 
## Fair

by Francis Rosenfeld

© 2016 Francis Rosenfeld

Smashwords Edition

Cover Design By Daniela

### Contents

Chapter One – Mary

Chapter Two – The Fire Maiden

Chapter Three – Matching Wits

Chapter Four – Mirror, mirror

Chapter Five – The Ladies' Circle

Chapter Six – The Book of Prophecy

Chapter Seven – Palimpsest

Chapter Eight – The Que'd

Chapter Nine – A Walk at Dawn

Chapter Ten – Content

Chapter Eleven – A Friend from the Past

Chapter Twelve – Mirror Enchantments

Chapter Thirteen – Black Mirror

Chapter Fourteen – Mirror in the Council Hall

Chapter Fifteen – The End Times

Chapter Sixteen – Blood Spell

Chapter Seventeen – The One in the Mirror

Chapter Eighteen – A Painting in the Clouds

Chapter Nineteen – Spider Silk World

Chapter Twenty – A History of Bits and Pieces

Chapter Twenty One – Ancestral Wisdom and Cholesterol

Chapter Twenty Two – Workshop

Chapter Twenty Three – Himalayan Poppies

Chapter Twenty Four – A Night in the Desert

Chapter Twenty Five – Aloud

Chapter Twenty Six – About Flight

Chapter Twenty Seven – Archetype

Chapter Twenty Eight – Crewelwork

Chapter Twenty Nine – The Life and Times of Mary Coulter, Born Fair

Chapter Thirty – A Maze of Twisty Little Passages

Chapter Thirty One – Denouement

About the Author

Other Books by Francis Rosenfeld

Chapter One

### Mary

"Stop lollygagging, Mary! The world is not going to wait for you to catch up, it's almost sundown!"Mary's great-aunt Lucille scolded her, as it was her habit.

Mary didn't flinch, she knew how difficult it was for people to be around her, and how much gratitude she owed to the one person gracious enough to take her in. The shocked reaction everybody had when they laid eyes on Mary was a never ending source of pain for the young girl and a great inconvenience for her great-aunt, whose neighbors and acquaintances, people whom she'd known for decades, had started avoiding her because of her little charge. Lucille was a self-assured woman who had worked very hard to assert her authority over the Ladies' Circle, the charities group and the church committee, and this kind of snubbing constantly irritated her.

She tried not to show it, of course, it wasn't the poor child's fault she'd been born that way, and taking her in was definitely the right thing to do after Mary's birth family decided that parting with an abnormal child like that was what faith and tradition demanded. Lucille was not in any way related to Mary by blood or family, a small detail the great-aunt had decided to keep to herself.

It was irksome enough that some of the villagers had made unseemly assumptions about the origins of this unfortunate child, despite the fact that Lucille's advanced age made it quite unlikely that she was trying to hide an indiscretion by pretending the girl was adopted. The plethora of cheek stinging gossip made it a bit harder for her to miss some of the people who left her circle, but the fact that nobody could look at her protégé without averting their eyes started grinding her nerves by repetition, and she often questioned whether doing the right thing did anybody any good. She sighed, then, looked up with a martyred look on her face, and told herself that even if people didn't agree, this was definitely what God wanted; she consoled herself that she was suffering for a good cause.

Still, she never got quite used to the child's odd appearance, and no matter how much she kept telling herself that the being in front of her was an innocent deserving of love, she surprised herself trying to find reasons to avoid Mary's presence.

After these awkward soul searching sessions, she occasionally praised the wisdom of her village elders, whose religion forbade the ownership of mirrors altogether. The community reviled these traps for vanity and self-centeredness which did nothing to advance the growth of the spirit. The absence of mirrors provided Lucille some comfort, however meager, and her spirit rested in the knowledge that her great-niece, whose lot in life was so unfair, would never get the chance to see herself as others saw her and be haunted by her own image for the rest of her life. The good lady was pleased that at least she managed to instill into the foundling the basic virtues of diligence, cleanliness and economy that would make her life a little bit more tolerable.

In her advanced years Lucille was still an imposing woman, with thick and lustrous jet black hair framing her pale features, a very striking figure even in their village, where everybody looked more or less like her.

She had been considered a great beauty in her youth, when she had had countless suitors, was the belle of the ball and had quite a few marriage proposals. At the time she was the envy of every girl in her circle of friends. After she got married, her status grew even more prominent, due to her husband's privileged position in society. If she thought about it, Lucille couldn't think of any way her life could have been more pampered.

Sadly, the Lord had taken her husband home a couple of decades ago, may he rest in peace, and after that she decided not to remarry. Her children went on to live their own lives, and she had grown fastidious with the passing of time, quite set in her ways, so adjusting to a new relationship and the societal expectation to submit to a new husband didn't seem like something she was eager to take on. In time she had gotten used to being the authority figure in the village and she ran all sorts of societies and committees, ran them, that is, until she chose to act out her faith and adopt Mary. Every expectation of normality fell through the cracks and vanished after that.

Lucille often contemplated how much better her life might have been if she remarried instead of adopting this one person social life wrecking ball, at least she would have consolidated her privileges and kept the deference of the people! Every time these thoughts crept up on her she blamed herself and sought strength in the knowledge that she was doing the right thing.

Lucille liked life neat and proper, things always in their place, dresses clean and modest, foods simple, and she kept Mary's hair always cut very short, to avoid it becoming a source of distraction for the girl.

Some of her closest friends decided to brave ostracism and stand by her in her misfortune, and they didn't miss the opportunity to offer a wealth of advice; some suggested that maybe it would be easier for Mary, and quite frankly, for Lucille, if the latter managed to dissimulate some of the girl's striking attributes, but sadly, the girl's eyes were so startling and impossible to avoid that they drew even more attention to the disguise.

Lucille dreaded the future, she didn't know what she was going to do with Mary, who was approaching fourteen and started showing her age. She deplored the fate of the poor girl, who was never going to attract anybody and was doomed to a miserable life of loneliness and rejection. She never told Mary that, though, and tried to put a brave face on this whole situation, because after all she had been providentially guided to take care of the child, who was to say what destiny had in store for her?

"Walk faster, girl! Those grapes will turn to vinegar before we get home!"

Mary picked up the pace in silence, as she'd gotten used to over the years. Since she had started walking she noticed that people were repulsed by her, and even if she didn't understand why, she was fully aware of the negative implications of her unusual appearance. Sometimes she wondered what exactly was it that people found so disquieting that they couldn't be in her presence for more than a few minutes. She spent her childhood in solitude, but didn't mind it, because she was an introspective type and didn't know how to miss something she never had. As she grew older, she could feel her great-aunt's growing discomfort over her life situation, and wished she could do something about it, but didn't know what.

The basket of grapes was heavy, and carrying it on her head made her neck hurt. She stopped for a second to lay it down and rest. The basket weave got stuck in the short hairs on the back of her neck and pulled them painfully. She winced.

Lucille looked back, annoyed by the sudden interruption, sighed and stopped to wait for her, standing and stomping her foot to express that she didn't appreciate this change in the established schedule.

Mary rested for a few seconds, and then picked up the basket quickly, to shorten the discomfort of buckling under her great-aunt's disapproving stare. There was a little gleaming strand stuck in the basket weave, something that would have passed for hair, except for its color, which looked like that their mare Rosemary's mane. Nobody she had ever known had hair like that, nobody! She shuddered, terrified by the countenance she presented to the world, and for the first time in her life she really wanted to know why everyone was avoiding her, and what did all of those people see to make them avert their gaze.

All her other features, her body, her hands and feet, looked like everybody else's, but her own face she had never seen, so she assumed that whatever it was had something to do with it or her hair. She made it her first priority to figure out a way to see her own reflection. This was easier said than done in a village with no mirrors, no open wells, and no lakes or ponds. One was hard pressed to find open waters in an arid climate like the one they lived in.

She tried every excuse in the book to dissuade her great-aunt from cutting her hair, but Lucille was relentless in the neat and proper management of her locks, which got even shorter than before.

Mary looked around for anything the least bit reflective, but there was nothing, really: the food bowls were matte porcelain, the silverware was dull metal, and the dark painted wood planks of the floors were always covered by overlapping wool carpets whose busy and colorful patterns made her dizzy. She figured if she stared in her great-aunt's eyes she might be able to get a glimpse of her own reflection, but Lucille couldn't bear to look straight at her, ever.

In time the preoccupation with her own appearance reached the point of obsession, which made her great-aunt more and more concerned about the poor girl, whose behavior was spinning completely out of control. Lucille deplored this newfound attitude that made her great niece even less socially acceptable, if such a thing were possible!

Mary spent the next year surreptitiously looking for reflective surfaces, under a barrage of criticism, resentment and complaints about being difficult and ungrateful. She wasn't happy to see her great-aunt angry with her, but it didn't matter: whatever it was that made her an outcast, she thought she had the right to know. Sometimes, when the pressure of Lucille's disapproval surpassed the limits of her endurance, she snuck out to the desert to watch the giant moon cast gleams and shadows on the dunes and make them look soft and liquid, like waves of molten metal.

It was during one of these nights, when the moonlight bounced off of the dunes, that Mary caught a glimpse of her own face in the shimmering sand, polished like a silver mirror. She gaped at this complete stranger, whose large eyes shone in the most unusual shade of green, eyes so remarkable they overshadowed the rest of her features, the oval face surrounded by short wisps of hair the color of corn silk, the straight nose, the high cheekbones, the graceful arch of her eyebrows, the well contoured lips, tightly closed in defiant silence.

She stared for a while, incredulous, at the eerie reflection, her eyes growing wider to take in the unexpected image and then she smiled and thought:

"Oh, my God! I'm beautiful!"

Chapter Two

### The Fire Maiden

Mary arrived home before the break of dawn. She tried to make as little noise as possible, knowing full well that she couldn't bypass aunt Lucille's superhuman scrutiny. The old lady had the senses and instincts of a mountain lion. As expected, her great-aunt was waiting for her in the kitchen, seated at the table with a prayer book in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, in order to press the point that her ailing old body had a very hard time coping with Mary's lapses in discipline.

She hadn't been crying, of course, because she secretly felt that at her age she was entitled to the privilege not to, but she liked to display that handkerchief in critical instances, as a symbol of her grave disappointment. The second she saw the dreaded piece of cloth, Mary knew she was in trouble.

Aunt Lucille sensed the girl slide quietly into the kitchen, but didn't turn her head. Her shoulders were so tense they loaded the whole room with an uncomfortable, almost palpable weight. Mary stopped and waited for Lucille's chastisement, which was usually doled out in installments: hurt, disappointment, anger, rejection, humiliation and submission, always in the same sequence. Mary had learned this pattern so well that she could anticipate her aunt's words, those words that tore at her heart with pangs of guilt. Lucille uttered a shrill sigh, and the young girl was almost relieved that her aunt had decided to start directly with installment three.

"Where have you been, Mary?!"her aunt wanted to raise her voice, but her throat had tightened up with all the tension she had accumulated in the last two hours, so the words came out in a strange, almost silent shriek. Mary paused to chose her words.

"Aunt Lucille, why didn't you tell me?"she asked, strangely poised.

Aunt Lucille turned and pinned her down with a probing stare, despite the discomfort she always experienced looking in those clear green eyes. There she saw the truth, which made her gasp and bring the handkerchief to her mouth.

"Oh, child, what have you done!"she muttered, terrified.

The mirror taboo was so ingrained in the old lady's heart that she considered Mary all but lost, her anger dissipated instantly and managing this crisis became her only priority. The girl tried to interject a comment, but her aunt was on a roll.

"Did you look in a mirror? Where on earth could you possibly find such a cursed thing around here? Did anybody see you? Mary, please tell me that nobody saw you! We can fix this, you know? Don't worry, your aunt Lucille wasn't born yesterday, I'll smooth things out with the Ladies' Circle, we're just going to have to be very careful,"she went on, outlining the plan that had already started congealing in her mind.

"Why is it so wrong to look in a mirror, and why didn't you tell me my hair was... different?"Mary managed to overcome her aunt's verbal avalanche.

"Why, of all the things...! How could you....! The shame I have to endure....! How are we ever going to show our faces again...!"Lucille tried starting several of her favorite penalty sentences, but they all seemed to fall of deaf ears, except for the last one, which filled Mary with outrage.

"Aunt Lucille, I couldn't show my face in public before, how is this going to be any different? Why am I this way?"she asked her aunt directly, in a tone that required a response.

Lucille stopped for a second, glancing swiftly at the girl to assess her state of mind, and quickly calculated the pros and cons of telling the truth, weighing exactly how much of that truth she had to divulge in order to make this dreadful situation go away. She finally answered.

"We don't talk about these things! You are called fair, dear, or blond,"she spoke softly, looking down, embarrassed.

"So what!?"Mary blurted, forgetting for a moment that aunt Lucille abhorred insolence.

The latter ignored the unseemly behavior, determined to be done with the awkward conversation as quickly as possible.

"It's been a long time since someone... like you has been born in this village, we were all hoping that..."she didn't continue, concerned she would hurt Mary's feelings if she completed her sentence.

How could she tell the poor child that the village had hoped, after so many generations, that God finally forgave their transgressions and the blond curse was extinguished from their kin. When Mary was born, the village fell into such despair that nobody got out of their homes for three days, and when they finally emerged, they did so dressed in mourning garments and consoled each other like after a terrible loss. Despite her conservative nature, Lucille had been so outraged by this display of injustice towards an innocent baby that she decided on the spot to adopt Mary and protect her with her life if need be. Ignorant heathens!

"What's wrong with being fair?"Mary asked, more curious than upset.

Nobody discussed it and few remembered its origins, suffice it to say that being blond was considered a bad omen in and of itself.

"I don't know exactly, dear!"she brushed Mary off."Did anybody see you?"the great-aunt continued compulsively.

"No."Mary grumbled."What difference does it make? Nobody looks at me anyway!"

The morning sunshine crept over the tops of the trees and bathed the young girl in a sea of golden light. Her face glowed radiant and her hair caught ablaze, surrounding her face with light, like a halo. Lucille didn't know how to react to this unearthly vision, so beautiful in its own way, the harbinger of doom. A chill went through her bones, she shuddered, then composed herself.

"Don't give it another thought, child. We'll discuss this later,"the good lady changed the subject."Whatever possessed you to seek your own reflection? Don't you know it is sinful and forbidden? Do you want to get banished?"

She would have liked to give Mary the standard speech about how God would be saddened to learn that she needed to feed her vanity and gaze at her own beauty, when He put so many loving hearts around her to reflect this gift with their friendship, appreciation and kindness, but then she remembered Mary's specific situation and reconsidered.

"I could, maybe, color my hair..."Mary suggested tentatively.

"Good graces, girl! Is there no end to your dissent? Whatever did I do to you to shame me so! Coloring your hair! How can you ever harbor such a horrible thought! What would people think?"Lucille built herself up into an outrage.

The conversation suddenly took a familiar turn and Mary found herself, wretchedly, facing installment one.

"What am I to do, then?"the young girl asked, and her aggrieved tone made her great-aunt dial down her indignation.

Lucille wrung her hands and started pacing to chase away her growing panic. What were they going to do, what was she going to do, what will people say, how was she going to explain this, and did she have to? She knew she did, there was no question about that, one of those nosy busybodies in the Ladies' Circle must already know something, she could swear they had a special sense for gossip, those ladies, and nothing moved in the village without their knowledge and consent.

The more she thought about it, the more she panicked, and a deep muscle shiver set in, against her will. What was to become of Mary, anyway? She couldn't help but jolt at the thought that there may be some truth to the blond curse, otherwise why would so many wise people hold it in such dread? One has to remember that traditions are usually born of common insight and who was she to judge the reasons behind the warnings of her ancestors?

How was this fair child born of raven haired parents anyway? Lucille's panic turned to sadness at the fate of Mary's mother, poor thing! Her entire life had fallen apart after the girl's birth, and nobody believed her innocent. The whole family repudiated her and she had to leave the village with only the clothes on her back and without her child. Lucille could only hope that God, in his kindness, found a place for Mary's mother, because the latter was a kind and saintly woman who deserved to be protected.

Lucille remembered all those stories she had heard when she was a child, of a maiden born of fire, whose locks were the color of gold and who was going to herald the end of time. Nobody ever elaborated on what that meant, exactly, and none of the children knew what to expect, after all there hadn't been a golden hair person among them for generations. When Mary was born, though, there was an instant recognition of the omen from everybody, young and old alike. There was no doubt whatsoever that she was the fire maiden and since she'd already arrived into the world, there was nothing anyone could do to stop the reckoning.

The old lady shook her head to chase away these superstitions, for she liked to think of herself as an enlightened woman, who doesn't let her mind be filled with this kind of nonsense, but she had to admit she never thought the fire maiden would be born in her lifetime, and couldn't help being constantly distracted by Mary's eerie appearance.

She finally looked at the girl, who stood there, wide eyed, waiting for her to answer, oh, those huge, clear eyes that put a shiver through the old lady's bones!

"We'll figure it out, Mary. Aunt Lucille will think of something, don't you worry about that! You should go to bed, child, you didn't sleep a wink,"she remembered her motherly doting.

Mary turned around, obediently, and started up the stairs to her bedroom, and her faint halo of golden light lit up the darkness as she ascended.

Chapter Three

### Matching Wits

As predicted, a couple of the most involved members of the ladies' circle showed up at Lucille's door within hours, with appropriately concerned looks on their faces and spelling trouble from a distance. Lucille crushed a few choice words between her teeth and remembered to smile. She sometimes wished that the mores of their society allowed women to express frustration in the same care free and irreverent way men did, but alas, she was a lady, and ladies never lost their composure. She took a deep breath to let irritation settle down, raised her chin and opened the door.

"Rosemary, Giselle, what a pleasure to see you so early! Everything is well, I hope?"she mimicked concern, at the same time managing to point out the etiquette gaffe of showing up at one's house so early in the morning.

She was hoping this detour would unsettle her acquaintances enough for her to redirect the conversation to a safe subject, like the deplorable state of young girls' fashion these days, or who had the best recipe for jam, but the ladies were on a mission.

"Our poor Lucille!"

"Such misfortune, dear, and so unfair, but we want you to know that we're here for you, after all it was never your fault and the Circle shouldn't hold this against you."

"Such a shame! We can't even imagine how you're coping!"

"How could Mary do such a thing to you! If there is anything that we can do to help!"they took turns bombarding her with fake sympathy the same way poker sharks confuse a sucker with kindness before they wipe him out.

Lucille wasn't a sucker. She reevaluated her position, cursed Mary under her breath for having put her in this situation and smiled, gesturing politely to the ladies that they should come right in.

"I'm afraid I don't know what you are talking about,"she faked worry."Let me sit down for a second to catch my breath, I feel a little lightheaded,"she said, bringing up a pallor and patting her face with the handkerchief to elicit concern.

The ladies had known Lucille for decades, and the handkerchief production was old news to them, but they couldn't breach the social mores, so they had to spend about twenty minutes rubbing her hands and fetching her cold water, while Lucille made herself look sicker to play for time.

The fact that the good lady could look unwell at will was an amazing skill that would have ensured her a glorious career in theater, if only the rules of society didn't prohibit a woman of her standing from entertaining such pursuits. She'd been masterful at engaging audiences since she was a young girl, and her gift of emulating and drawing upon human emotion made her a formidable opponent in deliberations within the Ladies' Circle.

She made good use of the twenty minutes, steeling herself against the sharpness of embarrassment and blame, two weapons she assessed would be brandished by default. She was looking through her eyelashes at the two, trying to figure out what they knew in order to develop her strategy. Unfortunately for her, she let out a little shrewd glimmer through, and it didn't escape Rosemary's keen eye. The latter got up and went back to her chair on the opposite side of the table, thus putting an official end to the charade.

"Well, we're hoping you feel better, dear! The situation is grave, you really have to do something, Lucille..."she paused for effect."About Mary, poor thing!"and stopped, in a hope that the reverberations of the last phrase would press Lucille to volunteer information.

The latter didn't budge. The silence between the two became uncomfortable, with poor Giselle left in the middle to wriggle in the drama.

Giselle was relatively harmless, at least compared with Rosemary and Lucille, who could guilt the feathers off a chicken if they felt the situation warranted it. Poor Giselle couldn't take the pressure anymore and spoke, despite a glut of piercing glances from the battling opponents.

"We're afraid poor Mary sought her own reflection,"Giselle's mild voice faded to a whisper.

As she stood across the table, wringing her hands with a pained look on her face, it would have been difficult for a distracted person to distinguish her from the furniture.

Rosemary always brought Giselle along everywhere, to create the illusion of social support, but everybody knew the latter had as many personal opinions as a potted plant, and pretty much the same personality. Rosemary was secretly furious that Giselle spoke out of school and ruined the scenario she was trying to develop; she couldn't show that, of course, so she smiled and decided to torment the wallpaper flower later with one of her favorite conversations. If delicate allusions about Giselle's lack of talent for needlework didn't do the job, she could always fall back on the wedding subject. Her friend never married and this gave Rosemary ammunition for decades of put-downs.

Lucille looked distressed and brought up the handkerchief again. As much as she loved Mary, she could choke the girl right now for forcing her into this uncomfortable situation. She wiped her nose needlessly and spoke.

"Poor Mary, oh, my poor dear! Where did I go wrong? I tried so hard to raise her well, even considering her dreadful... condition,"she brought the handkerchief to her eyes in an attempt to engender sympathy.

Rosemary didn't relent.

"We fear the dear girl has lost her way, Lucille. We're all very concerned of what this means for our society, you know, with the omen, and all. I know you don't give any credence to these superstitions, but she's going to cause trouble if the situation isn't addressed immediately. What if other young girls start defying the principles of our society like that? As if the dreadful state of fashion of our youth weren't enough reason for concern!"she descended from her moral outrage on a safe subject, to signal to Lucille an opening for negotiations.

The latter was wondering what Rosemary wanted, and nodded to allow her to follow her streak.

"If only we could find that dreadful object and destroy it, maybe we can nip this terrible corruption in the bud and protect our young people from its wickedness. You wouldn't happen to know where the poor child could have found a mirror, would you?"she glanced swiftly at Lucille, giving away the real purpose of her visit.

There had been gossip during Lucille's youth that Rosemary had sought her own image, and the rumor mill ran for months, in secret, debating her reasons, her morality and her endangered soul. Rosemary never admitted to any of it, of course, and her parents defended her honor fiercely, managing to shield her from what could have been a socially disastrous event while arranging to get married off quickly, before the rumor broke out publicly.

One didn't know what Rosemary had seen in that mirror, but her personality changed overnight. She turned from a Giselle to a Lucille with a speed that made her family members' heads spin, and Lucille could only assume her acquaintance had been pleasantly surprised by what she saw.

'So this is what you want!'Lucille thought. 'Our pillar of morality wants her mirror back, if only a little late!'

She meant it as a mean comment, but the state of fact was that Rosemary had aged well, with a glowing, wrinkle free complexion, a nice figure and only a few strands of gray in her hair. The she-dragon looked good and she knew it. Lucille continued.

"What on earth would you want with such a cursed object! I hesitate to ask Mary, she never talked to me about any of this! Are you sure she saw her reflection, Rosemary? You know people can be very cruel with their gossiping? We haven't had mirrors in this village since our youth, when council leader Abraham destroyed the last one in the public square. You remember that, don't you?"she threw a sharp glance at Rosemary to catch her unawares.

Rosemary looked like the picture of innocence, wide eyed and expressing proper moral outrage.

"That was a long time ago, my memory isn't what it used to be,"she went on the defensive.

"Nonsense, dear, I'm sure you're as sharp as you were in your twenties!"Lucille retorted.

"So you didn't talk to Mary about this?"Rosemary continued prodding.

"Why would I even think such a terrible thing were possible?"Lucille reached high moral ground."I'm really reluctant to discuss grave issues like this with her, she is sensitive, you know? Even considering the terrible misfortune of her birth, she has a kind soul. I fear that expressing suspicion might make her lose her way, and if this is just gossip!..."

"I'm sure it's worth the risk,"Rosemary interrupted her bluntly, with an irritated tone she couldn't dissimulate.

She never liked Mary, saw her as a threat and was secretly pleased that finally a reason for banishment had presented itself. How could one live in the same house with the green eyed curse was beyond her.

"After all, the girl is fair! How do you know what she is capable of?"

Lucille didn't answer.

"Well, we took a lot of your time, didn't we, Giselle?"Rosemary looked at her self-effacing companion with a commanding stare that dislodged the wallflower from her chair.

"Oh, yes indeed, we really were on our way to the market, we just thought we'd stop by your house and give you the news,"Giselle started to talk, only to be met by grizzly looks from Rosemary, who didn't appreciate when people of Giselle's caliber attempted to convey meaning in her presence.

"We won't keep you, dear. Could you please give our best to Mary, and assure her that we're all thinking of her and praying for her, now in her time of need,"she ended the conversation, getting up from the chair with a grunt.

She hated old age passionately, especially during moments like this, when her aching back reminded her she wasn't twenty anymore.

"I'm so glad you could stop by early, you know it's always a pleasure to talk to you, we really should do this more often!"Lucille reminded Rosemary that it was ten in the morning and she was woefully in breach of etiquette.

"We're looking forward to seeing you at our house, Joel was asking about you and I'm sure he'd like to express his well-wishes directly,"Rosemary threw a poison arrow back at Lucille, managing to touch upon her prolonged widowhood and the fact that Joel used to find Mary's auntie quite fetching in their youth.

Rosemary straightened her shoulders triumphantly.

"We really have to be off, look at the time! Don't forget to ask Mary about the mirror, will you? We need to nip this in the bud!"

'Wouldn't you give an eyetooth to get it!'Lucille thought, waving at the two departing ladies, who had already started whispering among themselves the second they were past the garden gate.

Chapter Four

### Mirror, mirror

As soon as the ladies departed, Lucille summoned Mary in a tense voice that still bore the remnants of her recent irritation. Mary emerged from her room sheepishly, trying to hide her glowing hair and looking for ways to diffuse her aunt's annoyance. Lucille didn't seem upset though, rather intrigued, a look that the girl knew very well and that was a sure sign the good lady had come upon an interesting little project to work on.

"Sit down, dear,"Lucille encouraged, smiling broadly to put the girl at ease.

Mary sat, uncomfortable.

"Have some cookies,"her aunt offered.

They were the girl's favorite treats and she helped herself to a good handful. Lucille let her munch in silence for a while, and then opened the subject, from a safe distance.

"Sweetie, you never told me how you figured out there was something different about you? How did you find out you were fair?"she finally asked, gently.

She didn't want to rattle the girl and risk one of Mary's taciturn streaks. Her stubborn niece could spend weeks and months in silence, a habit she had acquired by necessity, since most of the town's people preferred to avoid addressing her altogether. This habit of hers managed to drive her aunt up the walls. Lucille appreciated eloquence, a skill that had served her very well over the decades. One of the reasons the good lady managed to command attention and respect was her uncanny ability to talk her way out of any situation. The girl's silence undermined this very aspect of her command and as such, annoyed her greatly.

Mary looked up at her aunt, trying to gather her thoughts before answering. Lucille suppressed an irritated twitch. What on earth was there to think about? Half the time she couldn't tell if the girl was purposefully defying her authority or had become too shy to speak up due to her unfortunate situation. It took all of her resolve to refrain from prodding the answer out of Mary. She smiled instead, and waited patiently for her niece to answer.

"The sand,"the girl mumbled, still munching on her cookies.

"What on earth do you mean?"Lucille forgot her composure.

"I saw my reflection in the sand,"Mary clarified.

"Mary, this really is not the time! Seriously, where did you see your reflection?"Lucille forced.

"I swear, auntie, the moon was bouncing off the sand, I only got a glimpse,"Mary swore.

Her aunt believed her, she knew her niece couldn't be deceitful if she tried.

"You didn't find a mirror, then?"she asked directly, driving a probing stare into the girl's green eyes to make sure she wasn't hiding anything.

Their large pools didn't harbor any hidden thoughts, but as usual, glancing into their transparent depths put a shiver down Lucille's spine. She lowered her gaze, uncomfortable.

"A mirror?"Mary asked."Where would I find a mirror?"she asked, lowering her voice more and more until it reached a whisper."Is there a mirror in the village?"she asked, almost without sound.

"No,"Lucille spoke unconvincingly, stirring Mary's curiosity to new heights."Not that I'm aware of,"she left the door open for additional details, wondering if she couldn't persuade the girl to let out more precious information out of that sealed tomb of a mouth.

Unfortunately it didn't look like Mary knew anything else, but now that the cat was out of the bag, her aunt decided that sharing a little more of what she knew might prove beneficial in the future.

