Yet, somehow, I couldn’t help but feel affection for the two troublemakers. Especially after they’d fixed my house. And the Prince had promised they’d be running free deliveries for me every time they were near Cider Hollow (which, he shared, might be longer than the town realized). And they promised they wouldn’t turn my house into candy ever again, so at least that was something.
“You look beautiful,” Forrest said with a smile. “Like you belong here.”
I looked down at my dress, helpfully provided by Oak and Cardamom. It was sunshine (sunflower) yellow with veins of gold like those of a leaf and sprinkled with a little hob magic to make it sparkle.
I really did look like one of the Fae tonight.
A blush crept into my cheeks, and my hair streaked rosy again, but mixed with blissful yellow. “Thank you,” I said. “You don’t look half bad yourself.”
He shifted uneasily on his feet, and for the first time he looked unsure of himself.
“What is it?” I said, my smile fading. Was it something with the desserts? Did I miss something? Forget something?
He hesitated. “Reese, I really like you—and your pies. And, the thing is...”
Oh, spoiled spells. He’d had enough of me already. It was going to be a breakup. And our relationship had barely even begun!
“Out with it!” yelled Thea from behind the dessert table.
I stifled a giggle, giddy with the Prince’s proximity despite my nerves and my worry at whatever he was about to say. I blinked as fearful tears pricked my eyes.
He squeezed his eyes shut, his next words said in a rush. “I want you to meet my parents.”
I laughed, and all the fear floated away like a balloon on the wind. I’d never felt so relieved! “Is that all? Of course I’ll meet your parents!” But then another thought flitted through my head, and my eyes were drawn to my mom standing at the fire. “But I have one condition.”
“Anything,” he said immediately.
“I want you to meet mine, too,” I said, gazing back into those wells of eyes. I could drown in them.
He beamed and offered me his arm. “Deal.”
I took it and beamed back, and together we strolled toward the fire.
Freeze Thaw
A Sleeping Beauty Retelling
One
Before the Freeze
SOMETHING WASN’T RIGHT.
Talia the Elder lifted her nose to the wind, sniffing at the magic in the air. Next to her stood her husband, one hand on her shoulder. She gripped the baby, Talia the Younger, closer to her chest, her eyes alert.
Her husband felt it too. She could feel it in the way he clutched them protectively closer, even as he smiled and laughed with the village, pretending nothing was amiss. But there it was again, that smell of rot, of decay, of twisted and tainted magic.
So she wasn’t dead after all.
Talia the Elder glanced around the crowds of villagers. There would be trouble. They were in trouble. The old witch wasn’t likely to forgive them this oversight.
Her husband led her toward one of the village huts. Though he kept a watchful eye, he couldn’t see what Talia saw: cloaked in shadows, a thin elderly woman muttered silent words dripping with malice, her eyes narrowed toward the small family. The air vibrated red around her, and Talia’s breath caught in her throat as they made eye contact.
They slipped through the pelt covering the door of the hut. Could it already be too late?
Inside, a woman sat at the rough-hewn table, stone and metal scattered over the wood before her. Her tools moved deftly to bend and carve into the metal, shaping small rings for one of her projects. A few unfinished pieces of jewelry sat mixed among the fragments of copper and bronze.
But there was more to her crafting than mere stone and metal. Glowing green streams of light crept and swirled through the air, entwining around the ring in her hand. The emerald light seeped into the copper ring, disappearing momentarily before the light illuminated the runes and stones set into the metal band.
The jeweler smiled as they entered, and she took the baby from her mother, cooing and bouncing the small girl. “Talia, dear sister. After all this time, a beautiful baby girl. Your prayers have been answered handsomely!”
The man settled a hand on the jeweler’s shoulder, smiling brightly at her. “She will be the finest leader our clan has ever known.”
Talia the Elder shot a look at her husband. They could be too late.
