They clearly didn’t know Claire very well.
“And what do the two of you intend to do with me after we eat?”
“Besides turning you into a hunchback or other lowborn slave?”
Tad tried not to appear horrified at Tante Iezavel’s ability to peer into his soul. He nodded.
Tante Iezavel looked sideways at him, which caused him to brace, quite hopelessly, for a case of the pox. “You are a very unusual human specimen. I’d like to study you.”
Chapter 6
Of all the wicked fortune. Why did he have to be so interesting?
Tad picked up his spoon as the ladies were clearly waiting for him to start eating. Everybody had filled their plates and cups but his hostesses just sat and stared at him. There must be some manner of etiquette in this strange house, the opposite of what normal people did. That probably meant the guest had to lead the conversation, too. “Claire likes to study me as well.” After this fire-for-effect he immediately shoved a bite of orange flesh with butter into his mouth. His senses melted, just as they had when he ate Claire’s candied peacock roll. She might be a terrible magical assistant, but the girl knew how to roast a yam.
“Yes, this is why you are here.” Tante Iezavel put a forkful of human food to her lips. Tad watched to make sure she chewed and swallowed it down.
“She has a theory about you….” Claire spoke with unchewed bits string beans sloshing around in that babbling trap of hers. “…thinks you have a magic curse on you.” She gulped down a swig of cold tea.
Tad almost snorted. A curse? Him? Not unless Tante Iezavel did the deed. He concentrated on his yam while his hostesses soldiered on without him, arguing for fully half an hour without his assistance, about what was really wrong with him. Claire informed her landlord that he was merely a grump and a poorly-educated sort with no regard for science, but that did not, in fact, suggest a magical curse, but only a sad upbringing. Tad objected but neither woman heard him as they launched into a wild discourse he didn’t understand at all. Apparently, their experiments were the topic of conversation, but he could not be sure if they were talking about the weather, inherent magical properties of common objects, or female grooming rituals. He decided to eat his food and stay out of it.
“Oh, we’re all out of beverage,” Tante Iezavel said in the middle of Claire’s counter-argument and thumped the tea carafe that had only moments ago been half full. Then she looked at him accusingly.
Claire stopped her prattling, gave the empty pitcher a puzzled look, blew out a huffy breath aimed at Tad, and snatched it up. Her chair screeched against the stone floor as she pushed herself back from the table.
Tad watched with strange longing until she and the pitcher disappeared into the kitchen. She had left him all alone with Tante Iezavel, probably so she could claim ignorance of whatever happened next. He looked back at the creature across from him.
A smile creased her childlike face. Her hand waved over an empty gold and blue plate that had not been there before. When she drew it back the plate was filled with halved eggs, boiled and with their yokes smashed and lumped with what must have been pickled jerkins, based on the smell.
Tad drew in a slow breath to steady his nerves.
Tante Iezavel’s smile vanished but she regarded him with raised eyebrows.
He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. The witch had just made tea disappear and food appear out of nowhere right in front of his eyes.
Claire emerged from the kitchen with a pitcher of purple liquid. Her gaze landed on the plate of pickled eggs. “Ew.” She drew back and pinched her nose with her free hand. “I thought I threw all of those out, but of course you managed to squirrel some away. Ya know, if there’s one thing that makes me yak it’s boiled eggs.”
“Pickled eggs are tricky to make,” Tante Iezavel replied. Her eyes never left Tad’s.
“That doesn’t make them any less…blah.” Claire plopped down into her seat, feigning a gag and a hack. She set the purple liquid on the table in front of Tad and pointed at it with her left hand. “Guests first.”
“What is it?”
“Gooseberry juice, of course.” Claire looked at him as if his question betrayed the insanity she had always suspected.
But she was the one living with whatever Tante Iezavel was and by the looks of it she didn’t have a clue. So much for her being able to solve a romantic and magical mystery when there was a very simple and disturbing one right in her kitchen that had gone undetected for weeks. He congratulated himself on the realization that she had no hope of winning their wager, no matter what scientific trickery she planned to employ. Victory was his.
