Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  But Caroline only looked at her as though the dowager had taken leave of her senses. “I was looking for Michael,” she said, as though that were of little or no importance. “But Mama, there was a death. Seraphim killed someone.”

  “Impossible! Seraphim is in no state to–”

  “Pray, listen, Mama. Just listen.” The girl was far too high-spirited, and now she would carry her point in the face of her mother’s disapproval. “I went out to the garden, to look for Michael, because he is not in his room, and I thought he might be in his workshop. You know how he can get absorbed in his magical machines, and forget the hour. He didn’t come for dinner, either, so I thought I’d go and drag him indoors to eat and go to bed.” She paused.

  The dowager nodded. Her daughter’s attachment to her twin was well known, though why she should fancy herself as the boy’s mother, Barbara Ainsling would never understand.

  “He was not in the workshop,” Caroline said. “And I thought perhaps he’d come in and was in the library doing some research. So, I came in through the side servants' entrance, and that’s when I heard the footmen going out there. They went by me in the second floor landing, and have no fear, Mama, they never saw me, for I knit myself with the wall, but they were talking, and they said His Grace had sent out a killing bolt. That they’d felt it. And it was no use at all Mr. Penn saying it had been in self-defense, because how could it be, when it must have sought out the poor bas– the poor victim at the bottom of the garden, as the cook had seen it fly, true and fiery all the way there. It had to be a targeted murder, and His Grace probably had done it while out of his mind with fever and knowing no more what he was about than he’d known in his ramblings these last two days.”

  “And you came to tell me of what you heard?” the Duchess asked.

  Caroline looked faintly shocked at the idea, “Oh, no, Mama. Nothing so cow-hearted. I followed them, of course, in the dark. No, Mama, don’t scold, I promise they did not see me.”

  At any other time, the Duchess would have scolded her for this hoydenish behavior, but now she could only say, “And then?”

  “What do you think? They got a man from the bottom of the garden. A very well-dressed man, Mama.”

  “Alive?” the Lady Barbara asked, on a sudden impulse of hope.

  “Oh, no, Mama, very dead.” Caroline pulled back her hair, which had loosened completely from her braid and fallen in front of her eyes. “And I’m sure it was done with a killing bolt, Mama. It had that feel.” For the first time fear superseded excitement and she added, “Only… Mama, Seraphim can’t have known what he was doing. They can’t hold him responsible, can they?”

  Only the Duchess wasn’t sure that her son wasn’t responsible. There was the something he and Gabriel were holding secret. But the time for hesitating was over. “I don’t know,” she told Caroline. “But I intend to find out. You go to your bed. You did well in telling me, but not well in wandering about the house at this hour. Go to your room and to your bed, and leave me to find out what happened. I’m sure your brother wouldn’t do such a thing unless there were a legally defensible reason for his actions.” At least, she very much hoped so. As it was, a problem of this magnitude, legal or not, might be the end of all his chances with Honoria, particularly on top of the shamefully delayed engagement announcement. The unworthy thought that perhaps this was planned crossed her mind. But no. Why would the boy insist on the engagement, then seek to escape it by dangerous means?

  She kissed Caroline’s forehead and said, “Go to bed now, child.”

  The Duchess was out of her room and halfway down the hallway to Seraphim’s before she heard her daughter’s voice at her back. “But Mama! I still have not found Michael!”

  The Spider And The Web

  Nell woke up. She woke up with no consciousness of having been asleep, or any time having disappeared.

  It was rather like waking, or dreaming she’d wakened, and not being sure which. Had she slept before, when she’d imagined herself in the sunlit park with Sydell? Or did she sleep now?

  Now she was in the same park, but it was the dead of night, and the park was deserted. Strangely, it was winter, too, though it had not been cold when she’d been there during the day. Now there was frost on the trees – or at least something white frosted the branches. The lake stood motionless like a mirror. There was no sound, either, though the park was not that large and from where she stood she should be able to hear the noise of carriages trundling through the night, or at least the noise of swans splashing in the lake. Any noise. Anything, even the rustle of leaves or grass blades.

  Instead, everything was very quiet. It felt as if she were trapped in one of those dreams where silence has a physical presence and can envelop all.

  She took a step forward, and that too was like walking in a dream. I don’t like it, she thought, but the truth was that she didn’t have to like it. She didn’t have to give consent to it.

  “I am asleep,” she said, but the words came to her oddly, and she knew she wasn’t. Each step she took seemed to weigh too much and take too long, and she walked all the way to the edge of the lake, slowly, very slowly. Every step seemed to take a million years. Each moment was unnaturally prolonged.

  “I must think,” she told herself. “I must think where I am and how I came to be here, and what I must do.”

