Chapter 33 When the Clock Strikes Twelve
When the Clock Strikes Twelve
It felt like breaking the surface of a cold pool. Sage spluttered, re-emerging from the nightmare buried within the book with panicky gasps for air and a pounding at the back of her head. She reeled in the chair, rocking onto its back legs and gripping the sides of the book for dear life.
The final chapter of the story. Sharing the memory, delivering it for Sage in such a visceral way, had been Lilara’s last, most desperate attempt to convince Sage to join her in the conclusion that magic was not meant for her.
It had all been so cleverly crafted to prove that a witch could never dream of holding the greedy combination of both love and magic side by side. One could not exist where the other remained.
But the cruel final blow, making her relive her worst nightmare at the end of the story, had backfired.
Sage had witnessed the memory with a new clarity, with a sharpness and a breadth of detail that she had not allowed herself to experience before.
It had all been too confusing, too agonizing to face in such lucidity, so she had blocked it out entirely.
It had existed in her mind as a strange walled-off sort of blank until now—the one investigation that she had never permitted herself to keep working at.
The story’s final pages went against the version that Sage had grown up believing. The one where she was unworthy and unforgivable. It defied the story where her own magic was to blame for everything.
Her own magic had not poisoned her mother and father with Earth Sorcery, as she had always feared and believed.
Sage had never picked the deadly crimson-black roses from the garden.
She had chosen normal ones, bright red, traditionally full of love.
The strange black roses, unnatural and unknowable and deadly, had become that later…
as if by another sort of magic. As if on purpose, as if at the hands of a fateful curse that had taken flight the very first moment it could.
Lilara’s curse was not a new, fresh thing escaped just weeks ago from the pages of the book.
It had arrived long before. The curse had been at work on Sage’s fate from the very day she was born in Port Sylvan and was activated the very moment her magic came to be.
Her own pure, newborn magic had sensed its presence in the garden, had tried to warn her.
The curse alone was to blame for the terrifying crimson-black roses that had so cruelly stolen Sage’s parents from her and her siblings.
Their lives had bloomed unknowingly around the curse at their stem.
She held thick, raw emotion between her palms, pressed them into her hair and blew out a breath to steady herself as she rocked back. It was only when she felt that familiar effervescent spark between her fingers that Sage realized something wonderful.
Her magic had returned to her.
At the heart of the labyrinth, where Lilara had promised that love lay, the pages of the book had offered it back.
She had earned its return. Firstly, by being brave enough to forgive herself, even before she knew the truth and regardless of it.
Secondly, being strong enough to withstand the replay of her greatest nightmare too.
Sage gave a spluttered laugh of disbelief. “Although, after everything, quite frankly, that’s the least you owed me,” she told the book.
She flexed her fingers, stretching them out one by one, testing how the sensation felt now that magic was back between her bones, roiling beneath her skin.
It wasn’t until she had been stripped of it that Sage had ever taken much notice of the comforting warmth that her magic provided.
It was soothing. Before she had opened the book, Sage had been covered in goose bumps, shivering pathetically against the relentless winter snow within the labyrinth.
With magic finally flooding back through her system, she felt strong again. She felt good.
She was magic. How had she never given herself that small credit before?
“I’m sorry you had to see that.”
Lilara stepped out of the maze walls and into the heart of the labyrinth, her cloak surrounding her in a shadow that glittered with constellations.
“A cruel reminder, I fear, and yet I had no choice, though it pains me to see you suffer.” Lilara’s tone was soft once more and pitying.
It made Sage feel sick. “You cared less than I thought, about your loved ones, about this town. I suppose that is the heartless hold that magic has over us. Or perhaps you were just more wicked than I had ever considered, more wicked even than me.” A light laugh followed.
There was a note of delight in Lilara’s voice as she said that, a distinct echo of relief. Misery really did love company.
“I care about them more than anything in this world,” Sage said, voice thick with a choking, sticky anger unlike anything she had ever felt before. It rolled inside her like a storm cloud.
“Evidently not!” Lilara scoffed. “The curse was to forestall any more celebration of magic, Sage. I know better than anyone its destructive—”
“Stop!” Sage slammed her hands down on the cold desk, sending a puff of snow up into the air.
