Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  “One moment, Caroline,” Seraphim said. “I will come with you, in a moment.” He glared over his shoulder at Gabriel’s exclamation, and Nell could see Gabriel making an effort to prevent himself from further outburst.

  Darkwater turned away from his half-brother, and to the four strapping boys with the pallet on which Antoine lay. “Take him to the cold room,” he said. “We must notify the coroner of the death. Send Jem, on a fast horse. Tell him I will be available for interviewing no later than tomorrow afternoon.” He looked back at his sister, “And now, Caroline, I shall come with you.”

  “Your Grace,” Gabriel said. “You are not well enough to–”

  “There are duties,” Seraphim said, ostensibly talking to no one in particular, "that one cannot delegate, no matter how tired or ill one is.” He made an attempt to rise, supporting himself on his cane, then turned to look at Gabriel. “Give me your arm, Penn. I believe my strength is not equal to what I’d like it to be.”

  His strength was not in fact equal to much of anything, Nell thought, as she noticed how Gabriel Penn not only allowed the Duke to hold onto his arm to rise, but put his arm around the Duke’s waist to support him. How ill was the Duke, and why? Had he really sent the killing bolt that had killed Antoine? She shivered at the idea, and, as the gentlemen who’d brought Antoine’s corpse in prepared to take him out again, she realized she’d been forgotten.

  The Duke and Penn were following Caroline Ainsling out of the room, and Nell thought she could stay here, until Darkwater had solved whatever problem had now visited his house, and came back to his room, and remembered Nell existed. Or she could go with Antoine’s body and keep up some sort of vigil in the cold room – perhaps try to discover if that truly was Antoine’s corpse or some contrivance that looked like it. Or… Or she could follow Darkwater and Gabriel Penn and find out what had happened to the Duke’s younger brother and what else might be behind the turmoil in this household.

  She pulled her blanket tighter about herself. It truly didn’t make her any warmer, because her hair was dripping wet. But it made her feel somehow more protected. And then she started behind the Duke and his half-brother, as though she had every right to follow them.

  The gardeners were waiting, with Antoine’s body, but she thought that the maids, stationed on either side of the door, might stop her. So she threw her head back and looked very haughty indeed as she went by them.

  The maids didn’t move. They didn’t even look at her as she walked past. She’d have suspected magic, only she’d learned in Britannia the value of a good pretense and that a good display of arrogance surpassed all logic.

  The maids didn’t even follow as she walked after the Darkwaters and Penn down a long, marble-paved hallway. Really, the one thing about this world that kept astonishing her was how the houses of the noblemen looked more magnificent than anything she’d ever seen on Earth. Take the way the hallway ceiling arched above, painted a deep blue and sprinkled with gold stars. It was like something out of a theatrical set, rather than something you’d find in real life.

  It would testify in favor of this being a dream, except that in dreams one’s feet didn’t ache with cold and slosh in shoes that felt like they’d fall apart every time she took a step. And in dreams it was very rare for one’s hair to drip down one’s back in a disconsolate, icy dribble.

  They walked down the hallway, then up a curving staircase, then down another hallway. As Nell tried to orient herself, she realized they were going towards the southern wing of the house, and, from what she remembered of the house’s exterior – which wasn’t much as she’d only ever seen it from the back, while approaching it, the other two times she’d magically transported into and out of it – to a little tower that protruded out of it at that corner.

  She knew she was right when, ignoring the hallway to the southern wing, Seraphim, instead, opened the door to the tower.

  The Darkwaters, followed by the quite disregarded Nell, entered a huge, circular room. The tower might look small from the outside, but that was, Nell judged, because it was dwarfed by the other elements of the massive Darkwater house. Inside, the tower was one vast room. Vast enough that on Earth it could have passed as the lobby of a very large hotel. Its architecture too resembled something one might find in a hotel lobby, being largely unimpeded: just one vast circular space, going up far more than one story to–

  For a moment Nell looked up, disbelieving because it seemed to her as though the tower had no roof, but, instead, were open to velvety dark summer night sky, with naught but a golden spider web, of some sort, between them and the night. Then she realized the golden spider web was a framework for glass, and that the tower was one vast observatory or perhaps some sort of conservatory. And that roof had to be held together with magic, because with the technology of this world there was no way to keep that much glass up with so little metal.

