Wind Magic

by Nicolette Jinks

  He nodded. “Let's go to the common's lounge. I'm afraid you won't like this.”

  “Leif,” said Lilly, but he motioned to the man on the floor.

  “If word gets out about this rescue, we won't have time. We need to talk to her now. There won't be any time later.”

  Concerned, I checked Barnes' reaction. He was in on this, too—however, Mordon's brow was pinched in confusion.

  “What's it about?” I asked.

  “You.”

  Chapter Five

  Report: Militant Creatures Kidnap Baby Girl from Foster Parent in Merlyn's Market, Causes Riots

  Five militant Creatures reportedly kidnapped a baby girl from a foster parent who resides in Merlyn's Market, an incident that put domestic staff in danger and left a vacation home in ruins.

  The child snatching took place nearly a week ago, but has received almost no attention from news outlets. Until today.

  However, members of the domestic staff have been circulating what happened in public commentary pamphlets, with an insider from the Council relaying that the baby girl was an orphan taken from an unstable woman who tried to claim guardianship over her.

  The militant Creatures were of strong, pure bloodlines, at least three of which had dragon-forms.

  The baby girl was in her caretaker's holiday home in the Sawtooth Mountains when the Creatures broke in and stole her from the cradle. They then attacked the master of the house and destroyed most of the interior. The female Creature reportedly stole the child, assaulted the master of the house, and left the home ablaze.

  The domestic staff report “spells going everywhere” and “feeling terrified for (their) lives”.

  A riot with over 50 people broke out yesterday. They targeted Creature vendors and vandalized the booths. Many Creatures chose to leave as crowds shouted, “Equal justice, equal time.”

  “We need to know why this has gone unreported. Why are Creatures permitted to do these things without facing the law? The Council is covering this up because revealing it is 'discriminatory',” says one of the rioters.

  “What they're doing to our lives, it's not right.”

  No, it isn't right. It is time the Creatures face the same rules that humans do. This baby girl is probably going to be sold for a bride once she's of age, a common practice amongst Creatures...

  The article continued on for some length. I skimmed over it, astonished by the blatant lies they were writing. Bride-selling happened, yes, but it was a crime amongst the Creature communities. I said, “This is crazy. People don't actually believe this, do they?”

  I did not expect an answer. In my experience it is a universal truth that anything known to be a ‘thing’ is a ‘thing’ that is believed in by a shocking number of people throughout the worlds. Sometimes these beliefs were good, or at the very least harmless. Sometimes, though, this was not the case. And this article in my lap? It’s whispering message stoked fear and encouraged severe backlash.

  I sat on the carpeted floor in front of Mordon, newspaper in my lap, Mordon rubbing my neck at my insistence. From this angle I could barely see Lilly in the dining nook and hear Leif gathering cups for us in the kitchen. Doors to each of our individual residences lined the walls; presently I was facing Lilly's seaside cottage. My own double french doors were behind me. Mordon’s book on Latin was on the lamp’s table, the same place it had been for weeks.

  Barnes answered, his head outlined against a gas light burning in its sconce behind him. “It is a controversy.”

  I sat stunned, then outraged. “But half of the Council has Creature heritage!”

  “Any rational person says they don't count. It's not the mixed-bloods who are the trouble, it's the purists who are insane.”

  “But they aren't. It's a backlash against Cole.”

  “Who happens to be their leader, and who can ensure that whoever prints what he wants is given ample incentives. It's a method of controlling the crowd.”

  “Surely there are independent papers.”

  “Who reads them? Or takes them seriously if they do?” Barnes asked.

  I slapped the paper down in disgust. “Normal people can't possibly think like this.”

  An uncomfortable silence met me. I gazed distractedly at a pink vase with its peach alstroemerias and purple spikes of butterfly bush. It rested on the ledge of an octagonal window above the stairs leading to King’s Ransom. I focused on the red lips of the alstroemerias, trying to calm myself.