  “Sydell. I met with Sydell and he rifled through my mind and took from it all the matters pertaining to Seraphim Darkwater and to whatever it is he’s doing with the other worlds. All of it.” And that was bad, and she knew it was bad, but she didn’t count on the surge of panic that followed those words, on the feeling that there was more in her mind than pertained to the fate of two very nice, but let’s face it, somewhat hapless young men who had broken the law in pursuit of justice as they saw it. No, there was more there. Enough, she thought, that could tilt the universe on its axis and make the world a very dangerous place indeed. Antoine had told her–

  But when she tried to pursue what Antoine had told her, it receded before her mind, and she couldn’t pin it down. Something about her mind and its memories. Something about locking them from prying eyes. “But you should have taught me how to do it, Antoine,” she said, talking to the still air, the silent night, the cold-frosted trees standing, their pale branches gleaming in the moonlight like lost souls begging for mercy. “Because without you, my mind has got rifled through and picked, and whatever Sydell found in it caused him to send me to–”

  To send her where? She’d reached the edge of the lake and looking down she saw the water. It was water, but it was unreally smooth, like a mirror, so smooth that it might well be solid, like glass calm and unreflective.

  And from a place a long time ago, when she’d been just a young computer programmer, who seemed to have fallen into a fantasy novel and in love with a powerful wizard, she heard Antoine’s voice talking. “Sleeping Beauty,” he said. “Why do you think she slept a hundred years? And never woke? And never tried to fight her enchantment? Why do you think all those around her slept? The brambles never grew. That is a silly invention in your world. And no mice nested in the cupboard, no rat nibbled the sleepers. Do you know why? There are worlds in between the worlds that exist anew each ticking of the clock. Each time the clock ticks, reality hesitates and wavers, as many possible futures rush in and solidify into one. Just one present. Unending futures. From such unending worlds, though a magical accident, the multiverse’s many worlds were created. But in each of these worlds, the infinity of futures coalesces to just one second of present.

  “And between those many futures and the solidified present lies a unit of time. It’s so brief that in it your heart would not have the time to beat once. It is so long that, to someone caught in it, it will last forever and the future will never arrive.

  “A strong enough magician can spin another human – usually just one. One shudders at the thought of what it would take to really spin an entire castle and all its inhabitants into th
at space.

  “– into that time. That time between future and present. That time that will never be present nor future nor past, but a place apart from time. In them no one dies, though it could be said no one really lives, ever. And you can stay forever, imprisoned. Alone.”

  Alone, Nell thought, looking at the water still like glass. Alone.

  But there was a way out. There had to be. Sleeping Beauty had come back. The prince had kissed her. But that would need a prince, would it not?

  “So I’m out of luck, since all I have is a duke,” she thought and wanted to laugh, which is how she knew she was really tired and really scared, because laughter was inappropriate in here. Laughter had no place in this land where nothing would change and where she would be a prisoner forever.

  No. No. there had to be a prince and a kiss. There had to be a way of attracting him.

  The problem of Earth, she thought, and the problem of growing up on Earth was that one never got to learn how to get out of these kind of situations. If you could believe the people of Avalon, the Earth and Avalon, and the hundreds of other Earths had all spun from the same unified Earth.

  The theory of when it had spun apart varied, and some maintained it had happened well before human history begun, and others that it was as recent as a few hundred years ago. Yet others, saner, thought that it had taken place at different times for different worlds.

  But all of them believed they’d all come from common stock and had common legends. And that these legends, perforce, came from similar events, or encoded similar knowledge. And by and large that was true in Avalon, where one could learn from the perils of Cinderella – although mostly what one learned, at least according to Antoine, was not to perform love-spells involving one’s own father and a nice-seeming neighbor lady, when one was a very young and inexperienced witch. And as for Little Riding Hood, that charming cautionary tale had prevented many a young girl from giving her pet dog characteristics of her human playmates in order to have him better play house.

  But Nell didn’t think that anyone had ever told her what the real meaning of Sleeping Beauty was. And in the world in which she’d been so fortunate as to grow up, the best-known version said that she should send bluebirds or something of the sort to call Prince Charming to come and get her out of this bind.

  She snorted loudly. So much for Prince Charming. If he only answered to dial-a-bluebird she’d be lost in here forever, and he’d never know where she’d gone. Because, after all, nothing moved here. No bluebirds. No wind. Not even air. And she only remained alive because she couldn’t die.

  But she could move, her mind protested. She was an intelligent being and she could move, even though the rest of this world might be locked between past and future, never being present. And if she still had the ability to think and to move, then the only thing that she could use to call someone to her rescue was … her own mind.

  Part of her wanted to rebel and to say that she needed no one for rescue; that she was a self-sufficient woman; that she’d been taught to rescue herself. But the old legends didn’t work that way. They were older than mankind and certainly older than any vestige of self-determination, than any idea of females being embarrassed for being beholden to a male. The legends, and the puzzles they encoded went all the way back to the beginning, when a human without a tribe was lost, and when a tribe was often just a man, a woman and their offspring. In those times, in that place, you needed the rest of them to rescue you.

  That meant… that meant, she thought, that if she had bonded with someone, preferably someone male, she would be able to now call her to him by magical means, and he would break through the frozen stillness of this nowhere place and rescue her.

  But she had never bonded with anyone. Well, not that way.

  “Perhaps Antoine,” she said, aloud, and tried to take it seriously, but she knew it wasn’t. Antoine was just a dream. He had been the dream of a young girl – the extraordinary, enchanting wizard who existed even though all the laws of the world said he shouldn’t. But lately, just as they landed in Avalon, she’d started to wonder if he was truly all she’d thought, if he was as powerful, as urbane, as learned, but most of all if he was as good as she’d willingly dreamed him.

