Chapter 34
Amaritha spends the next hour and a half bent over her sketch pad, bouncing ideas off Sasha.
Bash and I politely make our excuses and leave them to it.
I settle behind the desk and he, naturally, takes up his usual spot on the stairs.
The cat, naturally, settles on his lap—judging from the purring coming from that direction, anyway.
She still looks like she’s sitting on the pile in the corner where I last saw her.
“Honeyrose sent me a book on water magic, if you’d like to take a look at it,” I say. It arrived in the morning’s post. I’d leafed through it but found nothing remotely helpful. “You can’t steal it, though.”
He shrugs. “As your sulky friend pointed out, I’ve got an ironic curse going, which seems to complicate the water magic.”
“It doesn’t seem like anyone’s written much about ironic curses, water or otherwise, so Honey’s not been able to find anything for you. Yet.” I have full faith in Honeyrose’s unparalleled ability to find anything, eventually.
“Like I said, you and I should write the book.”
“Did you say that?”
“Something like that.”
“It’s hard to remember, what with the endless nonsense that comes tumbling out of your mouth.”
He chuckles.
“Anyway,” I continue, “what little I’ve been able to find out about ironic curses is that they’re generally really small, like the one Sasha mentioned: always spilling when she wears white. Yours is so…so big.”
“Why, thank you,” he says, smiling broadly.
Irritatingly, I blush, making him chuckle again.
“You know what I mean,” I continue, trying not to sound too put out. Laughter bubbles up from the back room, though they’re too far away to hear us; it’s likely just a normal teen girl thing.
“I do,” he says, relaxing into another of his boneless poses and examining his nails. The picture of nonchalance.
“But it’s really hard to know, if you won’t tell me what the sea witch actually said to you. The words of the curse are extremely important; everything I’ve read agrees on that single point.” Nothing else, but that one point.
He takes a deep breath, then turns and faces me.
His expression has lost its usual vague charm.
“Tandy,” he says, suddenly very serious.
“I’ve made my peace with the idea that my curse is likely unbreakable.
I doubt very much I’ll be heading back to the sea ever again.
I appreciate your interest, but honestly…
” He trails off. “I don’t think you should worry about my curse. ”
“You’re giving up?” I gasp. “How can you just…give up?”
“I’m not giving up. I’m accepting the inevitable.”
“Nothing’s inevitable,” I say, stepping round the desk so I’m looming over him. Well, properly speaking, I’m only standing before him, but, given that he’s sitting, I—for once—have a slight height advantage. “How can you even say that?”
He looks away. After a long moment, he speaks, and his voice is low and sad. “What happens if you never break your curse?”
“I suppose…” I pause. I’ve turned the thought over in my head, but I’ve never said it aloud.
“I’ll live my whole life knowing that my heart’s desire was something I could have had, and I couldn’t…
find it, or reach it, or unlock it. Or even figure it out.
” The thought is rather deflating, so I sit on the stair below his.
He’s very close; I can feel the heat from his body, and the salty sea-air scent of him fills my senses.
“It’s a terrible possibility. So I can’t give up,” I conclude.
“But what happens if you don’t break it? You’ll spend your whole life trying, yearning for something you might or might not ever achieve, rather than simply living. I haven’t given up. I’m just making my peace with…with living.”
“It wouldn’t be the worst thing to stay here,” I murmur.
“That’s all I’ve been trying to say.”
We fall silent, long enough that I start to worry that I might be tempted to do something really wild. “But my mother will murder me,” I add. “There’s simply no way it can happen. Honey will find a sorcerer. She’s been to see the Dark Wizard now, you know.”
“I’d expect no less from all I’ve heard about the wildly efficient Honeyrose,” he says.
“We’ve got it!” Sasha yells, bursting out of my room. Amaritha is trailing behind her, carrying her portfolio. “Ama totally nailed it.”
Amaritha blushes and sets a few sheets of paper down before me. Each has a version of the name Green Dragon Bookshop sketched out, arranged around an illustration: a dragon reading a book, a dragon curled around a book, a dragon peeking out from under a book.
“This one’s my fav,” Sasha says, tapping a claw against a charming sketch of a tiny green dragon asleep on a stack of books.
“Mine, too,” I say, smiling.
