Pierce tapped the band on the underside of the shell. “It’s wider on
the females.” He let it fall into the water; the young men watched the
splash.
“I could eat,” Bayley murmured wistfully.
“Her restaurant’s open. It’s called Haricot. There’s crab on the lunch
menu. Follow the street the direction you were going; it’s just past the
Wander Inn.” He watched them query one another again. “A motel,” he
explained. “If you keep going the same direction out of town, the road will
loop around the cape and take you back to the highway.”
“Thank you.” They stirred then, stepped toward the waiting car, thoughts
shifting away from Pierce, back to their journey. “We appreciate the help.”
“We’ll tell them at Haricot that you sent us,” the dark prince said with
his father’s charming smile.
You won’t have to, Pierce thought as the dock swayed under their receding
steps, and the gull finally flew off. She knows.
The knights were long gone by the time he pulled up the rings in the late
afternoon and carried them and a bucket full of squirming crabs to the Haricot
kitchen.
His tall mother, nibbling a strawberry, glanced at him past the ear of Cape
Mistbegotten’s only sheriff. Her eyes, a rich blue-green, narrowed,
questioning. Pierce took off the apron and scrubbed his hands at the sink,
hearing her voice through the falling water.
“Well, I can look, Arn. But it’s been a while since I’ve done anything like
that. I’ve been retired for years; cooking is my magic now.”
Ha, Pierce thought, and felt her gaze between his shoulder blades.
“Thanks, Heloise,” the sheriff said. “It’s the third time those
interpretive signs and telescopes on the point have been vandalized, and I
still haven’t got a clue. If you could just—Well, keep an eye on them now
and then, when you have a moment.”
“I’ll try to remember.”
There was a short silence. Pierce, drying his hands, heard what Arn Brisket
was not saying, what he’d not been saying since the third time Heloise had
told him no. Not for the first time, Pierce wondered why. Arn was decent,
honest, with maybe more shoreline on his head since the first time she had
said it, but his chestnut mustache was still bold and thick as a squirrel’s
tail. And it would be a timely solution. Pierce froze then, at that unexpected
thought, staring at the towel in his hands with its little edging of green
beans.
“Pierce.”
He looked up dazedly. Arn had gone; his mother, trying to retie her apron
without tangling her long red braid in the strings, nodded in the direction of
her office. Pierce went to her, took the ties out of her fingers. They seemed
oddly chilly. He swallowed something hard in his throat.
“I’ll just get the crab pot on to boil first.”
She nodded again, briefly, left him without looking at him, her backbone
straight and rigid as a flagpole.
Staff chattered again, voices muted, as he filled the huge pot with water.
Arn, they talked about softly, and his stubborn, persistent longing, since his
wife’s death a decade ago, for the sorceress turned cook and gardener. Pierce
heaved the pot onto the stove. His thoughts drifted to the strangers who had
gotten so completely lost they had managed to find Desolation Point, the
westernmost thrust of land on the entire Wyvernhold coast. So did everyone
else’s thoughts, then. The knights might have come and gone from Haricot, but
they had left behind them vivid impressions. Pierce responded absently to the
questions and comments as he lingered beside the crab bucket. The strange idea
in his head took on clarity, dimension. He nudged an escaping crab back into
the bucket and felt his mother’s eyes again. But she wasn’t visible; she was
in her office, checking the evening menu or balancing accounts while she
waited for him.
Or maybe sitting motionlessly, watching him out of a borrowed pair of eyes.
He left the crabs to the staff, went out the back door through her rambling,
burgeoning kitchen garden, and drove home.
Home was on the outermost cliff on the cape, where it jutted into the wild sea
amid the shards and wreckage of time and the raw, irresistible forces of
nature. Shreds of morning mist still hung from the high branches of the
ancient trees around the pile of stone and wood that had been Pierce’s father
’s house. And his father’s before him, and his father’s father’s, back to
some distant past long before the watchtower that had guarded the headlands
had been torn down to add a wing to the family hall.