10:18
“Fine, one story,” Dempsey rumbled down at Gwen as they walked through the tearoom door, Dempsey walking forward while Gwen walked backwards so she could look at him while raising imploring hands, pressed palm to palm, to him. “Once it’s safe.”
Gwen heaved a dramatic sigh. “Fine, Dad. Once it’s safe. But it better be a good story.”
“Noted.”
Gwen turned around so she was facing forwards as she walked over the threshold. Dempsey shook his head at her back then turned to look at Siobhan following behind him.
Dempsey hesitated on the threshold, blocking the way forward. He turned fully to thrust something at Siobhan. It was a sword with an ornate basket hilt. “Trade me?”
Siobhan looked down at the hilt of the short sword Dempsey had given her sticking out of the corner of her bag. She’d tucked it there, hilt pointing out, and largely forgotten it while in the kitchen.
Rather than question the request, seeing as they were both his swords and it seemed stupid to look a gift sword in the mouth, she pulled the short sword from her bag and offered it to him. He took it with his free hand, then thrust it into his messenger bag. It disappeared like a sword down a sword swallower’s throat. Maybe someone else would have blinked at the phenomenon but considering her bag also held way more than it should it was another thing Siobhan barely blinked at.
Once the sword was secure he held out the pretty one to Siobhan. She took it, sliding her hand into the basket then holding the sword up to admire it. With its slim blade and the tiny enamel flowers festooning the basket it was practically a wand designed for an alchemist. She swished it a few times, getting a feel for the weight of it, then slide it blade first into her bag with the basket hilt sticking out at the corner of the bag.
“Thanks. It’s a beauty.”
“Welcome. The other blade was dull.”
Siobhan hadn’t noticed it was dull but okay. She settled the strap of her bag across her chest, playing her fingers over the bandolier straps sewed into it to do a quick inventory of her potions. There were a lot of empty straps and she was running a mental list of what she had still in the bag as she stepped through the threshold and onto grass.
She didn’t have to look down to know it was grass. The grass rustled, tickling her boots and her Magick in greeting. In fact there was a great pressing in of welcome against her Magick. She lifted her head and peered around Dempsey to determine where the rush came from and stifled a small gasp at what she saw.
They stood in arguably the perfect potager garden. About as wide as a derby track, which was to say it was around seventy-five feet wide give or take some and equally as long, it was hemmed in on the sides by the stone walls of the castle while at the end of it a lush hedge wall stood. The castle walls cast shadows on the plants closer to them while the central area was carved out into elevated beds separated by cobbled paths.
Edible and ornamental plants grew together in a vibrant patchwork. Five cobbled paths cut down the length of the garden, running between large, raised beds. The central path ran up to the hedge wall where an ornamental trellis stood dead center of the greenery. The four long side paths intersected paths running across the width of the garden.
From above the garden probably looked like an intricate gameboard. Something like chutes and ladders. But paths and beds. There was an intricate geometry to it that was at odds with the lush growth of the myriad plants.
The trellis was slightly recessed into the cherry laurel hedge wall. Scarlet runner beans grew up its sides, a contrast to the green of the hedge and the white of the trellis. The trellis acted as a doorway in the hedge, with an ornamental gate that looked kind of like a portcullis with wood slats in a basket pattern that fit the opening of the trellis up to within several inches of its arched top acting as its door.
Through the trellis Siobhan could vaguely make out another trellis in another hedge wall beyond the first. Siobhan’s Magick engaged on its own, reaching out for the second hedge, drawing at her. Even as her Magick narrowed and locked on the hedge it also spread out, melding with the primary and secondary roots throughout the garden so she felt in about a hundred or maybe even a thousand places at once.
“I need to,” she held up a finger to basically no one, her full attention taken up by the bounty around her. Plopping down with very little awareness of exactly where she sat, she unlaced her boots, removed them, and then took off her socks and shoved one each into a boot. Once that was done she tied the laces together and looped them around her neck so the boots lay on her chest.
