July 2044 - The Neutral Zone
Madam Millie’s Magic Shoppewas, by any stretch of the imagination, the single worst purveyor of consumer goods the world had ever seen. At least, it was the worst that Charlotte had ever seen — and she’d seen quite a number of terrible things since her kidnapping.
It wasn’t like the hapless shoppers who wandered through Millie’s jingling doors could hear Charlotte and take her warnings to heart, no matter how she howled or banged on the glass of her prison. She could have gotten stark naked and bellowed to the high heavens and no patron would have been the wiser.
If any of the curious non-magical — arrant, more precisely — customers could hear her, Charlotte could have told them that, no, those over-priced crystals wouldn’t do one’s energy any good. Or that, if one didn’t have a lick of Foresight, the stacks of tarot cards were about as useful in predicting the future as reading the smears left by roadkill on a street.
She couldn’t tell the tourists that the sigils on the cheap silver amulets were nonsense, nor could she warn the teens that they were wasting their allowances loaded on their implanted IDs on bootleg fey-made goods that would give them rashes before it did anything close to what Millie claimed. She couldn’t tell them that the shop was a front for something far, far more nefarious than poor quality goods and services.
If you wanted real magic, real divination, real curses, real sigilwork, the shopkeeper wouldn’t help you find it. She was one of those arrant humans who enjoyed playing at being a witch, but loved turning a quick buck more. Nothing in Millie’s would do the trick — nothing except the people trapped in glass prisons on a shelf behind the counter.
Person, not people, Charlotte reminded herself. All the others have been sold, remember?
Most of Millie’s customers were the hapless, magically uneducated sort, but not all of them. Some were the kind that came looking for the real, super-duper illegal stuff. Millie didn’t make a mint off of her bundles of dried weeds and glass crystals, after all. That was a front for her real business: m-siphons.
Charlotte planted herself on the wee granite pebble that served as her only furniture and watched as another arrant woman forked over fifty bucks for a bundle of something that looked vaguely mystical, but Charlotte knew came from a dime store up the street.
She tapped her foot on the mossy ground of her cage, grimly fascinated by how easy it was for Millie to swindle people. Honestly, the more unscrupulous fey could take a page out of her book.
She didn’t begrudge anyone taking comfort in whatever rituals they needed, but Charlotte had long lost patience with the mix of ignorant shoppers looking to spend their cash on nonsense and the unscrupulous folk who thought buying trapped fey for spellwork was anything less than barbaric.
Millie was saying something to the woman, using that same breathy voice she always affected whenever a gullible shopper walked through her door, but Charlotte could never quite make the words out. The glass that held her captive was just too thick, or perhaps it was part of the sigilwork that held her in there. Either way, she could never make a single word out.
It wasn’t like it took ears to figure out what Millie did, though. Charlotte’s eyes still worked perfectly.
Bored by the familiar charade, Charlotte kicked her feet in the air and examined her toes. She’d worn shoes once — nice heels with pointed toes and dainty little ankle straps — but after three hundred and seventy-six days in a terrarium-turned-prison, it just didn’t seem necessary. Most of what she once stubbornly clung onto from her old life remained in a little bundle beneath the fern that filled up most of the globe. Still, she kept on the slinky silver jumpsuit she wore the night that rat bastard feyrunner drugged her in an alley.
Charlotte propped her hands behind her back and hoisted herself up to glare at the warped image of the beast that stole her life.
No, Millie she wasn’t the feyrunner who initially snatched Charlotte off the street, but she was the one who paid him and kept her there, a product on a shelf, to be used as a magical battery for some two-bit sigilworker lacking the right oomf.
Charlotte scowled, watching as Millie meandered about the store, puttering around with her sausage fingers and her mumu and her non-prescription glasses.
Tempest break her, she thought for the thousandth time. If I weren’t so terrified of being left in this jar to rot, I’d be begging Grim to drag her to the underworld already.
When the arrant shopkeeper passed out of her limited field of view, Charlotte slipped off of her pebble and retreated into the relative privacy of the lush fern that took up most of the space in the terrarium. She collapsed onto her bed, a thing composed mostly of moss and flower petals that, thanks to the stasis spells that kept Charlotte unchanged, remained unwilted. She stared up through the leafy canopy.
The sunlight filtering in through the shop’s windows made the air within the terrarium humid, but it was slightly cooler in her little nest. The familiar scents of moist earth, forget-me-nots, and water were a comforting balm to her senses.
As far as jails went, the terrarium wasn’t the worst. Charlotte could have been trapped in a teapot, or a locket, or a repurposed coffee can, or a glovebox. Overall, the terrarium was kind of nice, if you could get past the crippling isolation and boredom.
Charlotte turned on her side and pillowed her arm beneath her head, trying to tune out the dull sounds of the ridiculous chanting Millie called music that wormed its way through the glass. Mostly Charlotte tried not to let the boredom consume her by spending every hour of the day critiquing her captor and her livelihood, but sometimes sleeping was the only way to get through it.
As usual, she dreamed of her parents.
They were the nicest pair of arrants one could ever find, and she used to hate them for it. Being a Changeling wasn’t easy. They raised her like an arrant, knowing full-well that puberty would smack her in the face with acne and arcane magical abilities.
Being a Changeling meant watching her friends go through trauma like boy drama and periods and weird, chunky foundation while Charlotte lost the ability to lie, ate everything in sight, graduated from an A cup to a whopping B cup, grew a ridiculous pair of glassy, basically useless wings, and developed the insatiable need to fiddle with things.
The worst, by far, was the glowing. Every time she felt anything beyond low-level apathy, she’d light up like some damn glowbug, telling all the world that she wasn’t as normal as she was supposed to be.
Her parents never asked her to be normal, but Charlotte grew up surrounded by normal arrant kids in a normal human neighborhood of the Elvish Protectorate. Her parents wanted to give her a good life there.
They just didn’t think about the particulars when they made a deal with the local fey covey. It must have seemed easy enough: A baby to raise, with only a contract that stipulated Charlotte would be turned over to her covey in the event that she manifested any “significant ability” by the age of sixteen to worry about. Her parents had their wish fulfilled and her biological family got rid of an unwanted bastard with minimum fuss. Win-win.
Except she never did show signs of a “significant ability”, and all her human parents got was a moody teen who took to yelling when her ability to tell a convincing fib went out the window.
In the three hundred and seventy-six days she spent trapped in the terrarium, Charlotte had ample time to reflect on her kind, bumbling parents. She couldn’t exactly fault them for wanting a kid — not when the result was a pretty good life, all things considered.