by Holly Evans
He grinned. “The captain of this fine crew, yes. You’d do well with us, and I believe you’d enjoy your time among our ranks.”
He’d leaned in again, his lips almost caressing my ear.
“What sort of woman do you think I am?” I asked.
I couldn’t keep the smile from my face. Any attempt at feigning offence I might have made was entirely shattered.
“The type who enjoys life,” he said.
Well, he wasn’t wrong there.
4
Prague was everything I’d hoped for and more. Beautiful red rooves filled the view below me, an array of spires striving towards the sky. It was one such spire that the captain landed our small airship on. The tinkers had done wonderful work making the platform blend in with the old gothic spire. The struts merged seamlessly with the dark stone beneath. It was a glorious day. Any concerns over exhaustion I may have had vanished with the gentle breeze. The delicate scent of lilac caught my attention. It had always been my favourite scent, and it felt like an omen to find it there.
“Come along, Miss Felis, I’m to deliver you to Mr. Thyrin,” a brunette woman about my age said.
She took control over my bags from Liam with an elegant swiping motion of her hand. She stood tall, her back straight, and her mouth in a firm line. The air elementals were known for their light attitude and fun-loving ways. She stood out, and that made me curious. I tucked the harpy feather away safely inside my jacket and walked up to the woman who stood a few inches taller than me, much like most beings.
“In a rush?” I enquired.
She looked down her small nose at me, her eyes storm grey and growing darker by the moment. “We have a schedule to keep.”
“Do lead the way, then,” I said.
The woman walked to the edge of the platform at an efficient clip and proceeded to form an air cushion beneath my feet with neither permission nor warning. I floated down to the ground at a quicker pace than Liam had made, although I landed softly and without harm. The woman was marching off down the narrow street without so much as a glance backwards to make sure that I was still following. The pavement suddenly changed to smooth cream, leaving behind the small stones in neat black and white patterns. I paused and looked around me.
The buildings shifted from simple cream walls with ornate decorations around the windows and trimming the red rooves to extravagant silver and black affairs. I hadn’t done any research into Prague. My travels had been focused around the Americas. It seemed that Prague was one of the rare cities that was partially magic born. What a wonderful discovery.
The air elemental stopped and turned to glare at me. “I’ve a schedule to keep, Miss Felis.”
I smiled sweetly and stepped over the threshold between the old city that had been formed on the natural-born Earth into that which had been created within the magical plane. Some time before I was born, something happened, no one knows exactly what, but there was a large shift. People refer to it as the falling of the veil, or the merging of the worlds. On one fateful day, the magical plane merged with our own, and that brought huge change. New cities were born, forged entirely on the magical plane. Magical beings popped up within our societies and cultures, the magical houses appeared. The world changed overnight, and no one blinked an eye.
There are many theories as to what exactly happened, but no one has quite pinned it down just yet. It was believed that the gods or some other incredibly powerful collection of beings wove a spell that tweaked the very consciousness of all who were involved to accept their new reality. People woke up with magic that they never knew was possible. It was an event I wish I could have witnessed. Still, I was glad to have been born in the time where the rough edges had been smoothed out and I could enjoy all the benefits that I had.
I caught up with the air elemental woman and followed her down the opulent street to the grand house at the end. The elemental gently placed my bags and such on the pitch-black floor outside the forest-green door at the front of the house.
“If you require transport again, please contact Sean or Liam,” the elemental said before she pivoted on her heel and positively marched away.
The door opened before I had a chance to use the simple brass knocker in the shape of three leaves. A distinguished elf stood before me, his hair the colour of freshly cut oak, his eyes a rich green, and his skin the colour of autumn sunshine, burnished and gemlike - ideal for blending in with the foliage. I’d only met one other wood elf in my life, and he didn’t compare to the man before me. The elf’s mouth curved up into an elegant smile that danced in his eyes.
“Miss Felis. Your uncle said you’d be arriving. I’m your new employer, Mr. Thyrin,” he said.
His voice was rich and melodic. I’d love to hear him sing. I smiled, more to myself than anything, before I regained composure. I held out my hand, eager to feel his magic.
“A pleasure to meet you. I’m afraid I jumped on the transport before I asked for any details about this arrangement,” I said.
Mr. Thyrin’s smile took on a sharp edge. He didn’t take my hand.
“Not to worry, I’m sure everything will be to your liking.”
A younger elf, she appeared to be eighteen or so, emerged from the shadows.
“If you’ll follow Mr. Thyrin, I’ll take your bags to your room,” she said.
She stood in complete contrast to my new employer. Her hair was pure white, her eyes the colour of northern ice and her skin the colour of fresh starlight. A snow elf. I hoped that they would allow me some questions. I hadn’t had many opportunities to study elves.
Mr. Thyrin gestured down the wide hallway. “If you’ll follow me, Miss Felis.”
He moved without sound over the burnished wood floors. People often forgot that elves were predators. I had no such fear with him.
5
“I have few rules in my house. Number one: You will keep your hands off Isla,” Mr. Thyrin said.
