Stray Magic

by Jenny Schwartz

  And so that the Faerene could learn more about us. The trials. This wasn’t about educating us. We’d been thrown scraps of information, just enough for us to survive the mental and psychic upheaval of being bonded to a Faerene magician. At the same time, our response to the new information would have been assessed.

  “What is the purpose of the vigil?” Pericles asked.

  Melinda’s horn glowed softly, a tender light, barely discernible. “You must lose your expectations and habits, so that the natural path for magic to channel through you is revealed.”

  Frida paced forward, and halted abruptly, rocking. Her agitation was significant and unsettling. “Any channel that magic takes through an untrained user is natural. The Fae Council wants to find what magic you are strongest at channeling.” And she objected. Obviously, there were aspects to the chosen detection strategy that we couldn’t guess at.

  I took a deep breath and released it slowly. What mattered was surviving what couldn’t be avoided. “May we drink water?”

  Melinda nodded. “You will have half an hour to drink and use the bathroom. We will meet on the field.”

  “And then what?” someone from Frida’s group asked.

  “Then the vigil begins.”

  Chapter 12

  A cold wind blew from the north, carrying the chill of the Black Sea and the scent of wet pine needles. I tried to tuck my poncho closer about me. My toes and fingers were cold, but from nerves as much as from the weather. If we stayed out here all night, sitting or lying on the wet grass, we’d end up with hypothermia, and probably pneumonia. We’d need the healers. The antibiotics which saved us from death by pneumonia were gone.

  Gone, gone. All gone.

  I jumped, startled at how my thoughts had drifted.

  I’d never experimented with drugs. They’d been easy to access in my world. Other kids had peddled them for influence more than money, but there’d also been professional drug dealers eager to target wealthy school children, and later, college students. Losing my mind had never appealed to me. I liked control.

  I blinked.

  The field had vanished. There were no Faerene, no other people. I smelled popcorn and hot chocolate. Soft fabric touched my skin. I stood in Mom’s living room. She’d sold the old house four years ago. I’d loved it. If you climbed on its roof, you could see the ocean.

  I glanced down. I wore a blue and white flannel shirt that I’d lost at college over cotton pajamas. My toes scrunched as I looked down at them. My feet were bare, the toenails painted blue with white clouds. This had the strangeness of a dream.

  Magic, hallucinogenic smoke, mesmerism? What were the Faerene doing to us?

  I started unbuttoning my shirt.

  No.

  My hands jerked. This wasn’t like when Lajos froze Chen and me with a stasis spell. I could tell that I was fighting myself. Part of me wanted to take off the blue flannel shirt. A larger part of me resisted.

  Melinda had said the vigil was to strip of us of expectations and habits. Fine. But she’d also said she’d be monitoring us. I wasn’t sure what the Faerene saw of my physical body and my psyche, but I wasn’t stripping for them.

  I forced my hands down to my sides. “No.”

  Fire engulfed me. My clothes burned.

  I screamed as my skin melted and bubbled, and kept screaming.

  No unicorn appeared to rescue me from the hallucination.

  I folded up, curling into a ball of misery. The fire curled up with me, condensing into glowing coals in my solar plexus.

  “This is where your qi is centered,” came the voice of a guest tai chi teacher at boarding school. “Feel your power. This is where your body heals.”

  Was the memory of Mrs. Taylor part of the hallucination or my attempt to assert control over it and heal?

  The flames vanished. I was dressed in scaled armor.

  “Tear it off,” a voice whispered. This voice, I didn’t recognize.

  I touched the armor, afraid I’d find it scorching hot. My fingers scratched along my calf. My nails were steel claws.

  “I hate dreams. I won’t do this.” I stated my defiance. If I had to shed expectations and habits I wanted to do so reasonably, not in this chaotic jumble.

  I got to my hands and knees, fearing more fire, more pain. None came. I stood.

