Chapter 29 Before You Met Magic
Before You Met Magic
Standing in Maggie’s room with her two closest friends, having learned that an ancient witch had cursed her to open the grimoire a hundred years before she was even born was just such an inconvenient, awkward occasion.
She glared at them defensively and offered a tight scowl.
“What?” she said crossly, arms folded tight. “Oh, stop looking at me, will you?” Her irritation only grew when she saw the silent, loaded glance that Maggie and Casimir shared between themselves instead. “And stop looking at each other, for that matter.”
“Where exactly would you like us to look, Specs?” Casimir asked, a gentle version of that lopsided grin of his creeping in, even still.
“Sage, I…” Maggie’s eyelids fluttered. Her hand flew to her throat as though she were trying to keep a hold over her emotions.
“And you can stop with the pitying tones too. I’m not an injured vole that you need to wrap in a blanket.”
Casimir rolled his eyes. “I think an injured vole would bite less.”
She glared more fiercely at him, but his face only softened in return. “For once, Sage, let us know what you’re thinking, will you? Bravery is no burden to be borne in solitude. Speak your heart.”
That was it. The gentle offer was the very last thing she needed to hear. Even beneath the ridiculous, princely facade, it was still there—his continued, unrelenting kindness, which she had done nothing to deserve. It made her snap. She threw the handful of letters to the floor.
“Of course I have to be brave!” Sage shouted.
The anger could have choked her. “Because what happens if I stop? How do I possibly begin to be okay? There has never, ever been another option but to be brave, Casimir. What don’t you understand about that?
” Her temper was white-hot at the sheer unfairness of it all, at the mess she had found herself in and at her lack of choice but to keep on wading through and hope she wasn’t pulled under.
“We still have to solve this,” she thundered on.
“The letters don’t change that. We might finally have an explanation of some kind, but we still have the spell—curse, hex, whatever this is—to lift.
In case you’d forgotten, we still have my brother and sister…
” Her shouts wavered. A choke gave way to a sob.
“We still have my brother and sister to save. I cannot be anything other than brave every single day of my life, and it is…It is so exhausting.”
The dam burst. Sage buried her face in her hands and her curls closed out the world as all of the fear that she’d been trying to keep contained inside herself for weeks—or maybe even her whole life—refused to stay a secret anymore.
Her whole body was racked with deep, hearty sobs that shook her from shoulder to shoulder.
It was so self-indulgent, so horribly embarrassing to hear herself cry, but she wept for the simple unfairness of it all.
She lived every day with a leaden, guilt-ridden shadow that followed her round in chains, whispering spitefully in her ear when life became quiet that she didn’t deserve the good, could never deserve the good.
And now she knew that her mistakes were not only stupid and careless, but fate-driven too.
Sage cried and cried. The impossible thought that other people simply existed in this world without being weighed down by loss and grief and solitude as commanding forces?
The concept that they would never once know what it was like?
To feel your chest crushed by a tidal wave of guilt, the repercussions rippling through the rest of your life while nobody else even remembered you were holding on to them. Life must be so, so sweet without it.
It was probably making Casimir feel endlessly awkward and probably making strong Maggie think less of her, but Sage couldn’t care less anymore.
She didn’t care that it made her sound petulant or childish.
She wasn’t sure how she had made it this far, with an impossible loss on her back that pulled her down beneath the waves like a wrought-iron anchor each day.
Lost to the unfairness of it all, Sage gave a slightly stunned whimper when a pair of wide warm arms pulled her in tight and a second colder presence stroked her hair. Casimir and Maggie both held her tenderly and simply let her cry.
Sage wasn’t even sure what it was that she was crying for anymore: her failure to fix the one unsolvable problem that she had ever come up against, the mess that she had been dragged into against her will or maybe the surprising revelation that perhaps she couldn’t be entirely to blame for every single part of it.
“The fairy-tale spell from Lilara was not something new,” Casimir said quietly into the top of her hair. “Her bitter curse has been there all along, waiting for a century for you to unlock it from the book and begin the story.”
While the arbitrary and unfair nature of Lilara’s decision to curse her was maddening, as well as the way that she had walked blindly into it, something about the inevitability felt like an odd sort of relief, in some ways.