"There have been rumors..."she continued, keeping a keen eye on Mary for any tell tale reaction.

The girl looked just as confused as always, with a slight hint of curiosity.

"Yes?"she asked.

"There have been rumors,"her aunt continued, mincing her words to play for time, but since there didn't seem to be any acknowledgment from Mary that she had any clue about anything, she sighed and continued,"that some of the ladies in the Ladies' Circle have sought their own reflection in their youth. We were all very young and the elders didn't go into details, but when they learned about it, they found the mirror and broke it. We all assumed it had been the only one, so the incident died down, fortunately."

Lucille looked down quickly to hide a little pang of guilt, and her reaction didn't escape Mary, who was a lot sharper than her aunt thought.

"Did you seek your own reflection?"Mary asked directly, rousing a bout of outrage.

"Mary, what a disrespectful thing to say! How can you even suspect!"Lucille overplayed her hand, giving the girl the confirmation she was looking for.

Mary didn't let her off the hook.

"Why is it wrong, aunt Lucille? What's so wrong about knowing what you look like?"she stared at her aunt, giving the latter the chills.

"Those eyes could keep a person awake at night,"Lucille shuddered, "I can't get used to them, no matter how innocent she is, so help me! She knows, the imp, how could she possibly know?"Lucille looked for a reasonable explanation for the mirror ban, but couldn't come up with anything that stood to reason. The rule had always seemed absurd to her too, but it had never been open to discussion; the council of elders, and council leader Abraham in particular, weren't the kind of people who could be swayed to give up the power and control that came with being the bearers of absolute moral authority. The result of this social dynamic had been that all those who didn't believe mirrors were a wide open door to hell sought their own image if they were lucky enough to find a reflective surface, and said nothing about it, not knowing who to trust. They enjoyed the revelation of their own countenance privately, drew their own conclusions about it and became the wiser for the knowledge. Lucille happened to be one of them.

"It isn't allowed, Mary,"she eventually said, feeling awkward because she couldn't find anything to add to qualify this comment.

"Why?"the girl asked, really wanting to understand the purpose behind the ban.

"I don't know, why are you asking me?"the aunt snapped."I didn't make the rules!"she let out, carefully fishing out the adjective 'stupid' from the phrase before it passed her lips.

Mary's eyes were shining with curiosity, so she continued.

"There have been rumors,"Lucille said again, cautiously,"that there may be some reflective surfaces left, and that some of the girls way back then managed to actually make some,"she whispered.

"All you have to do is paint the back of a shard of glass!"Mary blurted loudly, and her comment terrified Lucille to such a degree she actually covered the girl's mouth, looking around to make sure nobody heard.

"Shut up, girl! Do you want to get us banished? Oh, mercy, I knew this was going to end badly! How stupid of me to discuss grown up issues with a child! Don't ever mention it again!"Lucille regained her parental authority.

"I'm just saying,"Mary replied, in a much lower voice,"if they are that easy to make, there must be some still laying around."

She wanted to comment that Lucille probably had one hidden on one of her deep coffers, but reconsidered.

"We don't talk about these things, Mary!"her aunt ended the inquiry abruptly."You know,"she changed the subject,"my friends Rosemary and Giselle were gracious enough to stop by this morning. They were worried sick about you, thinking that you sought your own reflection! I told them I'd talk to you about it, to ensure you couldn't possibly have done something like that! I hope you didn't, sweetheart, you know it is forbidden!"she stared at Mary, with her eyes conveying the imperative more than her words.

"But,"Mary blurted, innocently, ready to point out that they already discussed this subject. Lucille interrupted her.

"More cookies, dear? Oh, it feels like only yesterday you were just a baby! I'm getting old, my memory is not what it used to be! I'm so glad we had this talk, and so relieved you couldn't possibly have broken the rules! I didn't think you've done something wrong, I raised you well, thank goodness, to be a comfort in my old age."She watched Mary munch on her cookies and her impatience grew.

"Well, we have things to do, Mary, we can't sit here and chitchat all day long. Idle hands, you know?"she got up and rose her niece from her chair."I'll just have to get to the council hall and let the Ladies' Circle know they were mistaken about you. I can't wait to see the look on Rosemary's face..."she started with a wry smile, but realized she was setting a bad example for Mary and stopped.

"Go on, dear! Don't you worry about wicked reflections anymore! To think they suspected you, poor innocent child! The times we live in!"

Mary acknowledged the fact that the conversation was officially over, and as she went up the stairs to her room she glanced at Lucille, out of the corner of her eye, to see the latter pace the room, energized, deep in thought and smiling at the strategies that started developing in her mind. Mary hadn't seen her aunt so excited about something in a very long time, and since it was her adventure that had engendered this excitement, the fair child felt proud.

Chapter Five

### The Ladies' Circle

Nothing in society exceeds the speed of gossip. By the time Lucille arrived to the Council Hall, its usually quiet chambers were buzzing like a beehive. All the ladies were there, a feat that hadn't happened in decades, and the animated conversation subsided suspiciously upon Lucille's arrival.

Rosemary and Giselle were already there too, of course, coagulating loose density centers in the crowd and generating spikes in the conversation volume with well placed comments. Rosemary noticed Lucille and proceeded towards her immediately, all smiles and parting the crowd with the inevitability of an ocean liner.

"Lucille, my poor dear! How are you coping, darling?"she asked with fake solicitude, in a tone loud enough to be heard across the room.

The room's attention instantly focused on Lucille, drawn to the fresh scoop of embarrassment like ants to a puddle of syrup.

'I've got to hand it to those two, it took them less than an hour to summon an entire village at the ready. At least next time we need a quorum, I know who to call.'She smiled, showing a socially acceptable level of relief.

"Great news, my dear! Mary didn't even know what I was trying to ask her! I felt so awkward trying to explain my concern, it is unfathomable that a innocent soul like hers could even be under suspicion. What kind of soulless person would even consider spreading rumors about Mary flouting the rules of our society like that?"she stared Rosemary in the whites of the eyes, hoping to make the latter lower her gaze. Rosemary didn't blink."To think that someone would be so callous as to accuse a child!"Lucille doubled down."She doesn't even know what it means to seek her own reflection!"

"I don't mean to pry,"Rosemary pried, trying to throw Lucille off her balance and hopefully squeeze out an unguarded comment,"but I have it on very good authority that the child knows she's fair, how else could she have found out? We never talk about these things, you know it's forbidden! I hope the nasty rumors that plagued our community in our youth aren't coming back to bring mayhem to good people."She got closer to Lucille, to whisper in her ear."Rumor has it that some of the ladies in this room didn't exercise enough discretion in their youth in regards to their reflection."She moved away and continued out loud."I pray that none of us provided the young girl with an excuse to misbehave."

"I think you can put your mind at ease, dear, there is no reason for you to worry. As I said, who knows how this rumors spread, it is sad that some people are given to spiteful gossip, but we shouldn't dwell on human weakness,"Lucille pushed back.

"Some of us have heard,"Mrs. Gentry rose her voice over the crowd,"that Mary went out into the desert at night. We are very concerned about this type of behavior, I don't think you should abandon your parental obligations like that, before you get to the truth!"she concluded, in a very assured tone.

Mrs. Gentry was a self appointed challenger to Lucille's authority and never missed an opportunity to point out how she could have managed the situation better, if it were for her.

She was slightly older than Lucille, and like most of the ladies in the Circle's leadership, had acquired an authoritative presence over time, beginning with the imposing stance, helped out by her tall stature, and ending with the stentorian voice, whose higher frequencies could break glass. She always wore black, despite the fact that her dear husband had passed more than fifty years ago, and insisted on not being called by her first name, a habit she found way too familiar.

Her veiled silhouette didn't bring up mournful thoughts, though, because it wain high contrast with her stupendous amounts of energy. She could wear down an army of staff with her constant demands and always ended up redoing their work, just to emphasize that it hadn't been done to her standards.

Mrs. Gentry had started many of the sub-committees of the Ladies' Circle, and as a consequence she headed most of them, which gave her the chance to think up projects and tasks for the less assertive members. In her opinion, she was doing the 'shy flowers', as she called them, a favor, by encouraging them to become more involved in the life of the community. She liked to point out that the tasks were always matched to the person's level of skill, so that they wouldn't feel overwhelmed by responsibility, and made sure none involved any decision making, which, she wisely pointed out, was better left to more experienced members, like herself.

She had tried repeatedly to involve Mary in one activity or another, because she felt it was her duty as a social leader to help the girl, whose misfortune was not of her doing, find some place in the village that was fitting her social status. Lucille had to work a few small miracles to keep poor Mary out of Mrs. Gentry's eager talons, because every time the girl was assigned to one of her well meaning tasks she was ridden within an inch of her life.

Mrs. Gentry, of course, considered her intervention to be socially responsible, and expressed this opinion very loudly, on many occasions, disparaging Lucille's failed parenting and wondering rhetorically why Mary couldn't exert herself even in the slightest. She honestly believed the tasks she gave the girl were no-brainers, just as she thought about the tasks she assigned to everyone else. Every now and then she liked to demonstrate the proper way to sort beans, for instance, just to give her protegés an example of the right way to do it, and then left them with countless sacs to sort until well into the night, together with the pronouncement that it wasn't that big of a deal, if one had some goodwill.

"You don't honestly believe I would allow Mary to go to the desert alone at night, I hope?"Lucille challenged her.

"You don't know how young girls are, she might have snuck out without your knowledge,"Mrs. Gentry insisted.

"Nothing happens in my house without my knowledge,"Lucille retorted.

"I wish I had your assurance about that,"Mrs. Gentry declared."You must be among the few who don't worry about Mary. It is the prophecy, you see,"she continued, in a softer voice.

"There is nothing wrong with Mary other than being the subject of backwards superstition!"Lucille's cheeks were instantly flushed with irritation.

She had heard the story of the Fire Maiden one time too many. The room was instantly flooded by a wave of murmurs, doubts and protests. Many of the ladies were raised with that belief and they felt threatened when it was challenged.

"I wish you gave some credence to the wisdom of our ancestors, they must have had a reason to pass down this story,"Mrs. Gentry retorted bitterly, for she was one of those who believed the omen to be true.

"I don't think you have to worry about being turned into a cursed creature, dear,"Lucille answered with just a hint of sarcasm. "And if you were, how would you notice the difference?"she thought, but then decided it wasn't nice and felt bad about it."I can assure you I looked into Mary's eyes many a time, and I'm still here to talk about it,"she declared.

"At dawn?"Mrs. Gentry clarified the terms of the curse.

Lucille didn't answer, because despite her best intentions she had never dared look in Mary's eyes at dawn, to prove to herself that she wasn't going to turn into a winged creature with snake skin, whose gaze sets things on fire.

Mrs. Gentry rested her case. She gave Lucille a patronizing look and left the scene, looking dignified and followed by a small entourage.

"What if I do that in front of you, right here, in the Council Hall?"Lucille presented her challenge.

"And put our safety at risk?"Mrs. Gentry turned around."If you turn there is no telling of what you'll do! I think I speak for everybody when I say that we don't want to be around that when that happens!"

"I'll do it at home, then,"Lucille counteracted.

"Sure you will, dear! I wonder what you wouldn't do for your dear Mary!"Mrs. Gentry replied.

Lucille thought about the catch twenty two for a second: she couldn't disprove the superstition publicly, for lack of volunteers, and if she did it alone, nobody would believe her. The situation bore an eerie resemblance to the truth of having seen her own reflection, only without any discernible benefits. She decided the whole issue wasn't worth her effort and didn't give it a second thought as she worked the room, discussing current events from the village, the proper way to raise children and the questionable mores of the younger generation.

Chapter Six

### The Book of Prophecy

After the council meeting ended, Lucille skipped the usual tea and cookies and headed straight home. She made a beeline for the attic where she opened an old coffer, covered with a thick layer of dust. Its contents were arranged with great care, like one would for long term safe-keeping, breakable items interspersed with delicate linen and fabrics protected from moths and mildew with shards of cedar and lavender buds.

She took the contents out, one by one, laying them aside on a round silver platter she had found inside, platter whose patina had dulled the original polish. The objects had no logical connection to each other – a large tortoise shell comb, a cut crystal candlestick, Mary's favorite baby blanket, her mother's betrothal gift, a very ornate emerald necklace, her own wedding veil in Chantilly lace, a gilded glass goblet, a single white glove in the softest kidskin.

At the very bottom, tucked inside a folded tablecloth, was the book she was looking for, the original copy of the Prophecy of the Fire Maiden, as it was foretold before the folk stories and village gossips ran it through the sieve of fantasy and rendered it unrecognizable.

Few people in the village remembered the Book of the Prophecy had been bequeathed to Lucille as a family heirloom, and if they knew they didn't like to talk about it. Between Rosemary and Mrs. Gentry there was enough inference woven from spotty knowledge to rewrite the legend from scratch, and they certainly didn't want the original to stand in the way of a more expedient story.

"What are you doing, aunt Lucille?"Mary asked from behind her and despite her soft voice she made the lady jump to her feet and get her hair tangled in the rafter ties.

"Good grief, girl! You're going to be the end of me one of these days! What are you doing snooping around my business?"she mumbled, upset to see Mary and the Book of Prophecy share the same ten square feet.

The book was bound in snake skin, a detail that Lucille hadn't paid attention to before and which put a shiver through her bones. She looked at Mary, who seemed as bewildered as ever, as if life always took her by surprise.

"I'm sorry, aunt Lucille, I didn't mean to startle you,"Mary dragged the conversation, stretching her neck at the same time to satisfy her curiosity with regards to the contents of the coffer.

"That's all I need,"Lucille thought, "to have you read what your eyes supposedly do to people! Like we don't have enough trouble managing the mirror gossip already!"she thought, and then smiled reassuringly and changed the focus of Mary's attention to the first object she laid her eyes on, the white kid glove.

"Just going down memory lane, dear. I'd forgotten about all of these, aah, how young I was when I lost the pair of this glove, almost as young as you are now, going to my first dance, years before I even met your uncle,"she waxed nostalgic, with a little too much enthusiasm.

Mary, who was a very smart girl, despite the bewildered appearance she wore to shield herself from well-intentioned advice givers, caught on to the diversion immediately but pretended to follow the cotillion story. She knew full well that her aunt never had a taste for these functions, which she considered pointless and pernicious, because like musty surfaces breed mold, they created a perfect set-up for the village gossip dramas.

Mary listened patiently to Lucille's first dance story, at the same time trying to inventory the rest of the objects. They all looked quite harmless, not something a person like her aunt would feel the need to conceal, including the snake skin bound scrapbook.

Every household had one, it was a tradition of the village and the pride of the lady of the house. These scrapbooks looked so similar one could almost think that the same family inhabited all of those households, living exactly the same life.

"Can you show me the scrapbook, aunt Lucille? I don't think I ever saw yours!"Mary asked innocently.

"How does the green-eyed curse always know exactly where to meddle?"Lucille asked herself, biting her lip to choke a few choice words. "Those busy bodies should be more worried about her eyes rummaging for truth inside their souls than the curse of the Prophecy. I swear sometimes I can almost feel that icy stare drill through my skull!"She sighed, resigned.

"Oh, what's the use! You always find just the wrong things to get involved in, girl. Suit yourself, but don't blame me if you don't like what you read!"The girl grabbed the book, eagerly.

"This is about me!"Mary commented, shocked, while reading the ancestors' story. "Isn't it, aunt Lucille?"

"Yes, dear. It's supposed to be about someone like you. Well, in fact it is about any fair maiden born into the village, but we haven't had any others. Don't pay heed to it, it's just a story."

"But it says that if I look at cows, their milk dries out!"Mary protested."I look at our Rosie all the time and she's just fine!"

"As I said, pay it no heed,"Lucille appeased her.

"And it says that you should never give me water, because the second I drink a drop, my gaze will be able to turn people into winged snakes whose eyes throw fire. How am I supposed to never drink water?"Mary protested, outraged.

"It's just a story, dear. Old wives' tales,"her aunt said.

"And it says that you shouldn't bear me to live!"Mary continued, more shocked by the second."Did people really feel it was their responsibility to rid the world of me?"

Lucille looked down, utterly embarrassed, not knowing what to say to her.

"No wonder nobody ever looks me straight in the eyes, apparently my gaze drains people's souls into eternal darkness!"Mary started sniffling softly. Lucille wrapped her arms around the girl, to comfort her.

"How am I supposed to live my life, aunt? It's one thing for people to dislike me, quite another for them to think my very existence is an abomination!"

"Sweetheart, don't give this another thought, you hear me? Not another thought! I wasn't born yesterday, I can deal with the ladies, don't you worry. You just mind your own life and pay them no heed,"she gently caressed the girl's fiery hair, rocking her back and forth to soothe her like one would a toddler with a scraped knee.

"But,"Mary managed to utter, between bitter sobs,"this is so wrong! Why doesn't anybody see that this is wrong? I haven't done anything to deserve it!"

"I know, dear, nobody said you did. Don't you worry, aunt Lucille won't let anybody bother you,"she said softly.

"But you shouldn't have to defend me for being alive! Nobody else has to justify why they should keep breathing! I'll go to that she-dragon, Mrs. Gentry, tomorrow at dawn and look her straight in the whites of the eyes, just to see her face!"Mary mumbled through her teeth.

"You will do nothing of the sort!"Lucille regained her authoritative voice."Every time you have a thought, my life gets more difficult. Just set aside the cursed book and find something useful to occupy your time, I'll handle the Circle."

"If only half of the stuff in it were true this village would have ceased to exist a long time ago!"Mary continued, outraged.

"You know what? How about we go to the kitchen and see if there are any cookies left?"aunt Lucille tried to entice her.

"I don't think cookies are going to make this all better, aunt Lucille. This is not a cookie kind of problem,"Mary said. She looked so hurt that her sorrow made Lucille's heart sink.

Chapter Seven

### Palimpsest

Despite Lucille's constant rebukes Mary became fascinated with the story of the Prophecy and didn't miss a chance to sneak up into the attic and read it again and again, until she learned its unpleasant contents by heart. It gave her a strange feeling, this story about her, written generations before she'd been born, the script of her life. It didn't even make her bitter anymore, just filled her with intense curiosity and a weird sense of control over her own future, for if one doesn't know the script to one's life, however vexing it happens to be, one can't make any sense of its circumstances.

After she was done learning the contents, she started studying every other one of its details, the sumptuous snake skin cover, the dark, purplish ink, the rough pages, thick as papyrus, that made the book heavier than lead. She caressed the rugged surface for the hundredth time, as if trying to read the cursive writing with her fingers. The surface was not even, it had continuous indentations that flowed on the page like text, but didn't follow the well known flourish of the old writing. She looked closer and gasped. Almost unnoticeable (the writer had done a wonderful job scraping off the old content before he wrote over it) underneath the dark purple lettering there was an older writing, undoubtedly the work of a more educated hand.

Mary was about to jump and run to her aunt, to tell her about what she'd discovered and ask for assistance in deciphering the contents, but then she remembered that her aunt forbade her under threat of punishment to go near the Book of Prophecy again, so she reconsidered, put it away and retired to one of her mindless chores to develop a strategy going forward.

Over the following weeks she spent a few hours every day painstakingly making out the old text, sometimes one letter at a time, and then running into the desert and scratching it into the soft soapstone sides of a small cavern she had discovered, until the entire contents of the book embellished its walls like ancient murals.

She never tired imagining who the original writer might have been, or what the text said, because, sadly, the language was unknown to her, with its strange stick like characters that gave it uneven rhythms and the rugged quality of an art form meant to be chiseled in stone.

During her daily routine, whatever she happened to be doing at the time, her mind was always focused on her new project, which gave her a reason to look forward to each day. That afternoon she finished peeling the potatoes for dinner, washed all the dishes and swept the kitchen, and she peeked out the window to make sure the way was clear for her to take the path through the back gate out into the desert in order to delve into the activity that now had her undivided attention.

"Where are you going?"Lucille boomed from behind, stopping her in her tracks.

"Where did she come from?"Mary asked herself, peeved about the change in schedule, and then said out loud:"Nowhere."

She didn't feel bad about giving a laconic answer, because in all fairness, she wasn't going to go anywhere now, so she really wasn't lying.

"Have you peeled the potatoes for dinner?"her aunt asked unnecessarily, since the bowl of peeled potatoes was placed prominently on the table, right under her nose.

Lucille didn't know how to talk to Mary, who was obviously hiding something, to ensure the girl didn't get herself in trouble. She stared her down, only to be met with the usual confused stare, and then sighed and abandoned pursuit.

"We have guests for dinner tonight, we need everything to be just right. I'll make pot roast!"she boasted, pleased. Mary cringed, since she couldn't stand pot roast, but said nothing.

"Who's coming, aunt Lucille?"she asked.

"Rosemary and Giselle, dear,"Lucille choked down the extraneous commentary, more suited to grown-up talk than sharing with a child.

"Oh,"Mary said, turning one shade paler, because Rosemary's visits always upset her aunt greatly, and the poor girl had to brace against a mound of dirty dishes and Lucille's unbearable mood after she left.

"Why doesn't she ever go to Rosemary's, why do they always have to come here?"she asked herself, and then she remembered Rosemary's husband and his alleged fondness for Lucille, and figured that would move the situation from the frying pan into the fire.

She sighed, inside her head, of course, if one could conceive of such a thing, because she couldn't take it anymore when her aunt gave her one of her half hour guilt trips about lack of gratitude and missing for nothing, and moved about the kitchen quietly to bring out the china, polish the silverware and set the table in a way that ensured nobody could find anything objectionable about it.

The dinner unfolded exactly as Mary had imagined it, with the invisible sharp arrows of wit flying precariously close to her head between Lucille and Rosemary, while Giselle interjected completely absurd and, unbeknown to her, inflammatory commentary at the least appropriate moments.

"So, my dear Lucille, don't tell me you're the last to hear the news again?"Rosemary asked.

"Whatever do you mean, Rosemary?"Lucille replied.

"I'd rather talk to you about this some other time,"Rosemary made an obvious gesture towards Mary, who, evidently, was somehow entangled in the latest gossip.

"We have no secrets here, if it concerns Mary, she should know about it,"Lucille encouraged.

"It's just that... Well, you see... I'm sure it's just talk, Lucille. I don't mean to bring strife into your household,"Rosemary looked down, waiting for Lucille's encouragement to continue.

"Sure you do,"the latter thought, "that's exactly why you are here!" She then continued out loud."What could possibly have emerged that all of us don't already know?"she asked.

"Well, people talk."Rosemary paused."It appears there is a copy of the Que'd out there, and since this whole story started with all of us thinking dear Mary might have sought her own reflection, and with all the prophecy wisdom being visited upon us again, some of us feared this new peril might have something to do with you,"she whispered.

"The Que'd?!"Lucille laughed heartily."Did they find the Ghost of the Mists too? The Midnight Fairy?"

"Don't laugh, Lucille! This is serious!"Rosemary replied offended.

"Sure it's serious! The Que'd! From the fairy tales! Why shouldn't I take it seriously!"

"Somebody swore they saw it with their own eyes. Nobody had used the old language in centuries, if it wasn't the Que'd, how would they have known?"

"Anybody can make up gibberish, how would the person know it was the old language?"Lucille retorted. Rosemary looked a little less unsettled.

"Maybe it was somebody who could read it,"Giselle threw in her two cents and crumbled under the weight of dread springing from both sides.

"Nobody can read the old language, dear!"Lucille bore down on her even more.

"Rumor has it that some people do,"Giselle continued, oblivious, making Lucille's cheeks suddenly flush. The reaction didn't escape Rosemary.

"How can you say such a thing, Giselle! You know as well as I do that the old language was banned when the Book of Prophecy was written, it is forbidden to teach it to anyone, especially the young. Who would dare expose themselves and their children to shunning?"she stared Lucille straight in the eyes, thinking "Oh, my, she can read the old language, sure as day! I wonder what else she knows?"She continued.

"You didn't hear any of this, Lucille? I was hoping to learn more about it from you, why, with your family descending from the Scholars' line,"she pushed.

Lucille got instantly aggravated. Being a descendant of the Scholars' line had been the bane of her existence and something she had tried to make people forget her entire life. It kept her out of the better circles, away from prestigious positions and generally held her at arm's length from sophisticated society. Only grace to marrying her husband, whose lineage had never been tarnished by unseemly ancestry she finally succeeded in reaching a better place in life. The fact that Rosemary never missed a chance to bring that up really did a number on her stomach acids. She paused for a second, to express disapproval, and then answered.

"Of course not. We never discussed forbidden subjects in my family, I'm surprised you'd even ask."

"Please forget I said anything, then. You know, I've been waiting for that exquisite peach pie of yours since the beginning of the evening, do you think we should start dessert?"Rosemary smiled sweetly.

Mary breathed a sigh of relief because she could finally skip out to the kitchen and sort out what she'd just learned, without the all knowing stares of Rosemary and Lucille reaching all the way to the back of her head. She made a mental chart of knowns and unknowns: Lucille could read the ancient language, somebody had discovered the cavern, the even older writing under the old writing was germane and nobody really knew what it said.

The best part of her analysis was that regardless of the content of the older writing, the modified prophecy written over it was no longer relevant. She reminded herself to find out everything she could about the Scholars' line, transferred the peach pie to the silver platter that had made it out of the attic and back into the dining room, despite its reflective properties, and brought dessert to the table, to the guests' delight.

Chapter Eight

### The Que'd

"What is the Scholars' line, aunt Lucille?"Mary asked, braving her aunt's stormy looks.

The room was quiet for a few moments. Normally Lucille would have chastened the uncouth youth for asking such an impertinent question, but under the circumstances it dawned on her that the spirit of cooperation might bring to the surface details that her niece would otherwise not think of sharing with her. She answered.

"It's our family line, dear. Way back when the Book of Prophecy was written, some of the members of the council were in disagreement, they insisted the Circle had misinterpreted the ancestral wisdom, they persisted in using mirrors, they founded their own school of thought. There they taught their own philosophy, and science, and rules of conduct, which unfortunately were in direct violation to the Council rules, in every way, really. It didn't take the Circle long to declare their teachings toxic, a plague on society's morals and a blatant trampling of our truths. The Circle required them to cease and desist any activities not endorsed by the Council. The more audacious members of the group protested publicly, in the Council Hall, during the plenum meeting, and thus pushed, the Circle, wanting to display strength and cohesion, voted unanimously for immediate banishment of the non-compliant."

"The remaining members of the Scholars' line acquiesced to denounce their erroneous teachings and adhere to our society's truths, and despite the fact that they could never regain the full status and privileges they enjoyed before, they reintegrated in society and managed to live their lives in peace."

"Of course the Circle never trusted them again, their teachings were showing such disregard for the Prophecy that nobody could in good faith believe them when they said they changed their minds. It's not something that we usually share with our children, we don't want to worry you unnecessarily, but some of the things they said..."Lucille paused briefly, unsure if she should continue.

"Please tell, aunt Lucille, I promise I won't be disturbed,"Mary insisted, wasted effort, really, because Lucille had already decided to share the whole story with her.

"Well, for one, it appears that they worshiped mirrors,"she whispered fearfully. Mary gasped.

"Really?"the girl asked, matching her tone of voice.

"At least that's what the Council kept saying, over and over, it seems the Scholars protested adamantly when the mirrors were broken and some even placed themselves in front of the cursed objects to protect them. They had this weird belief, though, that not all mirrors are equal, for some they didn't care at all, and for others they would have laid down their lives."Lucille paused again, before she continued in an even softer tone of voice, filled with sadness."Some believe that a few Scholars did lay down their lives to protect the mirrors. What a weird and wasteful idol worship, what would push someone to die for an inanimate object, and an undesirable one at that?!"She stopped to reflect.

Mary waited a few seconds, but curiosity was stronger than her.

"So, what happened next, aunt Lucille? What do we have to do with all of this?"

"Well,"Lucille continued reluctantly, knowing that she'll have to arrive to her socially undesirable status sooner or later,"again, rumors have it that some of the repenting Scholars weren't all that repenting. It seems they kept teaching their knowledge in secret, at great peril, at least to their direct descendants, some say they continued teaching the old language,"Lucille continued fearfully,"some say that the old language does something to the mirrors, something unnatural, terrifying."

"And we are descended from them, aunt Lucille?"Mary said."How come your parents didn't try to teach you the old language?"she asked innocently.

"You do realize that what you are asking me is if my parents violated every commandment of our society to fill my head with poisonous untruths?"Lucille objected.

