“I believe the poet Asmodor II reminds us that we ought not tarry in important matters such as these,” I say, hoping he won’t notice that I don’t recall my Asmodorian verse well enough to speak it off by heart. But that was the general idea. Bel takes a deep breath. I steel myself. He appears to do the same, then screws his eyes shut and kisses me, very quickly, on the lips. His kiss is dry, and he smells faintly of dust and talcum powder.
He pulls back immediately and looks at me, exhaling noisily. “There, did that do it?”
I didn’t feel anything—I barely felt his lips on mine—but I walk to the door, pull it open, and place my hand on the expected invisible barrier. Which remains solid.
“Nope,” I say, cheerfully. “Thanks ever so much for trying, Bel. I know it means a lot to my parents.” I cast desperately about for something someone may have once said on the subject of kisses. Or duty. “Honor is the greatest quality of mind besides courage,” I add. “As they say.” I can’t recall who said it, after all.
“When they tell you that your royal duties will occasionally involve curse-breaking,” he says, to no one in particular, “they do not mention that you might be the fourth prince to comealong and kiss some fool girl who’s gotten herself stuck in a bookshop. A”—he looks around again, a grimace on his lips—“rather shabby one, at that.”
“Hey!” Sasha yelps from somewhere behind me.
“Third,” I say. “Thirdprince.” I’ve got four more to go, more’s the pity. “Well, thanks again!” I say brightly, holding the door open for him. “I hear the hand pies at the inn are delicious.”
“Pie,” he says thoughtfully. “A primitive but undeniably filling meal. ‘Some live to eat, but I myself eat to live.’ That said, ‘in hunger, the rich and poor are one.’ And I am undeniably hungry.”
With that, he leaves, and I close the door and sag against it.
“What a charmer,” Sasha says. “As they say.”
“We’ve never really gotten along,” I say, a little wearily. Four more princes. Four more of these. At least this one was fast, and three of the others should be less trying than Bel. I hope.
“A pity,” the pirate says. “That one was a disappointment, although he did have a fair number of ridiculous opinions to distribute. I was hoping the other two might show up and challenge him to a duel, or something.”
“They don’t like him very much,” I say, hoping that’ll be enough of an explanation. “Driz finds him confusing, and Hamish thinks he’s pretentious.”
“PrinceHamishthinks someone is pretentious?” Sasha hoots. “Let’s get back to this window idea you had so I can go straight over to the inn and see for myself.”
The rest of the week passes quietly. Sasha and I clear out the front windows, which are bowed to allow for a small display of some sort, currently just books. The coven shows up and I receive a bottle of mead—“Lord Taramonth’s Revenge,” as they’re readingA Ship on Idle Seasthis week—which I place on a shelf in my room next to the last one, and leave unopened. Driz drops by for chats almost daily, bless him, bringing Hamish occasionally and Bel once, who explains that “the man who has eaten enough will never believe a hungry one” and that he wishes to understand my situation to some greater degree, as “sympathy is the highest expression of true feeling.” Bel then busies himself on the first floor, going through my collection on political economy, which, he later tells me, is sorely lacking. He is absolutely the only person who has touched any of those books in decades.
Sasha and I complete work on the second floor, which is now full, but not to bursting, with books and comfortable chairs. After insulting my collection of books about political economy, Bel admits that he, like Hamish, has been told he needs to remain in town as long as any other princes remain. The inn owners rename the inn, and a new sign, I’m told, is hanging over the door within two days of Bel’s arrival.
I don’t see the pirate all week, but I find another small shell on the stairs where he’d been lounging when Bel showed up, and drop it into the bowl with the other items. He appears to have made off with the stub of a candle. I still haven’t found whatever he left in trade for the stack of books weeks ago.
Sasha does not have another attack of teenagerdom, and Honey sends me a long letter and a book about water magic. She cannot reassure me that her search for a curse-breaking sorcerer is going well, she writes, with characteristic bluntness.
The most interesting part of my week is spent working on the window displays. Sasha and I argue a bit about what they’re meant to accomplish: draw in customers by demonstrating the bookshop’s superb collection of books, or compel them in by intriguing and delighting. My initial thought is to dig up the mostinteresting and beautiful books in the store and put them in the window, maybe against a backdrop of purple velvet.
“That way, customers know that we sell beautiful, high-quality goods,” I explain.
Sasha rolls her eyes. “No one in town is going to come here for books,” she points out. “Not unless they really need them. Plus, everyone is still sort of worried about the curse being, like, catching.”
I’m forced to concede the point.
“We should use the windows to display a selection of books. But, like, of a single kind. Imagine”—her eyes light up—“an entire display devoted to books by Gaspard Fen Tamian! And we could decorate it with dried flowers!” Gaspard Fen Tamian, of course, being the long-deceased author of seven romances, each more tragic than the last. Dried flowers tend to figure large in his writing.
“But anytime someone comes in wanting to buy one of the books from the window, we have to reconfigure or destroy the arrangement in the window,” I note.
“We get in extra copies!” Sasha yells. Smoke is curling up from her nostrils, she’s so excited. “Everything by Gaspard goes on sale for a special price during the, say, fortnight we have his work featured in the window. We ask the coven to discuss one of his novels during their meeting in that period. We could even…” She gasps, almost too excited to put her thoughts into words. “Since everyone already loves Gaspard, we could also feature books for people who have read them all a hundred times each and want something new!”
I think about it for a long moment. My instinct is that the point of a window display is to demonstrate what a superbly well-stocked bookstore we are, the way a butcher’s shop mightdisplay an array of meats and sausages in its windows, but Sasha’s idea is intriguing.
“I’ll tell you what. You take the window on the right, I’ll take the one on the left. Arrange it however you like. Let’s see what happens.”
“Oh, Tandy, thank you!” she cries, and pulls me into a crushing hug. Being a dracone, even a teenage one, she’s still a foot taller than I am, and massively more powerful. Not to mention, covered in scales.
“We also have to get started on clearing out the ground floor,” I point out. Floors 2 and 3 are in great shape, and 1 is getting there (deficiencies in political economy aside), but we’ve done very little to make the space on the ground floor itself habitable. It is, as it was the day I first set foot inside, the most crowded, most overstuffed of the four stories. Our goal, initially, was to make sure that customers could get around, primarily to the stairs, without knocking things over onto themselves, but that mostly meant clearing books away to the sides and creating ever larger, more teetering piles of books, which my dubious spells have only barely been able to keep from toppling.
I also have to admit that I worry about how many more princes of the realm will be showing up in my bookstore, and whether any will bring entourages. It’s been hard enough over the last few weeks with Driz, Sasha, and the pirate hanging about; add Hamish and now Bel to the equation, and the ground floor of the shop becomes perilously crowded very quickly. And there’s always the worry that folks from the village might start showing up to see the kisses. Sasha has told me that rumors about the first three have run rampant through her school, and that she has developed a new kind of social capital, being one of the very few people to see the kisses occur and to have met each prince individually.
