The Cup That Pours Itself

The tin came down into her hands. It always did — that was part of the trust between a witch and her shop, you put your hands out and the shop filled them — but this tin was cold, shop-cold, the cold of something that had been waiting a long time in a dark place to be needed. There was no label. Imani turned it over twice. Every tin in the shop had a label in her grandmother's small upright hand, or in her own; this one had nothing, only a single mark scratched into the base of the metal, an old looping mark that she recognized the way you recognize a word in a language you used to speak as a child. It was the mark her grandmother used for the wards. For the bindings. For shop business that was not, strictly, tea. "Sit down," Imani heard herself say to the cursed man. "Please. By the window." He sat. He had the obedient carefulness of a man long past arguing with anyone offering him a chair. And Imani, with the unlabelled tin cold in her hands and the kettle climbing toward its boil, did the only thing six years of trust would let her do. She opened it. The leaves inside were not leaves. Or — they had been, once; they were dark and curled and dry, but they were threaded through with something else, something fine and pale and slightly luminous, like the silk a spider leaves on wet grass, and when Imani breathed the smell of them her own grandmother's voice spoke very clearly in her memory, from very far back, from a childhood afternoon she had forgotten she still owned. Some things, baby, the shop keeps not to give away. It keeps them to give back. She made the tea. She did not decide the amounts. Her hands did it, the way they did on the rare mornings the shop took over completely, and she watched them work with the strange floating attention of someone watching a skill that is hers and also, suddenly, not. Three pinches. Water off the boil by exactly the count of ten. A pot she had never used, plain and brown, that had been at the very back of the lowest shelf since before she was born. She carried the cup to the man by the window and set it down in front of him, and she said, because honesty was the other rule her grandmother had drilled into her, "I told you I couldn't make you forget. I want to be straight with you — I still don't think I can. But the shop has made you something, and the shop is wiser than I am, and I think you should drink it slowly and tell me what happens." He looked at the cup. Pale gold, faintly luminous, steaming. "What's the worst it can do," he said. It was not really a question. It was the sentence of a man for whom the worst had already happened, and Imani felt the ache of that in her own chest. He lifted the cup, and he drank. For a long moment nothing happened at all. The shop held its breath; she could feel it, the tins still leaning slightly away, the warm midmorning light very still on the floorboards. Then the man's face changed. It did not crumple the way Mr. Adesina's had. It did the opposite. Something that had been clenched in him for a long time — years, she thought, the curse was years old, she had seen the careful age of the knots — something clenched began, very slowly, to open. His shoulders came down. His eyes, when they lifted to hers, were wet and wide and astonished. "I remember," he whispered. "You wanted to forget," Imani said carefully. "I know." He set the cup down with both hands, as though it were made of something far more fragile than china. "I know what I asked for. But I've had it backwards — I've had it backwards for three years. It wasn't the remembering that was killing me." He pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes. "It was that the curse had been taking the memories from me a piece at a time, and I'd been letting it, I'd been helping it, because remembering hurt — and your shop just gave me back the first piece I'd lost. Her name. It gave me back her name." And in Imani's sight, plain as the steam off the cup, she saw it happen: she saw one knot in that beautiful terrible binding, one single carefully tied knot, come quietly and completely loose. The curse was years old, and it had just, for the first time, lost ground. The man across the table was weeping and smiling and saying a name to himself over and over like a prayer. And Imani stood in the warm light of the only safe small life she had ever wanted, and felt the shop turn its attention, gently and unmistakably, toward her — the way it turned toward a customer it had decided about. The cursed man was not, she understood, the only person this morning was going to be about.