Chapter 28 #3
It was also, and this was the unbearable part, wonderful.
The stew was served. Bread was passed. Robbie required his cut into small squares. Belle required hers with the crust removed, a task she assigned to Kazrian by the simple expedient of pushing her plate toward him and saying, “Off.”
“I beg your pardon?” Kazrian said.
“Manners, Belle!” Mrs Fields said.
“Please?”
“I’ll do it,” Charlotte said with a sigh, holding her hand out for the plate.
“She means the crust,” Lucie explained. “She does not eat it.”
“Ah. Not to worry then. I can manage that.” Kazrian picked up the bread and carefully tore the crust away in a single piece. Belle watched him with narrowed eyes throughout, and when the task was complete, she accepted her plate in silence.
“Belle,” Theo said in a warning tone.
And Belle, who had clearly been given precise instructions after they had all left the parlor earlier, said, with near perfect enunciation, “Thank you, Lord Rowanwood.”
Kazrian gave her a smile. “You are most welcome.” Then his gaze shifted and found Lucie’s across the table, and she held it for several beats longer than she should have.
She was aware of everything. The modest size of the kitchen, the plainness of the crockery, the chip in the jug that held the water, the darned patch on the tablecloth.
She had never been inside Rowanwood House, but did not need to in order to know that it was grander than this by an order of magnitude she could not even imagine.
The thought of Kazrian—who dined at tables set with crystal, who had spent three years in a palace—sitting in this kitchen on a mismatched chair eating stew from a bowl with a hairline crack in the rim made her want to slide quietly under the table and never resurface.
But Kazrian did not seem to notice any of it. Or if he had, it did not seem to matter to him. And when she took a moment to think about it, she realized that of course it did not. Because he was Kazrian.
Instead, he was talking to her father about wood. He had been talking to her father about wood since the workshop, and the conversation had apparently not exhausted itself, because they had moved on from ash to silver wood.
“—somewhat rare in these parts,” Kazrian was saying, “but I had the opportunity to work with it in the Shaded Lands. It holds enchantment remarkably well. I used it for the framework I constructed for Lucie—for her confectionery demonstration tomorrow.”
Miss Fields, Lucie thought, even as she tried to hide her smile. You are supposed to call me Miss Fields.
“I’ve seen a few pieces crafted from silver wood,” Lucie’s father said. “Never had the chance to work with it myself, mind you. It does sound fascinating.”
“I could bring you some,” Kazrian said at once. “I would be delighted to see what a craftsman of your skill might do with them. Oh—” He caught himself, as though realizing belatedly that the offer might seem presumptuous. “That is, if you would want them. Please do not feel obliged to accept.”
Her father stared at him. Then he let out a breath and shook his head, and said, “Well, I certainly would not say no to that, my lord.”
Kazrian smiled and Lucie looked down at her stew and thought, Stop. Please stop being you. Just for one evening, be someone I could bear to lose.
Beneath the table, Charlotte’s knee bumped Lucie’s. Lucie bumped back, harder, which she hoped communicated, I will deal with you later. Charlotte’s responding bump communicated absolutely nothing except delight.
Lucie risked a glance at her mother. Mrs Fields was eating with impeccable composure, her gaze moving between her bowl and the table and, every few seconds, across to Kazrian.
There was a quality to her attention that Lucie recognized—the same sharp, quiet watchfulness her mother brought to a fitting, where she could assess the way a fabric sat across a woman’s shoulders without appearing to look at all.
She was studying Kazrian. Drawing conclusions.
And then her gaze shifted to Lucie, and their eyes met for a fraction of a second, and Lucie knew with sinking certainty that her mother had missed nothing.
Not the way Lucie looked at Kazrian. Not the way Kazrian’s voice changed when he spoke to her.
Not the warmth passing silently across the table between them.
Lucie looked away first.
The evening should have stayed excruciating. That was the strange thing. It should have remained a taut and mortifying ordeal from start to finish. Instead, somewhere in the middle of it, the evening simply … eased.
Perhaps it was when Kazrian noticed the embroidery on the table runner—her mother’s own work—and paused mid-sentence to look more closely at the border.
“Is that a briarknot stitch?” he asked. “My mother uses it for her finer pieces. She swears it is the most unforgiving stitch there is.” He glanced up at Mrs Fields.
“Do you use the enchanted thread? The one that assists?”
“No,” her mother said, and there was a note in her voice, not quite pride, not quite correction, but something carefully between the two. “I learned as a girl, with ordinary thread. It is rather complicated, I grant you, but I have had a great many years of practice.”
Kazrian nodded, and there was something in the nod, an unhurried, genuine respect, the recognition of someone who understood what it meant to work in fine, precise detail, that made her mother’s posture ease by the smallest degree.