Page 10 of The Trick of It

Seph grunted, testing the stepladder again and nodding at its newfound and temporary stability. “No,” she said. “I only release new ones during the high season. He didn’t invent any of those tricks, anyhow. Hell, I taught him several.”

“And yet the wound still seeps,” Libba intoned somberly, crossing her hands in front of her skirt.

“It’s not harming him,” Seph snapped. “Or anyone else. If he’s still trying to dazzle people with the rope snip or the vanishing coin, that’s his own sad stagnation of progress.”

“Perhaps,” Libba said, her voice very clearly hiding a smile. “Though I did just put on a production of Romeo and Juliet, which is hardly novel or groundbreaking, so I will choose not to take offense at your stance.”

“Entirely different,” Seph muttered.

“Is it?” Libba sighed, somehow sarcastically. “Well, you’ve done something. He claimed you were playing with his mind, something about theft, nocturnal omens, and then quite a long rant about how steaming wax seals off of letters doesn’t actually work very well.”

Seph blinked, pausing. “What?”

Libba shrugged. “I thought you would know.”

Seph sighed, digging a hand into her messy, blonde braid, and racked her brain for anything that aligned with the things Libba was saying. She shook her head, puffing her cheeks out with a gust of air. “I’ve got nothing.”

“Ah, well,” said Libba, seemingly unbothered as she swayed across the room to the till to take up the discarded hammer. “Get up there. I shall hold your nails and so on. And then you will tell me what those new pink tins are.”

“They’re dried tropical fruits,” Seph said, turning and stomping her way back up the ladder. “I need the silver hook with the nail on the end. Just there.”

Libba passed it up. “What sorts of fruits?”

“Pineapples, tamarinds, melons,” said Seph, squinting up at the mark she’d made on the ceiling beam. “They’re coated with a hot chili powder and then dried out and dusted with salt, lime juice, and sugar. It’ll burn your tongue, but it’s also divine.”

“I shall take two,” Libba decided immediately. “Here’s the hammer. I actually decided to come immediately because Rhys’s theatrics reminded me of a task he’d given me, some weeks ago, that I never concluded. A gift, for you.”

Seph paused, hammer, mid-tap. “That sounds wrong.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Libba said so emphatically that it startled Persephone. “It makes no damned sense. He doesn’t want you to know it is from him, but I’ve gone and told you, anyhow, so that cat has fled its bag.”

“I don’t think that’s how that expression goes,” Seph told her, resuming the tapping until the hook was firmly planted in the beam. She handed the hammer back and reached for the swinging sign. “What is it?”

“A fossil,” Libba said, still clearly disgruntled by its refusal to make sense. “An ammonite. He found it up at Malcolm’s quarry and polished it with my rose oil and told me to give it to you, to tell you that these would sell, and to not say it was from him. He thinks it’s a dragon.”

“Do you know for certain it isn’t one?” Seph asked, huffing as she hoisted the heavy wood onto the hook. “Oh. Does that look level? Can you walk back and check?”

“Yes, yes,” said Libba, trotting over toward the door again and peering up. “Looks perfect.”

“Good.” Seph slithered back down the ladder, ready to collapse. “Want to go upstairs? I can make you a consolation tea.”

Libba nodded, snatching up one of the pink tins as she came back around. “Yes, let’s do that,” she decided. “And I shall give you your dragon.”

Chapter Three

Rhys managed to avoid a direct confrontation for most of a day. Most of a day! The sun would be setting soon, wouldn’t it?

That should count as a whole day, he decided. Yes. He’d avoided it for a whole day. Nearly nine entire hours. That was a day.

He’d happily argue with anyone who claimed otherwise.

Given his propensity for impulse, he thought it very good.

And besides, he had tried to be clever about it.

He’d held the envelope over a steaming kettle until the cook had chased him out of the kitchens with a wooden spoon. All that had accomplished had been making the expensive paper wilt and ripple and smearing the insignia on the wax seal, which, he realized in retrospect, he ought to have looked at and memorized before destroying.

He’d even gone to his traitor sister, who had a friendship with the Witch of King’s Road, which was what he was calling that woman today. He’d had other names, of course, but he was always coming up with something better.