Protagonist Bound (41 page)

“Guys,” I interjected, my brain hurting from the sheer enormity of the day. “Can we focus please?”

SJ glared indignantly at Blue and straightened her dress. “Yes, well,
as I was saying
, even if someone had stolen the book, it would not have mattered. The spell I used last night takes two weeks to construct, and the book was barely missing for two days. So if whoever orchestrated the break-in had intended to use the same spell we did, they would not have been successful. Perhaps that is why they returned it this morning.”

“Or maybe they just thought of something you didn’t,” Blue countered.

SJ furrowed her eyebrows. “Given that the thieves had to smash their way through to get into the Archives, I highly doubt that.”

“Well then I’m out of ideas,” Blue huffed, flopping onto her bed. “Crisa, anything to contribute?”

“Honestly, I don’t really care how they did it,” I said bluntly. “I just want to know
why
.”

My friends’ resulting, reflective silence told me they wanted to know the answer to this question just as badly as I did. There had never been a break-in at school before, and those four items were so diverse. I couldn’t think of any one reason to take all of them. None of us could.

Temporarily abandoning any hope of solving this quandary, I decided to change the subject by getting the magic mirror from under my mattress.

It was a lot prettier in the daylight—solid gold with an intricate floral design all around it. I flipped it over in my hand for a second and fingered the words etched into its back. “Mark One,” just like the mirrors at Fairy Godmother HQ.

I’d told my friends about the shattered mirrors I’d seen back at headquarters and they’d agreed that the identical words discovered on this one definitely made the situation weirder. Although since none of us were quite sure what that peculiarity translated to (and since it was nowhere near our main concern at the moment) for the meantime we’d chosen to let this mystery simmer on the back burner too.

I turned the mirror right side up again and stared straight into its looking glass.

“Show me Emma Carrington,” I ordered.

The glass rippled like it was made of silvery water. When the glistening waves faded to a stop, an image of Emma came into view. She was outside—on her knees in a field of brilliantly colored wildflowers where she appeared to be gardening. The magic mirror also provided sound, so I could hear the flowing waters of the river next to her and a couple of birds chirping nearby. My godmother smiled away, humming some unknown tune to accompany them under the shade of her giant gardening hat.

As upset as I was, seeing Emma’s face made me smile. Everything about her was just as I remembered, despite the fact that I hadn’t seen her since I was very young.

“Well, we know she is by a river,” SJ said, peeking over my shoulder.

“Great,” I commented. “That narrows it down to, like, twenty-five kingdoms.”

“No wait,” Blue grabbed the mirror from my hand and studied the image. “Crisa, she’s in Ravelli!”

“How do you know that?”

“Look, there are mountains in the background. But they don’t have any snow on them so that eliminates the northern territories.”

“Okay, so that means it’s either the Lagatta Mountains or the Rangel Mountains,” I said. “Still though, together those mountain ranges run through six separate kingdoms.”

Blue held up the mirror really close to my face. “Yeah, but only
one
of those six kingdoms has bunniflies!”

Bunniflies?!

I squinted at the mirror and realized she was right. I could faintly see bunniflies hopping and flitting about by the riverbank behind Emma.

Along with your basic enchanted animals like wild Pegasi and the occasional temperamental dragon that roamed the realm and caused trouble, every kingdom in Book had its own special species that was native to that part of the land. And for Ravelli, that species was bunniflies.

Bunniflies were basically normal bunnies—fluffy, big eyes, cottontails, etc. But they had different-colored, big, brilliant butterfly wings sprouting out of their furry backs.

Unique to Ravelli territory, these cuddly, aerodynamic animals inhabited the kingdom’s forests and meadows in dense numbers. So if Emma lived in an area surrounded by them, we
had
successfully narrowed down her location.

“Well, that’s it then,” I said triumphantly. “Emma’s in Ravelli. SJ, how soon will your second potion for getting us out of here be ready?”

“I added the petal from the water lily to the preliminary potion this morning,” she responded. “The final product should be suitable for ingestion by Saturday.”

“Great, that’s the first bit of good news I’ve heard all day,” I replied. “Now I guess we just have to find some way to put the mirror back in the Archives before we leave. I want my conscious as clean as possible so that Lady Agnue has no reason to suspect me.”

Blue and SJ glanced at each other.

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” Blue said.

I raised my eyebrows. “Um, why?”

“Well, someone went through a whole lot of trouble to steal some random, but powerful junk from the Archives. Including that mirror. If we put it back, chances are they’ll probably try taking it again.”

“Blue is right,” SJ said sadly. “And based on what happened this morning, I believe it would be safe to assume that whoever did this would be quite capable of succeeding a second time.”

I nodded in agreement. “In other words, we can’t put the mirror back if we want to protect it because by stealing it we’ve already kept it from being stolen.”

It seemed like a gray area in terms of good conscious, as SJ was undoubtedly aware. But it did make sense. Whatever the reason someone else had wanted that mirror (based on the means they’d been wiling to go through to get it), I assumed their motives were far from benevolent. As a result, we simply had to hang on to the enchanted object to keep it safe, at least until the school caught the culprit who was after it anyways.

