Chapter 24 Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One
Sage and Casimir reached the Hedgehog House after an uncharacteristically quiet walk.
No jibes flew between them; there was no heated debate, no excitable chatter of discovery or thoughtful questioning to note for later.
Both were silent with their own thoughts, wrestling with those that should be shared and those that required private investigation instead.
Casimir knew she was holding something back, and while Sage wasn’t ready to confess, it felt wrong to be hiding anything from him.
Casimir pushed open the coffee shop door to the tinkle of the brass bell, and the familiar wall of warmth and chatter flooded out towards them.
They joined the queue at the counter, unwrapping their scarves and unbuttoning their coats.
Heat blared, condensation bloomed in each windowpane, and a strong earthy coffee scent flooded the whole café with bitterness.
For a brief moment, Sage registered a twinge of relief; some normality had at least remained here, if nowhere else.
“Oh, you’ve got to be…Well, the ominous forest was somewhat of a giveaway, but, yes, I suspect events have taken a decidedly less than cheerful turn,” Casimir said. He looked aghast, and Sage soon saw why when the crowd parted a little and they approached the till.
The usual selection of Bridgey’s incredible pastries, sweet treats and freshly baked golden goods behind the glass were not on display.
The polished marble countertop had gone.
The gleaming coffee machine that regularly saved their mornings had vanished.
Instead, a large brass pot dangled in the open fireplace, and on top of a roughly hewn wooden crate, there was a giant vat of magically overflowing porridge. So much for normality.
“Porridge?” She grimaced. “Of course.”
“Why is it always bloody porridge?” Casimir moaned.
It had never occurred to Sage before, but there really was a lot of porridge in fairy tales. They both stared daggers at the stuff as Bridgey slopped two enormous grey ladlefuls into bowls and handed them over the counter.
“I used to feed travellers at my cottage door; now they just call it a café.” Bridgey chuckled at them, looking thoroughly pleased with herself.
Sage looked uncertainly at her friend. The last thing she needed was small talk today. “Erm…Quite.”
Bridgey turned to Casimir. “Oats and stories both thicken if you let them sit awhile, that’s what my nanna always used to say.” She tossed her rag over her shoulder, folded her arms and nodded at him triumphantly.
Casimir leaned over the counter and lowered his voice, one eyebrow cocked. “Nannas, always so wise…Bridge, are you all right? You seem a bit off. How much do we owe you?”
Bridgey grinned, her ruddy complexion shining with a sheen of sweat, unsurprising given the roaring open fireplace behind her. “Coffee’s on the house if you promise to tell me what you’re wishing for today.”
Sage and Casimir shared a glance. This wasn’t right.
Bridgey was different, even compared to the changes they’d already witnessed at the autumn festival.
The huge grin on her face was strained. Her stance looked tense.
Her usual friendly, laid-back nature had been replaced by something unfamiliar and rigid.
Sage was about to ask Bridgey if she’d like a sit-down, perhaps a drink of water, but they were elbowed out of the way by the next customer in the queue, and Bridgey’s attention moved away.
“I used to feed travellers at my cottage door; now they just call it a café,” Bridgey said to the man who’d been waiting behind them. It was followed by a chuckle at the exact same pitch as the one she’d given before.
Sage shot Casimir another side look and found that he was giving her a matching bewildered reaction in return. Bridgey spoke again, cheeks taut. “Oats and stories both thicken if you let them sit awhile, that’s what my nanna always used to say.”
Sage felt a hideous, sickly dread trickle down her spine as she watched Bridgey toss her rag over her shoulder, cross her arms and nod at the man.
“How much’ll it be?” the customer asked her.
“Coffee’s on the house if you—”
“Promise to tell me what you’re wishing for today,” Sage and Casimir said in unison.
This was not the end to magic that Sage had assumed she would find that day. In fact, it was anything but. The spell raged on and, if anything, had only grown in potency.
“She’s stuck, isn’t she?” Sage said, swallowing hard. “A moment in time, a page in a story. She’s not herself anymore. She’s a character.”
“And not a very good one at that,” Casimir said, ushering a horrified Sage over to the same secluded table behind the coat rack where she had found herself last week, before all of this madness had unfolded.
