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Which, according to Penbrook’s looking spell, supposedly housed The Book of Ribs.
“I can’t tell if you’ve been given good news or bad,” Andromeda said.
Fia couldn’t decide either, because as much as she’d needed a way to get into the Willows, this invitation felt like a dangerous thing. Something meant to lure her.
But she had to go. It might be her only chance to find the grimoire, and though she still didn’t think it was a good idea to crack open the once-buried book before returning it to Thistledown, Penbrook and Andromeda were in desperate need of impossible magic.
And so she said, “Perhaps we’ve found the answer to all our problems.”
CHAPTER 16
With two long days before Sebastian Smith’s Bramble Ball, Fia reopened Sable Spells, thinking of Grace’s advice to go about business as usual, even though it felt wrong to do something so normal in the face of death.
It felt equally wrong to admit she’d missed the shop. Missed the way the autumn sun slanted through the windows in the mornings before anyone else arrived. Missed the scent of the books and the toasty fire, the feel of the dust-moted air around her and Finnick twining through her legs. Missed the sense of possibility—of who might drop in on a whim and what new spells she might be asked to create.
Although she still thought of Sable Spells as her mother’s shop, perhaps for the first time, Fia felt like she was throwing open the door with her own glad sense of purpose.
And it helped that she wasn’t doing it alone. Andromeda, all settled in at Hotel Hush, had determined to stay until they broke the curse or died trying, and had offered to help around the shop. And then there was Penbrook.
When she’d suggested he take on fewer customers given his cursed state—she did not use the word fragile—he’d stubbornly proclaimed, “I’m not in the ground yet,” and then insisted on rescheduling all his appointments. The customers were so eager for the opportunity to meet the magician, they waved away Fia’s apologies for canceling in the first place—so the spellshop filled again with chatter and laughter and magic.
Just now, Penbrook was designing an elaborate bouquet of out-of-season peonies, their heavy heads bowed by all the skirtlike layers of amber petals.
“They’ll bloom for five to seven days?” Gwendolyn Blair inquired.
“Yes,” Penbrook assured her with a note of pride. “And what’s more, they’ll never drop a single petal.”
“Ah, you’ll put the florists out of business. They can’t get me peonies this time of year, and never in this divine color. I’ll have another dozen, I think,” Gwendolyn said while her songbird, Rin, watched quietly from his place in her upswept hair, and Penbrook sketched another stem in the air.
“Why not two dozen more?” He offered a charming smile. “Your dinner party will be the talk of Wakesend.”
“Three dozen more!” Gwendolyn beamed like she was receiving the flowers from a sweetheart, overlooking the fact that she wouldn’t be able to carry them all home.
Fia started inching closer to warn Penbrook that he’d have to deliver the bouquets, and that Gwendolyn would likely talk his ear off and invite him inside and that he should absolutely, under no circumstances, taste her jellied gingersnaps. But then he glanced up at her, the light through the front window limning his profile with white gold.
She faltered.
They say the most beautiful people have some kind of symmetry to their features, but Penbrook Madbury didn’t have a face like that at all. One eyebrow seemed to rather permanently arch higher than the other, and his mouth (why was she looking at his mouth?) crooked up at one corner. And the way his dark hair fell across his forehead, as if he’d just run his fingers through it, afforded him a casualness that did not quite match the sharpness of his insufferably dark, sleepy eyes. They focused on her now, inscrutable.
What did he see when he looked at her?
“You’re…”
“Yes,” she said too quickly, and coming closer, stubbed her toes lightly against his own.
He angled away from Gwendolyn, whispering so only Fia would hear, “You’re like a mouse.”
Apparently, Fia shouldn’t have wondered what he thought when he looked at her. Oh, she could have killed him if he weren’t already cursed to die. “A mouse?”
“Small, whiskery, and always underfoot.”
“Whiskery!” she hissed, raising a hand to her face, then quickly lowering it when he grinned. And to think, she’d just been—quite unnecessarily—admiring that absurd eyebrow.
In quick succession, brassy peonies bloomed in his arms, fat and beautiful. The overlarge blossoms grew in every direction, the bunch just big enough to obstruct Gwendolyn’s view of their faces.
“Secretive, too.” He looked at Fia carefully, like he wanted to see inside her head.
“Whiskery,” she muttered, still chewing on that particular word.