"Really, aunt Lucille, if you did know the old language and wanted to teach me, I'd be more than eager to learn it,"Mary's eyes shone with curiosity, and her aunt gave her a probing stare and wondered why the girl was suddenly so interested in a dead language nobody could understand anymore.

"Why would you...? Of all the things, Mary!"she continued reluctantly, and then she became a little sad."I don't know it, dear. Over time, because of the secrecy and the danger, most of the knowledge was lost, and in the end we were left with bits and pieces, more ritual than true knowledge, really, and that's all my mother taught me, a few words, I don't even know what they mean..."

"Surely, you could pick it up if you happened upon the language, if you saw it written, for instance,"Mary insisted. Lucille was drenched in the sudden realization that the girl had gotten herself in over her head and if she didn't find out exactly what the trouble was, they were both going to end up joining their audacious ancestors in exile.

"See it written? Have you lost all common sense, girl?! Do you know how much effort and grovelling it took me to make those dragon ladies of the Circle look past my undesirable ancestry? Get me kicked out of the Council, why don't you!"Lucille shouted, outraged.

"Please, auntie? For me?"Mary begged, her clear green eyes looking tearful all of a sudden. Lucille relented.

"All right, I'll teach you what I know, but mark my words, girl, if you end up getting yourself in trouble, I wash my hands of you,"Lucille agreed reluctantly."First things first, there is the legend of the Fire Maiden,"she started again.

"I know about the legend of the Fire Maiden,"Mary interrupted her, somewhat disappointed.

"Not that legend. The other legend. I don't know truth from old wives' tales, so I'll feed it to you straight. They say that the blood of the Fire Maiden can open the mirrors, whatever that means."

Mary stood quietly for a second, pondering what she had just heard. Lucille continued.

"See, it seems that some of the ancestors in the Scholars' line happened to have hair and eyes like yours. They all got banished, of course, repentant or no,"she continued, trying to pour some ice water over Mary's newfound elation."Don't look so pleased with yourself, girl, I didn't say that was a good thing."

"What else do you know?"the girl prodded.

"You heard Rosemary talk about the Que'd, didn't you?"Lucille whispered.

"Yes."

"The Que'd isn't exactly a book, more like a set of instructions on how to use the mirrors, some think even how to build them. The legend says that one of our ancestors hid a copy somewhere the Council would never think of looking, and it's been around ever since. The Council gave up searching for it after several generations, nobody can read it anymore, even if they managed to find it. The old language is forever lost,"she stopped again.

"What else, aunt Lucille?"Mary continued prodding.

"You'll laugh, I find it hard to believe this myself, but my mother always said that our society was pushed backwards, that the knowledge we lost was infinitely more advanced, she said that our village could talk to other villages through the mirrors, that we sought knowledge in them, all forbidden things, of course."

Mary gasped, shocked. She started pondering. Nothing good could come out of this, of course, of the mirrors that had secret knowledge in them, that showed pictures from afar, how could this not be from evil? Then maybe the village was right that she was evil too, even though she was pretty sure that she wasn't going to give anybody snake skin and eyes that set things on fire, she was pretty sure of that.

If those mirrors could pour forth knowledge, who knows what else could come out of them? Who knows what she herself could inadvertently draw out of them, as she and the mirrors were intricately connected. She panicked and decided to tell her aunt what she knew. She went to get the Book of Prophecy.

"Mary, I told you a thousand times to stay away from this cursed tome. What do I need to do to make you listen to me?"Lucille regained her usual attitude.

Mary said nothing, she just opened the book, took her aunt's hand and started caressing the rugged pages with it until the look in Lucille's eyes turned from bewilderment to awe.

Chapter Nine

### A Walk at Dawn

"Great mercy, it's all here! Oh, girl, what have you uncovered!" Lucille thought, turning apprehensive eyes towards Mary, to see if her niece had any idea about the importance of her finding. It only took one glance to ascertain that Mary knew she was holding the long lost copy of the Que'd.

They looked at each other for a while, in a tacit understanding that any knowledge driven from the precious tome will never pass their lips. Finally Lucille decided to comment.

"What a strange thing, you know, with all of this resurgence of the legend of the Que'd, that somebody supposedly saw the old language in a cave not far from here! Why would somebody make up a story like that?"she asked, mostly rhetorically. The conversation continued unfolding naturally, in the third person, touching upon the subject lightly, without emotional involvement.

"I actually know that to be a fact, aunt Lucille,"Mary confirmed, omitting to mention the whole month of labor during which she scratched the old language text all over the walls of the cave."I happened to overhear some of the girls in our workshop talk about it while we were weaving. It's true, they even mentioned where the cave was,"Mary embroidered upon the truth, prompted by her aunt's example.

"I worry about you young ladies, these are not acceptable subjects for an evening sitting, what would the Council think?"Lucille faked outrage."Tell me more, my dear, we need to get to the bottom of this before somebody's curiosity pushes them to delve even deeper into these treacherous waters!"she prompted.

"I'm sure they'll be fine,"Mary reassured her aunt that discussions about the Que'd hadn't left the room."It seems that cave is quite near to our home, aunt Lucille, no farther than eight hundred paces from here."

"The thought!"Lucille picked up the information and rolled with it."The Council will want to know all about it, I'm sure. You know what? The ladies have a Circle meeting next evening, maybe I should do some research on the cave before that, just to get a head start on the work. I'm sure the Circle will ponder this subject at length before deciding the fate of the unfortunate artifact. It is not the kind of decision to be taken lightly,"she presented her point."As much as I dislike involving an innocent child in this grown up matter, I will need your help finding the cave, Mary, since you seem to know where it is. I'm sure the Council will understand my choice, given the importance of this finding."

"Of course, aunt Lucille,"Mary acknowledged."I'm ready to go whenever you want."

"You don't have any chores? Didn't Mrs. Gentry assign you anything to do?"Lucille sought reassurance, because the last thing she needed was to have the dragon lady chew her up for overstepping her authority.

"No, I'm all caught up,"Mary embellished the truth again, because in all fairness Mrs. Gentry's chores were not the ending kind, they tended to go on and on until the complete break down or death of the unfortunate laborer, whichever came first. "Be finished with Mrs. Gentry's chores, my aunt really does have a sense of humor!"Mary giggled silently in her head.

"Well, then, we should be going, no point in wasting time,"Lucille tried to dissimulate the urgency of her quest. She wanted to make sure she arrived at the scene before any righteous objector managed to damage the writings. She found it very hard to temper her excitement about being among the first people to see the precious text after so many centuries, the sacred book of her ancestors, a treasure of wisdom so many Scholars found worthy of their tribulations and their blood.

She didn't question whether the copy of the Que'd that adorned the walls of the cave was genuine, Mary's attitude made it quite clear to her that was not an issue, and she was curious to see how accurate her niece had been in duplicating the pages she could neither see nor read, secretly and in the dark. Lucille worried that the Circle would destroy the cave the moment they found its location, goodness knows some of the members weren't the most open minded individuals.

She worried that the person who spread the rumor had already risen the entire village to attention, and they were going to find a whole crew at the site when they reached it. She worried that the rumor spreading person was a lot closer to the Circle than Rosemary let out, even one of the members, maybe. She worried that sharing with Mary whatever she could decode from the old language would put them both in danger.

She looked at Mary, who was unfazed, as always, and wondered at the tides of thought that rose and fell behind those transparent eyes. The girl's hair was very long now, trailing way past her waist, and when the sun shone through it, her entire being was surrounded by its glow, like by a halo.

They had arrived at the cave right before dawn and found it empty, to Lucille's great relief. The cave had a natural opening at the top, which provided plentiful illumination during the day, but it was still too dark outside, so they waited patiently until the first rays of light hit the beginning of the text, as if the writing had been placed on the wall at that precise location on purpose.

Lucille looked Mary straight in the eyes, in an attempt to figure out whether she had planned the placement of the script, only to realize that she was enacting the very terms of the Fire Maiden's curse. The bright light of dawn shone from behind the girl's slight silhouette, rendering her features too dark to distinguish, only her icy green eyes glimmered softly in the darkness.

"Well, at least we crossed one item off the nonsense list, it seems I'm not going to be throwing flames out of my eyes,"Lucille thought, slightly disappointed by the absence of wing growth.

She looked around at the cave, impressed by the amount of thought that went into choosing it. Besides the good illumination the cave had a natural narrowing, like a bottle neck, that wound down, under the wall and then straight back up and divided it into two sections, of which the front was significantly smaller than the back. At first glance one wouldn't have known there was a second room or a passageway there, since her resourceful niece had the foresight to push a large boulder in front of the opening.

Lucille wondered how did the slight girl have the strength to push that weight back and forth every day, it seemed that Mrs. Gentry's endless list of hard chores offered some benefits after all.

Upon closer look, the text on the walls of the first cave didn't seem to make any sense to her, and she feared she must have lost too much knowledge of the old language to decipher it, but Mary went right past it, as if it were of no importance, snuck through the narrow passage that led to the main room and disappeared. Lucille followed her. She emerged into a large hall filled with light, whose walls were adorned with ancient writing, of which she could only make up words here and there, and it saddened her that the wisdom of her ancestral line slowly tapered off until so little of it was passed onto her.

The sun was now high in the sky and she realized that if their presence there were noticed, this would make both of their lives quite difficult, so she signaled to Mary that it was time to go.

"Come, girl, I've seen enough. I don't think it is my place to bring up these findings to the Council, after all many other people seemed more interested than me in this artifact, I'm sure they'll look into it as they see fit. As for us, we don't need to meddle into forbidden knowledge and venture into dangerous surroundings, away from our village and home. We're better served by forwarding our knowledge of the Book of Prophecy that we've been so blessed to inherit,"she looked intently at Mary.

"Yes, aunt,"the girl acquiesced. They crawled back out to the first room, whose walls were covered in beautiful graphics, albeit completely decorative. Mary pushed the boulder firmly in front of the entrance and sprinkled a good fistful of dust over and around it.

"We will never come back here again,"Lucille ordered Mary in a low tone of voice.

"Yes, aunt,"Mary replied again, softly.

Chapter Ten

### Content

The Circle meeting was quite boring, filled with organizational issues and the usual polite gossip. Lucille found it hard to pay attention to things she'd been hearing for decades, especially now when she was on pins and needles, filled with curiosity over the contents of the Que'd.

She was lost in thought, trying to make sense of the few words she managed to recall from her childhood, words that jumped at her from the ancient writing. For all intents and purposes, the text was as obscure as an abstract painting, and the fact that she couldn't read it saddened her.

Lucille tried to remember what her mother had taught her when she was a child, and was furious at herself for not having paid more attention at the time. She was only four or five and the puzzle of the ancient text seemed like a silly game, but she could still remember some of the nursery rhymes. For what it was worth, none of them seemed to have anything to do with the words she had managed to decipher.

Lucille was trying to assess how long it would take Mary to make another copy of the Que'd, one they could study in peace, sheltered from Mrs. Gentry's prying eyes, when Rosemary's voice snapped her back to reality with the finality of a sharp arrow.

"Don't you agree, Lucille?"

She turned towards the source of the sound, and when she was met by Rosemary's piercing eyes she realized she hadn't listened to the last half hour of the conversation.

"I apologize, ladies, I'm a little tired today. Agree with what, dear?"she asked Rosemary directly.

"The cave, of course. We have to find out who is responsible for this blatant disregard of our statutes! I don't mean to impose on you, dear, but, well, with your heritage and everything, we were hoping you could illuminate us in this respect,"Rosemary threw a barb in Lucille's direction.

The indignity of being descended from the Scholars' line was again flaunted in front of the entire Circle, and some of the ladies shuffled uncomfortably. Lucille was not bothered. Under normal circumstances, any reference to her lineage irritated her, because she always found herself having to defend being born, but this time it filled her heart with warmth and longing for the lost wisdom of her people. Rosemary noticed the look in her eyes and grew aggravated.

"I wish you could pay attention, Lucille, these are important issues, not to be taken lightly. I understand this discomforts you, it couldn't have been easy being raised in such undesirable circumstances, not that anybody holds that against you, of course, we can't control the circumstances of our birth,"she insisted on provoking Lucille, more and more irate that the latter didn't react the way she wanted her to.

Rosemary considered emotional manipulation an art form and she was very proud of her ability to incite the exact feelings she wanted in her hapless subjects; she would have been shocked to learn that many of the ladies of the Circle found her tactics simply indecent.

Lucille took a moment to be grateful she only had to take Rosemary in small doses, then continued.

"The cave, of course. Well, somebody should do something about that."

"Who better than you, dear? I just said that of all of us you are best qualified to spearhead the inquiry, something you would already know if you followed the conversation,"Rosemary brooded.

Lucille couldn't believe her good luck but assumed a thoughtful stance, appearing to struggle with the decision.

"I'm honored by your trust, I don't know what to say. Are you sure there isn't another member who would be best suited for this task? I don't mean to impose..."

"Nonsense, dear, who better than you?"Rosemary insisted, looking at the rest of the ladies for support. The members of the Circle nodded, half in agreement and half trying to shake off the drowsiness induced by a particularly dull evening.

The cool air of the night chased away Lucille's tiredness and sharpened all her senses. Her mind raced a mile a minute planning the work ahead, thinking of how to involve Mary and elated to have a reason to visit the cave on a regular basis.

The girl wasn't asleep when her aunt arrived home, quite late. The latter found her pretending to scrub inexistent water spots from a crystal bowl that was usually filled with fruit.

"Leave that, Mary. Go to bed, you need to be well rested tomorrow,"Lucille said in a sibylline tone.

"What is it, aunt? What did they say?"her niece asked, worried.

"We've been so honored, Mary. The Circle wants us to document the findings in the cave. You can finish that tomorrow, after we come back,"she nodded in the direction of the bowl, which was spotless already.

"Did they say anything else, aunt Lucille? Did they mention how they found out about the cave, or the old writing, or anything?"Mary asked shyly.

"Oh, I don't know, dear, I must have dozed off through the first half of the meeting, we'll figure it out later,"Lucille answered, absentminded, and then headed upstairs to rest.

They started out very early the next morning, this time equipped with writing utensils and little boxes for rock samples. The entrance cave was beautifully lit by the morning sun, an imposing natural chamber embellished with intricate carvings. Lucille and Mary didn't give it a second glance and passed through to the larger room, that the sun rays were just starting to illuminate.

"Where do we even start?"Lucille asked, awed by the magnitude of the task.

"Can you read any of this, aunt?"Mary asked, hopeful.

"A few words, here and there,"Lucille replied, daunted.

"Maybe we can start with those, then,"Mary encouraged, paper and pen in hand, ready to take notes.

"Ok,"Lucille started,"how about this one,"she pointed to the first word of the first block of writing."It means document, public"She started getting more excited as she went."And that says body text", she pointed to another word combination, half way down. Mary wrote down the translation, diligently.

Hours passed, with Lucille scanning through the copious writing for any word she could recognize, and Mary jotting them down on paper in a lattice, with their associated translations. None of them spoke any more than was absolutely necessary, Lucille completely immersed in the ancient language and Mary quietly trying to make sense of the collection of words she was gathering.

'Body text,'she thought, 'those old timers really pushed the boundaries, no wonder they got banished!'Tattoos were absolutely anathema in their culture, so much so that not even the most daring of her friends would presume to talk about them.

"Pay attention, Mary,"Lucille pointed to a whole line."This here says document script write. I don't understand, the entire opus is written by hand, why would they make the distinction? It must refer to something else, a play script, maybe? Or calligraphy,"she frowned with concentration. Mary said nothing, she just jotted down the words, feverishly, careful not to miss anything.

"Well, one thing's for sure, this document was meant to be shared with the public, whatever it says,"Lucille commented thoughtfully.

A little scurrying critter unsettled a few pebbles and startled them, as if waking them up from a dream, and they just realized they have been missing from the front room too long. What if someone came to check up on them and didn't find them?

Mary went through the tunnel first, quiet as a mouse, to make sure the coast was clear, and as she emerged, she saw the light hit the opposite wall and realized they've been at this the whole day, the sun was almost setting. Lucille went through after her and they both pushed back the boulder in front of the entrance.

"Well, that was a productive day, make sure to document your findings, Mary, we wouldn't want to go back empty handed, the Circle depends on us to get to the bottom of this,"Lucille directed.

Mary didn't comment. She folded the page she'd been writing on the whole day and put it away, then pulled out a blank page and started writing.

Chapter Eleven

### A Friend from the Past

"We're never going to figure this out,"Lucille said, dejected."Not only don't I know most of the words' equivalents, but I don't understand their meaning, either. Even the short sentences I translated make absolutely no sense to me. What on earth is 'meta property vr canonical content'? Why are we doing this?"she looked at Mary, exasperated. The girl, as always, donned a perplexed gaze.

The look in her niece's eyes helped Lucille remember that time allocation for this research had been recommended by the Circle, and as such, she didn't need to justify it to herself.

"What have you got, Mary?"Lucille stretched out her arm, pointing towards the papers.

Mary hurried to place the notes in her hand so that Lucille could look them over for a while. Her aunt then sat in a chair by the window for half an hour, looking out into the street with the papers in her lap, deep in thought. Mary didn't dare bother her, she just continued working, quiet as a shadow, to sort out the rest of the pages and put them in the correct order. She was so engrossed in her work that when her aunt finally decided to speak, her soft voice startled her.

"We need someone who can read this, Mary, and I think I know just the person to help us!"

The next morning Mary woke up very early to a terrible racket of platters and silverware rising from downstairs. She washed and dressed up as quickly as she could and went to the drawing room to find Lucille dusting the furniture, folding the good napkins, and polishing the silver teapot to a mirror finish. The latter saw Mary and got up quickly.

"Oh, good, you're awake! Help me with this, will you? Giselle is coming to have tea with me this morning, I want everything to be just perfect!"

"Only Giselle, aunt? Isn't Rosemary coming?"Mary asked, because she couldn't remember a single time when Giselle came alone, she and Rosemary seemed eternally bound to each other, like an object to its shadow.

"Wouldn't you know it, dear! I remembered last night that Rosemary was tied up at a mandatory Council meeting. I thought of canceling our morning tea, but it was way too late to reschedule, that would have been very rude, wouldn't it?"Lucille smiled at Mary, who quietly breathed a sigh of relief.

"Are you sure Giselle is coming, aunt?"she asked, incredulous.

"Of course she's coming, Mary, don't be silly! They are not Siamese twins, Giselle can make her own social schedule. Hurry up, dear, we don't have much time, she'll be here any moment now,"she prompted Mary."Pass me the cups, will you?"

Giselle arrived tangled up in knots of unnecessary gestures, and as she walked through the door she couldn't stop apologizing for anything and everything, from the state of the weather to the dust on her shoes, fussing heartily until her cheeks turned a deep shade of rose. Her behavior was entirely different from that of the Giselle they knew, and Mary finally realized the reason behind the Rosemary-Giselle tandem appearances: the latter was so mortified being out in public all by herself it was almost painful to watch.

"I'm so sorry, dear! So sorry! I wish I knew about Rosemary's last minute schedule change, I know you are always looking forward to her conversation! Oh, dear me, I'll bore you silly with my nonsense, won't I?"she glanced furtively in Lucille's direction, half joking, half serious, hoping for a protest.

The latter obliged promptly, with an overabundance of reassurance, compliments and pampering, and this soothed Giselle's anxiety for the time being.

"How nice of you to come, Giselle, these are momentous times, we need to stick together, you know? It's always good to see an old friend like yourself, especially now, with this new responsibility weighing down on me. I'm not complaining, mind you, it is an honor to be entrusted with this research, but I fear it got the better of me so far,"Lucille smiled modestly and put the half full cup on the saucer, without noise.

Giselle mirrored her gestures and leaned forward, eager to get first scoop of this interesting subject, before Rosemary had the opportunity to dissect, analyze and censor it, and then offer it back to her pre-masticated in a blend of her own opinions. A rare treat indeed!

"I'm trying so hard, I really am,"Lucille lowered her gaze, hoping to encourage Giselle to volunteer something.

"Well,"Giselle looked down, shyly,"maybe you should find someone to help you with it."

She lowered her voice and looked around, as if to ensure nobody else could hear her, and as she did so she propped her eyes on Mary, who was blending with the décor, so quiet that the ladies had completely forgotten about her. Lucille noticed Giselle's apprehension and jumped to reassure her.

"Don't worry about Mary, she's from the Scholars' line too; it has not been easy for her,"Lucille hesitated,"living here with hair like that."Giselle got the reassurance she was hoping for and continued.

"Over time, there have been many families descended from the Scholars, I'm sure somebody knows something about the old language,"she intimated.

"For all the good that does me, I can't just walk around asking people about it, now, can I? It's a sensitive subject, I know from experience that most of us don't like to be reminded of our misfortune", Lucille commented, a little sad.

"Nonsense, dear! There are lot worse things than being socially undesirable!"Giselle jumped to the rescue, only to realize she let out one of her notoriously flat-footed remarks.

All her new found social ease deflated and she clammed up in the chair, sweating profusely and waiting for the ordeal to end.

Lucille cursed her bitter fate and rummaged quickly through her brain for ways to entice Giselle back out of her shell. Her sadness amplified when she looked in Giselle's eyes. Her friend was obviously mortified.

"I didn't mean to, I'm so sorry, Lucille, I'm such a klutz! I really shouldn't have come,"she continued, digging herself deeper and deeper. Lucille reached out to stop the emotional bleeding.

"Don't worry about it, you hear? Not a little bit! I've lived with this issue my entire life, don't you think I've come to make peace with it by now?"She smiled."To tell you the truth, I know this is not something people bring up in company, but I'm a little curious to learn more about the old tradition. After all, good or bad, it is my heritage."

"Isn't it, though?"Giselle smiled brightly, relieved that a great load was taken off her chest."Me too, dear. Me too,"she modestly confessed.

"I didn't know you were descended from the Scholars' line!"Lucille acted surprised."What a blessing it is to know Mary and I aren't the only ones! It's not easy being different, is it?"she continued.

"It's not something I like to talk about, it makes life too hard, Lucille, people judge you, see you differently, can you imagine what Rosemary would say?"She contemplated the possibility and her face grew paler. She shook off the dreadful scenario and continued."Anyway, we are who we are, right?"she chuckled.

"I'll say!"Lucille chimed lightheartedly."Oh, goodness me, I almost forgot! Giselle, you absolutely must try my vanilla ice cream, I know it is your favorite!"She turned to her niece, filled with excitement."Mary, I already made the custard but I forgot we don't have any ice, would you be so kind and go get some? Not from the grocer across the street dear, the other one. Much better quality!"

Mary left and when she returned from her long walk across the village and back with a large block of ice nicely wrapped inside her basket Giselle had already left.

"There you are! It turns out I sent you out for nothing, Giselle had a previous engagement she needed to tend to and couldn't wait. Maybe the two of us can enjoy some ice cream", she said smiling, and got up on a stool to grab the salt from the top shelf.

Mary crushed the ice quietly, waiting for her aunt to reopen the conversation.

"We've been lucky again,"Lucille finally said.

"You mean Giselle..."Mary started, with only a quick glimmer in her eyes betraying admiration for her aunt's brilliance.

"Heavens no! Our sweet Giselle? God love her, she couldn't focus enough to help even if she knew how! No, our cozy chat reminded me of an old Scholar friend, I wonder why I didn't think of him before! A direct descendant of Abraham Coulter, no less, there is no way the esteemed elder abandoned his legacy to the winds! If there is anyone who knows anything about the Que'd, it's got to be him."

"Who is Abraham Coulter, aunt?"Mary asked.

"The author of the Que'd, dear."

Chapter Twelve

### Mirror Enchantments

The cave find became the focus of attention for the entire village. Their community hadn't had anything exciting to talk about since most of its members could remember, and the discovery of something both fascinating and inaccessible kept everybody on the edge of their seats with anticipation.

Public discussions about mirrors became so commonplace that even Mrs. Gentry gave up protesting eventually. "One can't squelch public curiosity, especially that of young people, it's a sad state of fact,"she thought, sighing with nostalgia for the good old days when even a mention of mirrors or reflections would immediately draw community shunning.

"The times we live in!"she complained, often out loud, to whomever was willing to listen."My parents would not have left the house for shame if I ever spoke so out of turn in front of my peers and elders! We're just sliding down a slippery slope towards certain doom with this abrogation of morality and sacred rules. I never imagined I'd have to discuss such profane and shameful subjects in Council! Oh, what will become of us!"she uttered tragically, and between the mourning attire and her strong classic features her countenance reminded people of Electra.

The core of the Council, even those who did not approve of mirrors in principle, finally tired of her drama, learned to nod politely during her antics and tune her out.

On a more practical side the study of the Que'd advanced with the slowness of a snail, in part because the task of translating a language she didn't know was daunting in and of itself, and in part because Lucille, for all her enthusiasm towards the freshly uncovered knowledge, was still uncomfortable speaking openly about a subject that had been her cross to bear throughout a lifetime.

The Scholar friend, whom Mary never got to meet, proved to be a godsend, moving them faster forward in the understanding of the tome.

"So, this is some sort of mirror guide?"Mary half-asked.

"It appears so, it seems to be a manual, although I'm not so sure how it works,"Lucille commented."If the spelling worked in written form, we'd already have seen some results. Or maybe you don't have the required skills,"she hypothesized, shaking her head, obfuscated."I can't believe I'm talking about spells with you!"she continued."Maybe if we say the words out loud something happens, although I worry about the consequences of such a dangerous experiment."

"Well, I don't think that chanting

'varthe date equalsnewDate;

vartest one equals the date get Time;

functionanimate'

is going to do anything, aunt!"Mary protested.

"Good heavens, Mary! Do you realize how reckless that was?!"Lucille jumped out of her seat."How can you be sure you don't unleash all breeds of hell upon our heads with these words, you should never test them until you know for sure what they do!"

"Nothing happened, aunt. I don't think it's the chanting,"Mary replied.

"Maybe. Or maybe the spell is incomplete, it seems too short. Anyway, it doesn't mention the purpose of that which it animates, does it?"Lucille frowned.

Mary became very thoughtful.

"Didn't your friend give you an idea about what all of this could be used for?"she eventually asked.

"All I could gather was that these are instructions on how to open the mirrors, we probably need one in order to see how the words work,"Lucille replied.

Her niece hesitated for a second, then offered sheepishly.

"You know, I could ask around, maybe somebody knows where to find a reflective surface, given our dire necessity. For research, of course!"

"Mary! I'm disappointed in you! Besides, it wouldn't help us anyway, dear. It seems it has to be of a special kind, a black mirror is what he said,"she whispered so quietly that Mary had to lean over to hear her.

"Why a black mirror, aunt? What's so special about them?"she asked innocently.

"They carry wisdom inside,"Lucille reluctantly disclosed."I seriously doubt there is one left intact in the village, though, the founders were adamant about finding and destroying every last one."

"But, hypothetically speaking, if we found one, this might work,"Mary continued her thought."If we, say, did manage to open one of those mirrors, what would it do?"

"That's the problem, I don't know. Maybe we're lucky not to have found one, Mary, it seems risky to rush into an experiment like this. We need to learn more about the cursed objects before we try anything. Let's wrap this up for today, shall we? "she said, getting up."I need to go to the Council Hall anyway, they're expecting updates."

The council was waiting for her as one, with bated breath. Rosemary presided over the gathering, thrilled to have been the center of attention and disappointed that Lucille's arrival with fresh information stole her thunder. The room went quiet upon the entrance of the latter, in anticipation of new revelations.

Eventually, Mrs. Eberhart spoke. She was one of the revered elders and the Circle naturally yielded to her wisdom.

"What news have you brought us, Lucille? We're all beyond ourselves with curiosity, don't keep us on the edge of our seats, let's have them!"

Lucille spent a good half hour doing her best to explain the findings to a perplexed audience. Many of the ladies were incredulous, even more were shocked, and a few simply didn't want to be there at all. To think they had spent their lives in the dignified manner of their tradition, only to be subjected to this awkward mirror conversation in the autumn of their days! The more Lucille spoke, the less they wanted to hear. Rosemary finally snapped.

"I think I speak for all of us when I say that the founders were wise beyond reason to relegate this despicable subject to oblivion! Say no more, Lucille! How about making a unanimous decision right here, right now, to ban this subject forever, seal the cave and remove all knowledge of it, so that the next generation doesn't have to be exposed to this depravity! Who is with me?"she prompted, looking around. Hands remained down, so she dunked back into the seat, offended. Mrs. Eberhart spoke.

"This seems a little far-fetched, Lucille, are you sure this is the correct interpretation, my dear? Maybe there are some mistranslations, even the Scholars' line seems to know almost nothing about the old language."Lucille assured her that the little they managed to translate was absolutely accurate.

