The Olive Conspiracy Read Free

like your hat,” said Aviva with
a giggle as she bent down to plant a sweet kiss on her queen’s
mouth.
    “ All the fashionable queens are
wearing lizards instead of crowns nowadays,” Shulamit shot
back.
    “ Nobody would mistake you for
anything but fashionable in that new plumage,” Aviva remarked,
smiling as she looked over the purple dress with its diaphanous,
lilac sleeves. “Here. Fashionable queens need mangoes.”

2. The Little Green Spy
     
    Under the veil of an aging night, Isaac left
the palace walls and walked to the Frangipani Table in human form.
It wasn’t ideal, because if anyone saw him, his size gave him away
even though he’d tossed a black, hooded cloak over his head. Most
of the natives of Perach were shorter than six feet, and he stood
inches above. After a few moments of feeling exposed, even though
he saw no other people, he used magic to draw any nearby humidity
in the air closer to him so that his path would remain slightly
foggy.
    He could have just walked the whole way as a
lizard and remained totally unseen, but this seemed easier. What
was the point of magic if you had to walk for hours to get
somewhere that was really only fifteen or twenty minutes’ walk in
human steps?
    When Isaac got to the restaurant it was still
too early for Yael to be there. He shrank down into his lizard form
and crawled up the wall in front of the door to rest on the
mezuzah. It turned out to be made of marble, and the cool
smoothness felt good against his little lizard stomach after the
overdressed, humid walk.
    Yael arrived as the sky edged toward silver.
While she fussed with a big metal keyring attached to her belt,
looking for the right key in the dark, she kissed the fingertips of
her other hand and reached out toward the mezuzah.
    Isaac wasn’t a total jerk though. “Good
morning,” he said in a jaunty but half-volume voice.
    Yael, startled, dropped her keys and spun
around, tense and angular. “Who’s there?”
    “ It’s me. I’m on the
mezuzah.”
    Yael picked up her keys and leaned in closer,
squinting. When saw him, she cried out in disgust. “I almost
touched you!”
    “ That’s why I warned you, didn’t
I?” The lizard was smirking mischievously.
    “ Ugh,” she said again, shaking her
head, but he could see a smile forming across her face.
    “ What, I should wait here for my
secret mission as the tallest and whitest man in the city? Some
secret.”
    Yael finally got the door open. “Let’s go
inside.”
    Since there was plenty of time before they
could reasonably expect their prey, Isaac resumed his human form
once the door was safely shut. Yael began her prep work for the
day’s service, and just as she’d promised, she wasn’t shy about
sharing it with him. “Here. You have any magic that can get these
shells off?”
    “ I’d better—it’s just about the
only way I can shell nuts!” He showed her the palm of his right
hand. Her eyes bulged when she saw the huge ugly, raised scar that
snaked from his hand down half the length of his forearm. “These
fingers don’t close.” He demonstrated by tensing his fingers and
thumb as if to try.
    “ That’s some scar!” Yael nodded,
clearly impressed. “I got this from hot oil, and this one from a
knife that slipped.” She was pointing to various bits of bare skin
that had indeed seen action, if of a very different type than
Isaac’s.
    As she bustled around the kitchen getting
things set up to prep, Isaac could see the tension in her limbs.
Her grip left dents in the sack of flour, and sometimes she walked
back and forth from the dry goods storage area to the prep table
without whatever she’d gone there to fetch. When he had to use
magic to stop a clay bowl from shattering after she knocked it off
the table, he decided he needed to distract her before her
agitation set the building on fire.
    “ I got that scar over twenty years
ago.” He picked up nuts in his left hand and aimed the fingertips
of his right hand at