Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Iris had said the upstairs study, and so it was to the upstairs study that Kazrian went, taking the narrow stairs inside The Charmed Leaf Tea House two at a time, his theory sitting whole and terrible in his chest where it had been assembling itself since the previous afternoon.
He had spent yesterday—in the moments when he was not helping Lucie with chocolate bees or honeycomb pieces or an array of other tasks—chasing the thing he’d sensed as he’d fallen asleep on a storeroom floor.
He had reached into the lattice again and again, quietly, the way one might run a thumb over a familiar seam, searching for the feel of the thing that ought not to have been there.
Sometime in the afternoon, not long before Lucie had declared that they had done quite enough for one day and that she would be leaving shortly and he really did not need to wait for her, he had finally found it again.
And this time he knew immediately who it belonged to.
He had then spent the whole of last evening assembling the courage to confront the person whose magic had absolutely no business being present within the actual lumyrite in The Honeycomb’s walls.
He reached the study door and did not knock.
She was seated at the larger of the two desks, silver hair immaculate, a ledger open before her and a cup of tea steaming at her elbow, and she did not startle when the door swung open. She merely lifted her eyes to him over the rim of her cup, took an unhurried sip, and set it down.
“Kazrian,” she said. “You look as though you have swallowed something disagreeable. Do sit.”
“I would rather stand.”
“How ominous.” She closed the ledger. “Well. Out with it, then. I find suspense tedious at my age.”
He had rehearsed this. He had rehearsed it a dozen ways coming up the stairs, and every rehearsal deserted him now, so that what came out was only the bare bones of it, flat and quiet.
“I felt your magic in the lattice at The Honeycomb.”
Something moved behind her eyes and was gone. “Did you indeed.”
“The night before last. When I was—in the storeroom. There is a ‘signature’, for lack of a better word, present at certain points in the lumyrite lattice that has no business being there, and it is yours.”
“Well, Kazrian, I do spend a great deal of time in the building, as you may have noticed.” She spread one hand, all innocence. “Whose magic would you expect to find there, if not mine?”
“In the lumyrite lattice? Only Evryn’s, Grandmother. Only Evryn’s.”
Lady Rivenna regarded him for a long moment. Then she folded her hands upon the closed ledger, very composed, very grand, and said, “I have not the faintest notion what you are talking about.”
“Do not. I sense faults, Grandmother. It is what I do. And the presence of your magic within certain lumyrite threads running through that building is, unmistakably, a fault. All this time I have been repairing the symptoms, when I ought to have been looking for the source.”
“Kazrian, I am an old woman with no aptitude whatsoever—”
“Oh, do not try that with me. I suspect you would find you possess an aptitude for anything you set your mind to.”
For the first time, she did not answer at once.
“You almost hurt people,” he went on, and now the quiet was cracking, the thing beneath it pushing up through the composure he had walked in with.
“That is what you have to understand. That is why I am standing here. The hob began heating itself without warning or explanation. A kitchen pixie was burned. Lucie was burned, Grandmother. That is what your meddling has—”
“I did not touch the hob.” The words fell out of her, sharp and immediate, and Kazrian watched the exact instant she realized she had given herself away. The smallest flicker crossing an otherwise unshakeable face.
“So you did do it,” he said softly.
“I admit to nothing.”
“You just did.” He lifted his arms wide, then let them fall heavily to his sides. “Why? Why would you—it makes no sense, none of it. You are the one who summoned me here to repair the wretched building, and now I discover—”
“Because you love her,” she said, her composure cracking open to reveal something fiercer and rawer beneath it.
“Because you had done everything I asked, and done it far too quickly, and you were about to vanish back to the Shaded Lands, because I know you, Kazrian. You had no plans to stay for the remainder of the Season, despite my—and your mother’s—wishes.
So I gave you a reason to stay. To have more time with her. ”
For several seconds, Kazrian could not produce a single word.
The room had tilted. Everything he had marched up here holding—the anger, the certainty, the careful architecture of his accusation—hung suspended, and through the middle of it ran one thought, over and over.
She knows.
“You—” he managed, and stopped. “How do you—that is—”
His grandmother looked at him with an expression of such profound and weary patience that it very nearly folded into pity. “Good gracious, Kazrian. I have known for years.”
