Chapter Seventeen #2
“The weather is turning dreich. Agatha suggested we get on the road before the storm hits, but Marcail will continue to search for us.” There.
I’d told Marcail the truth and the universe hadn’t seen fit to smite me where I stood.
If she didn’t think we needed to tell Bri about the trader and The Oxblood Book, who was I to disagree?
Bri nodded, not seeming surprised that we hadn’t discovered the cure to her curse. We stared down at Finlay, who had resettled with his head on the table and was snoring softly. I felt a warm bloom of affection in my chest.
“I suppose we’d better wake him,” Bri said.
“Aye, I suppose so,” I agreed. I nudged him on the shoulder, and he immediately sprang upright with a snort.
“Where am I?” he asked, blue eyes darting around. “Oh, right.” His cheeks pinked as he ran his hands through his hair. “I’m not sure what came over me.”
“It’s the library,” Marcail said from the doorway. “It tends to have this effect on people. Come on, you three. It’s time to get on the road.”
Back at Marcail’s, we piled into our cart, where Fergus himself was dozing, his nose nearly drooping to the ground. Finlay handed him a sugar cube to rouse him, and the pony crunched it contemplatively before perking up a bit.
I looked up at the ever-darkening sky, a pit of apprehension forming in my stomach. A proper horse might be able to outrun this storm, but Fergus was far from proper. Or a horse, for that matter.
“Maybe we should spend the night in an inn,” Finlay said, his own gaze fixed on the clouds overhead. “This looks like a serious storm to me.”
I was about to agree when I remembered our grand reopening, nearly forgotten amid all this talk of grimoires and curses. “We have to get home tonight. The shoppe is supposed to open tomorrow morning.”
Just then, a bolt of lightning split the sky, followed a few seconds later by a low grumble of thunder.
“I’m not sure it’s worth it,” Bri said. “We can’t open the shoppe ever if we’re all dead.”
It wasn’t a bad point, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of all those customers, pockets full of coin, waiting outside the shoppe.
Our reputation might not recover from that kind of disappointment.
“We’re not going to die of a little rain,” I replied, adjusting myself on the bench.
“But the longer we sit around here talking, the wetter we’re going to be.
Besides, we need to get back to Argyle.”
“I’ll send word if I hear anything,” Marcail said, waving to us from the side of the road. “Be safe.”
Our eyes met, and I almost asked for a moment alone with her.
But then Finlay clucked to Fergus, who glanced back at us over his sizable rump with a look of disdain before easing into a slow walk.
While Finlay continued to give the pony verbal encouragement, reluctant to use the reins on him, I tried to puzzle through what Marcail had told me.
Mr. Tell had also mentioned family grimoires.
If The Oxblood Book belonged to a family of witches, had they all died out?
If so, why would a trader or collector want it?
Most important, why would the cure to Bri’s curse be in some other family’s grimoire?
A few minutes later, I felt the first rain drop on my nose, and I braced myself for a long, wet journey home.
We were lucky, for a while. The road was covered in an arch of branches, most of which hadn’t lost their leaves completely, and though the rain was increasing, we weren’t yet soaked.
Eventually, however, the trees faded, giving way to open moors along the ocean road.
It wasn’t long before the dark clouds rolled in overhead, tearing open like sacks of grain and spilling their contents all over us.
Bri was huddled under an oilskin cloth in the back of the cart, while I held a flimsy brolly Finlay had brought with him over both of us.
I gave up not long after. The winds were constantly threatening to rip the umbrella from my hands, and the rain was blowing in sideways anyhow.
Fergus flattened his ears and plodded steadily forward, though he refused to even consider a trot.
“At this rate, we’d be better off on foot,” I said to Finlay, my voice raised to be heard over the howl of the wind.
“We can’t abandon Fergus,” he said. “We’ll search for cover as soon as we can.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t optimistic. Any possible shelter was farther inland, and we were as exposed as could be out here. There were no other carts on the road, and we were too far from Abundance to turn back now. The only option was to follow the road and hope for a break in the storm.
It was hard to judge the passing of time; the sky was so dark it could have been dusk for all we knew.
By this point, our clothing was soaked through.
I was doing my best not to shiver and failing.
At the sound of my teeth chattering, Finlay put his arm around me and drew me closer, but he was as cold as I was, and there was no body heat to be shared.
Bri had lost the cloth to a particularly strong gust of wind and was as drookit and bedraggled as we were.
“There,” I said, pointing off the road to a copse of cypress trees. It wasn’t much, but anything was better than this downpour.
I thought Finlay was going to argue, but he took one look at my appearance and nodded. We tucked the cart in as close to the trees as possible, providing Fergus with a bit of cover, and then crouched low to get to the center of the copse, where it was damp but at least provided some relief.
“This is miserable,” Bri said, wringing out her hair, which reached down past her shoulders when wet. “Finlay was right. We should have stayed the night.”
“No use in recriminations now,” I barked, rather than admit I’d made a drastic mistake. I plucked at my dress, which clung to me like a second skin. “We’ll just have to wait here and hope the storm finally passes.”
We had access to plenty of wood, but it was far too wet to start a fire.
Instead, we sat side by side on a log, shivering in silence.
Even though I knew it wouldn’t do any good, a part of me wished Finlay would put his arm around me again.
But none of us touched as we stared at the ground, rain dripping off our noses like melting icicles.
Suddenly, a crack of lightning lit up the sky, followed instantly by a peal of thunder so loud I knew the storm had to be right above us. We all jumped, and over the sound of my pulse pounding in my ears, I heard a rattle, followed by a different sort of pounding.
That of hooves on hard-packed dirt, moving away at a dead gallop.