  I strode through Dad’s Manhattan office, my feet on the floor below his, my upper body navigating around his large mahogany desk. I was a cross between a medieval knight and a robot. There were no people anywhere. No people. In the real world, Manhattan had been destroyed and remade as a Faerene wilderness.

  Acid spat from my mouth, erasing the office like spit smeared on a whiteboard.

  Now I was in darkness.

  I touched my arm. The scaled armor had gone. My skin was warm. Bare. I was naked all over. “Bastards.”

  I couldn’t see.

  Could they see me?

  Yes. Assume they could. They could hear me. They probably guided me through this, pushed and prodded and tortured me to dance like a puppet on strings of magic.

  I screamed.

  Magic punched up and out of me, exploding like freaking fireworks in the darkness.

  The magic rained back down on me. It sank into my skin with tiny darts like a million tattoo guns patterning meaning over my skin and down into the depths of me.

  “I’m meant to be shedding layers. Not adding to them. Idiots.” I spun slowly in space like an astronaut. Weightlessness was so strange.

  The rain of magic ceased. Instead, what was inside me streamed and remade itself.

  I couldn’t reach it. I couldn’t draw it out of me. I couldn’t talk to it.

  I was used to talking my way out of things, or into things. Talking, communicating, achieving what I needed by convincing people that meeting my needs served them best.

  Oh, ouch. Self-awareness hurt.

  I’d learned from my lawyer father and CEO mom. I’d learned from nannies and teachers, maids and housekeepers. Words were the subtle armor that kept me safe and fed and warm in a world that didn’t want me.

  Before the world ended, I’d wanted to be a psychiatrist. I’d wanted to learn the secrets of the mind. What was consciousness? How could humans survive trauma and re-imagine themselves? Why did some people transcend their beginnings and others repeat their parents’ mistakes? I’d wanted to help people, to heal their minds as well as their bodies.

  Now, I hung suspended in the void. Comforting self-deception had been burned away. The armor of ego had eroded. No barriers existed between me and the truth.

  I did want to help people, to heal them. But my intention wasn’t born out of altruism. I’d learned my lesson early that the world didn’t want me, so I’d make it need me.

  Did I have a body in which to cry? The darkness shivered around me, weeping.

  I’d never believed that I was enough. Just me. All my life I’d striven to be more, to acquire skills, to be liked and unobtrusively popular, and to be respected.

  None of it mattered.

  The magic sighed within me, connected to the universe; content to connect me to the universe.

  In the quiet, I spoke a name. “Amelia Carlton. Amy.”

  Chapter 13

  Istvan resisted the urge to prowl. The bunker inside the mountain near the field where the trials were being held was too full of people for a griffin his size to make any but the most minor and controlled of movements. All the Faerene from the trials were there: the tutors, healers, cooks, monitors and would-be familiar partners, like him. Other Faerene had joined them, including half the Fae Council and Fae King Harold.

  Harold wandered among the anima-graphs, observing the experiences of the eighty five remaining human familiar candidates up close. As an elf, he’d survived a vigil himself. However, he’d have prepared and would have known what to expect—and a bunker full of people hadn’t observed it in real time or recorded it for subsequent study.

  Still, the vigil was elven t
radition and as such even Tineke had accepted it as the best alternative to stringing out the trials for weeks until the humans were reduced to their essential natures. It was the orcs who objected. They were big on individual autonomy and privacy. Istvan discovered that he shared their view. Watching the deconstruction of the humans’ psyches felt like voyeurism. However, the process was essential. The Faerene scholars had to identify a person’s innate preference for channeling magic for specific usage. That would be the primary guide to matching the human familiars with their Faerene magician.

  A number of the magicians present wouldn’t be matched this time around. Already, fifteen of the original one hundred human candidates had failed out. Judging by the conflict and disorder in the anima images of those keeping vigil, another ten or more would fail, tonight.

  The tutors were all alert and grumpy. Rory alternated between scowling at Harold’s roving curiosity and monitoring the members of his group. Melinda stamped her front hooves at intervals. And if Rory seemed annoyed at Harold’s curiosity, Frida’s hands clenched and unclenched. She was a hair away from snapping and punching both the Fae King and those of the Council members present. Fortunately, her sense of duty to her tutorial group kept her focused on monitoring them.

