A/N: According to the Good Housekeeping UK website, the Fortnum & Mason Salted Caramel biscuit is the best able to stand up to being dunked in tea—able to survive more than 83 dunks without crumbling. The things you learn from the internet…
A/N: Some text in the flashbacks lifted directly from The Magic Bedknob by Mary Norton (Hyperion, 1943). It and its sequel, Bonfires and Broomsticks were later republished in a single volume: Bedknob and Broomstick—which inspired the 1971 Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Additional lines lifted from E4S11: Shattered Sight.
A/N: Although, as mentioned above, The Magic Bedknob was first published in 1943, according to the IWM (Imperial War Museums)'s webpage on "The Evacuated Children of the Second World War," a spate of German V-weapon attacks in the east and southeast of England—including London—in June 1944 led to a wave of evacuations from the area. The Magic Bedknob states in its first chapter that, "One summer, because it was not safe for [the Wilson Children] to be in London, they were sent to Bedfordshire to stay with an aunt." The sequel is set two years later and the war is over. For this reason, I've taken a bit of a liberty with the timeline and have the Wilsons sent away in this later evacuation, rather than in one of the earlier waves of 1939 or 1940.
A/N: The description of Miss Price is lifted directly from the book. While it bears a passing similarity to that of one Myra Gulch of Kansas (and it's certainly possible that Mary Norton was influenced by that depiction), I should probably point out that in 1944, at the age of six, it would be highly unlikely for Paul to have been familiar with the now-classic film in which she was featured.
Chapter 53
Tony picked up a chocolate-coated salted caramel biscuit from the tray on the table and dunked it into his tea even before he slid into his chair. He held it aloft with a rueful smile. "I guess I should apologize," he admitted. "I didn't want to say anything before I knew for sure what we were dealing with, but I should've expected you'd try running your own tests."
Rumple's eyes narrowed. "I take it that your abilities don't allow you to detect magic, then, or you might have saved me the trouble and the bruises."
Tia caught her breath. "Are you all right?" she asked. When he nodded, she relaxed somewhat. "We can detect people who have abilities like us. People who work magic with their minds and don't need to study spells or use wands or potions, I mean. But that's, I guess you'd call it 'telepathic'. Objects don't have minds, so there's nothing to read."
"But we have been looking for that knob off and on for a number of years," Tony nodded. "I mean, Tia has; she's a museum curator officially. Unofficially, she tries to track down artifacts that may or may not be magical but are… well, a little more than they seem. It's tricky, because as we said, we can't actually detect magic. But we do have a way of… finding people who… uh… let's just say they have family stories about old heirlooms and other items that were special." He took a breath. "In point of fact, my administrative assistant happens to be one of them. She identified the knob from that picture I snapped earlier. And if she's correct, well, it belonged to an aunt of her grandfather's in Bedfordshire, England. The knob would have come into her grandfather's possession, probably in June or July of 1944."
Rumple frowned. "So the aunt was a witch, then?"
Tia shook her head, but there was just a hint of a twinkle in her eye. "Not exactly…"
Paul Wilson was only six years old that summer, the summer that Mother took a job to help with the war efforts and sent him and his older siblings to visit Aunt Beatrice in Bedfordshire. "London's not safe for children anyway, now," she explained at the station. "Not with the bombs falling again." Paul was too little to remember the 1940 blitz, but Carey and Charles weren't. When the air raid siren went off for the first time in over three years, Carey had screamed and Charles had curled up in a ball, shaking, with his hands over his ears until Mother had half-carried, half-dragged him to the shelter.
Away from London, things went—well, they didn't go back to normal exactly; Aunt Beatrice certainly wasn't much like Mother and Bedfordshire was hardly London. But if the house was bigger and grander than what they were used to, the gardens surrounding it were simply wonderful for tag and hide-and-go-seek. They could swim in the river that cut across the property with nobody to call them back if they went out in water past their waists.
At night, though, when his brother and sister were sleeping, Paul found himself missing home. He wouldn't wake up the others to admit it; he was no baby, even if he was the youngest! Instead, he took to looking out the window beside his bed, gazing at the night sky and wondering if these were the same stars that shone over London. There seemed to be so many more of them here.
