Page 79 of Disenchanted

And while the world kept spinning and the music kept playing for everybody else, Sage Hemlock felt any ounce of reckless magic slip irredeemably between her fingers forever.

Caution and control were quick to take its place.

33

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.