Gwyn blinked slowly as what Lyra said started to unravel the shock cocooning her like a thick quilt. “On magic?”
Hysteria felt as though it was only a breath away. Waiting with eager hands to clutch at her with long, desperate fingers.
“Yes. Isn’t it wonderful?” Lyra gave her a hug that squeezed the breath right out of her. “I always suspected you had more to you. You have no idea how hard it was to wait. I didn’t want to tell you, get your hopes up and risk dashing them if I was wrong—”
Gwyn ignored the sparks of magic flowing from her fingers and grabbed her friend by the shoulders. “What are you talking about? And why here? Why now?”
“Who knows?” Lyra grinned bigger than she’d ever grinned before. “What matters is that you’ve found your magic at long last. Oh! The adventures we’re going to have! What would you like to do first?”
Magic. She had magic.
She stared at her hands, hardly daring to believe. If she had magic, then this changed everything. The Ruby Queen could no longer be quite the menace she was accustomed to being. Not when Gwyn could fight back.
With magic.
Her magic!
Gwyn shrugged and looked around for inspiration. She’d spent so much time wishing Lyra would come for her, that she hadn’t properly thought out what kind of adventure she wanted to have.
Not that it mattered. Things seldom went as she imagined in Lyra’s world, because it was upon Lyra’s imagination that the world depended. Already bits and pieces of color were starting to creep in along the edges where Lyra wasn’t paying attention.
A fiddle leaning against an overstuffed chair went misty as it started to turn into a tea cosy while the chair hunched over as it contemplated turning into a book. The one constant in Lyra’s world was that nothing remained what it was for very long. A hat could be a chair could be a dress could be a ladle.
There was something comforting about knowing that a thing could be whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted, without waiting for approval.
“I have magic,” she whispered, still delighting in the mysterious newness of the feeling.
Lyra laughed, and a bouquet of wildflowers sprouted in a vase that was half glass and half fish. “Silly! Magic isn’t something you acquire on a whim. It’s something you’re born with. You’ve had magic in you always.”
“No-o-o.” Gwyn puckered her brows together in thought. If she’d had magic all this time, she’d have felt this golden wonderfulness that was fizzing through her like butterflies on sweet nectar before. She held up her hand that was still cheerfully shooting sparks out her fingertips. “I would have known.”
“Really?” Lyra raised a brow, her hands on her hips. “And why do you think you didn’t?”
“I—I don’t know.” And that realization plopped into her stomach like one of the great, big journey stones her mother and father had told her about.
. . . TO BE CONTINUED . . .
© 2015 by Danyelle Leafty. All rights reserved.
There’s nothing quite so exhilarating as finding yourself after years of slogging around a flower-infested garden wearing gloves and doing what you could to keep your head down. Tyranny knows no bounds, after all. Until, at long last, it finds those it has tyrannized have found their own power from within.
Join me next Tuesday to see if Lyra is any more forthcoming and what having magic will mean for Gwyn and, ultimately, the Garden.
If this is your first time visiting, check out the first installment of this episode. Feel free to gather round the hearth and read the other stories that are going on too. The more the merrier!
If you like, feel free to join me tomorrow as we follow the adventures of a certain Queen of the Nearly Dead Fae in training. 🙂
Happy Tuesday!