Rising, she stepped up onto the nearest bed and curled her toes into the groundcover of sweet woodruff. She closed her eyes, breathing in the Magick of the garden through her nose and through the soles of her shoes. Even her palms and fingertips felt the flow of it, that was how abundant it was here.
Casting a glance over to Dempsey and then Dan, standing to the other side of her and a bit forward with his toes up against a bed of mint – peppermint, spearmint, chocolate mint, pineapple mint and watermint’s Magick tickling the soles of her feet, she took a deep breath, drawing in air and Magick and Magick-laden air so it curled in her lungs and spread out through her veins and corpuscles and Magick channels. The mint Magick carried with it the tingly coolness of the herbs themselves. It coursed up her legs, through her pelvis, and into her torso, refreshing her from inside.
The Magick was intoxicating and she was pretty sure she staggered a little as she stepped from the bed onto the central cobbled path. Looping along she walked under the runner bean trellis and to the next part of the garden.
Past the hedge wall the space was similar to the first section with raised beds and three cobbled paths. Unlike the first square of the garden this one had a fountain in the center section of the first and third paths, which was to say the ones adjacent to the center. Where the fountains stood the path formed a round cobbled section with the fountain in the center before narrowing back to a path heading towards the hedgewall at the end of the square.
Siobhan headed down the center path to the trellis on vaguely unsteady legs. This trellis was half-covered by rambling roses. An arm went around her waist, the first indication she wasn’t entirely alone in this green wonderland. It said something to her mental slash Magickal state that she didn’t see or hear Gwen come up next to her.
When Gwen said, “I’m just gonna walk here, m’kay?” she nodded and leaned on her friend.
“It’s pretty.”
“It is.”
“You are missing your story.”
“I can hear it later.” Gwen’s features made a funny then she looked to Siobhan. “Does it usually feel like this?”
“Like?”
“You are high. I mean not as a kite but you are definitely under the influence.”
Siobhan shook her head and forced herself to focus on Gwen rather than craning her head around to take in every single little plant in the garden. “There’s something about this garden.”
“Yeah. Want me to try to help?”
Siobhan considered a moment, then sighed. “I suppose you should.” Her smile got wistful. “But it feels so good.”
“It does. And that could be part of the trap.”
“Trap?”
“Puzzle? Test?” Reason slowly oozed through Siobhan. Normally she didn’t feel Gwen’s Magick. Perhaps it was the overabundance of Magick in her own body that made her feel it, like a subtle invader pushing the lethargy from her limbs.
Gwen squeezed her waist. “There. Did you notice that each of the tests so far used one of our skills?”
“Oh.” Siobhan turned her attention from the temptation of the garden, willed herself to absorb rather than float on the Magick flowing into her, and looked at Gwen. Her thoughts flitted over the last three rooms or tests. “Patti, Abe, then Kim and you?”
“More Kim, but yes, that’s what I think. Want to bet this,” Gwen turned her head to look at the idyllic, one might say perfect, garden, “is you?”
“Then why whammy me?”
“I have a theory.”
Dan’s voice came from just behind them on the path. It was a testament to the Magick’s power that Siobhan hadn’t noticed him there. Or, she flicked her gaze to the side, Prairie walking along the left path with Abe. Further along, closer to the interior wall of the castle, Patti walked with her shield held loosely in front of her while lifting her feet to avoid stepping on a runner.
A noise to the right drew Siobhan’s gaze to Ivan
Siobhan turned her attention to where Ivan walked along the adjacent path, his attention shifting from the retaining walls of the garden to the trellises and then to the raised beds of plants. Probably figuring out how it was all made, Siobhan thought.
She looked over her shoulder. Kim, walking next to Dempsey, gave a finger wave. The look she swept over Siobhan’s features was concerned, making Siobhan wonder exactly how dopey she’d been acting.
“I’m good,” she mouthed to Kim, who nodded in acknowledgement. Then she turned back to Dan. “Theory?”
“If this,” Dan waved his pencil around to encompass the garden but also with a wider sweep implying the entire environment, “is some kind of sandbox used by the creators who we have to assume have more power than we do it may be using too much power when interacting with us. It could be why some of our abilities are being super-sized in here.”
