Chapter Five
CHAPTER
Five
Paní Dagmar, might I have a word?’ Thea asked, now that the elderly witch had re-entered the world of the living.
She beamed at Thea, her bark-brown face seasoned with laughter lines.
‘Of course.’ She shuffled over, looping her arm through Thea’s as Rose began shrinking her toadstools back down.
‘You know, you are welcome in my haberdashery any time if you fancy a pot of poppy tea. Gives you the most wonderful dreams, you know.’
‘Oh, er, thank you,’ Thea said, thrown for a moment.
‘Actually, you mentioned having lived in the Quarter for centuries – you must have known so many people with so many names and I was wondering if there were any names that you think would best suit me?’ She was running out of inspiration for her guesses.
‘Of course, dear!’ Paní Dagmar lowered her voice to a confiding tone. ‘I am over five hundred years old, I have seen every name there is stroll through this Quarter.’ She laughed brightly, squeezing Thea’s hands as she spoke loudly and clearly: ‘The name that best suits you is Theodora.’
Thea stood there as Paní Dagmar left. ‘Thank you,’ she said automatically, hating how hope had brushed against her, just for a moment.
‘You’re lucky she calls you by your name, even if it isn’t what you were after,’ Rose told her dourly. ‘She keeps calling me Daffodil.’
Thea pored over the Compendium of Magic on her bed in a nest of sunshine-yellow blankets.
It was thick and sturdy, bound in taupe leather with its title pressed on in neat letters.
When you opened it, you stepped inside a portal to another woman’s life.
It burst with colours and thoughts and potion recipes, conjuring an old memory.
‘I can’t do this any more,’ Thea had told Jasper, her nails cutting into her palms as she heaved the words out.
‘You are making it more complicated for yourself,’ he had shot back, his frustration mounting as another of their lessons in fate-weaving ended in glares and clipped tones. ‘Your predecessors at this apothecary did not have half the difficulties you’re displaying in understanding my instructions.’
‘Then perhaps you made a mistake the day you set the terms of our bargain,’ Thea fired at him. ‘Perhaps you should tell me my true name now and set me free. I have no wish to work for you and even less to take these prices.’
Jasper’s face shadowed like a portent. Thea held her chin high, refusing to show neither a lick of fear nor the wobble in her left kneecap.
‘Fine.’ Wordlessly Jasper stalked from the back room of the apothecary into the glass-roofed room next door, empty apart from an apple sapling that had been a gift from the sharp-tongued garden-witch next door, and was given to dramatic outbursts.
As Jasper passed the sapling, it dropped a handful of leaves with a noise that sounded like a gasp.
Jasper ignored it, flexing his long fingers and performing a series of motions that he’d spent the past three days trying to teach Thea.
As she watched, the threads of fate rippled alive around him, leaving Thea unable to tear her eyes away as Jasper expertly untangled a curious knot, revealing a large book that had been hidden from sight, perched on a shelf.
‘Here.’ He handed the book to Thea. ‘I’ve taught you enough to fate-weave, now.
One of your predecessors kept this; the others found it useful, too.
Send a raven if you have any questions.’ His voice had been the sharp cut of glass, his eyes averted as if the very act of looking at her irritated him.
Now, Thea flicked through the book’s well-worn pages, past potions for memory and recall that she’d tried in her more hopeful days, searching for something that might bolster the Magic Quarter wards.
Or explain why they were faltering. She dipped a slice of rye bread into the bowl of goulash Zofka had dished out for her after the meeting, packed with garlic, marjoram and caraway, careful not to splash any on the book.
Some of the potions were simple remedies, like how to make fire-ginger, which burnt away any threat of an incoming cold.
Others delved deeper into magic, like how to track down a magical ingredient or how to reverse a shape-shifter’s transformation if they became stuck in their second form.
But more than magic, Thea was captivated by love stories, and the slow-brewing one penned into the margins of this compendium was the most delicious she’d ever read.
Giving up on finding a solution to the faltering wards for now, she indulged herself with rereading the first entry in the Compendium, which was every bit as comforting as the second slice of hot buttered toast she munched while reading:
I met someone yesterday. He was dark and quiet and charming, and he looked at me as if he couldn’t believe his luck.