And it was on one of those nights, that he saw a woman flying past—on a broomstick! Well, perhaps, 'wobbling' was the better word for it; she certainly wasn't very steady. And then the moonlight illuminated her face and he nearly cried out in astonishment. Of all the people in the village, who would have believed that the broomstick-rider was Miss Price! Why, she was always so prim and dignified. She visited the sick and taught piano and normally rode a high bicycle with a basket in the front. She was the last person in England he would have thought was a witch. For if she was flying on a broomstick, then what else could she be?
He thought about waking the others, but she was already gone. And they wouldn't believe him anyway. No, he'd have to keep this to himself. It would be his secret. Paul smiled. He'd seldom had a secret the others didn't already know. Having a secret of his very own was nearly as good as a sixpence. And he guarded it well.
Until the day that Miss Price hurt her ankle…
Rumple shook his head in disbelief. "Flight," he said. "Even if she using an aid like a broomstick instead of attempting it under her own ability, that shouldn't have been possible. Not in this land. Not even with pixie dust."
"Yes, well," Tia nodded, "nobody told her that. And since magic is predicated on belief…"
"How?" Emma asked. "I mean, even if you believe in magic, that doesn't mean you can just... snap your fingers and have stuff happen." Not planned out, deliberate stuff, anyway, she added mentally.
Tia nodded. "Not normally, no. But… Okay. Uncle Bené explained to us about the curse that brought this town into existence, and that you came here ahead of the curse and spent most of your life in the outside world."
"Yeah," Emma said with a frown.
"All right. Let's say that a couple of years ago, you'd found a couple of old books in a second-hand store. Or in a box in a corner of the closet of an apartment you'd moved into—something like that. You flipped through them and realized that they were a how-to guide for spell-crafting. What would your first thought be?"
Emma was silent for a moment. "I guess," she said slowly, "I'd figure that someone really into Dungeons and Dragons had left a couple of guide books behind. Or… I don't know. Would an occult shop sell books like that?"
"Maybe," Tia shrugged. "I don't usually shop in those. But is it safe to say that, even if was something you'd find in an occult shop, you'd think it was about as authoritative as the horoscope column in your daily newspaper?"
Emma saw what she was getting at. "Yeah, probably."
"Okay. As near as Tony and I can figure, well, first of all, this may be a Land without Magic now, but it's more accurate to say that this is a Land drained of Magic. Magic was here once. Maybe not in such quantities as found in a number of other realms, but it existed. It still does in small pockets, though those have gotten rarer as time's passed."
Emma and Rumple exchanged a startled look. Rumple pressed his lips together and gave the barest of nods. "I suppose it shouldn't surprise me," he murmured. "Until Bae showed me that bean, I'd never heard of a non-magical land before and most of the tomes I procured on traveling between realms, if they mentioned such lands at all, they treated them as theoretical."
Tony nodded. "As near as we've been able to figure, Eglantine Price somehow came into possession of a spell book composed at a time when magic was more common here. And, unlike most people living in the last century, she believed that the text was authentic. That belief," he continued, "was strong enough for her to unlock her own talent. To a point," he added, his expression serious. "Self-taught magic can get pretty dangerous pretty quickly. It's lucky she wasn't trying to use any kind of offensive spells or… Well, let's just say that there'd probably be a crater where Bedfordshire used to be."
Emma went cold. "So, what exactly did she do?" she asked, gesturing toward the knob.
"Well," Tony said, "according to Paul's granddaughter, she was trying to buy silence with a carrot instead of a stick…"
If they hadn't found Miss Price on Aunt Beatrice's land—just where the lawn met the trees in what the children called 'the forest', then Paul might have kept the secret indefinitely. She'd had a fall; it didn't occur to his brother or sister to wonder what she'd been doing on their aunt's property in the wee hours of night or morning, and her ankle was wrenched. Carey immediately took charge, ordering Charles back to the house to ring the doctor, but Miss Price had stopped him.
"No," she'd said, gripping Carey's arm. "Just help me home. I can put one arm around your shoulders…" she'd said. Then she'd looked at Charles. "…And one around his," she added. "And I'll hop."
That didn't seem fair to Paul in the least. Being the littlest meant that nobody ever thought you could do anything. Though he had to admit that he was a lot shorter than Miss Price and she probably wouldn't manage very well if she leaned on him. But then he spied the broom lying a few yards away and he knew that there was something he could do after all. "And I'll take this," he announced.
Carey looked at the broom and got the same expression on her face she usually got back home when she had a school chum over and he tried to join in their conversations or their games. "We don't want that," she said sharply. "Put it up against the tree."
