Chapter 25
There’s no point in standing on ceremony, and I’d really like to get this next bit over as quickly as possible, so I edge around the desk and make my way to him. He’s looking around the shop with an almost incredulous expression.
Bel bows, rather stiffly. He’s dressed in his formal court clothes, which is no mean feat; the formal court clothes from the city-state of the Five-Fold Night are immensely complicated.
No wonder it took him so long to make it here from the inn, if he had to change into all that.
He certainly wouldn’t have been able to travel in it.
“I’d never have expected to find you cursed in such a place,” he says, his voice almost wondering.
“Oh?” I say, dropping into a genteel curtsy. I’m not wearing anything approaching courtly clothing, but my dress serves the purpose well enough. Bel is a big fan of formality and, like Hamish before him, seems unimpressed by my clothing. I find it doesn’t bother me much.
“I’d expect a gothic tower, perhaps, or a ruined castle.
But this…It’s just rather rustic, and you’re so…
” He pauses. “As the great scholar Zantaran tells us, ‘a library is a balm upon the scarified soul.’ A bookstore, however…I don’t believe he had anything to say about so plebeian a thing as a bookstore. ”
I raise an eyebrow and wait. Bel has no great opinion of me; he tends to think that the only literature one should read or ought to read is epic poetry, followed—maybe—by philosophy; if one isn’t going to read in order to improve one’s mind, one oughtn’t read at all.
My taste for light literature is, according to him, a greater waste than if I spent my days merely not reading anything.
It doesn’t make much sense, but it’s a theory he concocted when he was about twelve and explained to me at length when, during a state visit, he caught me reading An Everlasting Night.
He’s never really respected me since, and I find him so exhausting to talk to that I haven’t done much to change his opinion of me. There’s never been any need.
“Well, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised,” he amends. “Supposing that your taste in literature has never improved.”
“So good to see you,” I murmur. “Shall we?”
“I’m only doing this as a favor to your parents,” he adds.
“I don’t expect it to work. Duty to one’s parents and one’s country is a privilege.
A gift. So we are reminded by the mystic D’ran.
‘That which is common has the least care bestowed upon it. That which is truly unique, however, requires the greatest attention by the greatest of those among us.’ My royal duty, of course, is unique to me and me alone, and thus requires the greatest of care in its execution. ”
“Naturally.”
“Immature of you to get caught up in such a situation,” he adds, stepping toward me.
Curses, I’ve come to learn, tend to happen no matter one’s age or how cautious one is; there aren’t many precautions one can take, besides the obvious ones like avoiding handling money and keys.
That said, forgetting those precautions is what got me here in the first place.
I decide not to make an issue of it; I don’t agree with him in theory, and the fact that I was cursed in practice because I was careless about a key is not going to improve his opinion of me any.
And I was trying to help an old lady, after all.
“I believe the poet Asmodor II reminds us that we ought not tarry in important matters such as these,” I say, hoping he won’t notice that I don’t recall my Asmodorian verse well enough to speak it off by heart.
But that was the general idea. Bel takes a deep breath.
I steel myself. He appears to do the same, then screws his eyes shut and kisses me, very quickly, on the lips.
His kiss is dry, and he smells faintly of dust and talcum powder.
He pulls back immediately and looks at me, exhaling noisily. “There, did that do it?”
I didn’t feel anything—I barely felt his lips on mine—but I walk to the door, pull it open, and place my hand on the expected invisible barrier. Which remains solid.
“Nope,” I say, cheerfully. “Thanks ever so much for trying, Bel. I know it means a lot to my parents.” I cast desperately about for something someone may have once said on the subject of kisses.
Or duty. “Honor is the greatest quality of mind besides courage,” I add.
“As they say.” I can’t recall who said it, after all.
“When they tell you that your royal duties will occasionally involve curse-breaking,” he says, to no one in particular, “they do not mention that you might be the fourth prince to come along and kiss some fool girl who’s gotten herself stuck in a bookshop.
