Chapter 14
MAGIC
Istilled at the king’s words. You do have magic. You are meant to save us all.
He said it without a trace of mockery. The words fell from his lips like a prayer.
My heart pounded, and I swallowed down the lump in my throat. I fixed my bleary gaze on his and tilted up my chin. “You are mistaken.”
“I am not,” The king said. “And though you spoke to me quite rudely about things you know very little, yet I feel your magic coursing through me even now. This unmistakable…joy.”
The joy I’d felt while I’d baked my gingerbread cookies.
He could feel it? Even from the wildly misshapen little gingerbread man I’d given him this morning.
I blinked over and over, not quite understanding this unexpected moment as I stood before the Elf King in an ancient library with rolling ladders and twisting bookshelves.
The Elf King’s eyes never lost mine. As if he was hoping I’d feel the same pull of magic.
“The cinnamon roll?” I stuttered remembering the little boy with bright gold eyes who’d cried when I’d fed him the pastry in my bakery—then thrown the buttermilk to the ground and fled.
“You told me, well, told the little boy you thought I was, that I would feel hope.” The king’s gaze flicked to the carved stone floor.
“And for the first time in a year,”—the king’s throat worked through some emotion— “I did. I felt true hope. It infused my very soul. I hoped, no I knew in that moment you held the magic we so desperately needed.”
I stared at him flatly. “Then you decided to wreck my kitchen.”
A slight smile lifted up the corner of the Elf Kings mouth, just enough to see a glimpse of his white teeth gleaming—as if the memory brought him immense pleasure.
“The hope, the magic. It filled me. I knew what I had to do, and well, I’d looked for so long, but it had come too late to save my father. ”
My hand was poised on the doorway, as if at one wrong word, one wrong moment, I would flee back to whence I came.
My leg throbbed, reminding me that I was sick.
That my life and the life of the king were bound together, our fates in the balance.
Though I didn’t care much for the king, he was being honest with me, finally.
I could see that now, and felt it in the tension in the air.
As vulnerable as I was, the king had also laid his story bare before me.
“My father fell sick not one year ago.” The king hung his head, opalescent hair spilling around his wide shoulders. “I learned all I could, searched for an answer, enlisted Jel’s magic. Yet my father turned.”
My breath caught. I knew sorrow like that.
The king pulled in a deep breath, then fixed his golden eyes on mine with trepidation I hadn’t imagined the proud king ever felt. “He was the shade monster who attacked you not two nights ago.”
I blinked at the startling revelation, then dropped into a large white seat by the wall I’d been clinging to, my mouth open in shock.
“And though my elven blood slows the disease, I’ve been infected for far longer than you.” The Elf King fixed me with his gaze. “I, too, have until Winter Solstice.”
“Until Christmas.” I muttered. I knew this but—
“Indeed. Until your human Christmas before poor Aldaar will be forced to take upon himself this mantle of king and face the same shadows we’ve been chasing for centuries. It will not be contained to only our lands. It will spread to the human realm.”
“It already has.” I thought the farmer’s lands had been cursed by the elves’ dark magic, but it was this blight. It was spreading.
The king’s expression shifted; his eyebrows knit together. He hadn’t known.
“And this is why you stole me away from my home?” The words left me in a tense breath.
The Elf King dropped his head, white hair spilling around his wide shoulders. “It is.”
“To break this curse on the elven lands?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re sure my baking has…magic?” Could I be like my ancestors in those scrolls? Like the knowing woman with the brown eyes who painted with such confidence?
“I know it beyond any doubt.” Sunlight spilled across the crown of the king’s head, along his broad shoulders, illuminating him in a gold light as if he were made of crystal. “It calls to me.”
He was beautiful. Resplendent in his fine clothes. And he looked at me with steady eyes. Ones that pleaded. Ones that saw me, truly saw me for what I was… magic.
This was all so fantastical, and yet a warmth filled my heart. A knowing burning that told me. You do have magic. You’ve always known it.
I couldn’t ignore how much more popular my bakery back in the human lands became once I started baking with my father. I couldn’t ignore the small warmth that filled my heart, that knowing. That small flame that just needed a little kindling.
“You were meant to save us all.” The words of the king rang in my ears.
