Shotgun Sorceress

by Lucy A. Snyder

  “Girl …” a voice whispered.

  I turned toward the sound, the will to simply not look somehow beyond me. A golden-haired young man stood in the trees, slender and pale, dressed only in a kilt of sheer material that left just enough to my imagination. I felt a dizzying, primal lust for him; he was everything I found physically sexy about Cooper amplified and intensified a dozen times over.

  “Come here,” Golden-Hair said with a smile that made my legs turn to water. He knelt and plucked a dandelion and blew the feathery seeds at me. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  Cooper’s hand was growing slick with sweat. I glanced at his face; he was turning red as he stared at Golden-Hair, looking equally embarrassed and angry. “Don’t listen to her,” he whispered, pulling me along.

  “Don’t,” echoed Golden-Hair, suddenly appearing from behind a tree in front of us, his voice like wind-chimes. “Don’t just walk away … don’t you want to see what your man sees? Don’t you want to see what delightful things we could be doing, the three of us? All you have to do is take a little peek.”

  “Don’t listen to it,” Pal warned inside my head. “It’s a trick. Stick to the path, no matter what.”

  What are you seeing when you look at it? I asked Pal.

  “I’d rather not say,” he replied.

  Golden-Hair popped up in the wildflowers a few feet away from me, sitting cross-legged. “Boots? You wore nasty ol’ boots!” he cackled. “Who dressed you this morning, your father? He should have tied a bell around your neck, because you lumber like a dimwitted cow. I’ll bet your mother was some plow-pulling beast of burden your father turned into the shape of a woman after he couldn’t stop himself from rutting on her in the barn. I bet the Virtus Regnum cut her into steaks and ate her after they killed her.”

  He paused, staring intently at the trails of smoke curling from my opera glove. My pulse was pounding in my head despite my attempt to breathe slowly and stay calm.

  “Ooh, everyone hide, the cowgirl’s angry now! Stop chewing your cud and come over here! Show me who’s boss, Bossie. Come over and try to shut me up.”

  For a long second, I thought about taking him up on his offer. My ocularis was itching like mad, but the scarecrow’s warning stopped me from blinking for a better look, stopped me from leaving the path. We weren’t here for me to get into a fight and endanger everyone else.

  Golden-Hair kept after me, whispering seductions one moment and mockeries the next. I kept my gaze focused on the lost treasures embedded in the path: ancient drachms of Hermaeus and Menander, shining argentus nummus, Ottoman akçe and Indian rupees, mottled Liberty dollars, plus dozens of exotic coins stamped with the pale faces of dead kings I’d never seen in any book.

  Finally, the path ended at what at first looked like vine-covered walls, but then I realized that the vines were the walls. The front door was a tall, thick oval mat of purple-flowered clematis lianas hinged on living tendrils; it swung open with a swish of leaves and a creak of green wood, and we filed into the tavern, everyone looking relieved to be free of Golden-Hair.

  I quickly realized that the entire tavern was built from still-living plants enchanted or artfully cultivated to form a functional architecture, although certainly not one that had much use for straight lines and ninety-degree angles. The interior walls and floor were formed by smooth, densely woven strangler figs. Ivory-barked trees rose like support columns for the leafy ceiling high above us, and luminous bracket fungi growing on the trunks cast a soft golden light throughout the rooms and passageways. Redwood-size tree stumps served as tables, and the woody figs rose from the floor to form trestle benches and stools.

  The patrons seated at the nearby tables were dressed in antique finery from various eras; they scarcely gave us a second glance. Viewed straight on, they appeared perfectly human; glimpsed from the corner of my flesh eye, some became large insects, creatures of twisted bone, or strange fungal conglomerations. It was just a little unnerving.

  A tall, beautiful woman in a diaphanous Aegean-blue chiton stepped toward us. Maybe she floated; I couldn’t really see her feet. She was like a nymph straight out of Greek mythology: her glossy black hair was piled in ringlets atop her head, and her skin was sun-bronzed. Her eyes were the color of storm clouds rolling over the ocean. She glanced briefly at my backpack, but didn’t seem the least bit concerned about it.

