Excerpt from Sparrows and the Mockingbird (One)

The shop was ordinary on the outside, brick and mortar with an awning stained by years in the midst of winter storms. The display windows were dusty and filled with a stage cluttered by goods, there was nothing bright and cheery about Mirror’s Edge, but no one wanted an aesthetic fit for a jeweler in a shop designed for the woebegotten. Three doors lined the front wall, a stained glass one that showed a busy high street, an intricately carved oak door with a deadbolt, and a modern steel and bullet proof glass door that was too frosted over at the moment to reveal any world beyond it. 

Shelves filled with seemingly random goods cluttered the shop floor. A collection of dolls in all states of disrepair and era sit above an assortment of music boxes. Herbs hung from the ceiling in bundles attributed to the moon they were picked under while I sat before a towering bookcase of jars. Raw wood, iron ore, and old eyeglasses; tarot cards, simple charms, and crystal shelves; twine, knives, mortar and pestles; the Mirror’s Edge existed as a one stop shop for anything a spellcaster might need. If it didn’t exist here, it would be on the other side of another door. 

The shop was silent at the moment, something to be expected considering it was almost midnight in Edinburgh and dinnertime in D.C. Tourists keep walking by the door but nobody came inside. It made sense, there’s far more of interest to the casual observer in the nation’s capital than within these walls. Even Mira and her parents were out for dinner that night, speaking with some Senator and his wife about some unknown cause. The Wards are good about keeping up appearances. 

Sweep the floors, dust the shelves, apologise to any disturbed spirits. It took me five years to stop being amazed by the daily ins and outs of working for the Wards, three years to grow accustomed to the odd disturbances at night, but I had yet to be quite comfortable in the place I call home. Cook the meals, balance the books, travel to pick up unusual aspects for a special order. When the world around you is exhaustingly extraordinary, your capacity for wonderment dwindles to nothing.   

As I replaced the mirror I had been polishing, the bell at the front of the store tinkled gently, the oak door. Returning to the front, my eyes were accosted by the towering figure of a man draped in what appeared to be a cloak made of glossy crow feathers. Before I could falter, the person turned their face to mine. Cheekbones that were carved from black marble, lips full and pouting, and a perfectly shaved head. Feminine and masculine in kind, they were an unearthly sort of beauty, but the most piercing part of their appearance came in the form of pale, wide eyes that were nearly silver framed by criminally long lashes. They stared at me, looking me over as I did them. They sniffed delicately, a light crinkle in their skin showing nearly white as the skin folded around it etching out a short, jagged scar across the bridge of their nose. Their eyes moved from mine and to my forehead instead. 

“Good evening, your grace,” I smiled lightly and moved behind the counter, a dais that granted me some extra height when facing someone as imposing as this. “How might I be of service today?”

“You are an indent?” they gestured at the silver band around my head instead of answering the question. “I hadn’t known the esteemed owners of the Mirror were looking for one.”

“Your grace I have been working under the acclaimed Master and Mistress Ward for some six years now. Are you picking up an order?” perhaps this was one of the court I’d been warned of but had never met. 

“No, child.” They peered at the shelf behind me, elegantly shrugging aside part of the feather cloak to reveal a sheathed sword at their hip. “But I am here to leave a message, seeing as Phantasma and Julius are not here to receive it.” 

I reflexively activated the protection spells embedded in the wood of the counter, but even as the almost opaque wall went up between us, they just smirked at me. The stranger withdrew their sword and laid its shining blade upon the counter between us, the edge of the steel rippling in tandem with that of the shield between me and it. Double edged and ornate, deadly with a mirror’s shine. The stranger slid a forefinger gently across the blade, leaving a scarlet stain behind. With a salute, the odd individual turned on a heel and seemed to fold inwards until all that remained was a single glossy black feather.

I was alone once again.

The shield flickered out as my attention wavered before popping like a soap bubble when I went to pick up the sword. My hand closed around the hilt, it felt perfectly fitted to my grasp. Lightweight, perfectly balanced, and seemed to quite literally sing when moved through the air. A note trembled on the tip of the blade, ready to devour any enemy set before it. It wanted to cut through the air and feel the bite of another blade, it was made to kill and would want nothing more as blood stained its edge. 

