Chapter 29 Before You Met Magic #2
Casimir gave a short laugh. “By my crown, you are the most unyielding woman I have ever had the honour of meeting. A stubbornness that could bring a kingdom to its knees.”
Sage scowled at him, officially giving up on trying to figure out whether it was Cas or the enchantment talking anymore.
The revelations from the letters had brought her into a new type of exhaustion; she was entirely strung out, as though her brain wasn’t quite looping one thought to the next as it should.
She had never realized until it was gone just how much her magic had always acted as an extra uncredited force to be reckoned with against the distinctly non-wicche feeling of…
tiredness. She missed it. She missed everything about it.
Sage tried to hold on to the sudden realization, but before she could examine it, it slipped away again.
“It’s Halloween tomorrow; the timing couldn’t be more perfect. I’ll face whatever Lilara has in store for me then.”
Casimir looked at her as though she were being ridiculous. “Specs, I’m not just going to leave you to go out there by yourself and face whatever this end to the curse might be without support.”
Sage shrugged. “I can manage by myself.”
“We’re a team. There’s no way you’re going out there—”
“Casimir,” Sage said firmly. She looked him directly in the eye. “I have lost everything.” She enunciated the last word specifically. “I have lost my life’s work. I have lost my magic.”
At that, his mouth fell open. “Specs, your magic?”
She rushed on. “I have lost my heroine too, and, of course, my brother and my sister. All in one fell swoop.” Her voice was calm and even-tempered. “I cannot and I will not lose you too.”
She prepared herself to argue her case further when Casimir jumped up from his seat, taking the argumentative stance that they often found themselves in at the archive, ready to butt heads over best approaches. But instead, he shut his mouth again and only gave her a small nod of defeat.
“Come on,” Casimir said gently, slipping an arm around her and guiding her down the hallway to her own room.
“Don’t get me wrong, we will be discussing these questionable decisions of yours thoroughly, but perhaps when you’re not quite so distraught.
On my honour, I am yet to meet a trial that a nap could not remedy: headaches, tasks, being stood up…
I believe it happens to less handsome princes of other realms. The revelation that you are lifelong bound by the unfair, twisted curse at the hands of a heartbroken wicked witch is not so unlike the others. ”
Sage awoke with a start. She and Casimir had fallen asleep as soon as they hit the pillows, her head resting on his chest and his face buried in her hair. She groaned at the sight of the night sky hung behind the open curtains.
Sage rubbed her bleary eyes, trying to adjust to the darkness, but as everything came into focus a little more clearly—her neatly folded clothes on the armchair, the organized chaos of books and papers, Mal snoring loudly at the foot of the bed—Sage realized she was mistaken.
It wasn’t the lullaby thickness of a night sky that had turned the world dark. They had slept right through. There was some daylight, the bleakest of greys and the deepest of maroons fractionally visible at the window. Halloween had arrived.
Sage eased herself from the covers, trying not to wake Casimir as she slid out from underneath his arm to escape his warmth, then flung herself at the glass, nose pressed up against the window.
The darkness was courtesy of thickets and thickets of tangled dagger-sharp thorns.
Impenetrable, intricate, thick knots of deep red roses, nauseatingly fragranced, had walled off the whole world.
The broad razor-like brambles spanned the entirety of the bedroom window and crowded against the glass.
She could make out snippets of Port Sylvan through the tiniest of gaps between the weave of thorns, but hardly anything was the slightest bit visible through the overgrowth.
The roses went on for miles, stretching as far as she could see.
Thorns had swallowed the town, spilling out of the rose gardens further and further as they grew out of control under the curse’s lock-tight grip.
Yet another reminder, the sharpest and most threatening kind—sacrificing her magic had brought no progress. Danger lingered still.
Sage found herself longing for the warmth that it had shared beneath her skin. She had never noticed these small unspoken elements of her magic until it was gone.
“You know what they always mean in a fairy tale, don’t you? Roses, thorns.” Mal sat up sleepily to address her.
She turned, and her heart gave an extra thump at the sight of her familiar at the end of her bed, tucked snugly in the divot between Casimir’s feet.
And, yes, perhaps at Casimir himself too.
It was troubling how adorable he looked, hair sticking out at all angles on the pillow.
She physically recoiled at the very inappropriate thoughts that had entered her head without permission. There wasn’t time for this idiocy.
“Thorns appear at the point where the hero has admitted defeat or taken a bow out of her own story. All hope is lost,” she replied quietly, gnawing at her lip and tugging at her pyjama sleeves as she took a seat on the bay windowsill.
“Great. That’s the motivational talk we’re looking for.
” Mal rolled onto his side and gave a lazy yawn.
“That may be true, but you forgot the most important part,” he said, stretching out his hind legs.
“When the time comes and our hero realizes that they deserve more, that she is more”—Mal jumped down from the bed, blithe and unbothered as he tucked his tail underneath him with an easy flick—“she emerges bravely and batters her way through. Torn and tattered, maybe, but stronger than ever before.”
Sage, despite herself, felt her eyes well up all over again. “Oh, so you just decided all of this on my behalf, did you?”
At her feet, Mal gave a very blatant shrug, which was something that she had never seen from a cat before.
“You normally trust books above all else to make you feel better. I thought it best to speak to you in the language you understand.” He leapt up next to her on the windowsill and curled himself against the side of her thigh with a slight headbutt of reassurance.
The round ball of ginger cat sighed contentedly.
Since Maggie had shared Lilara’s letters and they had both discovered a new version of the truth, everything felt trackless to Sage. The inevitability of a curse written into her fate, one that she had walked so blindly into the path of, made it feel hopeless to keep fighting.
But still, somehow, Sage could not help but sense the tugging pull of an incorrigible smile as she glanced down at her loyal familiar and across to the bed to find Casimir similarly unwilling to leave her side.
The wise words from Mal were difficult not to take to heart.
She kept the stubborn smile squashed into a determined, twitching line.
“Plus, this does all prove that he and I were right all along, just so you know. Maybe don’t tell him that part, though.” Mal’s words immediately put a stop to her smile. She raised her eyebrows at his feline arrogance.
“I know you noticed it, too, in those early letters,” Mal said sleepily.
“Lilara was unquestionably proud of her magic once. She was fond of it. So much so that she risked it all to tell her love about it. She wanted him to share in it. That doesn’t sound like inherent dark magic to me.
I propose it was simply her own doing—her later resentful behaviour—that curdled it. ”
Sage bristled, as she always did whenever someone tried to insist that she was wrong and they were right.
“Just”—Mal blinked up with drowsy eyes—“promise me you’ll think on it.”
Sage answered him with a chin scratch. “If I’m going to be served this fluffy, blasted nonsense by you, then I’m going to at least need coffee and pancakes to go with it.”
After a quick shower to reset both her mind and her resolve, she grabbed a hair tie and set about securing her spiralling curls into a plait, then reached for the collared white shirt and olive-green trousers that she saved for days when she truly meant business.
She hesitated, then threw on an old soft sweatshirt of Casimir’s that she’d stolen years ago.
It was scruffy and worn and far too big, but the scent brought comfort, and she wanted it for luck. She suspected she might need it.
Then she grabbed the bottom of the bedcovers to seize them away from Casimir in one fell swoop. “Up you get, Your Highness.”
“Oi! Fortune smiles upon you that I remain ensnared in my costume,” Casimir shouted, bleary-eyed and confused as she marched downstairs. “Without it, my indecent state would have been most unprincely!”