  “Please follow me,” she said, her voice a rush of sea breeze through a mountain olive grove. “Your party awaits.”

  She led us through a winding passage to a room with an enormous tree-table. Riviera Jordan, dressed in a silver gown and shawl, sat on the opposite side of the table, flanked by six Governing Circle agents in crisp black tuxedos.

  “Y’all have a seat,” Riviera said, rising from her strangler fig bench. “We have a lot to talk about.”

  We took our places at the table. At each setting was a single white, highly polished plate; there were no glasses, no cutlery, no napkins. I at first assumed the plate in front of me was porcelain before I saw the fine concentric grain beneath the shine.

  “Wood?” I asked Cooper.

  “Probably,” he replied. “Or maybe some kind of gourd or tuber.”

  Riviera was busy looking over some papers in her lap, so as quickly and surreptitiously as I could, I lifted my plate and licked the edge.

  Instantly, I was standing on a windblown hill, rearing back to shake off the horrible jabbering prairie apes clinging to my shaggy fur, trumpeting my anger and frustration to the sky as one of them scurried between my front legs and jabbed a sharpened stick up between my ribs—

  —I managed to stifle a gasp as I came out of the death-memory.

  “It’s wooly mammoth tusk,” I told Cooper. “Very old.”

  “Oh. Wow.” He gazed down at his plate, looking impressed. “I’ll be careful with it.”

  And then I nearly dropped my plate when it spoke to me: “Now really, it doesn’t seem very useful to lick me before the food’s been served, does it?”

  An amused elfin face was staring at me from the surface of the plate. I quickly set it back down on the table.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I was just trying to see what you were made of—”

  “Rather nosy of you, don’t you think?”

  “I’m very sorry. I wasn’t expecting sentient tableware.”

  Plateface sighed dramatically and rolled its ivory eyes. “Apology accepted, I suppose. Beverage?”

  “What?”

  “A drink? You know, something liquid that helps the food go down and prevents unsightly choking?”

  “Oh. Uh. Water will be fine.”

  Another eye roll. “Boring, yet vague. Do you want it hot? Iced? Room temperature? Sparkling? Paris bottled? Detroit municipal? Dipped from a Mongolian horse trough and filtered through a wool sock?”

  I frowned. “I’ll take Evian natural spring water, no ice, forty degrees Fahrenheit.”

  There came a faint cracking noise from the table. A straight green tendril sprouted from the polished surface. It quickly formed a large bud that elongated and split open to unfurl a spiral of waxy lavender leaves that fused and rose up into a vaselike hollow flower. The remains of the bud shell thickened into a sturdy green calyx base supporting the flower, which quickly filled with a clear liquid.

  “Your water, mademoiselle,” said Plateface. “And for your meal you’d like …?”

  I blurted out the first thing that popped into my head; I suppose I was partly jonesing for more of what I’d had for breakfast and partly channeling my wish to escape: “A Monte Cristo.”

  Plateface sighed. “Still very, very vague. Do you want the whole sandwich dipped in batter and fried, or just the bread? And what kind of cheese?”

  “Just the bread … and Swiss. No, wait, Gruyère.”

  “Since you seem indecisive, I’ll give you both. And the usual assortment of condiments.”

  Plateface vanished, leaving me staring at the shiny blank ivory
.

  The table cracked again as a woody sprout erupted beside the plate. In the space of a few seconds, it grew into a small bush that produced one large red bud and three smaller purplish buds. The buds flowered into pretty blossoms that quickly shriveled, overtaken by swelling fruits covered in thick, veined skins. The big red fruit expanded like a balloon, steam rising from its green veins, until it ruptured with a pop! and a hot, sugar-dusted Monte Cristo sandwich toppled out onto my plate. The other, smaller fruits dropped off the bush beside the sandwich and split open, revealing what looked like strawberry jam, honey mustard, and clotted cream. A small branch I hadn’t noticed fell off the bush and dropped beside the plate; it had a single long, serrated, bladelike leaf at its tip, and I realized it was meant to serve as a dinner knife. A large, velvety leaf sprouted on the plant and fell beside the twig knife: a napkin.

