Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  It wasn’t till Sydell walked away that Nell’s mind cleared enough for her to realize he’d put a truth spell on her and got her to tell all. Truth spells were much more effective than any truth serum on Earth. They were also almost a dark art, something no honorable magician would use. Of course, she’d long ago realized that the king’s spymaster might be an honored man, but he was probably not an honorable one. An honorable man wouldn’t use her lover’s captivity as a lever to move her in whatever direction he wished.

  Then another thought came on the heels of that. A case against Darkwater. That meant that they were thinking of prosecuting him. And that Nell had just handed Sydell evidence against the Duke. She must go back to Darkwater. She must warn those two men of what was about to befall them.

  Two Attacks and an Alarm

  Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, woke up with a sense of foreboding. For a moment, floating on the edge of consciousness, he thought he was a child, in the nursery in the attics of the house, with nanny hovering by, and that he’d been very ill.

  Then he moved in the bed, and the feeling of his body belied the illusion. Not nanny. And yet there was someone nearby singing, singing in a high voice. That was what had given him the impression that he was in the nursery. Nanny used to sing to him, in a high but not unmelodious voice. Only nanny had never used words that felt like fire distilled through his bones and woven through his nerves, raking his conscience like unsheathed claws. Words he didn’t understand. Words that felt wrong.

  The scream of “stop” tore itself from his lips as he sat up. The voice stopped, immediately, and in its place there was a scream, answering his, a voice much like his own, “Seraphim!”

  He opened his eyes to Gabriel running towards him, and in less than a second, Gabriel’s hands were on his shoulders, Gabriel’s voice too loud in his ears, “Damn it, Seraphim. You’re not well enough to sit. You–”

  He was in his room, his adult room, of course, and it was the middle of the night. Or at least the window, directly in front of his bed, showed only darkness, which meant it was night. Though both the bed and the window were equipped with heavy brocaded curtains – somewhat faded since the old duke’s profligate spending hadn’t allowed expenses such as replacing furnishings – Seraphim never let either set be closed. He believed in the virtues of fresh air. He also believed in keeping an eye on his surroundings, both within and without the house. Perhaps if his father had done so–

  And then he remembered what about his surroundings, just before waking, had caused such a violent start.

  “Who was singing?” Seraphim asked. “What were the words?”

  “What? There was no one singing. You were dreaming. It was a dream.”

  Seraphim shook his head. “No. Someone was singing. Working magic on me. A woman. Where’s the woman?”

  “The– If you mean Miss Felix, the lady you brought back with you, she left, presumably whence she’d come. I have a feeling we’ll know all too soon.” Gabriel Penn felt at Seraphim’s forehead with the back of his hand, then did one of the minor passes that allowed one to evaluate the state of health of another, and frowned. “You have no fever.”

  “Of course I have no–” Seraphim would never be able to say how he had seen the attack, much less how he was able to react so fast. One moment he was looking at Gabriel, trying to decide if it was possible at all that Gabriel had been playing some sort of trick, and thinking to himself that if Gabriel had been singing in a woman’s voice and performing such unclean magic as those words felt like, then it was time to take him to an exorcist and find which entity had claimed his half-brother’s soul. The next moment he caught a reflection on the glass, behind Gabriel’s shoulder. Something. He could never say more than that he’d been aware of movement. And he’d reacted.

  Perhaps he would not have reacted so quickly, if he’d not wakened to unclean magic. He couldn’t say. What he could say and do was cast a protection spell so quick his fingers smarted as the power left them, even as he pulled at Gabriel’s arm, and made him fall, awkwardly, across the bed. At the same time, Seraphim rolled, so he was in a different place.

  Through the confusion, and a sudden burning-feather smell, he was aware that his protective shield spell had failed and the pillow was now on fire. He was also aware of Gabriel across his legs, struggling to get up. But neither took up his thought, and certainly neither got his attention because he was drawing all his power, all his reserves, and sending them after the spell that had just come in.