Ben walked over from where he’d been exploring the hedge wall “Like my shadows.”
Dan nodded. “Like your shadows.”
“Does this help with the test?” Dempsey asked.
“I don’t think so. Just an observation.”
“Okay, then,” Dempsey looked around the group. “Be aware your Magick may act in ways you aren’t expecting and you might get lost in it if you aren’t careful.”
“Lost?” Prairie’s pressed a hand to her shoulder, then lowered it and looked at Dempsey, unblinking. “Okay.”
“I’d rather it be ‘high-test’,” Dempsey made air quotes, “Magick than The House throwing obstacles in our way but we shouldn’t assume anything. It could be potent Magick and,” he leaned on the word for emphasis, “part of a test. Siobhan?”
When he looked at her she realized her atttention had drifted again. She lowered her hand from where it had moved on its own to cup a rose on the trellis and looked at Dempsey. “Yes.”
“Are you good?”
Her immediate reaction was to say “Yes! Sure! Of course!” but she was willing to be honest. “Probably?”
Dempsey looked to Gwen. “You keep with her?”
“Yeah. Sure. Of course!” Siobhan looked at Gwen as she echoed Siobhan’s thought.
Gwen tightened her hold on Siobhan’s waist and turned to focus on the rose trellis. “You want to go on?”
“Yes!”
Oh, was that too enthusiastic? It felt too enthusiastic. Darn.
Siobhan smoothed her hair back from her face, brushed her fingers over her flower crown, then willed sense and serenity. She was no teenager, overwhelmed by her Magick. She was a sensible, mature, adult woman who was responsible enough to guide and protect classes of children. Magick was her tool; she was not its.
When she felt calm settle like a weighted blanket over the jangle of Magick, she nodded and edited her response to a subdued, “I think we should.”
She opened the ornamental gate in the rose trellis and walked into the next square of garden. The trellis was wide enough she and Gwen easily walked side-by-side under it.
The next garden was the same layout with five paths leading to the next hedgewall. The flowers and plants in it were different, just as they’d been in the second section of the garden. Siobhan had only heard of some of what grew here. Again the temptation to just wander the rows and step into the beds and absorb it all flowered in Siobhan. Closing her eyes she drew a steadying breath and continued along the path towards the next trellis.
Acorn squash grew up the sides of the trellis and carried over the crossbar at the top. Small ripe pumpkin-shaped squash hung in the growth, begging to be picked.
Squeezing Gwen’s arm, Siobhan indicated she was fine to stand on her own. When Gwen stepped back Siobhan turned her back to the trellis and the closed gate. She skimmed her gaze over the garden, paused on the castle walls to either side, then looked at her friends.
“Does it feel weird that there hasn’t been any attack? Or obvious obstacle?”
Dempsey’s gaze darted around the area, taking a quick visual survey. “We’re missing something.”
“Yes. But what?”
“Is there any pattern to the plants?”
Siobhan sighed and shook her head. “Patterns?”
“Did you notice anything like maybe…” Ivan waved his hand to indicate the beds of plants, “maybe they grow in different seasons or they have different uses or some are those ones that grow every year.”
“Perennials?”
“That’s the plants that grow in the same place every year?”
“Yes.”
“Then, yes.”
“No.”
Ivan looked at Siobhan under lowered brows. “No, perennials don’t grow every year?”
“No.” Siobhan started to run a hand over her head, then remembered her flower crown and shifted the gesture into a smoothing of hair behind her ear. “I didn’t notice any pattern like that. But I was pretty loopy.” She slanted Gwen a smile and mouthed, ‘thanks’. “We can go back to the start and I’ll be more observant.”
“Okay.” Dempsey pivoted and strode back down the path to the last hedgerow with the rose trellis. Everyone else trailed along behind him. He stopped at the gate then turned with a frown.
“Did someone close this?”
He looked specifically at Ben who threw up his hands. “Don’t look at me. I was in the front. And the side. And also on some of the paths. But definitely not in the back closing the gate.”
Dempsey shifted to look at Patti.