"It just seems so hard to believe that a few words arranged in sequence could do something, um, supernatural, so to speak, to inanimate objects, even to the mirrors, of which we know precious little. Not a very scientific approach, don't you think?"

"Exactly!"Rosemary gained back her confidence."Why poison young minds with this sacrilegious nonsense!"Mrs. Eberhart waved her hand to signal she wasn't finished talking.

"So, when you manage to fit together enough detail about this endeavor,"she looked at Lucille,"what then? I don't think we can scrounge up a mirror, it is my understanding they'd all been destroyed. Especially the particular kind you were talking about. By the way, you never mentioned, how did you find out these details?"she looked Lucille straight in the eyes. The latter searched through her notes again, as if trying to find the answer to the question written in there somewhere, and as she bode her time a very animated Giselle burst through the door to let them know the girls in the weaving workshop had ran out of gray wool.

The Council refocused its attention on the issue at hand, which seemed to have some urgency associated to it, and abandoned Lucille's pie in the sky research, to the great relief of the latter. The rest of the time was spent in an acerbic debate regarding which kind of gray wool was better, Merino or Shetland, and the meeting went on, well into the night.

Chapter Thirteen

### Black Mirror

Understanding the old language became increasingly challenging over time, and the hopes of making heads or tails of it diminished, even for Mary, who, despite the unfortunate circumstances of her birth was an unbridled optimist. She spent endless nights, risking her aunt's chastising, trying to decipher the meaning of the fragments they had translated, and it felt more and more like trying to mend an intricate tapestry after it had been torn to shreds, its big picture forever lost.

A puzzle with a million pieces, no two alike, without recognizable match lines, color themes or continuing patterns. As adept as she was at weaving together seemingly incompatible snippets into a cohesive flow, a skill she had mastered early in her childhood, she had to admit defeat after a while: what good does it do one to reconstitute something one can't possibly understand?

At the end of each week she threw in the proverbial towel, swearing to dedicate her efforts to more productive endeavors, of which Mrs. Gentry's list was never lacking, and every time the week began again she went back to the now so familiar puzzle, only to become disillusioned as the week progressed.

It was Wednesday, the day that usually split time, like a sharpened blade, into hope in unveiling the mystery and wretchedness about realizing she will never be able to solve it, a particularly unnerving day for Mary, and one she found especially taxing that week. Irritated by a continuous sequence of failures, she threw the papers at the wall, grateful her aunt wasn't there to scold her for such unacceptable behavior, and made her way to the Council Hall to pick up the in-basket and bring it home for Lucille to sort through. The community had the custom of dropping suggestions for improvements, lists for public purchases and checklists of completed tasks in that basket, and at the beginning of each week one of the Council members selected the work tasks.

Mary entered the large room quietly, relieved to find it empty, and reached for the basket, only to notice, to her surprise, that it contained no papers, just a bundled package that looked like a plate wrapped in a towel. She reached to grab it and almost dropped it, because what peeked out when the towel slid open was a black mirror!

Mary had obviously never seen a black mirror, yet she recognized it immediately, and keen excitement mixed with sheer terror put a nervous shiver through her whole body and made her hands shake. She couldn't resist touching it, and asked herself what could possibly go wrong if she did, it was just an object after all, and as she tried to rationalize her forbidden use of a cursed item she caressed the smooth surface lightly, barely touching it. The mirror lit up, instantly brightening the dark reflection of her face for a second, and then her features disappeared altogether and a sprinkling of tiny symbols showed up on the surface instead. Mary jumped back, startled. The little symbols wiggled for a second, as if unsure whether to go or stay, and then settled down, poised under the shiny surface. Mary, whose emotions and curiosity didn't stray too far from those of a child, extended a probing finger and poked at one of the symbols, to see if she could make it start wiggling again.

"Good morning," the mirror said.

Mary looked around, terrified that somebody might have heard that, grabbed the cursed object against all wisdom and started running. She ran all the way to the cave and didn't stop until she was safely in the back room, with the boulder securely closing the tunnel behind her. She laid the mirror on a flat stone and poked at the little symbol again.

"Good morning," the mirror said again. "What should I call you?"

"Mary," the girl responded in a tiny flat voice, shaking like a leaf.

"Nice to meet you, Mary. How can I help you?"

Mary had heard that magical objects sometimes granted wishes, only to follow them with terrible hardship, as if to punish the audacity of the inquirer. She wasn't going to risk being turned into a frog, a worm or a cockroach, so she didn't answer. She pondered the situation for a while, wondering how she was going to tell her aunt that the mirrors didn't need spells after all, not to mention her blood to open them up, and then she tried to reassure herself that touching the mirror was relatively safe and poked at another symbol, with more confidence this time. Its colorful companions started a weird little wiggle dance across the screen.

"Are you sure you want to delete that, Mary?" the mirror asked. The girl didn't know if it was safe to answer the question, so she did nothing, frozen in fear. The little symbols continued their strange wobble for a while and eventually stopped without her intervention. They remained on the screen just a little longer, floating right under the surface like the tree blossom petals she used to pick off the surface of the pond and just as colorful against the black background, and then the surface turned dark again.

"What am I going to do with you?" Mary whispered, not realizing that she had said the words out loud.

"I'm not sure I understand the question," the mirror responded.

Mary was about to respond when she heard a soft scratching sound, followed by her aunt's voice from the other end of the tunnel.

"Mary, are you there? What on earth are you doing, girl, I've been worried sick! I sent you to the Council Hall two hours ago, who are you talking to?" she emerged grunting from the tunnel.

"The mirror," Mary answered simply.

"No!" Lucille gasped, watching the black surface in disbelief.

"It talks back," Mary replied, as if this was normal.

"What do you mean it talks back? Without the old language?" Lucille frowned, skeptical.

"You have to poke it," Mary explained.

"What would possess someone to poke at a cursed object? The image is very dark," Lucille noted, looking at her own reflection in the black glass. Mary took a moment to notice that her aunt wasn't in any way daunted by seeing her own reflection; this prompted the girl to draw her own conclusions, all of which she kept for herself.

"You have to touch it," she said.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Lucille hesitated.

"It's quite safe," Mary reassured her.

"So, all the secrecy and the danger around the tome our ancestors hid for so many generations was for nothing? I find that hard to believe!" Lucille protested.

"Why don't you ask the mirror?" Mary suggested.

"Ask it what?"

"What the Que'd is for, for instance," Mary offered. The mirror didn't understand the question. "Or about my blood," she continued, in a softer whisper, concerned not to annoy her aunt with a subject that had always been taboo.

"Why don't you?" Lucille passed the question back to her.

"Can my blood open you?" Mary asked the mirror, immediately aware of the logical inconsistency of the question, since the shiny surface was already animated. The mirror didn't understand the question.

"My blood. Blood." Mary insisted.

"Just a moment," the mirror asked, and then started reciting "1. blood is the fluid that carries oxygen and other elements to the tissues and carbon dioxide away from the tissues through the heart and vascular system."*

"What is a vascular system, aunt?" Mary whispered in Lucille's ear, but her aunt shrugged her shoulders, looking almost as puzzled as she was. The mirror continued enumerating, impassible, "2. the vital principle; life. 3. a person or group regarded as a source of energy."

"You think it sees me as its source of energy?" Mary shuddered, too tired to be scared.

"Let's hope not!" Lucille stared her straight in the eyes. "How do you do this, Mary! How on earth did you get a hold of this object when the entire village swore on their lives there wasn't one left working?"

"I found it in the in-basket," Mary responded.

"At the Council Hall!??" Lucille couldn't believe her ears. "I wonder who brought it there," she mumbled, more for herself than for her niece. "And why does it work without the old language, this makes no sense at all, I know that a lot of the mirror lore is usually superstition and tall tales, but there is always something in them that rings true and makes logical sense. Why would it mention your blood?" she insisted. "Wait, maybe you touched the wrong symbol! How many of them did you open?"

"Just the two," Mary answered.

"Does the other one talk?" Lucille asked.

"No. It points north."

"Without a magnet?" Lucille started to worry.

The sun was almost setting and the cave turned dark.

"Goodness, I lost all sense of time. We need to head home, I don't want to walk through the desert at night," Lucille prompted.

"What about the mirror, aunt?" Mary asked.

"Bring it, we'll take it into Council tomorrow morning. I'm sure Rosemary will be as excited as we are that we found it," Lucille smiled, contemplating the perplexed look on Rosemary's face in her mind's eye, if only for a moment.

*Wikipedia definition

Chapter Fourteen

### Mirror in the Council Hall

"I think I speak for everybody when I say that bringing this curse into the Council Hall is a disrespectful and irresponsible act one hoped not to expect from a member of your standing!"Rosemary hissed at Lucille, who had just walked in, holding the object of contention.

"Naturally,"she thought,"who else would be the first to find out about the black mirror but our sweet Rosemary! On second thought, I wonder how she knew what I was holding?"Then she said out loud:

"Actually, I'm not the person who brought the black mirror into the Council Hall, I'm the one who returned it. Mary found it in the in-basket yesterday, dear child! I asked her to fetch me the contents and she obliged. Fathom my surprise to learn what the contents of the basket were,"she joked.

"So,"Mrs. Eberhart calmly evaluated the situation,"you've been in possession of this object since early yesterday and seem not to be harmed, at least not that we can see. Have you managed to learn anything about its purpose?"

"Not entirely. From what Mary and I gathered so far, it seems to be a means for divination."The audience gasped in horror, then a growing murmur started among the ranks. Mrs. Eberhart raised her hand, demanding silence, then addressed Lucille again.

"Is there a safe way to show us how it works? I understand some of our esteemed Council members' reluctance to be here during the demonstration, so if anybody wants to leave the room, they are free to do so."Rosemary got up, as if to to leave, but only moved to the back of the room where she remained standing, in protest, her arms crossed and a resentful stare in her eyes. The Council leader continued, looking at Lucille."Please proceed, my dear, I think everybody is ready now."

Lucille placed the black mirror on the table in front of Lucille and pressed against its frame. The mirror lit up, prompting Mrs. Eberhart to defensively lean back.

"Good morning, Mary,"the mirror said."How can I help you?"

"It thinks she's Mary!"Mrs. Gentry whispered in the ear of the person closest to her."The girl must have spelled the thing, I told you that child was up to no good! All those stories we've heard recently, my goodness, and now this!"she objected, more revolted than scared. One would have thought that a person whose entire life philosophy was centered on the fact that mirrors were an abomination darkness itself had forced on people of good faith would be somewhat startled by seeing one. Lucille continued her demonstration.

"Would you like to ask it a question?"Lucille offered to Mrs. Eberhart courteously, in deference to the Council leader's impeccable standing. Mrs. Eberhart thought for a second, then asked the mirror directly.

"What are you?"

"I'm just a humble virtual assistant", the mirror replied.

"What does it mean, virtual?"one of the ladies in the back whispered, disturbing the silence that had descended upon the Council Hall.

"It must have something to do with morality,"her companion whispered back.

"Aren't they supposed to be evil?"the first lady expressed her confusion.

"How should I know, dear? Maybe it's trying to deceive us."

Mrs. Eberhart looked at the two hard, trying to make them understand their private shushing was distracting. When order was restored, she continued quizzing the mirror.

"Are you a mirror?"she asked, for the record.

"Who, me?"the mirror replied. The Council leader hesitated for a second, taken back by the bluntness of the strange talking object.

"Yes,"she finally answered.

"That's what I figured,"the mirror said and didn't continue with the rest of the answer. The Council waited for a few seconds, literally holding their breaths, but the forbidden object remained stubbornly silent.

"Maybe we should ask it what a mirror is, first, after all we don't really know,"one of the council members offered, not realizing that Lucille's hand was still pressing against the mirror frame.

"A mirror,"the device recited,"is an object that reflects light in such a way that, for incident light in some range of wavelengths, the reflected light preserves many or most of the detailed physical characteristics of the original light."*

A deluge of stories followed the definition, all of them about mirrors, spanning the whole range from the trivial to the esoteric, to the shock of the respected Council members, who weren't used to uttering the forbidden noun, not to mention being drenched in information about it, all of it bizarre and unsuitable for public debate.

The Council paused for a second, not knowing where to go from there. Finally, Mrs. Gentry decided to break the silence.

"I know I'll live to regret this, but why don't we ask it something we already know, just to get an idea of how reliable its information is. What is a loom, for instance."

The ladies nodded in agreement, given the fact that her suggestion seemed both sensible and practical, but didn't have time to put the decision to a quick vote before the mirror spilled out the requested information.

"A loom is a device used to weave fabric."*

"Lucille, dear, would you be so kind and remove your hand from the frame? It seems that is required for the mirror to talk to us, I'd like to evaluate our options first, without it volunteering information,"Mrs. Eberhart asked, without losing her composure. Lucille obliged.

"It seems accurate to me,"Mrs. Gentry noted,"although all that talk about wavelengths and incident light is giving me the shivers,"she said very loudly, turning towards the mirror to see if it would start reciting definitions for any of the terms. The mirror remained silent.

"Aha! Got you!"Mrs. Gentry exclaimed, triumphantly."It also needs its frame touched in order to hear us! At least we learned something today!"

"I wouldn't count my blessings just yet,"Rosemary intervened in the conversation."Are you sure it's not just deceiving us? It is a cursed object after all, none of us knows what it can do."

"Maybe we could ask?"one of the Council ladies replied.

"By all means,"Rosemary condescended."What makes you think it's not going to lie to you?"

"What can you do?"the lady asked the mirror. The object immediately listed a sequence of tasks whose pictograms were just as foreign to the Council as the written descriptions that accompanied them.

"We can't understand any of this stuff! I'm telling you it's mocking us, throwing gibberish at us to make us run in circles around nothing!"Rosemary raised her voice, irate.

"Or maybe its knowledge is more advanced than ours, dear,"Mrs. Eberhart."Just because we don't understand something, it doesn't make it untrue. Let's test it some more and find out if we're on the same page about the things we already know."For the next half hour they asked and verified the shared meanings of the words village,council,harvest,faith, and a whole host of others, including appalling and reckless, at Rosemary's request.

"Well, that pretty much covers it,"Mrs. Gentry concluded."What I don't understand is what this has to do with the Que'd, the mirror was supposed to be answering that question for us, and there doesn't seem to be any connection. Are you sure it is the right mirror?"

"How many different versions of this torment do you think the Scholars cursed us with?"Rosemary asked emphatically."It's got to be it. So,"she asked hopefully,"when are we going to destroy this abomination?"

The whole Council looked at her like they didn't understand the question.

*Wikipedia Definition

Chapter Fifteen

### The End of Time

Lucille and Mary spent the following week trying to learn more about what the mirror could do. There was one aspect of this endeavor that none of them could shake: as exciting as it was to communicate with the magical object, the Que'd manuscript beckoned from the chest where it had been carefully stashed, wrapped in linen and strewn with lavender buds to ward off the moths.

Lucille couldn't let go of the thought that the truth remained hidden somewhere underneath that black water the playful symbols were floating on, the way sunken treasures sleep undisturbed in the depths of the ocean. From somewhere inside that dark water the ancient words of the Que'd called out to her, she could almost hear them, remember them from her childhood, although she would have chastised any person for lacking seriousness if they brought this up to her.

She remembered how many of her ancestors had braved great peril to keep the ancient language from being lost forever, and, scientific mind that she was, she simply couldn't warm up to the existence of pure magic. Deep within her soul she knew the Que'd had something to do with what made the mirror work, even though she had no evidence of that yet.

On the other hand, she wanted to remain open to the possibility that spells and enchantments did in fact animate the mirror, for if someone could compel an inanimate object to speak with human voice, one had to consider the fact that nothing was impossible anymore. She was shocked to learn how quickly the Council had accepted the reality of talking objects, considering their history.

For once, she found herself viewing the world through Mary's eyes. She waited for the girl to be occupied with some other task and then sneaked into the attic to study the book and the notes again, looking for patterns, seeking to remember meaning, trying to connect the ancient manuscript to the shiny object in front of her, so polished and smooth surely it couldn't have been made by human hands. Her heart skipped a beat when she looked at the mirror, wondering what kind of beings she and the village were getting entangled with, and then all of her misgivings about the curse of the Fire Maiden came back, making her wonder if there was some truth to that story, if only as a metaphor of their common unraveling.

But then she thought that the beings who had made this object wouldn't have gone to the trouble of trying to teach them how it worked if they meant the villagers harm, besides, her decades of experience with strategy told her that in any battle with this newly discovered entity, their lively little village would be seriously outmatched.

She stared at the mirror, watching her own reflection in the shiny black glass and contemplating the fact that, according to Council law, she was committing a felony punishable by banishment. She decried the fate of all the relatives and acquaintances who had been served bitter sentences for a lot less than what she was doing now. The thought of their undeserved misery brought all the blood to her cheeks with revolt, and strengthened her resolve to pull the blindfold of ignorance and superstition off the eyes of those who made such decisions, so that nobody would be harmed again for speaking the truth.

She looked at the mirror, and as intimidating as it was to her, it was just an artifact, the product of another being's superior intelligence and very skilled hands, but a made object nonetheless. It made her wonder what she could do if limiting thoughts were no longer lingering inside her mind.

She jerked when Mary entered the room, and attempted to put the Que'd back inside the chest, like a teenager caught passing notes in class by the teacher.

"I can't put that out of my mind either,"Mary gestured towards the manuscript."It's all too easy, this magical object that just happened to fall in our laps, don't you think?"

"Maybe,"Lucille said thoughtfully.

"Have you figured out how it connects to the Que'd?"Mary asked directly.

"Not in the least,"Lucille begrudgingly admitted.

"Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to go over the stories from the Book of Prophecy again. If they were meant to divert attention from the Que'd and the mirrors, there may be some clues we could find in there. At least it is written in a language we understand,"the girl suggested, and Lucille had to admit her niece still had the ability to give her the creeps with her irreverence towards the sacred texts, even as the truth stared them in the face. Lucille wondered what kind of inherited traits encouraged Mary to stray so far from the straight and narrow, given her own efforts to guide and teach her the Village's traditions the best she knew how.

"This is too much for me, Mary. Could you dial down the scientific approach a little bit? Better yet, why don't you do the research yourself, it would be hard for me not to be biased,"she finally answered.

Mary hesitated a little.

"Well, for instance, we could start with the fact that my eyes can...ahmm...do things..."she started euphemistically."I wonder if there is something in that story we could make sense of,"she turned to her aunt. Lucille's guilt over being disrespectful towards the Book of Prophecy was instantly replaced by the guilt of allowing her own niece to be treated like the Village monster.

"I can't imagine that would point to anything useful,"Lucille hesitated. Mary stared at the mirror, intently. The mirror did nothing.

"Yeah, probably not. What next? The blood,"the girl said, her green eyes still gleaming rebelliously.

"Don't drag me into this, Mary, black mirror or not, the Council will still have us out of the Village by sundown if we get involved in blood magic!"she said, in a definitive tone.

"But..."Mary tried to protest.

"Enough, girl! There are limits!"Lucille ended the conversation. Mary relented.

"Ok, how about that story where I'm able, with a single touch of my finger, to preserve my own reflection inside the mirror and then bring it back to do my bidding at will?"Mary suggested.

"You don't suppose there is any truth in that, do you?"Lucille asked, trying to suppress a shiver.

"Only one way to find out,"Mary said, and started touching the symbols, one by one. At some point, her own reflection returned to the dark surface, covering it entirely, with the exception of a tiny circle."What do you suppose this does?"she asked her aunt, and before Lucille had the time to yell"Don't touch that, Mary!"she had already placed the tip of her finger on it. The mirror uttered a small hiss, like the sneeze of a cat, as it trapped Mary's image inside.

"Oh, no! Oh, no, Mary, we have to get that out of there, do you have any idea what the Council will do to me if I show up to the next meeting with your image inside the mirror?"Lucille panicked."Why did you have to touch that symbol? How do we know what's going to happen now, this is bad, we have to remove your likeness from the insides of this thing right now!"

"But how, aunt? I don't even know how I made it happen?"Mary asked, innocently.

"That's precisely the problem! Whatever you do, don't touch that symbol again. Try the other ones, even though only God knows we're not any safer with them! Come on, we don't have a lot of time, the meeting is in two hours!"her aunt mumbled, tense. They fumbled over the black surface, their hands crossing over symbols and rousing all sorts of activity from the depths of the black glass, most of which they didn't have time to process, not to mention understand. "I think we're in way over our heads here, Mary," Lucille mentioned, wretched, as the girl was going from symbol to symbol, opening mirrors inside of mirrors inside of mirrors. Inside the last one they instantly recognized the now familiar old language, even in the guise of a tiny symbol.

"Look, aunt!"Mary pointed to it.

"I can see that,"Lucille confirmed.

"What should we do?"Mary said.

"I don't know,"her aunt replied.

"I can touch it with my finger and see if anything happens,"Mary suggested.

"You touched a lot of these symbols with your finger, you know something always happens, the question is, will that be something we'll be able to handle?"Lucille assessed the situation.

"This is what we were looking for, isn't it?"Mary said.

"Look underneath, Mary,"Lucille answered, her voice dry with apprehension.

"It offers to show us the Source,"Mary shivered."The Book of Prophecy says that if the Fire Maiden finds her way back to the Source it would start the undoing of the world."

"Does it specifically mention if the end-times happen before or after you touch that symbol?"Lucille asked.

"No,"Mary replied.

"Because we may already be doomed,"Lucille noticed calmly."What on earth just happened?!"she shouted, pointing to the mirror. The message had disappeared and as it did, another mirror opened up, displaying on its glimmering surface the ancient words of the Que'd, etched with crystal clarity.

Chapter Sixteen

### Blood Spell

"Now what!?"Mary thought.

"Oh, I knew it! I just knew it! It had to be!"Lucille couldn't contain her excitement, and all of a sudden she looked much younger, an echo from the care free days of her girlhood, when, much like her niece, she was willing to take on the world, no holds barred.

"Do you think we can order the mirror to do things?"Mary asked.

"Probably,"Lucille said thoughtfully,"if we knew how... Did you make any progress with understanding the language?"she turned towards her niece.

"Not really,"the girl confessed.

"No matter, we have time to figure out what we can, later, I'm late for the meeting, we'll talk when I come back."

After Lucille left, her niece paced around the attic for a while, to settle her jitters, then started to feel stifled by the stuffy room and decided to get some fresh air and sort out her thoughts. As she walked, deep in thought, her feet carried her to the cave, such is the power of habit, and she only realized it when she was almost at the entrance. The young girl shrugged off her absentmindedness and went inside, figuring that if any place could stir up breakthroughs about the secrets of the old language, the cave was it, with the ancient script carved all over the walls.

The Que'd didn't get a chance to impress her this time, because in the middle of the room, right under the sky opening, as if miraculously sprouted over night, loomed a much larger mirror, attached to a strange contraption, a table of sorts covered in symbols and lights, some of which she recognized, most of which she didn't. She poked at the mirror, trying to awaken it, even though there were no playful little symbols in sight, but the surface remained dark, ignoring her touch.

Mary was daring, not foolish, so she circled the contraption first, trying to figure out all of its details, from the strange threads that held it together, like loose warps on a loom, to the plethora of tiny lights and unfamiliar symbols.

Obviously it had been brought there on purpose, and Mary shuddered to think that there was no way any of its parts could fit through the tunnel, so there were only two possible explanations: it had either been dropped from the sky through the opening above, or, scarier yet, it had been summoned to appear out of thin air inside the space. She spent some time contemplating with dread what power those beings must hold to have mustered such a feat; she got even more disheartened when she realized she'd eventually have to explain all of this to her aunt in a way that would satisfy the Circle, and for the life of her she couldn't think of one.

Surveying the large mirror took her a couple of hours, during which she tried to figure out what she could about the strange object, especially what was safe to touch and what was not. There was one piece in particular that drew her attention like a magnet, because it was different from the rest of the pictographs under the transparent surface, and if she didn't know any better she could swear it looked like her hand.

Lucille's impassioned argument with somebody broke her concentration, but the voices were muffled by the thick wall and she couldn't get the gist of their conversation.

"In here,"Mary raised her voice, and a moment later her aunt emerged from the tunnel, followed by Mrs. Gentry.

"Oh, my goodness, another one!"the latter gasped."And this one is bigger! And more complicated! Is that a human hand?"she asked, aghast, making ritual gestures to protect herself from evil and reassuring Mary in the process that what she was seeing was really there.

"I think so,"Mary hesitated, and without thinking, as if attracted by an unseen force, she placed her palm on the hand print. She immediately gasped and winced, and that propelled Lucille to throw her arms around the girl and push her away from the table, placing her own body between Mary and the mirror to protect her.

"I think it stung me,"Mary said, her eyes starting to well up with tears, more from fright than from real pain.

"Let me see,"Lucille said, and as she looked at Mary's hand the little pin prick on the tip of her finger oozed out a drop of blood."Please tell me none of it got on the mirror, Mary!"she quizzed the girl, her voice lower with irritation, and in the absence of any validation she crushed a few well thought comments between her lips."Of all the times this could have happened, it had to be in the presence of the dragon lady, I'll never hear the end of it!"she thought.

"I think you better watch this,"Mrs. Gentry pointed to the mirror.

"Biometric database search initiated, please wait,"the mirror said, running a sequence of displays, all esoteric and frightening, and then started playing weird but soothing music, to pass the time.

"What's biometric, aunt?"Mary whispered, terrified.

"I don't know, but you should have thought about that before you touched the table! What did I tell you? You never listen!"Lucille snapped, too upset to be afraid. The girl was more stubborn than a mule and no amount of good advice had ever made its way inside that fair skull of hers! Blood spells, and in the presence of Mrs. Gentry, no less! The latter didn't seem phased, however, a very strange thing for her indeed, and refrained from starting one of her famous diatribes, too absorbed in watching the mirror's antics to pay attention to any of them.

"DNA markers detected, packet code six alpha. Accessing genetic data bank,"the mirror said.

"Let's just hope and pray that whatever it decides about your blood won't prompt it to smite us into kingdom come!"Lucille glared at Mary with a deep frown between her eyebrows. The mirror took its sweet time looking for whatever it was looking for, raising the anxiety of the three to epic levels.

Mrs. Gentry acted very much like herself and waited patiently, only her deafening silence betraying her tension. Lucille didn't know whether to be relieved or worried about the dragon lady's lack for words, goodness knows it wasn't something the villagers got to experience very often.

The mirror finally spoke again.

"DNA profile confirmed, class, Coulter, awaiting verbal authentication,"the mirror requested.

"What does that mean, Coulter, as in Abraham Coulter? What do I have to do with Abraham Coulter?"Mary turned to her aunt, wide eyed.

"Long story, dear,"Lucille brushed her off.

"What do you think it wants me to do?"Mary whispered.

"I think it means for you to say yes, girl,"Mrs. Gentry said, and Mary and Lucille were somewhat relieved to notice the lady's voice had regained its stentorian timber.

"Coulter class confirmed,"the mirror took her words for an answer."Please wait."

Mary stood in front of the mirror, petrified with fear, not knowing what was going to happen next, and the mirror reflected her terrified expression reduced to its most defining features, the huge green eyes and the wispy golden curls.

Her reflection disappeared suddenly, replaced by the smiling face of a man who seemed to be speaking directly to her from the other side of the mirror. The man was even fairer than she, and his countenance startled Mary, making her wonder how odd she herself must look to the villagers. She didn't even know how to respond, other than to start weeping quietly, because in her culture, for a girl to be addressed directly by a man was an disgrace that carried the shame of disavowal, a stigma that closed every door for her in civilized society and eliminated any hope that she would ever fit in.

"Jim, come here quickly!"the man on the other side of the glass looked for an invisible companion somewhere above the mirror frame."We found ourselves a blond, and a Coulter, no less!"A disembodied voice from beyond the mirror mumbled morosely something unintelligible.

"I'm dead serious, you think I'd joke about this?"the first man insisted. Another fair head appeared in the mirror, donning an unsociable expression that was a perfect match for the morose voice.

"I'll be darned, it's all true! What's your name, young lady?"he doubled down on the impropriety of addressing a girl directly. Poor Mary was just too shocked to answer.

Chapter Seventeen

### The One in the Mirror

"Answer him, girl!"Mrs. Gentry prodded a very confused Mary, whose young heart oscillated between shame and terror."Mary! Her name is Mary!"the lady clarified.

"Who are you?"the grumpy guy retorted bluntly, making Mrs. Gentry recoil with indignation.

