by Tim Pratt
“He didn’t leave me his memories, Trey, but he left me this book. It’s got…wow. Instructions, I guess. Or maybe incantations. So I have access to his knowledge, at least some of it, but it’s not embedded in the snake’s nest of neuroses and delusions and ambition that made up the rest of his mind.”
“That’s something, then. It seems like you’ve got some homework ahead of you.”
I made a face. “I was always terrible at homework. I was a big believer in learning just enough to do whatever I needed to accomplish right at that moment.” I kept flipping through the book. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there’s a spell in here for ‘make my crazy half sister chill the fuck out,’ so I think I’m still going with my original plan.”
“You never said what that was, but I can guess. Beg, cajole, and threaten?”
“Maybe not in that order, but yeah.” I flipped to the index, looking for the Firstborn’s name, but there was no page number, of course. “She’s still in the mirror. I’ll be back.”
“Wait, Bekah, maybe you should think this—”
I turned to the page with the picture of the mirror and tapped the page before Trey could give me all his reasons to delay. He didn’t get it. I had my father’s magic now—I felt pretty badass. I was chock-full of raw power and I had a wizard’s cloak and a magical book. Sure, the magic wouldn’t work inside the sanctum, but I figured I could kick off the rocks we’d piled on the mirror and let the Firstborn out, then dazzle her with my newfound majesty. Once she realized she couldn’t win, maybe she’d back down, and if she didn’t, I’d make her.
Overconfidence, thy name is Bekah Grace.
#
It’s a good thing I didn’t take Trey with me, because he would have died fairly quickly, or at least had a very unpleasant few seconds before I transported him back home. I materialized right next to the mirror, which was conveniently located at the bottom of a subterranean lake. Our little trick of piling stones on top of the mirror hadn’t done much to slow her down, apparently. Maybe there were enchantments in place to keep the inhabitants from being trapped inside—that seemed like the sort of situation my paranoid father would have planned for. My sister had gotten free at least long enough ago to make this nasty preparation for my potential return.
Maybe her cavern home was underground-lake adjacent. Everybody likes waterfront property. I wasn’t at deep oceanic-crush depth, but it was cold—I could feel the cold, though it didn’t bother me with the coat on—and I was far below the surface, where it was lightless and disorienting. Despite the total darkness, I could see the mirror, glowing with a pale golden light. Wizard-vision wasn’t as useful as night vision would have been, but it got the job done.
The book in my hands didn’t instantly turn into a mass of soggy pulp—the advantage of paper soaked in magic, I guess. And I could breathe, thanks to the jacket’s limited life-support powers. I considered going back home, but I was here, and running away because I’d gotten a little soggy would just be postponing the inevitable. I was pigheaded enough to try to follow through with my plan.
I kicked and flailed toward the mirror, not able to swim properly because of the book clutched in my hands. I touched the glass, and the mirror pulled me in and dumped me out in the sanctum, sopping wet and freezing, as the jacket’s miraculous properties abruptly stopped working in the sanctum’s magic-deadening interior.
The room was full of yellowish-green gas, stinking of chlorine, and I gagged and then held my breath. The Firstborn sat cross-legged in the middle of the room, looking alien and creepy in the poisonous mist, wearing a World War I–era gas mask. As she lifted the shotgun in her lap, I flopped backward, still holding my breath, and touched the mirror. It sucked me through and dumped me back into the water. The shotgun loads passed through the mirror after me, bouncing off my body harmlessly now that my jacket’s magic worked again.
My wise and considered reaction to that turn of events was to think oh fuck oh shit oh shit oh fuck and flail around in the water like a drowning cat. I’m lucky I didn’t drop the book.
Clearly the Firstborn had learned her lesson about the need to arm herself inside the sanctum. She’d set a nice little trap for me, and if I hadn’t been wearing the jacket it would have worked just fine—I would have had my choice of drowning or being gassed and shot. I bobbed in the lightless depths and flipped open the book, which also had its own magical glow—just light enough to read by—and found the page that would take me home.