  Mordon squeezed my neck once. Softly, he said, “It doesn't have to be all of them. Just enough to follow orders and rally the rest.”

  “But violence? Riots? Over what? How?”

  Barnes frowned, easing into his armchair across from me. “Cole has been known to be less than hospitable to Creatures throughout his career. Brutal, even, but he is denying his own statements. He has people who believe that he was misquoted. And those who are not so sure about what is true will be swayed by whichever story they hear repeated time and again.”

  I snorted and folded my arms. “So much for truth winning out.”

  Mordon said, “The average person relies on other sources for information as well, and they believe those sources tell the truth. It is why propaganda works—through telling stories. Stories that make people fear, stories that make people believe. News is about feeling, not about fact. This is why news is seldom happy or about educational programs.”

  “But you read papers. All the time.”

  “As a study. The attitudes and behaviors popularized in papers consistently reflect in the attitudes and opinions of those who read them.”

  I sighed. “Fine, so things are bad for Creatures right now. What's this got to do with me? It's not like this terrible piece of journalism spelled out who I was. Do you think the riots will get worse?”

  Mordon leaned back into the sofa which creaked beneath his weight. “That depends on where Cole guides the people.”

  “So he may calm them?”

  Mordon grunted. I felt my stomach churn. I picked at the cream carpet, wishing it was rolled up so I could scratch at the casting circles painted on wood instead.

  Leif knelt beside me. “Fera, do you trust me?”

  I gave him a studying stare, wondering what he really meant by that. “Yeah.”

  “I have access to Cole's inner circle. I know what they're saying. They're on fire. They want safety and security, and certain sacrifices must be made. It will be very bad for you if you get caught in the Market again.”

  I couldn't believe what I was hearing. “What? Why?”

  “Because you're opposed to the Commandant.”

  “With good reason.”

  “Would you be willing to pretend to follow him? To make a public statement to that effect?”

  “No.”

  “Then what would you do?”

  “I'd fight his game his way and throw the book in his face. He can't get away with shutting me up.”

  Mordon laughed. “Ah, but can you hire the Blackwings like he can?”

  The mercenaries would definitely be a problem, particularly with their ability to capture talent at any given time. Against them, I was outclassed. “I can trick them.”

  “At every turn?”

  I fell silent, taking in what they were saying. “Cole would step up the attempts to kill me?”

  Leif shook his head. “Not obviously, but nor can he have you undermining his efforts.”

  “I won't be chased off.”

  Leif put his head in the crook of his arm, letting out a slow breath. “It's not time to get stubborn, Fera. Give it a break for a few weeks. It may settle down by then.”

  “Suppose I do give it a break. Where do I go? What happens to the coven?”

  “Fera, we aren't disbanding.”

  “You said it yourself. You're near Cole's inner circle. We can't give that up, and I can't pretend to go along with Cole’s lunacy. Something has to give, or you're at risk, too. All of you.”

  Lilly sai
d, “Fera, you're over reacting.”

  “If I'm at risk walking through Merlyn's Market, then so are you—that is, if you continue to have an association with me.”

  “That's not what we meant,” Lilly said.

  Barnes propped himself up. “She's right.”

  “Barnes, not you, too,” Lilly said with a groan.

  “If it is not safe for her, it is not safe for us to be friends with her. The question is, are we the ones who are over reacting? One riot means little.”

  Mordon held up his hand until everyone fell silent watching him. “I think time will tell the truth of this. Perhaps we are over-responding. Perhaps not. I think the best thing to do at this time is to wait a little while, and keep Fera busy. She hates being bored, I can't say I blame her. It happens that the Kragdomen Colony is asking to see her in residence, and that they are able to provide care for the man we rescued. Once he is healed in a few weeks, we can re-evaluate the situation in Merlyn's Market.”

  The others were quiet, but I knew they approved of the idea of sending me away to Kragdomen for a while.

