Agatha Harkness's Arc

Chapter 16 of 21

The black soot on the mirror shard did not dry. Agatha kept the frost-glass in its jar for three days. Each morning she checked the shard. The stain spread. Her wards had gone quiet at last, but this thing gnawed at the edge of her peace. She had freed Peter. She had broken Ursula's claim. Yet the sea witch had taken payment from the fae king, and Agatha did not know what that price would grow into. She decided to ask the one who owed the debt. She found Peter far from Neverland, sitting on the porch rail of a small inn deep in the forest. Fairy lights drifted around its purple roof. He held a golden apple in one hand, though no such tree grew nearby. He did not look up when she climbed the steps. "You came to my glass for a year," Agatha said. "Now you're loose, and something followed you out." Peter turned the apple over. "I paid her. You wanted that." "I want to know what you paid with." He bit the apple. Chewed. Set it down. "A voice. Not mine." Agatha waited. He did not go on. A fae king said only what she dragged out of him. "Whose voice?" "One I stole a long time ago." His green eyes lifted to hers. "From someone I loved, before I forgot how. Ursula kept it in a jar for years. I gave her leave to keep it forever. That freed your mirror." Agatha understood then. The black stain was old grief, paid across water. Ursula had not touched Agatha at all. The corruption clinging to the shard was Peter's, not hers. "Then it isn't mine," she said. "No." He picked the apple back up. "You're clean. She has no claim. The soot is my leavings, not your debt. Bury the shard. It won't wake." Agatha studied him. She had spent a year trading one debt for two, tricking traps, shattering glass. Now the fae king sat eating stolen fruit, telling her she was free. She could not read a lie in his flat face. But Briar Rose had confirmed the summons was cut, and this matched. "You could have said this before I broke the mirror," she said. "You didn't ask." She almost laughed. She took the jar from her cloak, walked down the inn steps, and pressed the shard into the soft ground beneath a blossom-strewn path. The soot did not spread into the soil. It sat still, spent. When she stood, Peter was gone. Only the apple remained on the rail, one bite taken. Agatha walked home through the quiet forest. Her wards were silent. No summons hummed. No sea witch watched. For the first time in a year, nothing knocked at her door. But she remembered the apple, whole and golden where no tree stood, and knew Peter had left it for a reason she had not yet been given.