum of a list conquered.
Whatever the reason, her mind had not broken apart at the sight of three dozen chocolate bees in varying states of ruin across the pantry floor.
Instead it had raced ahead, brisk and orderly, forming a new plan, revising the schedule, laying out the steps required to manage this latest inconvenience.
New bees. She would make new bees. She would need the molds, the chocolate, the enchantment reworked from the beginning. She would not be going home tonight. That was perfectly all right. It was not a problem. It was simply a fact.
She had sent one of the brownies to find a messenger pixie.
It returned not long after with one perched on its shoulder, looking faintly put out at having been summoned in the rain.
Lucie composed a brief message to her parents: she would be working late.
They must not worry. She would sleep here tonight.
There was a bedroom, though between the crates and the supplies and the bed frame standing upright against the wall, it was not exactly in a state to sleep in.
But there was also the armchair in Lady Rivenna’s study.
It would be perfectly adequate for one night.
She had made herself eat something first—Lady Rivenna would have been pleased—and then set about preparing the enchantment first: the charm that would animate the little chocolate bees the moment they were wanted, and keep them resting, sweetly and obediently, until her signal.
This was the delicate part, the part that had already gone wrong once before, and she could not afford to rush it simply because she was running out of time.
She stood with her recipe book open on the worktable and carefully went through every step she had refined the first time around.
The rain still drummed against the windows, hours later, when the enchantment was complete.
Balthazar had disappeared at some point during all of this, and if she was being honest, it felt like a small form of betrayal.
Which was ridiculous, because he could not help with anything in the kitchen.
It was more that his presence was a kind of …
ballast. A warm, opinionated weight in the room that kept the rest of it from tipping.
And now he was somewhere out in the rain, which was rather strange because Balthazar hated the rain with a rather intense passion.
She collected the ingredients for the chocolate bees themselves, and the molds—
The molds.
She checked the shelf where they lived. She checked the shelf beside it. She checked the lower shelves, and the drawers, and everywhere else they might possibly be. But they were nowhere in the kitchen.
She took a moment to stand with her hands pressed to the edge of the worktable and felt the memory surface: the molds had been part of a stack of things she had carried upstairs several days ago, when she had run out of space in the kitchen and the pantry.
The bedroom. They are in the bedroom. You put them in the bedroom.
She untied and retied her apron as she hurried for the stairs.
The bedroom, please, she told herself as she climbed.
Not the storeroom. Not the storeroom. Though the storeroom had been behaving recently, had it not?
Kazrian had sorted it. It had been perfectly cooperative for over a week now.
So it would be fine if they happened to be in the storeroom, because the storeroom was being sensible, and it would simply open, and she would simply retrieve what she needed, and it would all be—
She reached the top of the stairs and stopped.
The crates were sitting against the wall. Three of them, heavy things, far too heavy for Lucie to move on her own, sitting where they decidedly had not been sitting before. And across the passage from them, the storeroom door was closed.
She tried the handle.
Locked. Of course.
She turned and went into the bedroom, because that was where the molds were. She was almost certain of it. She would never have put them in the storeroom, not when the storeroom had a documented history of doing precisely this.
She searched with the kind of thoroughness that left no surface unexamined, her breathing sitting high in her chest in that same shallow, too-fast pattern she had been living with for days.
But she already knew.
The molds were in the storeroom. And the storeroom door was locked.
She went back to it. She knocked—firmly, with the heel of her hand, the kind of knock that would have been considered quite rude if directed at a person rather than an inanimate door. When nothing happened, she knocked again, harder.
“Open,” she said. Her voice came out thin and high and not at all commanding. She tried again, more sternly. “Open this door. Right now. I am not in the mood for this, I do not have time for this, and you will open this door immediately.”
The door remained exactly as it was.
She banged on it once more, with her fist this time, and told it several things in a voice that could certainly be classified as shouting, none of which made the slightest difference.
And that was when she sat down against it and started to cry. Palms pressed hard against her eyes, her breath catching in shallow, useless gulps that did nothing to fill her lungs and everything to make the sobbing worse.
Which was how Kazrian found her.
She heard his footsteps on the stairs before she saw him—taking them two at a time, by the sound of it—and she knew, purely from having heard him move up and down this staircase countless times throughout the past weeks, that it was him.
Relief.
He was here. He would fix this.
She lowered her hands from her face, blinking through the blur, and the first thing she saw was Balthazar.
He came up ahead of Kazrian at a brisk, proprietary trot, tail aloft.
Then Kazrian himself, still in his coat, the shoulders of it dark with rain, rounding the top of the stairs at speed and crossing to her in several quick strides.
He crouched beside her. “What has happened?” His eyes moved over her, swift and searching. “What’s wrong? Balthazar came to find me. I have no notion how he even knew the way to Rowanwood House.”
She looked at Balthazar, who had seated himself a polite distance away and was regarding her with an expression of faint, weary vindication.
Oh.
The guilt arrived swiftly. She had thought he had abandoned her, when the clever, magnificent creature had in fact been a full step ahead of her the entire time.
He had known she would want the molds. He had known where the molds were.
He had likely come up here to check, found the door doing precisely what the door always did, and then gone out into the weather he loathed above all things to fetch the one person in Bloomhaven who might open it.
“Balthazar,” she whispered. “You brilliant, brilliant cat.”
“Lucie?” Kazrian’s hand hovered near her arm, not quite touching. “What happened?”
She wiped her hands hastily over her face before standing.
Haltingly, her voice catching in places, she told him what had happened.
The tin of chocolate bees. Her elbow catching the edge.
All of them scattered across the pantry floor.
The enchantment reworked. New bees to be made.
The molds, which she needed, which were upstairs, which were in—
She gestured at the closed door. “It’s locked.”
