For several long, echoing moments, her question received silence in response. Harper had the impression she’d taken them by surprise. They normally spoke first, but today, she had been watching. The candelabras were lit again, and in the wavering shadows they threw across the floor, she had watched a shiver pass through them. Normally, the long shadows from the high windows were stable and straight. By contrast, the flickering candlelight produced a wibbly, wobbly surface for them to traverse, and it seemed to her as if they needed to shift back and forth repeatedly just to make it to her small table.
“I had considered it today, now that you mention it. But I’m very glad to see you all the same.”
She laughed at the careful response. “The pleasure is mine. Always. But if this is too much trouble, I promise you won’t hurt my feelings if you tell me to leave.”
They tutted in response. “If worse comes to worse, there are lights I can turn on. Are you practicing your cards today?”
When she told them about her desire to study divination a bit more seriously, they leapt upon the opportunity to instruct her with zeal. Every visit to the tea shop involved a tarot reading, and she was not allowed to leave until she read the dregs of her cup. Harper couldn’t say that she had improved her skill at either discipline, but she was enjoying these lessons more than she’d ever enjoyed a single day of classes in school.
“I am. I already have a deck ready to go.”
“Very good. And what are you reading today?”
She grinned. She hoped there would never be another eatery wherewhat are you reading todaywas the chief method of placing an order. Closing the book open on the table before her, she showed them the cover. It was one they had picked out for her several visits earlier, and she was taking her time getting through it. The illustration depicted a stormy sky and roiling sea, an eldritch mass of tentacles and eyes looming in the surf, and a little girl standing at the water’s edge.
The shadows purred thoughtfully in contemplation. “Which part?”
“The girl just came back to the house at the shore as an adult.”
“Hmmm . . . wistful nostalgia. The bittersweet certainty that things can never be as they once were.”
“The Six of Cups.”
“Exactly, sweet one, exactly. Good girl. I know just the tea.”
Harper felt the precise moment when they left the table, the little nook seeming somewhat brighter, even as the air took on a flat quality, the absence of their crackling energy nearly tangible.
The toneless groan of the shop’s bell sounded just then, a couple stepping through the doorway. She watched the little cat leap from its cushion, hurriedly greeting the newcomers before attempting to herd them down the aisle to one of the tables with the scrolls.
“Look, it wants us to follow it. How cute!”
Harper hid her laughter in her napkin when the cat yowled in frustration, glaring at the befuddled couple as they continued to loiter about the entrance before turning to where she sat with an exasperated shake of its whiskers.Just think — you were that clueless, too, in the beginning.
“Looks like you’re going to have your hands full today,” she murmured when the tea cart made a jerking journey to her table, gesturing with her chin to the table of newcomers who were now puzzling over the spirit board.
“I do believe you are correct,” they sighed, and Harper took the opportunity to nudge out to the second chair at her table with her toe. “Promise me you’re going to come sit down for a moment when they leave. I’m exhausted just watching you try to get the tea cart across the room. I can’t imagine how you’re feeling.”
Another long pause. She had a feeling they found her ability to track them through the shadows disconcerting.
“If it were anyone else asking me, I would simply pretend I was already gone. This is white tea with vanilla and pear, and a vanilla madeleine.”
She burst out laughing as they left the table in truth, and a moment later, a low light was lit. A nightlight, she thought, from its placement close to the floor. One by one, they clicked on, three of them in total, creating long, familiar shadows across the floor. She understood why they did not keep them lit under normal circumstances – it did dampen the overall effect of the tearoom’s aesthetic, but she couldn’t imagine they would be able to serve another table simply using the flickering flames of the candles as their guide.
The first sip of her tea tasted oddly old-fashioned. As she sipped again, Harper felt nostalgic for drawing rooms and doily-covered furniture and creaking old floors, the sounds of childhood. The third sip had a tinge of melancholy, and on the fourth, she reopened her book.
As the girl in the pages moved through the rooms of the home she’d known as a child, tears pricked at her eyes. The girl had lived through something fantastical and traumatic, something that had shaped the woman she became, yet for all her Eldritch adventures, the house was just a house, despite all of the things that had happened there in the preceding chapters. The rooms were just empty wooden boxes, the time spent playing there lost to the wind, and with each sip of the tea, she felt her heart grow heavier. Nothing would ever feel like home again, and she wondered if that too, was an eternal emotion shared by all, regardless of age or species.
“What do you think?”
She jumped, lost in her reverie, as they approached the table. She realized with a start that the other couple was gone already.
“Sit.”
Their chuckle was like the crinkle of tissue paper close to the back of her neck, making her shiver. When she was able to discern the barest darkening of the shadow across the table, she was mollified.
“The tea was perfect. I wouldn’t have tried that one on my own. I don’t know how you managed to brew something that tastes nostalgic. Do you think it’s a universal experience? The Six of Cups? The reality that home will never be home again?”
“I think,” they hummed after a moment, the mellifluous glide of it seeming to creep over her skin, “that most emotional responses are rooted in universal experience for most.”
