“You are not having a particularly vivid hallucination,” the face said. “I am very real. The Godmother had high hopes of your intelligence, and she sent you the mirror with the presumption that she would be speaking to you through it eventually. I suppose your level of curiosity is high enough to make you wait. Good. Please enjoy this pleasant scene while the Godmother finishes her other business.”
The face gave way to a view of a field of flowers with butterflies floating over it. There was the sound of running water in the distance. It was a cloudless day, with no sign of anything like a human being — and after a while, she began to notice that she didn’t recognize any of the flowers.
She stared at the mirror and the scene it held, too dumbfounded to know what to think at this point. What was that face? It had acted like someone’s private secretary. How had it been able to talk to her? How had it known her? It had addressed her by name!
Well, the answer was obviously, by magic, but it wasn’t an answer that made her feel any less queasy. The invisible servants were only invisible; she had quickly come to think of them as just people that you couldn’t see. It wasn’t as if they were disembodied arms, or trays on legs. She hadn’t really had a chance to think about the mirror….
But free-floating faces in unnatural colors that spoke directly to her, well, that was something else entirely. It said magic in a way that she just couldn’t ignore. And she wasn’t sure she liked it. It made all the rules of the world seem as malleable as a handful of warm wax. Anything could happen when you had a world with green talking faces in mirrors in it.
The scene of butterflies and flowers was not giving her any answers, only more questions.
Just when she was about to give up and wrap the silk around the glass again, the face came back.
The effect of the floating green face in a sea of black was doubly unnerving the second time. There was no hint of anything like a body, nothing to indicate that there was anything but the face. It could just as easily have been a floating, talking mask. Hollow. Soulless?
It was worse when it smiled. “Oh, good, you’re still there. The Godmother likes patience and perseverance and she’ll be pleased that you waited. She’ll see you now.”
“She — what?” was all that Bella had time for, before the green face faded into white fog, and the white fog resolved into another image.
This was a lovely, blond-haired woman seated incongruously on a wall around a raised flower bed in what looked like a kitchen garden. She looked to be older than Bella, perhaps her middle twenties, but her unconscious air of assurance and authority made her seem older. Rather than the opulent gown that Bella was expecting a Godmother to wear, the woman was wearing a very plain linen chemise and brown moleskin skirt, with a voluminous apron tied neatly over both. Her hair was tied back with a simple lavender bow.
“Hello, Isabella,” the woman said, staring right at her as she gaped in surprise. “I rather expected you would be clever enough to think that the mirror could work both ways in some cases. I hope you won’t mind me continuing to work while we talk. You caught me at a disadvantage. I thought you would be so busy looking in on your family that you wouldn’t get around to trying to see me until later today.” She chuckled. “And I had it all planned out, too. Ah, well, that’s overconfidence for you. Instead of my impressing you by looking more regal than your Queen herself, you catch me up to my elbows in planting. Perhaps that is just as well. I never much like trying to intimidate people, anyway.”
The woman turned back to the bed, in which she was planting tiny seedlings. A moment later, Bella realized that she must be working in another hothouse, just like the one here at Redbuck. Only…much bigger, since Bella couldn’t see any glass walls from where the woman was sitting. That, surely, was the only possible explanation for someone planting seedlings in the dead of winter.
“Well?” Godmother Elena said, when Bella didn’t immediately answer. “What is it you want to hear from me? I assume you must have plenty of questions, so you might as well start asking them. I can’t keep the mirror spell open between us forever, you know. Even a Godmother has her limits.”
“That is a good, and a dutiful, question. I know he is quite distressed over your problem. Please know that he does not blame you, although for a while, before I convinced him that Sebastian’s escape was nothing more than a terrible accident, I feared he was going to take one of those antique crossbows down off the wall of his study and come hunting, even if he didn’t know what for.”
She felt a rush of both relief and grief. Her father didn’t blame her!
And her father knew the truth…
“You may not be aware of this, but not only is your father a reliable man, a trusted merchant who turned down the position of Guildmaster of the Merchants Guild several times because he wished to devote as much time as he can to his family, he has from time to time served as an advisor to the King.” She nodded at Bella’s surprise. “We knew we could trust him implicitly, so we told him the truth. He deserves nothing less. He is concerned for you, of course, but he agreed that this is the only possible course of action we could have taken,” Elena told her, in brisk and no-nonsense tones. “Privately, he is probably deeply conflicted, but he knows what his duty to his King and Kingdom demand.”
What on earth does that mean?
“I don’t know what he told your stepmother and stepsisters,” the Godmother continued. “Likely something less sensational than ‘my daughter was bitten by a werewolf.’ I wouldn’t trust your stepmother with any information that I didn’t want spread across half the city in two days, and we have been working very diligently these past few years to keep Sebastian’s condition a secret.”
Once again, Bella felt her throat close at the memory of her father’s haggard face. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this! What do you mean by my father’s duty? Why are you keeping this so secret? It’s not as if Sebastian and I are important. You could just — ” she waved her hands vaguely “ — put us on an island or a deserted tower in inaccessible mountains or something. If you’d done that in the first place with Sebastian, none of this ever would have happened to me, and I would be back at home right this moment!“ She couldn’t help herself; there was accusation in her voice and she wasn’t going to apologize for it, either. If Sebastian had been put somewhere where it wouldn’t matter if he escaped confinement, she would be at home, safe, right this minute.
“Such places are harder to come by than you might think,” the Godmother said, dryly. “Adventurers have this habit of stumbling on them. But that is not why we are trying to keep this from being generally known. The truth is,
