Chapter Text
“Hang on, Grandpa; you said the mirror was shining like gold when you first saw it?”
“Yes. Who knows how long it had sat completely dark before I began crossing that rickety bridge of beds? Even though I must have been half-a-league above, it seemed to feel its rescue approaching, and it lit up, white-golden, over the entire -”
“Why was it gold? I’ve never seen it do anything but purple ripples when it’s not showing a story.”
“Well spotted. Yes, it did settle into purple after that first night.”
“And there’s a story why? Right?”
“Not a full-on rambling story. Only a smidgen. A snip. A scintilla.”
“So… tell me?”
“Hm… Well. Well, come to think of it, perhaps another day would be best.”
“If it’s only short, can’t we squeeze it in before bedtime?”
“All right, if you’re so keen to know, the fact is that I climbed out of the well and found the thornweeds had spread and locked in round each other, as they do by night, and completely enclosed the clearing. When they pulled back in the morning, I made my way to the castle and gave the mirror to King Edward, who told me that he was nearly… well, he promised me again Daventry would be mine and sent me on my way. That’s the upshot.”
“… And, uh, after that the mirror was purple?”
“Yes, after that the mirror was purple. Speaking of purple, have I ever told you about the day the snarlax’s mate came for revenge on the kingdom? I remember it was a new moon on New Year’s night, and everyone in the valley was…”
“I don’t think that was the whole story.”
“Not tonight, sweetheart.”
---
Many a king had ricocheted down the wishing well shaft. Or at any rate, the flattering profiles of kings, embossed and etched on brass, silver, and gold. In the two centuries it had stood, the well had seen nearly a dozen different rulers fall. Robbers tended to wander down the rope for a bit of royal graverobbing now and again.
Graham was not quite king yet. But he was the nearest thing the well had known to a king shinnying back out. Not riding jingling in a thief’s pouch, but climbing with his own rope burned fingers and knocking knees. He hadn’t come for vengeance. Only for a looking glass. But he’d got it into the bargain.
He threw a leg over the lip of the moss-mortared well. The calm storm that had powered him through the dragon’s lair stopped before the other leg could follow through. Loose stones tumbled free as he half-willingly collapsed. Gravity pulled him the last few feet to safety. For a moment, all he could see was red. But it wasn’t dragonfire. His scarlet cape had somersaulted over him. The earth’s jolt knocked the wind out of him, and the back of his skull thudded against the well wall.
Graham hardly felt a thing – he could have fallen backwards into the well and been dashed on merciless rock, and he’d hardly have minded. His strength was dregged. He wasn’t going anywhere just yet.
Nice. Sincerely nice. Not sarcastically nice. Exactly whom was he clarifying his internal monologue for? He never knew. But he was doing it again, which meant he was done tiptoeing and shooting and thinking about something he couldn’t afford to think about.
And that was nice.
The last pink streak of dusk wavered over his field of vision, like the Milky Way had gone rosy, or the border forests of Daventry had staked a claim in the sky. He had just won those forests for his own, hadn’t he? And the blue mountain fogs, and the river that carved tunnels through the rocky hills, and every cobble, gable, and poor man’s trouble in the Town.
King. Graham. He couldn’t seem to fuse the two words into a name.
He fidgeted with that thought as long as it could keep its shape before it melted with the warmth of too much handling, and he had to stand up. The dusk streak was gone, and the headache turned real. Time to return in victory. Watch everything change.
If he could get out of the well clearing, which was half the size it had been when he’d arrived.
The spiniferous thornweeds took him aback despite himself. They wove through each other closer than his fingers when he cracked his knuckles. Mist and fireflies wandered through the brambles, but that certainly wasn’t in the cards for him. A shiver found every one of his spine bones as the cold settled into the splashes on his clothes. Dummy. He’d told himself it made no sense to come at twilight. Adventures always took longer than foreseen.
(He knew perfectly well why he’d put it off all day but not now, not now.)
What did he have to hand?
He pawed through his voluminous pockets. Most were empty today. He preferred to start adventures fresh if he could. Here was a brackety crank from a butter churn he’d picked up by the first fork in the passage. A cask lid with a cork stopper. Not the bow –he’d thrown that down for reasons he’d make sense of another night. And, oh, yes - a woolen blanket. The only one he’d hid beneath that hadn’t been mouldy with cave-damp. He had no special reason for pocketing any of these. Muscle memory and blind chance of usefulness had picked them up while his mind was at the dragon-most end of the cavern.
A little bit of trial and error later (not limited to spooling and unspooling the well rope at least ten times, loping around touching everything in the area to see if anything useful met his fingertips, and trying to hack through the thornweeds with absolutely everything on his person, including the blanket,) Graham had to accept there was no way out, yet. That was fine. If something doesn’t work it now, it just means you don’t have the proper tool yet.
So, camping trip, then. Doable. He could just stretch the rope from the well, like this, and tie it taut round a thornweed branch, like that. Throw the blanket over it, secure the bottom, and voila! Triangle tent. The cloak had served him often enough as a bed. He’d just take everything out of the pockets for now, and -
Golden light dazzled him.
Ah yes. The mirror that could show the far and the future had been sitting in his cloak this last however long, and he hadn’t even sneaked a peep since that stolen moment before the dragon charged him.
Perhaps he should look again. His mind was brim full anyway, and yet - if he was going to be here for the night, a distraction might be useful.
Graham stared into the Magic Mirror.