It was late afternoon when it finally occurred to Hailey what she had been missing all of this time. “I can’t believe it didn’t even occur to me,” she said. “Barinon would have been ashamed. The piece that has been missing all this time and I know exactly where it is.” The cat blinked up at her, annoyed that Hailey had woken her up. She stretched out a paw, yawned and fell back asleep on the priceless tome that Hailey had been pouring through. Hailey picked up the book, sliding the cat off of its pages and closed it.

“Sorry, Widget. We can’t have you clawing up any pages.”

The cat looked angry. She jumped down and walked to the door, waiting for Hailey to open it.

“I’m sorry, Widget.” But Widget had already hurried away.

She sighed and gathered up her books. She had things to attend to, and now that she thought she figured out what she had been doing wrong this whole time, she needed to hurry. The king had been well enough the last time she saw him, but his health seemed to fluctuate.

Remembering him, she took the mage lantern with her. She did not like to have it out of her sight. She hurried up the steps to the princess’s room, though she probably looked odd carrying around a latern in the middle of the day.

“Good morning, miss,” one of the guards greeted her. He was one of the biggest guards she had ever seen, probably a head taller than Aaron was.

“Good morning,” she said, not wanting to pause. The princess lay still and sleeping as ever. The spell that covered the princess was unusual. Almost every spell that Hailey had ever seen was either a sphere or a rune, but this one seemed to be embedded in the princess’s skin. She put the mage lantern down on the princess’s dressing table. The mirror reflected back the light. “The curse was was originally tied to a focus, and the focus, and the spell that kept her safe was tied to that one, which meant that this one is affected by the same thing!” She was so excited that she hadn’t realized that she was talking to herself.

“My lady, is everything ok?” The guard who had spoken before poked his head in.

“Yes, everything is great.”

He raised an eyebrow and continued standing next to the other guard. “Too much time by herself,” one of them said to the other.

“Shh!”

“Sorry my lady,” she heard and then in a quieter voice, “do you think she heard what I said?”

She ignored them. She had gone over this before, but she needed to do it again, from the beginning. “The princess pricked her finger when she turned sixteen. And what did she prick it on? All of the spinning wheels in the entire kingdom were destroyed. How could a spinning wheel even be there for her to prick her finger on?”

The guard poked his head back in. “Did you want me to answer that, miss?”

She waved a hand at him. “You don’t know the answer.” She paced in front of the princess’s bed. “The spell that Isabella cast on Aurora was a death spell. The curse took hold because the spindle was the foci for the spell. Isabella must have brought it to the castle and that’s why it was here in the first place!”

“Interesting idea.” said the guard.

She grinned at him. “I almost certain that that was how it happened.”

“Good?” He didn’t seem to understand why that was important.

She looked down at the princess. “I know what we have to do to get you out of here.” If she set up a powerful rune and Natalia helped her, they might be able to finally set the princess free, but to do that, she would need the foci of the original spell, and she remembered where she had stuffed it when she was the only one roaming the halls of the castle.

She hurried out of the room, excited that she might have finally figured out what she needed to do.

The basement of the castle was a dirty place. The staircase was shared with the dungeon. Smells of sweat and human waste drifted up to her as she descended. At the bottom a guard nodded to her but she turned the other way, away from that awful smell, and into the dark corridor that would lead her to the storage room where the spinning wheel should be. Down a long passageway with dust and dirt coating the floor, she traveled with the mage lantern that helped her keep an eye on the king’s health held high. She glanced back once and saw her footprints as the only ones clear ones in the dust.

She had thought that no one would ever want to see it again, but at the time, she had thought that maybe spinning a spinning wheel might be something that she would teach herself how to do someday. She had had years of being alone ahead of her, but Barinon had changed all of that. In a way, he had set her free and given her more responsibilities than she ever thought she would have.

She sneezed, opening the door to one of the rooms. Other items had been placed in here. She concentrated. “Fulguro,” she said, creating another mage light, which hovered over the palm of her hand, casting long shadows in the room. She glanced around, rubbing at her nose which wanted to sneeze again. Finally, she saw it in a back corner behind some other furniture.