"But it's Miss Price's," he protested, not wanting to irritate his older sister but not wanting to keep something that didn't belong to them either.
"How do you mean, Miss Price's?" Carey demanded. "It's just the garden broom."
"It isn't ours, it's hers," Paul said indignantly. "It's what she fell off. It's what she rides on."
Miss Price's face, already gray with pain, went deathly pale, even as Carey repeated disbelievingly, "What she… rides on?"
"Yes," Paul insisted, not realizing that he was saying anything wrong. "Don't you, Miss Price?" He took her silence for embarrassment and went on reassuringly, "You're quite good at it, aren't you, Miss Price? You weren't at first."
Miss Price burst into tears. "Oh, dear," she wept. "Oh, dear. Now I suppose everyone knows."
Carey embraced her, quickly assuring her that nobody knew but Paul. And then they'd helped her home and gone to Aunt Beatrice's, interrogating Paul on the way. Paul didn't see why they were so cross with him; it wasn't as though it was his fault that they slept soundly each night. Besides, even if he could have awakened them in time to see her, she always looked so frightened on that broom. He'd thought to wait until she had a bit more confidence.
"It was really very selfish," Carey maintained. "Now that Miss Price has hurt her ankle, she won't be flying for weeks and Charles and I might never see her!"
By the time they sat down to lunch, Miss Price had clearly collected herself enough to come up with a cover story. Aunt Beatrice informed them that she'd sprained her ankle after a fall from her bicycle and, good neighbor that she was, felt obligated to send her over a basket of peaches. Carey offered to bring it.
And so it was that, later that afternoon, the children found themselves as Miss Price's house for the second time that day. She'd been in much better spirits, thanking them for the peaches, finding a picture book for Paul to look at, and teaching Carey and Charles how to play backgammon. It wasn't until after tea, when it had been nearly time to start back, that Carey had screwed up her courage enough to ask, "Miss Price? If it isn't rude to ask, are you a witch?"
Miss Price sat very still for a moment. "Well," she said slowly, "I am and I'm not."
"You mean, you are, sort of," Paul suggested.
"I mean," she said, "that I am studying to be a witch."
Carey's eyes widened. "Oh, Miss Price," she said, elated, "How terribly clever of you!" And when Miss Price lowered her eyes with a blush and the faintest of smiles, she went on, "However did you think of it?"
"Well," Miss Price said, "ever since I was a girl, I've sort of had a knack for it, but somehow, what with piano lessons, and looking after my mother, I never seemed to have the time to take it up seriously."
Rumple leaned forward with an incredulous look. "She'd always had a knack for it?" he repeated skeptically. "You'll excuse me if I find that a bit farfetched."
"I think," Tia said slowly, "that she might have been a bit… like us," she motioned to Tony. "We could always do things," she elaborated. "We usually didn't think about whether we could or not."
"If she'd just used magic instinctively once," Tony nodded, "and realized what she'd done, if she did have that kind of raw potential, then…"
"Like I did when I faced Cora," Emma interjected.
Rumple shook his head. "That was in the Enchanted Forest. I doubt you could have done anything of the sort in this land."
Emma took a breath. "I… think I might have," she said slowly. Ignoring his disbelieving look, she took another breath. "You know that Ingrid was my foster mother for a few months, right?"
"It's not as though I didn't see the recording, dearie," Rumple retorted. Then, a bit more softly, he added, "and I know you mentioned on an earlier occasion that she attempted to unlock your gift and very nearly killed you."
"Yeah," Emma said, "but the reason she thought her crazy idea might work was because I think I did do something a week earlier than that. We were at an arcade. I was playing one of those coin games where you try to snag a prize with a mechanical claw—you know the kind I mean?"
Rumple frowned for a moment. "I believe I do. I take it you were successful in your attempt?"
"Yeah," Emma said again. "But right before I dropped the claw, there was something weird: the… the electricity went wild for a second. I thought it was a short. I was about to let go the control, but Ingrid stopped me. She said…
Don't let go. Win.
…A-and I did," she finished.
"That still could have been coincidence," Rumple pointed out. "You're certainly capable of deep focus, when circumstances warrant."
"The same thing happened when I was giving birth to Henry."
Rumple frowned for a moment. Then he sucked in a breath and let it out. "Very well," he said slowly. "There may be something to what you say. At any rate," he turned back to Tony, "I believe that you were in the middle explaining about the knob."
