Page 36

THIRTY

Time travel through fire was swift, bumpy, and a little scorching.

“Hot! Hot!” Thorn yelped as she tumbled out of the fireplace.

Bandit hopped off Thorn. He wasn’t burnt, but he had turned into a dark gray cat. He shook like a wet dog, and a great cloud of soot puffed out of him.

Meanwhile, Thorn rolled around the floor to smother the little fires on her skirt.

“Ribbit!”

“Sorry, Penny!” Thorn grabbed the lightly squashed frog out of her pocket. “But at least you’ll turn back into a human in your own century.”

“Welcome back,” Madam Maude said, wiping Bandit down with a damp rag. “My magic’s a little rusty, but I’m glad the Steal potion works as well on people and animals as it did on the rock we tested it on.”

Thorn looked around. Outside the window, the forest still stood.

The cottage was exactly how she’d left it two and a half months ago.

On her broom was her hat, once again a perfect cone with a pointy tip.

The only differences were that there was now a light covering of dust over everything, and her favorite armchair was ablaze.

“Fire!” By the time she dashed outside, pulled water from the well, and dashed back inside, her armchair was crispy. She splashed the whole bucket on it, turning it into a soggy mess. Panting from the firefighting, she said, “Some of the embers must have landed on it.”

“Why did you come back? And in such a hurry. I flew so fast from my house to yours.” Madam Maude’s usually coiffed hair was a mess of tangles.

“Let’s have a chat over tea.” Thorn went to the cabinet, and it took her reaching out into thin air to realize that the electric kettle wasn’t there.

“The kettle’s over there,” Madam Maude said, pointing to the table.

Thorn picked up the empty kettle and automatically brought it to the sink, which didn’t exist yet.

Madam Maude sounded very concerned as she said, “You have to draw water from the well first. Did the fire travel damage your mind?”

“It’s amazing how much you can get used to things in just two and a half months.” Thorn hadn’t realized how well she’d adapted to the twenty-first century. “But it won’t take me long to readjust. After all, I’ve been making tea the same way for almost forty years.”

After what seemed like ages, and when Bandit was once again a white cat, the tea was finally ready.

“I’m sorry I accused you of covering things up.” Thorn blew on her cup. “I was the one who brewed and drank the Liar Liar potion myself.”

Madam Maude’s mouth formed an O.

“I finally drank the antidote.”

Madam Maude sighed. “That day was the third consecutive day that neither your mother nor you girls answered my fireplace summons, so I visited the cottage. I saw you sitting next to your mother’s body.

You were hanging by a thread. I had to give you a Focus potion to get you to tell me everything that had happened.

No one should have to go through what you did.

I still don’t know if telling you about the Liar Liar potion all those years ago was the right thing to do, but at the time, I thought it best that you forget some of those horrible things.

Then you could move forward. Once you took the potion, I played along with the lies you told yourself. ”

“I didn’t know it then, but my familiar, Turnip, used his extra lives to travel to the future using what modern people call the cosmic cat distribution system. He dragged Rose along with him to the twenty-first century to rescue me.”

“He saved your life the only way he knew how. What a good little cat.”

“The potion made me believe that a black panther had eaten Rose and Turnip. It was terrifying, but nowhere as heartbreaking as the fact that Rose tried to kill me.”

“So she’s alive? Did you come back here to get away from her?”

Thorn stared at her tea. “It was just time.”

Madam Maude took a very long sip from her cup before finally saying, “Whatever the real reason is, I hope it doesn’t take you another thirty years to face it.”

Later that night, after Madam Maude had left, Thorn was changing out of her sooty dress when something tumbled out of the pocket.

It was her cell phone. She couldn’t help but scroll through the photo album.

Most of the snapshots were terrible selfies taken for her online dating profile.

But one made her pause. In the background, Walls knelt by the couch, tending to Bandit. He had turned his head to look at her.

An ache bloomed in her chest.

“Walls.” She gasped. She didn’t mean to say his name out loud. She was glad Bandit had gone out hunting and wasn’t around to cast her a judgmental look.

“Ribbit.”

Thorn peered into the water jug. “Not a peep out of you, Penny. In two weeks, you’ll return to being human, to your old life. I’ll do the same. He’ll probably be dating Michelle .” She switched off the phone and stashed it at the back of the wardrobe.

Thorn didn’t face the real reason she came back head-on, but at least this time, she wouldn’t use Liar Liar potion to hide the truth. She had grown up, and now she did what any self-respecting adult would do—throw herself into work and cleaning.

Without technology, much of her time and energy was spent just surviving.

Everything from making tea to doing laundry to making pasta now took ten times as long to accomplish.

Even when she had a little time to dwell on superfluous emotions, that was swiftly eclipsed by preparations for her comeback to the Sunday markets.

