Chapter 24 #2
He had been distantly, mortifyingly aware, even as he did it, that this was a wildly improper thing for a boy to be doing to a girl he barely knew, and he had been terrified his grandmother might walk in at any moment.
But it had worked for Aurelise, time and again, and he had had nothing else to offer, so he had kept braiding, and kept counting out loud with his slow breaths, and hoped.
When she had finally quieted, her breath still uneven but no longer clawing, he had stepped back at once, hands dropping behind his back, and begun stammering out an apology. For the impropriety of it. For touching her hair like that. For—well. All of it.
“No,” she said. Her voice was raw, scraped thin, but it was a voice, and she was breathing. “No, don’t—thank you. I thought … it felt like I was dying.”
He had asked her, gently, what had happened.
It had come out of her in pieces. His grandmother had asked her to demonstrate something in front of the tea leaf reading guests that evening—something new, something Lucie had only just learned from Mama Saffron, and the thought of failing at it, of embarrassing herself in front of a room full of fae, of somehow reflecting badly on the tea house and on her own family, had felt like far too much to bear.
She had come into the pantry to calm herself, had taken her hair down meaning only to re-pin it more neatly, and then the panic had arrived and she had abandoned the hair and everything else entirely.
He remembered thinking, afterward, that it was not fair.
He had been fifteen and had never once worried about his place in the world.
Everything he could ever need or want lay before him, already assured—his name, his family, his future.
And here was a girl of fourteen, barely a month into a new position, already carrying the weight of her entire family’s standing on her shoulders.
Already certain that a single mistake of hers could unravel everything her parents had carefully built.
She still carried it. Kazrian saw that now.
I need everything to be perfect.
Everything will fall apart if it is not.
“Kazrian?”
He drew a slow breath. “Yes?”
“May I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“The Shaded Lands. What is it like there?”
He considered the question for a moment, relieved to have something to turn his mind toward that was not simply her.
“It is … peaceful,” he said. “Not quiet, of course, but it lacks the busyness we have here. The gossip birds and the carriages and the market and the balls and other endless social events. Even in the quieter seasons here, one is always surrounded by other people and their opinions. The Shaded Lands are not like that. The forests are silver, and the light moves differently, and the colors in the sky shift throughout the day. The stars are different, and the seasons blend into one another. People ride pegasi, as they do here, but they ride dragons too.”
“Dragons?!” Lucie propped herself upright on one arm, and Kazrian’s gaze went automatically to her, because what was he meant to do? Continue staring resolutely at the ceiling?
It was a mistake. He knew it the instant he turned, because she was right there, looking down at him, the pale light tracing the line of her cheek, softening every edge, catching in the loose strands of hair that had come free around her face.
And the whole of it, the nearness and the dark and the way she was looking at him, hit him somewhere just below the ribs with a force that made his breath stop.
He forced a laugh out of himself. “Dragons, yes.”
“That is what you meant when you spoke of dragon fire and that enchantment for burns. You mentioned dragons that were large. Considerably large. You did not mention riding them.”
When he laughed again, it sounded somewhat closer to normal. “Yes. It is quite something.”
She lay down again—thank the stars—and Kazrian breathed a little more easily. “Do you enjoy it?” she asked.
“I do. If one is already fond of being on the back of a pegasus, it feels like the natural progression.”
She shifted slightly, and this time he was almost certain she was turning herself toward him, curving her body sideways.
Do not look. Do not look.
“What else did you do there?”
Take a breath, Kazrian.
“I … came to know the royal artificers in the palace workshop. They work a lot with lumyrite, and I learned a great deal from them after I manifested. They maintain everything from the palace infrastructure to the Veil Gate itself, and they were generous enough to let me work alongside them.”
“Do you miss being there?”
“I do.” A pause. “Though I missed being here too.”
“But you did not return for so long.”
“No.”
“Because …”
“Because,” he said simply. Because of you.
“Was it—” She stopped herself, then started again.
“There was talk, the Season after you left, that you—that there was someone. In the Shaded Lands. A match of some kind. A promising—I mean, it was only what people said, I did not—” She broke off abruptly, shifting away and rolling onto her back.
“I should not have mentioned it. That is entirely none of my concern and I do not know why I—please forget I—”
“No, it is fine. You can ask. That was …” He hesitated, though he could not quite say why.
He already knew he would tell her the truth.
Perhaps it was more that the truth needed a moment to stand on its own.
“It was a fabrication,” he admitted. “An excuse I fashioned. So that no one would wonder why I had not returned to debut that Season. So that there was a reason for my staying in the Shaded Lands that would satisfy the kind of people who require reasons for everything.”
He heard her draw a breath, hold it, then exhale. “So … there was no one?”
The question hung in the dark, and in the silence that followed, a dozen things moved through his mind in quick succession.
Hearts drawn in Orrit’s flour—the two of them racing through the tea house back garden—their heads bent together over an enchanted puzzle lock—sitting on the pantry floor laughing—the night he had finally taken her into his arms and danced with her in the kitchen.
A slow smile curved his lips.
“There was never anyone else, Lucie.”
She did not answer. He had not expected her to. He had not said it to receive anything in return, only to set it down between them, quietly, the way one might place something fragile on a table and step back.
Outside, the rain had thickened, falling harder now, drumming against the glass in heavy, uneven sheets. Thunder rumbled somewhere above the rooftops, closer than before, and then again, a low, shuddering growl that he felt in his chest.
And then, in the dark beside him, he felt her turn. Not the small, restless shifts of before. She turned toward him, slowly and deliberately, and this time he was certain of it, and his heart did something fierce and aching.
“We should sleep,” she murmured. “There are bees to make tomorrow.”
“There are.”
“And the honeycomb structure still needs assembling.”
“It does.”
“And the marzipan flowers.”
“Lucie.”
“Mm?”
“Sleep.”
Another breath of laughter. “Yes. All right.”
The rain was loud enough now to block out the soft rhythm of her breathing.
But he allowed himself, finally, to turn his head.
Just slightly. She was curled toward him, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, and in the dim light he could see the shape of her.
He watched as the small shifts of her body went still, and the rise and fall of her shoulder grew slower.
She was asleep.
He let his own body loosen then, the rigidity of his arms and shoulders releasing into the cushions.
His hand, which had been clenched at his side for what felt like an age, uncurled.
He shifted carefully, just enough to let his other arm drop over the edge of the cushions and rest against the floor.
The extra space helped. His eyes began to close.
He let his mind drift the way it always did at the edge of sleep, loose and unfocused, snagging on small things.
And then it snagged on something … unexpected.
It came through his hand resting on the floor.
The sensation of something, barely there, the way a note of music might travel through a wall from a distant room.
His magic, even now, even half asleep, was doing what it always did: reaching out through any surface that touched the lattice, feeling for faults, reading the system the way his lungs read air.
And somewhere in the lumyrite lattice threaded through the kitchen below, he could feel something. Not a fault, precisely, but his magic read it as such because it was not meant to be there. A presence. Not a something but a someone. A signature.
The recognition hovered at the edge of his mind, not quite assembling. He reached for it, tried to draw the connections, and felt the shape of an idea begin to form, distant and improbable and half mad.
But he was not fully awake. Sleep was pulling at him now, heavy and insistent. The idea did not complete itself. It sat at the back of his mind, unfinished and waiting, as Kazrian fell asleep.