Chapter Fifteen
By sheer luck, they caught Julian Harcourt just as he was leaving for an appearance in court, striding out of his offices, silver-white hair glinting in the afternoon sun. As soon as his gaze fell upon Rhys and Seph crossing the plaza together, he visibly sagged, his arms going limp at his sides.
“Afternoon, Counselor!” Rhys called, waving at him as though the man didn’t look like he wanted to walk directly in the opposite direction.
“Mr. Caradoc,” he said, casting a weary, apologetic glance at Seph. “I have told you before, you cannot bring suit against Miss Boswell unless she is selling a trick you specifically patented.”
Rhys blinked rapidly, shaking his head and holding his hands up. “No!”
“You what?!” Seph exclaimed, uncertain if she was amused or offended.
“That’s not what we’re here for!” Rhys shouted over her. “Need to ask you about inheritance rules. And travel. That’s all.”
Mr. Harcourt sagged with immediate relief, releasing a little breath and letting his folio sag at his side. “Oh,” he said. “All right, then. What’s amiss?”
To Seph’s credit, her immense credit and valor, she did not bring up what the barrister had said until after Rhys had laid out their predicament and gotten an answer.
She waited until he was told to just tack additional days onto the end of his calendar year to make up for whatever time he needed to spend in Lewes, so long as it did not exceed a month.
She waited until they had departed the Lanes.
She waited until they had re-entered the carriage.
She even waited until the horse had started trotting again, dragging them along toward King’s Road.
And then she exploded. “You tried to sue me?!”
He froze, green eyes wide and caught, like prey in a snare. “Erm,” he said.
“Rhys Caradoc!” she exclaimed, shrill and thin.
And then she began to laugh. She laughed in that way that she knew would hurt, would ache in her face and stomach, tears springing to her eyes as it escaped her.
Right away, his stiff, defensive posture sagged, those wide eyes going slack as his mouth turned down at the corners. “Yes, yes,” he groused, crossing his arms over his chest. “Chuckle well. Ho ho.”
“You … You tried,” she gasped, hiccupping through her amusement. “You actually spoke to a barrister.”
“You sold my secrets!” he barked, forehead wrinkling up. “You shattered the wonder. You … You did it to … to stoke my ire!”
“To heat your blood?” she asked, whisking away tears as they crawled down her cheeks, her chest convulsing with another hiccup. “Yes, I suppose I did. You thought I couldn’t.”
“I what?!” he cried, staring at her in some suspended state between baffled and horrified. “When did I say that?!”
She braced her hand on the side of the carriage, twisting her fingers through the curtains to support herself as she put her other hand on her spasming chest. “‘Not partial to blondes, am I?’” she mocked in a deep, Welsh voice.
“‘Princesses in storybooks have that hair, like gold. Doesn’t stir anything in a man. Too pure. Not for me.’”
Then she dissolved again, collapsing forward with her face in her hands as the hysteria wound through her deeper, tugging here and there at the bones in her ribs.
“I knew it!” he shouted, slapping his thighs. “I knew you were doing it at me. I knew you were selling those tricks to goad me specifically. They all called me paranoid. They called me childish. They said … They claimed I was … I never said that bloody thing about princesses.”
She tried to tell him he had, but she couldn’t catch her breath. She could only nod. And point.
“I did not,” he insisted, sounding less certain by the consonant.
“‘Rhys, do you like my new costume?’” she managed through ragged breaths. “‘Does it flatter me?’”
“What?!”
“‘Couldn’t tell one way or the other, Seph,’” she continued, mocking his voice again. “‘Just don’t see you that way, is all.’”
He could only stare, his mouth hanging open, until she finally began to regain control of herself, dragging deep, tattered breaths into her lungs and holding them there for a few seconds at a time.
She knew her face had gone cherry red. Her hair was falling out around her cheeks.
She didn’t care at all.
She felt …
Better?
“Ahh,” she sighed, her shoulders softer and looser than they’d been in months as the carriage ground to a halt outside her shop. “I needed that.”
He was still gawping at her like an owl.
“Going to help me bring in all this new merchandise?” she asked, throwing the door open and hopping out, oddly refreshed by the cool breeze as it stirred around her face. “I can ask Mr. Cagney if you don’t want to—”
He leapt out after her, bounding from the carriage like a deranged tomcat, his knees up so high, he seemed to soar and then land with a spray of pebbles next to her. “Unlock the damned door,” he grumbled, immediately moving to unpack the first of her parcels.
