Magic by Daylight

by Cynthia Bailey Pratt

“What next, I wonder? Will quills tickle me until I write letters, will my needle prick me until I ply it, will the pianoforte frolic about me like a foolish dog until I play? I have been dictated to by more than my share of people lately; must I now truckle to inanimate objects as well?”

  The book lay open, supinely offering itself for reading. “I suppose you are not so inanimate as all that,” Clarice said, still aloud as she picked up the book. “Very well; let us see what you have to say.”

  Using the lens, Clarice saw that this was the first volume of a history of England. The book felt comfortable in her hand, as though it settled down with a sense of pleasurable anticipation of use. “I don’t know what you want me to read,” Clarice said.

  One page rippled. “Oh, thank you.”

  She rattled off the words aloud, “ ‘In the dark years following the arrival of the Black Death in England, the customs and orders of a society predicated upon the manorial system were irretrievably damaged. Entire households were lost, from babe in arms to venerable grandfather. The histories of a household’s proper service vanished with the souls who accepted them as the standard for civilization. Even more damaging was the desertion and eventual destruction of many villages, where the death-toll was so complete that there were none left alive to bury the dead. A famous example is that of Priory St. Windle."

  Clarice’s voice faded. Her eyes moving more quickly, she read how the village had been abandoned to its dead, leaving such desolation that even the sheep reverted to a wild state. When the monks who owned the village at last crept out from the security of their stone walls, they found dead bodies lying in the snow all the way from their gate to the village.

  Painstakingly, the monks, guilt-ridden at having failed their community, buried each of the dead in individual graves, unlike the hurried mass graves of so many other places. Each name was recorded, all were accounted for with the exception of a small boy who, it was assumed, had been carried away by feral dogs. The monks of St. Windle said prayers every day for the souls of the plague-dead until Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1536.

  Clarice returned to the top of the page and read it again, carefully searching for the name of the boy. The historian who had summarized this sad tale did not mention it. Closing the book, she restored it to its place on the shelf. She did not really require confirmation; she knew the boy’s name already.

  She could not imagine what it must have been like for Dominic, seeing each of the people he knew sicken and die in such a hideous way. Children lost their parents even today; she herself supported a local orphanage. Yet how much worse to have everyone around him die, his parents, his neighbors, his friends, young and old. Her heart ached for him, though his suffering had been long, long ago.

  He had said that the Fay had taken him when he was six years old. From a distant memory of a never-well-liked governess’s teaching, Clarice recalled that the plague had struck England in the year 1350.

  All at once, Clarice needed to sit down. She put her head down on her knees. Though King Morgain had told her Dominic’s age, and he’d mentioned it himself, it was not until she herself did the math that it came home to her. Dominic Knight, looking no more than thirty, he who had guarded her, kissed her, and made her furious, was four hundred and fifty-five years old.

  When the dizziness passed, she wondered who it was that had wanted her to see that particular book. Glancing surreptitiously about her, Clarice asked herself if she was, even now, alone in the library. Was someone standing over her, watching her as she struggled to accept what she had learned? Why had someone wanted her to know so much about Dominic? Even more than this, Clarice wondered why Dominic had kissed her there in the make-believe meadow.

  This time, when she left the library, no book pursued her. She was curious to know whether Morgain was having the same trouble with his books. Did books grow jealous when one was preferred over another? Would they jostle frenetically for position, each seeking to be read first? Clarice felt sure Morgain was capable of keeping them in order.

  He was not in his room, nor in any of the corners that he’d taken to reading in of late. After she’d searched fruitlessly for some little time, she was disturbed by a gentle, attention-awakening cough in the dust-sheeted nursery.

  Camber—or whoever—stood beside her. “May I be of assistance, your ladyship?”

  “There’s no need to keep up this pretense,” she said coolly. “I know you are not my butler.”

  “But I am.” He smiled when she would have protested. “For the time being, I am most certainly your butler. I find it quite amusing. How may I help you?”

