Chapter 11
I close up after she leaves, not having had a single other customer, and head back to my little room.
The bluecaps follow, and I find I like their gentle presence.
The cat also appears out of nowhere and chirps at me.
“Hello,” I tell her, knowing full well that I may be addressing her illusion, and she might be somewhere else entirely.
“I suppose you live here, too. Maybe Sasha knows your name. I hope you’re feeding yourself,” I tell her, “since all I seem to have right now is turnips. Which reminds me.”
I pull upon the door to the little garden and wander over to the neat rows of vegetables and pull out whatever’s growing under those healthy green leaves. Sure enough, it’s a turnip.
I nod. “Figures.” I take the turnip inside, wash it off, and set it on a plate. This, I decide, is going to be dinner.
I flip open Garden Magic and turn the pages until I find a spell for turnip stew.
It requires no ingredients beyond a “reasonably fresh” turnip and appears to be a straightforward spell.
Figuring that I don’t have much of a chance of going too badly wrong, I read the instructions carefully, put the turnip in a pot, then incant the odd jumble of words in the order specified.
The turnip pops, making me jump, then makes a funny hissing noise and appears to melt.
I poke the gelatinous goo with a spoon. It definitely seems to have dissolved into some sort of thick paste.
Well, I’ve got my toadstone; I’m protected against poison, so I suppose I can at least taste it.
I hang the pot on the spit over the grate, poke the glowing logs, and watch with no small degree of satisfaction as a little fire sparks to life beneath the pot.
Twenty minutes later, my turnip stew is bubbling away, filling the room with the unmistakable scent of…
turnip. Perhaps I can flavor it with something to disguise its earthy turnipy essence.
I don’t know a thing about herbs, having never cooked for myself.
I wander out into the shop with the vague idea of finding a book about how to use them, and then stop.
How on earth am I going to find such a book, if it even exists? Then I laugh. The bluecaps. Of course.
A bluecap is floating gently over the desk. I turn to it. “Would you find a book about herbs? Cooking with herbs, I mean? Please?” I ask it. The speck wafts gently away from me, and I follow it. It drifts up the stairs to the second floor and comes to a stop before a very, very full bookcase.
“One of these?” I ask, though the cap can’t answer. It floats gently before a pile of books, which are in front of whatever’s actually shelved properly in the case, so I remove the pile. The bluecap then floats forward and lands on a book with a crumbling spine.
“Thanks,” I say, and reach up to take it.
The bluecap floats a short distance away and I pull the book down.
It’s easily a hundred years old, the leather binding crumbling in my hands, but the front cover does, indeed, say Herbarium.
I open it up. The spine cracks alarmingly, but the book seems like it’ll do the trick perfectly; the pages are illustrated and heavily annotated by previous owners.
“Brilliant,” I breathe. I look up at the cap. “Could you find me books about curses?”
The bluecap floats away, and tucking the herbarium under my arm, I follow it up to the third floor. It settles on a pile I’d moved earlier today, books looking even older and more ragged than the herbarium.
After a moment, I realize more bluecaps have joined the first one; they’re now dancing about the room, lighting on books spread about everywhere. “Are these all the books about curses?” I breathe, though that’s clearly the case.
Even knowing I’ve magical turnip gloop boiling away downstairs, I can’t help myself, and spend half an hour collecting every book the bluecaps indicate into a pile. “What do you think,” I say to them, once my pile is assembled. “Maybe I break with tradition and sort out the curse myself?”
The bluecaps don’t answer, of course, but I’m certainly satisfied with my plan.