The Accidental Cursologist
Bramble Hockspur's shop on Tallow Lane has a green door that blisters overnight, a lock older than the street, and absolutely no business being magical. But when a sealed letter bearing the sigil of Magistar Pim arrives at dawn , and the rolling pin on his counter begins, for the first time in forty years, to talk , Bramble learns that he is the only person in Brackenmere who can sense the seams of a curse. He is, by every unhappy accident, a cursologist. The hex is old, layered, and waking up. Its threads run through Mayor Maeve Underbough's orphaned daughter Pip, through the sheep of Farmer Otwell Gallows, through Sir Gideon Quill's vanished brother Eustace, and through Iolanthe Vance's careful silences. A grey-cloaked woman has been seen three times near the cheese shop. Seventeen operatives have descended on the village without explanation. And the Bureau Pigeon keeps delivering messages Bramble did not ask to receive. With only a chatty enchanted utensil, a colony of unusually informed mice, and a raven that will not stop staring, Bramble must trace the curse to its source before it finishes what it started generations ago. The door will open. The lock will yield. What waits on the other side will cost him either his quiet life or everyone he has only just begun to call his own.