Over his plot lay a balding carpet as dirty as the ground beneath it, stretching a few feet past the edges of his table. I stepped onto it and the world around us went vague. We could talk in privacy now, just yards away from hagglers and passersby who could no longer make out exactly what we said. I hoped that went for hovering spirits as well.
“We’re being haunted,” I said. “Bad summoning, ghost who won’t go. I don’t trust the person who says she can banish it. I wanna see if there’s something else we can do.”
Lazar considered me like I was a thorny crossword clue. Then he stood and shuffled around to the far side of his hoard.
“I’ve been thinking you’d be back,” he said, his Algerian accent flattened by years spent in this city. “First time I met you, I knew I had something that was yours.”
From between a limp stack of old newspapers and what I was pretty sure was a gramophone, he extracted a boxy black suitcase. It looked like the kind of thing a magician would use to carry around pieces of his assistant. Lazar settled the case over his knees and opened it with a toothy snap, revealing another, smaller suitcase. He went on like this for a while. I couldn’t tell whether the matryoshka bit was pure showman’s theater or something real, until he lifted the seventh box into the light.
Something real.
It was just over sandwich-size, made of what looked to be pure gold. Its leonine color made my heart drop. I had a pocket filled up from one of my dad’s emergency cash stashes, the one I’d known about longest and judged most likely to have been forgotten. But if the box was actual gold I would never be able to afford it.
My throat dried at the thought. I wanted it. Badly enough that I guessed the wanting was part of how it worked.
I cleared my throat. “What is it?”
He knocked gently on the box’s top. Or its bottom, maybe. The thing had no apparent lid. “It has a very long name. I call it the forgetting box.”
“Forgetting box?” I acted skeptical, hoping that might make it come cheaper. “Doesn’t sound like what I’m looking for.”
“It’s not about what you’re looking for, it’s about what you’ll need. Tomorrow or next year or in fifty years. You know me, I’m a matchmaker.”
I didn’t really know him, not well, but Fee had told me as much. She’d heard about Lazar from a curandera to whom he’d sold a length of white lace. The woman used the lace to trim two christening gowns, completing them in secret just before her daughter learned she was pregnant with twins following years of infertility struggles. Though I doubted all the stories about him were so sweet.
“I’ve got a problem right now,” I told him, still staring at the box. “Not in a year or fifty years.”
“That hand is dealt. There’s nothing I can sell you that will change it. All I can tell you is, one day you’ll want this.”
I found my fingers drifting toward my box. “What’s it for?”
He eyed me up. “That red hair, I thought Irish. But you’re Polish?”
“I’m both.” I frowned. “Why do you know that?”
“I told you, I’m a matchmaker. The forgetting box is from Poland. Like you.” He smirked. “What did you think, I’d sell a Polish-Irish girl a juju? A vial of Kvasir’s blood? No. You children like to swim around in other people’s waters, but you’ll never go that deep. And there are things in the water that’ll get you if you do. Blood, that’s thicker. Stick with the magic that’s in your blood.”
I could feel his words sinking into me, where I didn’t want them to go. I thought about the three of us working our shallow way through the grimoire of a dead occultist, a woman I preferred not to think about at all. As if every spell was a fresh-forged thing, devoid of fingerprints or history.
Lazar watched me, smiling faintly. “When it’s hard to hear, that’s how you know. Anyway. The box. There’s a Polish folk story, goes by a few names. ‘Agnes and the Lonely Prince,’ ‘The Little Hut in the Woods.’ A girl falls in love with a prince, but a jealous fairy steals his memories and hides them in a golden box. The girl goes through many trials to find and unlock it, so her love will remember her.”
“Uh-huh. And you’re saying this is the box from that fairy tale?”
He inclined his head.
I could almost believe it. The thing would’ve looked at home in the chapped hands of some winter queen, faraway, long ago. Or maybe he was just jiggering up the price. “Why would I even want this?”