  Then she looked down and realized that there was more magic at work here than the roof. The space might be free of architectural obstructions, but it was filled with machines, and … contraptions, for which Nell had no name.

  In the way of this world, these machines, no matter how utilitarian they tried to look, were made of polished brass and leather and wood, and their rounded shapes couldn’t help but look pleasing. And they were animated. Arms moved, gears turned. Something that looked like a giant telescope pointed at the ceiling gyrated slowly on a frame, clicking gently in a steady rhythm, while a mechanical arm attached to it wrote steadily with a quill on paper.

  In the middle of all this, perched on what looked remarkably like a high barstool made of brass, sat a young man, probably Caroline’s age or a little younger. He was so young, one might still be able to call him pretty without offending too badly. He looked like a version of Darkwater, or perhaps of Gabriel Penn, made of clay that had yet to harden, or like a sketch of one of them done hastily and left too smooth and soft.

  He didn’t turn to look as the party approached. The Dowager Duchess, who stood next to him, looking at him, intently, as though he were an object that must be puzzled out, did turn to look at them. “Seraphim!” she said. Then she hastened towards them, hands extended. “You shouldn’t have come. Indeed, you look very ill. And there is nothing you can do here, you see. Michael has been taken. They’ve left this in his place.”

  “Mama, are you sure–” Seraphim said, and stopped.

  Nell was sure he had stopped because, like her, if he unfocused his eyes and brought his mage sight to bear, he could see that the thing on the stool was not and had never been a human adolescent. It was more akin to an animated sculpture made of ice, or perhaps intersecting nodes of light and power. Something that could only impersonate a human for those with no mage-sight.

  Changeling. That was a thing the elves did, wasn’t it? Was this creature an elf, then? Or merely a construct the elves had left behind?

  The Duke’s Duty

  And now this. Seraphim stared at the thing on the seat. Were it not for his ability to unfocus his eyes and to look just so at that he would think it was Michael, but it was not.

  The question was, how long had his brother been missing? Would this sculpture, this animated construct, always have been like this, listless and unresponsive? Or was there a way it could have acted like Michael and Seraphim not have known, or – more importantly – the household not have known, while Seraphim was unconscious?

  He looked towards the Duchess and narrowed his eyes. “Mama, they’ve always told me… that is… I’ve always heard it told that you knew about changelings, and that this related to something in your childhood, but no one ever told me what? It was all whispers and then ‘well, you know, because of her childhood’ and when I pursued the information they told me I was not to speak of it.” He looked steadily at his Mama, hoping that she wasn’t about to tell him this was not to be spoken of. He knew he was making poor Gabriel damned uncomfortable. He could tell without turning to look, without Gabriel saying a single word. He k
new whatever the mystery with changelings in Mama’s childhood was related directly to whatever and whoever Gabriel was. That Gabriel would not in fact be here today but for mama and whatever had brought her into the presence of elves in her childhood. “How did you know, Mama? What is it with changelings? Have you seen one of these before?”

  The Duchess looked at the thing on the stool and sighed. “It is not,” she said, “a changeling like the one they left for me, when they stole me to Fairyland as a child.”

  A long breath, with a sound on the edge of keening escaped Gabriel, but Darkwater didn’t turn to look, and instead kept looking at his mother, who spoke like one in a dream. “This is a construct, animated. It looks like, and probably is, ice. Water that someone poured in the rough shape of a young man, and then left overnight to freeze, then animated and gave your brother’s look by magic. It is not alive. It has no feelings. It–”

  “Stop,” Gabriel Penn said. And what was so strange was that Gabriel had told the Dowager to stop, something he’d never done before. “Stop, Your Grace,” he moderated himself, and sighed. “It will not do. We should discuss it, yes, but not here. Not in … its presence.” He waved towards the changeling, who remained, impassive, on his stool, looking blankly at the world.

  “But Mother says it’s not animated,” Caroline said.

  Penn sighed again. “No, but still.”

  “What should we do with it then?” Darkwater asked. It seemed to him foolish to leave the thing alone, as though it might get up to mischief on its own.