  There was a moment – he remembered well from his studies at Cambridge – when right after a killing-magic-spell, the kind banned in all civilized countries, it was possible to follow it with one of the same kind and potency, even if you didn’t know from whence it came and certainly if you didn’t know how to cast such a spell, as no civilized man knew, such spells being forbidden in all right-thinking lands. It was allowed too. The only time it was allowed to loose a killing spell that was not contained in a mage stick. It was right of self-defense, secured to the English barons by the Magna Carta, and to all English citizens by the Land and Men act of Richard XII.

  None of this occurred to Seraphim, of course. His reaction was instinctive, as he seized the feel and magic of what had been hurled at him, and hurled it back as fast as he could.

  The power washed out of him in a great wave, and the room swam before his eyes. He would have collapsed back onto his pillow, but the pillow was on fire, so he collapsed sideways, at the same time that Gabriel finally managed to rise. He got hold of something from the bedside table, and flung it at the pillow, putting the fire out, but adding markedly to the smell of the room with an odd scent of cooked meat.

  As Seraphim managed to draw himself up and catch his breath, something about his expression must have given Gabriel the idea that his action was disapproved of, as he said, “Broth. For your dinner. I’m afraid.”

  Seraphim, though his mind was on everything but his dinner, managed a smile. “Better that than the contents of the chamber pot!”

  A quick smile flitted across Gabriel’s lips, then he frowned, as though coming to himself and realizing the import of all that had happened. “Someone… did someone send a killing bolt of magic through your window?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Seraphim said, and, rolling off the side of the bed, managed to hold onto it, though barely. Confound it. He was too weak. The reason why came to him, in bits and disjointed pieces. The damn pyramids; the woman; the boy. How had he let himself be caught so off guard? Perhaps he should have heeded Gabriel. Perhaps he’d been too weak to go off world.

  “And you sent a bolt after it! Seraphim. It’s illegal.”

  “Not according to the law I studied at Cambridge. Self-defense, Penny.” Seraphim tried to make his way to the window, by means of grabbing now onto a small occasional table, now onto the back of a sofa. But before he reached there, Gabriel had guessed his intentions and stood in front of him. “No, Seraphim!”

  Seraphim took a deep breath, “Gabriel, we must find out who it was, and where the bolt hit. You know such killing spells have to be line-of-sight, so he was line-of-sight when he loosed it. Or she, if it was that infernal singer.”

  “No one was singing! And you can’t mean to show yourself at that window when someone just tried to kill you.” He had Seraphim by the shoulders again, which was a deuced stupid habit for him to have acquired, and was trying by main force to push the Duke down onto a rosewood-framed loveseat. Unfortunately, at the moment, the force was on Gabriel’s side, and Seraphim had to allow himself to be pushed down.

  He was not, however, so lost to all reason that he would allow Gabriel himself to go to the window. To prevent this, he held fast to Gabriel’s sleeve and said, “Not you either, then, you damn fool. We don’t know which of us that bolt was aimed at.”

  Gabriel looked exasperated. “Seraphim? Why would anyone try to kill me? I am not the duke. I am not–”

  “You are your mother’s son,” Seraphi
m said, and suddenly something that had been bothering him connected in his mind. “And I have a very good idea that the song I heard as I was waking was in the language of your mother’s people.”

  Gabriel Penn went so still his features might very well be carved out of marble. He stood straighter, and swallowed hard, so hard that it was audible in a room that seemed, of a sudden, so quiet that even the crackle of wood in the fireplace sounded as loud as an explosion. “My mother–” Gabriel said. He shook his head, looked towards the window. “Impossible.” But all the same, Seraphim saw his hand move, and from the very faint tracery of light visible only to mage sight, he could see Gabriel setting a protective spell in place. Nothing like what Seraphim had done in the haste of the moment, but something stronger, harder. Something odder, too, all angles and askew logic. Something not human. And Seraphim knew that despite that “impossible” Gabriel found the threat possible enough to guard against it.

