The Conjurer (The Vine Witch)

by Luanne G. Smith

  “As-salaam-alaykum,” he said, though he had yet to open his eyes. Perhaps he needed more time than first thought to accept the light. She dimmed the lantern again.

  The old man blinked and scratched his scraggly beard. “Ah, Sidra.” He seemed pleased to see her, but then his forehead wrinkled in confusion. He glanced at the wall of his cave where several spiral markings had been scratched into the limestone. A sort of cosmic calendar he conferred with to keep track of the outside world. “Your tribute is not due for another sixty years,” he said. “Where is Hariq? Did he not come with you?”

  “No.”

  Rajul Hakim seemed then to remember what happened to her husband. His face showed the proper remorse before checking his calendar again. After a quick calculation, he nodded to himself and gestured for her to sit with much more solemnity than normal. When she smiled weakly back at him, finding nowhere to sit, he mumbled an excuse about his aging mind before presenting an illusion of comfort by introducing two plush hassocks beneath a silken canopy. A brass dallah full of coffee appeared on a table beside a bowl of shriveled dates. Sidra sat and inhaled the scent of cardamom wafting from the cup, pleased to let the aroma filter through her lungs. She passed on the dates, believing them to be from an ancient and outdated spell.

  The old jinni crossed his legs atop the hassock. “So, you do not bring tribute. Why then have you come?” He waved a finger, and a trio of hanging lamps came to life over their heads. In the brighter light his skin appeared ashen and sun deprived. Lizard-like.

  “You should get out of this cave for a change,” she chided gently. “Go to a bazaar. Indulge in some sun and soft desert wind at a street-side café.”

  “I do go out. Whenever I hear the little mortal children shouting in the cave on one of their tours, I send a whoosh of air that hits them on the back of their heads and makes the sound of ooooohhhh in their ears.” The old man laughed until he coughed. “They turn heel and run every time.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Bah.” He waved a hand. “I have seen enough of the earth above and its inhabitants. The world is darker up there than it is here in my corner of the underground. Here I see what I need to see and nothing more, nothing less.”

  “Do the people not call for you? Ask you for favor using their talismans?”

  “A few, but the calling is not as it once was. Too many of our people have let the old ways fall on the side of the road.” He made a gesture with his fingers as if they were two legs walking. “Now they are gone.”

  Not all, she thought, but let it rest. He was older and wiser than most she’d known. Old enough that he’d escorted the people when they traveled north to this foreign land centuries ago, carrying their beliefs and their customs with them on their backs and in their hearts. He’d answered the call to join them, saying he’d seen it foretold in the fire that he must go. The travelers asked for protection, guidance, and blessings from the jinn in the earthly realm as they built their new lives on unfamiliar soil. Now it was Sidra who flew to him needing guidance and assurance.

  A glass-and-metal pipe appeared at the old jinni’s side. He slipped the mouthpiece of the shisha between his lips and inhaled. His eyes shut for one pleasurable moment. “So,” he said, as if reading printed words on the insides of his eyelids, “you sail freely to my door, yet you are still held in bondage.”

  The truth spoken out loud sent a hot flame dancing along her spine. “I am.”

  He opened his eyes, leaning into the lamplight to reveal clouded cataracts that had thickened. Though he had become nearly cave-blind, the depth of his sight had been retained, regardless. “The feud continues, then.”

  “Jamra put a spell around his northern citadel. For a time, I could not leave the stinking place.” She fidgeted helplessly with the seam on her headscarf, nearly pulling it loose from atop her head. “He might have found me had I not discovered a third way out in time.”

  “You’ve always been resourceful. And the authorities?”

  “They are little more than clay figures grasping after smoke.”

  “Yet they caught you once before.”

  Shrewd old one.

  “I was too deep in my grief and didn’t see the snare until it was too late.”

  “Hmm, and now?”