  Why not?

  There was a lot of truth in Mordon's statement. My principle reason for refusing was petty: I didn't want to be chased out of Merlyn's.

  Something savory smelling came from the kitchen—an egg and ham dish, baked. Leif must have broken away earlier and slipped the casserole into the oven. The prospect of food made me less obstinate, though the honeybush tea earlier had curbed some of my irritation.

  “Fine,” I said begrudgingly. “I've wanted to start spending more time there, anyways.”

  Mordon relaxed instantly. He must have been prepared for a prolonged argument. Was I really so block-headed? Guess he thought so.

  “We'd probably best move our patient as soon as we can,” I said, noticing how the carpet scratched my knees. It felt good to have a plan in motion now. I hadn't realized how worried I'd been at his presence being discovered. I got to my feet, stretched, and caught Mordon's smile.

  “Don't look so pleased with yourself. I might kick up a fuss just to prove you wrong,” I said. It succeeded in making him grin large enough to show his teeth.

  The others got up, too, Barnes humming a cheery folk working song. We were making our way to the kitchen when a knock stopped us dead.

  We all went quiet, peering at the spot on the wall where a door had appeared. It was a massive oaken entryway. I'd never seen that particular entrance before. Rigid formality poured out of it, promising a nightmare of headaches and the threat of an inspection.

  “Friends of yours?” I asked nobody in particular, blissfully in denial.

  “It's the Council,” Barnes said, squashing my hopes in three short words.

  There was another knock. No one moved to answer.

  Hesitantly, I asked, “Can we get away with not letting them in?”

  I knew the answer was no, but it didn't hurt to ask.

  Leif let them in.

  There was a Constable in a blue coat, a prison worker who wore a black uniform, and a magistrate in a gray cowl. The magistrate withdrew a scroll to read from. He spoke for a long, long time and wouldn't let anyone leave.

  The gist of it was this:

  They were going to search my house. Without our interference.

  Right now.

  Chapter Six

  By noon we stood in the overturned ruins of my home. Amongst the wreckage it was impossible to see what they'd seen when they had first entered, but I still couldn't wrap my brain around their report.

  “They found nothing?”

  Barnes shook his head. “No spell traces, no bloodied rags—no escaped prisoner.”

  No escaped prisoner. No trace of him at all. No blood, when before there had been. To call it a miracle would have been wrong—it felt wrong in this case—but what else could I call it? Either the man had come to his senses and snapped everything into decent order quickly, or someone had arrived to take him away. Neither seemed probable. How would any of his friends know where he was when his pursuers did not? How would he recover enough to do what needed done?

  Unless, that is, his pursuers had found him, and borne him away again. If that was so, then why on earth wouldn’t they leave me a house filled with incriminating evidence? I had no answers. None, other than the thought that there was something far larger going on than I had ever thought possible.

  Stunned silence followed me as I investigated the wreckage the men had wrought on my home. It stank of spell burn, a combination of black powder smoke and motor oil which had us trying to crack windows wherever possible.

  Lilly approached me with something herbal in a cup. “Here, take it.”

  I eyed the infusion warily. It smelled herbal, and not in the distinctive flavor way I liked. This was the compounded mash of a dozen, or two dozen, plants all ground together in a large vat to be sold in a large pharmaturgical shop. The end result was a product whose properties varied widely from the intended uses of the individual components. Sniffing it again, all I got was a muddied hay flavor with hints of pollen. “What’s it do?”

  “It’ll make you calm down.”

  “I don’t want to calm down. Look at this place!”

  The things that had been in my storage chest now littered the house. Twisted bras, scraps of underwear, wadded piles of tunics, shirts, dresses. And socks. So, so many socks. They seemed to have taken the disruption in their order as a cue to reproduce.

