Threads

Chapter Two

            “What are these floating, shiny strings?” she asked quietly.

            Azura Grey looked pleased. “Ah, you can see the threads.  Good. Ruby was right.”

            “What does that mean?”

            “You can see magic.” Azura tapped her chin thoughtfully. “I can’t imagine how she knew just from watching you as a little girl. That woman never ceased to amaze me.”

            “Those strings are magic?” Alice stared at them again. The strings were thick in the air, running around the shelves and displays in the shop, curling up bookcases and ceiling pillars and clinging to the roof. Some of the colors stood out brighter than others, in some places they were together in patterns. Here and there lights pulsed gently as some kind of energy ran up and down the patterns. When she looked carefully she could see the objects on the shelves had threads on them too.  She approached the shelves cautiously, peering at the objects more closely.  A straw basket of colourful scarves had blue and yellow threads woven into the wool. In a wooden box a collection of reading glasses had threads of pink and brown clinging to the frames.

             Alice spotted a box of reed flutes with a neon pink thread wrapped all the way up to the mouth piece. “These things are enchanted too?”

            Azura looked proud. “You catch on fast. We sell all sorts of enchanted objects.”

            “Oh.”

            “You’re taking this all rather well,” Azura said, thoughtfully. “That is to say, you aren’t screaming or fainting.”

            “I think…I think I’m dreaming.”

            “Ah,” Azura responded, “I think you will find you are not.”

            Alice shook her head like she was trying to get water out of her ears. It sort of felt like she was underwater, or that her head was stuffed with cotton. Nothing made sense. It was as if reality had cracked down the middle like a badly made clay pot, and all her assumptions of what was real and normal were leaking out the bottom.  It had been several minutes now and the store was still the same; no vacuums suddenly appeared, the threads still floated in the air, refusing to vanish in the face of her denial. A thought snuck in past her defences. Maybe this is real.

            “Okay,” Alice spoke, trying to gather her wits, “I inherited a magic shop, and I can see magic, and I’m not going crazy.” Maybe if she said it out loud everything would start to make sense.

            “Also, you may want to start packing,” Azura added calmly.

            “Packing?” Alice was struggling to keep up. “Why?”

            “There’s a suite above the shop for you.”

            She had to pause for a second to grasp this new information. “I inherited a suite too?”

            “It comes with the store. It’s sort of necessary.”

            “Necessary?”

            Azura didn’t seem to mind that she kept repeating everything. “If you work here you need to live here, since you never know where it’s going to end up next.”

            “I don’t understand,” Alice said faintly.

            The older woman smiled. “I know this is hard to take in. Let’s have a seat by the fire, you look like your knees might buckle.”