“What?”
“You didn’t give me enough money. This little bastard war criminal kept bidding them up and—well, I’m not sure he was a war criminal, but he had this certain indefinable war-criminaliness about him—and I could see he was determined to get them, so I… maybe I shouldn’t have, though, since you don’t approve of my… pettiness, did you call it?” She smiled sweetly and dangled the remaining beads of her necklace. It was more of a bracelet now.
She’d used her new itch trick on the man, wishing a relentless onslaught of cranny itches on him until he fled the room. Surely Brimstone knew; he always knew. It would be nice, she thought, if he would say thank you. Instead, he just slapped a coin onto the table.
A measly shing.
“That’s it? I dragged those things across Paris for you for a shing, while beardy gets away with double gavriels?”
Brimstone ignored her and extricated the tusks from their shroud. Twiga came to consult with him, and they muttered in undertones in their own language, which Karou had learned from the cradle in the natural way, and not by wish. It was a harsh tongue, growlsome and full of fricatives, with much of it rising from the throat. By comparison, even German or Hebrew seemed melodious.
While they talked about tooth configurations, Karou helped herself to the scuppy teacups and set about replenishing her string of nearly useless wishes, which she decided to keep as a multistrand bracelet for now. Twiga hauled the tusks over to his corner for cleaning, and Karou contemplated going home.
Home. The word always had air quotes around it in her mind. She’d done what she could to make her flat cozy, filling it with art, books, ornate lanterns, and a Persian carpet as soft as lynx fur, and of course there were her angel wings taking up one whole wall. But there was no help for its real emptiness; its close air was stirred by no breath but her own. When she was alone, the empty place within her, the missingness as she thought of it, seemed to swell. Even being with Kaz had done something to keep it at bay, though not enough. Never enough.
She thought of the little cot that used to be hers, tucked behind the tall bookcases in the back of the shop, and wished whimsically that she could stay here tonight. She could fall asleep like she used to, to the sound of murmured voices, Issa’s soft slither, the scritch of wee elsething beasties scampering in the shadows.
“Sweet girl.” Yasri bustled out of the kitchen with a tea tray. Beside the teapot was a plate of the custard-filled pastries in the shape of horns that were her specialty. “You must be hungry,” she said in her parrot voice. With a sideward glance at Brimstone, she added, “It’s not healthy for a growing girl, always running off hither and thither at not a moment’s notice.”
“That’s me, hither-and-thither girl,” said Karou. She grabbed a pastry and slumped in her chair to eat it.
Brimstone spared her a glance, then said to Yasri, “And I suppose it’s healthy for a growing girl to live on pastry?”
Yasri tutted. “I’d be happy to fix her a proper meal if you ever gave me warning, you great brute.” She turned to Karou. “You’re too thin, lovely. It isn’t becoming.”
“Mmm,” agreed Issa, caressing Karou’s hair. “She should be leopard, don’t you think? Sleek and lazy, fur hot from the sun, and not too lean. A well-fed leopard-girl, lapping from a bowl of cream.”
Karou smiled and ate. Yasri poured tea for them all, just how they liked it, which meant four sugars for Brimstone. After all these years, Karou still thought it was funny that the Wishmonger had a sweet tooth. She watched as he bent back to his never-ending work, stringing teeth into necklaces.
“Oryx leucoryx,” she identified as he selected a tooth from his tray.
He was unimpressed. “Antelopes are child’s play.”
“Give me a hard one, then.”
He handed her a shark’s tooth, and Karou was reminded of the hours she’d sat here with him as a child, learning teeth. “Mako,” she said.
“Longfin or shortfin?”
“Oh. Uh.” She went still, holding the tooth between her thumb and forefinger. Brimstone had trained her in this art since she was small, and she could read the origin and integrity of teeth from their subtle vibrations. She declared, “Short.”
He grunted, which was about as close as he came to praise.
“Did you know,” Karou asked him, “that mako shark fetuses eat each other in the womb?”
Issa, who was stroking Avigeth, gave a tch of disgust.
“It’s true. Only cannibal fetuses survive to be born. Can you imagine if people were like that?” She put her feet up on the desk and, two seconds later, at a dark look from Brimstone, took them down again.
The shop’s warmth was making her drowsy. The cot in its little nook called to her, as did the quilt Yasri had made her, so soft from years of snuggling. “Brimstone,” she said, hesitant. “Do you think—?”
At that moment, a thudding sounded, violent.
“Oh, dear,” said Yasri, clicking her beak in agitation as she gathered up the tea things.
It was the shop’s other door.
Back behind Twiga’s workspace, in the shadowed reaches of the shop where no lantern ever hung, there was a second door. In all Karou’s life, it had never been opened in her presence. She had no idea what was behind it.
The thudding came again, so hard it rattled the teeth in their jars. Brimstone rose, and Karou knew what was expected of her—that she rise, too, and leave at once—but she slouched down in her chair. “Let me stay,” she said. “I’ll be quiet. I’ll go back to my cot. I won’t look—”
“Karou,” said Brimstone. “You know the rules.”
“I hate the rules.”
He took a step toward her, prepared to help her out of the chair if she didn’t obey, and she shot to her feet, hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay.” She put on her coat as the banging continued, and grabbed another pastry from Yasri’s tray before letting Issa usher her into the vestibule. The door closed behind them, sealing out sound.
She didn’t bother asking Issa who was at the other door—Issa never gave away Brimstone’s secrets. But she said, a little pitifully, “I was just about to ask Brimstone if I could sleep in my old cot.”
Issa leaned forward to kiss her cheek and said, “Oh, sweet girl, wouldn’t that be nice? We can wait right here, the way we did when you were small.”