“What, I’m second troublemaker?”
At Dempsey’s dry, “Yes.” Patti gave a huge shrug. “I didn’t close it. You were the last one through the gateway. Did you close it?”
“No.”
Dempsey looked to one side of the gate. Looked to the other. Ran his hand along the edges of it where it met the trellis. Ivan walked over and looked at the gate too.
“No handle?”
“No handle.”
“May I?” Ivan indicated the gate with a wave of his hand.
“Sure.”
Dempsey stepped to the side and let Ivan step up to it. He ran his hand along the crack where the gate met the trellis. He pressed his fingers to it in several places in pushed then made a ‘hmm’ sound.
Pulling a knife from his jacket he then ran this along the crack between the gate and the trellis. Where a latch would logically be he pushed the knife in and wiggled it around. Nothing happened. He squatted then dropped to his stomach to look under the crack at the bottom of the gate. After a few mikros he pushed back up to his feet and brushed his hands together, still staring at the gate.
He turned. “It opened in, right?”
Siobhan nodded. “Yes.”
“You just pushed it?”
Casting back a few meros to when she opened the two gates, Siobhan flicked through her memory of the action. Sadly she really couldn’t remember. They were just gates. And they opened. She really wasn’t paying that much attention to what amounted to a mundane action.
“I think I did.”
“Well, there’s no latch, at least not one I can find or trigger. We can’t go back.”
“Well, isn’t that just a shocker.” Kim murmured. “This, this right here,” she waved her fingers in front of her face, “is my shocked face.”
She snapped her fingers and a small flame danced over her index finger. “I could set it on fire.”
A sick feeling formed in Siobhan’s stomach at the suggestion. Whether it was the Magick of the space inside her or just keen intuition, she knew the answer was not burning the plants. Even they even would burn. If this was part of the test the chances of that were real slim. In fact destroying the hedge might seriously backfire on them.
“No. I don’t think that’s the answer.”
“Do you have another idea?”
“Actually I do.” Siobhan looked inside herself, calling to her Magick, then kind of pushed it out towards the hedge. This was very much not part of her skillset. Sure plants sometimes seemed to respond to her. She definitely had a green thumb. But actually using her Magick to affect plants? Not something she’d ever done.
Then again, Ben had never camouflaged himself with shadows before. And Kim said she’d never been carried by Air before. Dan could be right. Their Magick could have more oomph in The House. So it was worth a try, right?
Since seeing Rapunzel toss those seeds and grow a bramble wall she’d really wanted to try to see if her Magick would stretch in that way. No time like the present to test it!
Pressure formed in her forehead, like impending migraine pressure, and she started questioning if what we was doing was a great idea. For her body. Who knows if it could handle super-sized Magick?
She turned to look for Gwen. “Gwen?”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to do something stupid.”
“You? No. Stupid is my job.”
Patti raised a hand, “And mine.”
“Me too,” Kim echoed.
“Stupid is my middle name,” Ben added.
“You are,” Dan said, “usually the smart one.”
“That’s… unnerving.” Siobhan took a breath then let it out. She retrieved one of the ‘no, don’t touch’ potions from the bottom loop of her bag strap. “If I fall down or start frothing at the mouth or, I don’t know, explode, pour this down my throat.”
“Will you have a throat if you explode?” Abe asked.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t go that far. Okay.” She took another breath then turned back to the hedge. This time when her Magick built up in her head until she felt like it was going to burst out like a shoot from the ground, she drew a big gulp of Magick from the ground, channeled it through her body and sent it in a surge against the inside of her skull.
And the hedge shrugged. There was no other way to explain it but to use that human term because the hedge gave a huge heave. Dry leaves separated from the mass of it and fell to the ground. Where the trellis was flush to it the branches and leaves twisted. The trellis creaked and torqued slightly.
Then the hedge went still, reverting to his natural state. And Siobhan’s vision tunneled, black creeping in from the edges. Something in her unfurled, like the petals of a night-blooming flower at the touch of the moon. And energy that did not feel like Magick, or not like her Magick, flowed into her.
