Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  She was out the door before he could get over the feeling she knew very well what manner of lies he’d imposed upon her.

  “The forcing house incident?” Miss Felix asked.

  “Oh.” He took a deep breath and wondered if he could find the strength to talk. He was so tired that he felt as though this must be what it felt like to be ninety. Not that he expected to ever make it to that age. “I was … nine? Perhaps ten. I’m not… precisely sure of my own age, only that I’m older than Sera– His Grace. Probably a year or so older, and conventionally we consider my birthday the same as his only a year before. That was Sera– His Grace’s idea.” He saw she was looking at him in confusion, and tried to call all his strength to him and order his thoughts. “I arrived on his birthday, you see, and he wanted to share the party, which when you consider that I came into a dining room full of the children of the nobility in the rags in which… in which the old duke had found me–” He saw her eyes widen and decided he was going too far.

  No need to tell this stranger from another world about Seraphim’s longing for a brother, or how he’d decided that Gabriel would be that brother, even when they were both too young to realize they were related by blood. “Never mind that. His Grace was kind and generous even as a child. At any rate, he said it was to be my party too, and therefore it was decided my birthday was the same as his. And I was allowed to have a piece of the cake and the celebration… after the housekeeper gave me the most thorough bath of my life, before or since.” He caught himself up again, knowing he was saying too much. Curse his weakness and his depleted magic. “I had lived here about a year, or maybe a little more than a year, when Seraphim and I decided to practice a growing spell we’d seen one of the farmers perform on the strawberries in the forcing house. We were both, you see, inordinately fond of strawberries, and it was March and the plants just set in the soil.”

  “And it worked?”

  “After a fashion, Miss,” he said. “We did grow strawberries, but we must have got something wrong, because they grew to astonishing size.” Her gaze was interested. “And exploded. And we had to clean the inside of the glass with rags. For five days. But not for lack of my making up an elaborate story involving robbers. Her Grace was indulgent, because, I suppose, she feels sorry for me.” And, plunging as quickly as he could away from that, he said, “But none of this matters, Miss. What matters now is to find you a place to stay before the doctor arrives.”

  She looked surprised. “I don’t need a place to stay,” she said. “I need a minute’s calm to put together a transport spell.”

  “Miss?” Was she not aware that she’d been brought to a different world.

  She blushed, from the neck up, till she looked the rough color of a turnip. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “I suppose you assumed I was from that horrible desert world, with the pyramids? Well, I was not. My magic simply got entangled with the Duke’s and it pulled me into that world and… it was why I was so distraught and half out of my mind. I went out of the world and back into it again in less than a few minutes. And, as you know, magical entanglements are painful and confusing for both people. It cannot have helped His Grace’s reactions, either.”

  “What didn’t help His Grace’s reactions,” Gabriel said, aware that his voice colored the honorific in irony, “is that he’d already lost too much blood and was in a considerable amount of pain besides.” Which was the only reason that Gabriel could think of why Seraphim hadn’t realized that his magic had become entangled. But it made no sense. “The thing is, Miss, that entanglements don’t happen, unless– ”

  A knock at the door, and a voice called out, “Doctor Wilson is here, Mr. Penn.” It was the voice of the housekeeper. “He’s coming up the stairs.”

  Gabriel felt both relief and annoyance. Relief that he could now get the young shifter out of the room and into the capable hands of Gabriel’s Godmother, and annoyance that he would not be able to question this young woman till after the doctor left. But there was no time to lose. He lifted the table covering, and offered the boy his hand, which the boy took, allowing Gabriel to lead him to the door.

  The housekeeper, a kind woman of middle years, who still treated Gabriel as though he, himself, had been an urchin, looked from him to the boy when he opened door. “I thought there was as good a chance as any that there was someone,” she said, “if the Duke is took ill.” She looked at the boy. “I shall put a damping spell on his shifting, shall I, until he learns to control it? And the poor boy as naked as the day he was born. No worry. I’ll get him into the lilac room and bring him clothes.”

