The Conjurer (The Vine Witch)

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The Conjurer (The Vine Witch) Page 21

by Luanne G. Smith


  “Stop. What are you doing?” Jamra wrapped his arms tighter around Yvette.

  Yanis and Elena exchanged a look of disbelief before he replied, “Hariq, but how are you here?”

  Hariq?

  “Witch, do you have your spellfire?” Hariq asked.

  “I said stop!” Jamra grew jittery, taking a step backward and pulling Yvette with him. “Why do you address them in such a manner?”

  Elena snapped her fingers and a flame appeared in her palm. “I have my fire.”

  Titania matched Jamra’s retreat, closing the distance with him as though she floated on the air. “Release my granddaughter,” she ordered.

  Jamra blinked and looked from Hariq to Titania. “No.”

  Behind them, Yanis drew his symbols on a square of paper. He nimbly made a mark on each corner, then drew a circle around them but left an open space in the middle.

  Hariq had to know his brother’s true name. It was the only way. Elena mouthed to Jean-Paul to find her a bottle. Something small. While he skirted the broken glass in the shop to search for a container, the sorcerer slipped a blade of sweetgrass loose from his braided bundle and tied a knot in it.

  Titania continued to stare down Jamra, outwardly unafraid of him or his magic. “Do you really wish to say no to me, little jinni?” She let mockery slip into her voice as her face contorted into a ghoulish mask of gray skin with black eyes and fangs dripping with red saliva. “I have walked in your dreams with this face when your heart yearned to be a purveyor of fear and destroyer of peace.”

  “Get away from me, you hag!”

  “But really just a little boy afraid of the creatures in the night,” she said, advancing. “Cowering under your covers. Crying out when the nightmares descended.”

  “I’ll snap her fairy neck, I swear it!”

  Titania let the mask fall away again and clapped her hands together sharply. “Concentrate, Yvette. A fool like this cannot hold a daughter of the Fée lands.”

  Yvette, her eyes still wide with shock at what she’d seen her grandmother become, stopped struggling against the jinni. “Merde!” She closed her eyes and shimmered into a gold mist and slipped out of Jamra’s grasp, transmuting on the far side of the room.

  The jinni pushed up his sleeves. He blew fire across his fingertips, and a pair of ifrit flew to the broken window as if summoned like a pair of hounds. Their eyes blazed as they stalked the fairy queen.

  Hariq flinched, ready to fight, though Titania stood remarkably at ease even as the first of the fire demons prepared to lunge. With barely a finger twitch, the fairy queen flung the iron ring that had been around Yvette’s neck at the window. The band transformed in the air, becoming an iron bar that flew through the window and impaled the ifrit who’d tried to jump. The beast shrieked as the metal eviscerated his fiery core, his insides oozing onto the windowsill like lava, where it cooled and turned to lumps of stone. Outside, the second ifrit screamed in fury but did not cross the threshold, where the fairy queen’s magic still lingered.

  Jamra crouched and backed away. Titania advanced, daring him to lash out at her.

  Hariq called to the sorcerer. “He is called Shayik. Quickly!”

  Yanis scratched the name in the center of the circle on the paper. He placed the knotted blade of grass on top, folded the paper, and nodded to Elena. She relit the flame in her hand and held it forward as he sang the words of a spell in his native tongue.

  “A curse on you all!” Jamra screamed and dissipated from the physical world into the ether.

  Yanis hovered the paper over the fire, letting it catch. “You must follow him.”

  As the smoke rose, coiling like a snare, Elena doused her fire and sank into a trancelike state to let her mind walk in the shadow world. She found him there, sensing his invisible energy thrashing about in anger. Somewhere in the physical world a mirror fell from a wall and broke. Ceiling plaster cracked and popped. A door came off its hinges. Elena refocused her mind and chased Jamra’s reckless energy. He was fleeing quickly. Before he could vanish to the farthest reach of her vision, she spoke his name, his true name, the one that would bind him. The smoke from Yanis’s spell floated beside her through the ether, following the projection of her voice until the name perched in the jinni’s ear. The spell-smoke found him, bound him, and held on.

