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Grace saw through Fia’s strained smile. “Except?”
Everything spilled out of Fia at once, the way it always did with Grace. “The spellshop’s been cursed, Sebastian Smith has my mother’s spellbook, which might be the source of the ruin of curses, and we need to sneak into Thistledown tomorrow to return The Book of Ribs.”
“Oh, is that all?” Grace made a face.
“No,” Fia laughed, realizing how wild she sounded. “We need a quick glimpse of the invitation to the All Hallows’ Eve masque too.”
“You’re being reckless again, aren’t you?”
Fia couldn’t deny it. “At least I’m telling you in advance this time.”
“At least,” Grace sighed, “I’ll be at the masque and can keep an eye on you.”
CHAPTER 30
That night, after she’d told Grace every last detail and Grace had given her a million admonishments and they’d finally said their farewells, Fia, Penbrook, and Andromeda returned to Carrow Lane. All Fia wanted was to follow Andromeda up the stairs and crawl into her own bed, but she still had a spell to write.
If she could.
So now Fia sat at the kitchen table with a single candle burning, because that was how she worked best, at least for a spell of this magnitude—in the quiet, the corners of the room draped in shadows, all the items on the shelves and counters hidden in the dim. She touched the still-blank page before her, focus narrowing.
But not enough.
The candle’s ring of soft light spilled across the table, illuminating Penbrook’s slouched angles. He sat distractingly across from her, dark hair rimmed with gold, the candle’s flame reflected in his drowsy eyes, highlighting that scratch on his jaw left by Finnick. She wanted to push him away from the candle glow and into the shadows so she didn’t have to see his loathsome face. That wouldn’t have stopped her from hearing him, though—his insufferable sighs, and his pencil scratching.
The fact that he had already caught hold of the threads of a spell, and she had not, irritated her further. He’d had his head bent over his spellbook for the last hour, never once looking up. It didn’t matter that she was ill-equipped for the task and that nothing had changed since she’d first told him she didn’t have the ability to break his curse. She didn’t like this feeling of uselessness.
“Don’t you already have a serviceable mirroring spell?” she asked.
Lost in his work, he absently said, “Who said I’m writing a mirroring spell?”
Fia sighed. There was no point in talking to him. She needed to concentrate, but the harder she searched for a way into the spell, the more it eluded her—and despite what Penbrook seemed to think she was capable of, she wasn’t even aiming to counter the impossible curse, only to delay its descent. Stubbornly, she dipped her pen into the inkpot. A bead of black dripped from the nib, splattering on the page, and she stared at the star-shaped blot the same way a diviner might read the leaves at the bottom of a teacup.
Fia waited for that familiar tingling in her fingertips or the inexplicable dizziness that came when she caught the glimmer of a promising spell. Yet all she felt now was the rigid chairback against her rounded spine—and a mounting dread.
She couldn’t bear the thought of Andromeda dying.
Or, if she was being very honest, Penbrook.
Fia peeked at him under her lashes, taking in his bowed head, his elegant hand, the way he looped the pencil chaotically across the paper. Despite her unrelenting anger and her efforts to harden herself, she still cared what became of him.
“Having trouble?” he asked without looking up, pencil scribbling at the top of the page, then at the bottom, only to sweep upward again.
“What sort of handwriting do you have?”
“I told you on the day we met; I have very good handwriting.”
She let out an exasperated sigh. “Then what are you doing?”
At last, he looked up, arching his eyebrow at her ink-splattered paper, which held not a single word. “I thought we were both working on spells.”
“Something will come to me,” she said around a frown. For several minutes more she tried to refocus—envisioning the hands of a clock walking backward and breaths extending longer than they’d been designed for and hearts stubbornly beating even after they should have stopped—but it was no good. He’d distracted her too thoroughly to string any words together for a spell. “Will you show me what you’ve written?” she asked grumpily.
As she had the first and only time she’d seen Penbrook’s spellbook—that day she’d impulsively held it over the fire—she felt the intrusion of her question, asking to see something so personal. “I won’t burn it,” she added, in case that was his worry. That she was so mad at him, she might try to hurt him in this destructive way.
“I know you won’t,” he said, gripping his pencil more tightly. He looked down at the page, a hesitancy she didn’t fully understand holding him back. But then, as a spellwright, she was used to handing over her spells, and as a magician, he was used to writing them for only himself—so that he might entertain a jubilant Summerdown crowd or a single Sable Spells patron. Spells crafted in private to serve the Madbury family or, one day, the High Council.
Finally, he pushed his book across the table. Their hands brushed in the exchange, and she ignored the way her fingers still wanted to curl around his.
