About a week had passed since we’d dealt with Carredura.
A young woman stood outside Riviere Antiques thinking hard and muttering, “Hrrmmm…” Her hair was ash gray, her eyes the color of lapis lazuli. Now, who could that be?
“Well, if it isn’t Miss Elaina,” I said, waving hello.
“Well, well,” she said, waving back when she saw me. “What’s going on, Miss MacMillia?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” I said. I pointed at the store’s signboard. “It’s closed today. Again.”
The lights were out, and the door of Riviere Antiques was shut tight.
We hadn’t seen Riviere since that night. The last I had seen of her had been just after she’d disenchanted Carredura. “I think I’m going to take a little time to rest,” she’d said, and since then, not a peep. What in the world could be going on?
“You think she’s still resting?” Elaina asked with a puzzled tilt of her head.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know. “If she is, it’s been an awfully long time.” I made the same sort of Hrrmmm as Elaina. I didn’t doubt that disenchanting Carredura had required a considerable amount of power, so maybe it would take a while to regenerate, but it still seemed like we should have seen her by now. There was leaving us in the dark, and then there was leaving us in the dark! I was, in a word, to put it very simply—worried.
“You don’t suppose she collapsed in her house, do you?” Elaina’s tone was joking, but the unpleasant suggestion only fueled my concern.
“You know, a week is a really long time to not hear anything. Maybe we should try to get in there and check on her, even if we have to break down the door.” My anxiety-addled brain produced a mildly overdramatic suggestion and managed to force it out of my mouth.
“She’d get angry if we broke down her door.”
“Miss Elaina. Emergencies excuse a certain amount of breaking and entering.”
“I’m not sure I’d call this an emergency.”
“My boss disappeared right before payday, and now I don’t have next month’s salary!”
“Ah. So you’re the one with the emergency.” She didn’t sound impressed.
Okay, so the stuff about my salary was mostly a joke. But the store had definitely been too quiet, and by today I was starting to think seriously about forcing my way in.
First I tried knocking and calling “Miss Riviere?” several times. “I’m going to break it down,” I warned, and then I took a step back.
“What, you’re really doing this?” Elaina asked, also backing away—but from me, not the door.
“For my salary? Yes!” I said. I also really was worried about Riviere.
“Wow. Okay,” Elaina said, maybe sensing how serious I was. She shrugged.
“Here I go!” I gave a great cry and launched myself at the door.
Which was exactly when it opened.
“Good heavens. Could you keep it down out here?” My familiar red-haired shopkeeper appeared from within. Riviere. “What in the world are you—?”
She looked very annoyed by all this, standing in the doorway. Or in other words, exactly where I was charging.
“Huh?” For a moment, she didn’t seem to process what was going on.
“Oops!”
Shoot! By the time I realized what was happening, I already had too much momentum to slow down.
Instead of a joyous reunion when I saw my boss for the first time in a week, I gave her a solid head-butt.
“What is wrong with you?” Riviere asked as she pressed a handkerchief to her nose. Now she looked very, very annoyed as she sat on the sofa across from me.
“Yeah, I’m…really sorry…” I scratched my head and offered the most heartfelt apology I could. Maybe it didn’t look very heartfelt, because I was grinning when I said it. But what was I supposed to do? I’d been so afraid that my boss was down for the count. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“I’m not okay at all!” Riviere scowled, nursing her aching nose.
Beside me, Elaina gave another perplexed tilt of her head. “What have you been doing this past week?”
“Living my life.”
“Huh! Life, huh,” Elaina replied—a noncommittal social nicety. Really, she was busy looking around Riviere Antiques for the first time in a week. There was stuff everywhere. On the floor, on the shelves; even the sofa we were sitting on was piled with objects. They were all things that used to be part of the store’s inventory. The place looked like it had been ransacked.
What had she been doing for the past week?
…was clearly what Elaina wanted to ask. Instead she said, “You’re not much for tidying up, are you, Miss Riviere?”
“I’ll thank you to give me the benefit of the doubt. The shop doesn’t look this way because I enjoy living in a pigsty.” Then she told us, quite simply, “With Carredura gone, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do a little organizing.”
The aftereffects of disenchanting Carredura, she told us, had lasted about three days, after which she had returned to her usual body. For some time now she’d been storing sancta that were either somewhat dangerous or ethically dubious at the shop, rather than disenchanting them, in hopes that they would help her deal with Carredura. She’d devoted the last four days to going through the stock and mopping up a bit.
“We just turned out to have somewhat more stock than I realized…” Riviere sighed as she looked at the state of her shop.
Riviere Antiques had been in operation since the country was founded. Who knew how many sancta it had handled? A few things that even Riviere had forgotten about popped out during the process of excavating its shelves.
At least now we knew what had been happening.
“You could have asked us to help,” I said.
“That’s what I was about to do when I opened the door earlier.”
Oh! Uh… Oh.
“Now you’ve got the story. And I do want some help from you today.” She added that we would reopen the store once we were done organizing.
Then she smiled, the same soft expression that so often graced her face.
Even with all three of us working away, cleaning and organizing turned out to be pretty time-consuming. Practically heavy labor, if I do say so myself.