Chapter Fourteen #2
“She’s right,” Bri said. “I’ve been avoiding it, Fin, but Willow is right.”
“Ha!” I smiled at Finlay, but he only gave a mildly disapproving shake of his head.
Bri dabbed the corners of her mouth primly with her napkin and leaned closer to us across the booth.
“My parents lived farther north, near the border with Galtry. By all accounts, their lives were peaceful.” Bri paused, taking a long sip of her cider before continuing. “I told you my father is an architect.”
I nodded. “And your mother is a physician.”
“Yes, but this wasn’t anything to do with her profession.
Father was competing for a contract to design a large hotel, something grander and more beautiful than anything he’d ever built before.
His design won. But a rival architect accused my father of cheating, of stealing his plans and his commission. ”
I had heard of petty curses before, but this seemed beyond the pale. “The rival cursed you? A baby?”
“We don’t know if it was truly directed at me. My mother was still pregnant when the man cursed her in the street. For months, there was no sign of it. It wasn’t until I was about six months old and beginning to crawl that my parents realized.”
I held my breath, unable to imagine what Bri had touched that sent her parents running for another continent.
“I had a lantern in my room. A child’s night-light, really.
It played music and turned in a circle, projecting images on the wall: a dragon, a castle on fire, a witch extinguishing the flames with her magic.
When I touched it, the entire house went up in flames, and if there was a witch around, she didn’t bother to save us.
We lost almost everything in that fire.”
I glanced at Finlay, who looked as confused as I was. “Why would anyone put something like that in a baby’s room?”
“It was a gift from a colleague of my father’s,” Bri explained.
“We had no idea it was magical until I touched it. The colleague didn’t, either, for what it’s worth.
He’d purchased it secondhand. My parents took me to a witch, who uncovered what exactly was wrong with me.
That’s when my parents decided to move to Carterra.
Not just to get away from the architect, but to get away from all magic. ”
I had heard that Carterrans shied away from magic, but it wasn’t exactly like magic was hiding around every corner in Achnarach. “So instead of searching for a way to break the curse, they chose to leave everything they knew behind?” I asked.
She leaned back. “The other architect got the commission for the hotel. It seemed clear my father would have to rebuild his career wherever he went. He still never achieved the level of prestige in Carterra that he dreamed of. It’s been hard for them as immigrants.”
“And you were forced to spend your entire childhood in isolation,” Finlay said gently. “I’m so sorry, Bri. That’s awful.”
She glanced away from us, but not before I saw the glimmer of tears in her eyes.
“Well. Now you know why I came here on my own. If they knew I’d come back to the source of all our troubles…
” She released a shaky sigh. “They’ve spent the past seventeen years terrified for me, and that was when I was under their roof. ”
She didn’t say the words, but I could feel them simmering beneath the surface.
Terrified of me. I’d been betrayed by my father in many ways, but there was nothing that would cause him to turn his back on me.
Nothing but death, anyhow. Here I was, keeping information from Bri that could have already released her from the curse.
I’d been to the printer several times to check on our ad, but no one had responded so far, and it would only run for a few more days.
My stomach soured, but I chalked it up to indigestion.
Finlay smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry, Bri. I bet your grimoire is at the library waiting for us.”
It was such an utterly Finlay thing to say. He was an eternal optimist. But even my cynical heart didn’t want to voice what I knew we were all thinking. Finding Bri’s cure was going to be like finding a needle in a haystack, only we didn’t even know what city that haystack was in.
“What about the architect who cursed you?” I asked. “Maybe we can pay him for the antidote.”
“Believe me, I considered it. I went to Galtry when I first arrived here in Achnarach. But Lord Montrose disappeared years ago, when the hotel he built collapsed a few weeks after it was finished. My father had designed a beautiful glass dome for the lobby of the hotel. He was a brilliant architect, and this dome was to be constructed in a very careful and specific way. Montrose decided to steal the dome, only he didn’t know what he was doing.
Fortunately no one was killed, but there were some severe injuries.
He was disgraced and left the country shortly after. ”
I was down to my last few burnt chips, and I sifted through them thoughtfully. “All right, so we may have to do more digging into his whereabouts after we get back to Ardmuir. What I want to know is why he cursed your mother with magic. It seems like a strange choice, and a very specific one.”
“It was specific,” Bri replied. “My parents are Foundationalists.”
I felt as though the wind had been knocked out of me.
Suddenly every interaction I’d had with Bri was bathed in a new light.
Setting foot in my shoppe must have been anathema to everything she’d been raised to believe.
Foundationalists didn’t just eschew magic.
They abhorred it. Montrose must have known this and gone straight for the jugular. Which meant …
“Was there something between Montrose and your mother?” I asked, earning a horrified look from Finlay.
“There was, before she met my father. They courted in university for a time, and Montrose was desperately in love with her.”
“I take it your mother didn’t reciprocate his feelings,” I said.
“She’d obviously moved on to my father, considering she was pregnant with me.”
I wrinkled my nose in disgust. “He thought cursing her forever was going to help? Men can be so…” I glanced at Finlay and stopped myself. “Montrose sounds like a monster.”
Finlay ran his hands through his hair, disheveling it even further. “Bri, this is…”
“I know.” She sat across from us in the booth, suddenly looking very small. If I’d been on the same side of the table as her, I might have embraced her, curse be damned. “It’s a lot.”
“What about your parents?” I asked. “How did they cope with having a magical daughter?”
Finlay nudged me under the table, and I shot him a sideways glance. But his gaze was focused on Bri.
“It’s complicated,” Bri said. “We should go.” She reached into her pocket for her coin purse. “I’ll pay for dinner, since this trip is for my benefit.” She pulled out one of the coins I’d given her, our profit from our first honest sale.
As we left the pub and headed to where Fergus was hitched with the cart, I offered to sit in the back on the way to Marcail’s house, replaying the conversation in my head.
Did I always offend people without meaning to?
Had Finlay pointed this out before, and I’d been too obtuse to notice?
Or was I obsessing over everything he said now, because I suddenly cared in a way I hadn’t before?
I slumped down farther in the cart, wondering when I’d missed the lesson everyone else seemed to have mastered by now: how to be normal.