Chapter 30
I have a cracking headache when I wake up the next morning, in addition to a stiff neck.
I had, it seems, fallen asleep in my chair.
The gray light of early morning filters through my little room; the fire in the grate is nothing but ashes, dash it all.
I’m alone; the cat and the pirate are gone and so, I discover after a little investigation, is the bottle. At least I’d been expecting that.
He’s left another of his curious little braided tokens behind.
Perhaps he’s out of seashells and hasn’t got anything but time to braid and wheat to braid with now.
I push aside the odd sense of loss I feel; one of us covered me in a blanket at some point, which I fold up and set on my bed.
My stomach does a peculiar kind of dipping swoop at the thought of him draping it over me, so I brush the image away and make myself a cup of tea, and get ready for the day.
The rain has become little more than a light fog.
I retrieve my clothes from outside, wondering what on earth I’d been thinking of last night when I took them off, and decide I’d better not indulge in more than a ladylike thimbleful of mead at a time from now on, lest I make such perilous decisions again.
Finally, hair braided, freshly attired and feeling surprisingly restricted by my clothes, I head out into the store and flip over the enchanted rock.
It’s early; I can’t expect anyone to come by for ages.
The tea’s helped my headache and the crick in my neck from sleeping at an odd angle.
This, I tell myself, is one of the reasons why my parents are so careful about drink.
It was fun while it lasted, but my recollections of the night before are a bit fuzzy.
Did I truly stand outside, naked, in the rain?
Did I spend the evening having dinner with a pirate? While not wearing underclothes?
Despite my ebbing headache and sore neck, I find myself feeling energetic, and decide to start tackling the ground floor of the bookshop.
The three floors above are clean and neat and tidy, and really only just need to be restocked.
But the ground floor: It was crowded when I first set foot in the bookstore, all those weeks ago; now it’s positively crammed with books.
Every shelf is full to bursting, with books piled haphazardly on any reasonably horizontal space, hastily applied nontoppling spells the only thing keeping the entire place from being an absolute death trap.
Any stock that hasn’t sold from the table sales Driz and Sasha have been running has piled up in corners and along the sideboards, and the stairs leading to the first floor have books piled up on either side, so that customers have to make their way up and down very carefully, navigating a narrow passage between piles.
Yes, this is what I’ll start working on today.
By the time Sasha finishes school and drops by, I’ve spent hours moving things around—primarily, de-spelling rickety piles and moving them into new, less rickety piles.
Sasha brightens immediately when she sees what I’m about, drops her bag, and dives in.
By the end of the afternoon, I’m not sure we’ve accomplished anything other than rearranging piles into larger, sturdier piles, but it feels like a start.
The next day being a Friday and, ideally, a sunny one, Sasha promises to come back, set up tables outside, and hopefully rid us of some of our piles.
She also promises to drop by the Inn of the Four Princes and ask Driz and maybe Hamish to come by before she goes.
Maybe see if Yenny can lend us a trumpeter or two.
Once she’s gone, however, I find myself again at loose ends.
I decide to spend the evening going through what books about curses the pirate didn’t steal, noting down salient points of interest about my curse and his curse, and doing some comparing.
Bash was right, of course, that I’ve been writing things down, but not in any systematic fashion, just in the letters I send (and do not send) to Honey.
I spend a pleasant evening before the fire, going through my never-to-be-sent correspondence, pulling out various facts, and listing them on a fresh sheet of paper.
There’s not much there, so I promise myself I’ll quiz him more directly next time he comes by to steal things, and go to bed feeling, if not wholly satisfied, at least reasonably confident that I’ve got a few things under control.
This, of course, is how ironic curses work. Careless of me to forget.
Driz and Sasha do come by the next morning, Driz bringing Hamish and Yenny with him, and the four set out tables and begin displaying books.
Yenny offers the use of his fanfare trumpeters to drum up customers, but I decide not to risk the wrath of my neighbors and decline.
