Nigel grimac #2
The kitchen beyond the back door felt less like a room and more like an embrace.
Flagstones worn smooth by generations of footsteps stretched across the floor, while dark ceiling beams crossed overhead, blackened by age and decades of woodsmoke.
An old cast-iron range stood in one corner, the sort that burned coal or wood rather than gas.
Its black surface gleamed, and a copper kettle rested atop it, quietly steaming.
Opposite this was a large stone fireplace, its hearth broad enough to sit in.
A modest fire crackled there, casting a warm amber glow across the walls.
An antique rocking chair stood before it, its arms polished silky by years of use.
The scent of burning oak mingled with traces of baking bread, dried herbs, and tea. Always tea. So much tea.
Nigel paused a moment, struck by the scene, by the smells.
He’d heard so many stories that a strange sensation of heart-stopping nostalgia overcame him.
He could just about picture Extremely Great Aunt Amelia, sitting there in her black taffeta, rocking back and forth as she drank far too many cups of Wolf Brittlebum, while her three daughters and little niece clucked and plucked around her like nervous chicks.
He could envision young Luna and all the various ages of her childhood, adolescence, and blossoming young adulthood, hastening back and forth in the kitchen, brewing up pots of tea and assembling little trays of treats, her hair up in pins and hidden under a kerchief, her face a bit sweaty with exertion.
And for the strangest, briefest, most bizarre instant .
. . he saw another image as well. A vision of Luna, but much older.
Much older indeed. Not as old as Auntie Arabella, but not far off from it either, with silver hair and comfortable proportions and wrinkles lining her doe-soft eyes.
She sat in the old rocking chair, reading out loud from a little paperback novel, one hand gesticulating animatedly as she read.
A second shadowy form stepped into sight, bringing her a cup of tea.
Someone . . . someone in a waistcoat. With white hair smoothed back with pomade, other than one recalcitrant lock which fell over his forehead, and a pair of square-rimmed spectacles perched on his nose.
Luna looked up at him with a broad smile, accepting the tea, puckered her lips for a kiss, and . . .
Nigel gasped. He staggered back a step, nearly tripping over the threshold of the doorway, back out into the yard.
Auntie Arabella, a few paces ahead of him, looked back, her brow momentarily crinkled with a question.
Then it smoothed, and she clucked understandingly.
“I should have warned you,” she said. “There’s a great deal of scrying energy in this household.
If you’re attuned to it, you might catch glimpses of things without meaning to. ”
Blinking hard, Nigel shook his head. He was not attuned to scrying energy.
He’d never been gifted in that area. Why, he’d nearly failed Scrying 101, back in undergrad!
He knew better than to take any images he thought he glimpsed with any sort of seriousness.
They were more than likely merely carry-over glimpses from some parallel reality, utterly unrelated to his own.
Besides, the vision had been mostly shadows anyway. Nothing to get het up over.
His heart still beating strangely, he followed Arabella across the kitchen to a poky little stairway leading to the room above.
Gods, but this whole place reeked of Green Magic!
It was everywhere, infused in the painted plaster walls, in the creaking floorboards, in the murky panes of glass set in the stairwell window.
He’d rarely been anywhere more magically saturated, and he’d grown up with Garden right outside his kitchen door!
All this time, he’d assumed Luna’s aunties were a bunch of sweet old biddies with a bit of magical acumen.
He’d honestly had no idea of the truth, none at all.
Arabella opened the door at the top of the stairs. She motioned Nigel through, and he stepped into a tiny chamber with a single dormer window. The light from that window fell upon the still figure lying in a narrow, brass bed, and all other thoughts fled Nigel’s head.
She looked oddly young. Possibly due to the fact that she was back in her old childhood room, all the makeup washed from her face, all the horror smoothed from her sleeping features.
Someone had tucked a ragged old teddy bear into the crook of her arm, adding to the effect.
She was pale. Far too pale. Like a marble replica of herself rather than the living woman.
Her dirty white slip was gone, replaced by a soft blue nightgown with little flutter-strap sleeves.
Her hair was still limp, without any trace of her habitual pin curls, but neatly combed.
His gaze sought for the cut on her forehead, but it was gone.
So thoroughly vanished, Nigel couldn’t find evidence that it had ever been there in the first place. The work of some healing tea, no doubt.
But he could also see more clearly now—now that they were out of the dark confines of that dungeon cell, now that they were away from the gleam of the Dire-torch—the strange sorcery hovering around her.
With a little exhale, Nigel took a lunging step toward her.
He could not take a second, however, for a very small, very thin, very upright and severe person appeared like a wall in front of him, eyes blazing, nostrils flaring.
He looked down into a hollow-cheeked face which he knew could only belong to Auntie Aurora.
He’d heard far too many stories not to recognize her at once.
“And just what do you think you’re doing in this chamber, sir?” she demanded in imperious tones.
“Oh, do let him by, Rory,” Auntie Arabella said, her voice even sweeter by comparison to her sister’s. “He’s our Luna’s young man, you know. The one from the, um, the . . .”
Nigel looked in time to see Arabella winking broadly.
What that was all about, he scarcely dared guess, but it seemed to have a mollifying effect on her sister.
Aurora’s nostrils quivered one last time, but her expression became slightly less militant.
“Well,” she said, taking Nigel in again, her gaze lingering on the open front of his shirt.
Gods, he really needed to button up. “I suppose you want to know what’s come over our girl. ”
He did. He really did. He also wanted to cross that teeny, tiny, cracker-box of a chamber and gather Luna in his arms, press her to his breast, know that she was safe and close, know that he could protect her from all harm.
Though, of that last, he wasn’t entirely certain.
He’d survived the severmist once again, but it had sapped his strength, and he didn’t know how long it would be before he could safely work another spell.
In the meanwhile, he’d have to hope the anti-sorcerer wards set up around this place would work.
They hadn’t been strong enough to keep him out, after all.
But that might have had more to do with Luna than with any particular power on his part.
The wards would have been expressly designed to let her in.
Nigel tore his gaze reluctantly from Luna’s face, trying to focus on stern little Aurora. “What is that spell?” he asked roughly. “The one hovering around her. Do you know?”
“I do,” Aurora answered primly.
“Go on!” Arabella urged with a flap of her hand. “Tell him!”
Aurora heaved a sigh and muttered a brief prayer for fortitude before turning to Nigel again. “It is a spell of awakening.”
Nigel frowned. “But they placed a sleeping spell on her to—”
“Not that kind of awakening, dear,” Auntie Arabella said softly.