Episode 7: The Worst Version of Himself, Chapter 4

Seonaidh hurried back to her room in the tower. It wasn't so much that she was worried what her Grandfather would do if he caught her out of her appointed rooms. It was more that everything she hoped might help her situation was in that room. She had to get a message to Ezekiel. Whatever her Grandfather was planning, he would almost certainly not include her. He had made it perfectly clear that her only function now was to remain here and protect the castle: its contents, its grounds and its lineage. She stumbled into the safe haven of the room, waving a hand at the door to bar it behind her. All around her she could feel the castle and the land reaching out to her, their sympathetic arms offering comfort and protection. She groaned. She had landed on her knees when the adrenaline of her sprint up the stairs wore off. Through the denim of her jeans she could feel warm blood meet with cool stone. Her hands were no better. Scuffed and scratched from the rough walls, they had burst on connection with the hard floor. Her nails were broken. Her bright blond curls tumbled erratically around her face. She was broken, bruised, bloodied, exhausted, terrified and alone.

She got up.

Shaking like a willow over water, she turned her thoughts inward, focussed them, then sent them outward. They chased through the castle, searching high and low through rooms and attics and cellars and everywhere in between. Finally, she found it. But it was no use. The one item she had hoped could bring her help was in the very room her Grandfather had taken over, or perhaps reclaimed, as his own. She sought her mind for alternatives. A mirror was no more than a captured reflection. A magic mirror, little more than that and less in its origins. They both started the same way, didn't they? A mirror, a reflection, that was enchanted to show something other than it ought. He had been carefully, her Grandfather, when he had moved her to this room. He had made certain that nothing remotely mirror-like had been left for her use. Now she had a theory why. If she had power over the contents of the castle, and could bend them to her will, could she make a mirror show her whatever she wanted? Could she create something she had only heard of in fairy tales until a few short months ago? And could she do so without even having a mirror to use?

There may be no mirrors or metals to reflect an image in in her ineffectual prison, but there was water. He could not leave her here with nothing to drink. There was an old enamelled bowl of fruit on the dresser. She emptied its contents onto her bed and replaced them with clear water from the porcelain ewer left for her. Some of the water slopped over the edge and splattered on the stone floor. She waited, cross-legged on the floor, for the miniature waves to settle. Then she closed her eyes, turning her mind inward once again, shutting out all distractions, and directing it at the water. For a moment she saw it, particles of hydrogen and oxygen held together by forces she was no longer sure were stronger than her own. She drew back, holding her consciousness above the surface of the liquid, and focussed on the room she had glimpsed so often in her stolen chats with Ezekiel. That was the mirror in the main office of the library, he had told her. That was the one he was most likely to be near, but so was everyone else, so she should be careful to use it when the others were in bed. She didn't care who was awake or asleep now, or even what time it was there. If Ezekiel answered her, so much the better, but right now she'd take advice from any of them.

She got Charlene.

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"This is ridiculous!" Stone groaned. They were on their third safe. The first had been a simple lock, which Jones had, eventually, picked open. Inside the safe had been a pair of glasses, which of course the thief claimed as his own. The glasses had revealed another message, this time longer than one word. It had been a riddle. The riddle, which, had the first word spotted by Cassie not suggested so already, made it clear the series of puzzles had been left specifically for them, also boiled down to another key word. That word revealed another safe. That safe required numbers. Numbers that were keyed in next to letters. The letters themselves made no sense to him. There was no pattern, no particular language he could detect. There wasn't even the same number of letters in each case. There was a "V", an "A", a "W". Then there was an odd "Sv" followed by an "N". Apparently it was the very "Sv" that had confused him that had cracked the case for Cassandra. They were all scientific units. He and the thief had stood back while she incomprehensibly came up with a number for each of them, then crowded forward to see the contents as the door swung open. There was a key. Fabulous: they had a key. Only problem: no lock. Then there had been the letters on the wall behind them. Another glamour dropped when they had solved the science puzzle. This one was definitely more along his lines. Words were scrawled on the wall in a cursive script. The language was one he was only vaguely familiar with, but he managed to work it out. Another riddle. Together, they solved it, which meant he and Cassie had thought out loud while they mulled it over and Jones had jumped in with the solution. That solution had led to most of the letters falling away from the wall and disappearing before they hit the ground. The ones that were left rippled as if in a breeze. An anagram. Cassie had been the first to decipher it, naturally, and before its echoes had even had the chance to die away, the third safe appeared before them.

Jacob Stone ran a hand through his hair in exasperation. This one was numbers again, but an old fashioned analogue dial rather than the digital version of before. The thief had his ear to it even as the cowboy's internal rant ran its course. Beside him, Cassie had a thoughtful look on her face, as if the first number Jones had called out had been familiar. The kid called out a second and her blue eyes went wide. Jacob chuckled as the woman he loved batted away the thief's hands like a bickering prom queen and took over at the dial. The safe door swung open to reveal an inlaid wooden box. The box was fastened with an ornate bronze lock. The key they had found fitted the lock.