If these female sorts permitted him to leave.
“It’s the one thing Imogene and I disagree on besides the importance of science compared to magic.”
“Eggs?” Tad asked. In visualizing his victory march around Claire’s weeping form, he had almost forgotten the topic at hand.
“That’s because she doesn’t understand the importance of the egg,” Tante Iezavel said, “or that science and magic are intertwined.”
Tad didn’t care about science but he had heard a few superstitions about eggs. For starters, witches rode around in eggshells. Everybody knew that as a lie. Probably. But now with a bona fide witch sitting across from him, one that had just given a poor unsuspecting woman life-altering guidance based on an egg, he wasn’t so sure.
“She uses eggs all the time in her…well I guess I’ll call it a business.” Claire spooned a heap of jam onto her roll.
Tante Iezavel ignored Claire’s remark completely. She interlaced her fingers, leaned forward and whispered, “Would you like to know what kind of curse you have?”
Tad heartily shook his head.
Claire’s spoon rattled onto her empty plate. She held her jam-covered roll aloft in one hand and shook two fingers at Tante Iezavel’s face with the other. “You complain you don’t have enough business but with your methods it’s no wonder everyone thinks you’re a nut.”
She was a nut but Tad wouldn’t have said it out loud or dared to shake his head at Tante Iezavel the way Claire was doing now. The woman must have a soft spot for the girl to let her prattle on as she did and speak ill of her work. Unless she had cast a spell over her. That was probably it. Why else would Claire not comprehend her landlord was no ordinary person?
“She disapproves of my methods as well,” Tad said.
“Yes, I know. I have to listen to her moan about you. All day long it’s yap yap yap. He’s so irritating. I don’t know why Lady Love picked him. Boo hoo.”
Tad nearly spewed out a mouthful of gooseberry juice. He couldn’t help the laugh that resounded in his throat as he turned his eyes toward his scientific assistant. “So you told her all about me and Lady Love, eh?”
Claire wiped her mouth with her napkin again and again. If Tad looked under the table he might see her little foot tapping against the floor. He stared at her, wondering if she might have feelings like a normal person hiding beneath the mad scientist disguise. Just as he caught himself doing so he redirected his eyes to Tante Iezavel, who abruptly announced, “Oh, my eight o’clock is here.”
A knock-knockety-knock-knock sounded.
Tad looked at Claire expectantly. But she seemed not to notice the witchery that had just occurred, but made noises like a newborn kitten as she yawned and stretched, apparently unconcerned that Tante Iezavel had just conjured up a client.
“Up late last night working on your experiments?” he asked.
Claire blinked a couple of times. “Strange dreams again. I slept but I didn’t really rest.” She heaved a sigh and another wide yawn and began gathering the dishes.
“I’ll help you,” Tad said out of habit. He had been raised a gentleman, after all.
“No, it won’t take too long.” Her eyes brightened. “I have a contraption to assist with these sorts of things, and as you know…”
She prattled on until Tad’s eyelids grew hea
vy. “I’ll just be on my way, then,” he said when she paused for a breath. “Thank you for the dinner but I can see myself out.”
He turned toward the hall before she could finish her speech about gears and hydro something or other. The thought of walking home in the dark slowed his pace toward the door. He had almost forgotten he had magic. But he couldn’t seem to get his magic to work, no matter how hard he tried to expect to arrive at his cottage safe and sound. Probably Tante Iezavel had put a spell on her house to block magic other than her own.
A crackling voice floated toward him. Tad didn’t want to watch the spectacle that was going on behind the strange curtain. But he had to watch. He crept down the hallway, so silently that all that was heard was the hushed voices from the room at the end of the hall and the clinking in the kitchen behind him as Claire busied herself about the dishes.