She grinned at him, brilliant and clean and true. “All right,” she said. “I shall.”
“Good,” he grumbled, hoisting the barrel of tumbled stones out and onto his shoulders. “Gwrach.”
*
It took them a little over an hour to unpack everything and to arrange the new displays on the floor of the shop.
Rhys had a specific table in mind for the taxidermy and any time Seph attempted to intervene in the arrangement of animals, he batted her away with a hissing sound that amused her more than it should have.
“Well, if you won’t let me help,” she said, crossing her arms and watching him tilt the hoopoes, step back, and then rush forward with a grouse to tilt them again. “I’ll just pop to the pub and get something to eat?”
“Yes, yes,” he mumbled, rotating the snake skeleton so that it faced away from the birds, its bony fangs glinting in the sunlight. “Get dessert.”
She did not stay to watch him fuss, though it was tempting, those frizzy curls hanging down over his brow. And she’d gotten the cobbler from the pub because she knew he preferred it to the pie.
She sighed as she walked back because she knew she was in danger again. She just couldn’t dredge up the energy to care at the moment. It had been a taxing pair of days. There was nothing left for fretting, at least not before she ate.
What was odd was the clarity of relief that had settled over her mind, like it had been given a good dusting and then been binned in the rubbish after all the dramatics today.
She could think clearer than she’d been able to before.
She could see the space around ideas that had formerly been filled with static.
And that was why, when she walked back into her shop, the first thing she said was, “It has to be the Changeling,” followed immediately by, “Rhys! You have to pay for that!”
His head snapped up, hand covered in chili dust as he forced himself to swallow a mouthful of pilfered sweets from one of her pink tins. “I will,” he lied.
She narrowed her eyes. “I was going to go upstairs to get cutlery, but now I don’t trust you down here. Go get it. Here’s my key.”
She shook her head, staring after him as she set the covered dishes down on the little meeting table she kept in the corner.
He’d been rummaging through her “Curiosities of the Quill” display and had left one of her copies of Celtic folklore sitting open with a red fingerprint right in the corner of the page. “Rhys,” she muttered to herself, attempting to brush the chili powder off the page. “Honestly.”
“I have that book,” his voice said from the rear staircase, where he’d appeared holding forks and knives in one hand and spoons in the other like a knight’s page. “Mine’s older, more worn, and has a harder cover. But it’s the same book.”
“Does that one also have fingerprints in it?” she asked flatly.
He grinned at her. “Yes, especially that page.”
She rolled her eyes, glancing down at where he’d left it.
Gwenllian ferch Gruffydd, it read. Warrior princess. Martyr. Heroine.
There was a painting of her block printed on the opposing page, fierce and golden haired, wearing a dirty dress draped with chainmail and looking defiantly off the page, her sword still clutched in a sagging hand.
Under it, a small caption read, “Revenge for Gwenllian – Still used today as a war cry by the Welsh.”
She examined the page, frowning. “Oh,” she said. “They cut her head off.”
“They do that,” Rhys agreed. “The English. There’s another bloke in that book who just stayed a talking head afterward. My Gwenllian was too practical for such nonsense.”
“Hm,” said Seph, moving to unpack the hand pies from the pub. “Blonde.”
“Indeed,” said Rhys, his voice soft and low. “Blonde.”
They ate quietly for a moment, the book shunted off to the side, safe from sauce and spatter and crumbs.
She could feel him watching her, waiting to elaborate on what she’d said when she’d come through the door.
She had intended to wait until he asked, but he was being silent for once, and it was unbearable.
“He knows we are illusionists,” she said, her voice cutting through the still air.
“He knows they are all tricks. But when we did the Changeling, we did it with a story about ourselves attached. We claimed to be children who were switched, part of another realm, and then we demonstrated it. That’s what was different about us.
It wasn’t just not being able to figure out the trick. ”
“Surely, he knows we are not actual changelings,” Rhys replied carefully, tilting his head to the side. “Even if we were, would we know about it?”
“That isn’t the point,” she said, licking a flake of pastry off her thumb.
“Mind-readers, faith healers, mediums. They’re all performing tricks, but they claim to be something beyond merely human.
The only time we ever did that was with the Changeling.
That’s what he wants to see and we both know it. ”
“It’s just a disappearing act,” Rhys reasoned. “It’s hardly unique.”
“Merlin disagrees,” Seph replied. “And he is the one who is dying.”