I was gathering dream-bud flowers; the tiny pale pink blooms are forever locked inside a bud unless you open them in your dreams. Each one was the size of a teardrop.
They were growing like lichen over the escaped roots of the blackwood trees and their flowers are so hardly seen, they felt like treasure.
He was walking through the forest and we fell into step together.
My basket was already full when we stumbled on the largest outcropping of dream-buds, but he removed his cloak, offering it as a makeshift sack.
We picked flowers together and talked about everything until the moon rose and I took his cloak home.
Last night, I dreamt of picking dream-buds with him. When I awoke, I was surrounded by flowers.
Several days later and Pan Novak had not yet reappeared. Nor had Thea had a single knock on the back door of her apothecary come nightfall. Nobody had emerged from the darkness, keen to surrender their time, memories or dreams for a tweak of fate’s threads.
As Thea pondered, she tested her batch of blackberry ink, doodling on a scrap of parchment: Briar, Anastasia, Caliope, Juniper, Araminta. She didn’t realise she had a customer until they were standing in front of her counter, regarding her with amusement.
‘Oh!’ Thea wiped purple ink from her hands.
‘My apologies, did I startle you?’ Malek’s single dimple made an appearance, flustering her further.
‘Not at all,’ she lied. ‘What can I do for you today?’
‘I happened to be passing by and couldn’t resist coming in. You made such a lovely picture, immersed as you were.’
‘Oh,’ Thea said for the second time, noticing how his crisp white shirt set off his olive-toned glow, how his eyes were the shade of oak leaves in autumn.
She buried herself in the pages of love stories every night, yet her own story would have been nothing more than a couple of footnotes; in the years since losing her heart, she had only kissed a couple of men, the latest of which, she’d discovered, had also been kissing Zdenka and Fleur.
‘You’ve got to kiss a few frogs before you find your prince,’ Talibah had told her after the recent disaster, after which Zofka had unhelpfully chipped in, ‘Try to avoid the toads, though.’ Both were infuriatingly hopeful on the subject considering Thea didn’t have a heart, but still, she made little attempts here and there.
Things got awfully lonely if you cut yourself off from even the possibility of falling in love.
Malek’s smile was slow, sensuous. ‘I wish I could see the thoughts dashing across your face.’
Thea laughed. ‘No, you don’t, they’re more of a nuisance than anything else.’
‘I confess I’m intrigued.’ Malek raised an eyebrow, lending him an impish look. ‘What are your thoughts whispering about me?’
Was he interested in her? Thea couldn’t tell. Surely not; she was already five and thirty and there were many other women in Prague, ones who came with dowries and youth on their side. Ones who were not indentured to an apothecary. ‘Now that would be telling,’ she said lightly.
‘Hmm,’ Malek said. He cleared his throat, his attention sharpening. ‘I have rather a strange request, and after my first visit, I understand that this is the place to make it.’
Thea’s stomach clenched. Disappointment set in like an unexpected storm. He hadn’t come here for her as he’d claimed, then. She’d suspected as much, but surely he wasn’t going to—
Sweeping a glance over his shoulder, Malek leant over the counter, dropping his voice to a warm whisper that would have filled Thea with delight if her every nerve wasn’t standing on edge.
‘I need a key that will grant me safe passage into a locked room without a single soul knowing that I have entered it. I must leave no mark behind, not a smudge of my fingerprints nor a scuff of my boot, nor,’ he whispered, ‘a single memory in the mind of any other person who might witness my entry.’
Oh. Oh no.
‘I can assure you that I am an honest man,’ Malek said as if he had read the doubts coursing through her, his tawny eyes shining bright and true.
‘And that I would not ask if I did not have considerable need of such an item.’ Pain flashed through him.
‘Only, it is not for me, but my sister. She has found herself in an . . . undesirable situation and I must protect her. She is all the family I have left and if I were to lose her too . . .’ he trailed off, clearing his throat.
‘Well, I could not forgive myself had I not tried everything in my power to save her.’
Thea reached for his hand. ‘I understand. Family is a gift to be treasured.’ Although she had no family of her own that she knew of and could not love them if she had, without her heart, she knew what it meant to wish to protect someone.
There was nothing she would not do if Talibah or Zofka needed help.
He looked down at her hand, pressing his. Slowly, he turned his hand palm up, clasping her hand within his. ‘Then you will help?’