“Am I?” I supposed I was.
“Aye, you definitely are.”One eye cracked open, opal and gleaming.“You’ve said Na Trì Banrigh approximately forty-seven times in the last two hours. I’ve been counting.”
“Because it keeps appearing in these documents and no one bothers to explain what it means.” I shoved away from the counter in frustration, nearly knocking over my tea, which had gone cold at least two hours ago. “The Three Queens. Three queens of what? Scotland didn’t have three queens at the same time. Is it metaphorical? Is it code for something?”
“Have you considered that perhaps you’re overthinking this?”
“Have you considered that perhaps you’re underthinking it?”
“I’m a three-hundred-year-old repository of knowledge. I don’t underthink anything.”Quilliam yawned, showing off his tiny pearl-like teeth.“I simply think at the appropriate level for each situation.”
“And what’s the appropriate level for this situation?”
“Tea. Definitely tea. Yours has gone cold and you’re getting tetchy.”
I looked at the mug on the counter. He wasn’t wrong. Iwastetchy. I was also exhausted, having slept poorly for two nights running, my dreams full of shadowy figures and whispered warnings I couldn’t quite make out. By this rate, if one more person told me I looked like hell, I might actually haul off and whack them.
“Fine,” I said, picking up the mug. “I’ll make more tea. But when I get back, we’re having a serious conversation about why none of these documents actually say anything useful.”
I walked to the small kitchen at the back of the shop, filled the kettle, and set it to boil. While I waited, I leaned against the counter and tried to organize my thoughts.
What I knew so far was that the Wright family had been Bookkeepers for the Order of Caledonia for generations. The Bookkeeper’s role was to witness oaths, maintain records, and keep connections between... something. Someone. The documents kept referencing those who scattered.
Then Isobel Wright had done something terrible in 1746. The Bookkeeper position had been vacant ever since and that was where the curse had started for us.
And somehow, all of this connected to Na Trì Banrigh. The Three Queens. Whatever that meant.
The kettle clicked off. I poured the water over a fresh tea bag and watched the color bloom through the water, dark and rich.
There was something I was missing. I mean, clearly there was, but it annoyed me.
I carried my tea back to the front of the shop and found Quilliam had relocated to my whiteboard, hovering in frontof it with his tiny wings beating slowly. He looked ridiculous—this magnificent little dragon examining my chaotic scribbles like an art critic at a gallery.
“Your handwriting is atrocious,”he observed.
“Thank you for that constructive feedback.” It wasn’t that bad, was it? I studied my scribbles. Perhaps he was right.
“I’m simply saying, if you want to solve a mystery, legibility helps.”He flew back to the counter and landed delicately on a stack of papers.“Also, you’ve misspelled Caledonia twice.”
I looked at the whiteboard. Damn it.
“Quilliam,” I said slowly, a thought forming. “You’ve been alive for three hundred years or so. Give or take.”
“We’ve established this, aye.”
“You were bonded to the Wright line. To the Bookkeepers.”
“Also established.”
“Which means you were there. In 1746. When Isobel...” I gestured vaguely at the papers around us. “When all of this happened.”
Quilliam went very still. Both opal eyes fixed on me with sudden intensity.
“Aye,”he said softly.“I was there.”
“So you know. You know what she actually did.”
“Aye.”
