Chapter 49
“He stole…her magic…scallop,” I repeat. “Is that a euphemism?”
“I hope so,” Amaritha says. “Sounds like it ought to be.”
“No,” Honey says.
Eight pairs of eyes turn to Bash, who sinks lower in his chair.
“Are you going to make Honey tell us, Bash? Or are you going to tell us yourself?” I say. Scallop. Magic scallop. He’s been cursed to fear the sea because of a magic scallop.
He makes an aggravated noise and shifts in his seat.
“It was said to lead people to hidden riches,” he says, sounding embarrassed.
“I’m a pirate. A magical scallop that could lead people to hidden riches is an easy route to a sweet life for anyone, pirate or otherwise. I didn’t know it was her pet scallop.”
“So you stole a magical scallop from a sea witch?” Sasha gasps.
“I don’t steal,” he says, grimly.
“You exchange,” we chorus.
“It has to be an exchange of equal value,” I say. “What could you possibly have had that was equal in value to a sea witch’s pet magical gold-seeking scallop, something that you could have hidden somewhere nearby when you took it?”
He flushes, and swallows, but doesn’t answer.
“His heart,” Honey says, evenly. “He left his heart in exchange for the scallop.”
“Oh,” several of the others say. I say nothing, because I can’t quite sort through the implications of Honey’s words.
“Like, he gave her his heart because he was in love with her?” Amaritha asks.
“No, I gather it was in the nature of a lien,” Honey says. Off Amaritha’s look, she explains. “When you give a person something to secure a debt you owe that person.”
“I wasn’t going to keep the bloody thing,” Bash says. “I only wanted to find a bit of hidden treasure. One or two sunken ships, nothing big.”
“Exchanges of that nature: That’s deep magic,” Honey says. “Most civilized folks haven’t practiced that kind of magic in centuries. It lives on in some very old communities on the fringes of the eight kingdoms: pirate ships, vegetarian communes, that sort of thing.”
“It was only supposed to be for a little while,” Bash adds. “A week or two, depending on how fast the scallop moved.”
“From what I’ve been able to ascertain, she discovered the missing scallop and then found the heart; when our friend here returned, happily enriched, to retrieve his heart and give the scallop back: That’s when she cursed him.”
“I mean, that’s reasonable,” I say. Bash glances at me and I shrug at him. “You can be very aggravating.” He shrugs in return, as though agreeing.
“You took your physical heart out of your body and hid it in the sea witch’s cave?” Sasha gasps. “Just to steal a clam? That’s disgusting.” She sounds terribly admiring and not remotely disgusted.
“Scallop,” Bash says.
“How did you live?” Amaritha asks.
“That’s a fascinating bit of deep magic, actually,” the sorcerer—who we’d all thought was asleep—pipes up. “If you can find a copy of Bezeier’s Spellmancry, any edition printed in the last century, that is, you’ll find it lays out the—”
“I had an amulet,” Bash interrupts. “The spell was only good for about ten days. I was going to give the damned thing back.”
“So the sea witch found the pirate’s heart, realized someone had stolen the scallop, and when he came back to exchange them, she cursed him to fear large bodies of water,” Sasha says. “And then he ran here. I still don’t get it.”
“Not quite. He came here because it was as far from the sea as he could get,” Honey says.
“That much is true. By sheer coincidence, another curse—another bit of deep magic, although this one, I believe, was unintentional—took place in the same town, around the same time, and suddenly he was sharing a town with a woman who was suffering from a very powerful and very peculiar curse of her own.” She glances at him. “Would you like to explain the rest?”
Bash appears to have regained a bit of his composure. “You’re doing beautifully,” he drawls, waving a lazy hand. “Do carry on.”
“I wasn’t able to speak to the sea witch directly, so this next bit is hearsay, but from what I’ve gathered, when you returned to trade the scallop back for your heart, the witch handed it back with the imprecation that, next time you were parted from it, you’d find it a lot harder to retrieve.”
“That doesn’t sound like a curse that would make you fear the sea,” Sasha observes.
“Yes, she tacked that on as a bonus. Thought it might teach me a lesson,” Bash says.
“Oh, and the smell!” Amaritha shouts, and then blushes. “He smells like the ocean,” she murmurs, in response to my mother’s quelling look.
“If the curse was meant to teach you not to steal things,” I point out, “it didn’t work.”
“Then it was really like two separate curses,” Amaritha says. “The water one and the heart one.”
“I knew that ironic curse wasn’t deep magic,” Sasha says, sounding smug.
