Another blink, and Nigel came more fully to himself, only to find that he lay on the floor of his shop, pinned under the weight of a strange young woman. A woman whose face was so close to his own, he could easily tip his chin forward and kiss her if he—
Oh, gods. What possessed him tothinksuch a thing?
Somewhere behind him, a raucous voice screamed,“Never mind! Never mind!”punctuated by a flutter of flapping wings and the rhythmicbang, bang, bangof the shop door hitting the wall. Nigel shook his head, desperate to regain some sense ofdecorum in this pandemonium. Which was difficult to do while lying in the middle of a spreading puddle with an armful of woman crushing his ribcage.
“Madame—” he began with great dignity.
She tried to rise, pressing one hand firmly against his heart, the other on the floor. The heel of her palm slipped in rainwater, and she tumbled forward again, her nose bumping into his. Immediately, his senses were overwhelmed by the sweet scent of chamomile and lavender. It knocked the breath from his lungs almost as thoroughly as the sudden weight of the stranger hitting his chest once more, and he was suddenly, overwhelmingly,excruciatinglyaware of the very feminine form pressed firmly up against every inch of his body.
“Oh, sir, I do beg your pardon!” she gasped, pushing back upright. For a moment, Nigel’s fingers tightened around her elbows, struck by an unexpected unwillingness to let her go. He remembered himself, however, and forced his hands to loosen their hold. She scooted off and knelt on the floor beside him, and Nigel attempted another look at her, trying to assemble a clear impression.
He found that, chaotic though her arrival may have been, she was quite a put-together sort of person. She wore a neat suit of green wool, faded and threadbare and utterly soaked through. Her hair, what he could see of it beneath the rain hat, was equally saturated, clinging to her face and neck in dark coils. Roses bloomed in her cheeks, whether due to the brisk wind outside or the embarrassment of the moment, Nigel couldn’t guess. Possibly both.
“There, are you all right?” she asked, her brow puckered with concern as she offered a hand.
More than a little baffled, Nigel mutely slipped his hand into hers. Her fingers were very cold, her grip trembling, but she gave a tug and managed to pull him into a seated position just as thedoor once again slammed against the wall, and a blinding burst of rain spewed into his face. He lifted an arm to shield his eyes.
“Let me get that!” the woman cried, leaping to her feet. Her black boots slipping on wet tiles, she lunged for the entrance, and Nigel suddenly thought she was going to disappear back into the street. Another moment and she’d be nothing more than a bizarre apparition lingering in the back of his memory. And all before he’d even managed to utter a “hello.”
For some reason he couldn’t begin to explain, the idea opened a pit of regret in his stomach.
“Madame—” he tried again.
But she simply caught the door with both hands and slammed it shut. In a single fluid motion, she swept her dropped umbrella—yellow to match her hat and indescribably shabby—off the floor and jammed it into the gap between the door and the floorboards. The umbrella gave an ominouscrunch, but when the next gust howled down the sidewalks of Addle Street, it battered the entrance of The Arcane Bouquet in vain.
The young woman breathed out a heavy sigh of relief, turned, and sagged against the door. Rainwater dripped from her nose, her chin, the hem of her skirt. She was as bedraggled as a half-drowned kitten, but when she smiled Nigel’s way, it was such a sunbeam bursting through the gloom of this gods-forsaken day, the cockles of his cold heart unexpectedly warmed. He’d not realized he had cockles anymore.
“Whew!” the stranger huffed and wiped water from her face with a flick of her fingers. “I’ve never seen such a gale in my life! The leaves can exaggerate a bit sometimes, but not today, Green Mother bless us.”
Nigel couldn’t begin to come up with an answer for this inscrutable statement. He could only stare, his gaze slowly taking her in, from the buttons of her stout little black boots, up to the crown of her rain hat. There was plenty to feast theeyes upon in between, even clad as it was in saturated wool. Before him stood a woman of elegant proportions, slender, square-shouldered, long-limbed. A little on the underfed side, perhaps, but graceful. Every move she made had a quickness and precision which bespoke a decisive character. The raggedness of her apparel told a story of difficulty, but the dimples which appeared when she smiled promised a fortifying good humor which faced those difficulties with courage.