I landed on the carpet in the living room, damp and reeking of chlorine gas. Trey must have heard me groan, because he ran in and knelt to check on me.
“I’m fine, I’m fine.” I struggled upright, spitting out a few drops of foul water.
“I take it your talk went well.”
“She didn’t let me get a word in, just tried to murder me. Poison gas doesn’t leave a lot of room for fruitful conversation.” I shook my head. “I think I pissed her off when I rescued the Trips. She doesn’t just want to take my inheritance now—she wants to take me out.”
He could have gone with “I told you so,” and I couldn’t have blamed him, but instead, he simply asked, “So what do we do?”
I pondered my awesome, vast new powers for a moment, and then looked up at him.
“I have no goddamn idea.”
“When in doubt, eat,” Trey said, and went into the kitchen.
#
We sat on the porch eating turkey sandwiches and pondering our dolorous lot. “I think I can literally move mountains, but that doesn’t help me deal with the Firstborn. I don’t know what to do now.”
“Toss a hand grenade through the mirror.”
“She’s mentally ill, Trey. Raised by a crazy sorcerer, traumatized, abandoned, and with a soul stretched out and full of holes. You really think I should try to kill her? Did you drown kittens as a kid?”
“No, but kittens never posed an existential threat to me. Kittens never put me in a place where someone basically had to bring me back to life. I like kittens. As for the Firstborn…” He let the pause hang there, but I didn’t say anything, so he pressed his point. “Listen, you could make an argument that getting rid of the Eldest is just self-defense. She’s out for your blood. Also all your other bodily fluids, skin, and internal organs, too. I’m sure she wouldn’t say no to the powdered remnants of your bones, either.”
I shook my head. He was about to protest, but before he could say something, I said, “I’m sure there’s a legal argument to be made, that she poses an existential threat, and my brain agrees with you—but I don’t think that does anything to convince my soul. My father’s approach was to crush his enemies—I’d really rather not go that same route. Besides, the hand grenade idea wouldn’t work—because it wouldn’t do anything to her soul. Hurting her body is one thing, but her soul is another, and as far as I know it’s hidden away in a stone or an egg or something, and not even she remembers where. I could cause her pain, sure, but I couldn’t kill her.”
“So we track down her soul—there must be a way to do that, with all the power you have, some spell of divination or location in The Book of Grace—and smash it, and then do the hand grenade…”
“No. I’m not an assassin, Trey. Unless killing her is the only way to save myself, and there are absolutely no other options, I can’t see going that way. With this power I’ve got now…if I start thinking the easiest way to deal with my problems is just wiping those problems off the face of the earth, I can actually do it. My father was a monster, more often than not. With this kind of power, I can see how he got that way. That’s not my path. The easy way is often the bad way.”
He sighed. “I get that. I don’t like the idea of killing people, either. I had to help bury your brother, and I’m going to have nightmares about that for a long time. I don’t regret my part in that—I did it to save you—but it’s still ugly stuff. I just don’t want you to die, Bekah. I know you don’t need my protection…but I feel pretty protective an
yway.”
It was good to know that protectiveness wasn’t just the magical compulsion talking. “The thing is, I don’t think the Firstborn can kill me, not now that I’ve taken on our father’s power—not easily, at least. As long as I don’t go blundering blindly into a place where magic doesn’t work and she’s got a shotgun. At the same time, she’s more than just a nuisance. I can’t have her dogging me for the rest of my life. I’d never be able to relax.”
“How about this, then. You teleport back to the mirror, while she’s still inside the sanctum. You grab the mirror, and then you teleport to, I don’t know. The moon. Or Pluto. Then you leave the mirror there, and the Firstborn never bothers you again. Didn’t Hannah say the Firstborn can only teleport in short little hops? She won’t be able to come back from the outer edge of the solar system, then.”
I stared at him. “That’s…”
“A prison sentence.” He shrugged. “Not a death sentence—she won’t age inside the sanctum, or get hungry, or anything, right? It’s a place outside of time. It’ll just keep her from doing any more damage.”