“Years,” he repeated faintly.
“Since you were a boy and could not carry a tray past Miss Lucie Fields without walking into a doorframe.”
He thought of Rosavyn then, telling him she knew he had loved Lucie for years. He pinched the bridge of his nose and drew a long breath through it. “Good stars,” he muttered. “Does the entire family know?”
“I could not speak for all of them.” A pause, and then: “But I should be astonished if it were fewer than four. Hm, perhaps five.” Another pause. “No, I would put it at six, I should think.”
He was, for several moments, too horrified to speak.
Six. He ran the arithmetic against his will—Aurelise, of course, always Aurelise; Rosavyn, plainly; his grandmother; and that made three, which meant there were three more family members who—
No. No. He would not be turned. He had come up these stairs for a reason, and the reason had not stopped mattering simply because the ground had opened beneath his feet.
He straightened and cleared his throat. “That is not why I am here.”
“Is it not?”
“You endangered people, Grandmother. That is the matter at hand, and you will not distract me from it with revelations about how spectacularly I have failed to hide my own—” He caught himself.
“This was a dangerous game. You cannot go tampering with a lumyrite lattice as though it were a flower arrangement to be nudged into a pleasing shape. Lucie could have been hurt far worse than she was. A malfunctioning oven very nearly came down on top of me the first week I was here. I could have been crushed—”
“That one was entirely The Honeycomb’s own doing.
The oven. The cooling cabinets. The shelf and that darned storeroom door.
Every wretched thing that was wrong when you arrived.
” She spread one hand. “That was before I touched anything, Kazrian. Those faults were genuine. The building is old and temperamental and its magic did not agree with the lattice Evryn laid in, exactly as I told you when I summoned you. I did not fabricate the reason to bring you here. I merely saw it as an opportunity.” A small, dignified pause.
“I did not tamper with a single thing until after you confirmed that you had repaired it all.”
“That does not make it any better!”
She drew a breath and let it out slowly, and when she spoke again, something had shifted in her face.
Not much, but enough. “I did not know about the hob,” she said, and the dryness had gone out of her voice.
“I did not know about the pixie or Lucie getting burned.” Her hands folded and unfolded on the ledger.
“I did not intend for anyone to be hurt. For that, I am sorry. Truly.”
“Ah, well, as long as you are sorry about the hob.”
“Kazrian—”
“And did you intend for the two of us to be locked in the upstairs storeroom together for an entire night?”
The effect was immediate and, in any other circumstance, would have been deeply satisfying. “What?”
“The storeroom door. Two nights ago. It sealed itself the moment we stepped inside and did not open again until the following—”
“You spent the night—” She had gone quite pale, and then quite a different color entirely. “The two of you? Alone? Kazrian Rowanwood, who else knows of this?”
“So that alarms you. That, of all of it.”
“Who knows?”
“No one,” he said. “Fortunately. No one at all, save a single gossip bird, which appears to have kept its own counsel thus far, and which we must both hope continues to.” He watched her hand press flat against her collarbone.
“And you do not get to sit there wearing your scandalized face, Grandmother, when it was entirely your doing.”
“I will wear whatever face I wish, Kazrian.”
He raked a hand through his hair. “This is absurd. Do you not see how absurd it is? You should be sorry for all of it. Not merely the hob and the burns, though stars know that is enough. You should be sorry that you did any of it at all. That you decided, without a word to me, to take my life and Lucie’s and rearrange them like—like furniture.
Why could you not simply have asked me to stay? ”
“You would not have.”
Her words landed with the flat finality of a door closing, because they were true. “So instead you forced the two of us together.”
“I gave you time.” Her voice sharpened, rising to meet his.
“That is all I gave you. Time and proximity and the chance to stand in a room with her long enough to discover whether there was anything still alive between you, or whether three years had finally put it to rest. I did not tell you what to feel. I did not tell her what to feel. I opened a door and I left the two of you to decide, for yourselves, whether to walk through it.”
“And you unearthed a reason to bring me home now, instead of at some other point within the past three years, because …”
He let the sentence hang there, unfinished, waiting for her to complete it.