  Since the lilac room was right next door, the empty room reserved for the wife Seraphim would eventually take, Gabriel knew it was safe enough. The relief of it must have made him weak, because he leaned against the door frame to recover his breath.

  When he opened his eyes again, Doctor Wilson was saying, “And what have you been doing with yourself, Penn? Don’t tell me it is nothing, because you look in need of my services, though it was the Duke I was called for.”

  Gabriel managed a weak laugh. “It is nothing, compared to His Grace’s wounds, sir,” he said. And as he led the doctor into the room, he realized that Miss Felix was no longer there. He felt vexed he’d not prevented her transport spell, which she’d told him she would use, then relieved she was no longer there, and he didn’t have to worry about what she might say. It didn’t matter if she’d gone somewhere. He wasn’t fooled into thinking her presence accidental.

  And there were always ways of finding out who she really was and where she’d come from. Many of those ways would have to wait until Seraphim recovered consciousness. But they would work. And he and Seraphim would discover who this woman was who took so much interest in the Duke of Darkwater.

  A Step In The Dark

  Nell concentrated on the coordinates to her room and stepped through. There was the moment of bitter cold of the Betweener, the sense of winds howling around her, even though in fact wind could not exist in this dimension that was wholly devoid of air or any other element needed for life.

  And then she was stepping into the familiar confines of her room, almost on top of chalk drawings and a bowl shattered on the floor.

  She surveyed the chalk drawings, with dismay, noting that the water had splattered out to mark the floor indelibly with the chalk dust. This was going to be very hard to clean, and before she was done she might very well need to scrub the entire floor and wax it, lest the landlady get upset. Which she would. Particularly since Nell had also broken one of the bowls.

  It had taken Nell quite a while to truly believe that common belongings were considered precious, or that they were as expensive as they were. A simple glazed bowl, a platter, anything like that would have been thrown out on Earth the minute it became cracked. Here, even when broken, the shards would be collected in the hopes that the plate mender might fix it when next he did the rounds of the neighborhood.

  She picked up the shards of the bowl carefully and stored it in the cupboard in the corner, hoping to mitigate her landlady’s annoyance by telling her she’d saved the shards to be mended.

  Nell couldn’t understand it, and couldn’t work it out logically. On Earth she’d had plenty of friends who read fantasy and it had been assumed in almost any novel that a society with magic was by necessity prosperous and clean and all the other things real, pre-industrial societies hadn’t been.

  But this one wasn’t. Though Nell wasn’t sure if it was in the past in relation to the world in which she’d grown up and which she still considered the real Earth, this Earth seemed to be stuck somewhere around the regency. Time was hard to pin down exactly, because this England didn’t seem to have any of the same monarchs. Or rather, it had the same monarchs up to a point, that point being around the time of Arthur, who in this world was a real documented king, with his prime minister and court magician, Merlin. In fact, Seraphim, Duke of Darkwater, was supposed to be descended from Merlin and Morgan le Fey.
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  The thought had brought her right back to the subject her mind had been hoping to avoid.

  Having come to it, she realized she couldn’t avoid her obligations another moment. Taking a pocket watch from her desk, she looked at the time. Yes. She had to see Sydell. For one, he would be expecting a report. Which would mean that he would be in the park down the street, standing by the lake and scaring the mothers and nannies and the children they supervised by glaring at all of them, taking out on them the fact that Nell was now three minutes late.

  Sydell counted punctuality a virtue, one of the many things upon which he and Antoine seemed to disagree violently. Antoine had told Nell, very early in their acquaintance, that the only appointments worth keeping were those to which both heart and mind concurred and that if an assigned meeting didn’t inflame your heart with wild excitement it wasn’t worth keeping.

  The appointment with Sydell, so far from inflaming her heart with wild anything, gave her a strong feeling of having been encased in ice and wishing to run away. But if she had to hazard a guess, she would imagine that Antoine would actually wish her to keep this one. Else….