  She didn’t know the answer to that. She still didn’t. But she knew that having doubts had severed the connection between them. If there had ever been a connection. Now when she tried to reach for Antoine’s essence, for his magical strength, she felt nothing.

  It was like pulling at one end of a rope that was supposed to be tied to solid rock, and instead feeling the rope come up, all of a sudden, slack and too light. It was like taking a step in the dark and finding nothing under one’s foot.

  Antoine would not work.

  Gabriel, perhaps? Gabriel Penn had seemed a good, solid man. She’d liked his strength and his persistence, and his refusal to let his half-brother die. Given what the society was, and the difference in their positions, she could only imagine how many slights and insults Gabriel must have endured, and yet he was willing to risk it all for the legitimate heir.

  Yes, he could be a rock in times of trouble, and though she’d not perceived any attraction from him to her, he had told the duchess they were engaged. Perhaps that was a sign of a wish he dared not express?

  She looked at the lake, in the frozen not quite light of the not quite night. It wasn’t she realized, that it was nighttime here, but more that the light that was here had solidified like water. It was light on the trees, not snow. And yet she felt colder just thinking about it.

  Her mind, gently, carefully, quested in the direction of Gabriel Penn, thinking of him and of the power she’d perceived from him, and trying to establish a connection. Even if the connection was no more than a vague interest from him, that and her good will ought to establish a bond strong enough to–

  To what? To have him ride up to her rescue? No. She didn’t think so. She suspected it was more that establishing a bond would make it possible for her to pull herself up to where he was, to drag herself from this frozen never-was to the present. Wherever he was and whatever he was doing, as embarrassing as it might be, at least it was somewhere alive.

  Her questing mind met with something. It wasn’t like looking for Antoine and finding nothing where his mind and power should be. Gabriel was a solid presence in her magical quest, taking up a solid portion of her magical map. But when she tried to pull up, to pull to him, to feel him – her mind careened into a blank wall.

  No, not a wall, a gate. She could see it in her mind’s eye – tall and made of something hard and cold. Metal, or perhaps stone. And locked.

  For a moment she thought of shaking the gate, of rattling it, but realized it was less than a forlorn hope. The gate dwarfed her and loomed over her, and there was nothing in her human form that could open it. From beyond it came a disturbing song, in a language she couldn’t understand.

  She had the impression quite suddenly that the real Gabriel Penn was someone quite different, quite other than the servant he appeared to be. It was nonsense, but… She felt him as almost an alien being, someone she couldn’t hope to comprehend.

  That left…. She gritted her teeth and through her mind passed in review the many people she had met in her time in Britannia. Most of her meetings with men were less than inconsequential. Other than Sydell she’d had no constant male contact. And Sydell had sent her here. She was sure of it.

  So that left… Seraphim. What possible contact could he have with her? Well, he’d risked his life to save her. But he’d risked his life, too, to save the lion boy, and yet she didn’t think that he had any interest in lions. Or in boys, for that matter.

  But he was kind and he was – if she guessed his character properly – hard put to resist the claims of someone in need. And she was in need. So, if not with her attraction, she could forge a bond with her need.

  Thinking of her great need and that without him she would be locked in here forever, worse than a ghost, neither
dead nor alive, till she went slowly mad in an eternity of solitude, she reached for the power she’d seen as Seraphim Darkwater’s. At the same time, she called the duke’s aristocratic profile, his laughing green eyes to her mind.

  For a moment it felt like she’d met with the same wall that surrounded Gabriel, only if Nell had to picture this one, she’d picture it as those brambles grown around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. A profusion of defensive thorns, things to keep others away.

  “But I need help,” she said, and cringed to say it, and yet – desperate – pushed her need at him, forcing him to see that without him, she was barred from life forever.

  Whatever was holding her broke so suddenly that she had the impression of being picked up and lifted, then thrown bodily into the water.

  She started to sink, under the weight of her skirts and petticoats, then managed to paddle enough to keep herself afloat as she struggled to remove the water-logged petticoats before they pulled her under. As she did, details sank in – the murmur of the wind in trees around this lake, and something else. The lake was full of boats, the boats filled with men who looked like gardeners or stable boys and who carried a lantern apiece. Each boat held two men, one of whom rowed while the other stood, the other holding the lantern aloft and trying to look into the murky depths of the lake.

  There were two boats making for her as fast as the men rowing could make them. The man with the lantern called from the nearer one, “It is not him. Not the young master.”

  “Who is it then?” the standing man from the other near boat called.

  “It’s a lady,” the nearest man called. “Someone tell His Grace there’s a lady in the trout pond.”

  Lady In The Lake

  Seraphim sat on his sofa, wrapped in a dressing gown which made no more than a pretense of keeping out the cold, but did so magnificently, in shimmering green silk with a pattern of flying dragons. He’d asked for his cane with the silver top. But even such an obvious means of support hadn’t convinced Gabriel to let Seraphim get up and be about his business.