  “Nothing,” Penn said. “It is losing its magic and will presently melt. But if you feel better, Duke, we shall lock it in the closet.” He took the creature’s arm and led it, and it let itself be led, to a cupboard in the wall, where Michael kept his chemicals and his vials. Penn pushed the creature in there, closed the door and locked it. He closed the closet to sight and sound with a carefully aimed spell.

  Then he turned to the room. “Shall we speak, now?” he asked. “This is one of the safest rooms in the house to discuss such things in, since Michael has hardened it against magical interference, so no rival houses could see his designs.”

  “But that thing got in,” Caroline said. And Penn smiled at her. “Yes, Caroline, it did, but not through here. My guess is that Michael has been gone for days, perhaps before Seraphim was injured. These changelings have a certain programming and seem more real and solid initially, interact with everyone normally for a few days, and then wind down and become whatever material they were.”

  “Then why didn’t you allow us to speak in front of it?” Seraphim said.

  “Because sometimes they are rigged so as to transmit sight and sound to whoever made them. I have shut it in the closet and blocked all sound magically. We are safe now. And I believe,” he said, "first I will let Her Grace tell us what happened to her in childhood.”

  It occurred to Seraphim, for the first time, that Gabriel spoke as though he knew what it was. He said so, and Gabriel pressed his lips together. “Indeed, Seraphim. Perforce, I know.” And though Seraphim didn’t know why, perforce, in fact couldn’t think of any reason for Gabriel to know, save that, of course, his mother was an elf, and changelings were connected to elves, he kept quiet.

  “I will tell,” his Mama said. “But let us sit. Seraphim should not remain standing long.” He allowed his mother to lead him to a little sitting area around a large, glimmering sphere whose purpose Michael had never succeeded in explaining fully, but which seemed to interest the heads of several magic houses. There were three straight-backed chairs, a chaise longue and a sofa. He refused to lie down on the chaise, but allowed himself to be led to the sofa and sat down on it, glad only that no one had brought an invalid’s shawl to drape around his shoulders. Mama sat in one of the straight-backed chairs. Caroline half-reclined on the chaise. Gabriel remained standing, but Seraphim wasn’t about to challenge him, suspecting it had to do with his idea of preserving the appearance of his position while in public.

  Then he realized there was someone else with them. They’d been so absorbed in their conversation that he hadn’t noticed her before. Miss Helena Felix had come with them, trailing her grey blanket. The woman must be freezing, even with the blanket, and indeed looked very pale and tired. He looked at her. “Miss Felix? Should we have private talk in front of you? To whom do you report?”

  She gave something that wasn’t a half laugh. “To no one, Your Grace,” she said. “Up until this mor– no, up until the day I left here, whenever that was, I worked for Sydell, spymaster for the king. Then I would have said I reported to him. But all that was severed, first, by his betraying me, and then, by his killing the man he was holding hostage for my good behavior. I am now, Your Grace, entirely a free agent, and as a free agent, I confess I’d like to do what I can to bring your brother back.”

  Seraphim didn’t know whether to believe her. After all, the king’s spies were trained and paid to lie. He hesitated.

  “She can hear my story,” his mother said, quietly. Seraphim noted that the Duchess didn’t protest that Miss Felix was Gabriel’s fiancée. “It is nothing so secret that she can’t find out the general outlines of it simply by talking to anyone old enough to have listened to gossip or practiced magic when I was a child. It is not normally spoken of, because people are afraid to give me pain, but not because it is not known.”

  Seraphim looked at Gabriel. “And you? Since I presume you’ll be talking, also?”

  Gabriel looked surprised, then glanced at Miss Felix and shrugged. “Oh, she can hear mine too. There is nothing in it that cannot be gathered with some sleuthing, and I suspect the king’s secret services know it well enough. If I’ve kept it secret at all, it was to spare your family shame by association, but I judge in the trouble we face that that is the least of our worries.”