With our lunch hour almost over, I hastily shoved the mirror back beneath my bed, then grabbed a knapsack out of my desk drawer for later.

“Crisa, do you want to hit the practice fields after dinner today?” Blue asked as we headed out.

“I can’t,” I said with an irritated sigh. “I have detention.” Panic streaked across Blue and SJ’s faces.

“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “That was my reaction too.”

Rapunzeled

hile the hours I’d spent in class this morning had moved at the speed of a turtle, the time I spent in detention somehow moved even slower (like, maple syrup slower).

My stomach growled.

Ugh, why did I have to use a food-related analogy?

In retrospect, skipping lunch even though I knew being in detention would cause me to miss dinner was a bad idea. Thankfully I’d at least remembered my knapsack snack pack. I was always prepared in case I got a major case of the munchies while I was studying or, more likely, procrastinating late into the night. So the emergency sack of goodies I kept in our room was generally fully stocked.

I took a bread roll out of the bag and chewed on it woefully as I leaned against the cold, stone walls of my prison.

And btw, I’m not being metaphorical here when I use the word
prison
.

Detention was the worst punishment a mischievous girl could get at Lady Agnue’s. It was a positively primitive sentence that was both sad and humiliating.

“How bad could it possibly be?”
you may ask.

Well, let me break it down for you.

Princess detention meant being locked in the highest room in one of the school’s tallest towers for five hours at a time, à la Rapunzel.

These tower prisons had nothing but a stone-based interior, a stale cot, and a window to look out unto the world we were being isolated from.

That’s me overselling its amenities by the way.

When I finished my roll, I folded my arms and closed my eyes. This was so unfair. It was an inhumane punishment for any teenage girl, but the irony of
literally
being a princess trapped in a tower made it all the more insufferable for me personally.

I wished there was a way I could’ve gotten out of here, but I was completely stuck. I mean, I couldn’t exactly jump out the window or suddenly grow hair long enough to use as a bungee cord for escape. The first option would’ve led to death via 300-foot drop, and the second, well, even if it were possible, the amount of money I’d need to spend on conditioner afterwards would’ve been ludicrous.

With no way out of the cylindrical, stone room in sight, I tried to stifle my frustration as much as possible by allowing my thoughts to drift to other topics that might distract me. What I ended up focusing on, however, were my dreams, specifically the one about the Xs I’d had last night. And such ponderings were in
no way
calming.

In all the excitement, anger, and flat out ridiculousness that had occurred within the last twelve hours, I’d managed to avoid thinking about the subject until now. But with nothing else to do up here I couldn’t help but realize just how unusual my nightmare from the night before had been.

Other than my Natalie Poole dreams, this was the only other reoccurring vision I’d ever had. And there’d only been a few weeks in between the one I’d experienced this past Sunday and the one about the Xs I’d had while we were on our trip to Adelaide.

Call me crazy, but it felt like that had to mean something.

I mean, if I’d dreamed about Natalie repeatedly and she was real, then maybe that meant those Xs and the mysterious bunker room they’d been housed in were real too. And if that was the case, where exactly in the realm were they?

I knew that if they did actually exist, they were here somewhere. Like I said before, whenever I dreamed of scenes in Book, I was absolutely certain that this was where they were taking place even if their depictions in my head tended to be super blurry. Granted that did not make the most sense. But, really, what part of all this did?

The thing was, even if they were somewhere in this realm—and that was a mighty big if—I didn’t know what my dreams about Natalie meant, so how was I to know what visions of a bunch of multi-colored Xs implied?

Putting that brainteaser aside for a moment, the other part of my dream that was bugging me came to the forefront of my mind—the conversation between the cloaked girl and that black-haired boy.

While I was sure the cloaked girl had been a new character to my dreamscape, I couldn’t help but feel like the boy had visited it before, if only in the form of brief whispers and flashes. Last night’s image of him had been so vague, but even in its foggy residue his voice had been startlingly familiar. It was deep and resonated with me in a chilling kind of way—like the recurring voice I sometimes heard talking to that other girl in the aftershadows of my more vicious nightmares.

It made me wonder then if this black-haired boy had been the source of that haunting voice all along; and if this had been my first real glimpse of what he looked like, of who he was . . .

Naturally, I couldn’t be one-hundred-percent certain that it was the same boy. However as I sat in that tower—closing my eyes and concentrating on the dream—the part of my instinct that regularly courted the highly unlikely found itself believing that it was. This boy—the one the cloaked girl had called Arian—was the owner of those words and that dark, ghost-like presence that had penetrated my sleep for the last three years.

Follow-up questions swiftly began burning in my head in regards to this understanding. Though as many and varied as they were, two quickly stood out amongst them; two questions that I practically ached to know the answer to.

Who was he?

And why did my subconscious consider him so important?

It was all terribly perplexing and rather unsettling to say the least. For, although I had zero idea what he or his co-conspirator in my subconscious had been talking about, their exchange still gave me the shivers. Not in a fearful kind of way, but more like a form of anxiety. It was probably unwarranted mind you, but considering, well, everything, it definitely didn’t feel that way.