A”—he looks around again, a grimace on his lips—“rather shabby one, at that.”
“Hey!” Sasha yelps from somewhere behind me.
“Third,” I say. “Third prince.” I’ve got four more to go, more’s the pity. “Well, thanks again!” I say brightly, holding the door open for him. “I hear the hand pies at the inn are delicious.”
“Pie,” he says thoughtfully. “A primitive but undeniably filling meal. ‘Some live to eat, but I myself eat to live.’ That said, ‘in hunger, the rich and poor are one.’ And I am undeniably hungry.”
With that, he leaves, and I close the door and sag against it.
“What a charmer,” Sasha says. “As they say.”
“We’ve never really gotten along,” I say, a little wearily. Four more princes. Four more of these. At least this one was fast, and three of the others should be less trying than Bel. I hope.
“A pity,” the pirate says. “That one was a disappointment, although he did have a fair number of ridiculous opinions to distribute. I was hoping the other two might show up and challenge him to a duel, or something.”
“They don’t like him very much,” I say, hoping that’ll be enough of an explanation. “Driz finds him confusing, and Hamish thinks he’s pretentious.”
“Prince Hamish thinks someone is pretentious?” Sasha hoots. “Let’s get back to this window idea you had so I can go straight over to the inn and see for myself.”
The rest of the week passes quietly. Sasha and I clear out the front windows, which are bowed to allow for a small display of some sort, currently just books.
The coven shows up and I receive a bottle of mead—“Lord Taramonth’s Revenge,” as they’re reading A Ship on Idle Seas this week—which I place on a shelf in my room next to the last one, and leave unopened.
Driz drops by for chats almost daily, bless him, bringing Hamish occasionally and Bel once, who explains that “the man who has eaten enough will never believe a hungry one” and that he wishes to understand my situation to some greater degree, as “sympathy is the highest expression of true feeling.” Bel then busies himself on the first floor, going through my collection on political economy, which, he later tells me, is sorely lacking.
He is absolutely the only person who has touched any of those books in decades.
Sasha and I complete work on the second floor, which is now full, but not to bursting, with books and comfortable chairs.
After insulting my collection of books about political economy, Bel admits that he, like Hamish, has been told he needs to remain in town as long as any other princes remain.
The inn owners rename the inn, and a new sign, I’m told, is hanging over the door within two days of Bel’s arrival.
I don’t see the pirate all week, but I find another small shell on the stairs where he’d been lounging when Bel showed up, and drop it into the bowl with the other items. He appears to have made off with the stub of a candle.
I still haven’t found whatever he left in trade for the stack of books weeks ago.
Sasha does not have another attack of teenagerdom, and Honey sends me a long letter and a book about water magic. She cannot reassure me that her search for a curse-breaking sorcerer is going well, she writes, with characteristic bluntness.
The most interesting part of my week is spent working on the window displays.
Sasha and I argue a bit about what they’re meant to accomplish: draw in customers by demonstrating the bookshop’s superb collection of books, or compel them in by intriguing and delighting.
My initial thought is to dig up the most interesting and beautiful books in the store and put them in the window, maybe against a backdrop of purple velvet.
“That way, customers know that we sell beautiful, high-quality goods,” I explain.
Sasha rolls her eyes. “No one in town is going to come here for books,” she points out. “Not unless they really need them. Plus, everyone is still sort of worried about the curse being, like, catching.”
I’m forced to concede the point.
“We should use the windows to display a selection of books. But, like, of a single kind. Imagine”—her eyes light up—“an entire display devoted to books by Gaspard Fen Tamian! And we could decorate it with dried flowers!” Gaspard Fen Tamian, of course, being the long-deceased author of seven romances, each more tragic than the last. Dried flowers tend to figure large in his writing.
“But anytime someone comes in wanting to buy one of the books from the window, we have to reconfigure or destroy the arrangement in the window,” I note.