Tony nodded. "Yeah. Well, Miss Price was flattered by the children's interest. At least, she was, at first. But then she realized that if her secret got out, things could go pretty badly for her. And children… Well, they often talk…"
Maybe they shouldn't have begged for another display of magic. Maybe they should have just changed the subject. For now, Miss Price had a wild look in her eyes as she repeated slowly, "There must be some way… There must be some way…"
"Some way of what?" Charles asked finally
And then, Miss Price smiled a far nastier smile than the children had ever seen on her face before. "Of keeping your mouths shut!" she rapped out.
"Oh, Miss Price!" Carey gasped.
"Of keeping your mouths shut," Miss Price repeated.
"Wh-what do you mean?" Carey asked. "You… you don't want us to tell anyone else that…"
"…That you're a witch?" Paul finished.
She didn't seem to be listening. "In just a moment, I'll think of something. In just a moment…"
The siblings exchanged apprehensive looks. And then, Carey squared her shoulders, got up, and approached Miss Price's chair. "Listen, Miss Price," she said firmly, "we helped you with your ankle. We promise you we won't tell anyone. But if that's not good enough… then instead of using some kind of-of nasty magic on us, you can stop us in a nice way, can't you?"
Miss Price blinked. "How would you suggest I do that?" she asked, but she sounded as though she might be considering the idea.
"Well," Carey thought for a moment, "you could… maybe give us something magic—and if we told anyone about you, we'd have to lose it. The minute we told, the thing wouldn't be magic anymore."
"Yes," Charles leaned forward, his eyes alight with possibilities. "Like a ring we could twist and a slave would come. And if we told, they wouldn't come."
Miss Price hesitated. "I couldn't manage a slave, she protested.
"Well, something like that, then."
For a long time, Miss Price said nothing and neither did the children. The silence grew awkward, but nobody broke it. Then, all at once, she smiled—a lot more cheerfully this time. "You know," she said, "there is a spell I've been meaning to try out. Now, I'm not sure that it will work, but… has anyone got a ring on them?"
Nobody had. Paul checked his pockets, but all he found in them was the knob he'd removed from his bedpost that morning.
"Well, anything," Miss Price persisted. "A bracelet would do. It should be something you can twist."
Carey wasn't wearing a bracelet either.
"You can use this," Paul exclaimed, springing forward with the bed knob. "That's just what this does. It twists and twists. I twisted it off," he added triumphantly.
Miss Price accepted the knob and studied it carefully. "Let me see…" she began. Then she smiled once more. "You know, Paul," she said, "I do believe that this is the best thing you could have given me. Now, I can craft quite a wonderful spell with this, but it will take some doing, so please, children, be quiet and let me concentrate."
There was another long silence—nearly, but not quite as uncomfortable as the first had been. Finally, Miss Price handed the knob back to Paul."
"Is it done?" the boy breathed.
"Yes, it's quite done," she nodded. "And it's a very good spell indeed. It's something you'll enjoy. But don't get yourselves into trouble with it."
"How do we use it?" Charles asked.
"Just take it home and screw it back on the bed. Only don't screw it more than halfway."
"And then?"
Miss Price beamed at Charles. "Then? Then twist it a little and wish, and the bed will take you wherever you want to go!"
Rumple was shaking his head, his expression not disbelieving, but furious. "Of all the irresponsible, stupid…" His voice trailed off for a moment, then came back all the angrier. "Bad enough for a novice to attempt so advanced a spell unsupervised, but then to entrust such an artifact to a group of children without even bothering to test it first? Did she have any idea what she might have unleashed?"
The Apprentice coughed and a flush of pink came to his cheeks. "It's… not an uncommon failing for a pupil to think they know more than they do. In my case, it was an enchantment on a broom that went awry—to disastrous result." At Rumple's thunderous expression, he held up both hands in a placating gesture and continued in a more conciliatory tone, "While you and I aren't that far apart in our thinking, I suppose I'm a bit more tolerant, seeing as the children—and Bedfordshire—remain, I presume, unharmed?"
Tia nodded. "Well, the Wilsons are getting on in years, but they're all still with us, yes. In any event, one element Miss Price worked into the spell was that only Paul could actually use the knob."
"Paul," Rumple repeated. "The youngest; a boy of six, I believe you said? I think you'll excuse my not greeting this revelation with a sense of relief."