Sage would do anything to go back to that moment, to leave the damn book well alone and not let her cursed curiosity or her selfish ego get the better of her.
She slumped back into the chair that Casimir had guided her to and stared into the distance, half aware that she was watching Bridgey and each of the customers in the queue follow the same loop of behaviour and repeated lines of dialogue over and over.
A quick, disturbing thought that, until now, she hadn’t dared consider entered her mind.
What if this spell, this curse, was a problem that could never, ever be solved?
What if everything had changed forever? What if there was no way to return to normality?
Port Sylvan may be trapped. And that meant…
She turned to Casimir, still in the same ridiculous clothing for yet another day.
As the realization of what was unfolding began to truly dawn on her, the blend of worry, anger and dread turned into sheer fright.
“All right, we can get the worst part of this out of the way first. Go on. Say it. You told me so,” Casimir said as he took a seat opposite her. It was enough to snap Sage’s attention back.
“Well,” she sniffed. “I did.”
He gave her a conceding nod. “Maybe this is a somewhat more sinister series of events than I initially gave you credit for.”
At least reality was still managing to crack through the shell of Casimir’s solidifying character.
Although she had noticed the change in his syntax already that morning.
He was losing grip of himself. “And the decline makes perfectly logical sense too. Fairy tales start with some sort of beautiful dreamlike imagery and gradually spiral into the most horrifying, twisted nightmare for their unsuspecting characters.”
“Lilara knew exactly what she was doing, all right. Bitter old wi—” Casimir cleared his throat. “Woman.”
Sage’s defences shot up to defend Lilara.
“It’s not bitterness, Cas; it’s genius. She’s so smart, she knew how to make me sit up and pay attention.
It’s truly the perfect spell; it’s only my fault for not heeding her more quickly.
” Although, even as she said it, Sage had to wonder how entirely she still believed that sentiment.
A cloying, claustrophobic feeling left her tugging at the high neck of her sweater.
She steeled her conviction. “The sinister parts of fairy tales are never just cruelty for cruelty’s sake, are they?
There’s always an important message at the end of it to be taken as a lesson, and this is mine. ”
“And what, precisely, is that lesson meant to be? Maybe it’s about all of us as a community or me and you as a…partnership. Friends, obviously. Our working theory has always been that you’re the protagonist in all of this, but what if…?”
Sage dropped her gaze and tugged at the ends of her black sleeves.
“I knew it!” Casimir shouted. “There’s more, isn’t there? Spit it out, Specs.”
She still couldn’t bring herself to anything like honesty. The thought of admitting to him that she was something like unlovable, something like wicked, and knowing how he’d insist that she was wrong despite all the evidence…
“I don’t remember all of it,” Sage lied yet again through gritted teeth.
She could have recited every ugly word of Lilara’s warning to him, so burned was it into her brain.
“But, yes, she brought me another message. The key part was along the lines of…something, something…‘flee the town in dark spellbind.’ They were her exact words.”
Casimir scoffed. “Or what, she’ll turn us all into NPCs like poor Bridgey? Who does she think she is, demanding that you get up and leave?”
“Casimir, stop it. You’re not taking this seriously.”
“Of course I am! But please, allow me the privilege of protecting you, and this villain will trouble you no longer.” There it was again. He wasn’t fully in control of his own words anymore. He was unknowingly slipping into the enchantment, hour by hour.
“Look, look at her!” Sage hissed her words, trying to keep her temper contained.
They glanced back at the counter, where Bridgey was throwing a rag over her shoulder for the hundredth time.
“Everything we do is following evidence and learning lessons. We can’t ignore that just because this time it doesn’t suit us.
Then what…what happens to you? To everyone else? ”
For once, Casimir didn’t have a retort to fire back. He trudged his spoon through his gloopy bowl of porridge, brows knotted while he followed his trail of thought.
“I have to listen to Lilara’s warning,” Sage said quietly, a little calmer as she reeled herself back in. “She knows what I am and what will happen if I pretend otherwise. She understands the danger. No one else can understand it, but Lilara does.”
“But I’m trying my best to under—”
“I know you are,” Sage said heatedly. Her heart gave a grateful kick at the pained look on his face. “I know,” she softened.
“Do you think everybody in Port Sylvan is facing the same fate? That they’re going to fall deeper and deeper into this fairy tale?” His usual confidence was fading.
