Copper Veins(25)

I sat beside him, awash in understanding. “Did you lose a lot of memories?”

He laughed soundlessly. “More than I’d realized before I came here.” He raised his head, looking once more at the makeshift brugh. “I hardly remember meeting Maeve. I hardly remember marrying her.”

“But you still love her,” I blurted out. “Don’t you?”

“Of course,” he said, much to my relief. “My heart remains as true as ever. My head just can’t quite figure out how we got there.” He looked at the wooden table and the platters of food and pitchers of wine scattered across the chipped surface. “When Maeve brought me here, I just stared at the tables and the mound, wondering why she went through all this trouble just to eat outdoors. When I said as much, she looked like she wanted to kill me.”

“She probably did. She was really upset.” Dad’s eyes narrowed and he pursed his lips—okay, so maybe those last comments weren’t all that helpful. “You know, you could use this as an opportunity.”

“An opportunity for what, exactly?”

“You get to fall in love with Mom, all over again,” I said. “Won’t that be exciting?”

Dad was silent for a moment, still staring at the makeshift brugh as if he couldn’t imagine ever being in one, much less meeting his future wife there. “Sara, that is a wonderful idea,” he said at last.

I grinned and hoped that Mom would think Dad’s re-courtship was a wonderful idea, too. Dad got to his feet, and then he helped me up. So, my walk had been waylaid by yet another Corbeau family crisis—what of it? At least this crisis was going to have a happy ending.

As we walked back to the manor, a few nagging thoughts swirled around my mind. “Why didn’t you lose all your memories?” I asked. Dad raised an eyebrow, so I continued, “I mean, you remember plenty about the Mundane realm, and about the wars. You only seem to have forgotten about us.”

“Sometimes magic demands a terrible price,” Dad replied.

I shuddered—the more I learned about magic, the less I trusted it.





11


Dad and I re-entered the manor. After a bit of searching, we found Sadie in the kitchen watching Max, of all people, kneading dough. My day was getting curiouser and curiouser.

“Um, what are you doing?” I asked. I glanced at Sadie, but she only shrugged.

“Gonna bake some bread,” Max replied, then he gave the mass of dough a few punches. “Nothing like home-baked bread.”

As if Max had ever had home-baked anything. If it wasn’t for the store-bought food we’d eaten as children, we would have either starved to death or been poisoned by Mom’s cooking. “Don’t we have silverkin for that?” I asked. The little guys were capable of cooking up everything from grilled cheese to twelve-course banquets.

“Yeah, but I wanted to try my hand at it.” He wrestled the dough into a bowl, draped a towel over it, and placed it on the counter in the corner by the hearth. Yeah, we had one of those giant medieval fireplaces where we could roast an entire cow, for what reason I couldn’t fathom. I mean, up until a few months ago only Micah had lived here. “What’s up?” Max said as he wiped his hands on the hem of his shirt.

“Why did you just leave it on the counter?” I asked. “Shouldn’t the dough be in the fridge so it doesn’t go bad?”

“Sara, dough needs to rise,” he replied. After I’d blinked at him a few times, wordlessly communicating that all I knew about dough was that it eventually became bread, or better yet, pizza crust, Max continued, “So, what’s up? You have that face.”

I scowled but ignored that little comment, mostly because Max had flour in his hair and eyebrows and I was not going to tell him. “Turns out that Dad has a few memory problems,” I said, then I told my siblings about our father’s memory loss, and about what had really happened with Mom at the makeshift brugh out back.

“So that’s why Mom thinks you hate her,” Sadie murmured when I was through. Max glared at her, but she was unaffected. “What? She thinks he had a girlfriend or something.”

“Gods,” Dad said, covering his face with his hands. “How am I ever going to fix this?”

“You can begin by telling us what sort of spells you used that altered your memory.” The four of us turned as one and saw Micah standing in the kitchen entrance. He still looked exhausted, as if those last few hours of sleep hadn’t happened. “If you explain to me the sort of magic you employed, I may be able to help you with the aftereffects.”