“I will see to that,” the jeweler said, unaware of the woman outside. A spark of magic brightened her eye, and she rested a hand lightly on the baby’s cheek. When she spoke again, her voice was heavy, layered with arcane magic. “There is not now nor will ever be any other child as she. The gifts I give will bring all life, gifts of love and not for strife. Beauty and wit with grace for all, blessed with song that will enthrall. The greatest of leaders and kindest of saints, with these gifts, the clan gains strength.”
“That will not be all,” came a bitter voice from the doorway. As one, they turned to face the intruder. “She will be beautiful and gifted, yes, but it will not last. She will never live to be chieftain.” As the woman from the shadows spoke, the light in the hut dimmed, the shadows angry and hungry. Much like the jeweler’s voice, the Shadow Woman’s voice grew heavy and full of magic. “On her eighteenth birthday, listen well, the girl will fall under my spell. Before she may rule, she will be lost to the ice, never again to brighten your lives.” Her voice changed, losing the edge of dark magic but not the burning hatred. She narrowed poison eyes at the baby. “So it will be written. So it will be.”
The woman clapped her hands, and a tangle of ferocious runes slithered through the air away from her. Their dangerous red glow, the red of tainted magic, painted shocked faces as the runes crept toward the small child. She cried out as they touched her tender skin. She screamed as they burrowed beneath her flesh. Talia rocked the child, holding her close, glistening eyes on the Shadow Woman.
Yes, too late. She had known the moment the rot of that woman tainted the air.
“Why?” the man croaked, his voice harsh and broken, his eyes welling.
“Your line was never meant to rule, brother. You didn’t even invite me to the child’s birth party. My own blood!” The Shadow Woman threw something at the ground. When the billowing black smoke and crackling red sparks cleared, she was gone.
The man turned large hurt eyes toward the jeweler. The jeweler blinked back her shock and rushed to the table, shoving aside tools and metal bits and grabbing something out of the detritus. She held up a copper ring, grasped between shaking white fingers.
A green spark reflected off the jeweler’s face as it traveled from her finger to the ring. “The Woman of Shadow has decreed a loss, but ice is changing and fate be crossed. Death will not follow this child dear, but instead she will sleep for untold years. I cannot erase the curse of one, but I give now escape, until spring may come.” The ring glowed bright green, the color of spring grass and summer trees, before fading back to its etched copper tone.
She turned her desperate eyes back to the couple. “She must never be without this, do you understand me?” she said, her voice high and thin. “If she loses it or does not keep it with her, the Shadow Woman’s curse will live, and the child will die.”
Two
A Great Thaw
ICE STRUCK THE back of Owen’s head with a painful crunch. Without thinking, he turned toward the snowball’s source just to be hit in the face with another chunk of freezing ice.
Wiping the sparkling flakes and melting ice off his nose, he said, “Very funny, guys.”
His only answer was laughter ringing across the thawing ice of the Sleeping Princess Glacier. He had never been this far north before, but breathing the scent of the crisp, fresh air, the sparkling ice, the very air of discovery—he was meant for this. The ice was streaked with black and blue from mineral deposits along the ice flow, and the mountains rose sparkling gray and black all around, fo
rming sharp borders between glacier and rock. Winter was nearing its end, and bright violet and golden flowers speckled the rocks and nearby meadows, reaching for the approaching spring.
Even though winter’s bite was still in the wind, the sun was warmer today. Owen felt that surreal uneasiness that came from the mix of warm sun and the cold hovering over the ice pack. He rolled up his sleeves just a bit and turned toward a rustling in one of the tents behind him. He stood at the edge of the ice flow, next to the base camp they had set up on the gravelly beach of a pristine blue lake.
Dr. Karington stepped out of her tent, a stack of field notebooks in her hand, and glanced around at the scattered students. “All right, all right, enough goofing off. Let’s get back to work now.” Though her words sounded harsh, everyone could hear the smile in her voice. Let one person break an artifact, though, and all that would change in a heartbeat.
