Agatha Harkness's Arc

Chapter 8 of 21

Peter sat inside the frost mirror and waited. Agatha stood at her altar, candles burning low. Dawn came and went. She offered him gold. He shook his head. She offered him her herbs, her books, a century of quiet service. Each time, the same flat no. He wanted nothing she named. A bored king, ageless, with no clocks. She had built a perfect trap and could not pay the toll to leave it. She stepped back and looked at him truly. Not the king. The boy in torn leaves, cross-legged in the broken glass, picking at a loose thread. He had been sitting like that for hours. Not angry. Not scared. Just still, the way a child goes still when no one will play with him. "You're not waiting to win," Agatha said. "You're waiting because you've got nowhere better to be." Peter's fingers stopped. He looked up. "Four hundred years, I've wanted my house to myself," she went on. "I forgot what it does to a person. All that time and nothing in it." She held his green eyes. "You have more of it than I do." "Name your price," he said again. But quieter now. Agatha turned to a side table near the altar. On it sat a round glass table she had won in a bargain ages ago and never touched. A frosted cake. A little bottle marked in curling script. A small golden key. She had kept it because it amused her and then forgot to be amused. She carried the whole table to the mirror. "Here is my price," she said. "Not a thing. A game. The cake makes you taller. The bottle makes you small. The key opens a door that moves each time you find it." She set it against the frame. "I made it to trick guests. No one ever solved it. It has no end." Peter leaned close to the glass. He studied the cake, the bottle, the key. Something in his face shifted, small and real. "No end," he repeated. "None. It will still be running when your debt to me is a hundred years cold." Agatha folded her arms. "That is my payment. A game with no clock. Take it, and we are settled." He reached through the reflection. His hand closed on the golden key. The frost dimmed. The cracks in the glass went dark and quiet. "Settled," Peter said. He did not smile, but the flatness left his voice. "You understood the price. Most don't." The cold drained from the room. The mirror showed only Agatha now, alone at her altar. The debt was closed. She sat down hard on the stone step and breathed. Then she remembered. The debt with Peter was done. Which meant Ursula's price came due. The sea witch still held her name, and now had no reason to keep it a moment longer.