Chapter 28 #2
She came through wiping her hands on her apron, her mouth already forming some likely ordinary question—and then she saw who was standing on her rug.
Lucie watched the question die on her lips, watched the single moment of absolute horror take over her mother’s face.
And then her body went through a rapid and silent transformation, her spine straightening, her chin lifting, the apron coming off in one smooth motion and vanishing behind the doorframe as though it had never existed.
“Lord Rowanwood,” she said as she stepped into the room. A curtsy, precise and correct. “What an unexpected honor. You must forgive the state of us. We were not expecting company, and the little ones have rather laid siege to the parlor.”
“Mrs Fields, good evening.” Kazrian inclined his head.
“And please do not apologize,” he added.
“My brother has two of his own—Coralie is three and Emeric is not quite two—and I assure you, this scene is entirely familiar to me. Children do have a way of taking a room apart to its very foundations, do they not?” He looked down at Belle, who had finished rebuilding the castle and had edged forward to inspect the newcomer.
“That is a formidable fortification. Is it defended?”
“By a pegasus,” Belle informed him gravely.
“Ah. Might I suggest a dragon? Of the larger variety.”
Belle considered this for a moment. “Will you be the dragon?”
“Oh, ah—”
“Not right now, dearest,” Lucie’s mother hurried to say, her smile slipping an inch.
Lucie was dying. Quietly, internally, and with enormous composure on the outside.
Because he was being perfect, and her mother’s smile had that fixed quality that meant she was performing gracious welcome over a foundation of pure structural outrage, and Charlotte was still glowing, and her father was already saying, “Well—if you are truly certain—the workshop is just through here—” and gesturing toward the back passage, and Kazrian was saying it would be his pleasure, and the two of them were moving, they were crossing the room, her father and Kazrian Rowanwood, heading together toward the little workshop at the back of the house as though this were a thing that happened, as though this were normal—
And then they were gone, the pair of them, and the parlor was left ringing with their absence.
Lucie moved. She crossed the room, caught Charlotte by the wrist, and towed her bodily into the kitchen, past their mother, who followed at once with the grim inevitability of a storm front.
“What,” Lucie hissed in a furious whisper the moment they were through the doorway, “are you doing?”
“Fixing Father’s machinery,” said Charlotte serenely, reaching for a cleaning cloth. “You are welcome.”
“Charlotte!” Mrs Fields snatched the cloth from her daughter’s hand. “Do you have the faintest notion—the faintest—of how this appears? A fae lord. A Rowanwood. In this house. In this part of Bloomhaven. With an employee of his own family—”
“Father’s back has been dreadful,” Charlotte said, locating another cloth and moving to the kitchen table.
“You know it has.” She began wiping the surface clean.
“He has been hunching over it trying to coax it right, and the thing will not stay fixed no matter what he does. And Kazrian can put it right in moments—”
“Lord Kazrian—”
“—in moments, Mother, and he does not mind in the least. He said so, you heard him—”
“That is not the point!” Their mother caught herself, glanced at the wall, and lowered her voice again.
“The point, Charlotte, is that a young man of his station does not simply turn up at a home like ours. Unannounced. To tinker with a lathe. It is not—people do not—this is simply not how the world works, and you know that perfectly well.”
Through the wall, Lucie could hear the low murmur of two men’s voices. And beneath the argument in the kitchen, beneath her mother’s fury and Charlotte’s blithe defiance, something in Lucie was straining toward that sound.
She heard herself say, “Excuse me a moment,” and neither of them appeared to notice, so wholly were they locked into their standoff, and Lucie slipped out of the kitchen and down the back passage, quiet as anything, to the workshop door.
It stood ajar.
She stopped just short of it and looked through the gap.
Her father was bent over something on the workbench, and Kazrian was bent beside him, the two of them shoulder to shoulder, and they were talking.
Not the careful, formal exchange of a fae lord and a human craftsman, but the quick, overlapping, half-finished talk of two people who had found, unexpectedly, that they spoke the same language.
But that … that was not the lathe, Lucie realized. Their heads were inclined over something small—the little rosewood box Lucie’s father had been working on, she realized, the one with the sliding dovetailed lid he had fretted over. Were they finished with the lathe already? They must be.