  It would be childish to continue to argue. Clarice said, “I am looking for my nephew.”

  “Ah.” The Fay who wore Camber’s countenance looked about him. He bent his head slightly to look under a table and even strode to the double-doored wardrobe to examine the inside. One eyebrow rose. “He does not seem to be here.”

  “I realized that myself. And I should mention that Morgain knows all about you as well as I.”

  “Does he indeed?”

  “You don’t believe me? Then you should know that Camber cannot raise only one eyebrow. No matter how hard he tries, both always go up together.”

  He pursed his lips and nodded. “That would explain several things. I thought Morgain Half-Fay was strange in his distrust of me. I am grateful to your ladyship for pointing it out. How true that it is the little mannerisms that betray us.” Without another word, he closed his eyes and let his head loll on his neck.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Hush. I am casting forth my consciousness.”

  A silence as heavy and tactile as a velvet cloak closed around her. That, more than any single thing, taught her that this was not her home, no matter how like all the contrivances of the Fay could make it. Hamdry Manor, the real Hamdry Manor, had never seemed to her to be less than welcoming, more accepting than her mother had ever been. Yet in this silence, she felt no comforting aura gathering about her. She could not forget that she was the daughter of Forgall’s enemy and that these Fay playing the part of her servants were Forgall’s most trusted people.

  When heavy footsteps approached, she could feel them shake the floor. “That’s not Morgain,” she said, fear rising in her throat. If the Rider could come so close to taking her, what else might try?

  When Dominic opened the door, she was so glad to see him that she became angry at him for worrying her unnecessarily. “The least you could do is knock!”

  He glanced between her and the butler. The definition in his jaw grew more noticeable. “I’m interrupting you?”

  “We were looking for Morgain.”

  “He’s in his room.”

  “No, I looked.”

  “Then he’s in the library.”

  “No. Don’t you think I looked there as well?”

  Clarice knew she wasn’t angry with Dominic either for his obtuseness or for scaring her. If she hadn’t been so abashed at seeing him again, she wouldn’t have spoken so. Seeing him, she felt she could almost read his thoughts. He must be thinking of those stolen moments when he’d kissed her and she had so wantonly kissed him back. At the remembrance of how she’d clung to him, answering his passion with her own, she didn’t know whether to run away, slap his face, or throw herself into his arms.

  She did neither. Hating herself for being such a shrew, she challenged, “Instead of suggesting places I’ve already searched, why don’t you and your confrere here do something useful? Going away comes to mind.”

  The butler opened both eyes. “Are all mortals so uncontrollable, Dominic? You are not thus. It must be the females of your species that behave so. Troubling. No wonder you never have peace.”

  Clarice advanced upon him. “Considering how I have been put upon, sir, I suggest you take your patronizing tone elsewhere.”

  “Or what, my dear child?” His austere smile did not long survive her next words and the threatening gesture that went
with them.

  “Or I’ll touch you!”

  The Fay-Camber stepped back a pace. “Come, Dominic. Let us search for Morgain Half-Fay as she wishes. I do not want to be trapped by the Ancient Law into accepting the command of such a wild-hearted creature as this.”

  Dominic said, “Careful, Chadwin. I am sworn to protect her, even against you.”

  “But who, pray tell, will defend me against her?” The butler strode to the doorway. “I’ll find Morgain Half-Fay for you, my lady. Then we may all be comfortable again. This masquerade need not last much longer. Thy mother, Lady of the Pale Banner, will sue for peace soon enough.”

  When he’d gone, Clarice demanded, “What is ‘soon’ to an immortal? Two hundred years?”

  Dominic closed the door behind Chadwin. He stood with his back against it, gazing at her with a smile lurking in the depths of his dark topaz eyes. He seemed entirely at his ease. He’d left off his cravat and had unbuttoned the top two buttons of his waistcoat. This relaxing of the gentlemanly code gave him a rakish air that she should have found vulgar, but that appealed to her natural taste more than an over-particularity of dress.