  “I’d swear to it, Gabriel. I don’t know the language, as you … curse it, I never thought of it, but you must know the language. You were not an infant when….”

  “I know the language,” Gabriel said. He looked wary and tired. Very tired. So tired that ten years at least appeared to have fallen on his features. He dropped to the rosewood seat, next to Seraphim. “Blast it all, Seraphim. It is impossible. The treaties and the binds are unbreakable.”

  Seraphim cleared his throat. “I don’t know the language as you do,” he said slowly, deliberately. “But I know the sound and feel of it. When your mother’s people came, shortly after you came to live here, remember? When they came to the door–” He stopped.

  “Yes,” Gabriel said. And how was it possible, Seraphim thought, that Gabriel seemed to be quieter than silence and more still than stone, and so convey a sense of urgency so great that it could not be expressed in word or movement? A sense of urgency that pressed on Seraphim like the knowledge of a life-and-death trial?

  Seraphim took a breath. “Well, this language had the same feel, and I can’t very well imagine any other language, anything at all else in the world that would sound like that.”

  “No,” Gabriel said, and then, as though recruiting strength, “but perhaps you remembered and dream–”

  “It wasn’t exactly the same words, Gabriel. This time there was a spell being said. An unclean spell.”

  “Imp–”

  Seraphim said two words he remembered from what he had heard, two words so odd and so powerful they seemed to burn his tongue with saying them.

  “Stop,” Gabriel said. His hand shot out and covered Seraphim’s mouth. “Stop. No more.”

  “What are the words?”

  Gabriel shook his head. “Unclean. And dangerous.” He waved a hand, again, setting some form of cleansing in place. A form that Seraphim had never seen. Then he took a deep breath, loud in the room. “Two attacks then,” he said, in the same tone as he might use to inform Seraphim that his carriage was ready or that, alas, the boot boy had ruined Seraphim’s best boots. “Because that kill spell through the window was all human magic and none of ou– theirs. Two attacks. Aren’t we the lucky ones. And they are after you, not me. For two days, Seraphim, you’ve been not only unconscious, but shielded under so many healing spells not one would be able to get a spell on you. Or to find you with one. But today, as the healing spells slid off two enemies found you. It was you they were aiming for.”

  Seraphim shrugged. “Or perhaps you were close enough to me while I was under healing spells, to make you less noticeable also.”

  Gabriel rose, “I shall send some footmen down to see whom you killed. There will be trouble over that, mind, self-defense or not. Death must stand examination and trial. And the King’s court, because of your damned rank.”

  “Tell them to go armed,” Seraphim said. He let himself fall back upon the sofa. “There might be more than one out there.”

  Gabriel nodded, as a matter of course. “As for the other matter, duke, those words you overheard, if they were part of an attack aimed at you, would indicate that they think you too have my mother’s blood. And if they were aimed at me.…” He shook his head. “Did you ever tell anyone? About me, I mean?”

  “Which of the many things about you?” Seraphim asked, suddenly cautious.

  “Any of them.”

  “My dear Gabriel, I don’t tell your secrets to anyone. Oftentimes not even to myself.”

  A Mother’s Heart

  They were keeping secrets again. The Dowager Duchess knew this, though she couldn’t tell about what exactly.

  For the two days of her son’s illness – of his lying beneath healing spells, swaddled in blankets and force fed broth – she’d wondered how it had come to this. And she’d wondered what Gabriel knew that she didn’t know.

  Something it was, that she could be sure of. For one, Gabriel’s face was always easy for her to read. Had to be, as much as he resembled her own son. The reasons for that, though she’d tried to forget them, couldn’t but confuse her feelings towards the boy. She both loved him, almost like her own son, and hated him as a reminder of a dark time in her own childhood and of the misadventure that had almost lost her to the world of humans.

