“That’s what happens when you don’t think about one wish, but just wave your wand over everything,” Fiona said, with a smirk. “What are you going to do about it, since you now know how powerful you are, and you’ve learned that no one else can undo your hasty and ill-formed magic?”
Fiona stood there with her arms folded, tapping a black wand against her shoulder. She didn’t usually handle her wand unless she was casting a spell. She never just played with it like that. The crockery on her shelves seemed uneasy too, though they often vibrated or rattled. Today they seemed to shrink back as far from the edges of the shelves as they could get, huddling together, backs to the wall.
Maven swallowed. She really didn’t want to get the amphibian perspective, even though she had just doomed a number of people–dozens–to that fate this morning and was not sure how to change them back. “I don’t know what to do. I really didn’t mean to transform so many of them this morning, but they were going to be crushed in the crowd. They wouldn’t listen to me.”
“That was the first smart thing you have done since you came here.” Fiona leaned back on her desk, her wand pointing at the floor, the tip of it inscribing small circles that sparkled for an instant before fading. “Now they remember why they don’t come running to magic to solve their problems. Magic makes things worse, unless carefully and sparing applied.”
“What have you seen in your crystal ball?” Maven hoped Fiona would go and look, that she would stop playing with the wand that seemed more and more ominous every moment.
“I haven’t looked,” Fiona said. “I’ve been listening to you and your story, and this ridiculous situation, which is now all yours. It’s up to you to sort it out.” She crossed her arms, with the tip of the wand still moving, as if it had a will of its own. “What are you going to do about it?”
Maven listened for any suggestion from Bump of Direction, but got no sense of even having intuition, much less anything helpful, except to get out of Fiona’s office and see if she could think more clearly away from Fiona and her wand.
“I’m going back out there and muddle through.” Without waiting for any sort of instruction or orders, since it appeared there would be none, she took out her wand, swizzled it and poofed back to the grounds of the Palace.
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