Looking around the place told us we hadn't gone far geographically. One tree in particular looked out of place, and we soon recognised it as being in the middle of the new construction site. Adam peed on it. Dog instincts, apparently, but just once, just once, it would be nice to get through a mystery without Robin or Adam peeing on anything. Elizabeth seemed to think that that was just what men are like, but Michael's never peed on anything while I was around.
We needed a plan, but first, something was up with Michael. At first I thought he was just struggling to deal with having significantly more limbs than usual, but it turns out he was having a vision. The witch hunter in a tavern, talking to a woman, who was going to pay him but was unhappy about him finishing the job.
Robin had become overcome by the need to tidy the witch's cottage and was hard at work, while Alabaster was just doing regular cat stuff: sitting around, looking pretty and ignoring everyone. The rest of us got to work. The easiest way to find Agnes's pouch was to ask her where it was, which would be a lot easier if she was alive. So off we went to the gnome village.
Getting in to the village was easy enough. Elizabeth and me could fly, Michael was small enough to crawl through gaps or be carried, and Adam could just do dog stuff and get let in through the gates. The tavern was more of a challenge. I looked through the windows, and did manage to find the witch hunter's room, but he wasn't in it. Michael had a look downstairs. He wasn't there either.
We kept searching. Adam managed to meet a friendly cook around the back of the village elder's house, and not long afterwards the witch hunter and the woman from Michael's vision emerged from the house. He went to the tavern. She went elsewhere. Michael lost her in the crowd, but I spotted the house she went into and while the other two went to the tavern, we went for a closer look.
It was me. Or at least, it was someone who looked exactly like me, scrying over a map and using the same words I was taught as a child. It was such a shock I fell off the windowsill. Who was she? I was expecting a fae. And it was Agnes who was my relative, not this other woman. And even then, why would she look exactly like me? Michael seemed in a bit of a state as well, as far as I could tell from his spidery little face.
We needed Agnes, and that meant we needed eyeballs. Back to the tavern, where Adam and Elizabeth confirmed that he was now in his room. I had an idea. If we dropped some burning twigs down the chimney to light the fire, then stopped up the chimney, we could incapacitate him with smoke. Easier said than done. Magic is trickier when you're a bird. Fortunately Elizabeth was there to help out, as was Alabaster who'd finally come to take a look at things. After a number of failed attempts, and almost setting my own feet on fire, they lent me enough power to get the fire lit. They blocked up the chimney with wings and fur. Adam lay outside the bedroom door to keep it closed and stop the smoke escaping that way. And soon the witch hunter was unconscious.
Michael and me went in. I pecked out his eyeballs, and Michael spun a little silk bag to carry them in. And we fled, along with Adam, causing chaos on the way out and almost losing the eyeballs, except Michael had figured out his web spinners by then and grabbed them with a silk line. And then we were out.
Back at Agnes's cottage the place was spotless. I put the eyeballs on her chest and soon she revived. At which point things got even more complicated as we had to try to explain about being from several hundred years in the future, and that her familiars were all still fine and we had their memories as well as ours. She didn't like the idea of any of our family getting hold of the pouch and honestly I could understand that.
Then Mary showed up, and Agnes was quite relieved that we'd managed to get her alive again before that as it would have been a very nasty shock. Then there was another nasty shock when we mentioned that Mary was going to be dead in the future, which didn't seem very surprising to me, but apparently was to Agnes. So Mary had to leave the house while we talked more about that.
Adam asked me the most ridiculous question he's ever asked me: did my family often go to the bad? We don't go to the bad, we start out at the bad! I've had to make an active choice to be a nice person. Didn't he remember when we first met and he tried to kill me?
Anyway, I hope we didn't cause a temporal paradox but what I really wanted was to know about the woman who looked like me. Agnes thought she was a fae, which made sense, but she probably wasn't a doppelganger. So what on earth was she?
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