I’d followed him down a series of hallways, each covered in a different type of vine. I was completely lost in the heart of a predator’s den. Life would be horribly boring if we always played it safe.
“I trust Isla is the young woman I met a minute ago,” I said.
Mr. Thyrin inclined his chin just enough to acknowledge I was correct.
I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to be offended by his command. She wasn’t my type; as much as I’d love to question her about many things, I preferred my women to be out of college before I took them to bed.
“Secondly. Do not harm or move any plant in this house or the grounds upon which it sits.”
I nodded in understanding. That was unsurprising, but still a shame. I was sure that many of them had rather interesting alchemical potential.
“Finally, call me Fein. I may be your employer, but I’m also a friend of your uncle’s, and I’d rather we formed a friendly relationship,” he said.
The words didn’t quite match the hardness of his eyes.
Mr. Thyrin, Fein, opened the pale-silver wooden door before us to reveal the lab of my dreams. No, that wasn’t fair, it was better than I’d ever constructed in my fantasies. I fought to compose myself and retrieve my jaw from the floor as I stepped into the large room. Cupboards with clear glass fronts covered the walls, large lab tables evenly spread throughout the floorspace. I was at a complete loss for words.
“I trust it’s to your satisfaction,” Fein said.
I turned to face him and caught the smirk on his pretty mouth.
“Yes, I believe it’ll do just fine,” I said in what I hoped was a calm tone.
Inside I was dancing with glee. I stepped around the elf and looked more closely in the cupboards. They were bursting with top-of-the-range equipment and every ingredient I could possibly wish for, including some that I’d never seen in person. I couldn’t help running my fingertips over the smooth counter tops and giggling. It was absolutely incredible.
Fein cleared his throat. “As we’ve established your working conditions are
suitable, I have your first task for you.”
I spun around to face him and tucked my hands behind my back to stop myself from stroking the cupboards or something equally embarrassing. He covered the space between us with predatory efficiency. His eyes never left mine. My heart skipped a beat as my prey instincts kicked in. My feet rooted to the spot and my breath caught. Logically, I knew that he wasn’t going to harm me, but in that brief moment, that certainty fled.
He retrieved an ornate collar from his pocket and held it out to me. I could see the colours of the magic interlocking over and within the collar. There was alchemy there, but there was something else, too.
“You have twelve hours to devise a way to break the alchemy on this collar and produce something that can be applied to a number of people wearing said collar, quickly and safely.”
I looked between the collar and those leaf-green eyes, once again at a loss for words. I’d hoped to get a good night’s sleep before I began work, or at the very least to explore the lab fully and see what I had access to. I smiled politely and took the collar from him.
“I’ll start right away,” I said with false cheer.
Wispy buzzed in his cage groggily. Fein raised an eyebrow and looked down at him, seemingly seeing the wisp for the first time.
“Make sure to control your pet while on my premises. Isla will leave food on a spare table for you soon. I’ll be back in the morning,” Fein said as he turned.
He was standing in the doorway with the deep purple vines framing him when he turned back and said, “Do not fail me, Miss Felis.”
The hardness of his tone struck me and raised my hackles. I’d never been one to do well with authority. I smiled sweetly and reminded myself that the beautiful lab I was standing in was at stake.
“Of course not. My reputation was hard earned,” I said.
The elf inclined his chin before he closed the door leaving with nothing but the faint hum coming from Wispy. The exhaustion overwhelmed me almost immediately. I hadn’t slept in longer than I cared to admit. It was the quiet that really ate at me, though. There was no noise other than Wispy.
I walked around the room looking for some way to play music, a radio, something. Each wall was covered in pristine white cupboards with glass frontages. Elegant bottles and expensive silver equipment filled each cupboard to the brim.
“Oh, Wispy, what have I gotten myself into?” I asked as I slumped down on one of the remarkably comfortable lab stools.
The wisp rolled over in his small cage and buzzed in a low rhythmic pulse. He was snoring.
“Well, it’s alright for you,” I grumbled.
I unhooked his cage and placed it on the table I was leaning against before I began looking at the collar with some interest. It was a remarkable piece of craftsmanship. Whoever had constructed it had done so with great care and precision. The exhaustion slowly slipped away and was replaced by curiosity. That was what had gotten me where I was - my love of adventure and a good challenge. Life was too short to sit back and accept the mundane. There were far too many experiences to be savoured out in the world.
“Failure isn’t an option,” I told myself.
“You understand that your wisp won’t respond, don’t you?” a quiet feminine voice asked.
I looked up to see Isla placing a large tray piled with food on the table closest to the door. Her icy eyes bored into me, her small mouth pressed into a tight line. There wasn’t a scrap of humour within her.
I gave her my friendliest smile and a shrug. “Is there a way to play some music in here?”
She exhaled slowly and her gaze intensified into something close to a death glare.
“I’ll bring you a player,” she ground out.
“Well, she’s a charming individual,” I muttered to myself.
