Lava Red Feather Blue

by Molly Ringle

  “Oh, he’s preserved,” Sal said. “Hair included. That spell’s got fae magic backing it up; it’s good and strong. His clothes might’ve faded, though. Rosamund Highvalley and the fae probably didn’t give much thought to keeping dyes looking fresh, what with everything else going on at the time.”

  “See what you can do, then,” Merrick said to Elemi, and waved toward the wig. “Darker red.” He was an endo-witch—one who could magically alter himself, but not anything or anyone else. Elemi, however, was a matter-witch, someone who could alter non-living material.

  That said, she wasn’t a very experienced one yet. She got up and took hold of the wig, frowning in concentration. A burst of magic cascaded over Merrick, like being splashed with a glass of invisible water, and the wig turned orange. Elemi sighed and let go. “Lord and Lady!” she complained.

  Merrick laughed. “No worries. We’ll have Cassidy do it.”

  “Yes, because all your festival costume needs have to be done by me,” his older sibling, Cassidy, called from the adjacent room, a former bedroom that now served as junk storage.

  “Please?” Merrick added.

  “I’ll have a look,” Cassidy said in a grudging tone.

  “Thanks, Cass. We love you.”

  Cassidy strode into the library, dressed in all form-fitting black as usual. The scent of water-lily swirled in their wake. They tossed a long jacket with tattered silk hems to Merrick. “Here. Best I could find. I changed it from gray to blue and made the tatters more dramatic.” Cassidy, like their daughter, was a matter-witch.

  “Nice.” Merrick slipped it on over his shirt and flapped his hands. The cuffs fell over his knuckles. “Too big, though.”

  “Sweet Lady. I’ll fix it later, along with the wig.” Cassidy spun to frown at Elemi. “It’s seven-thirty. Have you started your homework?”

  Elemi looked sheepish. “It’s just one page.”

  “Math?”

  “Social studies. A worksheet about why the rest of the world doesn’t know about Eidolonia.”

  Merrick tugged at a loose button on the jacket. “Which is why?”

  Elemi rolled her eyes. “Because of fae magic keeping everyone else away.”

  “Magic such as?” Cassidy said.

  “Whirlpools, winds, fog, rocks that boats crash into.”

  “They’re called sea stacks,” Merrick said. “Also reefs.”

  “And people can’t even see the island usually,” Elemi added, in impatiently fast tones. “But if they do, they forget about it right afterward. The Crosswater Fade. And it’s where the island’s name comes from, because ‘eidolon’ means ‘phantom.’”

  “Among other definitions,” Merrick conceded.

  “What about satellites?” Sal challenged, her eyes twinkling.

  “The magic messes them up so they can’t take pictures.”

  “Good.” Cassidy waved toward the doorway. “Go write all that down. Bet it won’t even take you five minutes.”

  Elemi sighed melodramatically, but wandered out of the room, swinging her phone.

  “Merrick,” Cassidy said, “you printed all the labels for the festival scents, right?”

  The button fell off the costume jacket. Merrick crouched to retrieve it. “Yep, they’re ready.”

  “I’m going to count all the bottles and make sure. I want to start decanting early tomorrow.” Without waiting for his response, Cassidy left the library.

  “Cass still can’t trust anyone else to do things right,” Merrick said to Sal. “Especially me.” He pulled off the wig and dropped into the creaky armchair next to hers.

  Sal took another sip of tea. The pearly-blue mug looked delicate in her leathery hands. “I assume the perfumes are your real contribution to the festival. Yours and Cassidy’s.”

  “Yeah. The play is my friends’ project. They roped me in for a few cameos, including Larkin.” He had let go of the magic morphing his face, but touched his cheek where the beauty mark had been. “Will the fae be pleased, you think?”

  “I’m entertained already,” she promised.

  Tomorrow was the start of Water Festival, one of the seven festivals in the year during which Eidolonian humans produced gifts and displays of creativity to amuse and thank the fae. The festivals also helped soothe the occasional antagonisms that cropped up between fae and humans—though these days society was relatively peaceful, compared to the type of strife that people long ago like Prince Larkin had lived through.