Cassie did the honours and lifted the domed lid. Nestled in a dark blue velvet, a deep red stone glowed with some internal light. Cassandra reached out a hand and he grabbed it. What if all this was just a trap for them after all? While they were arguing about it, the thief snuck in and unhooked something from the lid of the box. It was a folded piece of paper that, on closer inspection, turned out to be a letter from the otherworldly couple apologising for the safety measures they had put in place before their flight. They had assured the Librarians they were safe, or as safe as could be expected for now, and had explained how to lift the glamours and enchantments disguising the room. They had also explained why, when rumours came to them of the death of a valkyrie, they had felt the need to flee. The letter had gone on to talk about the possible places the couple might find themselves able to build a new portal, pointing out that the sites of the old portals were always the easiest to use. It even went on to describe how the humans, when faced with these portals, had built temples over them, or sometimes under them or around them, and how the oldest of these had been deliberately buried by the humans ten thousand years ago. In fact the oldest Trudi could think of that even still worked was at least five thousand years old and hidden below a city on a small island somewhere in the Mediterranean.

Stone looked up as Cassandra finished reading the rambling epistle. "We need to get this back to Flynn and Eve."

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"We have a location!" Stone yelled, bursting through the double doors a full three strides ahead of Jones and Cassandra.

"We have a bigger problem," drawled Charlene, unrepentantly throwing verbal iced water on the cowboy.

"We have bad guys, end of the world," retorted the peeved art historian, "with an option on how to stop 'em. I mean, what beats that?"

"We have one of the few semi-immortals actively on our side about to go rogue and make things ten times worse," itemised Charlene, with secretarial sangfroid, "dark magic is being used in one of the places it really, really shouldn't, and a fairy princess in her very own tower breaking a whole lot of rules calling for help."

That brought a spark back into the thief's eyes. "Seonaidh? What's wrong? What rules? And how'd she call for help: he took her phone and all her mirrors away!"

Charlene winced. She hadn't missed the push it had taken to gain Ezekiel's attention, or the careless, nameless reference to his former mentor. There was no way this was going to end well. "Well 'he' did," she intoned, watching the youngest member of their group carefully. "That's just one of the rules she broke calling here. Your young lady made a mirror of her own. Jenkins, or Galeas, or whatever he's calling himself these days, has been pushing her. He thinks that, because her powers extend beyond the curtain wall of the castle, she's already more powerful than Flora. He doesn't know that Flora's powers extended that far too. As the family gained more land, and the boundaries of the estate grew, her abilities and protection grew with them. She had already learned how to control her magic though. Your girl Seonaidh seems to have skipped that lesson."

"What's wrong?" Ezekiel repeated, breaking away from Cassandra's side and pushing past Stone to come face to face with the older woman. Charlene folded her arms and stood her ground. The glare she levelled at the ex-thief made him think twice about the tone he used next. "She wouldn't have called here like that for no reason, and you said she called for help, so what help did she need. What's going on there?"

"Did you even hear the first two items on my little list?" Charlene remonstrated, pushing past the boy and dragging a drawer out of the card catalogue. "Galahad, the Perfect Knight, has gone rogue. He is going after the Serpent Brotherhood himself, which will, by the way, get him killed. Right now, I'm not even ten percent sure that fact bothers him in the slightest. It bothers me, and it should bother you, if only for the fact that we're going to need him if this latest ploy of theirs does go all the way to the final battle. Add to that the ridiculous idea that he's actually going after his own armour and weaponry first, which, might I remind you, is already in their control and, indeed, under it! And it's exactly what they'll expect him to do, so no matter how indestructible he may think he is, they will be ready for him! And to top it all off, your girlfriend described the spell he used to find it clearly enough for those of us who have actually spent a lifetime around magic, albeit a single one, to know it is not an enchantment of pixie dust and rainbows! And he cast it in the oldest part of a fae stronghold! The man is an imbecile and he's going to get us all killed!"

Jones took the slip of paper the seething Charlene foisted on him and looked down at it. "I know where this is," he faltered, recognising the artefact listed on the card. "But it's not this, he's just grieving."

"Check," Charlene demanded, extending and wiry and immobile arm in the direction of the main Library. "Save me the trouble of working out what in the world you did to my filing system out there! And you'd better pray that thing has fallen in his pocket at some point, because if this is him without it we're gonna need more than heaven to help us!"

Mollified, and possibly slightly terrified, the thief departed, dodging with fluid ease through the swinging double doors as da Vinci entered. He looked from the grey face of Charlene, to the silent and stern features of Stone, to the wide eyed worry of Cassandra.

"Something has happened," da Vinci stated warily. "What?"

"Just get Flynn and Eve back here," ordered Charlene, disappearing back up the stairs. "Pronto, or whatever the Italian equivalent is."

Jacob raised a sheepish hand and opened his mouth, but before he could say 'hey presto', a shimmering, translucent blue hand clamped it shut. He glanced at his own girlfriend to see an expression reminiscent of one he'd seen in a certain tapestry nearly a year ago. He held his hands up in surrender. The blue hand disappeared.

"I will go see if Charlene needs any help," sighed Cassandra, enunciating her words clearly and slowly. "You stay and help Leo reset the door for Flynn and Eve. When Ezekiel gets back come and tell us what he found. If you're bored I suggest you start looking for a way to take down Jenkins because if there is one, other than just Seonaidh and I, you can be sure the Serpent Brotherhood will already know about it."

"Yes ma'am," Stone muttered, watching today's short pleated skirt flounce up the stairs.

"Was Jenkins the only man around here who was allowed make his own mind up about things?" Da Vinci asked with a petulant sigh.

"You're kidding, right?" Stone raised an eyebrow at the old master. "You've met Eve."