  The bunker had been built in the Pontic Mountains to take advantage of their resilience to magic. It was one of seven sites across Earth that would be used to maintain contact with Elysium via world-viewers.

  This would be a small patch of the Old World in the new one until humanity adjusted to its new reality and could be trusted to accommodate a return to an industrial age; albeit one with limits and laws. The scholars anticipated humanity would need several generations before people truly understood the risk they’d run with their linear progression focus. Or, if understanding was too much to hope for, then at least an acceptance that the Faerene would not tolerate a return to humanity’s old ways of destroying the shield.

  The Kstvm would be watching, and the Kstvm had the sort of technology that made humanity’s inventions appear mere toys.

  Any advanced civilization surviving in the multiverse had chosen one of two approaches to life.

  The Kstvm pursued linear rapaciousness. They probed habitable worlds for weakening shields, and when they found a destabilizing world, they monitored it for a rift opening. Then they charged in, took control of the planet, and exploited its every resource mercilessly. They didn’t bother about repairing the new world’s shield. No one except other Kstvm was stupid enough to fight an established Kstvm colony. There were always other worlds—and the Kstvm would be searching for them. Their lifestyle rendered worlds uninhabitable. The Kstvm always moved on by that stage, either through a rift to a new world or by invading another Kstvm world.

  In contrast to the Kstvm, the Faerene believed in nurturing their home world of Elysium, and those worlds they migrated to. By maintaining the natural cycle of life on those planets, the worlds’ shields remained strong. It didn’t matter how insanely powerful the Kstvm’s technology became, nothing could break a world’s shield—except the sustained stupidity of its inhabitants. So the Faerene were able to avoid a technological arms race with the Kstvm. Out of prudence, they kept up with their ancient enemy’s developments, but the Faerene preferred to evolve technology at a gentler pace, and only bring it into use after considering all of the implications of doing so.

  On Earth, knowledge of that technology would be kept from humans. It was enough for the humans to learn to accept both the loss of their Industrial and post-Industrial era technology and the Faerene’s magic. Learning that the two could be blended would explode humans’ minds.

  A whinny of distress escaped Melinda.

  Viola hugged her neck. “There was nothing any of us could do. She chose to die.”

  Istvan clacked his beak in acknowledgement of their grief and the sense of failure in the bunker. Another of the human familiar candidates had chosen death over life in a world filled with magic. Or because of the self-knowledge forced on the woman.

  Bunkers were built for surviving, not living. There were no luxuries in the items pushed against the walls and stacked high to allow for people to move around and monitor the trials. Instead, there was technology, designs for technology, books of knowledge and theory, and supplies that could rebuild the Faerene’s technological base in the event of a migration-killing threat. What that could be had been hypothesized as anything from a unique viral attack to an asteroid strike.

  Istvan thought the most convincing threat was of the Faerene turning on themselves. Colonies could spin in unexpected social directions.

  The world-viewers that connected the Faerene on Earth to Elysium and other Faerene worlds were vital. They kept the scholars and technicians up to date on refinements and advancements in theory and practice in many fields. But they also kept the colony open and balanced, rather than insular and paranoid.

  If Istvan wanted to overthrow the Faerene Council and its elected head, Harold, then he’d seed the ground for social revolution by destroying the world-viewers. Ignorance bred fear and inadequate responses. That was a truth that would leave humanity in turmoil for generations. They didn’t understand why their world had changed so radically. Introducing the truth of magic, the primary importance of maintaining Earth’s shield and the just missed danger of the near-total enslavement of their world to the rapacious Kstvm would have to be done tactfully.

  It wasn’t Istvan’s responsibility. Witnessing the human familiar candidates’ struggle to digest their new reality, he was grateful for that fact.