  Else, she wasn’t sure exactly what, but she was sure it wouldn’t be pleasant. Antoine had been arrested the night they’d first set foot in the islands of Britannia in Avalon. She’d never been told why or what he had done to deserve that fate, but she thought it was no criminal matter so much as something between Antoine and Sydell – some old vengeance or some unfinished game – because Sydell hadn’t told her that Antoine would be going to trial, or that he would have to serve some sentence for some determined set of time. Instead, he’d told her that he, Sydell, was holding Antoine D’Argent at the pleasure of the king. Which pretty much meant, if Nell understood properly, what used to be called in France, in her world, before the revolution, a lettre-de-cachet, that is something that was used to apprehend an individual, keep him indefinitely and tell no one where he was.

  At the time she hadn’t realized this, and she’d been too numb, too confused, wondering why Antoine would take them to a world where he was likely to meet with such a reception, to be able to even ask how to free him. Fortunately Sydell had told her, unasked. “You’ll work for me,” he’d said. “Three years, three days and three hours. You are a competent witch and, as the king’s spymaster, I am always in need of one such who can nose out illegal use of magic, crimes against the innocent of unprotected worlds or other things against our law. You serve me well and you and your paramour will be able to leave Avalon in peace.”

  Am I arrested then? She had asked.

  Detained, you mean? No, you are not. You can leave this very moment, if you wish. But then your paramour cannot go with you. And his freedom will be entirely dependent on my benevolence, of which I have very little towards Antoine.

  Nell sighed. Yes, Antoine would definitely want her to keep this appointment.

  She picked up her cloak and wrapped herself in it. It was, like most of her clothes, serviceable. It had looked romantic and interesting when she’d first arrived here and all their clothes seemed to be like something out a fairytale. Now it was just a cloak, a little threadbare, bought second-hand because Sydell’s stipend rarely extended beyond the bare necessities of food and lodging.

  Clasping the cloak in front, she picked up her reticule and headed out the door, closing it carefully behind her lest the landlady discover the damage to her floor and decide to throw Nell out without ceremony.

  On the way to the park she tried to set in her mind what to say. Normally, when Sydell had asked her to find out what someone was doing, she found things she didn’t mind telling him about. Like that woman a few months ago who was sacrificing newborns in order to use their hearts in love potions. Nell had felt absolutely no qualms about turning her in to Sydell’s justice even though she suspected Britannia had horrible penalties for her kind of crime. No.

  She hoped Britannia had horrible penalties for her kind of crime.

  But then there was Seraphim. His crime was terrible by Britannia standards. Because, from what she understood, Avalon was such a strongly magical world, the king of Britannia had made doing business in other worlds strictly forbidden. And doing business could be interpreted as merely visiting for some minutes. But taking people or things out of those worlds – or bringing them in – definitely fell within the definition. The penalty for that sort of infraction was death. And the death penalty for Dukes might be beheading, supposedly a quicker and more dignified death than hanging, but someone who was beheaded was still very thoroughly dead.

  Yet Nell could see, in her mind’s eye, the boy-shifter pursued by those horrible men with the magic guns, and Seraphim risking his life to save him. Risking his life to save her. And then Gabriel Penn…. She shook her head. She couldn’t imagine turning either of the men in. But then, she couldn’t imagine not turning them in. What could she tell Sydell that would satisfy him? If he thought she hadn’t fulfilled her part of the bargain, what would Sydell do to Antoine? At various times, the King’s spy master had intimated that only Nell’s good behavior kept Antoine alive.

  “Ah, Nell, in a brown study, I see,” Sydell said. Even before she looked up, she knew he was in one of his moods. It was in the voice which had the biting edge of a chill wind.

  Looking up only confirmed it. Sydell was a man of maybe forty, with black hair, carefully combed back from his forehead, in the style at the moment fashionable for men. His clothes were as exquisitely tailored as Seraphim Ainsling’s had been: tight coat of blue superfine, so carefully fitted to his powerful torso that she thought it might require a spell to get him into it, and butter-yellow breeches, so tight that wearing them in public should constitute an offense against morals. His cravat, tall and arranged in graceful folds about his neck, was a thing of beauty.