  “When I was five,” the Duchess spoke, “I was stolen away to Fairyland. No one knows why.” She spoke a little too loudly, a little too cheerfully, as though trying too hard to sound normal. And she’d barely let Gabriel stop talking before she had started. “I had magic, of course, but no more than my brothers and sisters, and no more than a hundred other children in the immediate vicinity of my parents’ estate. But whatever it was, and for whatever reason, it was a well-planned thing. You see...” She looked up at Gabriel, and her eyes unfocused. Not as though she didn’t want to see him, but more as though she knew what she had to say would touch him very nearly and were trying to pull herself away from it, and not to dwell on the pain she was giving. “You see, the changeling they left in my place was not a construct, but a little girl. A little elf girl they had to have shaped from very early on to look exactly like me and behave exactly like me. For days – weeks – my parents didn’t know I was missing.

  “For myself too,” she said. “It was hard to tell. I lived mostly in the nursery, with nanny and the nursery maids. My life was surrounded by toys and I was an imaginative child. As such…well, I thought simply that my toys were more alive than before. For a long time, I didn’t notice that I was in another realm, and then…”

  “And then?”

  “And then I started to feel cold. Not physically. I don’t think Fairyland is any colder than here. It is, after all, like another world in the multi-universe, just one that never fully separated. It has the same climate at the same time. But there is… everyone in Fairyland is cold.” She shrugged. Gabriel was walking back and forth across the little sitting area, as though he couldn’t sit still, but he nodded when she said that. “It’s not that they don’t show emotion,” she continued. “It is that they don’t know what emotion is. They are like humans without the…” She shrugged. “I’m sure Gabriel can explain it better than I could.”

  “Yes,” Gabriel said. “Yes. But not just yet, pray go on.” He paced. She looked up at him.

  “I realized that I was in a way absolutely alone, as… as a child raised by wolves would be alone.” Gabriel shuddered, as though in response to her words. “
But I was too young to know what had happened or to seek to escape captivity. I could not, and as such, I would have remained forever captive in Fairyland, but…but my parents had an hostage. And they did what has always been done when a real changeling, a living one, is left behind in place of the child taken. They tortured her. They subjected her to various discomforts, until I was brought back.” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Gabriel.”

  He paused in his pacing. For a crazy moment, Seraphim wondered if the changeling had been Gabriel, such was the tone of his mother’s voice. Could elves change their sex? He’d never heard tell of such a thing. And besides, Gabriel was around his age, was he not? Could he have been kept in some stasis, so he didn’t grow? But no, Gabriel was Seraphim’s half-brother. He had the Darkwater look, the Darkwater magic, and Seraphim’s own father had recognized him as such.

  “What is there to be sorry for, Your Grace?” he asked, pausing in his pacing to look at her. “Oh, perhaps, yes, perhaps it was that torture, which, though, from what I heard was very mild, at least for an elf, which led her to never quite fit in Fairyland again. But I don’t think so. I never told you why we were thrown out, she and I, have I? I told my father when–” He shook his head. “I beg your pardon.”

  “You beg my pardon? For admitting the duke was your father? Or for mentioning it in my presence? Of all the things your father did, Gabriel, siring you was probably one of the most worthy. Don’t scruple to admit it. He admitted you openly, even if he never changed the name your mother gave you, since nothing could be gained by saddling you with Ainsling, when no title and no fortune accrued with it.”

  Gabriel only nodded, though Seraphim wasn’t sure to what.

  “My mother was the changeling left in place of Her Grace,” he said. “She was also the child of the deposed king of Fairyland. No, don’t ask me how or why. There are revolutions in Fairyland, and civil wars, just as there are here. And I think at the end of the last such war, when my… I suppose, my grandfather, the then- sovereign of Fairyland, was deposed, he left behind his young daughter. It was thought that by sending her as a changeling to the world of mortals, it would dispose of her, I think – though the thinking of elves is not the same as ours and it is hard to fathom at times. However, in the time she was away, there was another revolution, and my… I suppose my uncle, became the sovereign of Fairyland. He could not allow a princess of fairykind to be tortured in the world of humans, and therefore, reluctantly – and I do feel it was reluctantly, though I can’t explain why – gave Her Grace back to her parents and took my mother back. But my mother was ever odd. Oh, I don’t think they did more than threaten her and make her uncomfortable, and perhaps make her work – the things that legend says one should do to changelings, though some people make the poor creatures sit on live coals or worse – and strangely, from what I know of my poor Mama, I don’t think that’s what changed her.