Her father was turning the box in the light, gesturing with his free hand, and Kazrian was nodding, saying something back. She caught fragments.
“—came off the blade cleaner than I dared hope.”
Kazrian leaned in, pointing. “I see how tight the joint sits. No glue?”
“No, none at all, only the fit.”
“Remarkable. That is fine joinery indeed.”
Her father’s pleased deflection was too low to hear, and then he was saying something about “a great many ruined offcuts” and Kazrian was laughing in response. She heard him say the words “workshop” and “Shaded Lands” and then her father was pointing to something else across the room.
They moved to a different machine, and Kazrian crouched down, heedless of the sawdust. He reached in among the workings, and began, with those careful hands of his, to feel for something at the machine’s heart.
“Ah, yes, you are right,” he said, his expression brightening. “But it is so small. How in all the stars did you know?”
And Lucie’s father laughed and shrugged and said something about working with machinery for a lifetime and simply knowing when a thing was not right.
“Just another minute,” Kazrian said, “and I’ll have this one fixed too.”
And Lucie’s chest ached.
It ached so swiftly and so completely that she had to press a hand flat against her breastbone to keep from making a sound. Because this. This, right here. This was the thing she was not allowed to have.
She stepped back from the door, pressed her back against the wall of the passage, out of sight, and closed her eyes.
In some other, kinder arrangement of the world, this would simply have been their life. Kazrian in her father’s workshop on an ordinary evening, the two of them bent over some mechanism or other, her father’s laugh and Kazrian’s questions and sawdust on both their sleeves.
And she would be in the kitchen, and they would come through when they were done, and they would all sit down together, and then she and Kazrian would walk home to their own home, some warm, quiet, impossible place that existed only in the part of her mind she was not supposed to visit.
Stop.
She breathed in. She breathed out. She felt the tears come, hot behind her closed eyelids, and she pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and stood very still until they subsided.
Stop it. Everything is going to be fine.
She straightened. She smoothed down her dress. She composed her expression into something that did not look as though a small, essential part of her had just cracked quietly open and shown her everything she could not have.
Then she walked back to the kitchen.
By the time her father and Kazrian emerged, wiping their hands, the lathe pronounced “better than the day it was made”—her father’s words, delivered with a delight that put a fresh and complicated ache in Lucie’s chest—the table was laid and the stew was steaming in its pot, and Charlotte, who had clearly been waiting for precisely this moment, said, before anyone else could draw breath:
“Oh, but you must stay and dine with us, Lord Kazrian!”
The silence that dropped over the room was total.
Her mother’s face, behind Kazrian’s shoulder where he could not see it, performed a small, silent apocalypse. Her eyes found Charlotte’s across the room and delivered a message of such comprehensive fury that it was a wonder Charlotte did not simply combust on the spot.
Charlotte gazed pleasantly back, radiant with innocence, entirely and deliberately blind to it.
Kazrian hesitated. Lucie saw him do it—saw him register, however faintly, the sudden change in the air, saw the good manners in him reach for the graceful exit. “That is very kind,” he said, “but I have imposed a great deal already, and I would not wish to—”
“Nonsense, there is more than enough,” said Charlotte, “and it would be a shame to send you off into the cold with an empty stomach when it is right here, would it not, Mother?”
And there it was—the trap, sprung and perfect—because now the only thing more improper than inviting him would be for her mother to retract the invitation to his face, and her mother knew it, and Charlotte knew her mother knew it.
Everyone looked at Mrs Fields.
“Of course,” she said, in a voice of flawless, strangled courtesy. “You would be most welcome, Lord Kazrian. Though I fear it is very plain fare.”
Kazrian paused for one final moment, his eyes meeting Lucie’s before returning to her mother. “Plain fare shared with good company is the finest sort there is,” he said with a smile. “Thank you. I would be honored.”
And so Kazrian Rowanwood sat down to dinner at the Fields family table.
He was placed—by Charlotte, naturally—directly across from Lucie.
Charlotte installed herself at Lucie’s side.
Which meant that for the whole of the meal Lucie had her sister’s pointed elbow within easy range on the one hand, and on the other, across the narrow table, close enough that she could not possibly avoid it, the steady warm regard of the last person on earth she could afford to look at.
It was excruciating.