I descended down the cellar, blinked away the mould, frowned my eyebrows at the smoke-like smell. One of my paintings had caught on fire and was smouldering on the ground. They did that sometimes. I bent down to brush the ashes together, let the coloured glass panes filter my sight in blue and green. I had small windows all around the top of my cellar, so it wasn't entirely underground. I liked to see at least some of the many-limbed ferns waving outside. So like I said, I collected all of the embers in a neat little pile, cleaned the soot from underneath my nails. But that's when I realised. My paintings don't spontaneously burst on fire.
Arrow, arrow, arrow. My arms blistered with them. I jumped up, almost screamed all of Tartarus together.
"You need to stop finding these masterworks," Francesca said.
"And you shouldn't be here," I said. Shivers ran over my bones at the thought that she had been in my house this entire morning.
Francesca put her arrow away. She only had one, but they multiplied according to the intensity with which she wanted to address you. They were an illusion of course, one of the most dangerous category of charms we had been taught.
"You have something you never returned," she simply said.
And she had returned a memory to me. At the Academy, every single time I had bought or acquired a painting she thought was exquisitely beautiful, she had burned it. She did it with about every painting she saw hanging around our friends' dormitories. You see, whenever you destroy something with a charm, you consume part of it. It's a major power trip, for a second your mind stretches to the proportions of the brilliance of the object itself. I had let her do that, because what could I have done? She was Francesca, my friend at the Witches Academy. And I knew my restoring charms.
"How did you come into my house?" I asked, slightly exasperated.
"You have windows," she said. Her eyes had killed me with their depth many times before. It wasn't any different four years after we had graduated. She twirled around the leaves of one of my potted plants. It was fake, I hadn't figured out how to keep plants alive yet.
"Come on, I kept waiting and waiting, Lily. I thought, for sure, she would have already let me know by now. Why did you have to hold onto it for so long?" she asked.
I didn't know why I hadn't batted at eye at the painting laying smoking on the ground at first. Maybe I wasn't perfectly awake yet. Back at school, her habit had annoyed me, not because it was that hard to reconjure my artworks. But because it was a styxer, that charm she used. Not particularly wicked, but not clean-cut either. Our Academy wasn't very strict with that. As long as you didn't irrevocably damage property, you were excused of styxing every now and then.
"Well..." I trailed off.
Francesca's black coat with metal DDD badges I had never seen before. Francesca's hand full of golden rings that were all alien to me. Thank something that she was still wearing the necklace. The one with the topaz gemstone I had gifted her as her birthday gift in the summer before we graduated. Only now I noticed the forced open window all the way in the back. The DDD was the logical path after an education at the Academy. She'd easily learned a lot of new tricks in the previous years, that was for sure.
"Well what?"
"Because I didn't know if you would come to get it back."
Her lips broke into a slight smile.
"You give me too much credit."
*****
I had kept our Lie. A concentrated, bubbling, glowering pastiche of all the possible lies we could have thought of. It had started as a fun little project to kill time when we were fourteen, brewing a potion solely with Lies. But it didn't stop that one evening when we were watching frogs jump out of the Academy grounds pond, summer looming as heavy as a full-appled tree on the horizon. When Francesca told me the most extravagant lie she could have told me, and I had believed her. I didn't know why that was, but afterwards I felt like a cloud had started raining on me and had kept her alone dry. I was never good at catching lies.