This was going to take a while. Hailey moved things around until she was standing on top of a table, reaching for the spindle. She brushed it with one hand. Just then the table shifted, and she almost fell, but she pushed her weight back on the table, which groaned under her weight. She held her breath for a moment and then, doing what she should have done in the first place, she said, “extollo,” lifting the spinning wheel off of the top of the pile.

She picked up the mage lantern and the magelight that she had created and concentrated on floating the spinning wheel in front of her. She doubted she could carry it up the stairs without magic. At the stairs, she handed the guard the magelight. “I needed an extra. This one will take about a week before it fades.”

“Thank you miss,” but he hesitated to touch it. “Never seen one of those before.”

“It won’t burn you. If you don’t want it, I’m sure…”

“Oh no, miss. I could use it. It’s very dark down here, and I still got one of those lantern things. He hurried to the corner and came up with a dusty old one that was covered in cobwebs. “Here it is.” He grinned triumphantly. He held it out, waiting for her to place the light inside. She did so, and smiled as he heard him thanking her again.

She was wasting magic and she needed it today. At the top of the stairs, she put down the spinning wheel. She was relieved to see a guard at the top of the stairs as well. “Would you mind taking this to the princess’s room?” She asked him.

He complied, hefting the thing.

“Thank you.”

She didn’t follow. She had some other things to gather from the kitchen. As she rounded a corner, she almost ran straight into Esmerelda.

Isabella’s older brother was so much more frail than she remembered him being. Of course, it had been almost two decades since she saw him. Even as a child, he had been stronger than she was. Gently, she laid him in his bed. The clear magic sphere that held him aloft dissipated. He hadn’t said anything about flying and she worried about that. She was certain that if he were feeling well enough, he would have joked about it.

Over and over in her mind, she saw him strung up and in chains in the dungeon of the black castle. How long had he hung there before she saw him? That alone could have killed him. She wondered how long he had suffered with his illness. She found a cloth near the washbasin and used it to clean the blood away from his face. The water turned pink, but he seemed to sleep through her ministrations.

She bent and did something she never thought she would do again. She kissed her brother’s forehead. “I am so sorry,” she told him. “You wouldn’t have suffered like that if I had known who you were.” She sat on the edge of his bed, taking his limp hand in her own. Tears coursed down her cheeks. She had done so much to hurt him, to destroy the kingdom he tried to maintain.

His face was so pale. Just having him in the old and dusty black castle could have been enough to kill him, not to mention traipsing through the forest. He had said that he came, begging for peace. She scrubbed the tears away, thinking over what had been happening. She had sent troops out, had sent troops to attack Taivalon, but they were waiting for her to tell them to battle, which meant that they weren’t troops at all. They were her fairies, the ones who had played with her when she was a little girl. They had been kind enough to her, but she had seen the destruction that they caused, the harm that they could do to a person who didn’t have magic.

She had been attacking the borders and that’s why he had come. Her fairies were pelting themselves against the Shimmer and she was responsible for their actions. They would not have acted that way, damaging themselves against the shimmer without her orders and…she gasped. She had sent an army to attack his kingdom. They would be here by midnight.

She had not only killed her brother, she had relentlessly attacked his kingdom as well. She would do what she could to stop it, though. She rose, preparing a healing spell.

“I know what you’re doing, BB,” he told her, coughing again. “Healing me won’t do any good. I just want you to know that I’m sorry for everything I have done to hurt you.”

She blinked away the tears. There was work to do and she didn’t have time for crying like a child. “Don’t apologize to me. I’m the one who has done everything I could to destroy your kingdom, to destroy you.”

“I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that you would do that. You love Taivalon. This is your real home and you know that as well as I do. I might need for you to help defend it. There have been problems on the borders.”

He coughed again, but he seemed to be gaining some of his strength back. “Stay with me, brother. Your kingdom needs you.”

He smiled a sad smile. “My kingdom will be safe because of what I did, I hope. You can do more for them now than I can. And now I think I can finally stop worrying over it. I think you could make a good ruler. Endolynn would help you.”

She shook her head. “The people won’t have me. They only know the atrocities I’ve caused. No, Theodric. You’re just going to have to survive until we can free your daughter.”

He smiled weakly. “Everyone keeps saying that. They need a little more time. I just want you to know that I love you. BB, I missed you and I could use your help.”

She shook her head. After all this, everything that she had done to him, and everything he had done to her, she had finally found her family again.