Fearsome Magics

by Jonathan Strahan

  LATER, AFTER HER grandmother was bathed and settled in to watch the television for the evening, Tansie returned to the dining room to decide what homework she was going to do. She was on an at-risk track at high school because of her grades and her ‘family situation’ as the counselor put it, which was code for students who didn’t live with their parents for one reason or another.

  For some reason, being at risk meant they expected her to do more homework than the other kids as far as Tansie could tell. And it meant bag checks at the beginning and end of every school day to assure that she had carried all of her books home.

  She pulled them out of her book bag and sat them on the table one by one.

  English III. This semester English was just reading stories, and she liked that well enough.

  Algebra II. A battered book with half its paper cover torn away. Tansie always felt like she should be better at math because of paying the bills, but it turned out algebra was only partly about arithmetic. She would do what she always did and copy the homework off Greg Barnett in study hall before lunch.

  Keyboarding. Tansie could already type 80 words per minute and didn’t know what else she was supposed to learn in this class, or what the homework was supposed to be. Neither did Ms. Troutman, apparently, because all she ever assigned was ‘finger exercises.’

  Home Ec. II. She flipped through the workbook. They were in a unit called “Household Budgeting” and the exercises looked like the kind of arithmetic she knew how to do. It was also the kind of workbook that had the answers in the back, so you were supposedly graded on how you got the answer, not just whether you got it. Mrs. Burton never checked, though, so Tansie would just fill these in.

  And World Civilization I. Which was fine in class, when it was just Mr. Campbell telling more stories, but the homework would be reading a long chapter and then answering the study questions at the back.

  She put the Keyboarding and Algebra books back into her bag, then quickly went through filling in the answers to the budgeting questions. The English and History books still sat on the table when she was done. She heard the program changing on the television in the next room and could tell by the theme song that began to play that it was eight o’clock. She would put her grandmother to bed in another hour, and go to bed herself around midnight. There was no reason to get started on the real homework right away.

  The envelope still lay on the table, and Tansie picked it up again. When she shook it, she didn’t feel any movement at all. When she held it up to the dining room light, none shone through.

  She idly wondered how long she would take to talk herself into opening it.

  There had been a time when she opened all of her mother’s mail, along with that addressed to her grandparents. She had even tried to pay one of the bills that came, once, one of those addressed to Eileen Kincaid, which was just one of the three married names her mother had taken in the years since she left Tansie with her grandmother. That had proven to be a mistake, because it proved impossible to keep up with the payments and meant that even more bills for her mother had found their way into Mr. Stevens’ mailbag. Once, a deputy had even come by the house looking for her mother, but Tansie was able to truthfully say that Eileen Abnett hadn’t lived at the house for as long as she could remember, and that she hadn’t seen her in over a year. The deputy left a business card with a number for Tansie to call the next time her mother visited, but Tansie tore it into dozens of tiny pieces.

  So she had stopped opening her mother’s mail, and started putting in her grandmother’s information under ‘or guardian’ on any forms she had to fill out for school. Since her mother had stopped by out of the blue a few days before last Christmas to drop off matching Body Works gift baskets for Tansie and her grandmother, there were only three of the brown paper sacks under the table. Last December her mother had left the house burdened under the weight of more than twice that many, because it had been a long time since her previous visit. Tansie remembered hearing the lids of the neighbor’s trash cans being lifted and replaced one by one as her mother threw away the bags before she drove off into the night.

  She picked up the letter again, and examined it even more closely. She didn’t know how it had been delivered with only a partial address and no stamp at all. Some sort of mistake at the post office? That didn’t seem likely, but she didn’t know how else to explain it. Everyone wanted money to do anything, even if it was just the price of a stamp.

  She wasn’t aware of making a conscious decision to open the envelope until she found herself in the kitchen pulling a serrated steak knife from the back of the silverware drawer. She never fixed anything that needed a knife to cut, so she had to dig until she found something sharp.

  Back at the dining room table, she laid the envelope face down on the table and put the cutting edge of the knife up against the edge of the wax seal. She tried to work the blade under the wax, but wound up cutting into it and spreading a gritty mess of red flakes over the rough paper. She stopped and gently blew the flakes away.

  How would her mother even know if she opened it? When had she ever looked at her mail?

  But still, something kept her from just tearing the envelope open. She turned it over and read the address again. Eileen Abnett.

  That wasn’t her. That wouldn’t ever be her.

  WITH HER GRANDMOTHER in bed and the house finally, blessedly, silent, Tansie took up the envelope one more time. She turned it over and over and then shrugged and ran her finger beneath the fold on the back and tugged. The seal gave way without tearing.

  Then she saw why there had been no movement inside the envelope when she shook it. It wasn’t an envelope at all, but a large, single sheet of paper, folded this way and that so it was a letter that made its own package. Tansie thought of the geometry problems she sometimes saw Greg Barnett laboring over in study hall.

  All unfolded, the sheet was almost twice as long and wide as a piece of notebook paper. The address was written in the center of one rectangular fold among many rectangles and triangle creases. She turned it over.

