Chapter Three
By Wednesday afternoon, I was contemplating feigning the pox to buy myself some more time on the rent.
I’d come to the shoppe early every morning and stayed late every evening this week, all in the hope that Brianna would show up and provide a way out of my troubles.
Meanwhile, I’d done everything I could think of to get the wolpertinger to speak again.
I’d even gone so far as to hold a lit match under its whiskers, hoping the threat of a fiery death would make it open its furry little gob.
But it was silent, and the bell over the door didn’t ring once in three days. I was well and truly doomed.
I was beginning to clean up for the evening when I heard a light rapping on the door. I rushed to unlock it, only to find Finlay staring back at me through the window.
I rolled my eyes and turned away, not even bothering to open the door for him. As I’d expected, he came in without waiting for an invitation.
“Lovely to see you as well, Willow,” he said, removing his cap and placing it on the wolpertinger’s horned head. “How’s business?”
I thought about smacking him with the broom I was holding but decided against it. I couldn’t risk breaking my one good broom over his thick skull. “What do you want, Finlay?”
“I come bearing news.”
I scoffed as I knelt to sweep the dust into a pan. “I’m not interested in your news.”
I started at the sound of his voice right next to my ear. “It concerns our friend Brianna Hargrave.”
“Stop sneaking up on me. She’s obviously not going to work with us,” I said, rising so fast I nearly knocked him over.
“Probably not, if she hasn’t shown up by now.”
I emptied the dustpan into the bin, set it onto the counter, and turned to face him.
For a moment, all I could see were his brilliant blue eyes, and I found myself at a loss for words.
Finlay was a braw lad. Obnoxiously so. One would think I’d be immune to it by now, and I was, for the most part.
But every once in a while, I’d see him again as if for the first time.
The day we met, I’d gone to the print shoppe to pick up fliers for a sale Da was planning.
He had a fool’s notion—one of many—that if we slashed our prices, we’d sell far more, whether or not our objects were magical.
People couldn’t resist a deal, he said, and we needed cash fast. We were a month behind on rent at the time, and the landlord had far less sympathy for us when Da was still alive.
I told him it was a terrible idea, but he never listened.
Not to me, not to anyone. He passed away a week before the sale was due to begin, a sudden heart attack that the coroner attributed to stress, though Da hadn’t been at all poorly.
But we’d already paid for the fliers, and I needed the money more than ever.
I’d even decided I’d have to sell the mourning ring he’d had made with a lock of my mother’s blond hair, something he’d never taken off for as long as I could remember.
But the dratted thing was nowhere to be found.
I added the coroner to my growing list of enemies and set out for the printer.
I’d expected to find Jack working at the print shoppe, as usual, but was greeted instead by a tall, blue-eyed boy in a gray cap.
“Who the hell are you?” I’d asked, because I was bitterly angry with Da for dying on me and I wanted to be home sobbing into my tea, not preparing for a sale.
“I’m Finlay Barrow,” he’d replied without missing a beat. “Who the hell are you?”
I would never admit that I already liked him then.
Even before my father died, I wasn’t known for my social skills.
People told Da it was because I’d grown up without a mother, that he should marry for my sake, if not his own.
But he would laugh and tell them I was this way because of my mother.
Nessa Macrae was strong-willed, stubborn, and “prickly as a hedgehog.” Da courted her for two years before she finally said yes.
“What is it?” Finlay asked now, touching his face self-consciously and alerting me to the fact that I’d been staring. “Did I get ink on my nose again?”
“Yes,” I lied, pretending to wipe a smudge away with my thumb and hoping he wouldn’t notice the tremor in my hand. “Get your news over with, would you? I need to get home to Argyle.”
“I ran into Bri this morning.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Ran into?” Bri?
“Fine. I went by the Four Swans to ask her one more time for help.”
“You sure that’s all you were after?”
It was his turn to blush, bringing out the faint dusting of freckles on his cheeks. “Yes, I’m sure. I spoke with Jack, and he told me something I thought might entice her.”