As Sage blew out a steadying breath, attempting to claw back some air as well as some dignity before she could look Casimir in the eye, the colder pair of hands slipped from her shoulder with an affectionate tap.
“I think we all need something a little stronger than the kettle tonight,” Maggie said.
“Hang on, Maggs.” Sage reached out for her friend’s shoulder and inevitably found her hand slipping through her form. Maggie turned back with a soft, sad smile. “Are you okay? We should talk about what Lilara did to you, your fate, that last letter…”
“It’s rather a comfort to have an answer at last, as I’m sure you may feel too.
The last time I read these letters, I was alive and well.
I could not have known the weight of her words, or what they meant for my future,” Maggie said, finding the silver lining that she always somehow did.
“Lily, although good and kind, did sometimes fall victim to spoiled tendencies—a golden upbringing will do that to a girl. And unrequited love does peculiar things to the best of folk. We have plenty of time to talk about me. I’m certainly not going anywhere. ”
Her gentle words somehow managed to break Sage’s heart all over again. The ghost excused herself to head back downstairs, and Sage heard the tinkling of glasses and the rattle of the bar cart as she prepared each of them a drink.
Sage risked a shrinking glance at Casimir. “Go on, then,” she said, embarrassed that her voice sounded so nasal and, well, soggy. She sniffed and wiped at her eyes indignantly with the backs of her hands. “Say whatever it is you need to say.”
“I don’t need to say anything,” Casimir replied quietly, only reaching out with the end of his sleeve to mop up the couple of stray tears that were still stubbornly refusing to stop falling.
“I only ever really want to hear what you think, the marvellous way your mind works, Specs. You always have far more sense to offer than I do. Especially now that I’m often talking with such… horrific pizzazz?”
Despite herself, Sage’s own hand reached for his, and they rested together on her cheek. She just needed something to hold on to. “Even I don’t have the words for this one. I have no answers anymore. No suggestions, no proposals, no summation. Nothing.”
Casimir gently stroked his thumb over her cheekbone.
“Well, you’re a woman who has always appreciated facts and evidence,” he said, “so don’t ignore the ones we’ve just uncovered.
” He stooped to gather up the letters from the floor and held them out to her determinedly.
“Sage, what else do you need to hear to believe that you were never evil, bad or wicked? I certainly never believed you on that one, and look. It’s written in genuine historical resources, no less.
Our favourite! You were caught up in an impossible legacy decided by the fates long before you even met magic.
You might try to go a little easier on yourself. ”
Stubbornly, on instinct and reflex, Sage shook her head so vehemently that her curls trembled. She didn’t have to examine them to know that several would be in the shape of lightning bolts by now.
Casimir laughed throatily. “You don’t even know what you’re disagreeing with me on, do you?”
“It doesn’t change anything. Not really,” she said. “The curse might explain the mess we’re in currently, the fact it was waiting for me in the book, but it doesn’t change the darkness of my magic or my terrible mistake before that.”
Casimir sighed. “Regardless, you’re not a bad person, Sage,” he said, holding both of her shoulders. “If only that beautiful soul of yours might find the grace to forgive.”
Was that the prince or Casimir talking?
“Forgiveness for Lilara?” Sage considered the idea.
Being betrayed by her heroine was the toughest of pills to swallow.
But it was evident from the letters that Lilara had sadly descended into the kind of hasty, unsteady madness that only comes from the rawest of first heartbreaks.
Sage knew better than anyone that a magical sort of mind felt those things even more deeply than the non-wicche.
If there was one thing that Sage could never stand, it was irrationality, but she could see so clearly how Lilara had changed from the Lily that Maggie had known and the plain, cold-hearted cause of it all.
Lilara had been rejected and hurt by her lover, her parents, the entire town, left with only her fears and self-loathing for company.
It was clear where her bitterness and wrath for the next witch had come from.
Sage couldn’t hold this against her. In fact, she understood it all very well. Sometimes, finding even a single glimmer felt impossible.
“I meant forgiveness for yourself.” Casimir’s hands moved to her shoulders and he held her steady.
“Oh,” Sage faltered. “Then no.”