“Adorable,” Bash says, leaning over us, and I glare at him. He smiles innocently at me. “It is,” he says. Well, perhaps he’s not being completely insincere. For once.
“Let me work on a couple of versions of this at home, okay?” Amaritha says.
We’ve settled on the new design by the end of the week, and I leave it to Sasha and Amaritha to direct the removal of the old sign—which I decide to store in my back garden for the time being—and the creation and installation of the new one.
Sasha ropes Driz and Yenny, and several of Yenny’s trumpeters, into the project, and assures me that Bash, when not inside drooping about my staircase, is out and about irritating everyone and not helping at all.
The knowledge that he’s outside, being just as useless as he is inside, fills me with a funny kind of buoyancy, one I ignore as undignified.
While they all work on finalizing the new sign, I practice a spell to allow me to copy it onto fabric; I practice with old rags until I’m happy with the result, and then try it on a canvas bag Sasha gave me; the spell works, and I stand back and smile at the result: The Green Dragon Bookshop, written in beautiful flowing script, with our unofficial mascot, Piggle, asleep on a stack of tragic romances beneath it.
I run my hand across the rough fabric. Here it is: a thing I’ve made with my own two hands, more or less.
And the help of two enthusiastic teenagers.
I hang it on the wall behind the desk and write a letter to a canvas merchant Honey located for me, someone who supplies canvas for sails.
She’s apparently got a sideline in selling used sails to small businesses who make aprons and tea towels; now she can sell them to me as well, to make bags.
My friends troop in late in the afternoon, and I usher them all upstairs to the third floor for tea and biscuits and cake—they’ve brought the biscuits and cake; I provide the tea.
Sasha tells me they’ve left the new sign under a cloth, and is full of plans for the grand reopening in a week’s time; Amaritha can repaint and redecorate everything that’s not already repainted and redecorated before then, after school.
Amaritha suggests I leave the store closed for the week—and shutter the windows, too, to really create an air of mystery; Sasha is instantly full of ideas about how to decorate the windows for our reopening.
Yenny offers the use of his fanfare trumpeters for the actual opening ceremony, despite the fact that he’s the only one calling it a ceremony, and Sasha accepts on my behalf.
Driz drinks too much mead and makes a speech, and at the end of the afternoon, when I shoo everyone away and close up, I find that Bash has stolen one of my practice rags and left me a braided wheat figure in the shape of a fish.
All in all, I think, as I wash up and get into bed, a good day. And if I’m very lucky, neither of the two remaining princes will show up for ages.
I am, of course, not lucky. Two days before our grand reopening, Sasha and Bash and I are sitting in the darkened shop, drinking tea, when someone knocks at the door.
“That might be Ama,” Sasha says, perking up immediately. “I’ll get it.”
I glance at Bash, who shrugs at me. He’s been around so much recently that I’ve more or less stopped expecting princes to appear in his wake, but my instinct is still to worry first, relax after.
I know I can’t trust him to give me any warning.
I flip the enchanted rock to “open,” and Sasha pulls the door open, making the chimes jingle.
“Uh, Tandy?” a familiar voice calls, and I stand up, my heart sinking. Bash looks up at me with wide eyes.
“I’m back here,” I say, smoothing my dress, suddenly very nervous. Of all the princes of the realm, Calla is the only one I’ve ever really been truly friends with—but never in anything approaching a romantic way.
In the darkened shop—since we’ve shuttered the front windows, the only light comes from the bluecap-covered chandelier and a few lamps I’ve scattered about—I can only just make out her figure in the short traveling gown of the Mezothin people, which both men and women wear, primarily to display their ceremonial daggers.
All Mezothins receive a dagger from their parents, or whoever raised them, on their tenth birthday, and a second from their closest friends on their twentieth.
They wear one strapped to each calf; to have both is a potent symbol of wisdom and maturity in Mezothin culture.
The daggers are also quite, well, good-looking; tragic romances generally feature an attractive Mezothin character with flashing eyes and sharp daggers in a significant role.
“Calla,” I say, and drop a little curtsy. We’ve never been much for formalities before, but since she’s here to kiss me and potentially break my curse, I ought to be polite.
“Tandy,” Calla says, bowing. “Shall we get this over with?”
I smile. “Not feeling optimistic about your chances?”
“You know how I feel about curses,” Calla says, waving a hand.