6
The collar certainly was an intriguing challenge. Isla had given me a music player, which I wasted no time in turning on and tuning to my usual music provider. Some of the tension slipped away when the music washed over the lab. Of course, that woke up Wispy with something of a jolt. He shot out of his cage and did a highspeed circuit around the lab while turning all sorts of interesting shades of yellow.
“Oh, stop being so melodramatic,” I said as I rolled my eyes.
The wisp puffed himself up to twice his usual size and flickered around the edges. I ignored him. He was just grumpy because his sleep pattern had been disturbed. The collar sat on the white bench before me. It had an interesting rose and lilac shine to it. The metal itself was ornate silver so pale it was almost white. The delicate threads had been twisted into swirling shapes that formed a thin choker-style collar with a heavy clasp at the back. The magic shifted under my touch and took on a faint haziness which made it more difficult to pick out the components.
“You want to play it like that, do you?” I asked out loud.
The thing about working alone most of the time is, you develop all sorts of odd quirks. I wasn’t even aware that I was talking to myself half of the time.
Wispy floated over and nudged the collar with the edge of himself. The collar sparked and burnt hot in response. I dropped it with a frown. Wispy skulked away and hid under a lab table.
“Oh, really,” I said to him.
I’d taken him around the world looking for artifacts, and he was sulking because of what? I chewed on my bottom lip. He was acting bizarrely. Perhaps the vines and such were bothering him. They were very different to his home habitat, and we didn’t usually have quite so much greenery around us.
“Come here,” I said gently and patted the lab table.
He couldn’t talk, but I quite enjoyed his company.
The wisp sighed, a soft sound much like a breeze running through long grass. I shook my head and left his cage open on the table near me. I had work to do. I couldn’t afford to spend all night coddling him.
Once again, I picked up the collar and slowly moved it around my hands. The magic within glowed with different colours and textures, much like a semi-transparent puzzle. Each colour and texture told me something about the magic that comprised it. The sharp lemon-yellow shard that sat at the heart, right between the twists of silver, must have come from a strong solar magic. The lemon rather than gold told me that it wasn’t pure sunshine, and that it related to the very essence of the wearer. The pale blue band that sat just behind the yellow tied into the wearer’s magic, and the emerald green spots bound it all tight so that no one could take it off. The ink magic that was buried behind it all seemed to relate to shadow. I didn’t know how they were going to break that. Of course, I could do it, but it would take me the minimum of a week, and it had been made clear that I didn’t have that time.
Wispy had returned to me during my inspection of the collar. I smiled and ran my fingers over the cool edges of him, happy to see him a little more settled.
“I’d be lost without you, you know,” I said to him.
He gave a quiet humming sound of acknowledgement. No one could claim that he lacked in confidence or ego.
I tied my hair back into a ponytail. As much as I loved my long red curls, I couldn’t risk them falling in my face at a bad moment.
“I need to break the yellow first. It’s solar magic, which is best countered with earth to smash it open, or perhaps some dew to fracture and weaken it,” I said to Wispy.
He’d fallen asleep again, not that he’d have answered me anyway.
I headed back to the cupboards furthest from the doors and began looking for spring dew and mountain stone. The exhaustion was beginning to push in around the edges of my curiosity, making it more difficult to read the labels and discern what exactly I wanted.
“Maybe they put some coffee in here somewhere for me,” I mused.
They had not left me any coffee. They had, however, left me plenty of alchemical ingredients to make my own very potent wake-up tablets. The taste left something to be desired, but, my word, I was very awake. Once I’d bounced around the lab for twenty minute
s straight, I was able to get down to the real work.
Having access to only one collar and needing to make the solution in a form that could be applied to multiple people safely was quite a hurdle. At first, I thought about making a spray based around phoenix feather to break down the shadow portion, but then I realised there was a fifty-fifty chance of that setting someone on fire in non-alchemist hands.
After a few failed attempts, I finally figured out the solution. It wasn’t my most elegant work, but by the gods it worked. I ground up drake scale to block the collar’s access to the wearer’s magic, then added in phoenix ash (far less likely to set someone on fire), powdered nymph blood, a dash of starlight, and finally gryphon feather to make it drawn to the collar.
The final result was a rather beautiful emerald-green powder that I put into a large bottle. There was more than enough powder for some thirty collars in there. They hadn’t told me how many collars it needed to break, and no one was around when I peered out the door to ask someone. I didn’t dare try and wander the halls. Who knew how long it would take me to find my way back!
7
The sun had risen a few hours prior to when Fein entered the lab to check on my work. I presented the collar, complete with broken alchemy, to the elf with an entirely un-businesslike grin on my face.
“I’m afraid a tattoo magician won’t be able to break that ink magic, you’ll need someone quite special,” I said as he took the collar from me.
Fein’s mouth quirked up at the corner before he pulled out his phone and summoned someone. He pulled a small silver knife from a sheath that I hadn’t noticed on his hip. I looked what was probably a little too closely at his hips and pants, trying to pick out the outline of some illusion magic. He cleared his throat and I blushed, realising he likely thought I’d been staring at his crotch.
“Your hand, Miss Felis.”