  The human male, Chen, had kept vigil faster than the other candidates and with a comprehensible anima-image of his past. At the beginning of the apocalypse, Chen had found himself trapped in a city far from home. He’d fought to survive, but that hadn’t been where he’d directed his magic. His magic had channeled into growing things. Food. Sensible man. Even his subconscious had understood that food was the beginning. He’d had to force the pace of growth to ensure a harvest after a late sowing.

  Yet Chen’s harvest wouldn’t be food. Stripped of habit and expectation, his magic channeled naturally to support a healer’s work.

  A pity, Istvan thought. A stable personality such as Chen’s would serve well as a familiar to a magistrate. Istvan would have overlooked Chen’s youth and accepted him as a partner.

  However, if Chen wasn’t available…Pericles had the wisdom of age and his channeling showed no particular preference to serve a specific field of magic.

  There were about a dozen humans like that: blank slates.

  Rory’s woman, Amy, was one of them.

  No, not “Rory’s woman”, Istvan ruffled his feathers irritably. He looked for Koos, hoping the werewolf magician candidate was considering Amy, which would resolve the potential problem of Rory’s interest in a woman who would be a human familiar. Mated and deeply enmeshed in pack ties, Koos would be a stable match. He wouldn’t become emotionally involved with a human familiar.

  In the bunker, Rory was scrupulously focused on his tutorial group. What gave away his awareness of Amy was how carefully he kept his back to her anima-graph. He didn’t want to see her secrets, to view the essence of her in a way few ever saw another person. It mattered to Rory.

  Istvan settled his feathers. It mattered to him, too. Not just for Amy, but for all the human candidates. Their privacy and sense of self had been hijacked as part of the trials.

  Respecting their involuntary sacrifice meant picking the human familiar candidate who’d best meet his needs as a magistrate.

  Pericles, with Saul and Tabitha as second and third pick, respectively.

  Istvan edged backward, satisfied with his choice. He found a quarter of the other potential magician matches already gathered at the exit.

  Koos was there, but Tineke remained inside near the anima-graphs of the candidates.

  “Strange times,” Gideon, an orc, muttered to Istvan. He was one of the junior magistrates. Their assignments had
been unsettled by the death of two magistrates defending the Rift. Two of the junior magistrates had been promoted and given territories. The remaining junior magistrates in supporting positions had been shuffled around the territories.

  Istvan hadn’t been given a junior. Because I lack patience, he acknowledged to himself. In pursuit of justice he could be as patient as a stalking spiderpuff. But as a teacher or mentor, he had to admit that he lacked the temperament to guide a youngster. Which is why I need Pericles as my familiar.

  The human was old, but that didn’t bother Istvan. Healing tonics could restore the man physically, and as for ageing and death…well, all human lives seemed fleeting to Istvan. He was considered a young griffin at six hundred and three years.

  He shuffled outside to where he could move freely. Stretching his wings led to a luxurious full-body shiver. He preened a few of his flight feathers.

  Of course, there was no telling what the familiar bond might do to humans. Conceivably, it could extend the human’s lifespan to match their Faerene magician’s.

  Istvan stopped preening and stared back at the bunker. Had anyone considered that point? Goblins lived lives roughly equivalent to a human’s, dying by the century mark. But orcs could double that, and werewolves, griffins and dragons were notoriously long-lived. Add their love for pups to their long lives, and it was obvious why werewolves always formed the core of a Faerene Migration: they needed more territory for their clans to expand into. How would a human cope with living for centuries?

  It was just an idle thought. No need to worry. But Istvan looked from the bunker back in the direction of the trials’ field. No one knew what damage the familiar bond would do to a human. The scholars guessed, and the Fae Council was betting on a net gain, but for the individual humans…

  The clack of his beak echoed at the entrance. Heads turned in his direction.

  “Problem?” Koos asked.

  “The Fae Council expects us to be the human familiars’ babysitters, don’t they?” Istvan asked. “We’re the first. We’re to learn how to use the magic they channel. But we’re also the ones who have to work out how to keep them sane and reasonably happy.”