Chapter 12
My evening passes pleasantly. My turnip gloop is not what anyone would call delicious, but I end the evening both full and alive, so I can’t complain.
I spend hours bent over the various curse books, first sorting them into two piles—possibly useful and probably not useful—then make a start on the useful pile.
I don’t come away feeling too positive that I can break my own curse, however: Keys, I learn, are extremely powerful instruments, and the more symbolic they are, the more powerful they become.
Since I was cursed with a key to “unlock my heart’s desire,” my curse, it would seem, is especially robust. The words “old magic” are used regularly in such a way that I sense they’re meant to be very, very serious.
I can absolutely trust Honey to find a wizard or sorcerer or someone who can break the curse, but I don’t find myself reassured that my parents won’t try out the prince solution, too, if it occurs to them.
It seems that my sources are all pretty much agreed that a prince should always be one’s initial go-to curse cure, if the cursed person is a princess.
I will never hear the end of it if my stupid curse is broken by a prince.
I will absolutely have to get engaged to whoever it is, if not outright married.
I’ve managed to go twenty-two years without any sort of betrothal, and I’m not keen to start now.
My dolorous dracone returns the next day, a few hours after lunch, just as I hoped she would. She is still dressed entirely in black—her talons are painted with black enamel, I note, because it’s a little chipped today—and she looks miserable.
“Bad day?” I suggest.
“It stopped raining,” she answers, glumly.
“Want to see something amazing?” I ask.
She shrugs.
“Ask for a book,” I say. “Any kind of book.”
“The Reliquary of Saint Se’palium,” she says after a moment’s reflection. I nod approvingly. What teenage girl hasn’t been obsessed with The Reliquary?
“Bluecaps,” I say, “can you take us to a copy of The Reliquary of Saint Se’palium, please?”
Sasha looks up in surprise as I speak, and then her expression transforms into one of genuine astonishment as several bluecaps float up from behind the desk—they’d been nesting in one of the pigeonholes—and start to drift languorously up the stairs.
“Oh my goddess,” she says, with actual emotion. She scrambles after them, tail swishing up the stairs, and I hear her moving around before she returns, the bluecaps at her shoulder, clutching a book.
“Where did you find bluecaps?” she gasps.
“Nesting in the bed box,” I say, primly.
“That is so weird,” she breathes. I can hear approval in her voice.
“Look, if you were on the fence about maybe taking a job here…” I begin.
“No, I thought about it,” she says. “My parents are annoyingly into it, but it might be cool anyway.”
I manage not to smile. “That’s brilliant news, Sasha.
Look, I thought a lot about what you said yesterday, and what if we make the third floor into, say, a space that’s even more welcoming for reading and, you know…
just sort of existing around books? We could put out some pillows, maybe some comfy chairs; get rid of some of the less interesting books and make sure that there’s lots of—” I cut myself off before I say something dumb like “books teenagers love.” I clear my throat.
“Well, you could curate what’s up there, to make it more appealing to you and, if you wanted to bring any friends, something like that…
” I end with a little upward tilt to my voice, as though it’s a question only she can answer.
I can tell I’ve got her attention and she’s trying to play it cool. “Yeah, maybe,” she says.
“Why don’t we head up there now and see about clearing some space, see what we have to work with?”
She nods with studied casualness, and I smile inwardly. “I’ll pay you two sovereigns a week—first to help me get this place sorted out and then to help me run the till. It’s not like I won’t be here to run it myself, of course—”
She snorts, and I smile more broadly.
“—but even I need a break now and then.”
“A break from all your hundreds of customers?” she suggests, raising an eyebrow at me. Oh, I like her sense of humor when she’s not too busy pretending to be miserable.
“Yes, them,” I say.
“Yeah, okay,” she says.
“Great,” I say. “Let’s go upstairs.”
The third floor is basically one large room—it’d be an attic anywhere else, but someone at some point (Beulah?
Mrs. Gooch?) stuffed it full of bookcases.
Light filters in through two grimy dormer windows, one looking out over the street, the other over all the little gardens in the neighborhood, including mine.
I’m relieved no one can see into my courtyard garden; the grape arbor covers it completely.
“Pillows there,” Sasha directs, pointing at the window overlooking the street where I’d spotted the pillow earlier. I suspect she’s just revealed the location of her weekday nest.
“I think we need to clear some space first,” I suggest, sweeping my gaze around the room.
There are piles of books everywhere, and I can’t even blame Mrs. Gooch for some of them.
I’d come up here just last night collecting all the books the bluecaps could find about curses, and left things in even more disarray.
Several of the caps have followed us and accumulate on one of the beams overhead, where they glow gently.
“Do you really need so many books?” Sasha says, stooping to pick something up. “I mean, I know this is a bookstore, but is anyone really going to come in here looking for…” She pauses. “Uh, The Principals of Modern Poultry, published literally a hundred years ago?”
“Probably not,” I say, taking the book from her.
“Why don’t we organize all the books into, um”—I look about the room—“areas. So, that corner is for books we want to stay up here, that one for books we want to stay in the shop, that one for books we aren’t sure about yet, and that one for books we can let go. ”
“Actually, maybe the poultry book is cool,” she says, taking it from me and opening it. “There are drawings of chickens, see?” She shows me an illustration of what might be a chicken, if the artist had never seen one before. “It’s kind of funny,” Sasha adds. “Keep.”
I smile as I watch her move the chicken book to the “keep” corner.
“Hey, bluecaps, any other books about chickens?” she asks, looking up. The bluecaps float down from the ceiling and start to disperse themselves among the cases, some vanishing down the stairs. Sasha smiles at me, her first real smile. “That’s wicked,” she says. “We can have a chicken corner.”
I hear the door chimes tinkle two stories below—another spell, I guess, as it seems impossible I could hear them all the way up here naturally. “Can I leave you to this?” I say. “Someone’s just come in.”
“Yeah, totally,” Sasha says, clearly distracted.
I head downstairs.
“Sorry,” I yell, as I make my way down the last flight of stairs and back onto the ground floor. “Sorting out some chicken books upstairs. Can I…”
My voice trails off. Standing behind my desk, flipping idly through my (empty) accounts book, is the most handsome man I have ever laid eyes on.
“Can I help?” I say, managing to fumble my way back into my composure.
“Ah,” the man says, straightening. He’s very tall. “I don’t suppose you have any books about breaking curses lying about, have you?”