  Now Elena grasped the rope. She reeled herself back to consciousness, pulling the jinni with her. He attempted to resist, but the binding had rendered him weaker than a newborn lamb. Returned to the physical world, she opened her eyes. The smoke from Yanis’s spell twisted in the air before her. Jean-Paul held out an opaline glass perfume locket he’d taken from the lobby display. Cupping her hands over the miniature vessel, Elena directed the smoke to flow into the mouth of the locket. When the last wisp disappeared inside, Elena put the cap on and screwed it shut. The glass warmed from the heat of the jinni’s temper trapped inside, so she let it dangle from her fingers by its chain.

  The jinni who wished to command chaos in the world now ruled an empty chamber scented with an old woman’s rosewater.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Warmth filled Sidra’s veins, not with the welcome heat of a crackling fire, but with the damp, muggy oppression of a humid day. Like a wet rag that needed wringing, her body was sluggish to respond to her thoughts.

  At last her eyes opened, yet something still weighed heavily on her sight. A stone. On her forehead. She palmed the stone—oddly veined like a salamander’s skin—and sat up. Across the room, the witch, the one who made wine, held a tiny bottle on a chain as a trail of smoke poured into it. Where was Jamra? Where was the sorcerer? And the dagger?

  Wasps took wing inside her head. She wasn’t seeing straight. Jamra stood only a few feet away, but his clothes had changed and he smelled of oud. Somehow the fairy queen had appeared too. She shimmered beside him, her eyes following the smoke into the bottle. Sidra checked her head for blood or a tender spot. She felt no lasting physical damage or pain—that is, until the girl shrieked in her ear.

  “You’re all right! Look, everyone—she’s awake.” Yvette scrambled across the marble to squat beside her. “He’s gone. They got him. Jamra’s been trapped.”

  Sidra knew she’d heard the girl correctly, yet she couldn’t reconcile her words with what she saw. Jamra stood clearly before her. His hair was longer and his beard fuller, but it was him. Who else could it be? His head turned to follow the girl’s words. He lunged toward Sidra. Must she die on the floor at the hands of this camel’s ass? But instead of attacking, he knelt and swept the hair back from her face.

  “Habibti.”

  His face came into focus. His skin-and-bone face like a mortal’s. The one that had met her every morning since they’d married. She used to run her hand through his long hair as the dawn light revealed the glints of red and gold strands in the ebony curls. But that man could not be here. Hariq was dead.

  The man took her hand and bowed his head. “There is much I must explain,” he said. “And may I earn your forgiveness in the telling.”

  “You’re alive?” She did not know until that moment that elation, confusion, and anger could be intimate bedfellows under one coverlet. “How are you here? Is this sorcery? Did Yanis do this? Has he made a deal with Mother Ghulah and the dead?”

  “Sidra, listen to me,” Hariq implored, but she ignored him, her emotions too unsettled to even know how to look at him without becoming dizzy.

  She backed away and rose to her feet. The wasps in her head swarmed. She pushed up her sleeves, needing to unleash a storm of magic. She didn’t know what kind or at whom; all she wanted was to cast pain back upon the confusing world she’d awoken to. Unable to hold it in, she shot the stone in her palm across the room as if by gunfire, shattering the terra-cotta planter with the potted palm in it. The tree toppled to the floor.

  She marched across the floor to the pile of broken bottles, nudging the mess away with her toe. “Where is Jamra? He must be stopped.”

&
nbsp; “We got him,” Yvette said. The girl pointed to the locket in Elena’s hands, the one that she wasn’t sure had been illusion or not.

  Elena held the necklace up by the chain as proof. “Hariq gave us his true name. Yanis bound him inside.”

  “We both did,” said the sorcerer.

  Sidra held out her hand, supporting the perfume locket so it rested against her fingers. Prickling heat snapped against her skin through the glass. “And the dagger?” she asked, meeting the sorcerer’s eyes.

  “As far as we know, it’s still safe.”

  “Here it is.” Yvette reached in her endless pocket and drew out a perfume bottle with a pair of crystal birds for a stopper.

  Elena balked. “You mean you really had it all along? I thought it was a bluff.”