“Tricky to counteract,” Honey agrees, “but not deep magic.”
Everyone’s looking round the table as though they’ve understood something I haven’t. I certainly don’t feel any more enlightened.
“Does that mean Bash is cured now?” I try.
“Lawks, no,” the sorcerer says, feeding a treat to the sounder. “Still very much cursed.”
“Lawks,” Sasha mouths to Amaritha. I suspect I’ll be hearing that very mild, very archaic oath for weeks to come. Or I would if I were staying. A point we’ve moved past without coming to an agreement about.
“Wait,” Amaritha says. “Sasha says the Barn Pirate always left, like, weird little things here every time he stole something. And he says that’s like, a pirate thing.
Exchange, not steal. So, okay, but I’ve seen all the stuff he exchanged, and I know he kind of left it strewn around for Tandy to find.
But the first thing he stole was a stack of books. ”
“And she never found what he left in exchange when he stole the books!” Sasha concludes, looking around triumphantly.
There’s a moment of silence, and then my father says, “Ah,” and frowns.
“What?” I say. I glance at Bash, who’s looking embarrassed again and won’t meet my eye.
Mother sighs. “Honestly, Tanadelle.”
I look at Honey, a little desperately. She gives me a sympathetic look. “He left his heart in exchange for those books.”
“He still had the heart-trading amulet?” I say. Clearly, everyone else is getting something from this conversation I’m not. “But you stole those books months ago, and you said the amulet only worked for ten days.”
“The sea witch kept the amulet,” he murmurs, not looking at me.
“Oh,” I say, faltering. “I don’t understand.”
“Barn Pirate,” Amaritha says, “why don’t you just tell her?”
We all swing about to look at him, but he sinks lower in his chair.
“Good gracious,” the sorcerer says, apparently awake again. “Are we still discussing this? I’d guess that he didn’t leave it in exchange for the books; he lost it and then took the books when he realized it was gone. So the books are, in a sense, a red herring. A cover-up, rather than an exchange.”
“But,” I say, and stop. One “loses one’s heart” in literature as a euphemism for falling in love. How does one lose one’s heart in real life, when magic is involved?
“Tandy,” Sasha hisses at me, “he’s, you know.” She wriggles her claws in a fashion that is absolutely intended to be significant, and then raises her eyebrows at me, clearly willing me to read her mind. I shake my head at her, still completely lost.
“He’s in love with you, obviously,” the sorcerer says, rolling her eyes.
“He may not have even realized it when it happened, or fully understood. Falling in love while operating under the imprimatur of a curse about losing one’s heart…
it’s a seriously understudied area of the lore. I really ought to be taking notes.”
“But,” I repeat, directing my question toward the sorcerer, “he stole the books the first day he met me.”
“Love at first sight,” the sorcerer says, sounding bored. “Lost his heart, then stole the books.”
“Love at first sight’s not a real thing!” I protest.
“Rare, but not unheard-of,” the sorcerer says.
“But if he was cursed to lose his heart, then it’s as though he was cursed to fall in love?” I try. “So he’s not in love with me. He’s missing his heart, is all.”
“No, he was cursed to find it harder to get his heart back the next time he was separated from it,” the sorcerer says, sounding bored.
“By good fortune—or bad, depending on who you talk to—he was separated from it wholly accidentally this time, because he fell in love. I believe it’s quite lost to him now. ”
Because he fell in love with me? The day he met me?
The idea is preposterous. There must be some mistake.
Something they don’t understand, or which I’m failing to see.
I turn to Bash, suddenly outraged. “How could you not say anything? How could you spend all this time telling me you were cursed to be afraid of the sea when that was, was…” I throw up my hands in frustration. “That wasn’t the only curse!”
“I would be surprised if he knew what had happened at first,” Honey says, gently. She turns to him. “You felt your heart’s loss immediately, didn’t you?”
He nods, a little miserably.
“And took the books in a panic,” she suggests.
“They seemed useful,” he says, a little of his old bravado creeping into his voice.
“And?” I demand. “All the rest of it? All the cobwebs and seashells?”
“Cobwebs?” my father echoes.
“Oh, Tandy,” Amaritha says, shaking her head. “He was flirting with you.”
“By stealing my cobwebs?” This strikes me as even more outrageous than the business with the scallop. “None of that stuff meant anything! Or had any value!”
“He didn’t have anything to give you, and you are a princess, Tandy,” Sasha says. “It’s kind of intimidating. Imagine falling in love with you.”
“At first sight,” Amaritha adds.
“When you’re already afraid of water.”
“And living in a barn.”