The Glass Magician

She turned around. Not empty.

Her quick-beating heart lodged into the base of her raw throat at the sight of Lira, still frozen, crouching with her hands pressed to her face, still locked into the agony into which Ceony had frozen her on the shores of Foulness Island. She looked like a phantom in the shadows of the shed. Ethereal, ghostly. Ceony shivered.

She circumvented Lira, giving her a wide berth, and stepped toward the door, limping on her left side. The floorboards creaked under her weight, setting off the skittering of tiny, clawed feet in the walls, or perhaps underfoot. Mice.

Ceony tested the doors. Locked, but closer inspection told her they hadn’t been locked from the outside. Someone—Ceony assumed Grath—had installed two locks on the inside. Both required a key. Ceony’s shoulders drooped.

Ceony reeled back toward the remnants of the mirror, which she could barely see this close to the door, where the only light filtered through gaps between the wooden panels of the walls.

Grath. Grath knew where she had gone. He wouldn’t trust her here with Lira. He’d come for her, one way or another. Come for her and kill her.

“Oh God, help me,” she whispered, clutching both hands to her chest. Her body shivered.

She tested the locks, pulling at them, trying to wedge a fingernail into the screws that held them. They didn’t budge.

If only she had paper! A burst spell would blow the decrepit wood apart, surely.

She chewed on her lip, skin growing colder by the minute. She pushed against the doors, the splintering wood creaking with the force. Pushing her fingers through one of the larger gaps, she gripped the board and pushed, pulled, pushed, but she didn’t have the strength to break it.

“Think, think,” she whispered. No paper. What else did she have?

She glanced toward Lira, hobbled toward her.

The woman’s skin felt ice cold, and Ceony half-expected her to reanimate and strike her. The thought of being trapped in a shed with a vengeful Lira made her shudder. Still, she prodded the woman’s belt, her pants, her shirt, searching for anything that might be useful. She found a German train ticket that hadn’t been stamped and some sort of long nail or stake hooked through a belt loop.

Ceony drew a small switchblade from Lira’s right boot, about three inches long. She took that, the nail, a shard of glass, and the broken mirror’s frame and returned to the door.

First she tried wedging the nail between lock and wood and pounding it in with the handle of the switchblade, but the lock didn’t come loose and the tools slipped in her clammy hands. She wiped her palms on her skirt and tried dislodging the lock with the blade itself, but without success.

Tucking the switchblade into her camisole, Ceony grabbed hold of the mirror frame, careful not to cut her fingers on the remaining shards of glass. She winced as she placed her weight on her left ankle. Then, holding the frame at an angle, she brought her right foot down on it twice before the frame snapped on its long end. Ceony wrenched it back and forth until she had a good, long piece of painted wood in her hands. Heaving with the effort, Ceony shoved the frame end into the gap between the wood panels and worked it back and forth, leaning all her weight into the lever.

The wood creaked, then split at the bottom.

A surge of hope rushed through Ceony, and she dropped the frame and grabbed the wood, ignoring the splinters that dug into her palms and fingers. She pushed it out until it broke again three feet up. Placing her weight on her left foot once again, Ceony kicked at the rest of the board until it loosened and she could bend it out.

The tight fit scraped her shoulder blades and hips, but Ceony pushed out of the storage shed. An identical building stood next to it, both of them situated on a dirt clearing near an unpaved trail. A gray, overcast sky hovered above, and Ceony smelled the distant scents of salt and fish: the coast.

She stumbled away from the sheds, hurrying up the three-foot-wide trail and disappearing into the trees. No memory in her arsenal matched this place. Where was she?

Grath. Her cheek throbbed, neck burned.

It didn’t matter where the mirror had taken her. She had to run before he found her.

She took off down the trail at a lope, limping on her left leg. She didn’t appear to be on a mountainside, thankfully, just in a patch of untamed woodland filled with mossy fir trees and weeds. After about a quarter mile, she stepped off the trail, scared that Grath would take that path first to find her.