“Watch out, or you’ll make me think you enjoy my company and my stories.”
I swat the air. “I like this one.”
There’s a long pause between us as we stare at one another, and then he clears his throat. “But that’s not why our people hate one another. That happened later. The fae lords couldn’t stand the witch, so they made the king think she was cheating. It destroyed him, so he destroyed her.”
“Ugh. Why’d you have to ruin the good story with a bad one?”
He shrugs. “You’ve been wondering why our people despise one another. That’s why, and if I had to guess, your people don’t know about it because it makes them look bad, as if they started it.”
“But she was framed.”
“So she was.”
I place my hands behind me and lean on them. “You said the roses are real?”
“They are.”
“What are they called?”
He levels his gaze on me, and it feels like he’s peeling back the layers of my skin until he’s peering at my soul. “They’re called Golden Roses.”
“Ah. Fitting.”
My bones ache to ask him if lovers still give them to one another, but I don’t have the nerve. There are just some questions better left unasked.
“Want to work some more?”
“Yes.”
He rises and begins to pack up our lunch. “Then let’s get to it.”
We work for another hour,but nothing happens. By the time we’re finished, I’ve pretty much decided I’m never going to have magic, but I keep that to myself.
I spend the rest of the afternoon in my room. But as the sun sinks in the horizon, I’m restless. Stretching my legs sounds like a good idea, and before I know it, I’m striding through the castle and out the back door.
As soon as my feet touch grass, it hits me. Feylin must be close by. But how close?
Deciding to push the boundary, I keep walking, cutting back to the front of the castle and down the hill. This is weird. I’ve never made it this far before.
The sun’s buried in the horizon, and the witch lights in the village burn brightly. The shops are closed, and people are heading home for dinner, leaving the streets mostly deserted, with only a few people sprinkled here and there.
So I keep going.
My steps are slow, hesitant, as I wait to run smack into an invisible barrier. But when that barrier doesn’t shoot up in front of me, I keep walking until I find myself standing at the threshold of the Bookshop of Magic.
How in the world have I made it this far? Has the joining magic broken? Is this some fluke?
Better not to ask questions that I don’t want the answer to.
I don’t know what makes me do it—perhaps it’s curiosity, perhaps sadness for what the bookshop once was and now is—a place where you can’t dive into the books anymore. But before I think too much about it, my fingers push on the fakebrick that looks exactly like the others that make up the outside of the store, and a spring releases, revealing the hidden key.
I unlock the door and return the key, closing the brick back into place.
The store’s silent when I enter. The familiar scents of paper and glue trickle up my nose. There really isn’t any better smell in all the world than that of a book.
Well, maybe amber and leather. But I shove that thought aside as quickly as it drifts into my mind.
I close the door behind me and give the street a quick glance. Only a few people walk the cobblestone paths, and none of them are paying attention to me.