There was a clatter as it fell back onto the counter. My hands were shaking. Eyes darting, I scurried out from behind the counter and did my best to lock the three doors, knowing I could get in trouble for closing early. If I touched that cursed sword again, I might never put it down until my hand was removed alongside it.

The sweeping and dusting was done in a moment with a flick of the wrist, hoping I’d gotten good enough that the job would look like it had been done by hand. Reluctantly, I looked in one of the many tarnished old mirrors hanging in the store, seeing myself reflected back. Thick, dark brown hair pulled back in a braid, thin glasses framing wide brown eyes over high cheekbones. Anything that would make me memorable erased as the eye was instead drawn to the thin, silver band that encircled my brow with a single opal situated as a third eye in the center of my forehead. Reluctantly, I pressed it.

White hot fire encircled my head without burning my flesh, rippling the glass in front of me until the image reflected back was not my own but that of Phantasma Ward. Angular face full of a hard beauty, perfectly smooth skin even as she approached her mid-fifties that accentuated her full lips and eyes like flame. “You have good timing, Harmony, our meeting just ended.” She drawled, shrugging on her coat through the phantom reflection. 

“There is a message waiting for you,” I said, quiet even though there was no one to hear me but her. “It may be urgent.” She rolled her eyes at me, and wiped the image away, leaving me to my own reflection. She was too used to me, didn’t even say goodbye. Instead of dwelling on it, I walked back to the counter and started sorting a new shipment of crystals, a simple but absorbing task that required unerring focus. Within a few heartbeats, three separate mirrors rippled wildly and the Wards stepped through as one. 

Julius, short and plump full of warmth and smiles though dressed in an impeccable suit, a velvet cloak draped across his shoulders. His fingers twinkled with thick gold rings studded with a variety of jewels, each with a different charm attached. Phantasma would have him grow his hair out but he preferred it short, buzzed close to his scalp, sharply outlining the planes of his skull and contradicting the soft warmth of his small brown eyes. Laugh lines crinkled at their corners, betraying the smile he wore often without even noticing it. He was the sun on a growing field of wheat and the crackle of a hearth fire.

Phantasma was his opposite, the ice to his fire, the winter to his summer, the moon to his sun. She was elegant and tall, on a woman less imposing she might have been called willowy but she was too implacable to be ever considered something so whimsical. Like her husband, she wore a tailored suit though hers seemed to shift in color as she moved, a black so deep that it looked like the night sky. Her hair was in tight braids that reached down past the middle of her back, wires of different metals woven into them with jewels and rings hanging off of them. Even entering her own home she walked like the cloak she wore was made of light, not heavy fur. She was a terrible hurricane and yet a frozen river at once and she was magnificent.

Mira was neither. Mira needed no introduction from me.

The secret was that Edge had only been open for five years, not five hundred. 

I sold my services to Mira’s family when I was seventeen. The Wards were the most powerful family of witches on this coast and I felt blessed for the chance of a lifetime. Mira became the sister I always wanted, teaching me how to hone my talent into a skill and her parents got someone to mind the shop when they were at a conference. My parents still have no idea where I am, but they could find me if they wanted to, the price of hiring an investigator these days is fairly low all things considered. 

How could I not want to engage in their world? When I met her, Mira’s fingers were already covered in a handful of runes whose properties I would learn later. She wore jewelry designed to enchant others and enhance her gifts. Back then, I would have thrown myself in front of a bus for a moment of her attention. 

When I joined their household, Julius crafted a simulation of a high school diploma even though I never completed my senior year. It was the first piece of magic he performed in front of me, plucking a length of thread from my backpack to start with. Not concentrating particularly hard, he pulled at the string until it was the length he wanted before bending it in a sharp right angle. Three more times he tugged and bent until Julius was left holding a stiff and empty rectangle made of plain cotton thread. Mumbling under his breath, Julius flicked its edge, sending an odd sheen through the shape in a long ripple, the further it moved along the more paper seemed to materialize within the frame from nothing. 

