Page 12 of Disenchanted

She exhaled deeply and leaned her head back against the door’s cold glass. It was only a few moments before Casimir’s hands landed reassuringly on her shoulders. Having arrived at her safe space and found his company waiting, the current of her magic began to slow, the feeling of a whipped-up, raging tidal wave ebbing away.

“I must look on the bright side, I suppose. He’ll actually be a very interesting case study. We can monitor him throughout the day to see how the magic fades.” She dusted her hands off onto her coat.

Casimir gave her an amused, slightly baffled look. “You’re acting rather calmly, Specs, all things considered. It’s about this time that you normally bite my head off and somehow conclude that it’s all my fault.”

“I’m sure it is somehow. I think I might be in shock,” Sage said matter-of-factly. “Better put the kettle on. I need to see to that delivery before we get into anything else.” She walked off to find it, but Casimir tugged her back by her sleeve.

He returned his glasses to his nose and gave a more serious sigh before he finally dared himself to say it. “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”

Casimir had discovered the secret of Sage’s witchery for himself a long time ago, during their university days, when she was younger and less adept at hiding the truth. Fiery, reactive magic was combining with ignored grief and rampant hormones to ruin things on a regular basis, her powers even more unpredictable than she currently found them to be.

It wasn’t solely her misfiring magic to blame for the revelation. Casimir was, although he often didn’t act like one, an extremely intelligent man, with whip-smart instincts and, crucially, a penchant for sticking his nose into other people’s business, to analyse them while they were distracted by his charm and good looks. He always liked to tell her how she had beguiled him from the very first moment they met.

The fact that he had cracked her code was just one of the many, many inconveniences that he had caused Sage over the years. But ultimately, this was one inconvenience that she was very, very glad of.

To Casimir’s credit, he had barely batted an eyelid the night that he returned to their student house to find Sage struggling alone, all those years ago. On her twenty-first birthday, Sage’s magic had made a whole new quantum leap into the realms of out of control. She missed her parents terribly and wished they could have been there for her graduation, and she had never felt more alone. Reaching a sixth year of being pushed down, spurned and unused, her powers were flooding her veins, fired up and screaming for attention. Fed up of being dismissed, her magic had taken to bursting out of her fingertips in painful shocks each time a boom of thunder crashed in the matching, self-made storm outside. The room around her was destroyed: a smouldering armchair, the contents of her wardrobe thrown from its hangers, the blankets on her bed ripped to shreds. She had locked herself away to protect her housemates, but, noticing her absence from the end-of-year celebrations, Casimir had broken down the bedroom door, scooped her up and placed her in the shower fully clothed—to either snap her out of it or soothe her senses.

Only someone who had studied strangeness and sorcery as intently as she and he would ever have known how to piece it all together. The sudden disappearances for days on end. The unlikely occurrences that somehow seemed to unfold around her. The coin flip of either damage or quiet wonder that was left in her wake while he followed alongside her, determined to make her smile.

“It’s magic, isn’t it?” he had said quietly, leaning back against the sink with his chin pressed to his chest to stare at his own feet.

She’d only nodded, then rested her forehead on her knees and let the water soak her through to the bone. Seconds later, he had slid inside the cubicle and sat with her beneath the warm stream. That moment of unspoken care and closeness between them, for once not a barb to be found, might have been enough to bond them for life all by itself, but the years since had made sure of it.

Their matched intelligence had resulted in many project pairings through their degree, and, quickly, an academic rivalry had formed. Eventually, however, in third year, something like a truce was declared, and a reluctant friendship blossomed from their shared fascination with the occult. A joint dissertation followed, one that honed in on the notorious supernatural reputation of Port Sylvan. Having him nearby to say, “Wow, really?” ignited a spark in Sage that she rarely felt at any other time. It was a youthful feeling, a bubbling excitement. They had become unexpectedly inseparable, and when Sage had landed herself the curator role at her hometown’s museum, she had joked that Casimir was the only choice as her accomplice. Their list of discoveries, acclaimed research papers and peer-reviewed publishing was impressive. They had become some of the finest minds in their field, an almost incomparable wealth of knowledge on the topic of magic and sorcery through British local history.

For all of his infuriating qualities (and there were a lot of them), Cas was the impossibly patient anchor that firmly held Sage down when storms cracked open the sky and threatened a tidal wave of disaster. It made sense that he had found her that night, when her own thunder and lightning came crashing cruelly and mercilessly around her. It was the first time of many that he had saved her from herself.

And, very fortunately, Casimir had proven himself over the years to be a worthy secret keeper. Sage often considered how very differently her life could have played out had it been a less trustworthy friend she’d made by accident.

Looking at him now, a few more smile lines ghosting around his brown eyes and slightly more accomplished facial hair to speak of, her heart gave a kick with the same glow of frustration, familiarity and fondness. He saw through her every time.

“Don’t, Cas.” Sage threw a hand up to silence him.

He tutted in protest. “Didn’t say a word. All the realms know there’s no point.”

6

Lilara Mournfell

“There,” Sage said decisively, locking the glass door on the final display with a turn of the key. The spotlights positioned above it flickered in unison at the excited current of magic that passed through her fingertips. She shook it off like a static shock.

“Looks wonderful, Specs. Truly.”

Sage couldn’t help but let a small smile creep in at the compliment from Casimir. As much as he drove her half mad, his opinion had always carried the most weight with her. And it was something like “wonderful,” even she had to admit. It was…impressive.

Years and years of her most dedicated work condensed into an exhibition that had started last year as an idea for one side room. A small-scale but detailed examination of Port Sylvan’s most famous legends, rather than its factual history.

But those findings were in fact two lifetimes’ worth of study, and with more to share than they’d realized, their curation had taken over the full expanse of the museum in the end. Just for the season, it had become a museum of the magical.

While Sage and Casimir did their best to curate the small, understated space, something about its homey, cosy atmosphere always left it feeling more like an overgrown memory box than anything highly professional or scholarly.

The main exhibition hall wasn’t much bigger than a large living room, and three even more snug spaces ran on from there—plus the archive in the back, the gift shop and a small staff kitchen. Every wall was lined with wooden display cases that shared stories from the town’s past, changing once or twice a year to fit a new theme. The air always smelled like beeswax, the floorboards invariably creaked no matter what tradesman tried to stop it, and little pools of water formed daily in the corners of the windowsills, thanks to endless condensation in the listed building. But despite all of that, Sage was incredibly proud of the place. She had loved visiting as a child, spending her pocket money in the gift shop, and hadn’t thought twice about applying for the job seven years ago. As head curator, it was where she spent almost every waking moment and where Deputy Curator and Research Assistant Casimir spent the bare minimum that he could possibly get away with before she shouted at him.

Sage observed the dust motes hovering between the beams of sunlight that shone in from the outside world. Took in the nostalgic scent of ink and polish and musty pages and…yet more dust. Maybe Casimir was right, for once. Maybe it was wonderful.

“It’s nothing, really.”

“Ah yes, absolutely nothing. Only a comprehensive, curated exploration of Port Sylvan’s unique connection to magical folklore that invites you to”—Casimir turned his attention to the gold text on the entrance wall and cleared his throat—“to step through the veil that hangs between history and imagination, where enchanted forests, sleeping curses and shadow-bound spellwork may have once been more than mere metaphor,” he recited from their carefully considered words on the introductory poster.