  “I swiped this little beauty off the floor when he wasn’t looking. Knew the bottle was Sidra’s the minute I saw it.” She pointed out the dull finish on the filigree from where it had worn away from so much handling. “Not a chip anywhere.”

  Yvette. Usually such a clever girl.

  Hariq stroked the hair on his beard. “The dagger is in the bottle? But to think it could have been smashed on the floor and released. A very near miss.”

  Hariq. He truly was alive. But then where had he been hidden all this time? Why had he left her? Lied to her?

  “How are you here?” she asked as searing heat rose in her eyes. “Why do you call me habibti when you are the one who abandoned me alone to this fate?”

  He reached out to her but Sidra pulled away, not wanting to feel the heat of him against her. Not yet. Not while her mind still buzzed with the confusion of a thousand angry wasps.

  “I will tell you,” he said. “I will tell you everything. Please, just sit and listen.”

  The fairy queen interceded. “We haven’t yet finished this business with the dagger.”

  “It’s safe for the moment,” he told her, glancing at the intact bottle. “But first my bride must know the truth to put her mind at ease.”

  Hariq spread his fingers and waved his hand in front of the shop. Amid the broken perfume bottles and the potted palm lying on its side, he produced soft poufs for all to sit on. “Please, come sit.”

  Sidra took her perfume bottle from Yvette and sat with the crystal birds in her hands. It was true—the filigree decoration had tarnished from the months and years she’d treasured the gift. Holding it, admiring it, thinking herself the luckiest woman alive to have a man who made a scent just for her. The girl sat beside her and placed a hand on her back. She didn’t protest the touch or complain about the fair one’s soft glow that inexplicably rid her of the last of her soggy sluggishness. Nor did she mind when Elena sat on her other side and pressed a piece of amethyst into her palm.

  Hariq sat on his pouf opposite with his hands loosely clasped together between his knees. He didn’t avoid her eyes as he began. His voice, absent of the shrillness that so often accompanies excuses, remained calm yet commanding.

  “The plan was likely doomed from the beginning,” he said with a quick glance at Yanis. For the benefit of the others he added, “My wife and I have a complicated history with our families. There’s a feud between her people and mine. No one remembers how it started, yet neither side will relent. Those walls were built long before we came into the world and fell in love.” Hariq caught her in his sight again. “Our marriage was opposed. There was no place for us among our people. And the bickering from both sides, like ravens fighting over a dead mouse.” He made a gesture with his hands as if to throw it all away. “To be free of it we left, but perhaps you know all this?”

  Yvette nodded, knowing the story, as did Elena.

  “You are good friends for her to have told you,” he said with a light smile. “And you know, too, of the dagger and the responsibility we inherited to keep the sigil safe after it was discovered. And the new danger it introduced into our lives from my brother, Jamra.” He looked at his hands and wiped them on his thighs, as if he could rid himself of some unwanted feeling. “It’s why we decided to fool the world and pretend to be dead. To relinquish our association with the relic and free my brother’s mind, and anyone else, of the need to hunt for us any longer. But . . .” He stopped and braved a withering stare from Sidra. “To truly convince one as cunning as Jamra of the charade of death, we required the credibility only sincere loss and pain could bring. Which meant one of us must survive in ignorance of the truth. For that, we sacrificed honesty, with you, for deception.”

  Sidra’s eyebrow twitched. Her nose flared. Who was this “we” he spoke of?

  Hariq went on to describe how he’d diluted Sidra’s potion so that she would wake a day before him. He had to appear to the world to be dead. She had to take the blame in a lovers’ quarrel. That was the only outcome that would have convinced Jamra to accept the lie, because he was predisposed to already think her capable of such a thing, coming from the family she did.

  “In that way, we hoped to use the long-standing feud between our people to our advantage.” His brow tightened. “But when you thought me dead, you escaped with the dagger.”

  “To keep it safe.”

  “You flew to Jamra.”

  “To confront him. For foolishly thinking he’d somehow killed you, when all along it was a lie.”

  “The deception was necessary.”

  “I went to prison for your murder. They were going to take my head. I came this close to being executed for your game of lies!”