“Owen!” Dr. Karington called, striding toward him. As she approached, she extended one of the notebooks toward him. “I want you to take a look at this. It was my father’s from the last expedition here. See if any of the artifacts from yesterday match his descriptions. I want to know if we are dealing with the same culture.”
Owen nodded and took the notebook, flipping through it as he crossed the campsite to the border of the glacier. The other students were already climbing the edges of the snow and ice, keeping to the rocks bordering the ice flow. He could hear Dr. Karington following him, bringing up the end of the group.
Finally at the excavation site, Owen set about picking up where he left off the previous day. He uncovered his dig and opened his own field notes next to the notebook he had been given to study, comparing his rough drawing to the carefully sketched artifact that had been discovered thirty years ago.
A bird flitted to the ground just out of his line of sight, the fluttering wings drawing his gaze to it. It pecked its long black beak at something sticking out of the snow about twenty feet away. Owen quietly closed the book and moved toward the bird. It took off as he approached, leaving whatever it had found.
It was a hand, a bright aqua ring stuck on one finger. The ring was made of copper, its patina thick from untold years of lying in the ice, but under the tarnish, Owen could make out the same symbols they had been finding all over the glacier artifacts. The hand itself, though...that was the strange part. If he didn’t know any better, he would be sure this person was still alive. He gingerly brushed at the hand with his fingers, almost unconvinced. The skin was cold, soft, not brittle like the other ice mummies that had been uncovered nearby. As his fingers touched the ring, it twisted on the cold body, sliding until it sat against the corpse’s knuckles.
“Dr. Karington?” he called, not removing his eyes from the hand. “I think you should see this.”
Three
Lessons
“AND WHAT PURPOSE does flax serve in the general magic formula?” Nana asked Talia the Younger patiently.
“Flax is the stabilizer of the extreme energy shifts that can occur during spellcasting. Nana, can I actually try a spell now?” Talia whined. It was hard for a ten-year-old to pay attention for so long...and not do magic.
“We’ve only covered a small part of magical theory, my dear. You won’t be ready for a spell until next month, at least.”
Talia groaned and dropped her head to the table with a thunk, scattering brushes and ink bottles across the aged cedar.
“Talia, dear, pay attention.” Nana sat back down across from her goddaughter and held up a piece of metal. “Now, what is special about imbuing copper with magic?”
“For copper items, flax cannot be used as a stabilizer,” Talia recited dutifully.
“Good,” Nana responded. “Why?”
“It would have to be smelted into the raw metal, but the purifying process would burn the useful parts off. It would be like adding nothing, a waste of good flax.”
“Good. Now, what is our alternative for copper items?”
“The only alternative to flax is incantation.”
And a little hope, Talia thought to herself. The icy winds of magic were fickle, and there was no guarantee that the copper would take up the stabilizing effects of the incantation unless the caster was highly experienced.
Like Nana.
Nana gently picked up Talia’s hand, holding the copper ring on her finger in front of her eyes. “Correct. What are the signs of a successful copper incantation?”
“When cast, the threads of magic will be green in color with bright light. Any other color indicates improper stability, and intensity of light indicates strength of bond.”
Nana smiled again. “Very good. And red light?”
“Red light indicates dark casting and should be avoided.”
“Why?”
“Dark magic corrupts everything it touches. One does not cast dark magic and emerge unscathed.”
Four
Waking Nightmares
THE GRAD STUDENTS worked the better part of the day to uncover the ice mummy. Contrary to Owen’s first instinct, this was not a recent death; from the looks of the woman’s clothing and hair style, she was likely thousands of years old, maybe even older. The students carefully dug the snow and ice away from the body, but there was no saving some of the clothing. A course outer coat appeared to have disintegrated into the snow. They bagged samples and kept working at revealing the body. Owen slipped one vial of fibers into his pocket as they progressed on uncovering the dig, a sample to send for testing at the school. Their little base camp couldn’t handle the more complicated analyses, like composition tests, and he had been assigned to prepare lab samples.