"I believe it's untoward for you to address me, given that we're not related, nor have we been properly introduced,"she protested, ready to leave.

"Suit yourself!"the man cut her off."I only care about the girl anyway."

"Jim!"the other man protested."Would it kill you to be nice?"

"She wasn't supposed to be involved in this to begin with!"Jim replied.

"Why don't you go finish what you were working on, I'll take it from here,"his friend recommended.

"Real nice! After all the time I spent slaving over this monitor,"Jim protested, but left.

"Hi, Mary,"the one in the mirror looked at the girl again."I know how scary all of this must be for you, but I need you to stay with me for a while, so I can explain. You have no idea how excited we all are to have found you, we almost lost hope, we thought someone faked the rumors of your existence. Are there any more people like you in the village?"

"No,"Mary said, almost in a whisper."How are you speaking with me?"

"Mary!"Lucille protested the breach of etiquette, even if under the circumstances formalities seemed a little absurd.

"That's ok, we'll go over that soon,"the one in the mirror smiled.

"Are you the Source?"Mary asked him, shaking like a leaf.

"The source of what?"the man replied, confused.

"The Book of Prophecy says that if I find my way to the Source the world will come to an end,"Mary whimpered.

"I'm sure we'll all be alright for the time being,"the man burst out laughing."And I do believe we're related..."

"I'm related to the Source?"Mary's shiver intensified.

"Could you please explain to me what you mean by the source?"the one in the mirror tried to understand her misgivings.

"That which we divined in the mirror while we were searching for its spell, we didn't mean you harm, we just wanted to open the mirror and ask it questions. But it just kept opening and opening, and then the Que'd language appeared, but it was protected by the seal of the Source and we were all afraid when it burst open,"Mary blurted in one breath.

"You don't mean the source code, by any chance?"the one in the mirror did his best not to laugh.

"Indeed,"Mary started crying heavily."What will become of us?"

"I won't let you scare this child with your wicked chatter about the end-times!"Lucille intervened."Let's go, Mary!"she said out loud, and then whispered in her niece's ear."We need to get you somewhere safe, I'll deal with him later!"

"Please don't leave, please! I can assure you she will be perfectly safe here, from me anyway,"the one in the mirror threw a piercing gaze behind them. Lucille turned around just in time to watch Rosemary put together a disapproving frown, with Mrs. Gentry behind her, looking down, somewhat embarrassed.

"Serves me right,"Lucille thought,"for feeding the ambulant rumor mill. I'm surprised it took her a whole fifteen minutes to sick the mouth of damnation upon us,"she glared at Mrs. Gentry and then at Rosemary, displeased.

"What do I hear, Lucille? Is it true that this wretched child has the same blood as the Source? That she summoned it and it answered her? That she was spoken to by two men? This situation calls for a full Council meeting, with all the elders present, oh, how their poor souls will anguish over the evidence of her perfidy!"Rosemary couldn't contain a triumphant smirk."The girl will stand judgment, of course, if that even needed to be said, and then we'll finally destroy this place, for the sake of our children and our sacred rules. I am needed in Council to provide the elders with the information they need. Mrs. Gentry, I trust that you will escort the unfortunate to the Council Hall and lock her in a room until she has confessed her misdeeds and we have decided her fate. Lucille, darling, I am crushed to put an old friend in this humiliating situation, but in all fairness, dear, everybody told you that the child was born evil, you shouldn't have put yourself out like that, it's going to be so much harder now, after you fed and clothed her for years, I can't even imagine what you're going to tell your friends and neighbors. But we all make mistakes, don't we?"she went on, then turned towards Mrs. Gentry."Make sure to have the girl brought to the Council Hall within the hour, the questioning should start as soon as possible."

She thought of destroying the mirror before she left, but was terrified that the one inside it might come out, or worse still, drag her in, so she turned on her heels and left, planning to bring a whole team back to the cave later, to eliminate the curse once and for all.

Lucille and Mrs. Gentry looked at each other, and then at the mirror, where the fair man was frowning with concentration, trying to think up a solution to the conundrum.

"Sorry, dear, she dragged it out of me, you know she can be persuasive when she chooses,"Mrs. Gentry finally spoke. Lucille looked her straight in the eyes, but said nothing.

"You know what I'm thinking?"Mrs. Gentry started again."I am not as quick as I used to be,"she watched Lucille for a nod of approval. The latter obliged."I think it would be best if I went back to the Council and made an official request for assistance. If the girl tried to run out on us, how would we ever catch up with her? I will have to follow procedure, which may take me a while, so keep an eye on Mary, will you?"She fidgeted, not knowing how to continue the conversation, then said."Well, I'll see you later, time is of the essence, it seems,"and left the room, scanning for exits out of habit.

"What are we going to do, aunt?"Mary asked after Mrs. Gentry's departure, and with the swirl of unexpected events that had landed on her head during the previous week, she hardly had enough energy left to panic.

"Walk behind that boulder and follow the tunnel, it will take you to the next cave, which is very much like this one. Wait there, we'll set up another console for you,"the one in the mirror interjected.

"They are going to seal this cave for sure, how is Mary going to get out?"her aunt worried.

"The soapstone the hill is made of is very porous, there is a whole system of interconnected caves inside it, with exits everywhere. In truth, I'm counting on them sealing this one, it will take the heat off of us until we figure out a more permanent solution. I'll guide you through, don't go back the same way you came in. What happened to the tablet?"he asked.

"You mean the smaller mirror? With the symbols that burst open when you touch them?"Lucille asked.

'The portable computer with the touch screen, yes,"the one in the mirror said.

"What's a..."Lucille started asking.

"I'm sorry, I promise we'll discuss all of this later, but now you must hurry, and make sure you have the tablet with you, we need to stay in contact."

Lucille wanted to ask how, but Mary had already disappeared behind the boulder, and the former worried the girl would get lost in the maze behind it.

The room at the end of the tunnel was indeed very much like the one they just left, large, with a sky opening for good lighting and boulders sprinkled around the perimeter; Lucille assumed that behind every one of those boulders was another corridor, and this made her contemplate what a nightmare it would be to find one's way out of the cave if the need arose.

She made sure Mary found a cozy nook to rest in, caressed her hair like she used to when the girl was but a child, and got up to leave.

"You should be safe here for now, I'll return after nightfall with food, water and blankets, but I really have to go to the Council Hall now, I'm sure Rosemary already convened the plenum."

"What if they don't let you leave, aunt?"Mary asked, choking down tears.

"Oh, don't worry about me, child. I spent decades dealing with the Council, I know how to handle myself. See you tonight!"Lucille said smiling as she left.

Chapter Eighteen

### A Painting in the Clouds

Lucille returned after dark, and to her shock, she found the new cave completely transformed: a console had been installed, as promised, but also furniture, personal accommodations and storage modules. She saw what looked like a kitchen towards the back of the cave and set down the basket of food on the table.

Mary wasn't there, and Lucille started to panic, prompting the one in the mirror to provide an explanation.

"There is an underground stream two caves down, Mary got bored and went to get some fresh water. We thought she would be more comfortable if the place looked more like home, do you think you could bring her favorite things from her room? We tried to offer her food, but she seems reluctant to eat it. Maybe it would be best if you brought her home cooked meals for a while, at least until she gets used to our fare."He stopped for a second, to give Lucille a chance to reply, then, upon noticing the latter seemed at a loss for words, he asked."How did things go with the Council?"

Lucille forgot she was talking to a mirror, and couldn't suppress an irritated twitch.

"How do you think they went?"she retorted.

"Never mind, we have important issues to discuss. First of all, who we are and what we are doing here,"he started.

"Let me guess, you're the descendants of the exiles, and are here to reunite the Fire Maiden, a.k.a the last child of the Coulter line, with her family,"she said sarcastically, because her nerves were still a powder keg from what one could only assume had been a very unpleasant evening in the Council."I may not know how you are manipulating your mirrors, but that doesn't mean God begrudged me the benefit of logic."

"Yes and no. Some of us come from exiles, many of us are the descendants of the original inhabitants of the city where we settled down. I'm sure Mary's family would be thrilled to find out she is still alive, everybody thought the worst after her mother was banished, but I'm afraid our search for her has a bit of an ulterior motive."

"Of course it does,"Lucille sighed.

"When Abraham Coulter started to worry about the rising threats against technology, he digitized his vast library, which contains invaluable pieces of his research, and technical manuals that we thought lost for centuries, and stored it in a biometrically encrypted database floating on a cloud server,"he explained.

"Thank you, I'm so glad I got clarity on this issue now!"Lucille couldn't help herself."Why don't you start at the beginning?"

"He took all of his knowledge and turned it into a large, invisible canvas, which he painted in the sky, and allowed it to be reshaped and repainted constantly by the movement of the wind and the fall of the raindrops. He bound the mirror he used to see this masterful painting with his own blood, and the blood of his most trusted advisers, so that it would not open, not even for a peak, for anybody else but them."He looked at Lucille, to see if she was offended by the fairy tale analogy. She didn't seem to be, so he continued.

"He spelled the original object so that it could become any mirror, but this only happens if the mirror's guardian recognizes the essence of his blood."

"Or that of one of his trusted advisers,"Lucille continued.

"Exactly,"the man replied, relieved that she was following the story.

"And Mary has it,"Lucille deduced.

"We just found out,"he smiled, happy."As I said, I too come from the Coulter line, but in my case his genome was significantly diluted over the centuries and there are not enough markers left to activate the database."

"But Mary's is complete,"Lucille retorted incredulously.

"Not complete, sufficient. A wonderful strike of luck! Genetic variation sometimes yields improbable outcomes. We kind of guessed she expressed the recessive genes when she was born blond of two raven haired parents. Very rare!"

"So, now you opened your magical mirror to see the invisible painting in the sky, what do you need her for?"Lucille asked him bluntly.

"Well, right now we both are in a little bit of a predicament: we still need the blood essence every time we want to see the painting, and Mary has become a wanted outlaw. Quite frankly, we were hoping that after so many centuries someone had lifted that ridiculous ban on computer technology, but it seems that it only grew to include other mundane objects."He hesitated."And apparently most of the developments of science."

Lucille looked down, upset. Right then, Mary appeared from behind a boulder, with a weird water pitcher in her hand and the usual puzzled look in her eyes.

"What's a genetic variation?"she asked, making both Lucille and the one in the mirror realize she had been listening to the entire conversation.

"Why don't you enlighten her?"Lucille suggested.

A smaller picture, depicting a mound of beans, opened up over the face of the one in the mirror. Mary took a moment to look at them, they displayed every color, from beige to purple, to pure white, dark red, spotted, variegated, small, large, round or elongated. She recognized every type of bean in the pile, naturally, any child in the village learned to tell the beans apart by the age of seven, she just couldn't figure out what they had to do with her question.

"What do you see?"the one in the mirror asked.

"Beans,"Mary replied.

"Are they all beans?"he asked.

"Yes,"she gave the obvious answer.

"But they don't look the same,"he said.

"Nobody expects they would,"Mary commented.

"That's genetic variation,"he said."What are you?"

"I am a person."

"Why are you not like the other people in your village?"

"I'm a genetic variation,"Mary said, smiling.

"In an isolated population that experienced genetic drift,"he laughed.

"What does that mean?"

"It means that most of the life essence that allows one to be fair has disappeared from your group, and that makes it almost impossible for it to be passed along from one generation to the next."

"Why?"

"Maybe we can have this discussion some other time,"the one in the mirror skirted the subject, crushed under one of Lucille's grim stares.

"I'm sure Mary would love to learn more about that, especially considering that she has nothing better to do here, but we need to address immediate practical concerns."She turned towards her niece."Mary, the Council had decreed that all the information related to the Que'd and the mirrors had to be destroyed, and you, as you probably heard, are a wanted outlaw. I'm afraid you'll have to stay here for the time being. I see you're comfortable,"she inquired with her eyes.

"Yes, aunt."

"Rosemary designated a few Circle members to dig through the Book of Prophecy and find a way to end the curse of the Fire Maiden."

"I thought that was supposed to be done by keeping me in the sunlight with no water until my fair curse was lifted,"Mary commented, in a tone so matter of fact that it made the one in the mirror shiver.

"Do people actually expect her to turn brunette by slowly dying of dehydration?"he couldn't believe his ears.

"Easy for you to say, you don't have to face them tomorrow,"Lucille frowned, irked."I can assure you this debate is infinitely less amusing in person."

Chapter Nineteen

### Spider Silk World

"Aah, Lucille!" Rosemary pinned her under an icy stare. "How nice of you to finally join us, dear! We were starting to worry that you might have gotten lost on the way here," she commented, her sarcastic comment well padded by a sweetness that almost made Lucille gag. Since Lucille lived two blocks down from the Council Hall, the insinuation that she might not be all there didn't escape anyone in the Circle.

"Don't you worry about me, darling," Lucille retorted, in an even colder tone of voice. "If I need advice on how tie my shoes, I'll be sure to ask you. You're the best resource, all things considered," she smiled at Rosemary. The latter turned beet red and threw a bitter stare in her direction, sharp as a dagger. Everybody remembered the incident from decades ago, when a young and enthusiastic Rosemary, who was in the running to become the Maiden of the Harvest and lead the produce parade through the main streets of the village, stumbled on her shoelaces, that had come undone, and fell off the wagon, face first in the dirt. Nobody, not even her best friends, managed to banish this incident to oblivion, as they were all reminded of it annually.

'Well,' Lucille thought, 'if I didn't have an enemy before, I sure made one now!' She sighed and then remembered her recent interactions with Rosemary, and her mind burst with revolt. 'What in places am I even talking about! The woman wants me in jail! I just managed to get Mary out of her clutches by the skin of my teeth!' She settled comfortably in her chair, her mind at peace.

"Now that we're all here," Rosemary regained her bearings, "did Mrs. Gentry learn anything about that unfortunate girl? I shudder to think of the ways she may be trying to do us harm right now, using that wicked book of spells and those evil eyes she was born with! It was such a mistake to keep her around for so many years, and I told everybody, didn't I?" she turned to Mrs. Eberhart for approval. The latter didn't say anything, her attention seemed to be absorbed by a completely different subject. "Anyway," Rosemary continued, irritated by the lack of civility, "tomorrow at dawn we seal the cave," she said, in an authoritative tone that didn't leave room for disagreement.

"What of the book itself?" one of the ladies in the Circle asked.

"I was thinking of having it destroyed," Rosemary said.

"How, dear?" the lady inquired.

"Well, burn it, of course!" Rosemary replied.

"What are we going to say it is?" the lady reminded Rosemary that details about the Que'd had not been meant for fresh and innocent minds, and therefore, most of the young people in the village had no earthly idea it even existed.

"You are right, that would draw too much attention," Rosemary agreed, irked that she couldn't have the good old fashioned book burning that she had her heart set on. "Bury it?" she suggested.

"Somebody is bound to find it, be sure of that!" another lady in the Circle protested.

"We should put it somewhere under lock and key, keep it away from prying eyes," someone else proposed.

"Because it worked so well the first time? We locked it up, and here it is, centuries later, making fools of us all!" an angry voice in the back replied.

"What to do then?" Mrs. Gentry asked.

"Why don't we seal it inside the cave?" an innocent suggestion emerged from the back of the room.

"It's settled, then," Rosemary agreed. "We'll have the cave with that book of doom sealed inside. We should also institute a harsh punishment on anybody who disseminates any knowledge of the Que'd." The issue was put to a vote and it passed.

"Now, about Mary," Rosemary turned to Lucille. "Are you absolutely sure that you have no knowledge of the girl's whereabouts, dear?" the former probed Lucille with a gaze that was supposed to sweep every corner of her brain for any and all knowledge. "You know, human weakness aside, we're not going to look the other way on aiding and abetting, Lucille, the girl is a criminal," she smiled, pleased.

"I know nothing of her present situation," Lucille replied.

"I find that very difficult to believe," Rosemary insisted.

"Are you doubting a Council member's assertion, Rosemary?" Mrs. Eberhart intervened, more stern than usual, annoyed that the meeting looked like it was going to turn into one of those endless debates where no agreement was ever reached. Rosemary realized that she overstepped her bounds and returned to planning the destruction of the cave and the Que'd.

"We should fill the cave with rocks. Goodness knows it would be close to impossible to remove that diabolical machinery from it, it's way too big. I don't want to contemplate how it arrived there," she got more agitated by the minute, and Lucille suddenly realized that, at least for the time being, Rosemary wasn't angry or vindictive, but scared out of her mind. She almost felt sorry for her, if only for a minute, before the latter regained her composure, complete with the shrill voice and the unpleasant remarks. "That is, of course, if the Circle agrees, I know not all of us are united in the effort to remove this evil from our midst."

"Good grace, woman, do you have any idea how much rock it would take to fill up that cave? The place is huge!" Mrs. Gentry exclaimed, before she had the time to censor herself.

"What do you suggest, then?" Rosemary replied, peeved.

"Just seal the entrance and leave it be! Nobody should be wandering in that area anyway, not if we pay attention to what the youngsters are doing!" Mrs. Gentry replied.

"What if somebody climbs the hill and sees the demonic machinery through that top opening?" Rosemary asked, really concerned. Lucille so wished she could tell her the console was already gone and there were no signs of the activity that had happened in the cave, other than the carvings on the walls, of course, but in light of her own suspicious status she decided to keep this piece of information to herself.

"I think you're blowing this completely out of proportion, Rosemary! It's not like it's going to chase us down or anything," Mrs. Gentry tried to appease her.

"Blowing it out of proportion?!!" Rosemary fumed. "How can you even say that after you saw that...that...THING!" she continued escalating. "Quite frankly, Mrs. Gentry, I am of half a mind to indict you and Lucille too for being involved in this at all!"

"Rosemary, desist now!" Mrs. Eberhart raised her voice. She very rarely did that, in fact the council members had to go back decades to come up with another instance, and for that reason, those three words effectively ended the subject. The council jotted down the minutes and another meeting was scheduled for the following morning, to look into ways to lift Mary's curse, should they happen to find her eventually.

Lucille hurried home, where she put together a small basket of food, not forgetting Mary's favorite cookies, then waited until it was dark and made her way through the desert towards the cave. She mumbled under her breath, upset, for the moon was full and huge, and it reflected off the sand, lighting up the desert almost like daylight. There was no place to hide in that barren landscape, no trees, no shrubs, no rocks, if anybody happened to be wandering around, they could see her from a mile away. She picked up the pace and only started to relax once inside the cave, where she assessed that the return trip was going to be much later, and therefore, hold lower risk.

Mary was seated at the console, engaged in a lively conversation with the one in the mirror, and for a second Lucille's temper bubbled up to the surface, intent to give the girl a piece of her mind for having what it seemed to be a very pleasant time while she was risking her own skin to ensure her comfort. She then remembered that Mary couldn't get out of the cave or return to the village to see her friends, or her home, and her irritation diminished.

"I'm so glad you came, aunt! Caleb was teaching me how to spell the mirror," Mary said, smiling from ear to ear.

"I see!" Lucille stared with disapproval. "You are on first name basis now," she continued. "Need I remind you that being in the unfortunate situation that you happened to find yourself in," she lifted her hand to stop Mary's emerging protest, "for more reasons than one, of course, doesn't absolve you from observing the proper rules of society?"

Mary looked down, embarrassed.

"Does this gentleman have a surname?" Lucille inquired.

"Coulter," the one in the mirror replied. "It's Coulter."

"Of course it is!" Lucille's irritation returned. "That's going to be a constant distraction," she noted. "Now every time I need to address you, sir, I will feel like I'm not showing enough respect either to your illustrious ancestor or to our customs. That name had not been uttered in our village for over two hundred years, it is forbidden," she explained.

"It figures," the man in the mirror said.

"So, what did Mr. Coulter teach you, Mary?" she turned to her niece, trying to put out of her mind the fact that the girl had mentioned the words spell and mirror in the span of a very short sentence, smiling and addressing a male stranger by his first name in the process.

"Look, look at the mirror," Mary happily obliged. The mirror was black, the one inside it had decided to remove himself for the purposes of the exercise. Mary touched a few symbols on the table in front of the mirror, symbols that looked like they were painted on buttons and reminded Lucille of rune stones, only they seemed to be woven together in a dark fabric that allowed them to move up and down. She was too mesmerized by the movement of the painted buttons underneath Mary's fingers to notice that the screen had turned bright yellow, and when she finally did she jolted backwards involuntarily.

"I'm sorry I asked," she uttered in a raspy voice after she regained her wits. "I'm not so sure about this, Mary, between the blood and changing the color of things around you, this can't be good, can it?" she asked her niece, hoping she will contradict her.

"Actually, she can only change the background of the screen," the one in the mirror explained.

"You mean the color of the reflective surface itself," Lucille clarified.

"Yes," the one in the mirror replied.

"What about the mirror's frame? Can you change the color of the mirror's frame?" Lucille asked.

"Not from the software, no," the one in the mirror replied.

"But you can change it," she said.

"We can print another case, yes."

"Print, how?" Lucille's eyes widened.

"We can bring in a 3d printer, that's how we made most of the components of this console," the one in the mirror tried to explain, and upon seeing the perplexed look in Lucille's eyes, he came up with another idea. "Wait!" he said, then disappeared again and allowed another mirror to open up in his place. Inside it Lucille watched in disbelief how a strange looking mechanical contraption seemed to conjure up solid objects out of thin air.

"Is it summoning matter out of nothing?" Lucille asked, panicked.

"No," the one in the mirror reassured her. "It weaves a plastic polymer, almost in the same way spiders build their webs. See? If you look closely you can almost see the thread.

"What's a..."

"Plastic polymer? It is a synthetic substance we make in a lab, here is what its formula looks like, he opened another mirror, and in it appeared an animated strand, endlessly long and spinning around a cloud of C's and O's and H's, like fresh spun yarn on a spool.

Lucille spent some time quietly, staring at the continuously unraveling thread of letters, wondering how much deeper the knowledge of the mirror went, completely removed from Rosemary's never ending power struggles and the fact that it was getting very late, just watching the light that shone in Mary's eyes. She'd never seen the girl so happy, or so interested in anything, her niece looked almost unrecognizable when she tried to concentrate on those tiny painted buttons like they were the meaning of life itself.

"It's getting late," she said eventually. "Mary and I will have dinner, and then I have to go," she excused herself to the one in the mirror, as she and her niece retreated to the kitchen area.

"Maybe you shouldn't leave, aunt," Mary said. "It's so late, it's not safe out there, maybe you should sleep here and leave in the morning, when there is light out."

"Trust me, girl," Lucille frowned, suddenly remembering the brouhaha in the Council. "I'll be a lot less safe in the morning."

When they finished eating she kissed Mary good bye and left. All the way back she was so deep in thought about what she'd seen, and Mary's reaction to all of that wondrous knowledge that had been forbidden them for generations, that she could have run straight into Rosemary and not notice. Most of all she thought it had been unfair, for her, for her mother, for her grandmother, for all the people in the village, to make do with the most basic of means when such things were possible. It seemed so easy, everything seemed so easy for those people in the mirror! She thought about Mary, and what her fate would be now, not much worse than what destiny had in store for her before, a life that had repeated the same old patterns for over seven generations. They might as well have lived two hundred years ago, nothing had changed, not in the customs, not in the knowledge, not in the course of daily life. And then she realized that Mary was no more deprived than any of her raven haired friends, those whose future didn't falter on an undesirable heritage, those who were to marry, and raise families, and do chores, and watch their own daughters and grand-daughters do the same, in an endless loop of the only life they knew.

She remembered Rosemary's reaction, that instinctive dread of anything she couldn't recognize, of the reality without a precedent, or worse, the reality whose precedent had been fear and banishment, and without second guessing herself, she made a decision: she didn't know how, or how long it was going to take, but she vowed to find a way for Mary, her friends, herself, and anybody in the village who was willing, to learn those things, those almost magical things that the mirror had shown her were possible, so that they too would be able to spin things out of spider silk and change the color of mirrors.

Chapter Twenty

### A History of Bits and Pieces

The cave was sealed at dawn, with a very tired Lucille gazing at the endeavor in a sour mood, irritated by the fact that now she had to walk another fifteen minutes around the hill to the next entrance.

Rosemary directed the activities with almost ceremonial gestures, pleased to have won this epic battle over the Que'd and unaware of the fact that she'd already lost the war. When the Circle was finished dumping large boulders at the entrance of the cave and the large cloud of dust started to settle, the place looked so barren and desolate that even the most acerbic opponents of scholarly knowledge felt a tinge of guilt.

There was something inspiring, something larger than life in that cave with the ancient carvings adorning the walls, and many secretly wondered if they didn't throw away irreplaceable treasure just to quell their fears.

"Well, it had to be done, dear. Way overdue!" Rosemary poked Lucille, hoping to rile up an angry retort. Lucille was distracted by the lack of sleep and a little turned around by the necessary changes in itinerary, and, at the time, she was quietly evaluating which one of the other entrances was best fit for regular use anyway. If her plans were going to come to fruition, there would be a lot of foot traffic through that particular area, and the more inconspicuous the path, the better. She didn't respond to Rosemary, which made the latter step up her prodding.

"Mrs. Eberhart, I think I speak for all of us when I say that, as much as I love my dear old friend, I'm worried about her, ahhm,...absentmindedness. Frankly, she doesn't seem to be with us half the time, and I'm not sure how that can possibly serve the purposes of the Council, going forward," she threw another dart at Lucille. Mrs. Eberhart frowned as if she ignored the comment, but looked to the latter for a response. Lucille begrudgingly answered.

"I can hear you perfectly well, Rosemary, and as soon as I consider there is something useful I have to contribute to this conversation, I will do so," she set the dragon lady straight. She looked around and squinted; the crude morning sun reflected off the sand and felt gritty on her tired eyes. "Well, if there is nothing else..." she looked at Mrs. Eberhart, to see if the Circle activities for the morning were coming to an end.

"I guess we're done here," the latter dismissed the Circle with a wave of her hand, and they all walked home in silence, each pondering on her own feelings about the sealing of the cave and the destruction of the Que'd.

The following weeks passed in a whirlwind of activities, with Mrs. Gentry stepping up the busy work on the young'ums, to make sure they didn't have time to get themselves in trouble, and Lucille having to stretch her imagination to keep finding reasons for her regular absences. At first she tried to make a habit out of visiting the cave at night, but burning the candle at both ends was taking a toll on her, goodness knows that habitual lack of sleep can weaken even the strongest constitutions.

She then came up with the least credible of explanations, and because it was so preposterous, it worked. She told the Circle that she needed more time alone with her thoughts, to go over the cascade of events that turned village life upside down and come to terms with Mary's disgraceful disappearance, an explanation that fit right into Rosemary's constant attacks on her credibility, but under the circumstances, Lucille felt it was a risk worth taking.

Grace to her impeccable service over so many decades, the Circle allowed her any and all leeway. Most of the ladies were saddened by Mary's absence too, even if the girl was so different they had always found it difficult to relate to her. They knew, however, that Lucille loved her niece like she was her own child, and it didn't surprise them that the good lady had such a hard time adjusting to this unfortunate situation.

The visits to the cave brought both gratification and torment to Lucille: every day the girl seemed to advance in knowledge by leaps and bounds, and yet, the knowledge became more and more alien to her aunt, who had to listen to the girl's excited reports, now peppered with words she'd never heard before, and share in her enthusiasm over activities that by village rule were considered anathema. Every time Mary started talking about virtual memory, bandwidth and RAM, her aunt felt a cringe of discomfort.

She soon got used to the weird changes in the mirror display, however, and surprised herself with the ease with which she had accepted them, but she also had this feeling of urgency that if they were to catch up with the centuries of knowledge they were kept from, all those willing to learn had to start immediately, and it would have been better if they started decades ago.

She remembered the events surrounding Mary's birth and wondered how things could have evolved differently, and whether there was anything anybody could have done then, but for everything there is a season, and ideals need to take root before they can surge into the light. Lucille became quieter, thinking, thinking, thinking, putting together and disassembling plans until she found one she thought had the best chance of success.

A few weeks and a couple of wool spinning workshops later, a strategy was developed, and if the Circle ever caught wind of it, which would have been very unfortunate, they could have witnessed a most amazing feat: a long row of young girls walking through the desert at night, in total silence, stepping in each other's footsteps to leave as few footprints as possible, with the last one walking backwards and sweeping off all the traces of their passing.

The one in the mirror brought in a few of his colleagues and together they assembled an ad hoc curriculum, ready to be adjusted at a moment's notice to the girls' learning curve. Every night their young minds were mesmerized by this miraculous world of knowledge they never dreamt existed, slowly advancing through the wonders of alchemy, arithmetic, chronicling, the workings of living things, the workings of non-living things, the art of story telling, the rule of law, the essence of wisdom, but most of all, how to write enchantments to make the mirrors do their bidding, a task they all took to like ducks to water, as if spellbound.