I didn’t like the way my stomach soured with jealousy. What did I care if Finlay liked Brianna? Still, I couldn’t help feeling he should have come to me with the news first. “Really.”
“He knows a grimoire conservator. Says he lives about a day’s travel from here by coach. Seems to me that if Bri has enough money to stay at the Four Swans, she’s probably got enough to rent a coach for two days.”
I walked past him to the ornately carved curio cabinet full of our tiniest magical items: seashells that whispered trade secrets from across the world; candles that, when burned, created the illusion of whatever they smelled like; a brass dish full of nails that always struck true.
Or would, anyhow, if any were real. I turned the skeleton key—supposedly made from the wrist bone of a pixie—in the lock and pocketed it.
“What did she have to say?” I asked, still facing the cabinet.
A tiny spark of hope lit in my chest as I looked at the objects.
Da had always insisted they were real, even though no one could make them work.
But if Brianna had some kind of ability to turn even one of these objects into the real thing, I could make enough money to buy myself time.
Because no matter how much I resented my father, I couldn’t bring myself to let go of the one piece of him I had left: his shoppe.
I could see Finlay walking toward me in the mirrored back of the curio cabinet. He stopped several feet behind me. “She said she’d help us.”
I squeezed my hands into fists. “How?”
“We take her to the conservator first. Then she’ll make the wolpertinger speak again.”
I finally faced him. “What kind of a deal is that?” I asked, incredulous. “How are we to believe she’ll follow through? Give her the name of the conservator. We don’t owe her any more than that.”
Finlay placed a tentative hand on my shoulder. “I came to tell you myself because she was afraid to enter the shoppe again. She says she doesn’t have very good control of her magic. But it’s real, Willow.”
I shrugged his hand away. “How do you know?”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver thimble. “Because she gave me this.”
I snorted. “Even if it’s real silver, it’s hardly worth two days away from the shoppe.”
He shook his head, unable to keep a grin from twitching at his lips. “Give me your thumb, Willow.”
Reluctantly, I raised my fist and lifted my thumb.
He placed the thimble so gently, his fingers brushing mine, that I startled.
Fortunately, it was easy to pretend it had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the strange sensation that washed up my wrist, over my arm, and down my shoulder.
I glanced up at Finlay. Then the bastard did something so unexpected I didn’t have the wherewithal to smack him.
He raised the little knife he kept in his pocket and stabbed me in the stomach.
Was this what the wolpertinger was trying to warn me of? That the girl in the oxblood cloak would turn my only friend against me?
The blade bounced off my skin with so much force Finlay’s hand flew backward. I checked my abdomen for damage, realizing the blade hadn’t made contact with my flesh.
Meanwhile, he massaged his right shoulder with his left hand. “Damn it. I thought I was prepared, and it still hurts.”
By now, my wherewithal had returned with a vengeance. I cuffed him on the arm, none too lightly. “What do you think you’re doing, stabbing me like that? You could have killed me!”
“Not while you’re wearing that thimble. It provides an invisible shield over your whole body. Like a thimble, only—”
“I understand how a magic thimble works,” I barked, though I’d never heard of one, let alone worn it. “I’m going to take it off now, but not until you promise you won’t stab me again. Ever.”
Finlay returned his knife to his pocket and held up both hands. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I muttered to myself that I was fairly certain that was a bald-faced lie, and Finlay Barrow a filthy liar, while I removed the thimble. “Why would she give us this?”
“As a demonstration of sorts. Proof that she’ll help us once we’ve taken her to the conservator.”
“You keep saying we. Why can’t she go alone?”
“She’s an outlander, Willow. You know how people can be toward strangers here.”
He wasn’t wrong, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a verbal acknowledgment. “We can’t guarantee the conservator will have the grimoire she’s after, can we? What’s to stop me from taking this thimble to the trader we saw at the Four Swans and making a deal?”
