Epilogue
The morning came in gold, the way the best mornings did, shining through the glass honey jar on the counter and spilling warm light across the worktable.
Lucie stood in the middle of it with flour dusted across her apron and thought, as she had thought nearly every morning for weeks now, that she could scarcely believe it was all simply hers.
Not only the shop. She meant the whole of it.
The hearth sprites drowsing in the banked warmth of the fire.
The kitchen pixies bickering in whispers along the high shelf.
Balthazar, sprawled the length of his cushion beside the hearth, one paw twitching at whatever imperious dream a cat of his standing was entitled to.
Rosavyn’s voice threading through the air from the front of the shop, bright and unhurried, telling some patron an outrageous story that had the whole front room laughing.
And Kazrian, across the worktable from her, doing absolutely nothing of use and being wholly, wonderfully present.
That was the wonder of it. Not any single piece. All of it at once, so ordinary and so lovely that it made her chest ache to hold. This was simply the morning. This was simply their life now. And she did not think she would ever grow accustomed to the plainness of that wonder.
“It has been two weeks,” said Kazrian, “and still you have not told me.”
Lucie did not look up from the bowl. She was mixing batter for amber snaps, and it required her whole attention, or at least she was prepared to insist that it did. “I had rather hoped you’d forgotten all about it.”
“I had.” He leaned one hip against the worktable, arms folded, entirely at his leisure.
“Forgotten it completely. Put it out of my mind altogether. And then you undid all that good work a moment ago by holding a small bottle aloft and announcing, with a truly excessive amount of ceremony, that you had procured genuine ambervine nectar at the Stardust Night Market. The Stardust Night Market. You reminded me yourself. You have, I am afraid, only yourself to blame.”
“The topic,” said Lucie, “is the ambervine nectar. It is a rare and remarkable ingredient and it is the only thing you need concern yourself with this morning.”
“It is not remotely the only thing concerning me.”
She reached past him for the small dark bottle in question, and he shifted as though to catch her about the waist. She danced neatly out of his reach with the bottle held high and a laugh she could not quite swallow.
“Come now.” He straightened, and there was that particular light in his gray eyes, the one that meant he had decided to be thoroughly, cheerfully impossible about something.
“You three vanished. One moment I had you all in view, and the next the three of you had put your heads together and gone off giggling into the dark like a pack of conspirators, and I did not lay eyes on you again for the rest of the evening. Rosavyn will tell me nothing. I have tried. She gives me only that insufferable look and says, ‘I shall tell you when you’re older, little brother,’ which is a remarkable thing to say to a man almost two-and-twenty. ”
“It is very like her.”
“Even Theo knows. Theo. I asked him directly, and he turned red and informed me he’d been sworn to secrecy and that I should discover it in due course.” He spread his hands, the very picture of a wronged man. “What is this it I am forever being promised I shall discover?”
Lucie set the bottle down and permitted herself a small, private smile into the batter. “That part, at least, is true,” she said. “You shall discover it in due course.”
“Lucie.”
“Now.” She measured out a spoonful of the ambervine nectar with great deliberation.
“A far more pressing matter. For the wedding breakfast. I have been going back and forth, and I cannot for the life of me settle it, so you shall have to be the deciding vote. The honeyed rosewater comfits or the elderflower champagne jellies?”
Kazrian regarded her steadily. “I shall render my verdict the very moment you have told me your Stardust secret.”
“That is arrant blackmail.”
“It is negotiation. There is a difference, and it is an important one, and I shall be glad to explain it to you at length once you have—”
“The jellies, then. I shall simply decide for both of us.”
“You cannot decide for both of us. It is a matter of grave and solemn importance and I insist upon my rightful say.”
“You forfeited your say,” said Lucie, “the moment you attempted extortion in my kitchen.” She glanced sideways at the hearth. “Balthazar, you heard him. You are my witness.”
Balthazar did not so much as crack an eye. But his tail, which had been lying still, gave one slow, deliberate curl.
“There,” said Kazrian at once, with enormous satisfaction. “You see? He curled his tail. That is agreement. He agrees with me entirely. He believes you should tell me.”
“He did no such thing. He is asleep.”
“He is plainly awake and plainly on my side. Balthazar and I have reached a complete understanding on the subject. We discussed it some time ago.” Kazrian turned to address the hearth directly. “Is that not so, sir?”
Balthazar, with the air of a creature who had heard quite enough foolishness for one morning, rose, turned around once with immense dignity, and settled again facing the wall, presenting the whole of his back to both of them.
“He has recused himself,” said Lucie.
“He is considering his verdict.”
“He has gone back to sleep.”
“That,” said Kazrian, “is precisely what considering a verdict looks like, in a cat of his gravity.”
She laughed, and turned back to her bowl, and thought the matter comfortably closed.
She ought to have known better.
Because the next thing she knew, two large warm hands had settled at her waist, and the floor was no longer beneath her, and the whole bright kitchen tilted and swung as Kazrian lifted her clean off her feet and set her down upon the edge of the worktable.
“There,” he said, with the deep satisfaction of a man who has solved a difficult problem. “Now we may have this conversation properly. Face to face.”
Lucie clutched the edge of the table and stared at him, scandalized to the very marrow. “You cannot—you cannot simply pick a person up!”
“I am reasonably confident I just did.”
“But I—you—on a kitchen worktable, of all things!”
“You are short,” he said, as though this explained and excused the whole of it. “We have long since established this. It is one of the few genuinely settled matters between us. And I have grown weary of conducting our disputes while addressing the top of your head. The problem now stands solved.”
