Chapter 18 The Autumn Festival #2
“Since when does everyone drink mead? What even is mead?” Casimir asked as they shoved their way through, shedding their coats and cloaks as quickly as possible in the stuffy heat.
There was a distinct smell of…animal. Sage shuffled past Bridgey, who, like everybody else in town, was seemingly unaware of anything being remotely amiss.
She had an arm slung around Ron the landlord, who was sloshing around a foamy tankard while she shook a tambourine mid-song.
“I’m in hell,” Sage said flatly.
“No, you’re not,” Casimir said into her ear with a laugh. “Look, there’s cheese! There wouldn’t be cheese in hell.”
Between the riotous cries, the loud singing, the arm wrestling and even the very passionate bar fight which broke out near the wall of ale casks, they managed to find four spare stools and dragged them into the quietest corner.
“So, you said the next charm is a little mirror?” Laurel asked, who had made a pitstop for s’mores at the bonfire on her way to the pub.
She stretched a gloopy marshmallow as far as she could before squashing it between her fingers again and popping it into her mouth.
Sage marvelled at how rarely she saw her sister eat anything savoury.
“And when you reach the last one on the bracelet, the spell will call it a day?”
Casimir shrugged. “That’s our assumption. I think it’s a solid one.”
“All good spells end at twelve,” Laurel said with a nod of approval.
“The troll practically told me as much. Footsteps, cauldron…Keep walking through the steps of the spell and you’ll reach the mirror,” Sage said, picking at the crumbly cheese that was on the board in front of them next to some sort of miscellaneous roasted animal leg, which looked considerably less appetizing.
“Does anyone have any theories regarding the mirror? It would make me feel considerably better if we knew what to expect as our next chapter.”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Laurel replied, having already moved on to her bag of candyfloss for dessert.
“It’s not obvious to anyone with a functioning adult brain,” Robin said, sipping from his tankard. “Us grown-ups are struggling here.”
“Not my problem that you’re all too dull to think in stories,” Laurel said with a tut. “Oh, come on, Sage, this is your bread and butter!”
“There’s always truth within the glass, as the troll pointed out.
” Sage accepted a sticky bundle of candyfloss as she considered.
“It makes sense that this should be the chapter which enlightens us, some kind of gleaming reveal, an aha moment. And it’s also the charm in the very middle of the chain. That feels significant.”
Laurel shook her head impatiently. “You’re overcomplicating it, still relying on logic. Think fairy tale. Mirror, mirror, on the wall…” she said with wide eyes, as though it were the most blatant and glaring conclusion.
Sage’s eyebrows shot up. “Fairest of them all?”
“All right, I’m ready for my close-up,” Casimir interrupted with a sigh.
“Why would you assume that this one’s for you?” Sage asked.
“You’re telling me you think there’s someone fairer than me in this town?” he said with such matter-of-fact sincerity that Sage couldn’t even judge him for it. “We have the charmed mirror hanging in the exhibition. It all fits. I probably have to just gaze upon it.”
“I’m inclined to think that’s too obvious,” Sage said, shaking her head.
“But for the sake of exhausting all possibilities, we should go and take a look. See if it shows us anything, I suppose.” She slammed her hands onto the roughly hewn table.
“Come on, up you get. This place is giving me a headache, and we’ve no time to enjoy ourselves. ”
The three of them laughed. “I thought we’d agreed that was the whole point of the spell, Sage?” Robin said with a sigh.
Sage frowned. “Well, yes, that might be true. So how about we thoroughly enjoy ourselves while taking a stroll in the night air, and if we just so happen to pass the museum in the process of enjoying ourselves, then that would simply be a happy coincidence?”
“I’ll give you a happy coincidence,” Casimir muttered, reluctantly rising to his feet and taking a chicken leg for the road. “Universe forbid a man gets a night off from the ruthless world of academia.”
Their so-called stroll was in fact a very definite and brisk walk straight to the museum, with Sage calling back to them periodically to stop dawdling. She promptly shooed Laurel and Robin into the staff room to put the kettle on so she could allow herself a quiet moment to think straight.
Casimir strode over to the mirror the moment they arrived, a very sincere look on his face as he positioned himself in the centre of the glass.
But when it was clear that nothing was going to happen in return for his reflection, he threw his hands in the air.
“Nothing? For this face?” He gave a dejected sigh. “Sage, I think it’s broken.”
“Don’t take it personally,” she teased.
Carefully, she lifted the mirror down from its display and carried it back to the archive to examine it thoroughly in a new light.
Of course they had weighed, measured, dusted and swabbed the frame, the glass and its fastenings the moment they had identified potential magical qualities.
But now that it was possibly a more significant piece in the spell’s puzzle, she could not underestimate any tiny scratch or sparkle.
After careful inspection under a magnifying glass in the archive, Sage puffed away her hair in a grumble of frustration.
“There’s nothing!” she whined. “Not so much as a bit of sale sticker residue.”
Casimir had long ago slid down the bookshelves and taken a seat on the floor.
He was doing a terrible job of pretending to make himself useful, flicking through an old copy of Favourite Fairy Tales that he had borrowed from the library the day before.
Sage was privately very touched that he had gone to the trouble of researching without her having to nag. It normally required a lot of bribery.
“Mirrors are a very common fairy-tale trope,” Casimir said.
“Although rarely a bringer of good news. They seem to mostly either tell you that you’re uglier than your stepdaughter, that your crackpot father is in trouble, or they send you into a topsy-turvy world you didn’t want to go to in the first place. Take your pick.”
“I think we’ve already achieved the latter,” Sage said, leaning over the mirror on her desk at such an unflattering angle that she grimaced.
“They’re more than just bad-news bringers.
Mirrors always show characters something about themselves, a truth that they can’t bear to face or things they can’t perceive themselves. There’s revelation, there’s…”
“Illusion?” Casimir said. “Seeing things more clearly?”
Sage pushed the mirror away. That much was true.
She could see all too clearly that she looked tired and drawn, while everyone else seemed to have an unfair romantic glow about them.
As much as it annoyed her to acknowledge it—because it really shouldn’t matter—she felt left out that the spell had seemingly not bothered to give her her own part in the story.
Where was her transformation, her fairy-tale moment?
She pushed the mortifying, petulant thought to the back of her mind.
It made perfect sense, in many ways. Perhaps she wasn’t deserving of one.