“Why do you think my…magic”—It felt strange saying it, acknowledging its existence— “has anything to do with this curse?”
“My father left journal after journal in his obsession to find a cure. See here.” A smile lit up the king’s face, as if he were—relieved at my acceptance.
That smile. I almost lost the air from my lungs at the full force of it, the pure beauty, not quite knowing what to do. He stared at me then, mouth parted, but no words passed his lips. His eyes landed on my lips and tarried.
My cheeks heated at the open expression of the king. At the silence. “See what exactly?” I prodded, praying for relief from the rapt attentions of the king.
He pulled in a swift breath, blinking, “Yes, of course. I am just pleased that you have finally accepted the truth of your magic.”
I twisted my lips, but would not say more.
It almost felt like proving him right, and the spiteful part of me did not want to give him the satisfaction, but, sweet Christmas, that smile.
I would do almost anything for that smile, and that thought truly scared me.
Calm my racing heart. Then the king closed his eyes. Concentrating. Thinking.
I jumped back in surprise as several stacks of books appeared at the standing table before him in a blink. I raised an eyebrow and joined him at the waist-high table.
“Magic library.” The king practically winked. “Think of anything you are interested in reading and it will appear before you.”
“I just have to think it?” I asked skeptically, though I felt the ghost of a smile touch my lips.
Sure, I’d seen the enchantment, but it sounded a bit too easy and a little too dangerous.
“What if I were thinking about a book and it appeared above me? Should I expect to be clocked on the head with heavy tomes as I walk about?”
The king laughed then, a harsh huff of a laugh. As if his throat and chest were unused to the sensation. We both stared at the other, as if his sudden outburst surprised the both of us in equal measure. It certainly had surprised me.
The king recovered quickly, “Ahem, yes, well you have just come across the first pillar of elven magic. You have to think on what you wish to accomplish with real intent.” The Elf King nodded, “And the books will only appear on a table, not above your unsuspecting head. Like this—I wish to read a book about…cookies, written in the hand of a human.”
“Cookies?” I smiled.
The Elf King shrugged, actually shrugged! The casual gesture so at odds with his formal manner it caused a giggle to escape my mouth. “Is that not the kind of book you enjoy, Little Baker?”
In a blink, a brown book appeared on the stack of the other books. “I enjoy all manner of books.” I lifted the small brown book and inspected it. “Wilma’s Guide to Baking the Perfect Cookie. It is written in my language, too.”
I flipped through the long loping writings of Wilma, intrigued by the passages. Illustrations and words scribbled in the corners. Lines marked out and rewritten. “I think I’d like to borrow this one.”
“You may borrow anything you wish, especially if it will help you develop your magical talents.” The king smiled a starling half-smile that sent my silly heart skittering and somehow emboldened me.
“And if this blight was no more? If you could study what you wished? What books would you be interested in?” I asked.
Elden cocked his head, “Hmm, I have always been fond of plants, things that grow. They work their own kind of magic, one as natural as the setting sun.”
“That would explain the dirt on your fingernails when I happened upon you in Jel’s cottage.” I said, fighting back the blush that crept over me. I was feeling quite bold.
“Jel and I have been studying the blight for quite some time.” Elden nodded, “I had been splicing several species of apple branches together on one tree when I came upon those eggs. One of them was starting to rot with the blight. I figured Jel would want to study them.” He then rummaged through the stack of leather-bound books that had appeared earlier.
“These are my father’s journals. In here, he writes that humans lost their magic the same moment the curse was born, and he was made to flee his ancestral home of Winterthorn.
He was only a youngling when he lost both his father and mother during The Great Darkness.
” The king opened the first book of handwritten tomes.
He flipped a few pages and landed on the sheet he wanted.
“He was convinced the loss of human magic was connected to the curse on the lands. The blight. Here, father writes that if only he could find a human craftsman with magic, perhaps it would be enough to set things right.”
“So, if it’s true and I have magic, then wouldn’t that be enough to break the curse?”
The Elf King shook his head. “Father writes that some great magic had been broken in Winterthorn and he believed it was only there that the magic could be put back into balance.”
The answer was simple, if not daunting in a world-shattering way.
“Then we must go there.” I stated, even as nerves squirmed in my gut.