Chapter Two
I hadn’t been to the Four Swans since my father died.
He’d taken me there every year for my birthday dinner, and now it tinged too many happy memories sad and gray as dirty dishwater.
We’d never eat there together again. Da always ordered a steak cooked medium rare and rosemary potatoes, while I preferred the roast chicken with butter-drenched carrots and parsnips.
At least it was breakfast time now, so the dining room was full of the warm, yeasty scent of baked bread instead of roast meat.
I could pretend I was somewhere else for a while.
I caught sight of Finlay immediately. He was seated at a booth, the sable-haired girl across from him.
She’d foregone the oxblood cloak this morning.
Again, I thought of the wolpertinger—real or fake, there was something eldritch afoot—and how it had tried to warn me away from the girl.
But if it thought a little competition for Finlay Barrow’s heart would dissuade me from the possibility of dragon teeth, it was wrong.
I made my way to join them, clocking the man from the Sapphire Isles as I passed.
He was easy enough to spot with his long, forked beard and rings marching up and down both ears.
There had to be twenty piercings between the two, and enough gold there to catch the attention of every thief in Ardmuir.
But even the greenest thief knew to steer clear of an Islander.
I slid in across from the girl, next to Finlay, smoothing my skirt as I settled. I was surprised Finlay had managed to ingratiate himself with the stranger so quickly, considering how flighty she’d been yesterday. Then I saw her expression and almost burst into laughter.
Her full lips were pressed together, her brown eyes darting between the two of us as if we were a two-headed sheep and she wasn’t sure which head to focus on.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Finlay,” I groaned. “Does she even know who you are?”
The girl shook her head as Finlay cleared his throat, apparently only now finding his words. “I was about to introduce myself,” he said, his voice breaking like he was a lad of thirteen, though he’d turned eighteen last month.
“Finlay, this is…” I trailed off when I realized I didn’t know her name. “At any rate, that’s Finlay, and I’m Willow. We met in the shoppe yesterday.”
“I remember you,” the girl said, clearly wishing she didn’t. “But I still don’t know why you’re sitting at my table.”
I shrugged. “Because Finlay fancies you.”
He stammered something unintelligible while I cocked my head and studied the girl. “What’s your name?”
I thought she might run, but she finally released her breath in a huff, sending a lock of her hair floating upward before it fluttered back over her forehead. “Brianna.”
“Brianna,” I repeated, glancing around for a waiter. “After the way you ran out of my shoppe yesterday, I wasn’t sure you’d ever talk to me again.”
“You already met?” Finlay asked, always three steps behind in a conversation. He was lucky he was so beautiful, because I sometimes wondered if there was anything but cotton fluff between his ears.
“Technically, we’re just meeting now. Tell us, Brianna. What brings you to Ardmuir? Surely you have bookshoppes in Carterra.”
“I have family from Achnarach. Figured I may as well start my search here in Ardmuir.”
“And you thought you’d find your family in a grimoire?” I asked. Poking the badger, my father would have called it, but I wasn’t interested in a friendship with this girl. I wanted to know how she’d made the wolpertinger speak. More importantly, I wanted to know if she could do it again.
She raised a finger to her mouth. “Please don’t say that so loud.”
Finlay nudged me in the thigh, hopelessly lost.
“Why not? I run a magical shoppe. Magic is no secret around here. You’re calling more attention to yourself by being so dodgy.”
Brianna narrowed her eyes, and I felt a grudging respect for her, which wasn’t the same as liking her but was a step in the right direction. “We both know you’re not selling anything magical in that shoppe of yours. Least of all grimoires.”
Grudging respect officially revoked.
“Touché,” Finlay said with a smile.
I shot him a withering look, causing him to shift in his seat as though I’d inflicted physical pain.
I was about to fire back at Brianna with a similarly pithy rejoinder—she knew as well as I did that the wolpertinger had spoken when she touched it—when a man sat down with the Sapphire Islander.
He was around my father’s age, with sandy brown hair and a neat mustache.
Unlike the Sapphire Islander, who was dressed in a salt-stained coat and baggy trousers tucked into his leather boots, this man wore a neatly tailored three-piece suit.
A trader, I assumed, but a well-dressed one.
“Shh,” I shushed, though no one had spoken.
I had a clear view of them both, but I couldn’t hear their words from here. I considered walking past to eavesdrop, but the waiter chose that moment to stop at our table.
“Miss Hargrave,” he said to Brianna with a polite nod. “Will it be the usual, then?”
Miss Hargrave. I filed her surname away for safekeeping, along with the knowledge that she’d been staying at the Four Swans long enough to have a “usual.” And that she had enough money to stay at Ardmuir’s poshest hotel.
“Your guests?” the waiter asked, eyeing Finlay and me as though we were weeds in a rose garden.
“We’ll have whatever she’s having,” I snapped. Finlay nudged me again under the table, but I continued to ignore him. We didn’t want this man thinking we couldn’t afford to be here, even if we actually couldn’t afford to be here.
“Very well,” the waiter said, slithering off to the table where the Sapphire Islander sat.
I fingered a coin in my pocket, wondering how easily the waiter could be bought.
Surely he was overhearing useful information about these strangers, and I didn’t see how else I was going to glean anything about dragon teeth at this ridiculous excuse for a breakfast.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the table near the bay window where Da and I always sat. If I kept my focus elsewhere, I could imagine him there now, a fuzzy, ephemeral shape with a familiar slope to his shoulders and a proud, jutting chin.
“Why are you here?” Brianna asked, and I dragged my attention back to her pretty face. “I don’t recall inviting either of you to breakfast.”