  Sal was a hob, a type of earth faery. She had been Merrick’s favorite professor at Ormaney University in Dasdemir, where he had earned a business degree while refining his magic. He had kept in touch with her after graduating, and since she was in Sevinee that week to visit relatives, Merrick had invited her up to Highvalley House for dinner.

  Hobs rarely bothered with shape-shifting or glamour; they showed themselves as they were. In Sal’s case, this meant being stocky and short—she only came up to Merrick’s chest—with bright blue-black eyes, a nose longer than her hands, and pointed ears that stood up above her head like those of the Highvalleys’ corgi. Her coloring was mostly brown, but her nails and hair showed natural streaks of scarlet, pumpkin, and gold. She always smelled vaguely of garden soil, a warm note he found comforting.

  “The friends doing the play,” she said. “Are they the same ones you hung out with at university?”

  “Mostly. Some live around here now. The others are visiting for the festival.” Merrick picked thread out of the button, his thoughts meandering to the people he used to spend all his free time with.

  “My. What’s that somber expression for?”

  He looked around at the library of Highvalley House, with its oddly-shaped skylights and shelves of dust-covered books. “Just thinking how it’s only been seven years since we graduated, but it seems longer. They’re all doing real adult things—marriage, pregnancy, careers—and I’m … this.”

  “Talented perfumer and uncle to a great kid, living in a historic house in the Sevinee countryside? Could be worse.”

  “Well. It is worse.”

  “Hmm.” Sal swished her tea around in the mug. “I wasn’t going to ask. At least, not in front of Elemi.”

  “Whether I’d been arrested during Earth Festival?” He spoke the words with astringent clarity.

  “I take that as a yes.”

  Merrick steepled his fingers. “We were visiting Dad in Dasdemir, and he’d built some flying gadgets for the celebration. He and his friends decided to use them to fly a banner down Spirit Street outside Parliament. It, uh … here’s a photo.” He scrolled through his phone to find it, and showed her.

  All her facial features pulled upward in the hob equivalent of a smile. “Tell the Earth the Truth: Riquelme Lies. Well, the fae largely agree with you there. I’m a hundred and six, and I can’t remember ever having such an inept prime minister.”

  “‘Inept’ is too kind. I prefer ‘lying and hypocritical.’ Anyway, Parliament guards saw the banner and shot a spell-jammer at one of Dad’s machines so it crashed on the street.”

  “Oh,” Sal said in a falling tone of sympathy.

  “So I picked up the banner and … ” He arched his hand skyward. “Flew with it myself.”

  “Ha. I expect they didn’t like that.”

  “Nope. I knew they weren’t going to shoot me down, not with all those witnesses. At least things haven’t gotten that bad. But when I landed, about eight police officers closed in and arrested me. Charged me with ‘unauthorized deployment of rare witch abilities.’ That’s a seven-hundred-lira fine, by the way.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah. Though we can assume if I’d been flying with a ‘Riquelme is awesome’ banner, they’d have laughed and waved it off.”

  “Ha. Likely.”

  “So that’s my first strike for unauthorized magic. If I get to three—jail time. Which is … stressful to hear.”

  “Back in university, I recall, you occasionally got dragged in to
talk to professors for objectionable behavior, but it never went as far as arrests.” She smiled.

  “But now we live in interesting times.”

  “Rare witch abilities.” Sal sighed. “Yours isn’t dangerous, though. What harm are you going to do by flying for twenty minutes now and then?”

  “I don’t know. We always had to be registered, but nothing much used to happen otherwise. Now they’re checking up on people like me. And arresting us as needed.”

  Making temporary changes to his skin, giving himself a boost of super-speed, channeling ambient light to make his hand glow in lieu of a flashlight—those were all things any endo-witch could do, and were legally free to. Abilities like flying, however, were unusual, and authorities kept a tighter rein on such actions. Still, he hadn’t truly felt the legal oppression until lately.

  “How is your father lately, anyway?” Sal asked.

