Ah, he’s finished narrating his voyage and moved on to the grand duty of breaking my curse. By the great horned dragon, did I evernoticehow windy princes are before I got trapped here in this bookstore? Or did I just notcare? I don’t mind banter—witness my foolish, cyclical conversations with Bash—but this endlesspontificatingin advance of the kissing is really starting to wear on me.
“…and with the greatest of pride and exquisite awareness of the duty thus placed upon my shoulders…”
All this for a kiss that won’tdoanything. I quash the urge to cross my arms and sigh audibly; he’s still a prince, after all, and my mother wouldn’t stand for it.
Mama isn’t here,my mind whispers, traitorously,and might never know…
“…instilling in all of us, from a young age, the keen importance, nay, significance, of our roles…”
My heavens, he’s still going. I watch him declaim; he’s facing me, directing himself toward me, but clearly very aware of his audience; the fact that the door to the shop is open and several other princes are gathered in its shadow has brought other townsfolk out, and I can make out the shape of a fairly sizable crowd now, all waiting for something to happen.Please, can’t we get this over with, I think, hard, in Ternis’s direction. Ternis ignores my silent plea and carries on; he sweeps one arm out in a grand gesture meant to suggest scope, I believe, which knocks against a pile on a nearby shelf and sends it plummeting to the floor, where the books land with a series of loud thwacks. I cringe; he’s clearly going to take forever to get out of here, and leave a mess in his wake. Why hadn’t I re-spelled all the piles when I was moving them around earlier?
Yes, of course; because I hadn’t expected anyone to come by and start whacking them while gesturing. Foolish of me.
Ternis doesn’t even slow down. “…in recognition of the great service which we have witnessed…”
He sounds like he’s laying a wreath at a state funeral. Good dragon goddess, has the idea of coming all the way to Little Pepperidge to kiss me become the equivalent of attending a state funeral for the princes of the realm? What an appalling idea.
“…into the vast distance of time, in the fullness of memory…”
Somewhere behind me I hear a choking sound, the unmistakable sound of someone trying to cover up a laugh, and force myself not to look up the stairs at Bash, the only person near enough to me to be the cough-laugher. If I look at him, smotheringhis giggles, I’ll just start laughing myself, which, at this point, might cause some sort of international crisis. I stand up straighter and ball my hands into fists, willing myself into royal placidity. I’ve been doing this for twenty-two years. I’ve had my feet stepped on by the most famous people in the eight kingdoms. I can listen to Ternis with a straight face, for however long he chooses to talk. Ican.
Bash coughs again, and I feel my traitorous upper lip twist; just the tiniest quirk. I swallow, hard, and force it back into neutrality.No laughing. I will not laugh. I will not.
“…without which I could not be here today…”
Merciful harpies, he’sthanking someone.
“…my beautiful Tanadelle…”
Oh, hells; I had better pay attention; it sounds like he’s winding up.
“…with the greatest and most profound respect…”
No, he might just be in the middle of things. I close my eyes and take a deep breath, and am jolted back to the present by the feel of hands on my shoulders. My eyes fly open; he’s holding me, his face very close to mine, his eyes positively brimming with emotion. I open my mouth to say something, anything, really, but certainly something sensible, but before I have the chance, he closes his eyes almost rapturously, tilts me backward over his arm rather precariously, and kisses me, right on my half-open mouth.
The problem is twofold: One, his eyes may be closed in anticipation of unfathomable passion, but mine are wide-open, and his face is now very close. Uncomfortably close. I can see too much of him; he nearly fills my vision. Nearly, but not all. Two, the bookcase I’d been tidying when he first strode in isalsovery close; close enough, in fact, that when he bends me back, he tipsme directly into it. My head bangs against a shelf, not hard enough to knock me out but certainly hard enough to hurt, and as the thoughtThat’s going to bruisefilters through my mind, I have the strange sensation of seeing, from below, a large book, which is balanced on a shelf above me, begin to teeter precariously.
Ah,I think to myself, as Ternis remains with his mouth upon my own,I had just de-spelled that pile of heavy books and moved it up there to get it out of the way. Ternis moves his lips against mine as, idly, I wonder whether the book’s center of balance is far enough onto the shelf that we’re safe from it.Perhaps,I think,it will fall and knock him on the head, and then we’ll both have bruises. It’d serve him right. Ternis pulls me upright—I suppose our kiss ended while I was wondering about the possibility of falling books—and moves to embrace me; he’s still talking, and his embrace is so enthusiastic it sends us backward into the bookcase. I hit it hard enough that I feel the entire structure wobble a bit, and the sudden and unnerving thought occurs to me: I de-spelled any number ofpilesof books on this bookcase; what if the cumulative effect was enough to de-spell theentirebookcase? It certainly shouldn’t be wobbling.