  I’d been so focused on Plateface and my lunch plants that I hadn’t been paying any attention to how the others were faring. Beside me, Cooper was pulling the purple skin off a huge berry of shrimp carbonara; he had red wine in his drinking flower. The Warlock had a T-bone and a baked potato, and Mother Karen’s plant was dropping perfect little cucumber and smoked salmon tea sandwiches onto her plate. Pal was already gnawing on a large joint of some roast beast. Across the table, Riviera Jordan’s plant was growing and shedding a variety of leaves and vegetables to fill her plate with salad; her bodyguards had gotten burgers and other sandwiches.

  I nudged Cooper and pointed at the crispy bits of bacon scattered among the shrimp on his fettuccine noodles. “Aren’t you worried about getting a death vision off those?”

  “No more than you are, I guess.”

  “What?”

  He nodded at my sandwich. “That’s a Monte Cristo?”

  “Yes?”

  “Ham. Turkey.”

  I stared at it. “Oh, crap, I forgot. I only remembered it had cheese on it.”

  He laughed. “It’s faery food … I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  I cut my sandwich in half with the twig knife and blew on it to cool it a little. The bread was fluffy and moist under the crispy egg batter, and the inside was stuffed with cheese and turkey and shaved ham. I bit off a corner, expecting a kick of pain, but felt absolutely nothing. It certainly looked and tasted like meat, but I might as well have been eating a napkin for all the spiritual residue it contained.

  We finished our meals in relative silence. When most of us were finished, a handsome young man in a kilt of ivy leaves shuffled into the room. Each of his eyes was covered with a bright red poppy blossom, and his face was frozen in a smile. He began to uproot the spent dinner plants onto the dirty plates and clear the table. His hands moved fluidly one moment, jerkily the next.

  Mother Karen stifled a gasp when the young man took her plate; I gave her a quizzical look.

  “It’s Rick Wisecroft,” she mouthed at me.

  Her prodigal foster son? No wonder he’d left her house so abruptly. Clearly he’d crossed the wrong people. I watched him more closely as he gathered up my plate; he moved like a marionette, and I saw thin silver chains on his wrists.

  Mother Karen was staring at Rick, her face flushed, tears welling in her eyes; clearly she wanted to do something to rescue him from his slavery, but she couldn’t do anything without risking her own freedom and probably ours as well. I felt myself getting angry again. Given our warm reception in the woods, I doubted that getting Rick as our busboy was any accident. The seelies really seemed intent on provoking us. Part of me wondered how they’d cope with a little incendiary ectoplasm, but the rest of me considered Rick’s predicament and realized that was a bad, bad idea.

  Riviera Jordan stood up and rapped on the table for our attention. Her eyes flickered from Mother Karen to Rick; clearly she knew something was amiss, but I could tell from her expression that she wasn’t about to let it sidetrack the meeting.

  “Well, now, it looks like everyone has had a chance to finish the fine lunch our hosts have provided for us,” Riviera said. “And so it’s time to get down to bare boards, as it were.”

  She paused. “As head of the Governing Circle, my primary duty is to ensure the welfare of the Talented families under my jurisdiction. A large part of that involves enforcing the laws set down for us by the Virtus Regnum; that part’s usually pretty easy. But sometimes the law and our community’s welfare are at odds with each other … and that’s when things get difficult.

  “I was head of the Circle for over fifty years, but after half a century of being responsible for thousands of often-ungrateful lives, I was ready to spend some quality time in my garden. My nephew Benedict seemed to want the job, seemed to be entirely qualified to do it, so we all put it to a vote, and twelve years ago, he took the reins. Everything seemed to be going fine under his watch, until last week when some well-intentioned but frankly very poor decisions blew up in all our faces.”

  Riviera looked at me. “When I came into the house Friday night and saw what you’d done to Benny, I was ready to kill you on sight, my dear. When I saw what you’d done to Angus and Eugene in the alleyway, I was ready to clap you in irons and drop you to the bottom of the sea. But then the butler told me what he’d overheard and I learned about the babies … and I realized I needed to put my judgments back on the shelf until I had my facts straight. And you’re most fortunate, young lady, that you didn’t destroy my nephew’s mind completely, or else we’d have never been able to recover memories of his that cast your actions in a rather better light than we’d have ever guessed.”

