Chapter Thirty-Four
“Are you going to go back to the Rest tonight?” Seph asked Rhys, hours later as the carriage rambled toward Brighton.
She was lying across the velvet coach seat, her hair loose over his thighs as she gazed up at him, resting in his lap. Their fingers were entwined over her ribs, a thin blanket over the both of them.
“Or,” she added, “do you want to stay at the shop?”
“Whichever you prefer,” he replied, grinning down at her. “Since you’ll be coming with me either way. I confess, a part of me does want to see my siblings’ reactions when I bring you home again.”
She flattened her mouth at him. “The shop it is.”
He chuckled, leaning down to kiss her softly and then bracing as they hit another bump in the road.
The sun was starting to set beyond the windows, casting a cool, red light through the breaks in the curtained windows of the coach, each one dancing along the empty seat across from them, where Merlin’s tricks were sprayed out from their initial dive into what they’d gotten. What they’d inherited.
“When we marry,” he said, leaning back and running his fingers through all that molten gold in his lap, tress by tress, “do I get to help at the shop? I have many ideas.”
“Well, that depends,” she said, watching the sunset lights play over his face. “Do I get to help at the pavilion when it gets warm again?”
He scoffed. “Of course you do, gwrach. I can’t perform without you, can I?”
“You can,” she said. “I’ve seen it. But you probably shouldn’t.”
That made him smile despite himself, his lips curling at the sides. “Be silent. Wicked wench.”
“Never,” she answered, smiling too. “I like your mirror boxes trick, the one you did at the showcase last summer. You’ll have to teach me that one.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “It sounds like I don’t have to,” he said with a sniff, “since you already know there are mirrors in the boxes.”
“Yes, but when you rotate them …” she said, shifting to get more comfortable.
They chatted this way for the remainder of the drive, hours passing as darkness encroached on the road they took, until finally, they had arrived back on King’s Road. Back in Brighton.
Back at home.
Rhys helped her up from her repose, his insides going soft at how warm and pliant she was, at how she rubbed the grog from her eyes and blinked up at this thing she had built, a soft smile playing on her lips, as though she had missed it.
She handed him the key. It was warm and heavy in his palm and Seph folded his fingers around it and let him be the one to usher them back inside.
Though of course, that was where her languid, drowsy fugue immediately dissolved.
“Wh-What in all saints?!” she stammered, scrambling for a tinderbox to get the lights up. “What happened here?!”
“Ah,” said Rhys, a little stunned too as the flames jumped to life, Seph darting from lamp to lamp like a winged pixie. “Libba.”
The entire back wall had been painted in a forest-scape, with towering, gnarled trees and a river winding through them. It was simple but oddly lifelike, the trees seeming to sway and whisper even static like that on the wall.
The displays, too, had been moved around and reorganized.
“M-My … That … What?” Seph was stammering, pointing from table to table.
The hoopoes were still there, but the snake had sold, Rhys noted. It had been replaced with a trio of scorpions, posed on a bit of driftwood. The birds in the center had a glossy card, written in Libba’s elegant scrawl, Not for Sale.
He put his hands in his pockets, noting two other places Not for Sale had been announced: a huge half-section of sparkling agate with quartz crystals in the center, which certainly had not been there before they’d left, and his red ammonite, still shiny from the rose oil.
Both were serving as centerpieces for new collections, which Rhys immediately suspected Libba had purchased from Malcolm’s quarry. Fossils and stones of all sorts.
Behind the stone display was something that looked like a little ship’s cannon, its mouth poking out with a crank handle on its side. He drifted toward it and reached inside, withdrawing a note.
“What is that?” Seph asked, her voice gone high and crackly.
“Apparently, a stone tumbler?” Rhys said, showing her the card. “It says Lib bought it with extra profits because it was cheaper than paying someone to tumble the stones from the quarry on her behalf.”
“Oh, look at that,” Seph noted thinly, holding the letter to her nose. “She signed it: You’re welcome.”
“We can, erm … put things back how they were,” he assured her, crossing the room and putting his hands on her shoulders. “Bucket of paint and a day of dragging things around, and it’ll be back how it was.”
“What?” she said, wild-eyed as she looked up at him. “No, we cannot! Now I know it can be this and I’ll never be satisfied with what it was again. Don’t you see?”
He looked at her for a long time, remembering what it had been like, arriving here with that green letter, back when they’d been rivals. Back before he’d known what it could be. What it might look like otherwise.
“Yes,” he said gently, “I do see.”
“Oh, good,” she said, her shoulders sagging under his fingers. “But I still must be very cross with Libba the next time I see her, all right? Do not ruin that for me.”
“I would never,” he promised. “Do you want to look around a bit more, or would you rather just go to bed?”
“Let’s go to bed,” Seph said, lifting her hands and putting her fingers over his on her shoulders. “This will all still be here in the morning, won’t it? It’ll all still be here when we wake.”
“Yes, gwrach,” he told her, turning her toward the staircase and her rest. “It will all still be here when we wake.”