“Now for the final touch,” he winked at me and blew across the sheet as if blowing dust off of it. Instead, it was as if he had blown ink onto it, turning and shaping itself into simple words declaring me a graduate of James Polk High School, complete with the principal’s curled and unreadable signature. That done, he carefully pulled the paper off the cotton frame until the two were separate once again. He held them both out to me like a cat showing off a dead mouse. “Hold onto that, you never know when you might need some piece of magic or other.”

The certificate is still thumbtacked to my wall, just in case I need it, but the thread has found a new life as the seed from which my bed’s canopy was born. It took nine long months for me to have enough skill and power to weave thread from wind into something pretty enough for me to sleep under.

Three days after its arrival, the sword became a permanent fixture to my register station. Phantasma ignored it after just picking it up burned her palm, an incident that got enough of a rise from her that I was still cleaning up the results of her emotional hurricane. 

Fire still clinging to the edge of her formal-wear, Phantasma used her uninjured hand to wipe a portal through a mirror. Stepping through, only Julius knows where she might have gone but he was keeping quiet on the matter. With the band around my head, it was not my place to ask. Instead, I dealt with the incoherent ramblings of the Sword and the very coherent ramblings of Mira.

I was part of the way through polishing mirrors, a delicate procedure that needed human hands to not shatter the glass but could be hamfistedly made comfortable by riding an enchanted carpet (cliched but useful) from one ceiling-high mirror to the next. Mira was lounged at the other end of my ride, bored between classes, choosing to spend her time with me.

“She could have figured it out quickly by going to the local Court but no!” Mira’s legs swung in mid-air while she embroidered absentmindedly. “She’s such a drama queen, I don’t even think she told Dad where she was going. There are at least a dozen places outside of any of those doors she could have easily gotten answers from but instead she’s just gone. She can’t take me for my fittings with Sounder if she’s off in the fair underworld or whatever!”

“She’s probably looking for the guy in particular, they were kind of hard to mistake.” I had taken out bets with Belle the day before when I went to drop off mended goods at the Doubleshot. She was certain Phantasma had been taken up with the Court and wasn’t able to get home yet, but in all fairness a fairy would always bet that a fairy was exerting power over someone else.

“I dunno, he sounded kind of cute. Think you could set me up?” my face burned at the comment comment. I ducked my head to hide my cheeks but shouldn’t have bothered, she wasn’t even facing my direction. A loc of hair threatened to fall into her face and my fingers itched to tuck it back behind her ear.

I went looking to find how much it takes of what I have to send me tumbling into the abyss. It would be so much easier to take the prince’s advice and sleep, to dream, to leave this all behind. It’s meant to come in threes. We’re approaching the second stop. I suppose I could wait until afterwards. I have one tether to keep me anchored and I begin to doubt whether that rope will  hold firm. 

I ordered a refill on my medication in the hopes that this will stop.

“I get the feeling you wouldn’t be their type,” I said instead, looking into the mirror I cleaned to catch lightning quick head snap and outraged expression. Mira was vain as her mother but liked to pretend otherwise. “Judging by the cheekbones, seemed more like a Galatea type if you know what I mean.”

“Well then I’ll just have to ask for one for my birthday.” She stretched her arms up, letting a sliver of dark skin show from under her loose white tee shirt, sending heat running over my skin once more. “Let’s go to Doubleshot, Belle’s sure to be off in a few hours and then we can go see if Mystery Man is hanging around Club Seeled.”

“Sure, I’d love to be turned away at the door again until you and Belle kick up enough of a fuss to get them to let me in.” The conversation would end with Mira “convincing” me to go, no matter what I said. I was already sending the polish and rag into the supply closet, concentrating hard enough that the levitation rune on my index finger was starting to burn again. 

“That’s not going to happen, Fianola is playing tonight.”

“What?!” the bottle and rag crashed to the ground, spilling sulfur smelling polish everywhere. Scrambling, I half climbed, half fell to the ground to gather the spilled cleaning supplies before it could stink up the whole shop and leave a permanent stain on the artfully scuffed floor. As she rubbed at the floor, Mira drifted elegantly to the ground, still seated on the carpet and a smile gracing her lips.

“You haven’t heard? She’s been in town nearly a full two days now.” Mira casually snapped her fingers, letting the rug roll up behind her and go back to its normal place behind the counter. “I figured you would have known by now.”