Distantly she heard Patti cry out. There was a clatter of a falling shield. Siobhan tried to turn from the hedge only to feel a great suction come from it, travelling into her, and then beyond her. And she felt the energy surge, flowing into her so fast she felt like she was caught in a spring river’s surge.
She was pretty sure her feet left the ground. And then she felt something hard smash into the back of her head. Intense pain followed the blow, different than the pain from the pressure of her Magick. Another hit and her eyes rolled back in her head and her body collapsed. Her vision went dark but she did not lose consciousness. She was still aware of her body.
As she fell – yes, she had definitely been floating because she fell far too far for her five feet five height – she felt arms cradle her and lower her to the ground. Then there was a soft hand pressing to her forehead and another over her heart. And the familiar feel of a potion vial lip pressed to her lips. She opened her mouth and let the liquid trickle in.
She heard Gwen sigh and then the press of a head against her collarbone. Lifting a shaky hand, she pressed her palm to Gwen’s hair. Then she opened her eyes, very slowly, waiting for the stab of light on pupils she knew were expanded. The “break glass in case of emergency” potion coursed through her veins, energy feeding the gulf of Magick deprivation she’d courted trying to control the hedge.
Turning her head very slightly so she didn’t jar her healing brain, she looked around until she saw Kim.
“Next time maybe kill it with fire.” Her voice cracked and she licked her lips.
Kim squatted down next to her. “Maybe next time you don’t try to kill yourself.”
“Wasn’t,” Siobhan paused and swallowed to moisten her dry throat, “trying to kill myself.”
“I’m pretty sure you munched on some of all our Magick before Gwen smashed you with that wooden sword Dempsey gave her.”
Tears pricked Siobhan’s eyes. She closed them, took a slow breath, then opened them to look at Kim. “Guess you don’t get to be the only guilty one, huh?”
Kim circled her index finger in the air. “Woo hoo! That makes me feel so much better. Thanks for falling on that sword for me.”
The potion bubbled through Siobhan, filling her veins with effervescence. She lifted her hand from Gwen’s head and scrubbed it, and her other hand, down her skin like she could sluice the effect of the potion from her body that easily.
But it wasn’t going to leave her. It wanted to live under her skin and in her veins and part of her wanted to let it because the energy it provided was addictive. Which she knew all too well. The anos of being free of it stretched behind her, smoldering.
She closed her eyes to the implication of it, refusing to give in to the terror and anxiety that chased through her almost more potent than the potion. She’d kicked it once. She could resist it again. She had to.
She squeezed Gwen’s shoulder with one hand and reached to Kim with the other. “Help me up?”
Kim took the hand. “Always.” She looked at Gwen who dipped back to her heels and offered Siobhan her hand too. Siobhan grabbed it and let Kim and Gwen draw her to her feet
She turned to look at Dempsey and Dan who were standing shoulder-to-shoulder with that look men got when they knew there was a problem but did not have a solution to it. You know, that look. Kind of like they wanted to vomit or yell or possibly burst into an interpretive dance if it would prove an answer.
Okay, maybe not that last, it amused her to imagine it.
“I don’t think I can move the hedge.”
Dempsey’s shrug lacked its usual eloquence, but hey, at least he tried. Better than most would after someone tried to eat them. Well, nibble on them. A little nibble.
She turned to look at Gwen. “Thanks for socking me in the head.”
Gwen’s eyebrows drew in. For once she didn’t have a witty comeback. Instead, she just nodded and blinked rapidly.
“Don’t make me do it again. I don’t want to do it again.” She reached over and placed her hand on Siobhan’s chest where it had been a short time before. Then she looked deep into Siobhan’s eyes. “If the way we pass this test is by sacrificing one of my best friends I don’t want to pass. Let the damned world burn.”
Siobhan lifted her hand, covered Gwen’s, then whispered through dry lips, “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Either of those things.”
“Let’s hope,” Gwen whispered back, then stepped back, pulling her hand out from under Siobhan’s and turning to the others with her usual exuberance. “There’s no going back. So, forward it is.”
Enter The Woods 