“You took yourphysical heart out of your bodyand hid it in the sea witch’scave?” Sasha gasps. “Just to steal a clam? That’sdisgusting.” She sounds terribly admiring and not remotely disgusted.
“Scallop,” Bash says.
“How did youlive?” Amaritha asks.
“That’s a fascinating bit of deep magic, actually,” the sorcerer—who we’d all thought was asleep—pipes up. “If you can find a copy of Bezeier’sSpellmancry, any edition printed in the last century, that is, you’ll find it lays out the—”
“I had an amulet,” Bash interrupts. “The spell was only good for about ten days. Iwasgoing to give the damned thing back.”
“So the sea witch found the pirate’s heart, realized someone had stolen the scallop, and when he came back to exchange them, she cursed him to fear large bodies of water,” Sasha says. “And then he ran here. I still don’t get it.”
“Not quite. He came here because it was as far from the sea as he could get,” Honey says. “That much is true. By sheer coincidence, another curse—another bit of deep magic, although this one, I believe, was unintentional—took place in the same town, around the same time, and suddenly he was sharing a town with a woman who was suffering from a very powerful and very peculiar curse of her own.” She glances at him. “Would you like to explain the rest?”
Bash appears to have regained a bit of his composure. “You’re doing beautifully,” he drawls, waving a lazy hand. “Do carry on.”
“I wasn’t able to speak to the sea witch directly, so this next bit is hearsay, but from what I’ve gathered, when you returned to trade the scallop back for your heart, the witch handed it back with the imprecation that, next time you were parted from it, you’d find it a lot harder to retrieve.”
“That doesn’t sound like a curse that would make you fear the sea,” Sasha observes.
“Yes, she tacked that on as a bonus. Thought it might teach me a lesson,” Bash says.
“Oh, and the smell!” Amaritha shouts, and then blushes. “He smells like the ocean,” she murmurs, in response to my mother’s quelling look.
“If the curse was meant to teach you not to steal things,” I point out, “it didn’t work.”
“Then it was really like twoseparatecurses,” Amaritha says. “The water one and the heart one.”
“I knew that ironic curse wasn’t deep magic,” Sasha says, sounding smug.
“Tricky to counteract,” Honey agrees, “but not deep magic.”
Everyone’s looking round the table as though they’ve understood something I haven’t. I certainly don’t feel any more enlightened.
“Does that mean Bash is cured now?” I try.
“Lawks, no,” the sorcerer says, feeding a treat to the sounder. “Still very much cursed.”
“Lawks,” Sasha mouths to Amaritha. I suspect I’ll be hearing that very mild, very archaic oath for weeks to come. Or I would if I were staying. A point we’ve moved past without coming to an agreement about.
“Wait,” Amaritha says. “Sasha says the Barn Pirate always left, like, weird little things here every time he stole something. And he says that’s like, a pirate thing. Exchange, not steal. So, okay, but I’ve seen all the stuff he exchanged, and I know he kind of left it strewn around for Tandy to find. But the first thing he stole was a stack of books.”
“And she never found what he left in exchange when he stole the books!” Sasha concludes, looking around triumphantly.
There’s a moment of silence, and then my father says, “Ah,” and frowns.
“What?” I say. I glance at Bash, who’s looking embarrassed again and won’t meet my eye.
Mother sighs. “Honestly, Tanadelle.”
I look at Honey, a little desperately. She gives me a sympathetic look. “He left his heart in exchange for those books.”
“He still had the heart-trading amulet?” I say. Clearly, everyone else is getting something from this conversation I’m not. “But you stole those books months ago, and you said the amulet only worked for ten days.”
“The sea witch kept the amulet,” he murmurs, not looking at me.
“Oh,” I say, faltering. “I don’t understand.”
“Barn Pirate,” Amaritha says, “why don’t you justtellher?”
