Better get the letter-opener,she thought. That was a papercut waiting to happen if she’d ever seen one.
As she fumbled in the drawer, Willow hopped onto the desk, sending a pair of envelopes to the floor in her wake.
“You’re meant to be helping,” grumbled Alison.
“I’m organizing,” said Willow, unperturbed. “Helping you prioritize.”
The tabby cat purred slyly, her tail curling at the end. The very picture of innocence.
Alison sighed as her fingers found (gratefully, the handled end of) the letter-opener. Then she retrieved the fallen envelopes from the floor with a flick of her wrist and a thought:
Two in the hand,
Wouldn’t that be grand?
“Poetry” was sort of a loose term for what Alison had come to realize was the key to controlling her magic on her own. But “silly rhyming magic” sounded much less clever and impressivethan “poetry magic.” No one needed to know the quality of the “poems.”
Alison knew what lay in the stack of envelopes from their identical shapes: RSVPs. (A Gallic phrase, Keir had told her when they dropped the wedding invitations off at the post office two weeks earlier. Alison had never studied Gallic. “A pity,ma chère,”Keir had replied. “It is the languagede l’amour.” His accent had been so horrendous, Alison had burst into laughter, much to his chagrin.)
“I still don’t know why you bothered sending invitations to everyone in town,” said Willow, pawing at the envelopes. “You see most of them every day.”
“It’s tradition,” said Alison, someone who had little use for traditions at all.
Willow stared at her blankly, unbelieving.
“They’re just so pretty,” Alison admitted. “When Weyland drew such a pretty little cottage, I wanted everyone to have one.”
In fact, she’d gone to a great deal of trouble to see that they had. She had taken Weyland’s drawing—her little white cottage with the thatched roof, covered in winter snow—all the way to the printer in Sudport, the nearest one that could print in color. It was the very same printer that had expressed interest in printing a book of her poetry after seeing the pamphlet they had made at the summer.
But Alison hadn’t brought it along. She was too busy with the wedding planning, she told herself. She could worry about the book later.
(In truth, there was a part of Alison that was frightened to see the book in print, as much as she had longed for it. It would be putting a part of herself out there for all to see, and the wedding itself was more than enough of that for now.)
“Alright,” said Alison, starting in on the stack. “Let’s see what we’ve got. Yes from Mother, oh, and she’s bringing along AuntRose and cousin Eloise even though her invitation was only for her plus one…”
“At least she isn’t bringing some man,” said Willow.
Alison hadn’t even considered it as a possibility; the plus one had simply been customary.
“I can’t even imagine,” said Alison. She didn’t want to, truth be told. If Alison’s mother had met anyone since her father’s death, she’d never mentioned them. Alison knew that it wasn’t fair to her mother to wish for her to be alone for the rest of her life, but she couldn’t bear to think of someone else in her father’s place. At least not at her wedding.
She sighed. A wedding was supposed to be a happy occasion, but she’d found it difficult so far not to think of who would be missing.
“Come on,” said Willow. “That’s three people. Surely more of them said ‘yes’ than that.”
“Right you are,” said Alison, grateful to the cat for the reminder to focus. “Ah, Ceri and Leo returned their invitations together. Both said yes.”
“That answers that,” said Willow. There had been a bit of a wager going on how long the princess and her Gallicl’amourwould last, now that he was back in the same…realm? World? It was hard to say where Leo had gone exactly during their time at Winwold College, but they were grateful to have him back. And none more so than Ceri, although according to Idris, she was liable to toss him off as soon as she found some shiny new toy to play with.
Alison wasn’t so sure. She didn’t believe that her own experience in a strange magical world with Keir had been the only thing that pulled them together, but going through something beyond explanation certainly seemed to strengthen their bond. Perhaps Ceri’s writings to Leo during his journey had done the same.
“Yes from Lady Sibba and Weyland—”
“Obviously,” said Willow.
“Yes from Nigel Smalls and from Duncan Corbett, but both of them indicate they’re bringing a plus one. Do they mean each other?”
“I suppose you’ll have to go and ask them,” said Willow. “Which is what you could have done in the first place—”
