What the Shop Decides

The shop always knew before Imani did. That was the first rule her grandmother had taught her, before the blends and the wards and the long Latin-sounding names that weren't really Latin: the shop decides. A tea witch did not, whatever the customers liked to imagine, brew a person what they asked for. She brewed them what they needed, and she found out which it was at the same moment they did — when the kettle chose its own temperature, when the tin came down off the shelf seemingly by its own weight, when the leaves she scattered turned out to be a blend she had never deliberately made. Imani had run the shop on Marlow Lane for six years, since her grandmother went into the little flat above it and stopped coming down. In six years she had learned to trust it completely. The shop was kind. The shop was wise in the small domestic way of a thing that had watched four generations of women pour comfort into cups. When old Mr. Adesina came in grey-faced after his wife's funeral, the shop had given him something that smelled of her garden, and he had wept into it and then, slowly, over a season of Tuesdays, begun to mend. The shop had never once frightened her. It frightened her on the morning the cursed man came in. She felt him before the bell over the door finished ringing — felt the temperature of the room drop, felt the comfortable clutter of tins and teapots seem to lean very slightly away from the doorway, the way a room of people leans away from a draught. Imani looked up from the counter, and the man standing in her doorway was, on the surface of him, entirely ordinary. Mid-thirties. A good coat gone shabby at the cuffs. Tired around the eyes in the way half her customers were tired. But the shop did not lean away from tired people. The shop gathered tired people in. It was leaning away from this one, and so, Imani realized, was she — she had taken a step back from her own counter without deciding to. "You're open?" he said. His voice was low and careful, the voice of a man who had learned to take up as little space as possible. "We're open." Imani made herself stand still. "Come in. You'll let the warm out." He came in. The bell rang again behind him, and as he crossed the threshold she saw the thing properly — not with her eyes, her eyes still showed her only a shabby tired man, but with the other sight, the sight her grandmother called the shop's eyes, the sight that let a tea witch see what a customer carried. He carried a curse. She had never seen one before. Her grandmother had described them once, reluctantly, the way you describe a country you hope your child never has cause to visit: a curse, properly made, was not a cloud or a shadow or any of the things the stories said. It was a binding. It was a length of something dark and deliberate, knotted around a person, and you could see — if you had the sight and the stomach — exactly how carefully it had been tied, and by hands that had known the work. This one was tied beautifully. That was the detail that turned Imani's blood cold. Whoever had cursed this man had not done it in rage. They had done it slowly, with craft, with love almost, the way she scattered leaves. "I need something," the man said, "to help me forget." He didn't look at her when he said it. He looked at the wall of tins, at the kettle, at anything but her face, and Imani understood that he had said this sentence in a great many shops and been turned away from a great many counters, and that he had stopped expecting anything else. "Forget what?" she asked. Gently. The way the shop would want her to. "Everything would be ideal," the man said, with a small exhausted ghost of humour. "But I'll take what I can get. A night. An hour. I haven't slept a full night in —" He stopped. His jaw worked. "A long time. I heard this shop was — that you could —" "I can't make you forget," Imani said. "That's not what we do here. I'm sorry. Whoever sent you was wrong about that." She watched the last of the hope go out of his shabby tired ordinary face, and she felt, absurdly, terrible — and she had already lifted her hand to gesture him kindly back toward the door, already opened her mouth to say something soft about how he might try the herbalist two streets over. And the kettle, behind her, switched itself on. Imani turned around very slowly. She had not touched the kettle. The kettle was not plugged into anything that morning; she'd had the electrician in about the socket. And yet it was heating, she could hear it, the small rising roar of water deciding to become something, and on the shelf above it a tin she did not recognize — a tin she would have sworn on her grandmother's life had never been in this shop — was sliding, by its own slow weight, toward the edge. The shop had decided. It had taken one look at the beautifully cursed man in her doorway, and it had decided, and Imani stood between her cursed customer and her kettle with the cold certainty settling over her that for the first time in six years she had absolutely no idea what her own shop was about to pour.