By the early afternoon we’ve cleared two piles (of many; the absence doesn’t affect the mess much), sold three nonpile books to actual, inside-the-shop customers, and astonished Yenny with the truth of the amount of dirt, dust, and mess that accompanies commerce that isn’t related to royal sheep, each of which has its own personal attendant.
The pirate shows up and, irritated with my continued and inescapable blushing in his presence, I tell him to go do something useful.
He instead takes up his seat on the stairs, lounging among the piles of books, close enough that I can see him.
This despite my loud suggestion that he betake himself to the third floor.
I notice that he’s doodling on a scrap of paper; when I pull it away from him, I find he’s drawn a fish.
Things are just starting to wind down when the door bursts open, a gust of wind rustling the pages of every open book nearby.
I’m bent over a pile, trying to decide what to do with a seventy-seven-year-old copy of Moriboar’s Remedies for Pustules, Ague and Warts, and it startles me enough that I stumble backward, hard enough to knock against an overstuffed bookcase, making it wobble alarmingly.
I barely have time to think about how I haven’t yet re-spelled all the stacks of books and the bookcases in the hall before I hear the strident tones of Ternis, prince of the Endless Light.
“Your Most Serene Highness!” he shouts, shading his eyes as he tries to spot me.
“Prince Ternis,” I manage to exhale. I shoot a look at the stairs, hoping against hope that the pirate has betaken himself away when I wasn’t paying attention.
Alas, he’s still there, grinning at me. I turn back to Ternis.
My eyes adjust to the light coming in from the still-open door; naturally, Sasha and the other princes are there as well.
Wonderful. Maybe, eventually, one prince—just one—will kiss me without anyone else around.
“Madam, I have arrived!” he announces—rather unnecessarily, I think uncharitably.
“The moment, the very instant, we received your parents’ desperate missive, my parents and I knew I must attend in all haste.
Our royal steward immediately went about readying my trunks and the carriage of state, which I was to take to the royal port of Porto, where the flagship of our royal navy awaited, my own standards run up the masts, naturally.
I was settled in the royal cabin, and while my trunks were unpacked, the ship’s crew was made ready; a twenty-cannon salute was performed from the port side—seaside, you understand; left, that is to say, not the port of Porto side, naturally—”
Ternis, as my sister likes to put it, is a talker. He doesn’t seem to be saying much, so I take the opportunity to dust my dress off and straighten my hair. Finally, with a deep breath, I stand up and face him.
“…the noble and, indeed, ennobling act of our extraordinary union…”
Ah, he’s finished narrating his voyage and moved on to the grand duty of breaking my curse.
By the great horned dragon, did I ever notice how windy princes are before I got trapped here in this bookstore?
Or did I just not care? I don’t mind banter—witness my foolish, cyclical conversations with Bash—but this endless pontificating in advance of the kissing is really starting to wear on me.
“…and with the greatest of pride and exquisite awareness of the duty thus placed upon my shoulders…”
All this for a kiss that won’t do anything. I quash the urge to cross my arms and sigh audibly; he’s still a prince, after all, and my mother wouldn’t stand for it.
Mama isn’t here, my mind whispers, traitorously, and might never know…
“…instilling in all of us, from a young age, the keen importance, nay, significance, of our roles…”
My heavens, he’s still going. I watch him declaim; he’s facing me, directing himself toward me, but clearly very aware of his audience; the fact that the door to the shop is open and several other princes are gathered in its shadow has brought other townsfolk out, and I can make out the shape of a fairly sizable crowd now, all waiting for something to happen.
Please, can’t we get this over with, I think, hard, in Ternis’s direction.
Ternis ignores my silent plea and carries on; he sweeps one arm out in a grand gesture meant to suggest scope, I believe, which knocks against a pile on a nearby shelf and sends it plummeting to the floor, where the books land with a series of loud thwacks.
I cringe; he’s clearly going to take forever to get out of here, and leave a mess in his wake.
Why hadn’t I re-spelled all the piles when I was moving them around earlier?