  Plants had been uprooted in search of whatever incriminating evidence might have been hidden beneath them. They’d found nothing, but now I knew where not to attempt hiding things when I truly did have something to hide. There weren’t many options left, not even under the floor, since a section of the bricks in the sun room had been taken up and dug beneath. Soil scattered throughout the house, the thickest layer in the sun room itself. In the kitchen I found a shattered earthenware round pot, its trailing ivy decoration around the rim broken clean off the rest of it. A sock was inside the broken bit.

  I found another sock the sink. It wasn’t a mate to the one in the pot.

  Lilly spoke her first words to me ever since we'd heard the angry report. “Fera, how did you do it?”

  “Oh, come on—what could I have done? It wasn't like I could have snuck in here while I was with you guys, picked him up out from under their noses, and dropped him off someplace safe.” I didn't know if I should be charmed at her faith in me or annoyed that I hadn't actually done anything.

  Lilly sighed dramatically. “What else could have happened?”

  Mordon raised a single eyebrow. “Did you happen to make our portal this morning a one-time use?”

  I stared at him, realizing how the man had escaped. Which wind had he noticed? Where had he gone? And, most importantly of all, did the others know that I’d gone on a little bit of an anxious spell-casting bender that night? “Oh. Uh. No. It's still here. But how would he even know where to find it, nevermind get through it on his own?”

  Mordon said, “You have succeeded similar feats in the past. We did not have him restrained in any manner. Aside from his physical condition, he could have walked off.”

  “Sure, if he wasn't a normal person,” I said.

  “The alternative is that someone who wasn't us cleaned up and took him away, and didn't tell the inspectors about it. If that someone was linked to Cole, they would have left incriminating evidence. Which they did not do.”

  “So, we're looking at a friend of our victim? Someone who knew where he was and how to get in here?” The odds were stacking up against that.

  Mordon shrugged.

  I rubbed the back of my neck in an attempt to ease the tension which had been building since the inspectors had first arrived.

  My whole body still felt on edge. I paced restlessly along the house, feeling caged in and without direction. Belatedly, I started to clean. What else was there to do?

  I began with a clothes hunt, piling tunics on one chair, trousers on another, dresses
on the table. Socks soon went onto the dresses. Mordon watched as I found yet another sock in the dining room potions closet, hanging from a bottle of feverfew syrup.

  After a moment of lingering, the others helped. Lilly discovered a teapot, miraculously whole but missing its lid. I discovered a green wine jug with a crumbled cork, a thing I supposed could have been mine although I didn’t recall it. The sun brightened through the windows but did nothing to elevate my depressed emotions. What took the investigators ten minutes to trash took us fifty minutes to put to rights. A sandy dust covered all surfaces.

  “It is a disarming powder,” Barnes explained. “They call it Hit Grit. Wards turn to flame.”

  “Does it kill the wards?” I asked.

  “Maybe. Or maybe it just says that it’s there. Depends on the warding spell.”

  “Huh.”

  “Here,” Lilly said and handed me a wad of letters which had been crumpled, smoothed out, and refolded again. “That is the last of them.”

  I nodded, piled them with the other torn pages, and opened my kitchen drawer. I froze.

  “They broke the child locks!”

  Granted, I hated working around those stupid things, but did they have to destroy the enchantment my brother had done for me? It stung as though they had sent a deliberate message about how I wasn’t going to be needing them, anyway. The loss of Anna panged unexpectedly, and all I wanted to do in that second was hide until I could get control over myself again.

  It was stupid to be upset over her. She wasn’t dead, in fact, she was with her rightful caretaker which was the entire reason for taking her in the first place. It was still a sore wound, though, one that preyed on the lingering fear that a miscarriage had instilled deep inside. That I wasn’t enough to be a mother. And with Mordon and the rest of the colony depending on a baby boom to bolster their numbers, this fear nibbled away at me with renewed strength. Losing Anna had fed that whisper so that it was impossible to pretend I didn’t have it living inside me.

  Leif tested several other cabinets, frowning slightly. “They must have thought you were hiding something.”