  His gazing on her so steadily unnerved her. She thought that he knew that it had that effect on her and believed that was why he did it. She snatched her hand away from where she’d quite unwittingly been coquettishly smoothing her hair. “Why do you stare at me so? It’s exceedingly rude.”

  “You may stare back if you like.”

  “I don’t. I don’t see anything of interest in your face.”

  “No? Well, it’s the only face I have so I’m sorry if it doesn’t please you.” His shoulders came off the door and he began to advance on her slowly, giving her plenty of time to run from him. Clarice wanted to stand her ground, but she had a strange, hot, jumpy feeling in her stomach and it demanded that she back away if only to see how far he’d follow.

  “It’s not the only face you have. You’ve shown me half a dozen since you first came to Hamdry.”

  “Perhaps I have. But this is the true one you see now.”

  “How can I tell? Tomorrow you may wear another.”

  “I give you my word.” Dominic took her hand. She pried it loose from his lax grasp. Yet before she had an instant to feel gratified, he reached out for the other. He brought it to his lips and brushed the back of it. She had a little more difficulty getting free, but not a great deal.

  “Clarice,” he said with teasing reproach.

  He took her left hand again. This time, his warm mouth moved against the tender underside of her wrist.

  A thrill of desire seemed to shoot up her arm, overwhelming her senses. She realized slowly that her increasing difficulty in freeing herself was not because Dominic held her too tightly. Rather, her will to resist weakened every time he touched her.

  Clarice felt trapped in a dance of ritualized movements, the steps of which she had never been taught. Dominic, for all his years in the Living Lands, seemed to have mastered not only the desirable moves but also the countermoves.

  She searched his eyes. They’d lost their smiling look. Like a magnifying glass, their intensity narrowed to focus on her mouth. She could feel her lips growing warmer under the concentration of his gaze and knew that however much he might want to kiss her, she wanted it just as sharply.

  When he bowed his head to taste her lips, Clarice held him off, but in truth, it was her own nature she struggled to keep at bay. “No . ..”

  “Why not?”

  “I... because I want you too much.”

  “Good.”

  He pulled her off balance, so that she had only him to cling to as his mouth came down on hers. Desire came roaring to life as though they’d forged a new existence between them. This was no tentative touch of mouth to mouth nor did it end with a faltering sally of tongues. He seemed intent on conquering all her resistance with a well-planned undermining of her chastity.

  With her body in full traitorous revolt and on the point of surrendering to him, Clarice could not retreat and could summon no defense but attack. She slid her hands into the open front of his shirt, surprised by the contrast between his hard-muscled body and the soft prickle of his chest hair teasing her palms. A shudder went through him at this intimate touch, and Clarice felt the tide of battle turning her way.

  But then Dominic left her mouth to press his teeth against the side of her neck. She couldn’t hold back a gasp of pleasure, though she knew it gave away some of her position. His hands slid down over her full skirt to urge her lower body closer to his.

  She hadn’t known how much she’d wanted that until it happened. It stole her breath and a good portion of what was left of her reason. She pressed against him shamelessly, and was so lost to propriety as to think his groan the most delightful sound she’d ever heard. She put her chin up in a demand for more kisses, dragging his head down to meet hers, making sounds of her own, eager and wild.

  “Clarice ... ah, you’ll kill me.”

  An admission of surrender? So she thought, until Dominic cupped her breasts in his hands. At some point, he’d slid her gown down, exposing the creamy flesh of her shoulder and the upper slope of her bosom.

  She’d been so dazed and drugged with kisses that she’d hardly noticed, even when he’d pressed his lips to the base of her throat before kissing his way out to her shoulder. Then he slipped his hands up her waist and smoothed them over her bodice, lifting her breasts until they all but spilled over the lowered neckline.