  The writing was so curled and looped that she almost couldn’t read it. But then she made out what she supposed was a date at the top, ‘The 451st day of the 1,918th Great Year of Our Reign.’

  And on below:

  To the human, Eileen Abnett, these letters are writ.

  Our advisors have brought a matter of great importance to our attention. To our eternal regret, our beloved seventh son Killian, while visiting the earthly realm, lay with you. His seed quickened and you gave birth to a daughter of the elves. To his shame, Killian concealed this matter until he lay on his deathbed, having fallen to the cursed blades of the treacherous Dökkálfar.

  Now this child, who has lived in the ignoble mortal world for far too long, will be given to us and elevated as a lady of our court. A knight will be sent when the seal of this order has been broken and, on your release, recover her to us.

  I set down this writing

  Ilinana, Queen of the Ljósálfar

  Tansie let the letter roll back flat on the table and read it once again. She was always conscious of how lightly her grandmother slept, but she couldn’t help it. She laughed out loud.

  It had to be some kind of weird love letter from Greg Barnett, who spent the time in study hall when he wasn’t doing his homework or hers reading fat fantasy paperbacks. He’d lent her more than one, and she’d taken them out of gratitude for his help with the algebra problems, but she’d not been able to get into any of them. Too many made up words, for one thing, not much in the way of girl characters for another, at least not in the ones Greg favored.

  “Dockalfar,” she said aloud, trying the word out on her tongue. She had no idea how it was supposed to be pronounced. The little tick over the ‘a’ might mean a stressed syllable, she knew that from Spanish last year, but she didn’t remember any little dots like over the ‘o.’ Not that she’d done that well in Spanish.

  She was trying to decide w
hether she thought the note was weird-and-cute or weird-and-creepy when she thought to question why Greg Barnett would have addressed a love letter meant for her to her mother.

  But then who else could have written such an oddball letter? Maybe her mother had dated the adult version of Greg Barnett at some point.

  There was a slamming sound at the back of the house. It sounded to Tansie like a car door, but there was no way for a car to get into the weed choked back yard. She made her way back through the kitchen to the door that led out back and flicked the light switch, even though she knew the bulb in the outside fixture had needed replacing for years.

  The door from the kitchen to the back yard had a narrow window running from above the doorknob to near its top. Tansie couldn’t see anything through it, just her reflection and the kitchen counter behind her. For some reason, her gaze focused on the clean plates in the drainer, and then she realized it was because they were moving.

  No, not the plates, something white on the other side of the window. It was a hand, curled into a fist.

  Tansie jumped back, just as the slamming sound came again. This time she recognized it as someone knocking hard on the screen door outside. It was a single blow, sounding like a bat swung hard against a sheet of metal.

  “No way,” said Tansie, then louder, “No way! I’m not opening the door! Go away!”

  When Tansie’s grandparents had bought the house it had been in what her grandmother called a ‘decent, working neighborhood.’ Time and circumstances had changed that, though. The house directly behind them was abandoned, which Tansie was actually thankful for given what was rumored to go on along the backing street. Could whoever was knocking have jumped the fence from back there?

  Again, the slam.

  “I’m calling the police!” said Tansie. 911 always worked, didn’t it? Even when you hadn’t paid the phone bill?

  A voice, muffled by the door, answered her. “Are you the Lady Tanistasia Killiansdottir?”

  Tanistasia? No one had ever called her that, not even her mother. Tansie had only ever seen the name once when she dug out her birth certificate for some paperwork that had to be filled out when she started high school.

  “I’m calling the police!” she said again, with slightly less conviction, though she did walk over to where the old yellow phone hung on the wall.

  The voice was clearer this time, as if whoever was outside had opened the screen door and now only the kitchen door stood between them. “Are you the daughter of the mortal woman Eileen Abnett?”

  Mortal woman. This was the letter writer, then.

  “She’s not here!” Tansie said. “She doesn’t live here! Go away! Why are you in the back yard?” She said it all in a rush, and realized that her heart was beating fast.

  “You must be she,” said the voice, and Tansie now recognized it as a man’s, speaking in a strangely familiar cultured accent. “The glamour I cast has caused any without elven blood hereabouts to slumber. I am opening the door now.”

  As soon as he said it, Tansie picked up the receiver and punched in 911. Holding the old corded handset to her ear, she looked around frantically for something, anything, to fend off whoever might be coming through the door, even though she was sure that the door was locked.

  She saw the old iron skillet her grandmother had used to make cornbread when she still cooked and took it up in her right hand. It was heavy.

  There was no sound on the phone, no dial tone, no voice saying, “What is the nature of your emergency?”

  What was the nature of her emergency, anyway? She looked at the door, and saw that the doorknob was turning, even though yes, the deadbolt was thrown. But somehow, the door swung inward anyway.

  Tansie screamed “Go away!” and dropped the phone so that she could grip the skillet with both hands.

  The man who came through the door held up his open palms. “You greet me with cold iron? Are you giving challenge, my Lady?”

  He didn’t look like Tansie’s idea of a home invader. In fact, he didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen or imagined before.