  “They still search, but with no heart for the chase.” She thought of that pale, yellow-haired Inspector Nettles and the look of failure on his face as she disappeared before his eyes. His expression was a memory she would tuck away for nights when she needed amusement to distract her.

  Rajul Hakim seemed pleased to hear her report, nodding. He took another hit off his pipe, inhaling the tobacco smoke with the relish of a man satisfying a hunger. He nodded again, though this time in contemplation. “Jamra will not be so easily eluded a second time. His hatred is an oil fire that only grows the more you try to put out the flames.”

  The feud between Jamra’s clan and hers had been more than a millennium in the making. Wounds of pride torn open over and over again and left to fester between those of the sunrise lands and those of the sunset in the west. Two jinn houses divided by a broken ideology, skirmishing under the All-Seeing Eye. But she, born of the east, and Hariq, born of the west, had looked past the worn-out grievances between their families and found love in each other’s arms. And were punished for it. Relentlessly. Ostracized by members of both clans for not defending their family’s side in the feud. And yet they endured, creating their own oasis in the middle of the storm.

  Until the unspeakable happened.

  Hariq wasn’t supposed to die. He was wise and bright and beautiful. Charming and playful, he made her laugh like no other, with his harmless tricks on humans done to entertain her while they swam in the ether together. Tapping men on the shoulder at the train station to make them turn around. Sliding a diner’s coffee cup out of reach while they read the newspaper at a street-side café. Reversing a laundress’s shirts so they hung upside down on the line. They should have had a thousand carefree years together, but one cannot always predict the rock in the road that will next make them stumble.

  “Jamra will come,” she said. “He always does. But the All-Seeing Eye has set my feet down here again. With you. With the memory of Hariq.” She stared at the spirals on the wall with vague curiosity. “I had once known great peace here, but this village is now the source of my greatest sorrow. I’m pleased to meet my enemy in such a wasteland.”

  The old jinni puffed out a circle of smoke, his eyes fluttering at a vision. He cocked his head to the left. “And the other binding?”

  Other?

  “There’s a frilly yellow creature shadowing you, is there not?”

  Sidra nodded. “Fate has tied us together by our wrists in a knot I cannot seem to undo. There’s another as well, though her magic at times is worthy of the bind.”

  He considered this, seeing beyond into the cosmos. “It is good,” he said and set down the pipe’s mouthpiece. “Jamra will come, but you will not be alone.”

  She hadn’t thought of it like that before. The girl’s presence had always felt like a burden to her. A hindrance to clear thought and inner peace. But on reflection she saw how Yvette’s presence with her in the apartment had kept her from sinking into a despair so deep she would have shut the blinds and stared at the blank wall for an eternity.

  “It is good,” she agreed.

  Beside her the brass dallah full of coffee disappeared. The canopy and lamps disintegrated. The hassock beneath her collapsed so that she had to float to her feet. The old one’s pipe turned to smoke, followed by the jinni himself. Sidra stood for a moment in the dark with only the faint lamplight from her borrowed lantern to illuminate her thoughts. It was good, she convinced herself. It would have to be. For she knew what Jamra was coming for in addition to her life.

  CHAPTER SIX

  They laid Jean-Paul on a sofa in the salon with a pillow for his fevered head, a blanket for his body, and a sprig of rosemary tied to
an amethyst crystal tucked inside his jacket pocket. Though she didn’t know what good it would do, Elena spoke a protection spell to keep Jean-Paul from further harm, then squeezed Brother Anselm’s hand in thanks for agreeing to stay and watch over him. Without time to consult The Book of the Seven Stars, she could do little to reverse the jinni’s magic. Fortunately, she believed she knew where to find Sidra. That fragment of information was the only leverage she had.

  “Thank you for letting my husband stay in the care of my friend,” she said to Jamra as he escorted her into the courtyard.

  “How do you keep a man like that as a friend?”