In the room next to the entryway the beaded curtain hung, woven of the same items as Tante Iezavel’s necklace, and Tad tried not to think about this as he poked a finger through the string of earthen beads and peeked through with one eyeball. Tante Iezavel sat on a rug across from a middle-aged man, both of them hunched over looking at the contents of a black bowl. An eggshell lay next to it.
“Oh, a double yoke. Congratulations,” she said.
“On what?” the man asked.
Tante Iezavel’s substantial eyebrows drew down. “The babies, of course.”
“Babies, as in…?” The man’s eyes grew as large as the yolks in the bowl in front of him.
“If you do not wish for a multiple birth…” She leaned forward, turned her eyes first to the left, then to the right as if verifying her next words would not be overheard. “…don’t say any number above one until the child comes forth. And now, for your change. Let’s see, a quarter of an hour at sixpiece an hour and you gave me sixpiece…how many silverpiece do I owe you?”
“Uh…one,” he squeaked out.
“Very good. You pass the first test. And remember, no numbers above one. Yes, goodbye.”
Tad backed away as his hostess and her patron pushed to their feet. He inched toward the door as fast as his tiptoes would allow. His hand reached for the doorknob.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Tante Iezavel’s voice cackled out behind him.
Tad turned the knob and gave it a push. The pumpkin-colored barrier creaked open. He spun around just in time to see what was about to happen, and flattened himself against the wall as Tante Iezavel gave her patron a shove that sent him stumbling past Tad and out the door.
Tante Iezavel’s eyes snapped to where Tad was plastered against the wall. “You and I have unfinished business…And what about your curse?”
“No, thank you. I do not wish to be experimented upon.” He took a side step toward the door.
“Sure?”
Tad managed to nod, just once.
The witch held out her left hand, palm down. “For when you change your mind.”
Tad’s hand went unbidden toward hers and she pressed a cold, heavy rectangle into his fingers. Being that there was nothing else he could do, he looked down at the item she had deposited. A shiny, gold bar gleamed with an inscription. His face crinkled up in confusion. “Open…sesame?”
“Remember that.”
He gulped but took a brave leap over the threshold. The gold bar in his hand dissolved into sand and gravel. He sifted through it with his thumb. All rubbish. He let it slip through his fingers and fall to the ground and whirled back around, full of courage to ask one last question. “Why do you say eggs are important?”
“They are seeds.” Tante Iezavel’s eyes twinkled as she closed the door very slowly, very creepily.
But Tad didn’t care. He patted his legs, his chest, his head. Still alive, and with all of his original parts.
Instead of bone weariness he felt hopeful elation as he magicked himself home, pulled off his outer clothes and flopped down on his bed. He had made it through the most terrifying day of his life, dined with Tante Iezavel in her own home and made it out alive, and without any hexes or spells being cast over him.
That meant tomorrow would be a good day, a very good day because he was going to get up bright and early and get back at Claire.
Chapter 7
“Nice day, isn’t it?”
Tad’s shoulders slumped. He refused to look at the creature that had just appeared next to him. “It’s my turn to use the globe. Go find your own.”
“I’ve seen toads with less warty expressions. And no wonder. That’s your big clue?” Claire’s finger wagged at the globe and then returned to duty tapping on her nub of a chin.
“Romantic, isn’t it?” Tad replied.
Claire screwed up one side of her face. “He’s just writing another one of those silly letters. I wonder what he does with her replies.”
“It’s probably a very sad sight and I’ll ask you not to look so happy about a man getting his heart battered by the woman he loves, week after week for twenty years.”
A cough cheeped out of Claire’s throat, one that sounded suspiciously like an attempt to stifle a giggle. “But what if, and I know this may be hard for you to hear…What if Zaen is the one who’s cursed to keep chasing after a woman who doesn’t love him? Ever think of that?”
Tad, who had been shaking his head at her every word, stretched his torso up in preparation for a stimulating verbal brawl. “But Della is his true love. Either that or the birds are wrong. As often as you take their side against me, I’m surprised you’re admitting they’re imbeciles.”
