Agatha Harkness's Arc

Chapter 17 of 21

The golden apple sat on Agatha's kitchen table for a week. She would not eat it. She would not throw it away. Peter had left it for a reason, and a fae king's gifts were never free. On the eighth night, the apple rolled off the table on its own. It stopped against the door. When Agatha opened it, a spectral carriage waited in the dark, doors already spread. She understood. Peter wanted her at the sea. She rode the carriage down to the shore and stepped onto a rabbit hole that folded space around itself. It dropped her behind the coral shelves of the sea witch's lair. Ursula stood among her jars, sorting voices by size. She did not turn. "You stole your name from me," Ursula said. "Then you sent my husband to pay your debt." "You took his voice instead of my double payment," Agatha said. "You chose. I owe you nothing." "No." Ursula lifted a jar and set it down. "You don't." The word came out flat, without warmth. But she did not move to strike. Peter had spent something that emptied her claim. Agatha stepped closer. This was why the carriage came. Not to fight. To ask. "I want one thing," she said. "Not a bargain. A favor. You know where my manor sits now. Peter knows. I want you both to forget it. Tell no one. Send no one. Let me live in peace." Ursula's black eyes fixed on her. "You want the sea to keep a secret." "I want the two who found me to leave me alone." A long silence. Water dripped between the drowned statues. Ursula reached to a high shelf and took down a small clay jar. She held it out. "Peter's already agreed," she said. "He sent you here. This is his answer." Agatha took the jar. Inside sat a single curl of red hair. "His word, bound. He won't speak your manor's name. Neither will I. In trade, you keep this. Bury it deep. Never open it." "What's in it?" "His promise. And a piece of him I don't want anymore." Ursula turned back to her shelves. "Go. Before the water changes its mind." Agatha climbed back through the rabbit hole with the jar pressed to her chest. She surfaced at the shore. The carriage was gone. She walked home through the quiet forest and buried the clay jar beneath her doorstep, deep, where no spade would find it. That night her manor pulled itself back into hiding. The paths outside blurred. The windows dimmed to strangers' eyes. For the first time since the pixie, no one alive knew how to reach her door. But the jar held Peter's word, and Peter kept his word only until it bored him. Agatha lay awake, listening for the sound of a promise going quiet in the dirt.