It's Arabella who stops at the door, her shortbread basket empty. “For the first time since that letter came,” she says, looking around the room, "I'm angry. It's much better."
I stand in Grammy's blue doorway and watch Lyra and Arabella leave together, arm in arm, chattier and more hopeful than when we began nine hours earlier. When I turn around, Noemi hasn't moved from the table.
She's looking at the mantel again, that peculiar frown back on her face. "The book," she says. "May I see it?"
Grammy has been washing cups with her back to us, but at Noemi’s request, her hands stop in the basin. For a moment, the only sound in the cottage is water dripping from one cup.
Then she dries her hands on her apron, slowly, and turns around.
"You can feel it, can’t you?" Grammy asks.
Noemi nods. "I've felt it since I came through the door." Her voice is careful, the voice she uses with frightened customers and bottles that could turn dangerous in the wrong hands. "It's been looking at me all day."
My skin prickles at her words, but Noemi keeps her eyes on the mantel, looking like she’s seen a ghost.
"Mistress Sunfell –” she starts, but Grammy shakes her head.
“Please,” she says tiredly. “It’s Grammy. I haven’t wanted to be a Sunfell in years.”
Noemi takes my grandmother’s request in stride. “That book is magicked. There’s old craft wound tightly through the binding. I can feel it from here. I've spent nine hours telling myself it's a hedge-charm or a preservation working, but it’s neither of those, and I'd like to examine it properly." She glances at Grammy. "With your leave," she adds quietly.
I stand very still beside the door.
"Noemi, it's a book of fables. Grammy, tell her."
Grammy doesn't tell her. Instead, she walks to the mantel, pauses for a long moment, then takes down the book, and places it on the now-cleared table beneath the lamp. Then she steps back with her arms folded.
"My grandmother told me never to let a witch near it," she says. "Said she'd tell us something we didn't want to know."
Noemi's mouth tightens, but she doesn't look away from the book.
Grammy looks at me.
"I'm seventy-eight. I’ve spent years seeing my granddaughter tell herself that she doesn’t deserve love, and now I’m seeing it unfold before my eyes.” She sighs. “I'm done protecting myself from answers." She looks at Noemi. "Tell me what it is."
Noemi sits.
She doesn't open the book at first. She holds her palms over the cover the way she held one hand before Mirelle's face. She whispers a single word. The lamplight moves, but not as a flicker. Itleans,like grass when wind passes over a hill.
Noemi lets out a slow breath.
"Open it to the story," she says. "The one that matters."
There’s no way that she knows that there is a particular story. I’ve never mentioned it to her. But she’s never been here to Grammy’s house before, either. So I open it for her, my hands knowing the page better than anyone's.
There.
The Oak and the Needle.
The woodcut of the seamstress with her bowed head beneath the tree. Words I could recite before I could read them.
Noemi reads the story once in silence. Then again, her fingers hovering above the lines. Her face changes as she goes. The hard concentration I know from watching her work gives way to recognition, and beneath it, dread.
"Lissy." She says my name without looking up. "This isn't a fable about a curse."
My stomach drops as I swallow the lump back in my throat.
"Itisthe curse," Noemi says, her voice soft, reverent.