The left side of Claire’s face twitched ever so slightly. One more poke and he’d have her good and mad. “Have you considered the possibility that the messages the wind brings might have been intercepted and altered?”
“Lady Love would know if that was happening.”
“Maybe…” Claire’s expression was sober. “But you wouldn’t. Maybe she expects us to test things out first to make sure we heard what we thought we did.”
“The Lady doesn’t need our help to know what she’s doing. She…” He had a hard time saying this next part. “…chose the pigeons. They say what they hear. And if it’s good enough for Lady Love, it’s good enough for me.”
“But Pip said they have to interpret things. You’d know that if you treated them as you ought instead of being such a grouch.”
“I appreciate that all ladies enjoy bossing all men around…We do need discipline sometimes. Mothers and sisters are a gift. But you…” He ran his eyes from her heap of hair to her shiny slippers. “…are a scientist and—”
“And you are the only talking biological specimen I have ever encountered that demonstrates a complete immunity to constructive feedback.” Claire’s nostrils flared and her eyes burned with almost-wrath. It really was remarkable how much she resembled a dragon when she was losing an argument.
Tad looked away so he didn’t start mirroring her. He had accidentally done so once already in that unsightly moment when his own nostrils had flared. And speaking of mirrors…“What amazes me is that you can hold on to your theory that science is better than romance when it was the love goggles that broke Princess Arabella’s curse. Love goggles. That’s what they’re called, not scientific goggles. And Captain Avery kissed her, too, so that probably helped.”
“I admit I still don’t understand why the application of the goggles broke the curse…but that doesn’t mean you do, either.”
“It was all part of my plan. I’ll grant you were the one to figure out that it was the reef keeping the curse in place, but once I knew that, the final solution was obvious. The siren was too powerful to tie up and we couldn’t very well get rid of the reef or the water, so…true love to the rescue, as it should be. And that’s why I was summoned to the case.” He drew in a deep breath so he could get the rest of his speech in before Claire’s mouth erupted in scientific gibberish. “It was all about the mirror, and the reason you didn’t understand is because you only see what’s in front
of your eyes, and sometimes not even that.” Case in point, she was living with a verifiable witch she thought was a normal person. “The problem wasn’t a scientific one because it wasn’t the princess’s form as a siren that made her a beast. It was what she saw when she looked in the mirror.”
Claire was shaking her head. “There must have been a chemical reaction to the magic in the goggles.”
“You may be right. By my explanation is more right. Deep things, matters of the heart, will always beat mere physics.”
“Biology.”
“Whatever.”
“Hmf.”
“As much as I would delight to stay here in the library and have a hmfing contest with you…” He turned his thumb toward his chest. “I have a case to solve.” And then he began to sing, “love is a strange and glorious thing” at top voice.
Claire put her hands over her ears. Tad winked at her face of crumpled wrath and magicked himself away.
He landed in a crush of man and beast in the center of Shub-Haramb. The locals failed to notice his magical arrival but he was much too cheery to care as sandaled feet nearly tripped over his form. To his eyes, the place was aglow with the sparks of love. Yes, Claire’s plan to feed him to Tante Iezavel had backfired. Instead, the visit to their lair had set him up for life. He would never be afraid of anything ever again.
He weaved through the crowd, taking in the sights, smells and sounds of the most exotic city in all the realms. The air whirled with spices as fragrant as spring rain. Strange tongues mixed in heated exchange. Everywhere merchants beckoned behind carts overflowing with mysterious merchandise, all a steal if the yodeling cries were to be believed.
Gold, silver, jewels, silks, dyes, jasmine perfumes. Tad breathed it all in but choked out a cough. Clearly the perfume was to cover up the fact that these people didn’t bathe too often. He resisted the urge to pinch his nostrils shut. A little whiff of crushed manure accompanied the resplendent sights around him. And then he spotted his unwitting client.
A Thousand and One Page 4
