“Perhaps, but I’m here now, and I can’t sit around and do nothing.”
The dracone huffs a little breath of air, that funny teenage response to adult reason, when they want to be cynical but haven’t really got a leg to stand on. I was a teenager myself not that long ago; I still remember the language.
“Come back tomorrow and give me a tour,” I suggest. “Show me your favorite parts of the place, what you’d want to keep unchanged. I’d really appreciate your help.” I leave the sentence a little open-ended, making it sound a bit like a question.
She huffs again. “I don’t know,” she says, morosely. “Maybe.”
Maybe is a good start.
“Just promise me you won’t ruin everything,” she adds.
“I promise.” I hold out my hand again. “Tandy,” I reiterate.
She looks at my hand like it’s a dead fish, and reluctantly takes it. “Si’masasha,” she says. “Sasha, I suppose. Everyone calls me that.”
“I’ll call you whatever you prefer,” I say, shaking her taloned hand firmly.
“Sasha, then,” she says.
With one last mournful sigh, she turns and leaves, and, once the door is shut firmly behind her, I put my head down on the desk and laugh.
Chapter 11
I close up after she leaves, not having had a single other customer, and head back to my little room. The bluecaps follow, and I find I like their gentle presence. The cat also appears out of nowhere and chirps at me. “Hello,” I tell her, knowing full well that I may be addressing her illusion, and she might be somewhere else entirely. “I suppose you live here, too. Maybe Sasha knows your name. I hope you’re feeding yourself,” I tell her, “since all I seem to have right now is turnips. Which reminds me.”
I pull upon the door to the little garden and wander over to the neat rows of vegetables and pull out whatever’s growing under those healthy green leaves. Sure enough, it’s a turnip.
I nod. “Figures.” I take the turnip inside, wash it off, and set it on a plate. This, I decide, is going to be dinner.
I flip openGarden Magicand turn the pages until I find a spell for turnip stew. It requires no ingredients beyond a “reasonably fresh” turnip and appears to be a straightforward spell. Figuringthat I don’t have much of a chance of going too badly wrong, I read the instructions carefully, put the turnip in a pot, then incant the odd jumble of words in the order specified. The turnip pops, making me jump, then makes a funny hissing noise and appears to melt. I poke the gelatinous goo with a spoon. It definitely seems to have dissolved into some sort of thick paste. Well, I’ve got my toadstone; I’m protected against poison, so I suppose I can at least taste it. I hang the pot on the spit over the grate, poke the glowing logs, and watch with no small degree of satisfaction as a little fire sparks to life beneath the pot. Twenty minutes later, my turnip stew is bubbling away, filling the room with the unmistakable scent of…turnip. Perhaps I can flavor it with something to disguise its earthy turnipy essence. I don’t know a thing about herbs, having never cooked for myself. I wander out into the shop with the vague idea of finding a book about how to use them, and then stop. How on earth am I going tofindsuch a book, if it even exists? Then I laugh.The bluecaps. Of course.
A bluecap is floating gently over the desk. I turn to it. “Would you find a book about herbs? Cooking with herbs, I mean? Please?” I ask it. The speck wafts gently away from me, and I follow it. It drifts up the stairs to the second floor and comes to a stop before a very, very full bookcase.
“One of these?” I ask, though the cap can’t answer. It floats gently before a pile of books, which are in front of whatever’s actually shelved properly in the case, so I remove the pile. The bluecap then floats forward and lands on a book with a crumbling spine.
“Thanks,” I say, and reach up to take it. The bluecap floats a short distance away and I pull the book down. It’s easily a hundred years old, the leather binding crumbling in my hands, but the front cover does, indeed, sayHerbarium. I open it up. Thespine cracks alarmingly, but the book seems like it’ll do the trick perfectly; the pages are illustrated and heavily annotated by previous owners.
“Brilliant,” I breathe. I look up at the cap. “Could you find me books about curses?”
The bluecap floats away, and tucking the herbarium under my arm, I follow it up to the third floor. It settles on a pile I’d moved earlier today, books looking even older and more ragged than the herbarium.
After a moment, I realize more bluecaps have joined the first one; they’re now dancing about the room, lighting on books spread about everywhere. “Are theseallthe books about curses?” I breathe, though that’s clearly the case.
Even knowing I’ve magical turnip gloop boiling away downstairs, I can’t help myself, and spend half an hour collecting every book the bluecaps indicate into a pile. “What do you think,” I say to them, once my pile is assembled. “Maybe I break with tradition and sort out the curse myself?”
The bluecaps don’t answer, of course, but I’m certainly satisfied with my plan.
Chapter 12
My evening passes pleasantly. My turnip gloop is not what anyone would call delicious, but I end the evening both full and alive, so I can’t complain. I spend hours bent over the various curse books, first sorting them into two piles—possibly useful and probably not useful—then make a start on the useful pile. I don’t come away feeling too positive that I can break my own curse, however: Keys, I learn, are extremely powerful instruments, and the more symbolic they are, the more powerful they become. Since I was cursed with a key to “unlock my heart’s desire,” my curse, it would seem, is especially robust. The words “old magic” are used regularly in such a way that I sense they’re meant to be very, very serious.
I can absolutely trust Honey to find a wizard or sorcerer or someone who can break the curse, but I don’t find myself reassured that my parents won’t try out the prince solution, too, if it occurs to them. It seems that my sources are all pretty muchagreed that a prince should always be one’s initial go-to curse cure, if the cursed person is a princess. I will never hear the end of it if my stupid curse is broken by a prince. I will absolutely have to get engaged to whoever it is, if not outright married. I’ve managed to go twenty-two years without any sort of betrothal, and I’m not keen to start now.
My dolorous dracone returns the next day, a few hours after lunch, just as I hoped she would. She is still dressed entirely in black—her talons are painted with black enamel, I note, because it’s a little chipped today—and she looks miserable.
“Bad day?” I suggest.
“It stopped raining,” she answers, glumly.