Finlay shook his head with a bemused smile. “I have to give her credit, she already has you pegged.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She told me to tell you that the thimble won’t work if it’s in anyone’s hands but ours. Try to sell to a trader, and he’ll think you’re cheating him.”
I squinted. “How can she do that?”
Finlay shrugged. “No idea. But I don’t think it’s worth the risk to prove her wrong.”
“Hmph.” I walked around Finlay and approached the wolpertinger.
If the thing were real and not a taxidermic monstrosity, it would be worth far more than this magic thimble.
According to the old tales, wolpertingers were wish granters, and benevolent ones at that.
They wouldn’t try to trick you out of wishes like a genie or curse you like a monkey’s paw.
But just because Brianna had the ability to confer her own magic onto something—as I suspected was the case with this thimble, if she could turn it on and off at will—didn’t mean she could do more than make a stuffed rabbit talk.
And while that might be enough to con someone into a sale, it wasn’t the same as, for example, a real dragon tooth.
“We have to be back here by Friday evening,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I have to pay rent by Sunday, and that hardly gives me enough time to take whatever Brianna can offer me and trade it for cold, hard silver. My landlord won’t accept anything less.” Which was all true. It simply wasn’t my main impetus for getting back before Saturday.
“I work tomorrow and Friday, Willow. You know that.”
My lip curled. “So I have to go alone with her, is what you’re saying?”
“I’m saying, let’s go Saturday morning. We’ll be back by Sunday evening, and your landlord can give you a few extra hours.”
“I’m already three months behind, Finlay.
My extra hours are long used up.” I couldn’t tell him about my plans for that dragon tooth.
He may be willing to help me find a missing grimoire.
He might even encourage me to make a legal trade with the Islander.
But he would never go along with what I had in mind.
“Jack already did me a favor by telling me about the grimoire conservator. I can’t ask for two days off work.
” He didn’t say what I knew he was thinking.
He couldn’t afford to take two days off.
Unlike me, he was too proud to admit it.
I’d lost my pride the moment I went to the landlord’s office and begged him not to evict me from Da’s shoppe.
It was the second hardest thing I’d ever done, after burying Da the day before.
“She’s not going to like it,” I said finally. “Brianna, I mean. She’ll want you there.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Not because she likes you, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I snapped.
“No, I’d never—”
“Anyway, even if she does like you for some confounded reason, she decidedly doesn’t like me.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
It was such a half-hearted consolation I couldn’t help smiling. “Liar.”
Finlay smiled back, though not big enough to show his wonky tooth. “She could learn to like you,” he said. “You just need to make yourself slightly more … likeable.”
I shuddered dramatically. “The horror.”
When his smile widened and I caught the gleam of his crooked tooth, I felt a warmth in my chest and a fluttering in my belly that wasn’t unlike the prelude to vomit.
“Everything all right?” Finlay asked, scrubbing his hand through his hair. “You look a bit funny.”
I fought the urge to smooth his ruffled hair. “I think I might be coming down with something. I better get home. You’ll let Brianna know we leave tomorrow morning?”
He nodded. “I will. Get some rest. Can’t have you traveling if you’re ill.”
“I’ll be fine,” I assured him. “Now go on to your lass. She’ll be expecting you.” I opened the door for him, but he stayed where he was.
“Willow.”
“Yes?” That funny feeling was back in my belly. I waited for him to tell me I was being ridiculous, that Brianna was not his lass, that I was the only girl he’d ever love. Even if he was only teasing, I couldn’t deny I liked hearing it.
Instead, he shook his head and held out his hand.
With mock chagrin, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the thimble. “Oh, very well.”
“No one knows you better than I do,” he said, fetching his cap from the wolpertinger and placing it on his tousled hair. “You remember that now.”
I stared after him until he’d disappeared down the road. He wasn’t wrong, I thought as I fingered the real magic thimble in my pocket. But knowing me better than anyone else didn’t mean all that much, in the end.