  Yes, to an outsider it would look strange for a witch and monk to have developed a friendship, but Brother Anselm was much like Jean-Paul—he didn’t shut his mind to the existence of the supernatural outside his own faith. Well, not anymore. Both men had needed convincing at first. But she supposed their curious minds, convinced by the weight of undeniable empirical evidence, were predisposed to accept the truth in whatever form it took.

  “He’s a good man. Unlike some,” she said pointedly and marched toward the wine cellar. Elena had agreed to find Sidra and lead the jinni to her in exchange for Jean-Paul’s life, but she didn’t have to be cordial. She opened the door to the cellar and lit a lamp with a snap of her fingers.

  The jinni peered into the dark beyond her flame. “What is this place?”

  “It’s where we keep the wine. My workroom is also down there. I’ll require my spell book and a few supplies if you want me to find her,” she said without looking back. If he struck her down, so be it. But she wouldn’t suffer this jinni bullying her another moment.

  After he sniffed and gave his approval, Elena pressed her palm to the lock on the workshop door at the bottom of the stairs and whispered, “Vinaria.” The door swung open with a creak. Inside, she ran her finger quickly over her jars of herbs, bits of dragonfly wing that had nearly crumbled with age, and a pouch of salt. Yes, she might want to keep some of that with her. But what else?

  “Why do you need a book of spells? Isn’t your being your source of magic?”

  Is that how jinn magic worked?

  “No, I . . . witches are merely a conduit for the energy they express, though I can call up the magic I need as readily as if it were a part of me. It’s just that some spells are more complicated than others. They require the right combinations of words and offerings to conjure the desired outcome. To pinpoint Sidra’s location, I may need an additional spell to bolster my ability to track her.” A lie.

  Jamra picked up the grimoire on her worktable to inspect the contents. Elena made a silent plea for the book to behave while in his hands. She also hoped the jinni’s touch wouldn’t singe the poor thing’s edges. She’d accidentally dropped it once near the kitchen stove, and the book didn’t let her open its pages for a week.

  He turned the grimoire over, unimpressed, and handed it back to her. “Collect what you need to find Sidra. Quickly. We are already losing time.”

  “Of course,” she said and slid the spell book inside her leather satchel, which she slung over her shoulder.

  The only thing she truly required was Yvette’s hairpin, which Minister Durant of the Lineages and Licenses office had returned to her when he no longer held any sway over her future. Elena removed it from the drawer, along with a handful of items she thought might come in handy, including her athame, and slipped them inside her bag.

  The jinni rested his hand on her forearm. The heat of his touch penetrated to the bone. “I say again, cooperate and your man will recover. Deceive me or defy me and he will die. Let’s go.”

  Jamra stole a bottle of wine from the cellar before forcing Elena back into the courtyard and ordering her to do her magic. She hesitated to enter the shadow world with him standing so near. She was exposed and vulnerable while her vision was elsewhere, but it was the only way to know for sure if Sidra and Yvette were in the Fée lands as she suspected. If her vision would even let her see that far.

  If not, there was always the athame. As far as she knew, jinn bled as readily as witches.

  She took a seat on the bench by the door where Jean-Paul often kicked off his muddy boots before entering the house. She ought to remove a few items from her satchel besides the hairpin, she supposed, to make it look more like a spell, so she set a calcite crystal and feather on the bench beside her. With the jinni watching her every move, she closed her eyes and concentrated on Yvette’s hairpin. A buzzy sort of energy danced against her palm, encouraging her to follow its trail.

  Soon her mind’s eye opened in a meadow near a stream. A grove of trees with standing stones in the middle of a clearing came into view. Two chairs made out of bent branches posed beside a stone font. But no one was there. The forest was eerily quiet. No birdsong, no rustle of leaves. She felt hot breath that reeked of charcoal on her neck and for an instant thought she should reel herself back in, but then a woman approached at the edge of her vision. She wore a metallic-green gown that reminded Elena of the beetle shells she sometimes collected near a rotting log on her walking path. The woman’s shimmering gown floated just above the periwinkles poking out of the earth. On her head she wore a crown made of tiny seed pearls and dragonfly wings, and around her neck hung a silver chain bearing an agate stone no bigger than a thumb. The woman’s eyes glittered when she smiled.