“What we have established,” said Lucie with tremendous dignity, given the circumstances, “is that you are unreasonably tall, and that the correct remedy has always been for you to bend.”
“I do not need to bend.” He stepped in closer and set one hand on the wood to either side of her, so that she was framed neatly between his arms, and lowered his voice to something warm and unhurried. “Because now—you’ll observe—you are at exactly the perfect height.”
And he was close. He was very close. His face was right before hers, near enough that she could see the small line at the corner of his mouth that came when he was trying not to smile too broadly and failing, and they were near enough to be breathing the very same warm honeyed air.
It had taken work, this. She could remember, still, even after all those dances at the masquerade, even after that first kiss, how careful he had been for weeks.
How he had held himself always a courteous half step too far away, forever waiting to be quite certain he had leave, as though her nearness were a thing he had no right to assume.
She had had to tell him, more than once and in plain words, that she wanted him near.
That she had always wanted him near. That he need not stand a polite mile off, hands clasped behind his back like a footman awaiting instruction.
He had, it seemed, at last received the message.
Except, of course, when his grandmother was in the room. Some proprieties one did not test.
“Very well,” said Lucie.
She let a small silence unspool between them and looked up at him from beneath her lashes, and enjoyed—thoroughly and unrepentantly—the way his breath caught.
And in that pause something in his face gentled and turned.
The teasing eased out of it. He looked at her the way he sometimes did when he thought she did not know, a look with no cleverness in it at all, only a plain and steady tenderness that still, even now, could make her forget the whole of what she had been doing.
“Lucie,” he said quietly. “If you truly wish to keep it your secret, then keep it. I shall not press you another moment. You need only say the word, and I shall let it go entirely, and we shall never speak of it again.”
And there it was. The whole of him, in a single sentence.
He would have meant it, too. He would have walked away from two weeks of relentless, delighted curiosity in an instant, without a flicker of complaint, the very moment he thought his wanting to know might cost her the smallest discomfort.
He gave her the choice as though the choice were the most natural thing in the world to hand a person, over and over, in matters large and small.
“The very last thing I want,” she said, and heard her own voice come out soft, “is for you to let it go. Or to back away. Or to stand one inch further off than you are standing at this precise moment. In fact—if you were to come only a little closer—I believe I might be persuaded to show you the secret myself.”
He went still. Then he considered this with the grave attention he gave to all serious propositions, and cast a swift glance toward the doorway.
Rosavyn’s laughter still rang from the front of the shop; no shadow moved toward the kitchen.
Satisfied, he leaned in, a careful, deliberate degree closer.
Lucie reached up and drew aside the top of her right sleeve, easing it toward the edge of her shoulder. There, in the hollow beneath her collarbone, worked in fine dark lines, was a small honeybee.
Kazrian stared at it. Then he stared a while longer.
“That,” he managed at last, “is the very last thing I would have guessed. In a hundred years of guessing. That this—this is what you ladies were about, giggling off into the dark.” He looked from the little bee up to her face and back again. “A honeybee.”
“There was an elf artist traveling with the market this year.” She felt suddenly, absurdly shy of it, of him seeing, and had to resist the urge to draw the sleeve back up.
“From the far continent. It is a custom of theirs. The markings are not merely ornamental. You are meant to carry something true. Something of your own nature, or a vow, that sort of thing. Rosavyn and Charlotte have something else, in places just as hidden.”
Kazrian said nothing, still considering the small shape.
“What do you think of it?” she asked softly.
His gaze shifted back to hers, and for a long moment he only looked at her. Then he bent his head and lowered his lips to the skin beneath her collarbone, and pressed a soft kiss just there, over the little bee.
“I think,” he murmured against her skin, “that it is perfect.”
Warmth bloomed all the way through her, slow and golden as the light through the honey jar, and she smiled and relaxed and thought that she might happily stay exactly here, on the edge of a worktable, for the remainder of her life.
Then Kazrian drew back, and there was something rueful in his smile now. “And I think,” he added, “that I have distracted you quite disgracefully, and you have amber snaps to make, and I have a storeroom that is not going to reorganize itself.”
He set his hands at her waist once more and lifted her down as easily as he had lifted her up. But before he let her go he caught her hand and turned her under his arm in a single brief unhurried twirl, so that her skirts belled out and the light spun gold around them, and she came up laughing.
“There,” he said. “Now the morning may proceed.”
“You are entirely ridiculous.”
“I am reliably informed of it. Chiefly by you, and by Balthazar.” He pressed a kiss to her knuckles and released her, then turned for the stairs.
Lucie watched him go. He was headed up to the storeroom—that stubborn little room whose door had resisted him for the better part of the Season.
He had given up on the lock itself, tried to remove the door entirely, discovered an enchantment that appeared to be keeping the door firmly fixed to its hinges, finally defeated that enchantment, and now the storeroom possessed no door at all. Victory, at last.
Since then, he had been reorganizing everything that lived in both the storeroom and the bedroom.
Lucie turned back to her worktable, drew the bowl toward her, and took up her spoon.
Nearby, the glass honey jar poured its steady light across the wood.
On his cushion, Balthazar had rolled onto his back with all four paws in the air, having apparently forgiven them both and gone wholly, bonelessly to sleep in the warmth.
Through the curtain, Rosavyn began another story, and the front room laughed again.
And the light came in gold, the way the best mornings did, and everything—every last ordinary piece of it—was perfect.