Chapter 46
Morning comes too quickly, the light filling my little room too brightly.
Beside me, Bash makes a pleasant little noise, and I tamp down the urge to close the box bed up entirely and hide until someone forces me to leave.
But no; that wouldn’t do, so I push myself up and find my clothes, and give myself a thorough wash at the basin, and cast the little spells that make me feel fresh and presentable: clean hair, clean face, clean nails.
I’ve got a bit of lavender and rosemary essence I boiled down a month ago as a first effort at a scent, and I dab it on my wrists and my temples.
It’s a far cry from the expensive perfumes I used to wear, the same scents that swirl around my mother and sister, but it’s a scent I made myself, and it reminds me of…
of home, my mind whispers, but I push the thought away.
I go digging through my clothes—and Mrs. Gooch’s, of course—wondering what I could possibly wear that won’t give my mother fits, but everything is old and soft and not remotely courtly; the closest thing I’ve got is the traveling gown I was wearing when this whole thing kicked off.
I pull it out and stare at it. I haven’t worn velvet in months, and I haven’t missed it: heavy, suffocating fabric that it is.
“S’that what you’re wearing to the gallows?” Bash asks. I glance over at him; he’s on his stomach, arms crossed, regarding me. He’s naked, and the blanket only just barely covers his lower half. I blush a little.
“I have no idea,” I admit. “Nothing’s what my parents would think of as good enough, and I can’t stand the thought of putting this one on.”
He shrugs and rolls over. “Wear whichever one makes you happiest,” he says, putting his hands behind his head and regarding the ceiling of the box bed.
“Easy for you to say,” I retort. “You wear the same clothes every single day.”
“And now you know why,” he says.
I sigh and look down at the heap of fabric at my feet.
“The gray dress,” he says. “You like it and it’s pretty.”
“How do you know I like it?”
“You always twirl when you wear it.”
I do like it, and it is pretty. But I don’t want my last memory of it to be caught up in all the other last memories.
I fold it up and set it aside, and choose a green skirt with a white blouse and green vest. Then I take the stack of paper—the letters I’d written to Honey and never sent—and begin to feed them to the fire.
I hear Bash behind me, dressing, moving about, and then he sits in the chair closest to me and watches me until the last sheet is gone.
“What was that?”
“As a royal personage,” I say, watching the fire flicker, “everything I write is considered part of the historical record. Whenever I would write to Honey, for example, asking for information or a book, I knew that she wouldn’t be the only person reading my letter: my parents surely would, and likely my sister, maybe a few ministers.
Probably whichever sorcerer they eventually found for me.
And then it’d be numbered and dated and sent to the archives.
“So I also wrote these letters. They were addressed to Honey but I suppose they were really letters I was writing to myself. Like a journal. I’ve been promising myself I’d destroy them for ages, and last night I realized that they were hardly even hidden; if Mother had started pulling open drawers, she’d have found them immediately, and then…
” I look over at him. “They’d never have understood.
They’ll send me straight to the College of Infirmities after the curse is broken if they ever lay eyes on what I wrote. ”
He’s silent for a long moment. “Everyone deserves their secrets,” he finally says.
“I suppose. But now mine have to go back to living inside me,” I say. I can hear the sadness in my own voice. “Tea?”
“Not if you’re serving that horrifying black sludge, thank you very much.”
“Mrs. Gooch was well over a hundred when she died, judging from the, well, everything,” I say, gesturing to the room at large. “If it was the turnip leaves that kept her going, then who are we to judge?”
“I’d rather live a short life and enjoy my tea.”
“I have a bit of the proper stuff that Honey bought when it all first happened,” I say, hanging the kettle over the fire. “It’s nicer than the stuff I’ve been making myself. We can drink that.”
“I prefer yours,” he says, and though his back is to me, I smile and set the tin away. Instead I pull out one of my own concoctions, and take the teacups down: one pretty, one hideously ugly. “Do you want the nice one?” I turn and wave the two teacups at him.
“You must be feeling down if you’re offering me the nice teacup,” he says. “I’m quite partial to the ugly one. I’ve got one of my own, after all.”
I sigh. “Are you going to bring it back?”
He tilts his head as he takes the cup from me. “Probably not,” he says, carefully.
Something inside me twists in a painful, ugly fashion, and I realize my hands are shaking.
I set my cup down and turn around so I don’t have to look at him, giving me the opportunity of putting off thinking about him for a moment or two longer.