  “You’re so beautiful. I’m hopelessly in love with you,” he murmured and lowered his head to steal a taste. The sensation of his mouth on her tightly furled nipple was fugitive, maddeningly elusive, and yet sweetly wicked. She couldn’t keep back a cry far louder than those soft moans and sighs which had escaped her vigilance.

  It was as if someone had sounded a clarion call of danger in her ear. Her friend and companion, Melissa, raised in an uncaring world, had told Clarice all about the activities of men and women in love when they were but green girls of seventeen. Clarice wondered now how many illegitimate children were brought into the world as a consequence of the hot, urgent feeling of a woman’s body when a man touched, held, and worshiped her as Dominic did now.

  Taking advantage of his distraction as he touched and fondled, Clarice propelled herself out of his arms. She retreated a final step, clutching the fallen left side of her bodice with her right hand. He tried to hold on to her, letting his hands slip away at the last instant.

  Dominic looked heavy-eyed and slightly dazed as though he’d wakened to a strong light in the middle of the night. She doubted that she appeared any more alert. Even now the heady narcotic of passion was urging her to return to the pleasure of Dominic’s touch, hinting that there were many more delights to be found farther along the road they’d begun to travel together.

  “I’m sorry,” she blurted out as hurt began to replace the desire in Dominic’s expression. “We must stop this here and now.”

  He tried to smile, but perhaps the tide of desire beat too strongly in him still, for his smile died before it was half-realized. “Why must we stop? Didn’t you like it?”

  “I—never mind. Where... how...? Before you did not kiss me...” She found herself having to gulp a few mouthfuls of air before she could finish by saying, “you didn’t kiss me before like... that.”

  “There’s a saying among the People to the effect that the third time one tries is the mature child of the first two efforts.”

  “We say, ‘third time’s the charm.’ “

  “Much more succinct.” His dark eyes were still focused on her with a deeply serious intent. “Besides, I want you more now than I did before. I’ve tasted how sweet you are and I hunger for more of you, Clarice.”

  If only he’d smiled when he’d said those things. She could have discounted them as the hyperbole of a man seeking mere physical gratification. But he’d been entirely, dauntingly serious. What answer could be made to such a declaration?

&
nbsp; She knew honesty deserved nothing but honesty. “I’m sorry, Dominic. I should have stopped you at my ‘no,’ rather than continued to make love to you.”

  “You did say no. I should have stopped there. I was wrong.”

  “So was I. You are, after all, something of a jailer. I always thought those stories of women falling under the spell of such a one were imaginary.”

  “Your jailer?” He was obviously offended. “Is that what you think of me?”

  “I am your hostage, Dominic. There’s no sense in wrapping up such an ugly thing in plain linen. If it were not for that, we should never have met.”

  He said eagerly, “Only say you don’t regret it, Clarice.”

  “No,” she said without hesitation. “I do not regret it.” She held up her hand when he would have seized her joyfully in his arms. Mindful of what a touch could lead to, Dominic stopped. The desire in his eyes was nearly as arousing as a kiss.

  “It’s too dangerous,” Clarice said. “If Forgall knew...”

  “He may know already. You see, I have not even a solitary drop of Fay blood in my veins. I cannot shield my thoughts from the least among them. It has made growing up in Mag Mell something of a challenge as you may imagine.”

  “Are you afraid of Forgall?”

  He did not deny it hotly as a younger man would have done. Dominic deliberated for a moment before saying, “I have never given him cause to be angry with me.”

  “Until now.”

  “Until you, Clarice.”

  In some agitation, she tried to adjust her gown, unable to meet his eyes.

  “Let me,” he said. With a tender touch that held much of the lover but not uncontrollable desire, he tugged the gown back into its proper position. Then he stood away from her.

  “What happens now?” Clarice asked.

  He smiled at her so warmly that she lost some of her embarrassment. “I shall help you find Morgain Half-Fay. Then, unless your mother relents, there will be a war.”

  “Which you and others like you will fight.”

  “It is what we have been trained for all our lives. You need have no fear for me. In the end, my comrades and I will overcome those who fight on the other side.”