“That’s our business,” I barked, even though we’d made it her business by sitting with her.
(I’d heard the term “kill them with kindness” batted around by those without guile or a whiff of sense, but I preferred “confuse them with cruelty.”) “Now then, Finlay works at the print shoppe here in Ardmuir. I reckon he might be able to help you find your grimoire.”
Before Finlay could counter my claim, I dug my nails into his thigh until I elicited a satisfying squeak. At least I had Brianna’s attention. Her eyes darted around the room before settling back on mine.
“All right, then. Where?”
I squeezed Finlay tighter to keep him quiet. “Not so fast. He’ll help you find the grimoire, but only if you come back to my shoppe.”
“Why?”
I released Finlay and crossed my arms on the tabletop, leaning forward. “Because something happened while you were there. I want to see if it will happen again.”
“You mean the winged ferret?”
“Wolpertinger. And yes. It’s never spoken before.”
She grunted. “I’m sure it had nothing to do with me.”
“Bollocks,” I hissed. “You ran out of there like you had hot coals in your britches.”
“I was frightened,” she shot back. “I’ve never encountered a talking jackalope before.”
“Wolpertinger. And neither have I. That’s why you need to come back to the shoppe.”
Finlay, whose eyes had been darting back and forth between us like bouncing balls, finally threw up his hands in surrender. “Can someone please tell me what’s going on?”
Brianna and I stared at each other across the table, waiting for the other to blink first.
After a long pause, she sighed. “Fine. But we shouldn’t talk here. My room will be safer.” Before I could answer, she rose from the table and began to walk out of the dining room.
“What about the dragon teeth?” Finlay said to me, as forlorn as a lost puppy.
I rolled my eyes and gathered my skirt. “We’ll get to that, Finlay. In the meantime, what about breakfast?”
I’d never been inside one of the guest rooms in the Four Swans, and I was impressed despite my best efforts to appear as if I spent all my time in fancy hotels.
The damask wallpaper had a subtle swan print, gold on butter yellow, and the duvet on the four-poster bed was pristine.
I’d never seen linens so white in my life.
A faint smell of rose water permeated the air.
Brianna had a little leather trunk on the luggage rack at the foot of the bed, along with what appeared to be a violin case, but aside from that—and the oxblood cloak, hanging on a gold swan-shaped hook behind the door—the room was neat as a pin.
She motioned for Finlay and me to sit on the two chairs by the window while she perched on the edge of the mattress, as though ready to take flight at a moment’s notice.
What was she so afraid of? Her dress wasn’t extravagant, but it appeared well made, and her leather boots looked brand-new.
I hadn’t had new shoes since Da died, and my cramped toes twinged with envy.
She must have noticed me studying her, because she crossed her ankles self-consciously and cleared her throat. “All right. I’m ready to discuss your offer. But first I need proof that Finlay can help me find the grimoire.”
He looked to me, as if I had thought this plan through beyond getting here and eating a large breakfast paid for by someone else.
When it became clear I hadn’t, he turned to look at Brianna.
“Ehm, well, my boss procures his paper and ink from a man in Colworth. I imagine he may have some idea where we can start.”
She crossed her arms, unimpressed.
“What do you want this grimoire for?” I asked. “If we know that, we can help you better.”
“That’s my business,” she said, echoing my words from earlier.
“Does it have something to do with the wolpertinger?”
She didn’t answer, but I could tell I’d touched a nerve when her lips pressed together.
“Listen. We both have things we want. You want to find this mysterious grimoire you won’t tell us about, and I need to sell articles in my shoppe.
If you can repeat whatever you did with the wolpertinger, I think we can help each other out, but that’s up to you.
” I rose and nodded for Finlay to join me.
“You can find me at the shoppe. If you don’t come by, we’ll pretend none of this ever happened. ”
Brianna was chewing on a fingernail. Given that her other nails were filed into neat little crescents, this wasn’t merely a bad habit. Whatever she needed this grimoire for, it couldn’t be anything good. But that wasn’t my problem. Rent, on the other hand, was.
As we got to the door, she cleared her throat. “I need to think on this. How long can you give me?”
Rent was due in less than a week. If I didn’t make a big sale by then, it was unlikely the landlord would give me another chance, considering I was already three months behind.
He had never particularly liked my father, and while he wasn’t keen to throw me out—that would mean finding a new tenant, after all—business was business.
“I need to know by Wednesday,” I said, hoping the extra days would be enough to come up with a plan B, should this not go the way I hoped it would.
With that, we left Brianna behind. We were about to pass through the lobby when I heard the soft, sibilant accent of the Sapphire Islander, standing with the trader near the front door. I grabbed Finlay and pulled him behind a large potted plant.
“It’s settled, then?”
The trader nodded. “Two hundred pounds for the tooth. You’ll get the rest when you deliver the bones.”
The men clasped forearms in the way of Sapphire Islanders. The deal was done.
“Bones?” Finlay whispered, his breath tickling the hairs on my neck.
But I hardly noticed. My ears were ringing with the phrase two hundred pounds.
With that much money, I could pay my rent for the entire year and still have enough for food.
Hell, I might even splurge on a pair of fancy boots.
If this trader was willing to pay that much for a single tooth, it had to be real.
Swindlers wore fake jewels and brokered deals in back alleys.
But the trader was well dressed, conducting business in a fine restaurant.
Besides, he’d be a fool to cross the Islander.
They were known for swift, eye-for-an-eye justice.
“Saturday at midnight. At the docks. Be there.”
Oh, I thought, my mind spinning with possibilities. I will be.