  “Never,” Hariq said. “I wouldn’t have let that happen. We had a plan to save you before the blade dropped. An illusion that would have left everyone, including Jamra, believing that you were dead by execution and the dagger lost forever.”

  She stood and shook her pleading hands in anger. “Who is this ‘we’ you keep speaking of?”

  Hariq, to his credit, absorbed her rage as one who knows he is deserving of the ire. “I will let him explain.”

  The warmth in the air shifted. The faint scent of turmeric and cumin wafted through the space as Rajul Hakim materialized beside Hariq. For the old one to animate outside his cave was exceptional, but Hariq showed no surprise at the jinni’s appearance. He got to his feet and welcomed their adopted clan leader with a quick bow before ceding his seat to him. The ancient jinni settled on his pouf, stroked his long beard out of habit, then produced his shisha. The old one never went anywhere without his pipe.

  Hurt, disappointment, astonishment—a whirlwind of uncomfortable emotions swirled inside Sidra at the sight of another she had trusted with her heart materializing before her. “You also conspired against me?”

  “Deception,” said the old one, “is sometimes a long, winding thing like a monkey’s tail.” He took a puff from his pipe, letting the smoke encircle his head as he spoke. “Without it to grasp the limb, one would fall from the tree. This I wish you to remember.”

  Elena and her husband exchanged doubting looks, but it was how Rajul Hakim spoke sometimes when he knew he had an audience. The witch bade Sidra to sit again and listen, despite the quirks of the old man’s theatrics. Her ears burned at the thought of listening to more of their lies. Still, she sat and allowed herself to fume.

  “We could not tell you our intentions. How would it have looked to one as shrewd as Jamra to have even one shred of falseness in your reaction?” The old one puffed on his pipe and squinted at her. “Our actions were cruel, but they were done to save your life and Hariq’s, so that you would not always be wondering when chaos would fall into the hands of one ready to cut open a seam in the world’s underbelly.”

  “We were prepared to intervene in the execution,” Hariq said. “But then you escaped your cell before we could carry out the last part of our plan.”

  “That would be my fault,” Titania said, rising to her feet to explain herself at Hariq’s side.

  Sidra got an uncomfortable knot in her stomach from seeing Yvette’s grandmother stand so close to her husband. How could they even be familiar
?

  “My granddaughter was to be reunited with her family on her sixteenth birthday. But her fate took a different turn.”

  Yvette hugged her arms around her waist, glowing softly as she nodded.

  Titania described how she’d kept track of Yvette after she’d run away, peering in on her periodically at the carnival she traveled with, in the hope a reunion could still be arranged. Then one day Yvette wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere. The fairy queen couldn’t find her even with the aid of Oberon’s vision. She’d simply disappeared.

  “It was only after a chance encounter with a bird, while I reclined beside a country stream, that I found you again. He perched on the branch above and sang the most interesting tale. He said he’d just spoken to a jinni inside a prison cell who’d fed him a daddy longlegs and a silverfish from her fingers. With her was a witch and a foul-mouthed, yellow-haired waif. Well, I suspected right away it was our Yvette.”

  “I do not have a foul mouth,” the girl said in her defense, to which everyone disagreed, nodding their heads in the affirmative.

  The fairy queen smiled, and radiant light shimmered around her. “The powerful rune magic employed by the jail had shielded her from my sight, but there was no mistaking her golden hair and, shall we say, colorful vocabulary.”

  “Mon Dieu.” Yvette covered the sides of her head with her arms as if she didn’t wish to hear any more.

  “So, a witch, a fairy, and a jinni together in a cell.” Titania pressed her hands palm to palm and touched her fingers to her lips, as if reliving the moment she’d contemplated what she could do with that information. “There had to be a way to work that combination to the best advantage.” Her eyes landed on Jean-Paul. “And then I found you, a self-assured mortal fellow,” she said. “You have no magic, and yet here you are, perfectly at ease with those around you.”

  “One of the side effects of falling in love with a witch,” he said.

  “I knew right away I could depend on you.” She leaned forward with one brow raised. “Shall I confess it was I who supplied the matches you found in your kitchen on the morning of your visit to the jail?”

 

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