  It had been the same since the moment her husband had brought Gabriel in, and the truth was that if Gabriel hadn’t been a year older than Seraphim, and a few months older than their marriage, the dowager would have insisted on claiming him as a son and brazening the world and the ton with some excuse about one of a pair of twins stolen by magical beings. But Gabriel was the elder, his age could be found by magical means not too difficult to employ, and there was no way to make that lie convincing. Not when at the time of Gabriel’s birth the, then, Lady Barbara Hartwitt had been dancing the night away at various soirées and balls, slim as sylph and still unmarried.

  Also, they couldn’t risk Gabriel inheriting. Not with the blood in him. Most other people would not have been sure about allowing him into the house. She remembered her husband asking her, “Are you sure, Barbara? We don’t know, after all, how he will turn out. There are some who say–”

  But all she’d done was nod, because he’d told her what he’d taken the boy from, and what fate waited him if his mother’s people got their hands on him, and Gabriel looked so much like Seraphim even then, that Barbara could not imagine consigning the child to death, or worse. So she’d taken him into the house, and raised him as a fosterling, letting everyone know he was her husband’s son and that some provision would be made for him in the fullness of time.

  They’d been more than ready to make provision, too, despite their straitened circumstances. They’d sent him to Cambridge with Seraphim, and were ready to stand him his beginning in a small magic business, or, perhaps, in law. Even the church, if he had a bent for it, though considering the magical trouble the boy got into, that seemed like a forlorn hope.

  But now, standing in her room, pacing, Lady Barbara realized that had been the first sign of trouble. Gabriel had been sent down from Cambridge, for an offense that her husband would not speak about, that Seraphim claimed to be sworn not to disclose, and that Gabriel himself turned pale but refused to speak of.

  Something had happened there. For a time, the Duchess had nurtured suspicions, but not if Gabriel was in a fair way to being engaged.

  The problem was that she didn’t quite believe he was in a fair way to being engaged. Not to Miss Felix, at any rate. She didn’t know who the woman was, but she would bet she was not who she’d said. For one, the Duchess could feel Miss Felix’s magic quite well. And it was not the kind of trifling magic that would fall to the lot of an illegitimate daughter or the daughter of a poor family. A woman who brought that kind of magic with her could aspire to the highest families in the kingdom. She would not be considering Gabriel, such as Gabriel’s position and expectations appeared to be, and she would not be meeting with him on the sly.

  No. The girl was something to do with Seraphim. And Gabriel was hiding what he knew of it, an
d what he knew of Seraphim’s injuries, too. And it was no use at all denying it. She’d marked how Gabriel stinted sleep to stay by Seraphim’s side and listen for any stray word, any casually dropped hint that might have told the dowager more than they wished her to know.

  She took a deep breath. She was afraid for the boys. This time, whatever trouble they’d managed was far more severe than the forcing house.

  A scratch at the door called her attention. It was the sort of gentle scratching that she’d taught her daughter to employ, instead of the far more brash knocking. “Come in,” she called.

  Caroline came in. She looked like a younger replica of her mother, her features small and well placed in her oval face. Only her eyes were the same as her brothers’, the large, intensely green eyes of the Ainslings. Right at the moment, they were wide open, and her skin, which tended towards a more golden color than that of the boys, had gone pale. The dark hair which she wore in demure braids had become loose, and she was clutching the skirts of her white muslin dress in great handfuls, probably as a result of having run up the stairs. “Mama,” she said, without preamble, “there was someone….” She swallowed hard. “There is someone killed in the garden.”

  The Duchess clutched at her skirt, in an involuntary reaction. “There’s been an accident?” she asked, and then as it occurred to her that, the hour being late, her sixteen-year-old daughter, barely out of the nursery, and certainly not out of the school room, should not be up. “And pray tell, where were you? And why are you not abed this late at night?”