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“What I know you’ve done. I saw that article in the Fantillian Fanfare, and it said—”
Andromeda’s hand flew to her mouth, and at first, Fia thought she was crying and wished she could stuff her words back into her mouth, but then Fia realized she was laughing. Loudly enough that a few people on the street turned to look at them. Fia pressed her lips together, perhaps not understanding the situation as well as she’d thought.
Rounding his shoulders against prying eyes, Penbrook gestured at Sable Spells and practically growled, “Can we go inside, please?”
Fia unlocked the door, and though the shop was more private, they brought the awkwardness inside along with them. Or at least she and Penbrook did, and they stood well apart from each other. Andromeda only seemed amused.
“You don’t know the whole story,” Penbrook said, not at all sounding like he wanted to share it.
“Sounds like she knows enough.” Andromeda grinned, spinning the amethyst ring on her finger. “That you left me at the altar.”
“You didn’t want to marry me either,” he muttered, making no denial.
“That’s beside the point.”
“Is it?”
“Isn’t it?”
Penbrook threw his hands up in exasperation.
“I thought you were here because you were heartbroken,” Fia said to Andromeda, feeling enormously foolish.
“Hardly,” Andromeda said, and the way her mouth curled, it looked like she might fall into laughter again.
“But—”
“She cursed me!” Penn accused at the same time Andromeda gloated, “I cursed him.”
“What?” Fia looked back and forth between them, trying to keep up. Wondering if Penbrook had fled because he’d been cursed or if Andromeda had cursed him because he’d fled. “To the death?”
How did you get tangled up in a curse? Fia had asked the morning he’d told her about it.
It doesn’t matter, he’d replied. You’d only think I deserved it anyway.
“That wasn’t my fault,” Andromeda said defensively. “The curse somehow twisted itself. Or else the curse worker I commissioned to cast it took things too far. He denied it, of course.”
Penbrook slouched in the doorway, giving up the fight. He rubbed at his finger, as he’d done before, only now Fia saw a ring encircling it, which he must have taken to masking with an illusion, because a moment later it winked out of sight again.
“Our parents arranged the marriage,” he gloomed.
“They’d been threatening it all our lives. Maybe thinking they could lump the two of us together and make something more worthwhile than we represented apart.” At Fia’s confused expression, Andromeda added, “I have only the barest touch of magic, you see.”
“And my father has never liked the way I approach mine,” Penbrook admitted morosely. “So he—with no objection from my dear mother—required we exchange promise rings before the wedding, upon which we were each to place a curse against the other should one of us break our commitment. A safeguard, they thought.”
Andromeda lifted a shoulder, acknowledging what Penbrook hadn’t said aloud. That she was the one who usually left a trail of heartbreak in her wake.
Fia had been so quick to cast Penbrook as the villain, but hadn’t the Fanfare referred to Andromeda as the Heartcrusher?
It wasn’t so difficult to believe as Andromeda played with all the sparkling rings dangling from the ribbon around her neck. They must have been engagement rings. As if before Penbrook ever left her, she’d skipped out on a half-dozen weddings.
“I can’t help myself. My heart is a fickle thing.” But Andromeda didn’t sound quite as airy and unconcerned as she’d probably meant to.
“So why are you here?” Fia asked.
Andromeda’s smile dropped away, and now she was the one rubbing her finger, twisting and tugging at the slim band wrapped around it. But though the ring turned and turned, it couldn’t be forced over her knuckle. “I was struck by the same curse as Penbrook.”
“Sleep will be the death of you,” Fia murmured in horrified awe.