“Solitary confinement in a small room for eternity without even the sweet release of death to look forward to? I think it would be more merciful to kill her.”
He leaned back in his chair, and to his credit, he didn’t look a bit annoyed, just thoughtful. “So killing her is out, and imprisoning her is out, and she won’t listen to reason…” Suddenly, he leaned forward, intent. “All right, then how about Plan F, or whatever letter we’re on. You have your father’s power now. Presumably that includes the ability to compel people to obey you. I speak from experience when I say that kind of magic is pretty effective. Do you think you could learn how to entrance the Firstborn, and just order her to leave you alone? Cast a supernatural restraining order?”
“I’ve got a philosophical objection to mind control,” I said. “But it might be the least-bad option. She can still live her life, as long as she doesn’t try to screw with mine. The problem is figuring out how to do it, and getting close enough to her to work the magic without her trying to cut off my head with a machete or something.”
“The answer to part one is probably in The Book of Grace, and part two…we can work it out. Lure her, somehow.”
I snorted. “Sure. Plant a fake obituary for me in the newspaper, that’d bring her running to ransack the house.”
“Heh. If it comes to that, I know a guy at the paper.”
“I should start researching. A spell of compulsion probably requires wing of bat and a white hair from the muzzle of a virgin wolf and the noise a cat makes when it moves and frog hair and all that.”
Trey reached over and took my hand. “We’ll get through this, Bekah. You’ll get your life back.”
“With luck, I’ll get a whole new life,” I said.
#
Trey went home, and I started reading. It didn’t take that long to find what I needed, and it turned out to be sort of obvious in retrospect.
The only problem with the magic was the fact that it wouldn’t work.
#
I met Trey for brunch at a cute little place not far from campus, and even though it was a brisk fall day we sat outside on the patio, because it was more private, and we had to talk about the kind of stuff that makes you sound insane if you’re overheard.
“The candle that entranced you,” I said, pausing in my methodical demolishment of a pretty decent eggs benedict. “The flame isn’t just a shiny thing, good for captivating people and making them stand still for a while. Fact is, anyone who looks at the candle falls into a suggestible state, and you can plant a compulsion in their mind.”
“Great! So we just show the light to the Firstborn, and then you tell her to leave you alone?” He was eating a bowl of granola and yogurt, because he’s a giant weirdo who hates deliciousness, I assume. Proof no man is perfect, right there.
“Unfortunately, no. My father wrote in the book that he, personally, was immune to such compulsions himself, because he’d put his soul away for safekeeping. It turns out that the compulsion gets its hooks into your spirit, the substance of your self, and since that essential substance wasn’t in his body anymore, he couldn’t be compelled by that kind of magic—trying to cast a geas on him would be like trying to put a fishhook into a snowball.”
“So look in the index of The Book of Grace and find the Firstborn’s stone—”
I shook my head. “Tried that. Surprisingly—or not—‘Firstborn comma soul egg’ is in the index, but there’s no page number. Hiding your soul away wouldn’t work too well if people could find your soul, after all. The same kind of magic that hides the contents of the sanctum from The Book of Grace hides away her soul. The egg is probably like a little sanctum in miniature.”
“So we’re screwed?”
“Not necessarily. I know what I need to do, so it’s just a case of figuring out how to do it…and I’ve got an idea for tracking down her soul. Come back to my place after we’re done here and keep me company?”
#
“I’ll only be gone a second,” I said. “Subjectively it might seem like many hours to me, but for you, only a second.”
“Do you think I’ll look good in black and white?” Trey leaned against the kitchen counter beside me. “You know, classy? Like a film noir hero?”
“Those guys were all alcoholics with intimacy issues. Be careful with your role models.” I stirred the spoon in the coffee mug, and this time, instead of just letting the vision take me wherever it wanted, I tried to steer…or, at least, make my will known.
Show me the Firstborn, I thought. When she put her soul away.