Tony sighed. "Let's agree that Miss Price wasn't above a bit of showing off and that she probably was more invested in pulling off a difficult spell than in asking herself whether it was the right spell to give to three grade-school kids." He dunked his biscuit again and took a bite. With his mouth still full, he added, "When I was their age, I'd've been thrilled with a cookie jar that never ran out of cookies or a pen that didn't leave blotches. I was going to say, 'one that would fix spelling mistakes'—I used to make too many of those, but," he winced, "that was before I experienced auto-correct."
"Yeah," Emma said, "okay, so we know what the knob does. But why don't the kids have it anymore? How did it end up here?"
"I can't answer your last question," Tia admitted. "But as far as the first, well, you only know half of what the knob can do right now."
"But you'll enlighten us?" Rumple asked, his voice low and almost frightening in its calm.
"I'm not sure I ought to," Tia admitted, looking a bit flustered. "I mean, it's going to be a little hard to believe."
"Hard to believe," Rumple repeated. "Harder to believe than the notion of a neophyte student of magic who manages to teach herself the craft from an old book in a realm that's not supposed to have magic, who somehow contrives to bind a translocation spell to an old knob which she entrusts to a six-year-old and his elder siblings and somehow this entire… incident is able to pass unnoticed, both by the media and by the next door neighbors? To use allow a phrase more familiar to Ms Swan's lips to pass my own, 'Try me'."
Tia winced and took another breath. "We've… been in town long enough to have heard a few things. And Uncle Bené's filled us in on some others. So, I guess you ought to know…" She looked down for a moment, closed her eyes, and then looked up again nervously. "Zelena wasn't the first person in this land to cast a time travel spell…"
"Much better," Maleficent smiled, as Lily resumed her human form. "Just a bit of scaling left around your eyes this time. And you still have your claws."
Lily looked down at her hands and winced. They were about twice their regular size and their nails were long, tapered, and a deep berry red. She loved the shade, but she didn't love that they were nearly half the size of her fingers. She focused for a moment and her hands shrank. Wondering, she gazed down at her reflection in the still waters of the lake. The scaling looked a little strange—like she'd been halfway through being done up like a Cardassian for a Star Trek episode and gotten out of the makeup chair early—but it wasn't actually bad. "Could I… keep it like this for a little?" she asked.
Maleficent shrugged, but she was smiling. "If you like. I would prefer that you master the complete transformation on your own, at least once, but once you've done that…" She took another step to join Lily at the edge of the lake. "It really does suit you, you know," she said.
Lily smiled back. Then she shook her head. "Maybe I ought to stay in dragon mode a while longer," she sighed.
Maleficent saw the shadows in her daughter's eyes. "If that's what you'd prefer," she said slowly. "But is it? Or is it something that you feel you must do?"
Lily closed her eyes. "When I came here, I-I really messed things up. When I found out you were dead, I wanted to make everyone pay and I… After everything I did, there's no way anybody's going to give me a chance here." She winced. "I know I said I'd give this place a week—and I will!" she added quickly. "But when that's over, I don't think anyone's going to want me to stick around longer besides you."
"If people have a problem with your being here," Maleficent said with a dangerous note creeping into her voice, "they can take it up with me."
"I don't want to stay in a place where everyone hates me. And they're right to," she added. "After what we—Ursula and Cruella too, yeah, but a lot of it was my idea—after what we did, if Rumpelstiltskin doesn't… doesn't rip my heart out and crush it, Zelena will. You can't protect me all the time and I can't always be on my best behavior. I'm going to mess up again and I don't want it to be here."
In the waters of the lake, she saw her mother lift a hand and tried not to flinch when it came down on her shoulder, but Maleficent had noticed. "I'm sorry," she said at once. "I didn't mean to…" She took a breath. "In any event, Rumpelstiltskin has agreed to relinquish any claim he has against you."
"Why?" Lily asked, wincing again as she heard her own voice and realized that her shock probably sounded a lot like belligerence. "Why would he do that after…?"
"I asked him," Maleficent said.
Lily shook her head. "You didn't have to do that." Maleficent said nothing, but when she put her arm on her daughter's shoulder again, Lily didn't try to remove it. "What did he make you do in return?" she asked nervously.
Maleficent drew herself upright at that. "He didn't make me do anything," she said loftily. "He merely requested that I relinquish an outstanding claim I had against him. Considering I had no plans to exercise it in the first place, I agreed. Knowing Rumple, I'm sure he thinks he's gotten the better end of that bargain, but let him."