  But the face of such a carefully attired gentleman was pale and at the moment peevish, his lower lip slightly advanced, his eyes darting daggers in her direction. She thought of everything she knew, surmised, and had heard about Sydell. He was called a snake and worse, and that was by his friends and admirers.

  Cold, dangerous, deadly.

  The other things she’d heard about him included that he disdained female companions and preferred his men young and helpless. This didn’t shock her as they would someone from Avalon. They only inspired in her pity for any men who might fall in his clutches, and relief that he was not interested in her in that way.

  The park, filled with mothers and nannies and children, from those so small they were in carriages, to the ten year olds chasing each other around the lake or feeding the ducks, was a place of life and sound, but everyone seemed to avoid Sydell’s periphery. Everyone but Nell, and she only because she couldn’t avoid it.

  She bobbed a curtsey by habit and with no thought. It was amazing how quickly such habits developed. “I beg your pardon, Sydell,” she said. “I got myself… accidentally enmeshed in a spell, and it took a while to extricate myself from it.”

  He frowned at her, then his lips curved quickly upward, not in a smile so much as in what seemed like pleasure at her having suffered a delay. “Well,” he said. “Well. What workings did you get involved in? Was it Darkwater? What has the Duke been up to? Tell me without delay.”

  And that was Sydell all over. Tell me without delay was his version of “please make a report” and delivered with even less ceremony than that would have been. Unspoken and hanging between those words was the sense that what it all actually meant was “Tell me or else.”

  But she could not tell. She thought of the Duke on the floor, his life-force ebbing away, and of Gabriel Penn desperately pushing strength and magic into the duke with his resurrection spell. She could not let them be arrested. Oh, they’d broken the law. They’d assuredly broken the law. But it was for a good cause, was it not?

  She had a notion her argument was slippery, yet looking at Sydell’s pale face, his frosty glare she couldn’t imagine that he would be on the side of right in
this. Instead, she reached, desperately, for the story that Penn had told the Duchess. She’d tell the same story. Something that juicy would be about town in no time, and the two lies, meeting somewhere in the middle, would corroborate each other. Sydell would never suspect, and it would give Nell a little longer to study Darkwater and to find out whether, indeed, anything nefarious hid behind the Duke’s seeming benevolence.

  She put a smile on her face and told Sydell, “Nothing of consequence. It’s so diverting. I don’t know what you thought Darkwater was doing, but what he is doing is what you expect of a wastrel of his kind. You see, he left in the middle of his own engagement party to meet with a … a married woman. And I got pulled into his transport spell, and fell atop the lady’s husband, who was hiding in the bushes, and the whole thing got blown out of proportion… or perhaps into proportion. The offended husband demanded satisfaction, and the Duke got wounded, just as you would expect, and then he transported into his room, and his valet tended to him, and I took the opportunity to return here before anyone asked my name.”

  Sydell brought up the cane he’d been playing with, an elaborate affair of varnished mahogany, topped with heavy silver, in the shape of a wolf’s head. What he said was “I see.” But what he did was twirl the wolf’s head, as though absently. “And what was this lady’s name? Or her husband’s?”

  Nell forced a laugh that she hoped sounded like an amused giggle, “How would I know? You are very well aware I know nothing of the fashionable of your world.”

  Suddenly Nell felt dizzy and swayed on her feet. She blinked, and had a sense that a lot of time had passed. The small park, with its duck pond, had gone marginally darker and colder, and there were noticeably fewer children than just a moment ago.

  “My dear,” Sydell said, and the coldness in his voice belied the apparent meaning of that word. “You should know that when you travel between worlds, there is magical residue left on your clothes. You should also know that I am a very hard man to fool. Next time, do not make me resort to outrageous measures to get the information you owe me.” He got out a small pouch and handed it to her. “Here is your stipend, Miss Felix, and do try not to give me difficulties next time. You will continue keeping an eye on Darkwater, for now. We need more evidence to leave the case.”