Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
The enchanted carriage slid to a halt outside The Charmed Leaf Tea House, and Aurelise pressed her palms against her temples, trying to quiet the chaos in her mind.
Every emotion she’d spent years learning to contain was now crashing against her carefully constructed barriers like waves against a crumbling seawall.
It was too much—this breathless, terrible, wonderful rush that swelled inside her until it ached, as though her heart could not possibly hold so much feeling without splintering under the weight of it.
She needed Kazrian. She needed someone who would understand this drowning sensation without judgment, who knew her well enough to recognize when she teetered on the edge of being utterly consumed.
Oh, Lady Aurelise, we’re here! We’re here! Thimble’s telepathic voice bubbled with nervous energy as she perched on Aurelise’s shoulder, her tiny paws tangling in loose strands of hair. Everything will be all right, I promise!
When Aurelise had burst into her chambers after escaping the music room, Thimble had taken one look at her face and immediately demanded to know what was wrong.
Aurelise had tried—through tears and uneven breaths—to explain.
It hadn’t been an easy tale to make sense of: something along the lines of “The prince is entirely too wonderful, and I may be hopelessly in love with him, which is precisely why I must flee both my feelings and this palace at once.”
To their credit, her companions had grasped the general sentiment with remarkable speed and leaped into action—after Thimble’s brief, squealing interlude of, You LOVE him! I KNEW it! I told you from the very first day how wonderful he is!
Then the tiny pink mouse had created a distraction with the palace guards while Spark had somehow procured use of one of the lesser enchanted carriages—Aurelise did not dare ask how—and the two of them had smuggled her out through the servants’ entrance.
They’d gone to Rowanwood House first, of course.
It had been Thimble’s idea to scout ahead while Aurelise waited in the carriage, her tiny form and Spark’s diminutive size allowing them to slip through the house unnoticed.
They’d returned with disappointing news—Kazrian wasn’t there, though Thimble had overheard one of the footmen mentioning he might be at the tea house.
Now, Aurelise climbed from the carriage, her voice still a little wobbly as she said, “Thank you for your help, dear ones. Will you … will you wait for me? I presume I shall need to return to Solstice Hall after I’ve spoken to my brother.”
Of course! Thimble squeaked.
As if we would abandon you, Spark huffed.
The carriage door swung itself shut, and Aurelise stared at the familiar ivy-covered walls of her grandmother’s establishment.
She could hear the gentle hum of conversation from within.
The front entrance was out of the question—walking through the main tea room in her current state would set every gossip bird in Bloomhaven squawking before sunset. So the back entrance it would be.
Aurelise gathered her skirts and hurried along the path around the side of the tea house.
She rounded the corner toward the kitchen door, moving too quickly to properly watch where she was going, and nearly collided with someone emerging from within.
Strong hands caught her shoulders, steadying her, and she looked up to find—
“Kazrian!”
Her twin’s storm-gray eyes widened with surprise, then immediately narrowed with concern. There was something off about his expression—a tightness around his mouth, a brightness to his eyes that suggested he’d been wrestling with his own troubles.
They stared at each other for a suspended moment, and then, in perfect unison, both said, “What happened?”
Despite the emotional storm still raging in her chest, Aurelise nearly laughed at the absurdity of it.
Kazrian recovered first, shaking his head. “Nothing. Nothing at all. I’m perfectly well. But you—Lise, what’s wrong? Aren’t you meant to be at Solstice Hall?”
“I—yes. But I …” She pressed her shaking lips together, trying to hold back the flood of emotion. She took a breath, opened her mouth, and words spilled out. “But I think I have fallen in love, and not merely with one person, but two, and it’s really quite awful!”
Kazrian’s eyebrows shot upward, confusion written plainly across his features. Then he started laughing. “You … what?”
“Do not laugh!” she scolded. Then she threw her arms around him and buried her face against his shoulder. He returned the embrace, holding her tight as she struggled to contain her sobs.
“Might we speak somewhere private?” she managed, voice muffled against his coat. “Somewhere we won’t be observed?”
“The gardens?” he suggested. “The back portion should suffice. There’s no one about except the garden gnomes and pixies, perhaps a sprite or two.”
