“All the broken glass can’t hurt me. I’ll pick out the little shards, windbag. You just clean up the room.”
Bones could be very helpful when he wanted to be. It was part of his charm.
“Very kind of you, friend Bones,” Augustin said. “Still, I don’t see myself sleeping here tonight. Very chilly with the draft and all.”
Braiden frowned. “This wouldn’t be such a problem if you would just put a shirt on for bed. And something warmer than those ridiculous shorts you love so much.”
He didn’t really mean that, of course, considering the very lovely sight that Augustin and his shorts had to offer.
Augustin gestured vaguely at the broken window. “Why don’t you conjure up some curtains strong enough to keep the wind out?”
Braiden folded his arms and smirked. “I will, as soon as you cast a spell to calm the wind down specifically outside your broken window. See how silly that sounds?”
Before Augustin could protest, Bones dropped an entire handful of broken glass and gasped.
“The two of you, shut up for a minute. Look at this.”
Braiden and Augustin leaned closer, squinting as they followed the skeleton’s bony finger, but there was nothing there, only the wall, painted the same boring beige as the rest of the shop.
Bones harrumphed in annoyance as he crawled across the floor, bits of glass sticking into his skeletal crevices. “No, right over here,” he said, jabbing his finger at the wall. “Don’t you see it?”
Still nothing, until Bones scratched at the paint with the end of his finger. One, two, three scratches, and an entire section of it had lifted away.
“Look, Bones,” Braiden said. “The paint we used for the shop is the cheapest money can buy, but I’d still appreciate if you wouldn’t — if you wouldn’t — ”
The section of paint came away, and somehow kept coming away, like a little scrap of paper. And why was it in the exact shape of a rectangle?
Carefully, his fingers guided by all the practiced precision of a musician, Bones peeled the piece away. He held up the little rectangle to the light. The window might have been open, but the shiver that ran down Braiden’s spine didn’t come from the cold.
It was one of Granny Bethilda’s cards — and one that Braiden had never, ever seen before.
Chapter
Five
Business at Beadle’sNeedles was indeed very brisk the following morning, surpassing Braiden’s expectations. The combination of Augustin Arcosa’s mere presence at the shop with the specific kind of customer that he could attract made for adventurers who were more than primed for purchasing Braiden’s new selection of moongrass accessories.
And while things weren’t exactly flying off the shelves, this was certainly better business than the shop had seen in several years. The blur and buzz of the morning was here and there interrupted by the tinkling of gold coins as they fell into the till.
And yet all that Braiden could think about was the card that Bones had discovered in the storage room. It was stuck right under the window, blending so well into the paint that no one would have noticed unless they were doing precisely what Bones was doing: crawling on all fours and getting an obscenely intimate look at the molding.
It was sitting in Braiden’s pocket right now, sandwiched safely between the pages of a small notebook. He’d taken the time to compare it with the rest of Granny Bethilda’s deck of cards. It was a match, of course, the same color and thickness of paper as the rest, and the same handwriting. The only differencewas how this specific recipe card was unlined and contained only a single sentence across the center.
Ours is the way of warmth.
Braiden hardly slept a wink. What was this supposed to mean? Why was the card stuck in the molding under the windowsill, as if placed there deliberately? Or had it only fallen out of Granny Bethilda’s grasp by accident? And what an interesting accident that would be, for the card to land precisely in the tiny gap between the wall and the molding.
Perhaps it was only intended as the very first page for the deck of cards, a sort of cover forBethilda Beadle’s Book of Everything. Card No. 0, as it were. But that didn’t make any sense either. Maybe there was a secret message, Braiden considered as they closed the shop for lunch.
He turned it over in his hands, inspected it against the light to look for faint traces of invisible writing. He’d read about this before, how thieves and assassins would inscribe letters into paper with a sharpened stick and no ink, leaving writing that could only be revealed by placing a thin sheet of onion paper over the top and rubbing against it with graphite. But nothing.
Braiden nodded absently as Elyssandra and Craghammer asked to stay behind at the shop. He thought nothing of it, knowing that the two of them could very well feed themselves and trusting them more than anyone in their motley crew — even Augustin — to keep watch over Beadle’s Needles without it spontaneously bursting into flames.
Maybe the message is embedded in the card in a different way, Braiden thought, his feet automatically carrying him down the street as he followed behind Augustin, Warren, and Bones on the way to the Deadlight, a basket dangling from his elbow.
Augustin had helped him pack some sandwiches for lunch, then had helpfully bottled some of his elixirs to wash them down. He’d procured an inexpensive wand with a frost spell juststrong enough to cool his bottled beverages from the outside, tapping each elixir before handing one to a customer. Very convenient, especially for picnics on warm days like this one.
The Deadlight was the grave and funeral district located at the very edge of the industrial part of town, fortunately far past some of the smellier and noisier warehouses and workshops in Weathervale. Here the greenery grew thick and lush again, untainted by the oils and gears of the industrial district. It was a nice enough place for Granny Bethilda to rest.