  “Welcome,” she said, staring straight at Elena as if she were truly standing in front of her. “I’ve been waiting for your arrival.”

  “Titania?” Elena couldn’t be certain if she said the name out loud or not.

  The fairy queen nodded, then looked past her as if meeting another’s gaze. The sparkle she’d carried dimmed, replaced by a hard glint full of warning. For the briefest moment her countenance changed from ineffable beauty to something wraithlike and threatening. But it was only a flash before she was herself again.

  The heat on Elena’s neck flared at the sight. Jamra. A nasty trick by the jinni, piggybacking on her vision. She’d have to cleanse with salt for a week to get the trace of him out of her mind. Titania had seen him and somehow made him withdraw with her brief, bizarre transformation. Was this queen’s power strong enough to make the jinni take flight? The women exchanged half smiles in the shadow world as their minds met on the same ground.

  “Yvette and her guest are no longer here,” said the queen, anticipating the reason for Elena’s intrusion.

  So, she’d been right about Sidra escaping to the Fée lands with Yvette. That would explain how she’d slipped through Jamra’s binding spell. He’d been careless after all by restricting his spell to the earthly realm. Pity for him, but good for resourceful Sidra for figuring a way out.

  Elena was about to ask the fairy queen if she knew where the two had gone when Titania held a finger to her lips.

  “I do not know the mortal place-name, but I can show you. She and my granddaughter are there together,” she said and held out her sleeve. Elena reached out with her spirit hand, and soon her mind was flying over fields of flowers that grew in neat agricultural rows. Fields of roses, lilacs, irises, violets, and jasmine. Though her body was not truly there, the heady scent of the flowers intoxicated with their magnificent fragrance as she breathed in the southern air between mountain and sea.

  As soon as the place was fixed in Elena’s mind, the scene faded at the edges. Her sight was at its limit. Titania, perhaps sensing their connection was nearly undone, made a request. “My granddaughter was hastily sent abroad before I could fully inform her of the risk.” The queen looked from side to side as if checking for another’s presence. “Please, you must warn them.”

  The connection quickly failed. Elena gasped for breath as she was yanked home to her own time and place. Waking from her trance, she swayed on the bench as she acclimated to her physical surroundings again.

  Jamra stood before her, his arm outstretched as if he’d summoned her back with his jinni magic. He relaxed his fingers and rested his arms behind his b
ack. “The witch queen told you they were not there, so why did you stay with her?”

  “How did you go there with me?”

  He leaned forward, his gaze uncomfortably piercing the space between them. “Jinn are master travelers of the mind, able to see into the dimensions of thought when left unguarded.”

  His boast unnerved her. But, thank the All Knowing, he’d backtracked out of the vision before the rest was revealed. She could tell him anything, lead him anywhere. Though she had not seen Sidra in her vision, she now knew the jinni had gone to the southern province where the perfume witches made their famous scented concoctions. Titania claimed she would also find Yvette with her. But why had they gone there?

  Elena had to think quickly. “I know her granddaughter,” she said, standing and straightening her skirt. “I helped her reunite with her family in the Fée lands. Titania wished to thank me for my assistance.”

  “But where is Sidra? The witch queen must know where they went.”

  “Why the city?” Elena asked abruptly.

  “What?” He looked at her as if she were a gnat that kept buzzing in his nostrils.

  His annoyance was growing. She needed to be careful. “That’s where you set your trap for Sidra. So why there? Why the city? Why were you so certain she would show up there, of all places?”

  “Because it is where I sometimes live so that I may observe the ways of mortals. The spell was as much for my protection as it was to ensnare her.”

  “You thought she’d come looking for you?”