“Hopefully no gossip birds,” Aurelise added with a watery laugh, pulling back to wipe at her eyes.
Together they walked through the kitchen gardens, past neat rows of herbs and flowers. They passed the fountain and the outdoor seating area and finally settled behind a particularly large glimmerbark tree whose trunk would shield them from any curious eyes in the kitchen.
They sank onto the grass, backs against the rough bark, and for a moment Aurelise simply breathed.
The afternoon sun filtered through the leaves above, dappling them with golden light.
A bee droned lazily past, while the fountain tinkled pleasantly.
The peaceful setting helped, though that tide of emotion still surged within her chest, threatening to pull her under at any moment.
“So,” Kazrian said carefully, “two people? I do hope one of them isn’t our charming prince who enjoys flirting his way through every Season.”
Aurelise covered her face with both hands.
“Truly?” Kazrian’s voice rose in shock. “I was not being serious! Do you mean to tell me you have genuinely fallen in love with Prince Ryden?”
“I’m endeavoring very hard not to,” she groaned, lowering her hands to peer at him miserably. Then, because there seemed little point in maintaining secrets after going to the effort of sneaking out of a palace in order to confide in him, she told him everything.
She spoke of R first—“I’ve been corresponding with a gentleman I’ve never met in secret for nearly a year now”—and had to pause when Kazrian spluttered, “What?!” She told him of the letters, of how she’d shared essentially everything except her identity with R, and how he had done the same in return.
How it felt as though she knew him better than almost anyone else in her life.
She told him of the dare list, of how Prince Ryden had somehow found his way into nearly every challenge she’d attempted.
How he’d teased and encouraged her, how one absurd escapade had led to another until she’d quite lost control of her own heart.
She’d flirted—badly—swum in a lake at midnight, climbed to a rooftop to stargaze, run through rain-drenched gardens, and been outrageously, scandalously improper at least half a dozen times.
“Oh, and there was the driftshade smoking,” she added as an afterthought. “I’d nearly forgotten about that.”
“The—you smoked driftshade leaf?”
By the time she concluded her account—ending off with the fact that she was now ignoring R’s written confession of love and had fled from a prince who had all but declared the very same thing with his ‘I want to choose you’—Kazrian was staring at her as though she’d suddenly become an entirely different person.
“I genuinely don’t believe I know you at all,” he said slowly. “When did you become so … bold? I’m beginning to think I knew nothing of what I spoke when I told Prince Ryden at the Season’s start that my sister desired nothing more than a quiet, unremarkable existence.”
Aurelise straightened indignantly. “You also told him I was dull? Both you and Evryn? I am not dull!”
“Firstly, neither of us employed the word ‘dull.’ And secondly, yes, I am now shockingly aware of precisely how not dull you are.”
A few moments of quiet fell between them.
Aurelise sighed, tipping her head back against the tree trunk and covering her face once more.
Through her fingers, she found herself describing all the reasons her mysterious correspondent was so wonderful—his wit, his patience, his ability to see straight through to her heart with mere words on paper.
Then all the reasons the prince was equally wonderful and nothing like society’s perception of him as a shallow flirt.
He was kind and genuine, protective and vulnerable, with depths she’d never expected to discover.
“And it’s all so terrible,” she concluded miserably as she lowered her hands, “because I never wished to love anyone, let alone two people.”
“But … why?”
She heaved another breath, struggling to find the words to explain. “Because it’s … so vast. So overwhelming. It will consume me entirely.”
“And that’s necessarily terrible?”
“Yes! It’s … it hurts! It hurts, Kazrian, because there is just so much of it, and it leaves me feeling as though I can barely breathe. As though I’m drowning. Drowning in him—whichever one I might choose.”
Kazrian was quiet for a long moment, then sighed, tipping his own head back to gaze up through the canopy of leaves.
“Perhaps drowning in someone is not the terrible fate you imagine. Perhaps that is precisely how it’s meant to feel when you fall in love.
” His voice had gone soft, distant. “If she would permit it, I would gladly drown in her.”
Aurelise blinked, turning to stare at her brother. He looked back at her, momentarily astonished, as though he couldn’t quite believe he’d spoken those words aloud. Then she collapsed into laughter, pressing a hand over her mouth while Kazrian groaned and covered his face with both hands.