  Merrick touched the plastic orange strands of the wig lying across his lap. “Not getting any better. The healers have nothing. Seems the only hope is if our mother would show up, finally come out of the fae realm and tell us if there’s anything she could do. But she never has.”

  “Is he happy, though?”

  “Of course. Always.”

  “Then maybe it isn’t something that needs to be fixed. Just accepted.”

  Merrick threw the wig onto a table, where it draped a stack of books. “But I want to fix things. The way—well, the way Prince Larkin did.”

  “By complete self-sacrifice?” Sal set her mug on the table. “I hope you meet a better end than him.”

  “He put the truce in place. He fixed a lot for the country. Along with Rosamund, I guess, since she made the deal and did the magic, but it’s a little hard to view her as a hero. She was almost as awful as Riquelme, with some of the land-grabs she pulled on the fae. Some people say she’s why Ula Kana started attacking. Kind of an ignoble ancestor to have.” He sent another glance around the house, with a rueful twist of his mouth.

  “Nonetheless, a fascinating personage to us historians.”

  “That reminds me … ” Merrick turned his head, listening. Cassidy’s voice answered Elemi’s, down on a lower floor. He met Sal’s eyes. “Let me show you something.”

  He went to the room that opened off the library, where Cassidy had been rummaging for old clothes. An eighteenth-century canopy bed took up half the space; in its honor, they called it the Canopy Bedroom.

  Sal shuffled in after him and peered at the painting on the wooden underside of the bed canopy. It depicted a shipwreck in progress, with drowning sailors, snarling mer-people, and tempest-blowing air fae. Given the creepy décor, generally no one ever wanted to sleep there. Merrick certainly never had.

  “Still haven’t figured out how to move this old thing, eh?” Sal wrapped a hand around one of the carved bedposts.

  “Nope.” Merrick opened the top drawer of a chest. “Rosamund locked the whole bed in place. Who knows why. We have a thousand theories; can’t prove any of them.”

  “Must hide something. No secret passages?”

  “None would fit in the walls or floors. We’ve measured. But the bed’s old news. This is what I wanted to show you.” From the drawer he took out a faded cardboard box with its corners coming apart.

  Sal peered over his arm. She poked a finger at the tarnished jewelry in the box. “Oh yes. Some spells in there somewhere.”

  Merrick’s magic only extended to altering his own body, and he couldn’t sense spells on other people or things unless they were active enough to affect him. As a faery, however, Sal could pick up such information easily.

  “Do you think any of it could be Rosamund’s?” he asked. “These things were always in here, stashed with other junk. Our grandma told us she thought it all belonged to her grandmother. But the other day I noticed … ” Merrick picked out an earring, a drop-shaped scarlet gem with gold leaves wrapped around it. “These look an awful lot like … these.” He pulled over a history textbook he’d left nearby and opened it to the page he had bookmarked.

  The portrait in the book displayed Rosamund Highvalley, wide-bosomed and beaming with triple-witch pride in her three colors of sashes—and wearing gold-and-red earrings that exactly resembled the pair he had found.

  “Well, well,” Sal said.

  “I’d gotten this book down to look up something for Elemi’s homework. And that same day I got out this box to make room for other stuff. When I saw the earrings, the connection clicked.”

  Sal held the earring in her palm, then set it back on top of the chest. “Might be the same ones, but these aren’t enchanted. The spells are attached to something else in here.” She kept poking, shoving aside bird-shaped pins, gaudy cufflinks, and tangled strings of fake pearls.

  Merrick’s heart beat fast. “Please, please let it be her Lava Flow charm.”

  Sal laughed. “The palace already has that. It’s in their museum.”

  “Maybe she made another one. A charm to cure people of fae spells is exactly what my dad needs.”

  “Good luck using it, even if you somehow got hold of it. Rosamund’s talents were unparalleled and her charms were often too complex for others to grasp … ah.” She pulled out a silver chain, thread-thin and at least three feet long.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Resistance charm. Just in case anyone’s trying persuasion magic on you. Still potent, if you need one.”

  “Oh.” Merrick took it, wrapping its length around his hand. “We can buy these, though.”