Lily turned her mother's words over in her mind a few times. Then, cautiously, she smiled. "Thanks," she said. "But what about Zelena? A-and the damage I caused to the clock tower? Was anyone in there when I brought it down?" Something about Maleficent's expression made her shoulders slump. "There was, wasn't there?" she whispered. "Who?"
"Some fairy, I think," Maleficent said slowly. "And Rumple's wife and her father."
That friendly librarian who'd been so helpful when she'd been trying to feel her way about the town. "I hurt Belle?"
"Her father's poorly," Maleficent allowed. Briefly, she explained how his injuries had happened.
Lily felt her shoulders slump. "It was an accident," she said, knowing that it wouldn't change a damned thing.
"I know it was. So does Rumple," Maleficent murmured. "All the same, he does seem to command a certain influence here. You… might want to consider apologizing to him. The others as well, perhaps, but it might be best to start with the one most likely to accept it."
Lily nodded, tight-lipped. "I'll think about it, okay?"
"Of course," Maleficent nodded. She laced her fingers together and raised her hands over her head in a most undignified stretch. "Going by the sun's position, I do believe it's past midday," she said. "Do transformations leave you as hungry as they did me when I was learning?"
"I could probably eat a horse," Lily muttered. Then, quickly, "Not that I'd actually want to; but yeah, I'm hungry."
"Should we head back to Granny's then?"
Lily hesitated. "Would she have any more of that frumenty? The savory kind?"
"I don't think I saw it on the menu earlier," Maleficent murmured. "But it's no hard trick to produce some." The wind started to pick up and she pulled her gloves out of her pocket. "I think we'll enjoy it more if we got out of the elements, mind," she said. "We could go back to the cave. And if your friend is working in the tunnels, well, if you wanted to ask him to join us, it's not as though there won't be enough food."
This time, Lily's face broke into a grin. "Yeah, that'd be on fleek."
Maleficent blinked. "Please. I'm not familiar with that expression. Are you accepting my suggestion?"
"Yasss…" Seeing her mother's half-hopeful, half-confused expression, Lily laughed. "I'm accepting it, Mom. Honest."
Rumple shook his head angrily. "Time travel. Don't you think you're stretching my credulity just a bit too far?"
"We didn't believe it either at first," Tony nodded understandingly. "Again, if her power worked like ours—"
"The fact that she needed to study her craft out of books seems to disprove that notion," Rumple scoffed.
"If she needed to," Tia said, "you're right. But… did you ever watch Dumbo?"
Rumple's eyebrows knit together. "That tale of the large-eared elephant who gained adulation when he discovered he could fly? I'm familiar with the plot."
"I was thinking about the part where he thought that the only reason he could fly was because that mouse gave him a feather and told him it was magic. Only it was just a normal feather; the flying was all him." She took a sip of tea and made a face when she realized it had gone cold. "I think Miss Price did have an affinity for magic—our kind, I mean. But she was so sure that magic had to come from books and scrolls and things that she never tried doing it any other way. In any case, if you put that knob back on the bedpost it came off from and twist it one way, it will take you anywhere in the present. Twist it in the opposite direction, and it will take you anywhere in the past. At least, it did twice that we know of."
"Twice," Emma repeated. "And they didn't change anything?" She frowned. "Wait. Did they change anything? I mean, would we know?"
"An excellent question," the Apprentice approved. He looked at Tony and Tia. "Well?"
"As near as we—or anyone—can tell," Tony said, "they didn't. It wasn't as though they landed in Sarajevo in 1914 right when Princip was about to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and set off World War One. The Wilson kids turned up in London in 1666 during the reign of Charles II. About the only initial change they made was disclosing to the first person they met that the Great Fire was about a week or so away, but it wasn't like he could stop it from happening."
"The only initial change?" Rumple echoed, raising an eyebrow.
"That first person they met? They… brought him back to twentieth-century Bedfordshire with them. He stayed with Miss Price for a few weeks. Then he wanted to return to his own time. And Miss Price decided to go with him. And that," Tia added, "is where things really get complicated."
"Oh, I think we hit that point some time ago," Rumple muttered, loud enough for them all to hear.
Tony sighed. "Point taken. Miss Price, by that time, had decided on her own that magic was too dangerous to use safely. She left her books behind, destroyed her notes, and…" He took a breath, "had Paul stand beside the bed when he twisted the knob and spoke the command to send the bed—with herself and the man they'd brought forward with them—back to the seventeenth century. Which, of course, meant that there could be no return trip ever."