  He was about her height, or even less, which would mean he was barely five feet tall. His long hair and his skin were milk white, like an albino’s, but his eyes were huge and green instead of tinged with pink. His chin and nose and ears were all sharply pointed, and he wore the most extravagant clothes Tansie had ever seen, a knee-length coat with brocade and epaulets of gold over puffy pants gathered at the knee above high red boots. His shirt looked like the kind of blouse her eighth grade music teacher had always worn, except that it had a lace collar. And, of course, Tansie’s eighth grade music teacher had never carried a sword.

  The blade was thin and gleamed in the light of the overhead fluorescents, but then practically everything about the man gleamed, from his clothes to his boots to the rings he wore on every finger. He caused the tip of the blade to move in a lazy figure eight, and said, “The honor has been given me to—”

  He stopped talking when Tansie threw the pan straight at his face for all she was worth. It caught him in the forehead edge on, and he folded to the ground in an almost prim fashion, blood pouring from a huge welt above his white eyebrow, and, Tansie had to be imagining this, steaming as it flowed freely into his fluttering eyes.

  Tansie stood still for a moment, waiting to see if the man would rise, but he appeared to be out cold. Dead? She couldn’t think about that.

  Instead, she rushed through the living room and into the den where she’d moved her grandmother’s bed when getting her up and down the stairs grew to be too much trouble. She expected to find her standing in her nightgown, searching for her canes. But she was still under the hand-pieced quilt, softly snoring. How could all that noise not have woken her when a car driving by could be enough to make her cry out?

  Tansie took her grandmother’s stout oak cane from its place leaning against the nightstand. She cautiously walked back through the living room with it held out before her in two hands like a softball bat.

  The blood on the kitchen floor was steaming where it pooled around the skillet. But where was—

  The man stepped out of nowhere, his arm moving so fast it blurred. Pain shot up from Tansie’s palms and wrists where his sword came down on the cane, not just knocking it from her grasp but slicing it cleanly in two.

  “No more of that, half-breed,” he said, his voice low and threatening. He held a dishrag to his forehead in the hand that did not hold the sword to her throat.

  Tansie leaned back from the point of the sword but the man simply took a graceful step forward. She felt the steel tip graze the hollow of her throat where her collarbones met, and then a lightning fast jab like a vaccination shot. Involuntarily, her hands went to her throat, where she felt the welting of a drop of blood.

  “Now we have each wounded one another,” said the man, “and I need not kill you unless you carry on attacking me.” He didn’t lower the sword.

  “I won’t,” whispered Tansie, terrified. “I won’t attack you.”

  The handset of the phone still lay on the floor where she’d dropped it, and it suddenly let forth with a loud, repeating beep. Showing his uncanny speed again, the man whipped his sword around, severed the coiled yellow cord, and brought the blade back to bear on Tansie, all in the space of a quick breath.

  “A talking machine, yes?” asked the man. “You meant to call for aid. But, Lady, you have nothing to fear. I am the knight of the Queen’s message, sent here only to escort you to your new home.”

  The Queen’s message. The letter.

  “The letter was to my mother. I… I opened it by accident.”

  The man cocked his head to one side, and at that moment Tansie realized that the reason his accent was familiar was that it was the same as the strange postwoman’s from that afternoon. “This is of no import,” he said. “You are Tanistasia, the daughter of Prince Killian of blessed memory, borne by the human woman Eileen Abnett, yes?”

  Tansie lifted her g
aze from the sword to the stranger’s green eyes. “I’m Tansie Abnett. I don’t know who my father is.” Then, “If I don’t have anything to fear why are you pointing that sword at me?”

  The man cocked his head in the other direction, and Tansie thought of eagles or owls. For a moment, she was afraid he was going to stab her again, but then he stood up straight and moved the tip of the sword so that it nearly rested on his chin. Then his tongue, as black as his skin was white, darted out and touched the blade’s point. His nostrils flared and his eyes widened. “Yes,” he said, with an odd hissing noise, “it is polluted by mortality but it is the blood of my Queen in your veins.”

  He backed away from Tansie, spread his arms as wide as he could in the galley kitchen, and bowed. Then, not turning his back to her, he stepped back and kicked the bloody skillet through the still-open back door. It made a dull clang when it hit the brickwork walk.

  “Iron is an ugly thing,” he said. “Not often wielded by a princess.”

  It occurred to Tansie then that the man was completely insane.

  “Are you one of my mother’s ex-husbands?” she asked.

  The man opened his mouth as if he were about to answer, but then closed it again. He blinked very slowly, twice.

  Then he said, “I am Gothwiddion, the Primrose Knight.”

  Tansie studied the man’s elaborate clothing again and decided he probably wasn’t her mother’s type. Aloud, she said, “Are there any little dots over your name?”

  The man’s smile was not pleasant. His teeth were white but looked like they had been sharpened with a file, and his gums were as black as his tongue. “Prince Killian was a jokester and a player of games, as well.”

  Killian. Her supposed dead father.

  “So your queen is my other grandmother?”

  The man nodded. “Ilinana, Queen of the Ljósálfar and Lady of the Realm Beyond, most beautiful of the High Fey and immortal ruler of us all. And the mother of your father of blessed memory, yes.”