  “This one feels stronger than the over-the-counter ones. But there’s still something else in here … a-ha.” After another few seconds of rummaging, she drew out a gray stick, five inches long and as thick as Merrick’s thumb. It was carved with spiraling designs and had copper wire wrapped around one end, gone green with age. “Summoning stick. Definitely not legal to own these days.”

  Magic to force anyone to do anything against their will—even just come to you—had been against the law in Eidolonia since the early nineteenth century. Shield charms, like the chain, existed to protect people in case someone illegally tried.

  Decent finds. But neither held the magic he had hoped for.

  His shoulders sank. “No Lava Flow charm, then.”

  “Sorry. Both still powerful, though. Rosamund really did have a talent for locking her charms into place.” She turned the stick to admire each side, then handed it to Merrick. “The lawful thing to do would be to turn it over to the Researchers Guild. Other option? Put it back in that box and pretend you don’t know it’s there.” She twitched one ear, her equivalence of a wink.

  He folded his fingers around the summoning stick, drawing it up against his chest. “Would it work on a faery?”

  CHAPTER 2

  AT TEN O’CLOCK THAT NIGHT, AFTER DROPPING Sal off at her second-cousin’s place, Merrick drove up a wooded hillside a few miles from Highvalley House, where the road curved close to the verge. The stars shone between feathery black treetops. The nearest houses were a mile downhill, and the road was quiet. He pulled over, got out, and tiptoed into the woods.

  He knew when he had reached the verge, for the air crackled and sparked, stinging him with tiny electric jolts—a warning installed by the fae. The sparks flashed upon the sign on a nearby post, set up by the Eidolonian government:

  WARNING!

  Crossing the verge poses grave dangers to humans. Emergency assistance cannot reliably be reached past this line. Respect the truce: do not enter!

  Merrick drew back a step, enough to stop the sparking, and stared into the forbidden land.

  He had chosen a spot between two guard posts, which were stationed every mile throughout Eidolonia, a perimeter loop of over six hundred miles circling the center of the island. Signs like this one were posted all along it. It would have been easy enough to tell the line of demarcation regardless, for in fae territory many of the trees were immense, over a hundred feet tall and three times wider than the span of
Merrick’s arms. The smell of earth, moss, berry, and leaf rolled out from the forest, thick and alive. Little glowing forms moved about in the forest’s looming darkness, at every height from the treetops down to the ground—either luminescent fae or floating lights created by them.

  “Summoning stick probably won’t work if you use it from the human side of the verge,” Sal had said. “But I can’t recommend you cross over, of course. Maybe, if you stand right up next to it … well, it’s worth a try. Just be careful.”

  Unlike his father, he had never crossed the verge, though he longed to. Being half fae, he felt he ought to have some right to go in there, should be able to expect some safety. But it didn’t work like that. He was counted as human: mortal and thus vulnerable.

  He took out the summoning stick from his sweatshirt pocket. At Sal’s suggestion, he had wrapped a few of his own black hairs around it and had tied on a blue feather dropped by a kiryo bird.

  He held up the stick to the starry night sky. “I summon Haluli, air faery, my mother. I ask her to come to me.”

  Her name means “blue feather” in their language, his father had told him. Or “feather blue,” is how she put it. The feather of the kiryo bird.

  Merrick had tried before, of course, standing at the verge and calling her name. She had never come. But he’d never had a summoning stick before, let alone one made by Rosamund Highvalley.

  Lightning illuminated the tips of the trees. Thunder rolled against the mountainside. Something whipped past his ear, then chittered from a nearby branch, sounding like an angry finch. Merrick squinted into the dark, trying to see. The wind picked up, blowing his hair into his eyes. He held the carved stick higher and channeled his magic into it, pulling it from the air.

  Clouds spread across the stars. Thunder crackled closer.

  “Hey, stop! What are you doing?”

  A wallop of magic hit him in the spine. His limbs went rigid and he fell onto his back. Someone seized his arm. Lying on the damp leaves, he found himself squinting up into the flashlights of two guards.