The next day they were so tired they often fell asleep in workshop, their noses buried in the baskets filled with spools of not yet spun wool. Mrs. Gentry worried she was working the girls too hard, and in a very uncharacteristic move, decided to lighten their workload, but the tiredness and the falling asleep persisted. On rare occasions, one of the girls, on the brink of exhaustion, talked in her sleep, and words like acetyl CoA, or oxidative phosphorylation strengthened the convictions of the most conservative ladies of the Circle that evil was at work in their midst, preying on the young ones, so they stepped up their efforts to inculcate the correct values into this precious at-risk group.

Discipline was brought front and center and the rules of attire were strictly enforced, and the ladies were pleased to see the girls offered no resistance to these new restraints on their lives, and congratulated themselves for having raised the young generation so well.

Over the weekend, Lucille liked to spend more time with Mary, to listen to what her niece had learned, discuss her progress with the one in the mirror, and try her own skills at mirror enchantments every once in a while. Strangely enough, life had found a new balance, and settled into it like a river in a new bank, in this strange top lit environment, open to the sky, where everything that was needed was spun out of artificial spider silk and all questions found answers inside the many layers of the mirror.

Work on the restoration of the Coulter library progressed very slowly, for it was a gargantuan undertaking to put together all the pieces of information in a coherent stream. Mary was kind of indifferent to the painting that emerged from these disparate bits of information at first, young and eager as she was to learn all of those wonderful things she didn't know existed, but the more the tapestry of events from centuries ago unfolded under her eyes, the more interested she became in its significance. The strange thing was that the isolation the village imposed on its inhabitants had kept her out of time and a lot closer in a way to understanding the reasons and the customs of those ancestors from centuries ago than her educated relatives inside the mirror.

Sometimes she could almost see the events described in the library archives, and felt the people's tribulations as if she were there with them, in their time, instead of watching them with detachment from the safe distance of history. The more she learned about those people, who were so much like her, even though they lived in savage and perilous times, the more she admired the courage it took them to guard this precious knowledge, sometimes with their lives.

Abraham Coulter was a fastidious chronicler who abandoned no important events to oblivion, and between the history she'd been taught in the village and the truth that burst out in bits and pieces from his letters and personal journals, a different image of her world emerged, in which the events of her time started making sense to her, and in which her own existence suddenly became meaningful. She didn't know why, but she felt it, as if she had found her place in the world and smoothly snapped in place inside it, as if her life story was always meant to be.

Chapter Twenty One

### Ancestral Wisdom and Cholesterol

It's been said that nothing happens on this earth without leaving traces of its passing. Sometimes those come in material form, through the testimony of even the most mundane objects, other times through the subtle changes in behavior, and taking upon a different way to see the world.

The lessons in the cave didn't get lost on the girls' hearts and minds, how can one discover an entirely new world and stay the same? They were more confident in their strange compliance, and completely unafraid. If there was one thing in the world that incensed Rosemary was people not knowing their place. She had held to her position in society and obeyed its every restraint, and she wanted to make sure every member of the generation after her did exactly the same. The fact that her place in society had been quite cozy and comfortable, due for the most part to fortunate birth circumstances and helpful people to guide her way was beside the point, she firmly believed that her life in and of itself validated her right to be were she was, and those who didn't fare as well did so by the faults of their own conscience.

Most of all, she couldn't understand a young girl not cowering, and as the very subtle absence of this behavior permeated the ranks, she perceived it as danger, so she decided to keep a close eye on the young ones, to see what brought about the change. There was nothing at first, just the strange exhaustion of an age group that, if she were to judge by her own endless stores of energy, was anything but normal, or the total lack of disagreement regarding their attire. She knew for a fact that when she was a girl their age, she defied any rules regarding clothing that she could, fact she now strongly disapproved of in others. Even the mirror incident, which she still remembered with a smile, a forbidden activity if there ever was one, seemed to her more normal than the acceptance without a single objection of the new decision that the only permitted colors for young girls to wear were gray and tan.

There was something afoot, and she knew it, she just couldn't put her finger on it, but her instincts rarely betrayed her, so she had learned to trust them over a lifetime of experience.

Fate finally smiled on her quest when one of the girls slipped and as she passed on the deep fried bacon croquettes at breakfast, said they had too much cholesterol. That was enough for Rosemary; being an involuntary messenger of evil in one's sleep was one thing, but speaking abomination out loud while fully awake proved consent. An inquiry was opened immediately into the unfortunate, who, by the rules previously agreed upon in the learning group, was disavowed by her friends and subsequently fed secret messages and cholesterol free goodies through the little awning window at the top of the wall of her holding room.

Rosemary convened an extraordinary meeting of the Council, requesting that every single member be in attendance. When the time for the meeting finally arrived, the Council Hall was filled with static electricity, at least that is the metaphor one would have used if one knew what static electricity was. Some were irritated by this imposition on their time, some showed real worry, not knowing what to make of the girl's strange utterings, others were simply curious and saw this meeting as a providential gift that shook the dust of boredom and stagnation out of a society that was never moving forward.

The subject of contention, whose name was Lisa, was brought in front of the Council, her beige dress in stark contrast with the black gowns of most of the council members, and the wealth of her shiny black hair neatly braided and hidden under her bonnet. Lisa was fortunate, for beige was very flattering to her olive complexion and her large dark eyes, and this irritated Rosemary further, because the whole point of the drab colors was to make the girls modestly fade into the background, not to highlight their features.

The girl's demeanor was quiet and subdued, and even the light in her eyes was dimmed, as if she weren't there in spirit, just a shell left behind. Mrs. Eberhart sighed before giving the opening statement, dissatisfied with the example they were setting for the younger generation, even though she had deep personal concerns about the recent behavior of the girls.

"The Council is now in session. If I may, could we skip over the usual statements and get straight to the point? There is a lot of work on today's agenda, not related to this incident." She paused for a second, to wait for objections, and then continued. "Lisa, what is cholesterol?"

The girl looked at her, puzzled, as if she had heard the word for the first time.

"Don't be afraid, we won't judge you," Mrs. Eberhart said, biting her tongue with bitterness for saying something so obviously untrue, "we just want to know where you heard this word, is all, we're all worried for you, dear," she continued, kindly.

"I'm sure I never heard that word, Mrs. Eberhart," Lisa hesitated, really scared, because all the eyes of the Council were on her now, and very few of them reflected the leader's kindness. She gulped, then continued, her mind racing at high speed trying to find a familiar word that even came close to approximating "cholesterol", but she couldn't find one. "Surely somebody must have misunderstood me, I couldn't say a word like that, I don't really know what it means."

"You realize, girl," Rosemary launched the first stone, "that lying will only worsen your punishment. I heard you with my own ears, have you no shame for showing me such disrespect?"

"Please, Rosemary," Mrs. Eberhart intervened. "Can't you see the girl is terrified? Our goal here is to get to the truth, not to punish," she admonished gently. "You can answer your elder now, my dear, as truthfully as you can." Lisa pondered on the meaning of the last sentence and in accordance with her interpretation of it, manufactured on the spot a believable explanation for what Rosemary had heard.

"I was talking to one of my friends, please don't get upset with me for saying this," she meekly whispered, "but I was telling her that I felt I couldn't even eat anymore because I was so nervous about the Coulter role."

"You can't be serious!" Rosemary exploded. "This flippant girl is making a mockery of this session!" she bubbled like a volcano, ready to explode at any moment.

"But the cast for the Feast of the Harvest play has not been assigned yet," Mrs. Eberhart objected. "Why would you be nervous about it?"

Every year, on Harvest Day, there was a reenactment of the historical event when the Book of Prophecy was adopted as law and the Scholar's line was cast into the shadows, and suffice it to say, the role of Abraham Coulter wasn't among the ones sought after. Every year the girls dreaded being cast as this objectionable character, and just to make things fair, the Council had decided to draw names out of a hat, so nobody would think they were singled out on purpose.

"Who can blame the girl for being nervous about that?" Lucille reluctantly intervened. "It's the luck of the draw and nobody enjoys being stuck with that role," she said.

"I'm pretty sure your delinquent relative wouldn't mind too much," Rosemary took the opportunity to remind everybody of Lucille's dubious connections to the Scholars' line. Lucille congratulated herself for stumbling upon this diversion that would block at least a half hour of inquiries, thus giving Lisa, who had proved to be quite resourceful, more time to come up with a credible line. The Council's attention was immediately captured by updates on the state of the search for Mary and the means and methods described in the Book of Prophecy to free her young mind from the curse of the Que'd.

"I told you from the very beginning, Lucille, that the girl was not to be allowed anywhere near water! I blame you for blatantly disregarding the traditions of our village, look at what this lack of judgment of yours brought us to!" Rosemary commented.

"You can't begrudge a thirsty baby water, Rosemary," Lucille said, strangely calm. "I think even you would agree to that."

"And why not?" Rosemary snapped. "The girl is not like us, Lucille, and it's only your human weakness that convinced you that she could come to harm as a result of not being given water. The Book of Prophecy clearly delineates that, and it would have served you to stick to ancestral wisdom, not to your own recusant beliefs."

"What if you found out you were descended from the Scholars' line? Then we shouldn't give you water anymore either," Lucille postulated.

"But I'm not, am I?" Rosemary took a superior stance. "I couldn't bear the shame of such ancestral baggage!" she said, before thinking, and Lucille's argument instantly gained the unspoken support of all of those who had had to hide their lineage, just to fit in.

"Just hope that you don't find out otherwise," the latter smiled, content, and let the argument die.

"Can we get back to the inquiry now?" Mrs. Eberhart interrupted, eager to move on to real issues. She turned to Lisa, who had progressively diminished in her chair as the discussion about the Scholars' line got more fired up, because she too shared that undesirable ancestry, and she didn't think its additional weight would help her plight. "So, dear, what you're saying is that Mrs. Kressler might have misheard you?" Rosemary was startled to hear her last name, which she seldom used in Council. Unlike Mrs. Gentry, who had always insisted on being addressed by her married name, she didn't stand on formality and liked to be called Rosemary.

"Yes, ma'am," Lisa whispered, looking down.

"Well," Mrs. Eberhart turned to Rosemary, relieved to be done with this pointless waste of the Council's time, "it seems that it was an honest misunderstanding, dear." Rosemary's nostrils flared with outrage, but she said nothing. The leader continued. "Let's move on to today's agenda." She noticed that nobody reacted to her words and realized they were all waiting to be formally dismissed.

"You may go, girl," Mrs. Eberhart told Lisa. "Also, all those who were called in for the extraordinary meeting are free to leave, even though you're all welcome to sit in for our regular session if you so wish."

A shuffle of chairs and footsteps ensued, and about a third of the audience left, unsure whether to feel relieved or disappointed. Lisa joined the group of girls in the back, who had been brought in to witness the bitter fruits of dissent, and could hardly wait to get out of the Council Hall.

The Circle went back to the issues of the week under the curious eyes of those who had chosen to remain in the audience, whose patience was rewarded by the knowledge that the needs of the village were carefully tended to by diligent and able hands.

Chapter Twenty Two

### Workshop

"May I have your attention, please?" Lucille cast her voice over the audience, and the murmurs and shuffles subsided. "Is everybody here?" she scanned the cave to make sure all the girls had made it inside, safe and unnoticed. When she was reassured that they were all there, she continued.

"Before class starts, I don't think I need to reiterate the importance of keeping this knowledge to ourselves, at least for the time being. I'm sure the reasons why don't require explaining." A soft wave of discomfort weaved through the gathering and quickly subsided, as they recalled the unfolding of events in the Council Hall. "Back to more interesting subjects, if memory serves, Blanche was going to present her study on gene splicing and the effects of introducing snapdragon DNA into tomato breeds. So, without further ado," she waved her hand, inviting Blanche to the podium, to present her slides to the class.

"Are you going to stay for the presentation, aunt Lucille?" Mary asked her aunt as she left the podium to join the audience.

"Are you kidding? I wouldn't miss it for the world!" Lucille winked at the girl and sat down in the chair behind hers. "Could you scoot over to the left a little bit? I can't see the smart screen."

"You're not calling it a mirror anymore?" Mary teased.

"Of course not, dear! Don't you know? Mirrors are banned," Lucille explained, poised.

Blanche's presentation was followed by a dissertation on computational geometry, an open debate about forms of government, a poetry reading, and a video lecture on coronal mass ejections and the plasma dynamics of G-type main sequence stars.

From the other side of the mirror, the teachers were watching too, interjecting observations or making slight corrections to the content, and answering questions from the audience. When the school night was over, everybody returned to the village, in the same weird single file configuration, and since they were blessed with a bright and cloudless night the return trip turned out to provide a great object lesson in astronomy. Despite Lucille's repeated requests to keep quiet, the shushing and giggling followed them all the way home.

The next day Blanche and Lisa fell asleep in workshop again, face down in the basket of spools. Their makeshift wool pillows were soft, cuddly and extremely comfortable, so much so that Mrs. Gentry had to splash cold water on the girls' faces to wake them up.

"We have to get to the bottom of this, Lucille! This is absolutely unacceptable, we can't have these girls sleepwalking through day after day, we need to know what are they doing that gets them so tired. I fear evildoing, the poor children don't know any better, if we don't protect them, who knows what they'll get themselves into," she boomed towards Lucille in her unusually loud tone of voice, so loud that it instantly snapped the latter back to attention together with a few girls who were dozing off in the back. Lucille too was tired, and she let her mind wander a little bit every now and then, when it got too quiet.

"I'm sorry, dear, what?" she mumbled, a little puzzled, as if she had just entered the room.

"I don't know what to say, Lucille, can't you pay a little more attention? I know that since Mary...ahhm...ran away and all..." she didn't know how to continue, but since the subject had been brought up, she burst out the question she was itching to ask ever since she had left Lucille and Mary alone in the cave. She looked around to make sure nobody was listening, and then whispered as softly as she could into Lucille's ear. "Have you heard from her, dear?"

Mrs. Gentry's whispering was almost as loud as her voice, and the few girls who were not half asleep raised their eyebrows, startled. Lucille grabbed the lady by her arm and led her outside.

"Mrs. Gentry, you don't want the girls to get preoccupied with this, do you? I don't know anything about poor Mary, dear. She ran, as you said, and I couldn't catch her. I trust that she didn't run into misfortune, though," she felt she needed to reassure Mrs. Gentry, who obviously felt responsible for the girl's fate, "you know Mary, she can be quite resourceful if need be."

"I fear that whatever it was that she got herself into when she touched that mirror didn't stop with her," Mrs. Gentry returned to her current worry. "I don't know what's wrong with the girls, but whatever it is, it started recently, just after Mary escaped. Do you think she might be involved in all of this? Casting enchantments with the mirror?"

"I can't see how," Lucille tried to divert her attention. "Do you find the girls' work lacking?" she quickly found a subject she was sure will capture all of Mrs. Gentry's attention.

"Not entirely," the latter grabbed on to the subject eagerly. She was a strong advocate of keeping the girls always busy, thus yielding benefits for both them and the community. "Their work is acceptable, they're not all going to be master spinsters, you know, not everybody is born with skilled hands, and it takes years of practice to produce exceptional quality, but, all things considered, not too bad. How they can spin wool in their sleep is beyond me, but they seem to get their job done." She stopped to gaze upon the workshop group and exploded with indignation. "Look at that! She fell asleep again! This is so revolting!" She got up, outraged, to get another pitcher of water. Lucille looked at Blanche. The girl had returned to her peaceful slumber, face down in her basket of wool and with a slight smile on her lips.

"Mrs. Gentry," she called out to the stentorian lady, who turned around, still irate. "Why don't you ask one of the girls to wake Blanche, we're late for the Council meeting." Since the lady looked a bit confused, Lucille brought up more details. "Remember? We were going to meet with the village elders and learn more ways to remove Mary's curse?"

"Oh, yeah," Mrs. Gentry replied. "Wasn't that supposed to be tomorrow?" she asked.

"No, dear, it's today. It seems you must be tired too," Lucille smiled.

"No wonder, with this darned story following us around!" Mrs. Gentry boomed again. "I'm telling you, Lucille, it is the curse, and we were fools not to believe the Book of Prophecy, and now, it's already started! Oh! What will become of us!" she took on her favorite dramatic pose, that of the tragic Electra.

"Well," Lucille tried to stifle a yawn, "I'm sure some of the elders must be in possession of unwritten wisdom, passed on from generation to generation. Otherwise we wouldn't have come upon the knowledge about Mary's gaze, can you imagine what would have happened if some unsuspecting person stared into her eyes at dawn?"

Mrs. Gentry felt awkward because she didn't believe Mary could turn her into a snake with her stare more than she believed that the sky was green, but she played along, for effect.

"I know, dear. I know." She paused a little, to allow the weight of the argument to sink in. "Well, let's make haste, then, we don't want to keep them waiting." She looked back at the work group as she proceeded towards the door, and shook her head in disgust at the laziness of the young generation. "If I ever fell asleep in shop, my mother would have never been able to get out of the house for shame! What is this world coming to, Lucille! We're responsible, you know!" she struggled with her conscience for a bit, but at the end of the struggle the elders took precedence and she left the young to help the young.

The meeting, presided by Rosemary, produced a wealth of information regarding the lifting of the curse, all ready to be put into practice. Unfortunately, all actions hinged on capturing Mary, and since the girl was nowhere to be found, that presented a challenge.

"I said, and it bears repeating, that the best and fairest way to rid the girl of the curse is to tie her up in front of a mirror and make her gaze into her own eyes at dawn," somebody in the audience declared, very sure of himself.

"And have her turn herself into a winged fire breathing snake? What good could come of it?" somebody else replied.

"Winged snakes can't enchant mirrors!"

"What makes you think that!?"

"Well, then, you come up with a solution!" the first speaker retorted, a bit offended.

"I say that we should burn her dwelling to the ground, so the evil essence that she left behind can be released back into the air," another elder proposed.

"You're not burning down my house!" Lucille jumped into the conversation, really disturbed. "Besides, how would releasing evil back into the air make our lives better?" she pointed out the flaw in the argument.

The elders talked amongst themselves for a while and came to an agreement that, indeed, under the circumstances, this solution was not optimal.

"How about this?" a wise voice from the audience came up with a successful method. "We bring the girls out into the desert and ask them to remove evil from their midst."

"Remove evil how?" Mrs. Gentry asked, concerned about the unproductive use of the girls' time.

"By having them soak into the warmth of the sun until all darkness is gone," the person replied.

"It's too hot out there in the middle of the day," Lucille protested.

"We'll go early, use the morning sun," the person replied.

"But not too close to dawn, we don't want to run into Mary by accident, can you imagine the horror?" somebody protested. A roar of dread permeated the crowd.

"And make sure the girls are well rested," Mrs. Gentry added, "I don't want them dozing off and stumbling over their own feet!"

The discussion then veered into what garments the girls should be wearing to best ward off evil, and whether the group should take the risk of bringing any water at all for the trip.

In the meantime, back at the workshop, Blanche, Lisa, and a few of the other girls, took the unexpected opportunity that Mrs. Gentry's absence presented them with to take a much needed and undisturbed nap.

Chapter Twenty Three

### Himalayan Poppies

The cleansing ceremony in the desert came and went with no consequences, which was a little disappointing for Rosemary, who was hoping for some sort of vindication of her beliefs. Weeks passed, then months. The girls were as tired as always, but finally figured out ways to keep out of sight and thus managed to rest at least long enough to prevent themselves from falling asleep in company.

Life in the village continued virtually the same, and if one wasn't intimately familiar with its daily intricacies, one wouldn't have felt the subtle shifts in attitude or in the ways of doing things, but the elders were, and so they did.

They didn't say anything about it though, not that this almost imperceptible shift didn't concern them, but because they started noticing that for some reason nobody could understand, everything in the village just started working better. Whether it was the small adjustment to the salt content of the pickle brine that helped keep the cucumbers crisp longer, or the adjustments to the spinning wheel that rendered the yarn smoother, or even the way the Council archives were organized, that made everything easier to find. Everybody was happy about the improvements, of course, despite the fact that they were still unsure of whatever it was that brought them about, and couldn't understand how more work got done since the group of girls responsible for it seemed to always be sleeping at the helm, so to speak.

Of course the automated yarn spinner remained well hidden under the floor boards of the workshop, oiled religiously to make sure it didn't make noise, compliments of the blossoming engineering talent of a tiny girl whose presence was usually ignored.

Blanche's new bean and corn hybrids also went unnoticed, and were only met with wonder and gratitude after the harvest, when the Council relished in the extraordinary luck the earth blessed the villagers with that year.

The craftsmanship of the baskets was better, because of the special solution the reeds were soaked in, the weaving patterns perfectly even, due to the optimization of the tension in the warp, and the fabric hues were brighter and more colorfast, compliments of the new mordants in the dye bath. The bread tasted better after a few tweaks in the proofing technique, the silverware was always polished to a mirror shine, grace to the tarnish remover the girls were experimenting with in class. Even scrubbing the floor took half the time, to Mrs. Gentry's exasperation; every time she looked at the girls they seemed to be idling about, running their mouths with what she was sure was nothing but useless gossip.

Some of the more nurturing elders noticed the improvements, which under normal circumstances would have taken extraordinary amounts of work to implement, and assumed that the girls were always falling asleep because they were overworked.

The group almost got caught on numerous occasions while adding copper sulfate to the dye bath, or using the digital soil analyzers, but they managed to keep themselves out of trouble, for the most part, until fate decided otherwise.

Blanche, who had been experimenting with a Himalayan poppy hybrid able to withstand the conditions of a much warmer climate, mixed up the seed packets and accidentally planted it instead of the regular poppies in the large flower bed in front of the Council Hall. Nobody was the wiser until, a testimony to hard work, improved knowledge of agricultural techniques and surreptitiously added fertilizer, the entire field bloomed all at once, glowing bright blue and basking in the sunshine.

When Lucille arrived, summoned for an extraordinary Council session to witness this strange event, the whole Circle was already there, staring in disbelief at the delicate flowers. The girls were there too, with Blanche standing in front, torn between the joy of seeing the hybrid perform beyond her expectations and the agony of trying to figure out how she was going to explain all of this. Lucille snuck behind her and whispered, somewhat annoyed.

"That's why they keep telling you over and over in botany class, LABEL EVERYTHING!"

"You wouldn't happen to know anything about this, would you, Lucille?" Rosemary turned around, like a magnetic needle towards true north.

"Well, her hearing seems to be working well," Lucille pondered while thinking of an answer. "I see the same thing you do, Rosemary, these flowers kind of look like blue poppies."

"There is no such thing as blue poppies, Lucille. Not without wicked enchantments, anyway. Surely you must agree with that!" the former attacked.

Lucille weighed the difficulty of growing Himalayan poppies in their climate and had to agree that the charming sight in front of their eyes - a sea of blue petals moving fluidly in the breeze, was close to a miracle indeed. She made a mental note to congratulate Blanche on the successful hybrid later and took a second to think up a response.

"What kind of enchantments, Rosemary?" she asked, finally.

"To drive us all mad, of course!" the latter replied.

Lucille looked at the beautiful flowers again.

"They are very pretty, actually," she said.

"Did anybody hear that?" Rosemary turned to the audience, which was just as perplexed as her by the unusual sight, half of it because they didn't believe in the existence of blue poppies either, and half because they realized they had released a very large cat out of the proverbial bag and were avidly thinking of ways to put it back in. "The blue poppies don't bother her in the least! What's next? I fear, and heed my words, I fear that they are going to turn to the harvest next! What if they turn the tomatoes black?" she asked rhetorically.

Lucille wondered what 'they' Rosemary was referring to and how she knew about the black tomato cultivars, which weren't going to be ready for another month. "No matter, I'll figure it out later."

"What makes you think they're poppies?" she chose a direction for the conversation and moved forward.

"Do I look like I've grown feeble, Lucille?" Rosemary blew up. "I know what a poppy looks like! These are poppies, and somebody enchanted them. I'm sure it has something to do with the mirrors, the forbidden book you hid from us all these years and that curse you call your niece and I won't rest until I find out!" She turned to Blanche, menacingly.

"You will tell us right now, girl, how these poppies turned blue, if you know what's right for you! I'm sure the desert gets very cold at night!" she threatened.

"Leave the child alone, Rosemary," Lucille intervened. "How on earth would she know?"

"Stay out of it!" Rosemary hissed. "She planted those flowers herself and I don't trust her as far as I can throw her. Look at those eyes, she's guilty as sin!"

"Actually," Mrs. Eberhart pointed out, "there was a whole group of girls, if I recall."

"Then they're all in on the wickedness!" Rosemary protested. "Who else was here for the planting?" she started an ad-hoc inquiry. Several girls stepped forward, with apprehension in their eyes but no hesitation in their step. "Speak, girl!" Rosemary approached the closest one to her and got in her face. "Have you not heard me?"

"Yes, ma'am," the girl mumbled, scared.

"How did you turn the poppies blue?" Rosemary pressed.

"We didn't, ma'am! We just planted them, the seeds looked no different, we just planted them, that's all," she pleaded.

"I don't believe you!" Rosemary raised her voice.

"Well," Mrs. Eberhart intervened, "it is conceivable that somebody could have switched those seed packets without her knowledge."

"Or enchanted them to change their color!" Rosemary replied. "Who knows what other curse they might have imbued them with! How do you know they're not poisonous?"

"Who eats poppies?" Giselle asked innocently, and was dismissed with a brisk hand gesture by a very irate Rosemary.

"What if they just bloomed blue all on their own? It wouldn't be the first time..." Lucille tried to remind everybody of the time when some of the pink roses in the public garden started putting out the occasional white flower.

"Sure they did!" Rosemary replied sarcastically. "And if you believe the good earth would yield such damned things as blue poppies, I have nothing more to say to you!" She paused to assure herself that she had the last word of the argument, and since nobody replied, she continued proudly.

"Burn this cursed field, and let its wickedness be gone with it!" she said with pathos.

"What's with her and her obsession with burning things down?" Lucille wondered quietly.

"We'll do no such thing!" Mrs. Eberhart protested. "We need to know what this is, don't we? Let the poppies go to seed and plant them. If they come true from seed, then we'll see where we go from there. If they don't, then we'll consider the possibility of evil influences."

"With all due respect, ma'am," Rosemary said, "I don't think you'll find a single soul in this village willing to plant the cursed blue poppy seed!"

"I'll do it," Giselle volunteered, her eyes filled with their customary naivete. Rosemary looked at her with disdain, wondering how she could have cultivated the company of this airhead for so many years.

"What?" Giselle felt the need to justify herself. "They look kind of pretty."

Chapter Twenty Four

### A Night in the Desert

Later that day Lucille prepared a basket of food, like she did every evening, not forgetting Mary's favorite cookies, fresh out of the oven, waited for the night to fall and stepped out into the desert quietly, careful not to attract attention.

She walked without noise through the soft, powdery sand, under the stars that shone so bright they cast shadows around the dunes and brightened the desert night enough to light her path. She stopped at times, to put the basket down, sighed in response to her thoughts and then continued on her way. She walked for a couple of hours, too deep in thought to pay attention to her surroundings, the way a person who walks the same familiar path is suddenly surprised to find herself much farther along it than she thought she was. At the end of the journey she slowed down and looked around swiftly, and then, reassured, turned at a sharp bend around a dune and stopped in front of a mound of rocks which looked like it had been placed there intentionally, as if to mark the spot.

There she stood for a while, waiting with increased impatience, and then, realizing that it was getting too late, she placed the basket in front of the mound and reluctantly left, sighing again, very deeply, and looking behind her in hope of seeing a familiar shadow appear from the depths of the desert.

She walked back home picking up the pace a little bit, as the entire firmament moved towards the horizon, and the wee hours' constellations started to appear. Almost home, she turned sharply again, following the path that led to the cave, shuffling her feet in the powdery sand to cover her tracks and as she did, she noticed, pleased, that the girls had left no traces in their passing either.

"Thank goodness, aunt Lucille! I was worried sick!" Mary jumped from her chair in an explosion of relief. The last presentation was wrapping up and the girls frowned at her for disturbing it, so she lowered her voice to a whisper and pulled Lucille to the side. "Whatever happened to you, are you alright?" She looked at her aunt, to ensure everything looked fine.

"Of course I'm alright, don't I always tell you not to worry for me?" Lucille smiled, swiping a stubborn strand of bright blond hair off of her niece's forehead. "Get your hair out of your eyes, child, it's not good for your eyesight," she commented.

