Jim Armstrong and the Goblet's Curse

Chapter 13: Trees Can Give Us Clues

   "See? The pictures look exactly the same!" I leaned back on the bottom bunk and ran a hand through my hair, frazzled. "The pictures... and the evidence..."

Noah had gotten out of the shower and as soon as he did, I'd shoved the book at him, yelling about what I'd found. Soon after, Cecily had joined us and all three of us were sitting on the floor of our dorm, looking through the book, not believing what we were seeing. Here, all in this one book, was evidence of Amour's curse. And nobody but us knew about it.

"Okay, they do look the same, but how do you know that it's Amour's curse that's causing it?" Cecily tried to reason. "I mean, Amour cursed a goblet and the victims don't show any evidence that the goblet did it."

My mind raced, thinking back to all the incidences, as thoughts begin to formulate in my mind, I grabbed the book away from Noah and Cecily, looking carefully at the pictures and captions. Sure enough, I found what I was looking for.

"Actually, there is evidence of that!" I said, shoving the book back to Noah and Cecily. "Think, when Agnes got cursed, she was holding a goblet, before she got burned and dropped it. And Carl-

"He got cursed when he was going to get a drink of water, and he had a goblet," Noah continued.

"And look here, at the pictures," I said, pointing to the corner of the first picture I had seen. In the corner of the picture, one of the golden goblets lay in a pool of water, clearly having just been dropped from the girl's hand when the curse took effect. I read allowed the caption that was under the picture:

"The picture above shows a girl that has serious, third-degree burns that transpired after the girl picked up the cup of water, unexpectedly burst into screams and then passed out, with a deathly pale sheen to the skin."

"Sound familiar?" I asked Cecily, who was biting her lip, no doubt trying to find other ways that this couldn't be true.

"Well, what about when Carl got cursed, he held the cup all the way from the Dinery to the water fountain and filled it up before he was affected," Cecily said.

Nobody said a word. I was stumped. She was right. Carl had held the cup for a really long time before the curse took effect on him, while Agnes had been affected almost immediately. Then Noah gasped. He grabbed the book and flipped through the pictures, looking for something. After coming to a conclusion, she turned the book towards Cecily and me.

"Look, every one of these pictures has water, or some other liquid in the picture," Noah said. "Maybe, the curse only works when some sort of liquid is in the cup."

"That's how Carl was able to hold the cup before the curse affected him. It didn't have any water in it." I continued.

"And juice was already in the goblets when Agnes picked it up, so the curse affected her immediately." Noah finished, triumphantly.

Again, Cecily didn't say anything. She only bit her lip, trying to find other things to contradict. Finally, she must've come to the conclusion that what was happening was reality, because she said,

"We have to tell someone," she said, looking up at us.

"Benoit," I said. "We have to tell Benoit." Noah shook his head.

"We need an appointment to talk to him, which could take days, since we're students and not teachers. And fairly new students at that too. By the time we get an appointment, more people could have been cursed and we can't risk that."

"So... who?"

"How about Electra?" Cecily suggested. "She's the Administrator of Activities, so she'd have an easy time getting an appointment with Benoit."