Color bled from the world, and the walls melted away, replaced by trees, but not the pines that surrounded my house. These trees were leafless, with white bark, and snow shimmered on the ground. It was a landscape well suited to black-and-white viewing. I listened, and heard a crunching sound off to the left. Soon my oldest sister appeared, walking with snowshoes, breath puffing little clouds into the air. She held a wooden cigar box in her hands.
My sister was a lot younger than I’d expected—almost as young as she’d appeared in the pictures in the photo album, maybe fourteen or fifteen. She was on the gangly side of willowy, and wasn’t dressed anywhere near warmly enough for the weather, wearing an ugly prairie dress and wool stockings.
She was just a girl—one who needed someone to take care of her, and didn’t have anyone to do the job. I wondered how long ago our father had abandoned her.
I followed her—every step leaving deep indentations in the snow, which disappeared as soon as I lifted my foot for the next step—as she threaded her way through the trees. She clearly had a destination in mind. After a while, she reached it: a low wall made of fieldstones, the kind of good fence Robert Frost wrote about. She knelt and fiddled with something, then withdrew a stone from the wall, revealing a recess inside. She opened up the cigar box, full of wadded-up toilet paper she’d used to cushion a small, greenish egg, speckled with brown spots. I wondered if it was a blue-jay egg.
The Eldest Daughter lifted up the egg carefully, then wrapped it in layer after layer of paper from the box. Once she had a fist-sized wad, she slipped the padded egg into a leather bag and tied the drawstrings closed. She put the bag into the hole and fitted the stone back over it, making the wall whole again. I took a close look at the loose rock: it was darker than the others, and speckled with little sparkling flecks.
Great. So her life was hidden in a stone wall…someplace. A place with birch trees and snow. That narrowed it down, but not enough. She couldn’t have hidden it in the Empire State Building, or underneath a convenient street sign, at least?
I took out my phone, hoping the magic would cooperate and give me usable GPS coordinates for this place, but alas, as far as modern technology was concerned, I was still in Meat Camp.
I followed the Firstborn back across the snow until we reached a road, where a beat-up hatchback was parked on the shoul
der. I didn’t believe she was old enough to drive, but I guess being the daughter of a sorcerer and a forest spirit means not worrying about that kind of minor illegality. The car had Vermont plates, which helped. Assuming she hadn’t chosen a hiding place too far out of her way, I had a ballpark idea of where I was in the country. Didn’t narrow things down much, but every little bit helped.
I considered trying to get into the backseat, to ride along with her and see where she lived, and what her life was like. But I had a pretty good idea anyway: grim, and lonely, and increasingly desperate since Father had deserted her for his own asshole reasons.
Sympathizing with my sister further wasn’t going to help me do what was necessary, so when she got into the car and drove off, I didn’t even watch her leave. I settled for walking along the country road until I found a little wooden church with an epic steeple, and took note of the name on the sign out front.
I closed my eyes for a moment, thinking, Cup. No idea if it would work, but—
When I opened my eyes, I was back in the woods where I’d started, with the cup waiting, hovering in midair. I turned the spoon sunwise and the trees shimmered, replaced by my kitchen walls.
Trey hadn’t moved a millimeter. “You’re back?”
“Yeah. How do you fancy a romantic weekend in Vermont? I hear they’ve got good bed and breakfasts—”
Something twinged in the back of my head—I guess taking on magic gave me spidey-senses, too—and a cast-iron skillet on the stovetop flew into the air, passing in front of the window. The window glass broke, and the skillet shattered—seriously, like it was a ceramic plate smashed with a hammer—and shards landed all around us.
“Down!” I shouted, diving at Trey. We hit the ground together just as another gunshot cracked, shattering one of the cookie jars on the counter. I hadn’t heard the first shot, but some enhanced magic capability in my reptilian backbrain had sensed the danger and tried to stop the bullet with the frying pan. Who knew a bullet could shatter cast iron? At least it had served to deflect the shot from hitting me or Trey.