"What happened?" Mary asked again.

"I had to shake Rosemary, the woman is nothing if not persistent. Harder to get rid of than a clump of thistles." She looked at Mary and remembered. "Oh, I'm so sorry, Mary! You'll have to make do with food from the pantry tonight, I had to put the food basket to good use."

"How did you know you were being followed?" Mary asked. Lucille smiled, but said nothing.

"How was school today?" she asked her niece, while searching through the pantry for ingredients to put a meal together.

"Good," Mary replied. "I aced organic chemistry," she smiled proudly.

"Wonderful!" Lucille said. "Would you grab a pot from the shelf for me, please?" Mary complied.

"So, what's going to happen now, aunt?" she asked.

"Well, if I were to guess, our dear Rosemary is lying in wait at the rock mound, hoping to catch you."

"You walked all the way to the rock mound?" Mary exclaimed, shocked. "In the middle of the night? That's two hours away from the village! What if you got lost?"

"My sweet child," Lucille smiled. "I lived here my whole life, I couldn't get lost if I tried."

"What are you going to tell her? She is going to raise the whole village when she comes back?"

"I'm counting on it," Lucille smiled like a Sphinx. "In fact I think the team in charge of breaking the curse of the Fair Maiden will be quite busy with preparations for your punishment for a while. I assume they'll set up camp at the mound. I would have liked to make it a little farther from the village, but two hours away is not too bad."

"But..." Mary protested, trying to put together in her head the pieces of the story, "last time I saw them they were planning to bring me out into the desert and leave me there to fry with no water," she said, almost apologetically. "Why on earth would they think I'd come back?"

"Because you are expected to obey, dear," Lucille replied. "Besides, they assume you're alone in the desert and you should be desperate enough by now."

"What about you? Isn't she going to get back at you for feeding me in secret?" Mary asked, concerned.

"I told you not to fuss over me, child, I can handle myself very well, thank you," Lucille retorted. "Can't a concerned aunt hope against hope that her prodigal niece finally saw the error of her ways and returned to face the consequences of her actions?"

"I wouldn't, really," Mary commented.

"Here's hoping for that," Lucille mumbled under her breath. "Anyway, I'll handle the details of this, you pay attention to your studies. After all, all of you, with the knowledge and the skills you are learning now are going to shape the future of our village. What a beautiful future that will be!" Lucille's eyes welled up, with gratitude for this unexpected fountain of knowledge that yielded its extraordinary wonder and wisdom day after day, with sadness for not having found it sooner, with concern over the challenges to come, with pride for her niece's, and all the other girls' avid thirst for learning. "I love you, Mary," she said, somewhat embarrassed by this outward display of affection, "I want you to be happy. You know that, don't you, dear?"

"I love you too, aunt Lucille," Mary smiled, reassured. Right then, the first rays of the morning sun got caught in the cold mirror of the girl's clear green eyes and put a shiver through Lucille's spine, despite her better angels. "Good grief, child! Are you trying to turn me into a snake?" She looked up, concerned. "Oh, my! It's already light out, if anybody sees me I'm not sure how I'll be able to explain myself."

"You can stay here until nightfall," the one in the mirror suggested.

"Don't you ever sleep?" Lucille turned around, annoyed that her private conversation with her niece had an audience.

"We work in shifts," the one in the mirror apologized.

"Thank you," Lucille answered the previous sentence, "but I have to go back, otherwise everybody will be on alert about what happened to me, and besides, I need to bring Mary the cookies I promised her, the desert mice must be making a feast of the previous batch by now."

When she got back to the village the sun was already up, and a large group of villagers and Council members was assembled in front of the Council Hall. The full Circle was there, staring intently at Lucille as she approached the gathering. After explanations were exchanged, the full attention of the group was consumed by Rosemary's plans for apprehending Mary, plans which were elaborate in nature and requiring generous amounts of the community's time and resources. After about half an hour of emotional appeals for compassionate but exemplary punishment of the errant girl everybody lost track of the discourse, zoned out for the remainder of the speech and politely waited for Rosemary to stop talking.

Two hours later, in the daze created by the convoluted details of the punishment plan, a group was selected to take to the desert and find any traces that the exile might have left behind. The little creatures of the desert, delighted by the unexpected feast the universe had bestowed on them had cleaned up the food basket with great efficiency, and there was no way to tell if the creature whose hunger was appeased was human or otherwise. In the fervent unfolding of events, Rosemary decided to take the high road and forgive Lucille the human weakness of trying to feed and protect the child she had raised from infancy, even though, as everybody had to agree, the fair girl was nothing but pure evil.

Chapter Twenty Five

### Aloud

In the agitation created by the events that surrounded the search for Mary the Circle almost forgot about the cursed poppy experiment, and was only reminded of it when the second generation of plants emerged and bloomed even bluer than the first. Mrs. Eberhart shrugged at the sight of the field donning the color of the sky, irritated that the Council had wasted her time again with superstitious nonsense.

"When are we going to be rid of this curse already?" Rosemary clamored, displeased that the plan she was contemplating in her mind, the one where even the memory of the Que'd was stripped from the Village record and life went on, with industry and righteousness, like it did for her generation, and her mother's generation, and her grandmother's, and her great-grandmother's.

She had thrown herself enthusiastically into the belief system that everything she'd been taught as a child was proper and unchanging and for this reason she never questioned her actions or convictions; ironically for a person who had spent her entire life demonizing mirrors, Rosemary had become a mere reflection of a very carefully crafted communal thought.

The fact that Mary was still roaming loose somewhere out there in the desert weighed on her conscience, disturbing her sleep and making her restless. She didn't understand how the girl could possibly have gotten away, but she had her theories, which she shared with willing members of the Circle on occasion, in order to vent her frustrations. What annoyed her most, however, was the cavalier way in which the younger generation was leading its life. If somebody were to ask her, she couldn't pinpoint a specific behavior that she found offensive, or a character flaw that needed mending, but her misgivings had something to do with the poise in the girls' demeanor and the unacceptable level of confidence in persons of their age, a fact which simply unsettled her.

She remembered her own youth, all those secrets she kept from her family, those careless indiscretions that are the appanage of young age, and they all seemed like nothing compared to whatever lay hidden behind those girls' calm eyes and their well behaved smiles. Whatever it was, it didn't give them pause; there was no guilt, no shame, no fear associated with it, no burden of sin that she could sense in them, to her great chagrin. Rosemary couldn't shake the feeling that life as she knew it, with its hierarchy of obedience and privileges of rank, her social standing, all of those things that she was always taught she deserved, was slipping away slowly, and those impudent girls surely had something to do with it. Their humble attitude grated on her nerves, because she could smell their defiance, even as it was now, carefully wrapped in the Council approved garb, and for this reason she became so easily rattled that even her closest associates had trouble dealing with her temper.

In order to keep the peace and get Rosemary off their back, the Council summarily approved her plans for a stake-out in the desert and gave her the resources she insisted she needed for the task, as well as a number of accommodating members of the Circle, whose patience and compliant nature was guaranteed to ensure the success of the mission. The team left early in the morning, after much pump and ceremony; Rosemary insisted it was the dignified thing to do considering they were going to sacrifice their comfort in order to save the Village from dissenting elements and restore propriety to a confused generation, which now seemed lost at sea with no compass.

The group advanced through the desert slowly, but with great determination, and the community watched them for a while, until their caravan melted in the distance and all that could be perceived about its presence was the cloud of powdery dust stirred by the wheels of the carts and the hooves of the beasts of burden. They arrived at the rock mound at noon and wasted no time setting up camp behind the dunes, to gain some relief from the unforgiving sun and have some shelter where they could rest and appease their parched throats. After a short reconnaissance mission that gave them precious little information about their surroundings, which looked more or less the same, they settled comfortably in their tents, in patient anticipation of a long wait.

After the departure of their group the Village returned to its habitual activity, with everyone quietly going about their tasks, somewhat ill at ease about whatever was lurking out there in the desert.

That evening Lucille decided to go to the cave early, excited to spend more time than usual with Mary and catch up on the latest news about school. She found the girl talking excitedly with the one in the mirror about some database detail they couldn't agree on.

"I don't think that's correct, Caleb," Mary insisted, "I believe he meant 'aloud' not 'allowed'."

"Why would he define 'aloud' as an option value?"

"It's a public file," Mary commented.

"I can see that!" Caleb replied, impatient. "The spelling is wrong," he frowned.

"It doesn't look wrong to me," Mary replied. "That's how we spell it here."

"Even though I understand the consequences of complete isolation for your culture, I still find it surreal that you speak and write in a barely modified version of the ancient language!" He paused for a second, concerned that Mary might feel slighted. "I feel like I'm talking to a person from two centuries ago."

"In a way, you are," Lucille thought, and sat down quietly, not wanting to interrupt the conversation.

"How do you even know what 'aloud' means, we haven't used that word in decades?" Caleb continued, mystified.

"Of course I know what 'aloud' means!" Mary replied, surprised. "It makes sense since it is associated with a file from the public repository. The Council uses this word all the time when it refers to proclamations intended for common knowledge."

"What is a proclamation intended for common knowledge?" Caleb's bewilderment amplified.

"You know, new edicts, event schedules, whole town meetings," Mary explained.

"So, it is part of the public address system?" he asked.

"Yes," Mary confirmed. "If the proclamation is not meant for the whole village, it will be 'written', otherwise it's 'aloud'."

"You mean you yell it out in the streets?" Caleb couldn't believe his ears. "Do you have a town crier?"

"Not officially," Mary continued, unperturbed. "It's usually one of the Council members, whoever happens to be free at the time."

"Still doesn't make sense to me," Caleb disagreed. "Especially since the other option values are 'burn', 'null' and 'chart'. What does that even mean?" he frowned again, and then remembered Lucille's arrival and turned towards her. "Good evening, Lucille. Any good news from the village?"

"Define good," Lucille hesitated. "Rosemary is out in the desert guarding a mound of rocks, whether that's good news or bad news remains to be seen. We got lucky with the blue poppies, they came true from seed, but other than that, nothing new, really," she smiled, and then got up to make some tea and then settled down in one of the cozy chairs to wait for the girls' arrival.

They showed up together, as usual, so quiet that they startled Lucille when they brushed past her chair to get closer to the smart screen. It wasn't time for class yet, so a few of them joined her for a cup of tea to chase away the chill of the desert night.

Blanche pulled up a chair and sat down next to Lucille, visibly preoccupied but hesitating to open the subject that haunted her. She gathered the courage to start eventually.

"Ma'am," she said, so quietly that her voice was almost imperceptible.

"What is it, dear?" Lucille encouraged her.

"What good is it for us to learn all of this stuff if we can never use it?" she asked.

"But you're already using it, aren't you?" Lucille replied. "The plant hybrids, the spinning machine, the knowledge of your body, you're already using it, aren't you?"

"But it's such a small part of what we learned, we could never speak of computers, or physics, or even literary works. Why can't we just stay here? We have everything we need!" Blanche replied, encouraged.

"Beloved child, you can't better your life by running away from it! You don't change the Village by leaving it, you change the Village by persuading it to see a better future. What would you do, hide in this cave for the rest of your days? You have to live your life, build your family, make a contribution to society, grow!" Lucille answered her kindly. "You are here to learn and bring the knowledge back with you, so the Village can have better things too! Besides, what would I tell your parents?"

"But..." Blanche hesitated. "How come Mary gets to stay here?"

"That's a different situation, you see. Mary is banished," Lucille smiled.

Chapter Twenty Six

### About Flight

In all fairness, Mary was banished indeed. The makeshift team at the rock mound spared no effort in setting up means to detect her presence, if and when she decided to approach the apparently agreed upon meeting place and look for her aunt. Every day a small group of ladies took it upon themselves to check all the tracking markers, only to notice that their condition always changed. The wind, the rain, the little creatures of the desert trampled them over in their comings and goings, oblivious to the interests and goals of the humans and answering only to the larger scale of nature.

The group spent lots of time in meetings, trying to pick out the artifacts from the random patterns of being, an activity blessed with the same odds to succeed as finding a needle in a haystack. Every now and then someone in the group would single out a detail that looked like obvious proof of Mary's touch and they made it their main goal to prove themselves right. The more someone else contradicted them, the more invested they became in the defense of their theory and when challenged they took it personally. The contradicted parties abode morosely by the group decision that the artifact was not relevant, but stashed the offending item in a coffer, certain that the truth will see justice in the end. That's how the camp was blessed with an ever growing collection of sticks, rocks, sand pattern molds made of wax, drawings of quasi-random straw patterns, and even, for a reason nobody really understood, an abandoned bird's nest.

There was no rhyme and reason to the cluster of artifacts as a whole, but if all the items were to be displayed together they would have made for a fascinating, albeit completely meaningless collection. Lucille showed up every now and then, since it was part of her Circle duty to be involved in issues important to the Village, and she listened patiently to all the hypotheses, proudly presented by Rosemary. The latter eyed her shrewdly, trying to catch some tell-tale reactions that might prove her suspicions with respect to Lucille's fostering of unsanctioned behavior correct. Lucille had the composure of a gambling grand master, and exhibited appropriate interest for the artifacts, studying them closely to ensure she didn't miss critical details and asking questions when she deemed appropriate.

"I find it difficult to believe," Rosemary interjected, "that your niece hasn't had any success in her attempts to get in touch with you. A three year old could track her down around this mound of rocks, she left a trail wider than a pheasant's tail, I'm surprised somebody hasn't caught up with her yet." She paused to assess from Lucille's behavior if she had hit a nerve. Lucille smiled back graciously, shrugging her shoulders, so Rosemary was unable to contain a bilious streak. "Quite frankly, dear, the girl was never all that smart." She continued to look at Lucille, who said nothing, but donned a somewhat surprised gaze. "Surely somebody is helping her," she threw two sharp darts from her eyes, determined to get to the bottom of Lucille's involvement, no matter what it took.

Much like during the mirror incident in her youth, Rosemary was beholden to her desire to take credit for her qualities and achievements, or anything else that she had and other people didn't, and couldn't help brag about them, even when it wasn't to her advantage to do so. Lucille continued looking at her, waiting for the inevitable outburst. Uncharacteristically, Rosemary contained her guile and opted for a probing insinuation instead.

"I just wouldn't want to be the person aiding and abetting that delinquent, dear. You know how strict the Village laws are against the dissemination of seditious propaganda, and you," she paused for effect, "well, with your unfortunate background, would be the first person they would suspect." She was pleased with herself for having found the right tone, and continued. "I care too much about our friendship, Lucille, and wouldn't want anything bad to happen to you, just because of that misguided girl you're trying to protect." She attempted a stare down, which, unfortunately for her, Lucille didn't notice. She was mesmerized by a very intricate sand pattern that somebody had cast in wax to reveal every painstaking detail and whose fractal derived repeating patterns looked almost hypnotic.

Rosemary insisted on making a point. "Just so you know, were you found to have disrespected our customs, I would not be in the position to help you."

"What is this, exactly?" Lucille asked, still fascinated with the intricate pattern. It looked as if a million little feathers had touched the ground, all at the same time, caressing it for only a moment, and leaving behind traces more elusive than a wave on the sea.

"Something must have brushed against the sand," the owner of the cast replied. "It didn't look random," she explained herself.

"It looks like the trace of a bird wing," Lucille continued her fascination with the object.

"It probably is," her conversation partner replied.

"It's beautiful!" Lucille replied.

"See?" Rosemary snapped, irritated that the owner of the artifact was diverting attention from her. "This is why things are so dire around here and why the future of our children is at stake! How can we hope to stay true to our traditions when even elders such as yourselves waste their time in silly banter instead of attending to emergencies of this magnitude!"

It had been a few months since the chase for Mary had started and so far there was no progress in ensuring her capture, despite the plethora of evidence the clumsy girl had left behind for all to see. Rosemary thought that if she were ever that dumb she would certainly wish to get caught, just to get the agony of worrying about her situation over with, but didn't say anything out loud and instead set the verbal barb back in its quiver, to be used another day. She cast aside the first track of the conversation and decided to approach her target from another angle.

"To be sure, dear, I don't mean to bring you even more distress, goodness knows that it can't be easy being in such an awkward position, but sometimes I fear for the worst, Lucille. It has been too long, surely the girl would have felt compelled to return by now, were she still able. As sad as the prospect makes me, I worry that she can't survive in the desert much longer, even if she, by some miracle, managed to find some shelter and sustenance. If you care for her at all you'd better let us know about her whereabouts, I'm not sure how you would be able to cope with her passing."

"Oh, yes, of course!" Lucille replied. "I worry about her myself every day! I can't tell you how much I appreciate you going to such lengths to find her," she continued, looking down with sadness. "I know that the sentence awaiting her upon return will not be kind, but she did go against our customs and I am hopeful that the ceremony in the desert and keeping her away from any form of water will eventually cure my dear niece of her curse. All things considered, any fate would be better than whatever agony she's experiencing right now," she sighed convincingly. "The loneliness alone..." she pondered.

"Whatever you say, dear," Rosemary retorted bitterly.

***

"How are things going in the Village, aunt Lucille?" Mary asked smiling.

"Oh, same old, same old, darling. Just the same way you remember them," Lucille smiled back.

"I want to show you something," Mary glowed with pride. She ran to one of the cupboards and brought back a piece of artwork.

"Child, this is beautiful!" Lucille admired the craftsmanship, despite being taken aback by the subject of the piece. "Did you make this?" she asked, to allow Mary to brag about her work.

"Yes, I did!" Mary replied, beaming from ear to ear. "It's a bird's wing, it's supposed to symbolize flight," she felt the need to explain her artistic vision.

Chapter Twenty Seven

### Archetype

The more Mary delved into the recovery of the database the more she became tangled in the old story buried inside it, almost as if her own memories were finally brought back to life. At times she felt as if she had awakened from a long sleep and found herself in a room she recognized without knowing why.

She had learned enough of the old code to understand that the Que'd held technical instructions, not the story of her ancestors, and she was a little disappointed about that. After all the secrecy and the sacrifices that kept the sacred book from being lost through the centuries, she expected it to reveal the meaning of life, or at least provide some moral guidance for her future. On the other hand, the database was a never ending source of wonder, an entire alternate history her generation knew nothing about. It is said that history is written by the victors, and a couple of centuries ago, as the defeated party, the Scholars' line simply slipped out of existence, its every trace erased, and only its shadow stayed alive in the folk tales, carried by the vague whispers and half remarks passed down from generation to generation by the few dissenters left behind.

Mary was mesmerized by this new window into life as she knew it; it wasn't because of the extraordinary scientific advantages it offered, although that in and of itself would have been enough, it was more because of the overwhelming realization that everything she had ever been taught about her life was a lie. She often got lost in hypothetical scenarios in which her ancestors lived their lives in the Village, where their knowledge was sought after and revered. She wondered what her own life would have been like, were she not the only one who was fair, were she not the cursed Fire Maiden. She fantasized about having that large social circle and that future she coveted, the one her lineage made impossible; in short, she dreamed about the care free pursuit of a normal life.

"There is no such thing, Mary," the one in the mirror replied softly to her unspoken reflections.

"I'm not sure what you mean," Mary answered him, blushing with embarrassment for having her deepest thoughts exposed.

"There is no such thing as a normal life, my dear. What you see in right front of you, what you discover, that is what's real, the rest is just a fairy tale," he said kindly.

"How could you possibly know..." Mary whispered, dry mouthed, terrified by the idea that the one in the mirror could see her thoughts.

"Let's just say that I'm pretty good at reading faces and your emotions are closer to the surface than other people's," he smiled. "All of those years you spent alone didn't teach you to hide your feelings very well, that is something you learn through socializing."

Mary decided to take a chance since the subject had been opened anyway.

"What is your life like?" she asked, taking the one in the mirror by surprise.

"What you see is what you get," he said, somewhat awkward. "You must have noticed I'm here for a good chunk of the day."

"What about family, friends?" Mary asked. The one in the mirror didn't answer, just shuffled uncomfortably in the chair and looked for a reference manual that seemed to be nowhere in sight.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pry," the girl mumbled.

"You are so young, Mary," he noted casually and then changed the subject. "So, what is your class schedule for today?"

She answered him and went to finish a research project she'd been working on for the last week. Layers upon layers of the ancient story mingled with her thoughts and tried to recreate the unfinished puzzle of her alternate life, the idealized one where everybody sought her company, where she was born to a well situated family, where she led the parade on the Feast of the Harvest, where many eligible young men competed for her attention. She had been painting that picture for so many years in so many different ways back in her childhood, when she wished to have her heart's desire at least in a daydream if it wasn't possible in real life, that she thought nothing in the world could shatter its vision inside her head. For a second, she held on to the vision of that place where she lived in in order to escape the real world, and as she gazed upon its familiar sights she was shocked to notice that her dreamworld had become flat, devoid of content, a sumptuously decorated book cover holding blank pages, a painted landscape. Even if she could have that life, which under the circumstances was about as likely as being elected to Council, what would she do with it, really? What part of that life could capture her attention enough, after all that she had learned here, to keep her happily involved for the rest of her life? What wonderful things would she miss in the process, what projects would she have to give up for the pleasure of afternoon tea, being socially desirable and partaking in Village gossip? She suddenly realized that all of those years growing up alone didn't help make the concept of social life very palatable to her. She suddenly realized that the life she had coveted for so many years would make her absolutely miserable.

She looked around the cave and noticed that everything she needed was printed for her on demand, that all of her questions were answered, that she went to school with the other girls in the village, no different from anyone else, and she suddenly wanted to know that world out there, from which these great things flowed to her so effortlessly. She had no expectations of it, just an intense curiosity and the thrill of wonders undiscovered yet.

She didn't belong in the Village anymore, which was just as well considering that she never really fit in. She hadn't learned how to build social connections, that web of relationships her aunt seemed to forge so easily, and the superstitions that had followed her around for all of her young life made her as much a part of myth as the Book of Prophecy.

"Maybe being the embodiment of an archetype is not as bad as you think," the one in the mirror smiled, amused by the silent drama on her face, generated by the expressions of her internal struggle.

"How so?" Mary asked.

"Look at it this way. How many people get a sacred text written about them centuries before they were born?" he joked.

"I don't know about that," Mary seriously considered the concept. "That book is mostly filled with instructions about how to kill me."

"Details," the one in the mirror started laughing.

"I want to see the city," Mary blurted out with no introduction.

"I beg your pardon?" the one in the mirror asked, surprised.

"The city. The place where you live. I want to see it."

The one in the mirror thought for a second, frowning over the logistics of the task, and then said simply.

"Ok."

"Oh, thank goodness!" Lucille breathed a sigh of relief upon arriving to the cave. There was such silence and peace inside this natural room open to the sky as the sun cast its last rays on the wall carvings that it made her feel as if a large weight had been lifted off her shoulders. She looked at the illuminated wall again, really noticing the fresh carvings this time. It seemed that her niece had a little too much time on her hands.

"I missed the old room," Mary smiled as an excuse. "It felt right that the words of the Que'd should decorate this hall too, even if they don't mean what I thought."

Lucille breathed in the peace and rested her eyes on the warm glow of the sunset that painted the wall rose, orange and purple.

"It's so quiet in here," she said, remembering the brouhaha in the Council Hall, Rosemary's empty clamor, the revival of the threat of enchantments and the debate over the blue poppies. "I'm of half a mind to stay myself," she joked.

"Why don't you, aunt Lucille?" Mary asked. "I'm sure they can make accommodations for you quite easily. Life can be very pleasant in here."

"Oh, my dear child. Who's going to take care of the Village if we all retire into hermitage?" She smiled again, trying to assess exactly how comfortable her niece was with her quasi-solitary existence. "Not everybody is suited for the life of a recluse, you know? I would miss a lot of the people from the Circle, even if we argue at times; we've been together our entire lives, the Village is my home," she confessed, looking around, slightly alarmed. "Where is everybody? Aren't the girls supposed to have shown up for class by now?" she almost jumped to her feet to prepare for the unexpected crisis.

"It's a holiday," Mary soothed her anxiety. Lucille scanned through the list of holidays in her mind but couldn't figure out which one.

"Their holiday," Mary clarified.

Lucille frowned to a thought for a second, and then started laughing heartily when she heard the remote boom of thunder muffled by the distance and the thick walls of the cave. "Of course! How silly of me, I almost forgot!" she said.

"What is it, aunt Lucille?" Mary insisted, curious.

"You mean they didn't tell you?" Lucille continued laughing.

"Tell me what?" Mary replied innocently.

"It is The Day of Thadith."

Mary tried to recall anything about it, but her mind didn't find anything.

"I've never heard of a Day of Thadith," she replied.

"Of course not, dear. It has been decreed that it never existed," Lucille explained.

"Wouldn't there be a reference about it in the Que'd or the Repository?" Mary asked.

"Both of them were written long before it, I don't know if there were any records kept about that time, nothing but word of mouth, I'm afraid."

"Tell me about it, aunt Lucille!" Mary's eyes shone with curiosity.

"In light of everything I learned here I'm a little reluctant to share the folk tale with you, people make up crazy things to explain what they can't understand," Lucille teased, and then saw the disappointed look in Mary's eyes and continued.

"Oh, never mind! Here goes. The story says that at some point the Scholars learned how to summon lightning, some form of electricity recovery from the higher atmosphere, I wouldn't know. It was supposed to be a major breakthrough in technology and would have sped up the advancement of society by leaps and bounds, at least that's what the Scholars thought. Unfortunately, that was also the precise moment when the Council started seeing them as a threat, they were worried that this power was too great to control, so they revolted against it. Of course the fact that the new technology was in dire need of fine tuning and there had been some unfortunate incidents related to it probably didn't help the Scholars' cause. That's what I inferred from many different sources, you know? The real legend says that the Scholars, our ancestors, consorted with the forces of evil in order to gain power over the earth and the sky, and that power turned against them for leaving the path of righteousness. The legend says that they called the evil forces in the mirror, and promised them innocent victims from the Village, and the pact was sealed inside the mirrors as long as the mirrors existed."

"So, that's how they convinced people to get rid of all the electronic equipment?" Mary asked, wide eyed.

"I'm afraid so. People would do anything if they believe their loved ones are in danger," Lucille smiled sadly.

"What happened afterward?" Mary asked.

"The trials started, that's when the Book of Prophecy was written; every known member of the Scholars' society and everybody in their families was banished, the mirrors were declared an abomination, found and destroyed. An edict was passed, forbidding the spread of the cursed information and the grown ups were held under an oath bound by the threat of banishment never to reveal this story to their children."

"So, you are risking banishment as we speak?" Mary said, worried.

Lucille laughed again.

"I think that cat got out of the bag a long time ago, child. It seems like the story found you!"

"Why is it called The Day of Thadith?"

"Do you remember the Wrath of Elijhar?" Lucille asked.

"Of course, all the children were terrified! When we heard booming in the sky we were all supposed to hide indoors with candles and read from the Book of Prophecy!" Mary replied.

"Well, you have to agree that having a thunderstorm out of the blue in the middle of the desert is a pretty odd occurrence. The Scholars chose that day to remind those left behind they were still out there and we should not lose hope, so every year on The Day of Thadith, as we lit our candles, we knew they'd be back one day."

"Why is it called The Day of Thadith?" Mary came back to her original question.

"Thadith means lightning in the old language."

Chapter Twenty Eight

### Crewelwork

After many months with only an impressive collection of desert artifacts to show for, Rosemary and her team were called back by the Council, despite clamorous protests and, on occasion, veiled threats. Every time she had to go to a meeting, Rosemary got into the habit of carrying around an object or other from the collection, which she liked to parade around the room as a symbol of her righteous outrage.

"There is no hope for the Village anymore. You just destroyed our last chance to uproot evil from our midst once and for all!" she raised her voice in Council, an outrageous and completely unheard of behavior that made even Mrs. Eberhart frown with disapproval. "I warn you! This will not end well, and I'm not going to sit here, idle, while the likes of Mary and her evil mirror mongers destroy our traditions and endanger our children! If you don't do anything about this, I have no choice but to take matters into my own hands!"

"I don't believe the Council will see things your way, Rosemary!" Mrs. Eberhart admonished, with an unusual hint of harshness in her normally soft voice. "Things have been decided by the group as a whole."

"Don't say I didn't warn you!" Rosemary hissed as she stormed out of the Council Hall, determined to have her way no matter what.

At the end of the meeting, after the customary tea and cookies, Giselle approached Lucille under the guise of helping her dry and put away the teacups, and since her friend's natural clumsiness was amplified by the stress of the situation, Lucille made sure to maneuver as many of the imperiled recipients as she could before the former doomed them to a bitter fate.