Sage sniffed. “Yes.”
His brows shot up. “Even me?”
Sage couldn’t bring herself to reply. There was no doubt: It was already happening. The truth hung unspoken between them, but he always said that she was terrible at keeping her feelings from her face.
Casimir leaned back and blew out a long breath, hands slotted behind his head as he processed her conclusion.
After a moment, he rocked onto the front legs of his chair and leaned in close.
“Specs, I am far, far too good-looking for a fate like this.” He said it with an emphatic finger on the table and such sincerity that she couldn’t help but laugh, despite everything.
He had always had a somewhat wonderful talent for making her do that. “How do we fix this?”
“We do not fix anything, Casimir. I fix this. I keep working to prove to Lilara that I understand her warning and I await her next instructions. I thought I’d done enough already, but…
At least she’s thorough; I appreciate that better than anyone,” Sage said uncertainly.
“It’s a task that I have to complete alone.
I refuse to involve you—or Robin and Laurel, for that matter—in any more of this. ”
She gestured to the unnerving chaos around them. The tables, filled with familiar faces and people who they walked by and interacted with every day, had existed in the same loop of simple conversations and repetitive motions since they’d sat down.
Casimir was desperately trying to read her face for the finer details that she wasn’t willing to hand over. It almost made her buckle and admit her fate to him. But then she saw the shift in his demeanour. The shoulders broadening, the chin raising, the glazed look.
“Be at peace. As the laws of academia dictate, you may bar the gate, but curiosity slips still through the keyhole. You cannot shut me out, fair Specs. I won’t let you.
” He threw down his napkin and shot to his feet.
“I have trained for this all my life. Destiny wrote our names side by side long ago, and who am I to fight it? I remain your champion.”
Through the ridiculous princisms, Sage thundered, “Cas, don’t you d—”
“I’ll be back, Specs. I must see what I can uncover.
Go straight home, stay with Maggie, lose yourself in the safety of research.
Do not go into that forest alone. Don’t do anything…
I shan’t say ‘stupid,’ because you’re too brainy for that to ever be the case, but don’t do anything reckless.
Don’t do anything hasty. And most likely, knowing you, don’t do anything self-sacrificing.
All right?” He dragged her up to her feet too and held her by the upper arms, shaking her slightly for emphasis.
He had no idea that she had already done all of the above. “Promise me, my lady?”
For one insane second, Sage was fairly certain that he was going to kiss her. Instead, he pulled her in for a painfully tight hug, left a dramatic kiss on top of her wild curls and shot out of the Hedgehog House, sword swinging behind him, leaving her to fall back against the table.
She took a moment to catch her breath and plan her next move.
She couldn’t be certain how much of that display was the real Casimir and how much was the prince—the lines between the two were blurring—but he was right about one thing: She should go home.
She should ask Maggie for advice, calculate a new plan before acting on any further hasty inclinations.
She just had to stop by Laurel’s house first, then Robin’s, to make sure they were still holding on.
Without Casimir to distract her from her thoughts, the cloying warmth of the café intensified.
The looped chatter seemed endless, a sharp shriek of laughter playing on repeat.
The clatter of spoons in starchy bowls, the scent from tankards of burnt coffee.
A damp, salty sheen of sweat began to cling to her skin; panic pulsed everywhere.
She grabbed for her coat and scarf and lurched through the front door.
For once, Bridgey did not follow to check on her or wave goodbye, and the small loss only made things feel worse.
These people, whom she had come to care deeply for in such passive, quotidian ways, were lost. She hoped with every fibre of her being that Lilara knew what she was doing.
Sage felt the chilly air hit her face as she leaned against the outside wall.
She swallowed it in greedy gulps as she clung to a handful of ivy, now interspersed with the wild overgrown red roses, to steady herself.
When she felt secure on her feet, she buttoned her coat to the top and took a few steps in the direction of the theatre, where Laurel lived nearby.
Until she heard it.
It was soft, but there was no mistaking it. Caught on a chilly breeze that threw her hair back in knots, Sage heard the voice of her baby sister. Laurel’s voice, trapped in a trailing tangle of rustling leaves and groaning, pained, bowing trees.
It was coming from the forest.