By the great green dragon, he’sstilltalking; oh no; he’s coming in for another kiss. I instinctively step back, but I’ve nowhere to step backto, and wind up banging into the potentially structurally unsound bookcase again. I hear more than see the fluttering whoomp of that one large book as it slides off the bookcase and straight onto Ternis’s head. He pauses, mid-sentence, and brings his hand to his forehead in confusion, and then his gaze travels upward, from my face to the bookcase behind me, and his expression evolves from one of romantic concentration into something approaching confusion. He drops his hands from my waistand steps back, looking at a point above my head, which gives me exactly the amount of time I need to wonder whether another book is about to fall onme, when, with an almost comical splintering groan, the entire bookcase shudders and collapses. Right on top of me.
Chapter 31
Some instinct for self-preservation sends me dropping to the floor, arms crossed over my head and neck, as the giant, heavy, overloaded bookcase topples forward, books raining down on my back and my arms. I will admit to emitting a rather less than ladylike shriek during the initial moments of crisis than my mother would have approved of, but needs must. I’m not sure how long I spend, crouched into a ball, being pelted by books; even very old books and very small books, it turns out, have sharp corners, although those are second in consideration to my immediate and overwhelming concern that the entire heavy wooden case will wholly collapse and squash me flat. It has absolutely fallen forward on me; why ithasn’tsquashed me, I can’t begin to imagine.
For a long moment, I’m aware of nothing but the sound of books hitting the floor, and the sensation of being myself hit by them, pummeling my back; none of the experience is at all pleasant.
When it seems that the books have stopped falling on me and the bookcase itself isn’t going to crush me, I open a cautious eye. I don’t appear to be dead, or even too badly wounded, though it’s hard to know for sure. I am in near-total darkness, surrounded by books and that peculiar, evocative scent of old paper and crumbling leather and dust. The scent is very much stronger when one is completely encased in a cavern of old books and a broken bookcase. Everything is very quiet. I take quick stock of myself; I’m under several pounds’ worth of books, and everything aches, but nothing feels broken. Hard to say, however, given that I’m crouched in a ball beneath a partially collapsed bookcase and hundreds of books. I shift a little, and a couple of books slide off me. It’s dark and very uncomfortable.
And then I hear someone shouting my name, and realize that the books around me are beginning to shift again; this time, however, because people are trying to move the collapsed bookcase off me. There’s a fair amount of yelling, and then light breaks into my little cavern of books, and suddenly there’s too much light, and I feel hands clearing the detritus off me. I groan as I sit up; that makes my entire body hurt. I unmistakably feel like I’ve just survived a cave-in. I blink and look around; Sasha is holding up one bookcase—the one opposite the one that collapsed on me. Perhaps they both fell forward. I should, by rights, be very dead.
Driz and Yenny have pushed the other one, the one that did collapse on me, back up against the wall. Ternis is standing about a foot away, looking distraught, and the bluecaps are drifting anxiously above me. I am being supported by a pair of very masculine arms, and I can feel myself going pink at the realization that I’m being held, in a rather intimate fashion, by the pirate. Who is, for once, not making jokes or cryptic statements. There are also what must be hundreds of onlookers crowded around us,in the hall and outside, peeking through the door and windows, and it takes me a moment to realize that Ternis’s endless speech before he kissed me gave approximately half the town time to assemble to see the show.
Someone is speaking to me in a low voice, and I focus on that; Bash is looking me over with a gaze of such intense concentration I blush again. He’s asking whether I’m all right. I think I am. I raise a hand to my temple and it comes away wet, and I look at my fingertips in confusion. It makes sense that something would have hit me hard enough to break the skin, but it’s still surprising.
He sees my bloody fingertips and curses, very colorfully. “Youtwat,” he says, looking up at Ternis, and the emotion in his voice blunts my own confusion for a moment. “What kind of bellend knocks someone into something and then stepsbackwhen it starts to collapse?” We’re both looking up at Ternis, whose expression is utterly stricken. I can hardly process the tone Bash has taken, which is so completely different from anything I’ve heard from him before, when he turns his attention back to me and, with infinite gentleness, asks if I can stand.
“Yes,” I say, with significantly more assurance than I feel, and he helps me rise, his hands on my elbows. Everything hurts but nothing feels broken.
