Page 13 of Muddled Magic

If Grandmother had actually let the trees grow big and tall here, I’d climb one and hide in its branches behind the screen of leaves, shutting myself away from everyone except the birds that wanted nothing from me. I could just enjoy them and their songs, but no such trees existed within the estate, and if I wanted music, I needed Otter.

Maybe he’d finally figured out how to enchant that flute to play itself and I could take it with me.

But my vagabond cousin was nowhere to be found.

“Aunt Hyacinth?” I ventured. Maybe she knew where her son was.

“Eh! Time for my nap,” my aunt said, marching off into the house.

Everyone knew not to mess with Aunt Hyacinth when it was time for her nap. She took one once a day at three p.m. like clockwork, though it was debatable how effective they really were. Most of the time she was refreshed, but sometimes she looked drained.

I huffed a sigh and waited a beat before sneaking into the manor after her. Otter was the kind of person who could always be found outside, so maybe that was his secret—he was somewhere inside the house to throw everyone off his scent. Maybe he really had found a hiding spot. And maybe he’d let me share it.

My heart and mind were still in an uproar over my conversation with Grandmother that morning. I felt lost, like I was back on the lake again when I was ten, waking up from an afternoon nap in my canoe to have found Marten had crept alongside during my slumber and stolen my paddle. I’d been rudderless, an incoming storm turning the gray-blue waters to white-capped chop.

Someone had heard my shrieks from the shore, and while a handful of family members had pushed off in kayaks and canoes to come get me, it was Grandmother standing barefoot on the sandy beach with the wind whipping through her hair whose lashing voice had ceased their attempts. To me, she had boomed, “You know how to get out of this. You have all the tools you need.”

I’d pushed down the panic then, growing a new oar from the canoe’s trim. She’d made me paddle almost the entire way back before allowing Mom to enchant my canoe and whisk it to shore in the blink of an eye.

I sucked in a shuddering breath. You have all the tools—

Shut up! the hurting part of me shrieked. Don’t reason your way out of this! Don’t bottle it all up and bury it like you always do. Get out. Get out of this house and go to the wilds and feel before you condemn yourself to always be nothing more than an obedient, mindless dog!

My feet thudded to a halt, my pulse rising to my throat. I… I will! I wrenched around and took a deep, invigorating breath. I will! I’m going to march to the southern fields, hop that stone wall, and go find me a man-beast in the woods!

Man-beast. Shifter. The very idea of them sent a shiver down my spine. We’d only been taught the basics about them—that they existed and weren’t to be trusted or interacted with at all—but like the ancient forest beyond the boxwood hedge, the idea of them called me. There was something wondrously simple and primitive about their existence, or so I believed. At the very least, if they liked a girl, they wouldn’t lead her on and murmur sweet things to her and then flutter by like a butterfly to another flower with prettier petals. No, I envisioned them as faithful as wolves, as attentive as cardinals, as protective as bears. To put it concisely: intensely devoted.

I gulped. M-maybe not for a tryst. I wasn’t sure I was ready for another relationship, albeit a devoted one, even if it had been years since Jeremy Rook. It’d been a crushing blow, even more crushing that it had been my own cousin, who was as close to me as a sister, who’d lured him away. But I could still talk to the man-beast! What’s Granny got against shifters anyway?

Ooo… you just called her Granny. How informal of you.

I was in the middle of giving myself a congratulatory smile at my foray into rebellious behavior when resounding footfalls heralded an approaching family member.

But those weren’t the thud-thuds of bare feet on hardwood, rather the clip-clop of heeled leather boots.

Grandmother.

I wasn’t ready to face her again so soon, not when I was convinced she would take one look at my face and realize what I planned to do with my afternoon.

Spinning a tight circle, I realized my own steps had taken me further into the manor than I’d planned, into a wing of the house I had no business being. As usual, there were potted plants everywhere, and the ones that lined this short windowless hallway like a Gothic boulevard were all tall shade-loving trees with twisted trunks. I flattened behind one now, sucking in my stomach and making sure my toes didn’t extend past the base of the pot, just in time to see not Grandmother, but Aunt Hyacinth striding past.

Aunt Hyacinth? Wasn’t she supposed to be napping?

And yet here she was, definitely not snoozing away in her room on the opposite side of the manor, but striding with purpose to the end of the hall.

Leaving my hiding place, I padded forward on silent tiptoe to the hallway junction and craned my head after her. The end of this hallway didn’t terminate in a stained glass window, but rather an iron door, the only one of its kind in the entire house. Not even the manor’s front door was made of iron, though an iron portcullis imported straight from a European castle had been embedded into the ash wood.

And in front of that iron door was the only beast allowed in the house: a big black dog.

Except it wasn’t a dog. When I shifted my eyes to the side and viewed it from my peripheral vision, I could see the fuzzy edges of the glamour that revealed it to be anything but the Irish wolfhound it was disguised as. It had to be some kind of fairy, maybe even a feral one called a fiáin—it was impossible to tell what it was with the glamour in place. Grandmother didn’t allow Fair Folk on the property, not even a family of brownies to help us with the housework, but she’d clearly made an exception.

I held my breath as Aunt Hyacinth approached. Us youngsters were told never to go near that dog, for though we were all Hawthornes, it would bite whoever wasn’t a robed elder.

The not-dog was curled up in front of the iron door and lifted its head as Aunt Hyacinth approached. Yellow eyes gleamed with a fiery glow as its nails scraped against the floor, the beast rising. While her step didn’t falter, Aunt Hyacinth’s stride certainly slowed. She stopped when there was an arm’s length between them, and when the beast didn’t move, sniffing, her hands flew to her hips and she tapped her foot. “Well?” she demanded in that prim voice of hers.

Grumbling, the not-dog ambled to the side.

“That’s what I thought.”

---