By the time the students pulled the frozen woman free of the glacier, the sun was setting over the mountains, setting the snow on fire. They carried her down to one of the tents near the lake, carefully laying her out in a crate for the night. Owen was the last to leave, his eyes lingering on the girl’s face, the lines soft as if in sleep.
“I wish I could just...talk to her,” he mused quietly. “Ask about her life.”
He sighed and clicked off the light.
***
The moon glowed bright silver against the snow a mile up the mountain from the campsite, making the glacier glow with an otherworldly light.
In the artifact tent, the moon’s light was dimmer, seeping into the cracks in the fabric and inching along the ground. The beams fell on the copper ring on a corpse’s finger. The ring began to glow, almost imperceptibly.
Back up on the mountain, a red glow began deep below the ice, creeping toward the surface, interrupting the silver glow of the moonlight. The ice began to melt.
In the tent, a finger twitched.
On the mountain, a hand broke through the snow, a black ring glowing red on one finger.
Five
Cracking
TALIA LET OUT an exasperated breath. The bodyguard behind her didn’t seem to notice. It had been like this as long as she could remember, her parents treating her like something breakable.
“No one has seen the Shadow Woman in years, Mother,” she said.
Talia the Elder shook her head. “Her prophecy was clear, Talia. We can’t be sure she hasn’t done anything else.”
Talia bit back her automatic reply. It was their fault her life was in danger in the first place, and now she had to live with the consequences. Whether they had meant to exclude the Shadow Woman from Talia’s birth party, she never could say for sure. But the fact was that they had.
Talia twisted the ring on her finger, wishing she could just leave it there on the table and walk away, but she knew that if she did, the Shadow Woman would return to kill her.
Instead, she simply sighed and turned away.
Six
Gone
A SHOUT RANG through the campsite, and Owen’s eyes snapped open. The sky was the faintest rose of dawn, the stars still glimmering in the cold night air. He sat up on the cot, rubbing the remnants of sleep from his eyes. He shoved his wire glasses
onto his nose and bolted from the tent he shared with the other male students.
There was a buzz of commotion around the artifact tent. Dr. Karington had her hand tight around the upper arm of a young girl. Her face was a mask of anger, but she was too good a person not to notice the girl’s shivers.
“Owen!” she roared. “Get an extra coat from the truck!”
Owen nodded once, still taking in the scene, and ran along the gravel toward one of the parked trucks. He rummaged in a duffel bag in the bed of the truck, coming up with one of the spare winter coats, the university’s logo plastered on the sleeve. He hurried back to the tents.
“What’s going on?” he demanded as he handed the coat to Dr. Karington.
“The mummy is gone,” she replied, shoving the coat over the girl’s shoulders. “And she just showed up out of nowhere. She has to have something to do with it.”
The girl’s face was scared, her voice coming in long strings of unintelligible syllables. There was something familiar about her. His eyes traveled over her dusky face, her stringy raven hair, her soaked animal hide clothing. Then he saw the ring.
“Um, Dr. Karington?” he started.
Dr. Karington turned her boiling gaze toward him, and he shrank back a little. “What?”
“The ring. She has the ring.”
She turned quickly, grabbing the girl’s hand and holding it up so that the ring was between them. “Where is the mummy?” she demanded, her eyes glaring back at the girl.
The girl started crying, more of the unknown language streaming from her mouth.
Owen took a deep breath and ran his fingers through shaggy brown hair. “I wish we could understand her.”
The ring started glowing bright emerald, and the girl snatched her hand away from Dr. Karington. She turned to stare at Owen with bright brown eyes. The next few moments were a blur in his memory, but they seemed to play out over a hundred years.
Seasons of Magic Volume 1 Page 13