Yes, of course; because I hadn’t expected anyone to come by and start whacking them while gesturing. Foolish of me.
Ternis doesn’t even slow down. “…in recognition of the great service which we have witnessed…”
He sounds like he’s laying a wreath at a state funeral. Good dragon goddess, has the idea of coming all the way to Little Pepperidge to kiss me become the equivalent of attending a state funeral for the princes of the realm? What an appalling idea.
“…into the vast distance of time, in the fullness of memory…”
Somewhere behind me I hear a choking sound, the unmistakable sound of someone trying to cover up a laugh, and force myself not to look up the stairs at Bash, the only person near enough to me to be the cough-laugher.
If I look at him, smothering his giggles, I’ll just start laughing myself, which, at this point, might cause some sort of international crisis.
I stand up straighter and ball my hands into fists, willing myself into royal placidity.
I’ve been doing this for twenty-two years.
I’ve had my feet stepped on by the most famous people in the eight kingdoms. I can listen to Ternis with a straight face, for however long he chooses to talk. I can.
Bash coughs again, and I feel my traitorous upper lip twist; just the tiniest quirk. I swallow, hard, and force it back into neutrality. No laughing. I will not laugh. I will not.
“…without which I could not be here today…”
Merciful harpies, he’s thanking someone.
“…my beautiful Tanadelle…”
Oh, hells; I had better pay attention; it sounds like he’s winding up.
“…with the greatest and most profound respect…”
No, he might just be in the middle of things.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, and am jolted back to the present by the feel of hands on my shoulders.
My eyes fly open; he’s holding me, his face very close to mine, his eyes positively brimming with emotion.
I open my mouth to say something, anything, really, but certainly something sensible, but before I have the chance, he closes his eyes almost rapturously, tilts me backward over his arm rather precariously, and kisses me, right on my half-open mouth.
The problem is twofold: One, his eyes may be closed in anticipation of unfathomable passion, but mine are wide-open, and his face is now very close.
Uncomfortably close. I can see too much of him; he nearly fills my vision.
Nearly, but not all. Two, the bookcase I’d been tidying when he first strode in is also very close; close enough, in fact, that when he bends me back, he tips me directly into it.
My head bangs against a shelf, not hard enough to knock me out but certainly hard enough to hurt, and as the thought That’s going to bruise filters through my mind, I have the strange sensation of seeing, from below, a large book, which is balanced on a shelf above me, begin to teeter precariously.
Ah, I think to myself, as Ternis remains with his mouth upon my own, I had just de-spelled that pile of heavy books and moved it up there to get it out of the way.
Ternis moves his lips against mine as, idly, I wonder whether the book’s center of balance is far enough onto the shelf that we’re safe from it.
Perhaps, I think, it will fall and knock him on the head, and then we’ll both have bruises.
It’d serve him right. Ternis pulls me upright—I suppose our kiss ended while I was wondering about the possibility of falling books—and moves to embrace me; he’s still talking, and his embrace is so enthusiastic it sends us backward into the bookcase.
I hit it hard enough that I feel the entire structure wobble a bit, and the sudden and unnerving thought occurs to me: I de-spelled any number of piles of books on this bookcase; what if the cumulative effect was enough to de-spell the entire bookcase? It certainly shouldn’t be wobbling.
By the great green dragon, he’s still talking; oh no; he’s coming in for another kiss.
I instinctively step back, but I’ve nowhere to step back to, and wind up banging into the potentially structurally unsound bookcase again.
I hear more than see the fluttering whoomp of that one large book as it slides off the bookcase and straight onto Ternis’s head.
He pauses, mid-sentence, and brings his hand to his forehead in confusion, and then his gaze travels upward, from my face to the bookcase behind me, and his expression evolves from one of romantic concentration into something approaching confusion.
He drops his hands from my waist and steps back, looking at a point above my head, which gives me exactly the amount of time I need to wonder whether another book is about to fall on me, when, with an almost comical splintering groan, the entire bookcase shudders and collapses. Right on top of me.