It didn’t hurt that she boasted the kind of angelic features master artists would sell their very souls for a chance to replicate in oils or stained glass.
Not once in the three years since the Shadowbane Lady’s fall had Nigel Grimm so much as noticed a woman. Everyone around him, male or female, was nothing more than a blur of faces and voices to be endured rather than observed. If pressed, he could probably dredge up a basic description of old Mrs. Goddard, from whom he let this building; he seemed to recall a rotund little figure topped with a head of gray curls under an old-fashioned lace cap.
But somehow he knew, with a conviction verging on fanaticism, that years from now, when he lay upon his death bed, he would be able to call to mind this stranger’s face in exquisite detail, right down to the little mole just at the lefthand corner of her bottom lip.
Realizing his eyes were bulging and his mouth hung agape like a codfish, Nigel gave his head a little shake, blinked twice, and began to gather his feet under him. “Madame—” he attempted for a third time.
He made it no further, however, for just then she swept the hat from her head. Her hair, which had been bundled up underneath it, fell to her shoulders in a mass of frizzy locks as hairpins pattered to the floor, and Nigel lost all powers of speech.
“Oh no!” she cried and dropped to her knees, scrambling to collect the escaped pins. “I’m coming all to pieces. I should have stayed at home, I suppose, following such a dismal reading, but I was just so hopeful having seen that shop sign yesterday. ‘Mystic Infusions,’ it said, ‘Tea and Readings.’ It seemed like fate!” She sighed and sat back on her heels, pins clutched in her lap. “I suppose even fate can’t work miracles.”
Spying a pin near Nigel’s hand, she leaned forward, reaching out to claim it. Her wrist extended beyond the cuff of her wool jacket—a fine, slim wrist with delicate bones and pretty blue veins beneath translucent skin. But Nigel’s gaze, drawn to it almost against his will, fastened on a certain symbol tattooed there: a seven-pointed star, scrawled in ugly black ink.
His stomach knotted. He knew that symbol. All too well in fact. It was a heptagram: a sorcerer’s mark. This woman, whoever and whatever else she might be, was a sorceress. Or, at the very least, born to a sorcerous family, branded by the Authorities of Plym as warning to all of the powers she bore. Or might bear. Or could bear under the right circumstances. The Authorities weren’t overly concerned with specifics. Many of the women thus marked after the fall of the Shadowbane Lady couldn’t conjure magic any more than they could fly.
But that didn’t make the warning any less ominous.
The young lady, realizing her mistake, flashed Nigel a quick glance before deftly pulling her sleeve back down. When she caught his eye, she smiled again, and Nigel had to wonder if perhaps shewasa dark and powerful sorceress. Sorcery was the only possible explanation for a smile that devastating. He felt as though he’d just been leveled to his knees, though in reality he was still seated on his bum in the middle of the shop floor.
“I am so terribly sorry for barging in on you like this,” she said, her voice trembling a little as though uncertain how he would react, having glimpsed that mark. “I promise, I will makemyself scarce as soon as possible, but . . . well, now I’m here, do you mind very much if I wait until the worst of the storm passes?”
“Of course,” Nigel replied, finding his voice at last, though it emerged in an odd little hiccup. He cleared his throat and attempted a casual shrug of one shoulder which he suspected came across as a compulsive tick. “Please. Do. Stay.” Each word emerged as a short, sharp bark. Hardly the paragon of eloquence he liked to imagine himself. Mortified, he shut his mouth tight and scrambled to his feet. His shoes slipped once or twice, but he managed to achieve a standing position.
Before he could attempt a stab at gallantry and offer his hand to the lady, she rose as well, rather more gracefully than he. “You’re too kind, sir,” she said, her soft brown eyes gazing up into his. “I won’t be a bother, I—”
Her voice broke off in a sneeze so violent, it rocked her entire body and made her stagger.