"Say, Lucille, you wouldn't happen to have a tapestry needle you can spare?" Giselle brought up the first pretext she could think of that would justify paying Lucille a visit without the benefit of Rosemary's presence.

"Of course, dear," Lucille encouraged, pleasantly surprised, curious about the things Giselle had to share. In time she had learned that they tended to be a lot more interesting than one expected. "I'm sure I have a couple that I don't need right now. Why don't you stop by my house when we leave and I'll let you chose."

"Oh, thank you, Lucille," Giselle breathed a sigh so big it felt exaggerated with regards to the task, but upon a closer look Lucille deemed her friend's relief genuine. "You're a life saver!"

Giselle paused to ponder whether she should continue her thought, then looked around and decided to risk it. "I brought the crewelwork with me, maybe you can help me pick the right needle for it," she pointed to a neatly folded piece of cloth in her basket; the little bundle looked suspiciously stiff and squarish for a silk weave.

Lucille cast a quick glance in the direction of the basket and smiled casually.

"Well, I'm sure you don't need my help, but I'm more than happy to offer it, if you'd like," she hinted at Giselle's unchallenged mastery in the art of embroidery, and crewelwork in particular. "I just hope I have what you need."

"It's just that I..." Giselle mumbled, embarrassed by the unexpected compliment, "aahm...would appreciate your advice on this...pattern that I'm working on. I'm... just not sure how to refine it," she stared at Lucille intently. "It feels a little...disjointed right now."

"Nothing that can't be sorted out, I'm sure," Lucille opened up the conversation, hoping that Giselle's answer will assuage her curiosity with a little more detail before she got to see the actual thing.

"No, not really," the latter jumped through the opening in the conversation. "It's just that I can't seem to get the gradient and the shadows right, the whole pattern seems to fade into the background. Of course, silly me, I chose to work with white on white, who does that, right?" she looked at Lucille for approval. "Besides, I don't think I interpreted the sample correctly, I was working from a color pattern."

To say that Lucille's curiosity had been piqued would be an understatement, but she kept her composure, finished putting away the china and walked home leisurely in Giselle's company, stopping several times on the way to greet acquaintances and nod at the inevitable comments about the young generation's abysmal choice of attire and the eerie reasons for the presence of blue poppies.

Once at home, Lucille and Giselle went to the kitchen where, as expected, the latter unwrapped a tablet with a blank screen.

"Sorry to put you on the spot, Lucille," Giselle started abruptly, "but I'm such a klutz that I turned the fonts white and can't figure out how to turn them back to the original color. I've been agonizing over this for days, could you please find out if one of the teachers can help? I asked a couple of the girls, but they couldn't figure it out either, I must have erased a critical piece of the program or something, I want to kick myself sometimes!"

Lucille was flabbergasted.

"How in creation did you find out about this?" she managed to ask eventually.

"Oh, dear," Giselle continued cheerfully, completely missing the stunned expression on Lucille's face, "you know the girls, they're given to gossip, it's their young age, I suppose. Besides people don't seem to notice me much when I'm around, I just happened to be in the workshop once or twice when Mrs. Gentry was away." She turned to Lucille apologetically, trying to soothe her worry. "The girls ask me for help on occasion. You remember my old friend from back in the day, don't you?"

"Who else knows about this?" Lucille asked, with a calm that felt almost surreal under the circumstances.

"A small group of ladies in the Council," Giselle started enumerating. "Of course Mrs. Gentry, it was kind of hard keeping this stuff from her after she found the mechanical loom." Lucille sighed, wretched but somewhat relieved, since the source of the sudden progress in the Village had to come to light sooner or later. "And Mrs. Eberhart, naturally."

"Mrs. Eberhart?" Lucille continued, with the same weird calm.

"Well, how else would we keep Rosemary out of your hair, dear?" Giselle smiled. "Do you know how much planning it took to produce all of those artifacts she found? The desert is really not that prolific."

She paused for a few minutes, to give Lucille some time to adjust to the news, and then continued.

"Anyway, those of us who are familiar with the subject wanted to put our heads together and figure out how to square this circle, so to speak. We can't live in the dark ages indefinitely, you know. Not with what's out there."

"So," Lucille brought up the obvious point. "If the Council already knows, why not bring the devices back into the Village, I'm getting a little tired of all those trips through the desert and the girls could really use some sleep."

"We need to ease into it, dear," Giselle argued, excited. "We can't just blurt it out, some of the ladies are very sensitive about the subject, we don't want to stir up a conniption. Why, just yesterday Mrs. Bentree expressed her dread about the demonic seed that sprouted the blue poppies. By the way, the girls are getting incredibly good at what they're doing, how did they manage to grow Himalayan poppies in this climate? Don't they need cold mountain air?"

"Not these particular hybrids, they were bred for one of Blanche's projects in Genetics," Lucille answered, still in disbelief that she was discussing this subject with Giselle.

"Anyway, that's what I wanted to talk to you about, maybe if you come up with some ideas we can all talk about them some time," Giselle got up to leave, and in the process unsettled the bowl of beans Lucille had left out on the table to cook for dinner. The bowl fell to the floor with a lot of noise, spreading its contents all over the room. "Oh, I'm so sorry! I have two left hands, I can't do anything right!" Giselle blushed to her hair roots, deeply embarrassed by the tiny disaster, which Lucille dismissed with a quick wave of her hand.

"What about the white fonts?" the latter remembered to ask. "How soon do you need those fixed?"

"There is no rush or anything, just whenever you can, I kind of miss using my tablet," Giselle said as she went to the door. "And also," she blushed again, hesitating, "can I bother you about that tapestry needle? Mine broke right in the middle of a pattern."

"Yeah, sure, of course," Lucille replied, surprised by the rather unsophisticated request, and turned on her feet to retrieve one from the sewing basket.

Chapter Twenty Nine

### The life and times of Mary Coulter, born fair

"So," Lucille said casually, "I hear that our safely guarded secret school is the talk of the Village!"

Mary looked at her with genuine bewilderment.

"Giselle told me all about it yesterday over a cup of tea. Oh, by the way, could you ask somebody to figure out how to make this work? She left it with me to get looked at," Lucille pulled the tablet out of the basket and set it on the table.

"How did she find out about this?" Mary asked, and a fleeting flash of fear shrouded her eyes.

Lucille forgot about her irritation for a second, when she remembered that the girl was hiding there to safeguard her life. Her previous priorities fell to the wayside for a little while, as she thought of the best way to reassure her niece.

"She listened in on the girls while they were talking in shop," she said in a much softer tone. "It seems," she hesitated, "that not every Council member is averse to the idea of all of you learning these things."

"Does that mean I will eventually be able to return to the Village?" Mary asked in an even voice, emptied of all emotion.

"Not immediately, but probably soon," Lucille smiled encouragingly; she was surprised to watch the fear in Mary's eyes turn into great sadness. "What's the matter, Mary? I thought you'd be happy about it."

Mary didn't answer, she got up to grab a cup of tea and watched the last rays of the sunset as they swept the edge of the opening at the top of the cave. She sat quietly for a while, and Lucille didn't insist, just waited patiently for the girl to reveal the source of her unease.

"I am happy here," the latter said eventually. "I don't want to go back to the Village."

"But didn't you understand? We can move the school there, you can continue your studies, you don't have to be alone in the desert."

"I'm not alone," Mary pointed out.

"I don't mean your teleconferences, you can't live in isolation, you need other people in your life," Lucille argued her case.

"But I was alone before," Mary replied. "All the time." She noticed discomfort in her aunt's demeanor and corrected herself. "Except for you, of course. And I'll still have you."

Lucille searched inside her mind for an appropriate response, but couldn't find anything.

"I'm different, aunt Lucille," Mary pierced her aunt's gaze with one of her uncomfortable stares, so icy because of the clear green eyes, and her disquieting look made her aunt realize even she never adjusted to the fact that her niece wasn't like the rest of the people in the village. Mary continued. "I'm not going to stop being different just because people no longer want me dead. I'm very happy for the girls, though, their lives are going to be so much better from now on. Are you sure the Council doesn't mind?"

"Well," Lucille pondered her response carefully, because she knew that selling the school idea to the Council would be a slightly steeper climb than she wanted it to be, "if Mrs. Eberhart doesn't object to it in principle, I'm sure we'll find our way to an agreement."

"Mrs. Eberhart is aware of this?" Mary asked.

"Yes."

Mary didn't answer, she just looked down, deep in thought.

"I miss having you around, I'm sure your friends will be happy to have you back too," Lucille tried to persuade her.

"What of my life, aunt Lucille?" Mary asked her, and her eyes gleamed eerily in the faint light of the night, in the glow of the stars and the moon. "What will become of it if I return?"

"You can settle down, have your own home, a family," Lucille hesitated to offer, with the realization that Mary's unusual countenance made the aforementioned options unlikely, if not impossible.

"You know as well as I do that these things are never going to happen," Mary said, and continued when she noticed that her aunt was getting ready to comfort her, "but I don't want them to. I don't belong in the Village, aunt. I never did."

"There will be things for you to do in Council, in time. After all you learned more about the Scholars than most of us, they'll need your expertise to change things, I'm sure."

"Maybe," Mary answered plainly. "I want to be among people who are like me, learn about my heritage. I want my life to count for something," she said with a hint of frustration in her voice.

"So, you're saying that serving in Council is a waste of time?" Lucille asked, a bit offended.

"Quite the opposite," Mary replied. "It's just that I don't think, given my family tree and my history, that this would be a reasonable path for me to consider."

"What would you like to do, then?" her aunt insisted.

"I don't know. That's why I need to find out what's possible before I decide to apply myself to it," Mary said thoughtfully.

"There is no such thing as 'possible', Mary," the one in the mirror commented. "Only the limits of your own thought."

"How come you're here, then, day after day, guarding that screen?" Lucille couldn't help herself, annoyed at the intrusion in what she perceived to be a private conversation. "Surely there must be something more exciting for you to do than that!"

"Not exactly," the one in the mirror smiled without taking offense. "Do you know how many before me tried to unravel the wonders hidden inside the Coulter repository?" He turned his gaze towards Mary. "Actually, if you want something to feel good about, consider that you happened upon a treasure many generations of our people spent lifetimes trying to find."

"So, what's going to happen now?" he turned back to Lucille, and his question drew the attention of the latter to the practicalities involved in presenting the school curriculum to the Council.

"I think the best thing for us to do next is talk to Giselle and get a clearer picture of the attitudes in Council. I'm sure she knows a lot more about things than she lets show," Lucille smiled enigmatically. "The woman seems to be everywhere something interesting happens, without ever getting noticed. I sometimes wonder if she acquired the gift of invisibility." She got up to leave and kissed Mary's cheek as she headed towards the exit. "Cheer up!" she smiled at her niece. "The best hasn't even happened yet!"

Mary watched her aunt leave and then turned up the lamp to chase away the shadows that had enveloped the cave at dusk. As it was often her custom when she was all by herself, she picked up the Que'd from the shelf, its pages a little worn by all the recent handling, opened it and glided her fingertips over the surface of the pages, like she used to do back in the attic at her aunt's house. The angular indentations of the letters felt familiar under her fingers, as she sounded the old code inside her mind, in cadence, its short lines reading almost like a chant. Even after she had learned what the lines meant, the melody of the strange words, written in short sequences like an endless poem without rhyme still managed to give her goosebumps.

Her eyes lit up and she smiled, then jumped from her chair to look for something else on the shelf. She picked up an empty composition book and a pen, drew the table lamp closer and sat down to write:

"The life and times of Mary Coulter, born fair"

Chapter Thirty

### A Maze of Twisty Little Passages

The following Wednesday Giselle showed up at Lucille's house for a nice cup of tea and a lengthy demonstration of her new embroidery pattern. The table in Lucille's drawing room got covered quickly with bits of yarn, several types of canvas, scissors and pads of paper covered with sewing motifs, wristband pincushions, thimbles, cups and saucers, a teapot, a sugar bowl, a plate of cookies, still warm, and two tablets, one of which was Giselle's, finally restored to proper functioning.

After a few hours the crewel technique was mastered and Giselle left, tablet in basket. She picked up the pace when she was out of sight and headed straight to the Council Hall where she interrupted a meeting in progress in order to whisper a few words in Rosemary's ear, a feat unheard of in general and quite incredible coming from Giselle.

The former got up, with a momentous expression on her face, and followed Giselle into the hallway for an ad-hoc conference. She stormed back into the room, fifteen minutes later, to call for an emergency get together at the cave, and because she donned the same expression of triumph mixed with doom, an expression that demanded the utmost seriousness, the Council conceded her request.

One of the girls in the workshop was dispatched to Lucille's house to summon her, a task that also served to bring to the forefront the fact that a member in good standing of the Ladies' Circle had missed the weekly meeting, which hopefully would draw the disapproval of the Council members who were more discipline oriented. The young girl looked terrified, and despite the urgency of the request, Lucille had to spend a little time reassuring her.

The two arrived at the cave at high noon to join the Council, just in time to watch Rosemary and Giselle lead the way into the second cave, the one that had stayed carefully hidden up to that point.

The girl who was sent for Lucille clung tightly to her hand, looking terrified.

Rosemary led the way into the second room, the place that bore the ominous promise of horrid discoveries, things so unspeakable that they would shake even the most level headed of ladies, as well as offend their precious beliefs. As she advanced into the hidden cave she spoke of demonic contraptions that stole the soul, and evil incantations that made cursed objects appear from thin air, and words that damned the one who said them and all those who heard them, as well. But most of all she made the promise to finally reveal the lair of the Fire Maiden, the fair curse who had destroyed all the village's happiness, decency and way of life.

The ladies emerged one by one into the room of the promise, a bit perplexed by the sight and waiting for an explanation. The cave was empty and looked untouched by human hand, just the way it was the first time Lucille saw it.

"What happened to all the school stuff?" the girl whispered in Lucille's ear, relaxing the iron grip on Lucille's hand.

"Shh!" Lucille said, nudging her to pay attention to the scene.

Mrs. Eberhart finally spoke.

"Would you care to enlighten us, Rosemary?" she said, poised. "Why are we here?"

"But it was all there, I swear! Giselle, tell them what you told me!" she ordered. Giselle looked as confused as always and took a step back, evidently uncomfortable with Rosemary's outburst.

"Well, dear. I only wanted to share with you a bit of information I happened to be privy to," she said, tentatively.

"Information heard from whom?" Rosemary loomed, livid with anger.

"You know, I'm not exactly sure," Giselle took another step back, and a good number of the ladies of the Circle gathered around her to offer protection. How dared Rosemary treat Giselle like that, a woman who, by anyone's standards, was nothing short of a martyr to have put up with the dragon lady's whims and impossible demands for decades. Lucille counted them, pleased, and then her attention reverted to the scene in progress.

"I just overheard the girls talking in shop," Giselle babbled.

"Which girls?!" Rosemary ranted. "You will tell me right now, if you know what's good for you! Do you think I forgot that time when I saw you seek your own reflection?"

"So that's the answer to the Rosemary-Giselle puzzle," Lucille thought. She'd always wondered why even a kind and forgiving soul like Giselle's would put up with that kind of abuse. "I should have guessed it involved blackmail, it's Rosemary's specialty. Poor Giselle!"

"I think we've heard quite enough!" Mrs. Eberhart intervened, in disbelief at the violence of the outburst, the disrespect towards the Council and being dragged to the middle of the desert to stare at blank walls.

"I'm sure the fair curse was here! I'm sure of it! They must have cleaned it all out! I'm telling you the truth!"

"Who's they, dear?" Mrs. Eberhart frowned, displeased.

"Mary's evil kin, of course!" Rosemary insisted. "They appear to her in mirrors, she's going to damn us all! You have to believe me! Or else I'll..." she started searching through Mrs. Eberhart's past for a bargaining chip that would serve her purpose and in her zeal to drive the point across she grabbed onto the Council leader's sleeve. The latter recoiled, outraged.

"How dare you!"

"I apologize, Council leader, I meant no disrespect. I assure you this will never happen again," Rosemary tried to mollify her.

"I assure you it won't!" Mrs. Eberhart pinned her to the wall with an icy stare, then turned towards the rest of the Circle. "This matter is closed, effective immediately. We will no longer hear any inquiries related to the myth of the Fire Maiden or the Book of Prophecy. You've wasted too much of our time, Rosemary, and our time is too precious to be wasted, considering the list of Village tasks that remain undone as a result of your ridiculous wild goose chase! And I don't think it needs mentioning that you will never, under any circumstances, lay your hands on me again."

"But," Rosemary tried to protest, sure she was in the right, "I swear it was all here, all of it!"

"Have you actually seen it?" Giselle asked innocently, turning Rosemary's agitation up a notch.

"You deceitful..." Rosemary lunged at her. "I should have turned you in for that mirror incident! A treacherous heathen like you doesn't deserve the gift of my friendship!"

"So," one of the ladies in Council replied, "you witnessed her transgression and didn't speak of it? Doesn't that make you culpable as well?"

"I have no idea what she's talking about," Giselle spoke softly. "I've known dear Rosemary for a long time, and all the while watched her involvement in the life of the Village, in both good times and bad," she paused, then continued in an even softer tone. "I just never thought she would ever say such horrible things about me."

"But," Rosemary interrupted again, and the limits of Mrs. Eberhart's patience were finally reached.

"Mrs. Gentry," the latter interrupted, "please take her into custody, we'll discuss disciplinary action in Council tomorrow."

"Take me into custody!?" Rosemary's anger reached climax. "For what!!?"

"Contempt," Mrs. Eberhart replied, as the ladies exited the cave to make their long and unpleasant way home under the unforgiving desert sun.

Lucille adjusted her stride, so that Giselle could catch up with her.

"So, I see the team had plenty of time to clear up the place," Lucille said. Giselle nodded smiling.

"Where is Mary?"

"In the next room, seventh boulder to the left. Remember the cave is an endless maze of rooms, all more or less the same."

"Don't you worry that somebody is going to figure out the sequence pattern eventually?" Lucille asked.

"Not in our lifetimes," Giselle smiled. "Besides, it doesn't matter all that much now."

"You should tell the girls to pay more attention to detail next time. The generator was gone, but I could see floor junction boxes peeking through the sand," Lucille said.

"Oh, no, dear! Those were little black pebbles with random holes drilled into them," Giselle smiled. "We thought we'd set up some props to make things more interesting in case somebody was looking for ports. For effect, you know? Sadly our dear Rosemary can't tell an outlet from a hole in the ground. It's ok, though. Things turned out well after all."

"What happened to all the wall carvings?" Lucille remembered.

"A thin slathering of mud, it'll wash right off," Giselle replied.

"I'm glad the two of you have such energy as to walk and converse at the same time," Mrs. Eberhart passed them by, signaling an end to their discussion. Lucille waited for her to advance towards the front of the row and then whispered to Giselle.

"I guess by the time we're done with this all of the rooms of the cave will be adorned with identical texts from the Que'd. That's going to be quite the brain teaser for future archaeologists! They'll beat themselves up for years trying to figure out why."

They walked in silence for a while, taking frequent sips from the water flasks to parch their thirst.

"So," Lucille asked, "do we invite Mrs. Eberhart for a tour of the school?"

"Well, it so happens that the girls already brought her along a couple of nights ago. She made the acquaintance of Caleb Coulter, who she thought was a very nice young man."

"Good thing she didn't happen to meet his work partner," Lucille thought.

"She had tea with Mary, I can't tell you how relieved she was to know that no harm had come to the girl," Giselle continued.

"How come you didn't tell me any of this?" Lucille asked, unfazed by Giselle's conversational tone.

"Oh, you know me, dear, I forget sometimes," the latter answered innocently.

"Giselle!" Rosemary blurted, in disbelief that her friend was trying to pull the wool over her eyes.

"It had to look real," Giselle conceded. "Don't worry, everything will turn out just fine."

Chapter Thirty One

### Denouement

The meeting room of the Council Hall was filled with the electricity of anticipation but eerily quiet, as if the solemnity of the event muffled the usual banter and pleasantries. A request for a full plenum from Mrs. Eberhart was a rare occurrence, and even if quite a few of the ladies of the Circle knew what the meeting was about, they were still somewhat nervous about the details.

Mrs. Eberhart stood up and walked to the podium, waiting the customary minute or two for the room to settle down, a pause completely unnecessary now, given the frozen silence.

"I have had the honor to lead the Village Council for many years, and as such, was entrusted with the responsibility to uphold its laws, a duty I fulfilled with the utmost respect and of which I always strived to be worthy. It is unfortunate that our devotion to the law led us to results that sometime defy its very spirit. No justice is served when children are held responsible for things they have no control over, or can even understand, or when the brightness of our human spirit is overshadowed by fear.

A long time ago our ancestors have made a decision, one for which seven generations already paid too heavy a price. It is difficult not to mourn the loved ones who passed before their time of easily treatable illnesses, or all the curious minds and enterprising spirits who were punished in their search for knowledge or denied a chance to achieve their dreams because of the circumstances of their birth. I have no doubt our ancestors acted in what they considered to be the best interest of our community, and I don't see any benefit in passing judgment on their mistakes. I don't want to perpetuate them either, and deny our children the opportunities we never had.

We have been presented with an extraordinary gift, a chance to make up in one generation all the discoveries and accomplishments our society missed over the last two centuries. Some of you may already know what I'm talking about, if there is one thing that works flawlessly in our community is the spreading of news."

"The black mirrors," one of the ladies in the front couldn't help whispering.

"I think the time has come to stop calling them that, but there will be a lot of catching up and plenty of time to do so." She nodded and the girls in charge of setting up the screen worked quickly and expertly behind her, to the amazement of the audience. "I would like to present to you the team of scientists who have taught our children for almost a year now, and to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude. " One by one the members of the science team waved from the other side of the screen, eliciting gasps.

"How are they doing this?" a lady in the back finally had the courage to ask.

"There are many things that need to be learned before you will be able to understand the answer to that question, but I can assure you of one thing: they can be learned by all of us. I have served with you for many years, and was privileged to experience your quick wit and your sound judgment. The knowledge may, for now, be beyond our grasp, but it is certainly not beyond our capacity."

"I thought it would look more like a mirror," another lady commented, staring at the screen and the people in it with avid curiosity. Her companion started to inquire how she knew what a mirror looked like, but reconsidered, too absorbed in the novelty of the extraordinary object to waste time with the question.

"Are they real?" another lady asked.

"Of course we are real," Caleb Coulter replied from behind the screen, unable to repress a smile.

"How can you tell?" the lady turned the question to Mrs. Eberhart, and her need for a plausible explanation brought a glimmer of admiration in the eyes of the one in the mirror.

"You have a valid point, and one we hope to be able to demonstrate soon," he replied.

"Are you responsible for the demon poppies?" another one of the ladies interjected unceremoniously. The Council had never been known to mince words. Caleb was a little taken aback by the bluntness, but answered anyway.

"No, they were a school project. The children did wonderful research on hybridization and genome mapping." He paused to let the information that the miraculous occurrence was in fact the work of children sink in, then asked. "Why would you call them demon poppies?"

"What am I to call poppies that are blue? There are no such things!" the lady said, then corrected herself. "That I knew about. So, you are going to explain all of this eventually?" she retorted, visibly displeased.

"Certainly, actually we could provide you with some reading material right now," he said, and the printer in the corner, which up until that point had remained unnoticed, started spitting out pages at high speed, startling the ladies sitting next to it to the verge of panic. It needs mentioned that the ladies for whom all of this was news, though few, were so shocked by the revelation of one forbidden contraption after another that they stopped reacting altogether and quietly waited for the ordeal to be over.

"So," Mrs. Eberhart asked, a bit tense, "now that you have seen all of this, what is your judgment?"

The members of the Circle took a few moments to ponder and talk among themselves. The lady with the demon poppy comment volunteered her opinion.

"Surely we don't want to be intimidated by knowledge that doesn't scare the children! What would that make us?" she frowned, even more annoyed than before. "Can somebody stop that dreadful thing?" she twitched nervously as the printer started spewing the second batch of the printout. "What is it?" she gave it a sharp look, determined not to allow the cursed object to get the better of her. "Some sort of printing press?"

She got closer and closer to the humming box and almost fell backwards when the dreaded contraption started spitting out paper again.

"If the Council will forgive me, I think I had quite enough evolving for one day. May I be excused?"

***

When Mary walked into the Council Hall after so many months, countless pairs of curious eyes followed her, which didn't help assuage her discomfort at all, but the fact that her classmates welcomed her effusively lightened up the burden a bit. She found a chair and sat down at the end of the first row, trying as hard as she could to fade into the background, a task not easily achieved. The dressing standards had been relaxed significantly, but her hair, now so long that it reached down to her waist, still remained the distinctive blond dot in a sea of black tresses.

Lucille walked to the podium smiling and waited for the room to grow quiet.

"Today I stand before you, deeply humbled by your trust, to mark the beginning of the school year, a privilege I share through time with all the principals that came before me. There is no greater, more personal gift, as I celebrate the courage of so many generations of Scholars who kept knowledge alive in the face of fear and prejudice, than to see their ideals brought into the light. Today the Scholars' Line is restored to its purpose, which is to inspire the accomplishment of great things, some of which we can't even dream of yet. It will be an extraordinary journey for all of us, this leap into the future, and a steep learning curve at times. It will require all of our efforts, especially from those of us who are honored to serve in Council, and letting go of many preconceived notions, to make this transition as smooth as possible.

The girls already know the teachers who are joining us remotely today, but for the sake of the rest of our group we would like to ask the members of the science team to introduce themselves and their areas of expertise before going through the structure of instruction."

"Where is Rosemary?" Mrs. Gentry whispered to Giselle, and her question boomed like thunder through the relatively quiet room. "Sorry, dear!" she corrected herself. "That's the best I can do on my indoor voice."

"She's at the rock mound, collecting and logging the evidence," Giselle replied, one eye on the tablet in her lap, trying not to miss the digital conversation she was engaged in.

"Is that hard?" Mrs. Gentry tried not to show too much interest, but completely taken by the speed with which Giselle was manipulating the strange object.

"Not too hard," Giselle replied without stopping the elaborate finger dance on the surface of the glass. Mrs. Gentry remembered her initial question.

"Why on earth would she go to the rock mound? Didn't anybody tell her that we made up the artifacts?" she asked, perplexed.

"It would be hard for her not to know, given recent events," Giselle finished what she was doing and turned all her attention to Mrs. Gentry. "I...aahm...was appointed technical liaison," she apologized, her voice almost a whisper.

"What's that?" Mrs. Gentry replied in a decibel range that was normal for her, an order of magnitude louder.

"I'm...supposed to bring the Council up to speed on the use of electronic devices," Giselle blushed, looking down.

"You mean I'm going to have to learn how to compel a black mirror?" Mrs. Gentry burst with laughter at the fine ironies of Council rule.

"It's not..." Giselle started to protest.

"I know, dear. I'm joking," Mrs. Gentry finally settled down.

The two noticed that the smooth flow of the presentation had ceased and the shuffle of chairs in the room indicated the participants were taking a break. Mary glided by them almost unnoticed, with the soft and silent movements of a cat.

"That girl is something else, showing up right next to you without any warning, it's like being haunted by a ghost sometimes, so help me!" Mrs. Gentry mumbled displeased that the girl's presence had taken her by surprise again.

"Why, Mrs. Gentry!" Giselle giggled at her predicament. "You of all people! You know there are no such things as ghosts!"

"You'll have your wisdom and I'll have mine!" Mrs. Gentry replied, morose.

Mary exchanged a few words with the one in the mirror before the room went silent again, for the second part of the presentation.

"It's going to be a heck of a challenge to get used to all of this," Mrs. Gentry frowned, yet unconvinced to take that leap of faith into a new way of life.

"A steep learning curve, for sure," Giselle acquiesced.

As the presentation resumed, Caleb mentioned casually that the team had promised Mary she could come visit, and if she made the trip right now she would only miss a couple of days at the beginning of the school year. Since Lucille had no objection to the trip in principle, Mary got up, advanced to the center of the room, opened a door into thin air and disappeared, only to show up a moment later on the other side of the screen, all grins and waving at the audience.

The Council Hall froze in disbelief. Mrs. Gentry and Giselle looked at each other for a moment and then Giselle composed herself and commented.

"As I said, steep learning curve."

***

About the author

Visit Francis Rosenfeld's Blog at

www.francisrosenfeld.com

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Other books by Francis Rosenfeld

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### Terra Two

### Generations

### Letters to Lelia

### The Plant – A Steampunk Story

### Door Number Eight

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