A loaded, dangerous silence held between them, laced through the slowly falling snowflakes, each witch daring the other to move first.
“Still you doubt me?” Lilara said quietly, faltering. Her eyes pinched before her glance shot back behind her suddenly. “Who did you summon?”
“Summon? Nobody, I—”
“Who is that?” Lilara called.
Sage supposed that echoes of a magical form must have considerably better hearing than the average witch, because Lilara was right.
Seconds later, she could hear it too. Hasty footsteps rushing through the labyrinth, getting closer and closer to the heart of it, to them.
At the first sight of a shadow stretching in front of the figure, Lilara’s eyes widened in panic and she vanished back into the walls of the labyrinth.
“Cas!”
Sage felt her entire form collapse in relief when Casimir burst around the corner with a sweep of his cape and stood proudly at the entrance to the maze’s heart.
But her delight was short-lived. His boots were planted wide, chest lifted, but as his eyes connected with Sage, his hand flew once more to the hilt of his sword and dragged it from its sheath with a scrape of metal.
“Oh, for the love of…Casimir, this is really not the time.”
He flourished it in front of him, and despite the mortal peril, Sage couldn’t help but notice that his hair looked even more outrageously perfect than usual, as a singular curl fell in front of his face and he shook back the rest. Typical.
“How dare you address a royal of the realm with such familiarity, witch?” he cried, taking bold steps towards her with the sword brandished in her direction once again. “Kneel before me so I may more easily slay you, with dignity that is far more than you deserve in such a life of wickedness.”
She sighed. This chapter of Lilara’s quest to show that love and magic could never be one had, in many ways, been the cruellest of all.
That the handsome prince would find the wicked witch and be the one to end her, the way that most happy endings had to unfold in a fairy tale.
But Sage wasn’t afraid of the curse anymore.
In fact, she dared it to try. She made sure to bring her face closer to the end of his sword and swallowed hard.
“This magic is vexing indeed,” Casimir said in a low, quiet voice, undeniably fascinated by her. “Making such beauty of a witch designed to trick me, I see.”
“How are you still this much of a nuisance to me, even when under cursed enchantment?” she whispered.
Casimir’s eyes flickered hotly.
She hated to do it. She really, really did.
But what choice did she have? She could only deal with one arrogant numbskull at a time.
More importantly, it was safer for him to be as far away from Lilara’s echo as possible.
The witch was so reactive, so disturbed, Sage was failing to predict what she was going to do from one moment to the next.
She would stop at nothing and wouldn’t think twice about sacrifice. Sage had to keep Cas away.
“You know,” Sage said, drumming her fingers on the desk. Magic crackled between them. “Typically, the witch tends to be dealt with by someone far more unassuming than the handsome prince. This probably isn’t a good use of your precious royal time.”
Casimir frowned, lowering his sword. “Of what do you speak?”
“Try reading a book for once, Prince Everald.”
She had him thoroughly baffled. He was faltering.
“You esteemed sort are usually far too busy vanquishing something with a little more pomp and circumstance than the haggard old witch. Little old me? Surely not,” she said, easing the blade of the sword downwards.
“You always were such a show-off. Wouldn’t you like a bit more of a challenge? Or are you too scared?”
Casimir breathed heavily as she stepped closer, their faces only inches apart. He gulped as their lips came perilously close to grazing. “I do not tremble, witch.”
Somewhere, beneath the facade and costume and strange loaded tension, Sage recognized the softness of his cologne. Woody, sea-salty, familiar. He was still in there, somewhere. She had to trust her returned magic. She had to trust herself.
Sage thought back to a transferral spell, one that she had been able to conjure back in her brief few days of practising teenage magic.
She had been fascinated by apparition as a notion the moment that magic had made itself known to her—obviously.
Only a fool wouldn’t be. So she had naturally used Robin as a willing guinea pig.
She had successfully managed to send him from the bottom bunk of his bed up to the top one in the blink of an eye.
He had approved of the whole thing as “wicked,” in a good way.