Chapter 22
I spend the next quarter of an hour trying to figure out if he’s stolen anything on this visit as a means of calming my racing heart and my spinning thoughts.
In the end, I find another of his tiny shells on the windowsill to the left of the door, where I’m pretty sure a scrap of old newspaper had been caught in a cobweb.
The cobweb and the newspaper are gone. I’d been meaning to clear them away and hadn’t gotten around to it.
I remind myself to ask Sasha—when she’s in a better mood—whether she did, though I know the answer, and take the shell into my room.
I drop it into the bowl with the crab claw, the first shell, and the florin, and consider the four little objects.
He’s taken a cup, a bookend, a ribbon, and a cobweb with a scrap of paper caught in it, and left me…
these. Perhaps one of the books he stole—which he didn’t leave anything behind in exchange for, at least not anything I’ve yet found—contained something I missed when I went through them, about exchanges as a way of breaking a curse.
Or perhaps the exchanges are what allow him to get in when the store is locked up, or steal my things…
if he leaves something of similar value to whatever he takes.
Thus, a shell for a cobweb. A crab’s claw for a teacup…
That can’t be it, I think. He stole an entire stack of books on his first visit and, worthless though they were to me, they probably had some sort of monetary value, and I’ve not found anything that he might have left in exchange.
The simplest answer is that he’s just a pirate, engaging in some strange bored-pirate-stuck-on-dry-land nonsense. I shrug, set the bowl aside, and head back out.
Sasha is standing behind the desk, looking for something. She straightens as I approach, and has the good grace to look a little sheepish.
“Sasha,” I say, gently, “if you’re having a bad day, just let me know and take the day off. But no losing your temper in the store, okay?”
“I know. I’m sorry,” she says. “School sucked today, and Mom’s giving me a hard time about the end-of-the-year ball. It just was…a lot.”
“I get it. But still.”
“I organized a lot of the second floor,” she says, hopefully.
“I heard the thumping.”
“Yeah, it was really satisfying. I’ll set the pulley up and we can start getting rid of the extra stock tomorrow. Set up the tables outside again. Maybe your friend…the loud one? He could help again?”
“I’m sure he’d be delighted.”
“Who was that other one?”
“Hamish,” I sigh. “Of the Two Mountains. A bit less…bearable than Driz.”
She pauses, picking a fleck of black enamel off her claws. “Aren’t there seven princes of the realm?”
“Alas, yes.”
“And that’s two of them?”
“That is indeed.”
“Do you really think your parents will send five more up to try to kiss you?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. Not if Honey can’t dig up a good wizard first.”
“You’ve got to tell them not to. I mean, I want to see it, but I also don’t want to see it, if you know what I mean.”
I do.
“I’ll definitely be sending another letter to that effect, yes. But, probably, my parents will just ignore it.”
“Parents, right?” Sasha says, mournfully.
“Right,” I agree. We fall silent.
“Hey, what’d the pirate steal this time?” she says, a moment later.
“What makes you think he stole anything?”
She gives me a look, and I sigh. “A cobweb, I think,” I say.
“That guy is so weird,” she says.
It’s clear within the next few days that Hamish, like Driz, will not be leaving the inn anytime soon.
Sasha tells me he’d sent a note to his parents about his failure to break my curse and requesting whatever was required for him to return home, but had made the mistake of mentioning that another prince was also in town with no intention of leaving, and—to his dismay—was informed in no uncertain terms that he was not allowed to leave if a second prince of the realm felt it was his duty to remain.
And so, with very ill grace, Hamish settled into the inn as well.
Rumors that the owners of the inn are planning another name change circulate wildly, Sasha tells me, a prospect that seems to dim Driz’s light a little.
Sasha does set the tables up outside to clear stock, and Driz and Hamish wind up manning them, bickering back and forth for hours at a time like an old married couple, although Driz challenges Hamish to a duel only once, and they wind up postponing it for lack of seconds.
Hamish goes to great pains to assure me that he’s staying in town only to ensure my welfare, seeing as I have only one other prince in the neighborhood to keep my safety and my reputation intact, and that his beloved is fully understanding.
She is, he reminds me daily, a very good candidate for a wife.
A person who has never been cursed, not even in the slightest.
I send my parents a letter requesting, in extremely clear language, that they desist in sending me princes and instead aid Honey in her search for a sorcerer.
I receive, in response, a letter from my mother, expressing her deep and ever-increasing concern about my situation.
