Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(18)
I looked like some uncanny fairy princess, nowhere near the slightly improved version of myself that I’d been shooting for.
It was so overblown and ridiculous that once I got over the sheer shock of it, I actually laughed aloud. Even my voice emerged in a crystalline chime, like a host of delicate cymbals ringing, an entire chorus of Disney princesses tittering together in harmony.
“Okay, well, that was bizarre,” I muttered through helpless giggles, lifting my steepled hands back under my chin to reverse the spell. “Hard pass on this whole . . . look, however.”
I closed my eyes again, murmuring the charm that would undo the glamour, ticking my fingertips back up over my face as another giddying, full-blooded rush of power whipped through my hands.
When I opened them again, the residual smile slipped completely off my face.
The charm hadn’t just reversed the glamour. It had, once again, risen far above and beyond my intent—stripping my face completely free of both makeup and moisturizer, even undoing the volume I’d achieved with my blow-dryer and round brush alone. I looked like I’d just rolled out of bed after a sleepless night, and when I experimentally rubbed my fingers over my skin, they came away completely clean. The cosmetics and creams really were gone, whisked away by the magic.
The charm had somehow undone not just the glamour, but all the mundane effort I’d put into my makeup and hair.
A chill blew through my belly, sending a flurry of tingles up my spine—because this wasn’t supposed to happen. Blackmoores were elementalists and illusionists both, flip sides of the same coin. But an illusion-based spell like the one I’d used wasn’t meant to be able to affect the underlying matter this way. It was one of the natural limitations on illusion magic; unlike elemental magic, it could only mimic the effect you wanted. But it couldn’t transmute, couldn’t make any true changes to the base elements.
“What in the actual hell,” I said to my reflection as I met my own eyes in the mirror, dull and bloodshot once again, “is happening here?”
7
A Play of Ice and Fire
An hour later, I arrived at Castle Camelot looking as close to a normal person as I could manage. Rather than risk any more demented glamour whiplash, I’d just swiped on some concealer and rosy lip balm, coiled my hair into a simple bun, and called it a day. As I stepped from the drawbridge through Castle Camelot’s massive wooden double doors, twin onyx-and-gold pennants rippling on either side against a gunmetal sky that presaged yet more endless snow, I was still feeling rattled to the core.
But just the first breath of its familiar air—stone dust, fried carnival food, and the distinctive claylike smell of the cosmetics the face painters used—put me more at ease. Much more than Tintagel, my family’s ancestral demesne, Camelot felt like home.
I’d been pelting through these winding corridors of polished flagstones, French braids flying behind me, since I was tiny. Here, I’d eaten myself sick on blooming onions and turkey legs; had my face painted into dragons and tigers and fairy queens; watched knights joust in the courtyard while the reigning court of royal cosplayers cheered and booed them, sometimes letting me play the princess role. When I got older, I often celebrated professional accomplishments with a six-course dinner at the Avalon, an upscale restaurant marooned on the artificial island in the moat, to which you had to be rowed. And the times I’d gotten tipsy with my brothers in the countless secret places tucked into the towers and battlements practically went without saying.
To me, Camelot wasn’t just the cheesiest jewel in the Blackmoore crown, the way I knew so many of the town’s witches saw it, for sour-grapes reasons or more legitimate ones. It was the cherished place that had shaped me, molded my internal topography in ways that were often invisible to anyone else. The space in which I’d grown into myself, for better or worse. Even now, though I could easily have moved to some fancier locale downtown much better suited to a legal office, I still preferred to work out of the castle proper simply because I loved being here every day.
In the Great Hall, only a dozen or so tourists were milling around, examining the empty throne and the looming suits of armor guarding the corners, craning their necks at the winged gargoyles clinging to the ceiling, the “medieval” tapestries draped over the stone walls. I’d come at an in-between time, when everyone was either enjoying the matinee, watching the joust, or seated at one of the taverns and snack bars for early lunch. One of the visitors—a burly lumberjack-looking guy, with a tiny, sheepish partner in tow—was jamming his fingers into a suit of armor’s visor and yanking it up and down, despite the roughly one thousand placards asking tourists not to touch the exhibits.
It sent a bolt of pure rage through me to see it, this blatant disregard for the rules that applied to everyone else, as if he were somehow above them just by existing.
Before I had the chance to do anything about it, one of the squires who served as ushers and attendants bustled toward him, clearly intending to intervene. Still fuming, I headed toward the hidden staircase that would take me the six flights up to my office, directly above the Grand Theatre—where, despite the extra insulation, I could often hear fine strains of music weaving through the stones, the appreciative rumble of applause—when the air turned . . . brittle.
I could feel the change against my skin immediately, all the fine hairs on my neck standing at attention. It was a weird texture thing at first, as if all the humidity had been sucked away. Then the temperature dropped, a frigid plummet so abrupt and unexpected it stole the breath from my lungs.