Page 100 of Spellwright

“Already?” Fia tried not to panic. She couldn’t believe so much time had passed. That she’d been out for so long, sleeping while they were awake. Practically a whole day gone.

“Yes, so you’d better hurry.” Andromeda looked pointedly at the pale dress still in its box, then stepped back, ready to leave Fia to change.

“Wait… tell me about the spell. It worked, didn’t it?”

She couldn’t have lost a day for nothing.

“You gave us more time.” Andromeda lifted her lips in the semblance of a smile. “I watched the sunrise again this morning and walked for miles beside the sea. I ate too much for lunch, and tonight, nothing will stop me from enjoying the masque.”

Spoken as if these were the last things she would do. Already the high color that had bloomed in her cheeks the night before appeared to be fading, and her movements had become more languid—slow-blinking eyes and barely there shrugs. The spell was ending as suddenly as it had begun, and the reverse transition was all the more harrowing to witness.

“While I was out,” Andromeda continued much too breezily for the words that came next, “Penbrook holed himself away here with you and Finnick, muttering over last-chance spells.”

“Last chance… oh, Dromeda—”

“Come out when you’re done,” Andromeda all but sang as she slipped out of the room and closed the door, shutting down any talk of the curse—and how it was, at last, claiming her.

On borrowed breaths, they’d kept the curse at bay for a single night, but to do it again, Fia would have to give up another day. And another and another.

And she knew neither Andromeda nor Penbrook would ask that of her.

Seeing as I’ll likely be dead by tomorrow, he’d written.

He’d known.

“We have to leave in ten minutes!” Andromeda called through the door, as if she guessed Fia was standing there in a daze and needed a good shaking to get her moving again.

It worked. Fia ran to the desk, fumbling for pen and paper with a pressing need to revisit the spell that had given Penbrook and Andromeda another day. I promise, I promise, she’d vowed, and yet here they were, spending some of their last moments on her needs, when they required help the most.

In that moment Fia knew she’d risk all of herself if she had to. If it would save Penbrook and Andromeda. She cared too much about them to do otherwise.

It was what her heart wanted.

With her hand trembling over the slip of stationery, Fia tried to fall back into the rhythm she’d found the night before. But her mind was a blank slate, and her magic felt distant and uncertain.

“Five minutes!” Andromeda warned from the other room.

Frustrated, Fia dropped the pen. She wasn’t giving up. She was only letting the spell simmer.

As Fia thought of clocks and breaths and heartbeats, she tore off the dress she’d slept in. Then, from the box, she grabbed the gown Penbrook had left her without caring what it looked like or seeing more than a blur of ivory and countless folds. The fabric felt strange as she stepped into the skirt and held the bodice to her chest. The cloth was soft to the touch but unyielding in construction. Spinning a small spell, she laced up the ribbons at her back. When she moved, everything rustled, and a sweet scent like the old pages of her favorite book lifted into the air along with the golden dust from her fingertips.

Hurriedly, Fia crossed to the long bronze-framed mirror, knowing she’d have to do something with her hair, but she blinked in confusion at its clear surface.

Her reflection was nowhere to be found within the frame.

Finnick padded over. In the glass, she could see him approach. Could see him flop onto his side, finding the last dwindling patch of sunlight. He appeared to be alone in the room.

Fia felt entirely unbalanced, a shiver of vertigo, and she stumbled closer to the mirror, as if she might retrieve her reflection if only she touched the glass. Her fingertips grazed the surface. The gesture did nothing to call her image forth.

Another one of Sebastian’s curses had reached her. Even here. It was just as Elena had described the curse from the day she’d gazed into her grandmother’s silver mirror and hadn’t found her reflection. That feeling of disappearing.

Fia looked down at her shaky hands. Felt the terror in her fast-beating heart.

Then she told herself a reflection didn’t matter, and neither did her hair. She was here. She hadn’t gone invisible.

Whirling away from the mirror, Fia scrounged in the box for the pair of slippers she’d spied there. Beneath them, she found the original paper-wrapped parcel Penbrook had previously tried to give her. She plucked it up just as Andromeda came into the room again, her champagne skirts whispering around her ankles.

“Ready?”