I hear him come up behind me and feel him slide his arms around me, and we stand there for a long moment, over the sideboard, two mismatched teacups putting off the inevitable for a little while longer.
Eventually we slide to the floor, our backs to the sideboard.
“I’m sorry,” I say into his chest after a while.
“What are you sorry about?” he says, sounding incredulous.
“I feel like I ought to have something inspiring or courageous or meaningful to say.”
“By the actual undescended testicles of the great green sea serpent,” he says, sounding outraged, “that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Do you honestly feel that you’ve got to give a rousing speech to me because we spent the night together?”
His sincere outrage makes me smile. “No, I feel like I’ve got to give a rousing speech because I’m sad, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to say goodbye to things that I care about. Rousing speeches are what they taught me to deliver when things feel…”
“Bad?” he suggests.
“Big,” I say.
“Well,” he says, relaxing a little, “that’s a bit more reasonable. But you don’t have to say anything. Just feel your feelings, for the sake of all that’s holy.”
“What about your feelings?”
“My feelings? Do you want me to say something? Confess my deep dark adoration? Fill you in on a few of my more thrilling secrets?” He runs a hand across my hair, and I lean into his warmth. “I will, of course, if that’s what you’d like.”
“No. I suppose I was asking if you wanted me to tell you how I felt,” I say.
He chuckles, a low rumble in his chest. “I have a pretty fair sense of how you feel,” he says. “We did take all our clothes off, you know.”
“I had this fantasy—completely unfounded, as it turns out; just a daydream—that if I ever kissed you, you’d turn serious for a little while and say something real,” I say, running a hand down his arm. I can feel the muscles beneath the soft fabric of his shirt. “But, alas,” I sigh.
He laughs, a real laugh this time. “That was your deep dark fantasy about me? That you’d kiss me and I’d turn into someone who says sensible things? By all the stars in the sky, I doubt anyone has that kind of power. Not even the sea witch herself could lay that curse on me and make it stick.”
“Please. The kiss of a princess doesn’t curse; it cures curses,” I say, primly.
The last of the early-morning light has left my little room, and I can hear the bells striking the hour, somewhere outside.
Perhaps—indeed, almost certainly—today’s the day I’ll finally see the clock tower for myself.
I missed it on my maiden voyage through Little Pepperidge, all those months ago.
“Will you really stay here?” I say, gently. “After?”
“You doubt that I’ll be trailing after your carriage, reading Salvongian love poetry to you, until the end of time?”
“I do, actually; Mother’s favorite palaces are all on cliffs overlooking the sea, and I don’t see that working in your favor.”
“That is an issue. I’ll have to post you my poetry, then.”
“You could look after the bookshop? While you look for a cure?” This, of course, is one of the subjects I’ve been trying, rather poorly, to find a way to broach.
He’s silent. We watch the fire die down in the grate. “I’ll stay if you want me to,” he finally says.
“It’s better than a barn,” I point out. “Fewer drafts. Less mucking.”
“Compelling arguments all,” he says.
“Bash,” I say, turning to him, taking his face in my hands and forcing him to look at me. “What will you do after I’m gone?”
“After I rend my clothes and tear my hair?”
“Yes,” I sigh, “after that.”
“I don’t know.”
“What were you doing before I arrived?”
“Running,” he says, and although his tone is light, I can hear the weight of the word.
I stand and take the key down—the one Mrs. Gooch pressed into my hands all those months ago—from where it hangs by the door, and drop down next to him again.
“Take it,” I say, folding his fingers over it.
“Once I’m gone you can do whatever you like with it; give it to Sasha or leave it in the door or bury it out back with the turnips, but at least you have the option of going somewhere that isn’t near the sea, and isn’t drafty, and you can sleep on a real bed, not a pile of hay.
” He said he’d been sleeping in a hammock, but apparently we’re using humor to defuse our feelings this morning.
He looks at the key in his hand. “I liked the hay,” he says. “Might bring some in to replace the bed.”
I feel like I might cry if I have to stare at the key in his hand any longer, so I kiss him, and tell him to give the cat a name.
And when the bells over the doors chime and it’s time to get up, we uncurl ourselves and head upstairs to greet my parents and the sorcerer who’s going to break my curse.
If Bash has any thoughts about the fact that I lead him by the hand, his fingers intertwined with mine, he doesn’t share them.