He nodded once. “Of course it is.” He turned to face the door.
He placed a hand flat against the wood, then tried the handle.
Tested it again, with more force. Pressed his palm to the frame, his fingers splayed and his brow furrowed in concentration.
She knew that expression. She had watched him wear it a hundred times over the course of the past few weeks.
“Right,” he murmured. “Right. Let me think. I have determined several successful methods during my time here, I must simply run through them all until we find the one that works.”
He shifted his hand along the doorframe an inch at a time, pausing after each movement, his head tilted as though the wood were whispering something just below hearing.
Lucie paced. To the bedroom door and back. To the study door and back.
“You did not walk all this way in the rain, did you?”
He appeared to be mostly dry, which suggested the answer was no, but there were charms for warding off rain. It was possible he’d used one.
“No, I brought one of the family carriages.” He pressed his hand to a different section of the frame.
“Balthazar arrived looking like he’d been dragged through every puddle between here and there.
I believe he came in through the kitchen, and someone chased him all the way to the drawing room, where he found me.
It was some moments before I understood he wanted me to follow him.
” A brief, distracted smile crossed his face as he traced his fingers along the edge of the doorframe.
“He was greatly appreciative of the carriage on the ride back here. Sat on the seat as though he’d been traveling by carriage his entire life. ”
The image nearly made her laugh despite everything. Balthazar, soaked and imperious, installed upon the velvet upholstery of a Rowanwood carriage like visiting royalty.
Kazrian shrugged out of his coat, and Lucie was already reaching for it before he’d finished the motion, without quite thinking. “Oh—thank you,” he said.
She folded it over her arms and resumed her pacing. It was warm from his body, and damp in parts, and it smelled of rain and that cool, green, foresty scent that—
Not relevant. Not even slightly relevant. Focus.
He did something to the lock she could not see. Nothing happened. He tried something else. Nothing happened again. He crouched beside the lock, one ear nearly pressed to the wood, listening for something only he could hear.
Balthazar padded over and butted his head against Kazrian’s knee—a slow, deliberate press that became a drag along his leg.
Kazrian absently reached down with one hand and rubbed his knuckles along the side of Balthazar’s cheek, and Balthazar tilted his head into it, eyes closing, and a low, rattling purr filled the corridor.
Lucie stopped pacing. She stood there, her arms wrapped in Kazrian’s coat, and felt something shift inside her chest that she could not put back.
What in all the stars was happening? Balthazar, who hated everyone.
Balthazar, who sparked and hissed at anyone who came too close. Her Balthazar. And her—
No. Not her Kazrian. She had to be very firm about that.
Kazrian glanced up, perhaps noticing the silence where her footsteps had been. “What is it?”
“I … I find I have no words.”
His gaze followed hers to where his hand rested on Balthazar’s head. “Oh. That.” He looked faintly sheepish. “He … seems to have forgiven me for the crime of existing.”
“That is rather more than forgiveness, I should say.”
Balthazar withdrew from Kazrian with immense dignity, wound once between Lucie’s ankles as though to remind her that loyalties had not been reassigned, merely expanded, and then stalked to the far end of the corridor to sit and watch both of them.
Lucie looked between the two of them several more times, wondering if she was the only one who seemed to think some monumental shift had just occurred.
Kazrian leaned his forehead against the door and murmured something Lucie could not quite make out, though from the tone and cadence, he might have been attempting to reason with the thing.
“Lucie,” he said eventually, and his voice had shifted into something careful, tentative. He looked at her. “Would it be … entirely out of the question … to proceed without the bees?”
She stared at him.
“I do not mean to suggest that they are unimportant. I simply mean, if the door does not yield, might the showpiece still—”
“Of course it needs the bees!” The words came out far too loud. “They complete the whole—they are the entire point—this place is called The Honeycomb, Kazrian, there is a beehive at the very heart of the showpiece, it must have bees, what is a hive without—”
She stopped. Attempted a deep breath that went nowhere near filling her lungs.
“I’m so sorry.” She pressed her face into the folded coat and the scent of him flooded through her, and then she remembered whose coat it was and hastily pulled it away from her face.
“You are being entirely reasonable and I am being—I should not have—”
“No, I understand. You have a certain vision of it all in your mind. I am merely …” He turned back to the door and crouched beside the lock. “No, I will find a way in. It is only a matter of—”
“No, you are right. Of course you are right.” She sniffed and took another breath.
“I should—I should go downstairs and find something on tomorrow’s list and do that instead, and then tomorrow I shall have the whole morning for the bees—if the door is open by then—and that is a far more sensible use of the time. I do not know why I didn’t think of—”
Click.
She stopped.
The door swung slowly open.
“Yes!” The word burst out of her, and she was already moving, the coat clutched against her, lunging forward as Kazrian stood and pushed the door open the rest of the way.
“Balthazar,” Kazrian said as Lucie hurried into the small space. “Stand just there, in the doorway. Whatever you do, do not let the door swing shut.”
The small faelight that was enchanted to illuminate when someone stepped into the room bloomed to life with a pale golden warmth—then flickered, sputtered, and died, because apparently it was too much to ask that any enchantment in this building remain functional once Kazrian had repaired it.
Lucie looked around, her eyes sliding over the spare pans and cake tins, the cushions and linen, a small upholstered stool of the kind meant to accompany a dressing table, all of it illuminated by the lights in the passageway.
And there they were. The molds. Not hidden, not buried, not lost. Sitting on a shelf in plain view, exactly where some past version of herself had set them, and the relief of seeing them was really quite ridiculous considering what they were in the whole vast accounting of things that mattered.
She snatched them up and pressed them against her chest. “Oh, thank goodness. Thank—”
Click.
The room plunged into near darkness.