CHAPTER 35
The teapots trembled, and their lids rattled with unease. They knew something was brewing and it wasn’t tea.
“Quiet!” Camille ordered. Her nerves were already on edge without the porcelain pots adding to her distress. “Let us think! When did those wretched things become sentient?”
“Last century, I think,” Izzy replied, “probably from spending too many decades crowded between four brilliant witches as they drank tea and discussed kingdom woes.”
“Not so brilliant, or we wouldn’t be in this pickle,” Adela commented.
The lids settled at Camille’s harsh order, but the spouts huffed out two last puffs of steam.
Izzy buttered her crumpet and sighed. “They usually hold their tongues.”
“Sisters, shhh,” Jasmine said softly, her fingers crumpling the letter in her palm. “I have a decision to make. I need your counsel. She still wants it removed immediately.”
“As you said, there’s only one way,” Adela replied, unable to say it aloud: Stop her heart for good. “It would be a mercy. And we do have our blood oaths to consider. Her kind—”
“She is our kind too!” Camille argued. “And pooh on oaths.”
Camille’s blasphemy swept through the room like a stinging gust.
Adela brushed a tired hand over her brow. “Then just what is your solution, Camille? Chain her and deliver her to the northern islands, where she will die a slow and cruel death? I have witnessed—”
“Absolutely not! Don’t forget Elphame needs her. Would it be better that we all starve when Kormick takes control of the cauldron?”
“Yes, Elphame needs her,” Izzy said, “but once the kingdoms have what they want, they will still chain her and take her to the northern isles anyway.”
“Only if they find out.”
If. It circled in their minds, Jasmine’s most of all. Hiding the truth? It might solve one problem, but another still remained.
“I have an idea,” Camille said.
The Sisters were silent, leaning in, the teapots shifting, the candle at the center of the table wavering. Camille told them her plan.
Adela groaned. “Tell her another lie? And a thinly veiled one at that. That’s what the poor girl has lived with all her life. And what if she doesn’t listen to us?”
“She will. Trust me,” Camille said.
“And how long before it’s found out? It’s just a matter of time—”
“She plans to return to the mortal world. She’ll be gone in a few weeks. She will never shift, and no one will ever know.”
Jasmine shook her head, contemplating the lie and the risk.
She finally rose, wincing as she pressed her hand against her back.
“I’ve made my decision.” And with that, she left the Sisters to their tea and misery, and went to her study to write her reply to Bristol.
She would do what she had to do and not make the others complicit.
This was her burden to bear alone. Hiding one of Bristol’s kind was a high crime.
And then she worked out a backup plan, in case stopping Bristol’s heart wasn’t enough to persuade a tick that was drunk with power.