“We get in extra copies!” Sasha yells. Smoke is curling up from her nostrils, she’s so excited.
“Everything by Gaspard goes on sale for a special price during the, say, fortnight we have his work featured in the window. We ask the coven to discuss one of his novels during their meeting in that period. We could even…” She gasps, almost too excited to put her thoughts into words.
“Since everyone already loves Gaspard, we could also feature books for people who have read them all a hundred times each and want something new!”
I think about it for a long moment. My instinct is that the point of a window display is to demonstrate what a superbly well-stocked bookstore we are, the way a butcher’s shop might display an array of meats and sausages in its windows, but Sasha’s idea is intriguing.
“I’ll tell you what. You take the window on the right, I’ll take the one on the left. Arrange it however you like. Let’s see what happens.”
“Oh, Tandy, thank you!” she cries, and pulls me into a crushing hug. Being a dracone, even a teenage one, she’s still a foot taller than I am, and massively more powerful. Not to mention, covered in scales.
“We also have to get started on clearing out the ground floor,” I point out.
Floors 2 and 3 are in great shape, and 1 is getting there (deficiencies in political economy aside), but we’ve done very little to make the space on the ground floor itself habitable.
It is, as it was the day I first set foot inside, the most crowded, most overstuffed of the four stories.
Our goal, initially, was to make sure that customers could get around, primarily to the stairs, without knocking things over onto themselves, but that mostly meant clearing books away to the sides and creating ever larger, more teetering piles of books, which my dubious spells have only barely been able to keep from toppling.
I also have to admit that I worry about how many more princes of the realm will be showing up in my bookstore, and whether any will bring entourages.
It’s been hard enough over the last few weeks with Driz, Sasha, and the pirate hanging about; add Hamish and now Bel to the equation, and the ground floor of the shop becomes perilously crowded very quickly.
And there’s always the worry that folks from the village might start showing up to see the kisses.
Sasha has told me that rumors about the first three have run rampant through her school, and that she has developed a new kind of social capital, being one of the very few people to see the kisses occur and to have met each prince individually.
But Sasha is entirely focused on her window display idea, and we set the thought of clearing out the ground floor aside as she clears a shelf on a case near her window (which results in yet another perilous pile on the floor), and hand-letter a sign to hang beside them.
Her window, overall—at least from the inside—is truly a work of genius: She brings deep blue velvet cloth from home and spreads it over a structure she creates out of books, then places a single, beautiful copy of each of Gaspard’s seven novels in the window, surrounded by dried flowers and posies of herbs liberated from my garden.
The whole thing is arranged so that, from the outside, the seven novels are displayed to advantage, each at a slightly different level.
She places dried roses, lavender, and daisies in delicate vases—also brought from home—hangs them in bunches from the top of the window, and scatters petals among the books.
The overall effect, even from behind (my only vantage point), is very compelling, I’m forced to admit.
My own window display, meant to highlight how many quality books I have in stock, looks pretty shabby in comparison, even against the backdrop of emerald velvet I manufactured from one of my traveling gowns.
Feeling a little shameful about how poor my window is in comparison, I scatter some dried flowers about the books.
The cat, clearly feeling the need to prove some arcane feline point, immediately takes up residence in my window and spends much of each day sunning herself atop a copy of Thro’ the Riven Rushes.
But Sasha’s idea works; within an hour of unveiling her window, we have two customers, townsfolk who’ve never come inside before, asking whether How Great Was Our Love is really worth all the talk, and both walk off with copies they’ve bought from us.
After the second customer leaves, Sasha turns to me, eyes shining.
“I think this is going to work,” she breathes.
“And Mom’s super excited about getting the coven to read Felicity Among the Petals.
” She pauses. “She’s also excited about the mead Hestia’s making in Felicity’s honor.
It’s going to be flavored with flowering wall-creeper.
” She pauses, and makes a face. “Gross.”