Page 84 of A Lady’s Guide to Fae Kings

Chapter Twenty-Two

The trouble with Fae kings was that when you let down your guard and started to think they were normal in any way, you discovered you were very much mistaken.

Pippa had washed most of the mud off and fallen asleep face first on the bed, only to be awakened hours later by the prickle of the Red Grimoire tracking spell. Her feet tingled and would not let up until she swung her legs over the side of the bed. She rubbed her bleary eyes. The sun had set and her chambers were in deep shadows. “All right,” she muttered when the spell turned from a tickle to a pinch.

She followed the magical pull, her moth leading the way down the hall. The blackthorn blossoms were closed into buds, but she did have to keep ducking under branches so laden with peaches as to be a hazard. The pull of the spell flared into something a great deal more than insistent. It practically pulled her off her feet, urging her to hurry, hurry, hurry. Her Librarian senses sharpened, on alert.

Something was wrong.

She skidded to a halt in front of a heavy oak door and pushed it open.

Lachlan leaned by the hearth, joined by Cai, Archimedes, Arcadia, and a lady she did not know. It appeared to be a study, with several plush chairs and a stone hearth. There was salt on the floor. The mists crawled at the window, tapping. Her feet burned.

She pointed at Cai, who held a torn page from a book over a map of Elphame. “Stop!”

He did not stop. He only flicked his hand dismissively. “Your pet is here, Thorn.”

Lachlan straightened. “Be very careful,” he suggested. “I won’t warn you again. I don’t care how important this is.”

Pippa was beyond suggestions and warnings. She marched over and plucked the page from his hands. “What do you think you are doing?”

“No business of yours, Tithe.”

Lachlan growled. Pippa called on the calm of a Librarian during the height of examinations. “Let me rephrase,” she said. “Whatever it is that you think you are doing, you are doing it spectacularly wrong.”

“I was tracking a book.” The amiable smile was gone.

“You were not,” Pippa said. “What you were doing is how you get a plague of locusts and boggarts in the cellar. Is that what you want?”

“This spell has brought us three pages from a book we cannot find,” the stranger remarked. She had translucent wings, like a dragonfly.

“It’s also triggered a curse on the book. And it’s getting much worse.” Pippa read the title on the map. “The Red Grimoire. Of course.”

“Can you undo the curse?” Arcadia asked.

“Not completely, you triggered it too long ago. And every time you steal another page, it grows stronger. But I can at least stop it from feeding on you tonight.”

“A witch?” the dragonfly lady said. “She doesn’t know real magic.”

“She knows books,” Lachlan said. He nodded to Pippa, but she had already begun. She was not waiting for permission.

Hedgewort materialized, holding a butcher knife and a rolling pin. “What the bloody hell is going on?”

“I need salt, please,” Pippa said. “Iron nails and lightning water, if you have it. And my Librarian pouch in my room, on top of the chest.”

Hedgewort vanished.

“Do not let that mist inside,” she said to Lachlan. “Stab an iron blade into the windowsill and burn three black candles. And I need two of the red ribbons.”

Archimedes went to a cupboard for candles; Lachlan pulled a spool of red ribbon from the desk.

“Tie a ribbon around the knife and knot it three times,” she ordered them.

Book curses were not rare, but they were not usually as malicious as this one felt. It was like her hands were wrapped in thistles, her feet encased in ice. The Red Grimoire was in the wrong hands.

And it did not like it.

Pippa dumped the last of the tea from a cup on the desk and filled it with the salt Hedgewort brought her. She placed the torn page inside and covered it with another layer of salt.