  “I never meant—” I began, but she held up a hand to silence me.

  “Please let me finish; you’ll have your time to speak. This is a little difficult for me, and I want to get it all out here on the table.”

  She took a deep breath. “I told you I stepped down because I was tired. That’s not the whole truth. My son Reggie … you know that he killed himself, Jessie. And you know why, probably better than I do. I never laid eyes on the hell my brother Lake made for himself and his family, and that’s my failure, as a sister, a mother, and a governor. That’s my mortal sin, one I’ll carry to my grave.

  “The day Reggie died … well, I hope none of you ever feel the way I felt. I told myself I wasn’t fit to protect the city if I couldn’t protect my own son. And I crumbled, I simply crumbled. Benny told me that he would take care of everything, and I took him at his word. But instead of dealing with Lake’s hell, he simply kept covering it up.”

  “Didn’t you know that my brothers were trapped in the hell?” Cooper asked, sounding deeply suspicious.

  She shook her head. “Until you brought them back, I didn’t even know they’d been born. When Reggie took Benedict to the farmhouse and he discovered Lake and Siobhan dead in the basement and the blood in the ritual circle … Reggie misjudged what had happened. He never saw the other children; the devil had probably already pulled them into its realm. Or maybe he saw the babies but couldn’t bring himself to tell me about them. By then, the mundane authorities had found Cooper and his baby brother. Until last night, I thought the Warlock and Siobhan were the only sacrificial victims. Benny, it turns out, knew the truth from the beginning, but never told me.

  “I should have dropped everything to investigate my brother’s atrocities myself, but the Circle was in the middle of a crisis; several of the founding families were demanding we secede from the Regnum and withdraw entirely from the mundane world, and things were getting violent here,” Riviera said, then looked at Mother Karen: “You lived here then, didn’t you?”

  “That was a bad time for the city,” Mother Karen agreed. “A lot of children were orphaned. And so I hung up my wand and went into fostering full time.”

  “Your service to our community has been much appreciated,” Riviera said to her, then faced Cooper and me. “I was convinced that if the news of Lake’s madness became public, the secessionists would have turned it into a scandal to paint our whole family as closet necromancers.”
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  Riviera paused. “So I told my son to burn the farmhouse and stay quiet.”

  “What would have happened if the Circle had voted to secede?” I asked.

  “We would have gone to war with the Virtus Regnum,” she replied. “And we would have lost. Badly. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of people would have died. I had visions of entire families being wiped out.”

  “What happens now?” I asked. “Is Pal or Mother Karen or the Warlock in trouble for helping me? Am I going to jail?”

  “There are certainly a variety of local criminal charges that could be brought to bear,” Riviera replied. “But, having reviewed my nephew’s memories, it’s clear he abused his power in appalling ways. He evidently commissioned some kind of third-party psychological profile on you that convinced him that you would fold under pressure, and the more you didn’t do what he expected you to, the more he tried to force you … Well, he’s as much to blame for what happened as anyone, I think.

  “So, right now I’m not inclined to press any charges against any of you, provided y’all continue to work with me and the Circle in a good-faith effort to remedy the damage that’s been done. And, Jessie, seeing as you didn’t respond in anger against our hosts’ provocations on the silver path, I do have faith that we can work together.”

  I frowned. Had she set Golden-Hair on us—on me—as some kind of a test?

  Riviera must have read the change in my expression. “I didn’t ask our hosts to harass you, but I’ve been to Faery many times before and I know how they treat newcomers,” she said. “And I had to know that you’re able to rise above that kind of provocation when the situation calls for restraint rather than going in spells ablaze.”

  “But if I’d screwed up, we all might have been enslaved here,” I protested. “And what would have become of the kids back at Mother Karen’s house? You risked their safety just to see if I could ignore a Faery’s ‘yo mama’? Really?”