Her letter does not mention that she’ll be giving up sending along princes.
She ends by asking me to trust that she has my best interests at heart.
The sentiment does not fill me with optimism.
“Darling,” the Lord Mayor trills on her way in for the next meeting of the Coven of Conviviality, “the store is looking utterly marvelous these days.”
Modesty forbids me from saying anything too boastful, but she’s right, and it makes me stand up a little straighter to think that she’s noticed.
After more than a month of hard work, Sasha and I have cleared two floors and several cupboards’ worth of cobwebs, hex-resistant spiders, stray spells, broken crockery, bits of moldy furniture, and crumbling books that no one was ever, ever, going to buy.
In addition to the lovely third floor, the second floor is the very model of a tidy, well-organized bookshop: the cases are full but not bursting, well marked by subject and arranged alphabetically by author, and we’ve pinned little papers to the shelves to recommend favorite books, as we had for the third floor.
The bluecaps seem to know where everything is no matter how we move things around, and are more than happy to help customers find whatever they’re looking for.
Not that I have many customers, alas—the fear of my curse still seems to be keeping folks at bay.
The Inn of the Two Princes, however, has been doing land-office business, according to Sasha, who says that Driz and Hamish are extremely popular with the locals.
I try not to take offense that the townsfolk are more interested in chatting with two loud princes than they are in shopping in my lovely, hospitable little bookstore.
But otherwise, I…well, I’ve gotten a fair amount of reading done.
Most nights, when I lock the doors, I head back to my little room, use Garden Magic to cast a spell on a turnip so that it tastes less like a turnip, and read, or write to Honey or my parents.
It took a few days after my incident with the fire—and the butter—before I could get the fire relit, and I have been very careful to tend it from that point on.
My hand recovers none the worse for wear.
I can’t imagine my letters to Honey are too exciting: sold three copies of The Rogue of the Misericord today; de-hexed an old nail; ate a turnip for dinner.
It’s a quiet life. Driz and Hamish drop by regularly, and the pirate never.
Which, I tell myself, is a good thing. I absolutely do not spend my time wondering if he’s left town for good, and I refuse to ask Sasha for intelligence.
I’ve asked about your sailor friend, Honey wrote back to me, in reply to the edited letter I sent her.
I don’t have much to tell you. He’s operating under a curse which seems to involve an entirely different kind of magic than that which I’ve been seeking out in your case.
Water magic. Really sorry not to be more helpful, but the sailor will have to find a specialist in water magic—probably hard to come by unless via correspondence if one is nowhere near the sea, as Little P famously is not.
I paid that idiotic Wizard of Light a visit, and he was—expectedly—useless.
I laugh. I’ve met the Wizard of Light twice; he’s very solicitous of my mother and visits the palace regularly. My opinion of him is no higher than Honey’s.
I’ve also met an interesting sorcerer who may be keen to dig into the water curse, mostly as an academic issue, but cannot do anything about yours, alas.
She’s the one who told me that water magic derives from a different source than the magic we use on dry land, and thus a water-magic-based curse is unlikely to be broken by any land-based magic such as is studied in our universities, etc.
Well, at least I can tell the pirate that there’s a sorcerer who’d like to learn a bit more about his curse, at whatever inopportune time I see him again.
I’ve taken to wearing the key—the key—around my neck on a ribbon.
After reading Honey’s most recent letter, I set the paper aside and untie it and dangle it from my fingers, watching the key twist in the air.
My experiments in using magic to pinpoint magic have, unequivocally, determined that it, and I, are under some sort of magical spell.
Beyond that, I’ve been able to learn nothing—about the curse, how to break it, or what to do about it.
I seem to be able to do nothing except live with it.
I set the key down on the table, next to the bowl with the crab claw, the florin, and the little shells.
They’re not magical, I know, having tried with them, too. Just…small items.
Or, perhaps, I correct myself, they’re water magic, and I’ve been practicing only land magic, which can’t detect it.
In my next note to Honey, I ask if she can send me a book about water magic.
The bluecaps haven’t been able to find one in the store and I haven’t got any way to send for such a book besides asking Honey.
I suppose I could ask Sasha, but she’d take the wrong message away from my request: All I want, of course, is to understand the nature of the pirate’s curse with an eye toward breaking it and getting rid of him.
But she, being fifteen and therefore prone to reading too much into things, will absolutely assume it’s because I have developed a tendre for him, which I have not.
The very idea.