"Not with the bed back in 1666 and the only person able to use the knob nearly three centuries away," Tia agreed. "Even if she'd wanted to go back, there was just no way." She topped up her cup with fresh tea. "I found the bed in an antique shop a few years ago. It needed some restoring, but it was in pretty good condition, on the whole. I'd met Paul when I was vacationing in England some time before that and I knew he'd want the piece, knob or no knob."
"And you don't know how it ended up in my shop," Rumple said.
"I could hazard a guess," Tony ventured. "See, if Miss Price ever realized that she could still work magic even without all the components she'd always thought she needed, then sooner or later, she'd probably have been tempted to. She might even have figured out how to modify that traveling spell to remove the original safeguard, so that anyone could use the bed. In the 1600s, witchcraft, magic, necromancy… all of that was illegal. Sometimes it was a capital crime, depending on the locale. So in that climate, I'm guessing that she probably thought that the best thing she could do was unscrew the knob, bury it somewhere—or maybe chuck it in the Thames—and just forget that the bed had ever done anything… special."
Rumple nodded slowly. "That's easily the most plausible thing you've said since you began," he allowed. "When I brought magic here, I did so by pouring a potion into a well. A well," he added, "which they say has the power to restore that which was lost. Magic calls out to its own. In that initial influx of power," his voice was thoughtful, "yes, it could have collected such objects of strong magic as were scattered about this realm. And while I know that you were speculating a moment ago, I think that your notion that Price disposed of the knob in a body of flowing water is quite likely. I'm not entirely certain of the powers vested in our well. But its waters do run deep and may well reach the ocean. If they do, I ought to point out that the Thames does flow into the North Sea, which in turn flows into the Atlantic. Which means that those waters could also flow into our well." He closed his eyes. "At least, it's an explanation that fits what you're telling me."
"So, what happens now?" Emma asked.
"Now?" Rumple sniffed. "Now that we know the knob's history, I think it best we find a safe way to disenchant it. The ramifications if the thing should be misused would be…"
"I thought you said before that it was too dangerous," Emma said.
"Well, now that we know what the spell on the knob was designed to do," Rumple smiled, "we can fashion the proper safeguards. It's translocation, not lightning or fire. Nor is it a sleeping curse—something I'd wondered about, seeing as it was cast on a bed knob," he added. He glanced at Tia. "Once the spell's neutralized, I suppose that if you want to restore the fitting to its original furnishing, I'll give you a fair price for it."
Tony and Tia exchanged a look. Tia nodded slowly. "I don't imagine Paul will be happy about it," she admitted, "but I think we can talk him 'round."
"I could ask Carey to—" Tony started.
"So he can yell at her instead of us? No, if we've decided what we're doing, then I think we need to step up and take responsibility for informing him."
The Apprentice picked up the knob again. "This won't be an easy task, I'm afraid," he rumbled. "The spells binding this object are old and tangled. Their knots are pulled tight and it will require careful work to unravel them. Still, I do think that the risk of matters going awry is minimal, so long as the knob and bed remain unjoined."
"Since the bed is in London right now," Tia smiled, "that should be fine."
Rumple chortled suddenly and they all looked at him. "What's so funny?" Emma asked.
Rumple smiled broadly. "Oh, I was just imagining the look on Zelena's face when she learns that her greatest feat of magic was actually performed by a neophyte witch in a land purportedly without magic, more than six decades before she managed it..."
Ever since she'd started turning into a dragon, Lily had noticed that her appetite seemed to have increased. She'd eaten more than three helpings of the frumenty, plus a haunch of venison, and she probably could have had more. If this kept up, she'd be the same size in her human form as in her dragon!
She wished she didn't think that Maleficent was right: she did owe Rumpelstiltskin an apology. She probably owed him more than that, but at least she could start by apologizing and see where things went. If he was going to hold her guilt over her head and try to extort favors from her like so many had in the past, well, she'd teach him a thing or two about messing with dragons. But if he was going to give her another chance, like her mother had implied, well, she didn't get many of those. Maybe she could manage not to stuff this one up. Maybe—
A hand clamped down on her shoulder and spun her about and she found herself face to face with a furious witch. Zelena's red curls seemed to be fighting to escape the tight twist they were bound in. Her eyes were blazing. And green magic seemed to swirl about her as she snarled, "You!"