“People at the markets have been asking about you,” Madam Maude had told her. “They had two theories: that you had either been eaten by the black panther or gotten married. They were taking bets.”

Despite her hands and feet being busy, Thorn was restless inside, like there were ants crawling all over inside her rib cage.

She found herself sighing often and found herself bored by brewing the same potions she had brewed for years.

She hadn’t realized until now how much fun she had developing new recipes with modern ingredients in the twenty-first century.

When night fell and all was quiet, in the short moments between climbing into bed and passing out from exhaustion, Thorn had no choice but to finally feel that ache in her chest. No choice but to think about Walls.

Even though it was just mere seconds before slumber took her, some mornings she woke up with tearstained cheeks.

She was so miserable that when Sunday finally arrived, she was grateful for the distraction provided by small talk and haggling customers.

They were exactly the same as she had left them two and a half months ago.

She was explaining to a man for the fourth time that All Night Long was simply a potion for insomniacs when someone yelled, “Bloody cat!”

Thorn looked up just in time to see Bandit scurrying down the path between the two rows of stalls, dragging a whole leg of lamb. The butcher was hot on his heels.

She stepped out from behind the stall. She hadn’t wanted to bring Bandit to the markets with her, but now that they no longer had a cat-proof frog enclosure, she couldn’t leave him home alone with Penny.

It was easy to find Bandit as a crowd had gathered where the butcher had caught up. Thorn arrived to see the butcher holding on to the leg of lamb with Bandit dangling off it by his teeth.

“Even Bandit’s the same.” Thorn rummaged in her pocket for coins to pay for the leg of lamb and freedom of cat. But as she was counting out five coins, Bandit let go.

He landed silently on all fours. And he didn’t run away. He just sat there in the middle of the thoroughfare. He looked defeated.

“Next time, I’ll have cat on the menu,” the butcher spat as he dropped the lamb leg and stormed away.

Thorn scooped up Bandit and his meal and made her way back toward her stall. “What’s gotten into you?”

It’s not the same , he said.

“Sorry, Bandit. How about I boil this lamb till it’s mushy like mousse?” Thorn was surprised. To her, the cat had seemed to adjust back to life in the seventeenth century without batting an eyelid.

She, too, had in practice been living life the way she had before she time-traveled, before she met Walls, but although everything was the same as she had left it, she wasn’t the same.

Just then, Thorn passed by the blacksmith’s workshop. The blacksmith was there, his sweaty back to her. He was forging a pot.

“I’m sorry,” she called out from the door.

It took him several seconds to place her face to her name. “Thorn Scarhart. Why are you sorry? I was the one who led you on, even if for only a short time. I don’t know what came over me that day.”

“I know. I fed you—”

Someone yanked Thorn back by the elbow and pushed past.

“I’ve found just the right woman for you,” Madam Maude said, stepping between Thorn and the blacksmith. “I’ll come back to your workshop tomorrow with the details. For now, Thorn and I have a grave matter to discuss.”

Before either the blacksmith or Thorn could say anything, Madam Maude pulled Thorn by the elbow and didn’t let go until they were behind Thorn’s stall.

“You can’t tell him you potioned him,” Madam Maude whispered. “Word will get out, and Father Jorrison might call for a witch hunt. It’s one thing for people to voluntarily buy potions from you, but to be unwillingly potioned is another thing. Pandemonium would break out.”

“Sorry. I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m still reacclimating to this era.”

“Don’t be sorry. Because what you just did convinced me that what I’m about to do is wise. I’ve found five suitable men for you.”

Thorn was confused. “Five? But I had to bribe you just to introduce me to one man before. How did you scrounge up five suitable men from your Big Book of Marriageable Ladies and Gentlemen?”

“Oh, Thorn. I admit that your age makes it a bit more of a challenge, but my hesitation was mostly because of your insistence on using potions for love. Judging by how you apologized to the blacksmith, you seem to have finally seen the light.” Madam Maude fished out a paper scroll from her basket and handed it to Thorn.

“?‘You are cordially invited to “A Night of Love and Lemonade” the evening of October 31, 1690,’?” Thorn read aloud. It was the very important letter that the Historical Society had framed up in the twenty-first century, except this one was intact.

“You said the one you participated in was fifteen men and fifteen women, but the venue I chose is much smaller. You said coffee, but I think that lemonade drink you mentioned sounds more delightful. And five minutes between patrons might have worked in the twenty-first century, but seventeenth-century people need more time. Our pace of life is slower.”

“?‘Five warlocks and five witches… Bring your own chairs… Fifteen minutes of getting to know each potential suitor… ’?” As Thorn continued reading, her eyes grew wider and wider. “This is a speed-dating event!”