“I suppose you’ll be leaving now, too?” I ask the pirate. “Forever?”
“I’d really rather not,” he says, calmly. “I’d like to see how this all turns out.”
I sigh, heavily. “Why, for the love of unicorns?”
He grins at me, his smile bright in the dim light. “Your parents sent you this prince. I expect they’ll be sending another prince up once they hear His Worshipful Grace here didn’t get the job done. And another and another, until your heart’s desire is unlocked and you’re finally free to walk away.”
I drop my gaze to my now-cold tea. He is, I fear, right.
“I don’t necessarily need a prince,” I mumble.
“Remind me,” he continues, looking like the cat who caught the canary, “how many princes of the realm are there?”
I close my eyes and then open them again, and focus on my hands.
“Seven,” I say. “Not counting my sister, there are seven princes of the realm.”
“Oh, right,” Sasha says. “It’s a title, not a gender thing. I keep forgetting. So, seven, huh?”
I look up. Sasha and Driz are watching me with somethingakin to sympathy. The pirate, however? His expression is best described as gleeful.
“As for why I’m staying?” he says, his eyes glinting in the firelight. He leans forward and I find I can’t tear my eyes from his. “I’d like to see this through to the end. If today’s any sort of preview, it should beextremelyentertaining.”
Chapter 18
Driz only calls the pirate a blaggard twice more before I’m able to get rid of both of them. The pirate leaves behind his nasty bit of crab claw, but manages to make off with one of my teacups. After going through the motions of being annoyed and dismayed, I shrug it off and tidy up. They’re not very nice cups, to be perfectly honest; not that I demand the finest bone porcelain, but something that is a little less reminiscent of fungi, in shape and color, might be lovely. Since the pirate’s theft leaves me with only three cups, I send Sasha home with the entreaty that she bring me another, shut up the shop after my guests, and then go sit outside in my little garden and scowl at the turnips until the warm, green scents of the garden improve my mood. The bluecaps hover around the grape trellis, lighting the little garden with their eerie glow, and the cat reappears—I think—and winds herself around the legs of my chair, purring loudly. I look away before I reach down to pat her; it’s too strange to see her in oneplace and feel her beneath my fingers, so instead I trust that she’ll be there. She bumps her head against my hand and winds her tentacles delicately about my wrist. They’re warm and soft against my skin.
“I really ought to name you,” I tell her. “If you haven’t got a name already. I’ll ask Sasha tomorrow.” She purrs away, completely unbothered. There’s usually a minor kind of magic associated with giving something a name, but cats are immune to it—I think because they simply don’t care about names.
I change into my nightgown and slip into my box bed. The bluecaps drift in from outside and settle onto the pages of my book, where they glow warmly; when I lift a corner to turn a page, they float upward and then resettle. I feel the gentle bump of the cat jumping onto the mattress beside me, and then her soft, warm weight as she settles down at my feet. I read for so long that I realize I can hear the midnight owls begin to hoot, and decide to turn in.
It’s odd, I think to myself as I shoo the caps off to their nest and close the book, to have had such a strange day and yet to feel so content. I try not to dream of pirates.
The next day, Driz and the pirate both show up several hours after breakfast and hang about, making rather a nuisance of themselves, until Sasha tries to put them to work manning the table outside. Only Driz takes her up on the offer, the pirate instead seating himself on the stairs, across from the desk, and dangling one of my ribbons for the cat. After he leaves, I find one of his tiny shells on the stair where he’d been sitting, although the ribbon is, mysteriously, gone.
Since Driz is under the same prohibition against handling coinsthat I was, Sasha is at first stuck outside with him, overseeing sales, to her immense annoyance. Driz, meanwhile, is unusually cautious about potentially cursed objects—no small wonder, given my situation—and refuses to touch anything made of metal, or smaller than an apple, or that looks more than a hundred years old. Finally, irritated beyond measure, Sasha lights upon the idea of setting up an honesty box, whereby any interested party can pay without coin passing Driz’s palm. Meanwhile, Driz’s booming voice and flair for drama—as well as his provenance—prove an irresistible attraction to the locals, who demonstrate less resistance to visiting him than they have to dropping by my shop. Sasha had explained, after another day with only a few customers, that the locals were a bit concerned about the curse and its ramifications; what if, it was wondered, the curse affectsanyonewho enters the shop? Sasha’s comings and goings notwithstanding, the townsfolk have remained hesitant to cross my threshold. Selling books outside, with a loud and reasonably handsome (and very personable) prince to man the table, is proving to be a successful sales strategy.
Once free of the responsibility to handle money for Driz, and clearly ready for a break from him, Sasha returns to her project on the third floor, stepping over the pirate on her way up with an exaggerated, much-put-upon groan. The next day, Driz only shows up for an hour or so; within a week he tends only to drop by for lunch or tea, make approving noises over whatever Sasha has done, and then vanish again. Sasha explains he’s taken to holding court in the salon of the coaching inn, which the proprietors are seriously considering renaming in his honor. “The Inn of the Prince of Parciful,” she says, laughing. “Can you even imagine!”
Of the pirate we see not a hair after that first day, but I have no doubt he’ll make good on his threat and reappear the momentanything interesting happens. Or perhaps if he feels the need to steal another of my teacups. The idea alone—that he’d drop by even without another prince to watch, or perhaps kiss—is enough to make me feel almost intolerably anxious in a way I refuse to admit is exciting, and whenever it happens I force myself to move books around until the feeling vanishes.
And so another week passes.
Two weeks after my arrival in Little Pepperidge, and thirteen days from my curse, Sasha bounds down the stairs and demands I come up with her. I’m more than happy to leave my current project—working on my newfound spell-casting abilities to unjinx an utterly immobile stack of books—and accompany her. She leads me into the completed third floor, now totally transformed from what it was when I first arrived.
I coo with genuine appreciation and run my fingers across a painting of a little green dragon curling across a low beam.
“Perhaps too cute, I know, but it felt right,” Sasha says. I wonder vaguely about her relationships with dragons, given that dragons and draconae are distantly related.
“I had a little green dragon when I was a girl,” I say, almost wistfully. “As a pet. From somewhere far beyond the Shining Realm. An ambassador brought her as a gift.”
“You had a petdragon?” she gasps, sounding scandalized.
“They told us she’d been orphaned as a kit,” I say, dropping my hand from the little painting. “That she couldn’t fend for herself in the wild. We didn’t really know what the protocol was, and ambassadorial gifts are nearly impossible to refuse. She went everywhere with me.” I can still remember her light weight on my shoulder, the way her tail would wrap around my arm or even my neck when she was alarmed. I’d been devastated when she died, a month after my thirteenth birthday.
“I suppose other places don’t know you shouldn’t keep dragons as pets,” Sasha says, a little doubtfully. “Beyond the Shining Realm.”
“We gave her a good life,” I say, feeling suddenly extremely melancholy. “Short of repatriating her—and we didn’t know precisely where she’d come from—there wasn’t much else we could do.”
