“You can find your way out from here?” she asked.
I smiled. My face felt strange, and I imagined I was grimacing. “Of course.” Once more, she appeared as the elderly woman that I had always known. But her eyes . . . I saw a trace of the wild being that she truly was, flaring like embers.
“Good. Until next time, Clementine.”
I slipped past her and made my way down the curling stairwell, my boots clicking on the marble in a measured pace, because I knew she was listening.
Her butler—an old, craggy man dressed in livery of a lord long dead—was sitting in a chair by the front door, snoring. I tried to sneak past him, but he startled and stood, fumbling for the door handle.
“A good day to you, Miss Clem,” he said in a raspy voice. “And may you be victorious in battle tonight, with the new moon.”
“Thank you, Mr. Wetherbee.”
While his eyes were gentle and haunted by cataracts, the sort of eyes a grandfather might have, I couldn’t help but wonder what reflection he cast in a mirror: if he was the old human man he appeared to be, or if he was something quite different.
I passed over the threshold, descending the steps to the gravel path that led to the road. Triangles of shrubs grew in perfect symmetry, and when I reached the iron gate, I dared to glance back at the house.
It was a grand manor, built of red brick and three stories high, with square windows that glistened like teeth. The first magician of Hereswith had dwelled here, and then her successor. This had always been the domain of the town magician, and one would think magic still lingered in the walls and had seeped into the floors. And yet Mazarine had lived here for many years, according to the town records, and she was no magician.
She was not even human.
I wondered how she had accomplished such a feat, hiding her true face. Fooling us all.
I hesitated, as if to turn my back on the mansion was foolish. But at last, I pivoted away from the gate and began the brisk walk home.
Hereswith was not a vast town. My father and I could walk the entirety of it in the span of an hour. It was quaint, if one forgot the curse of the adjacent mountains. Cottages were snug, two storied, and built of stone and cob, capped with thatched roofs. Some had little gardens with ivy that attempted to eat the house; others had brightly painted front doors and mullioned windows blown from an erstwhile era. And then there was Mazarine’s mansion, which felt overwhelmingly out of place with its grandness, but still lent character to the town.
To me, Hereswith was home, beloved, even as it seemed to languish beneath summer’s final days. By late afternoon, when the sun began to set, the shadows from the Seren Mountains would reach us, and the breeze would smell of cold grass and smoldering wood and damp stone. Like old magic.
I never wanted to leave this place.
With each step I took from Mazarine’s demesne, the more my doubt began to simmer. By appearances, Hereswith felt idyllic and charming. But I began to wonder if the town was hiding something beneath its exterior.
I learned a vital lesson from Mazarine that day. One that made me vow that I would never trust appearances alone.
2
“What is Mazarine?” I asked Imonie the moment I returned home. She was exactly where I knew she would be—in the kitchen, preparing dinner. My father and I always ate well on new moon nights, just before the streets turned deadly. If it wasn’t for Imonie, the two of us would have been shriveled-up magicians with threadbare clothes and wounds that never healed properly.
She stood at the counter, peeling a mountain of potatoes. She was like a grandmother to me, although she was too young to be such a thing. She had never confessed her age, but I guessed she was in her early fifties. She was tall and trim and had threads of silver in her corn-silk hair, and while she rarely smiled, a few wrinkles touched the corners of her eyes.
“What do you mean?” Imonie asked, her attention devoted to her task. “Mazarine is a grumpy old woman.”
“No, she’s not.”
It must have been the tone in my voice.
Imonie stopped her peeling and met my gaze. “Did she threaten you, Clem?”
“No,” I said, despite the fact that there had been a moment when I’d felt afraid of her. When her gaze had met mine in the mirror.
“I’ve told you for years now to stay away from her.”
“She’s lonely and she pays me well. She also feeds me stories from the mountains.” I intently watched Imonie’s face, and I noticed how her brow furrowed. She longed to return to her ancestors’ home in the Seren Mountains.
“I could tell you the same stories,” Imonie said, and resumed her paring, viciously.
“Then why don’t you?”
“Because they fill me with sorrow, Clem.”
I fell quiet, feeling a twinge of regret. But in that silence, I thought of the mountain story she had told me often when I had begged her as a girl.
The realm of Azenor had not always been beset with tangible nightmares, although it was difficult to imagine such a world. It was all I had ever known, but Imonie had told me the legend that had started it all: Once, the mountains held a prosperous duchy. Magic itself had been first born in the summits, where the clouds touched the earth. But when the Duke of Seren was assassinated by his closest friends, the mountain province had sundered. Well versed in magic, the duke had cast a curse as he lay dying. No death and no dreams for those in his court who had been touched by the betrayal. They would live endlessly, watching as those they loved grew old and perished without them. And without dreams . . . their own hearts would become dry and brittle.
One does not realize how powerful a dream is, in the sleeping world as well as the waking one, until it has been stolen from them.
The duke had died on a new moon, and that was when the mountains began to spin nightmares into reality, all across the other two duchies of Azenor—the valleys and forests and meadows of Bardyllis and Wyntrough. No one could escape it, and so magicians had risen to answer the danger, perfecting the avertana branch of magic and becoming wardens of intricately mapped territories. Like my father.
Imonie hefted a sigh, as if she knew the exact story I was imagining. It seemed fitting for a new moon day, though. And she set down her potato and knife, leaning on the counter to fix a firm gaze on me.
“I can smell her from the road when I pass that ugly manor,” she said. “Moss and stone and cold winter nights.”
I waited for Imonie to continue, eager to know the truth. Eager to know who I had been drawing over and over for months now.
But then Imonie smirked and asked, “What do you think Mazarine is, Clem?”
“I think she’s a troll from the mountains.”
“You’re probably right, although I haven’t gotten close enough to her to see for myself.”
“Is she cursed?”
“Cursed? I think whatever guise she dons is one of her own making, how she wants to be perceived. For while Hereswith has warmly welcomed those such as me from the mountain duchy . . . do you think the mortals here would be delighted to know a troll dwelled among you?”
“Most people would be afraid of her,” I confessed. “Although it seems people already are.”
“And perhaps she likes the fear,” Imonie said. “Just enough to keep people and their suspicions away. So she can live peacefully here.” Her eyes narrowed at me. “And how did you come to know her true nature?”