by Sarah Hoyt
“And?”
“And you must under no circumstances accept an offer to live in Fairyland. Oh, it won’t be presented that way. It’s usually presented as great riches, a palace, anything you care to own.”
Caroline looked at her mother curiously, her head tilted a little to the side, as though evaluating something. “How very odd. But you’ll be with me and able to remind me of these rules, will you not?”
“I don’t know,” Barbara said. “What you have to understand is that Fairyland works in ways that our world doesn’t. The same rules of logic do not apply to both. I wasn’t with the people who came to rescue me, but I know that they got separated, and never found out how. So, if you get separated, do remember those rules. They should be enough to keep you safe. And now let us walk.”
“Which way do we walk on the road?” Caroline said, confused, looking behind her, and then ahead.
“It doesn’t much signify,” Barbara said. “Direction also doesn’t mean in Fairyland what it means in our world. Instead of north and south, they have deeper and out. Whichever way we walk in Fairyland, while in pursuit of our goal of finding your brother, we will be penetrating deeper into the lands of magic.”
“But how do we leave, then?” Caroline asked, as the two walked the way they were facing, along the gently rolling road, amid a meadow so beautiful it looked like an illustration from a child’s book. In fact, everything from the too-green grass, to the intense scents of summer, to the rolling hills gave the landscape the impression of being too beautiful to exist – something not even out of a real dream, but out of a story.
“We leave when we’ve found your brother and we’ve fulfilled all the conditions of our coming here, such as our agreeing to render help to three unfortunates. That is,” she said, as another thing occurred to her. “When those are done, we are automatically ejected from Fairyland and into the real world. That is, unless….”
“Unless?”
“The king of Fairyland objects to our going,” Barbara said.
“And then we’re prisoners here forever?” Caroline asked, her eyes very wide and for the first time the hint of fear in them.
“No. We’re here,” Barbara said, "until we can find a champion to fight for our freedom." She paused. Somewhere ahead, something or someone was crying desolately.
Mystery On Mystery
“What do you mean?” Seraphim asked. “You came from Avalon?” He remembered the pyramid world and the feeling that she was a citizen of Britannia who had learned her magic in some far off and desolate place.
She blinked at him. “No,” she said. “No. I simply knew I came from somewhere other than Earth.” She turned around and paced towards the window, and looked out of it at the farm outside. He’d caught a glimpse of it when he was walking from the bathroom and had a vague idea of a broad plain drenched in sun with mountains in the distance. He had tried, of course, to place those mountains in his own world. Landscapes that existed in one place existed – after all – in the other and this was often a good way to guess where in this world corresponded with his own world. But the mountains were wholly unfamiliar to him. Yet, since Miss Felix and her Grandmother spoke English, he had to assume they were somewhere in the North American colonies. But he could not place it in any of the English-speaking portion of them. Not that it should matter. Sometimes different peoples occupied different places in alternate worlds, but it bothered him all the same.
“What would make you think you weren’t from Earth?” Seraphim said, then cleared his throat. “Did you have a memory from another world? Or is the knowledge of other worlds that well known in this one?” There were a few worlds, he knew, where knowledge of magic and of magical alternates to the world they lived in were quite normal and in fact subjects anyone might discuss. But in the Madhouse, where magic seemed not to be used at all?
“No. I think I was brought over as a newborn or very little more,” she said. “And no, belief in other worlds is not widespread. It’s just that….”
She turned away from the window and towards him. He was struck by how beautiful she looked. And he shouldn’t have found her beautiful at all, not in her outlandish clothes. In Britannia, the clothes she had struck him as comely enough, but not extraordinarily good-looking. But here in her native – or not her native – world, in those blue breeches that molded her figure, in a shirt so light and plain that a lady from Britannia would consider it too light for underwear, she looked magnificent.
He thought it might be that he was weak and therefore susceptible. Then he thought, no. It was that her small, delicate features, her dark hair, all of it lent itself to far simpler styles than anyone in Britannia would dream of wearing. He shifted in bed, lest his attraction should become obvious. But she was looking into his eyes.
“A little more than twenty-two years ago,” she said. “My parents were childless and … well… very upset about that state. They wanted children, but there seemed no hope of conceiving one. Adoption in our world, in our region is, for various reasons, a complex and difficult process, or a costly one. You can’t have one without the other. Also, father’s income was irregular, as he was a classical musician, and… no, never mind that, it would take forever to explain. They finally managed to conceive, but the baby was stillborn. As a way of bringing mother out of a very deep depression, father took her to Paris when he went there to play.
“They were walking outside the convent of Holy Grace, in Paris, when they saw a basket appear on the steps. The basket contained a girl: me.” She gave him a brief, brittle smile. “One of my father’s friends knew a doctor in Paris, and they arranged to have it claimed mother had given birth to me, and for me to have a birth certificate, which allowed them to bring me home at the end of father’s engagement in Paris six months later.”
He tried to make sense of her story. “But surely,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that you are from another world. I mean, if your parents didn’t believe in other worlds, surely–”
“No, listen, when they found me, they saw me appear on the steps.”
“But–”
“They were walking under a steady rain, with an umbrella, you know? That’s why there was no one around. But I and my wraps were no more wet than if we’d been under the rain for only one second. And that, you see, is why they thought I’d come from elsewhere. They didn’t quite put it at another world, but the idea of parallel worlds is not completely alien here, and there are stories of people appearing or disappearing out of nowhere.”
“I see. So you thought you might have come from elsewhere, and you wanted to find out from where?”
“They didn’t even tell me I was adopted,” she said. “Not till I was fourteen, and then they didn’t tell me. Only they died in an accident, driving to a new job with a philharmonic in Kansas. I’d stayed behind, with Grandma, to finish out my school year. Anyway… when they died grandma told me. As you’ve found out, she has some magic, and she’d taught me some magic. It is of the sort that peasants do in Avalon, you know, healing minor ailments and such. I took what she gave me, and I built on it, and of course, my magic is much stronger–”
“Strong enough for a noblewoman in Britannia.”
She flashed him a smile. “Yes, my landlady in Britannia has the persistent idea I’m some nobleman’s by-blow.” And then quickly, as he felt his cheeks heat. “Oh, I beg your pardon. I’m back on Earth, see, where no man would find it embarrassing to hear that, not even from a woman’s lips. Anyway, her illusions amused me, because surely… but never mind that. I don’t even know if I come from Britannia. I might come from another world more magical than Avalon, where a peasant has as much power as a nobleman in Britannia does. No. But yes, I had more power, and after a while, grandmother thought, perhaps my origins explained it and so she told me. Therefore, I was … primed you might say, the first year I was living away from home and working at my first job when Antoine appeared in front of me, on a deserted street. And I was prepared to learn ma
gic from him and to….” She blushed. “And to accept his invitation to go and see the other worlds. He said it would be fun,” she said, wistfully. “And it was for a time. Gloriously fun.”
Seraphim guessed at what she didn’t say and didn’t think much of the Antoine fellow. Even if he hadn’t tried to kill Seraphim himself, and if his corpse hadn’t been the reason that Seraphim found himself in these straits, Seraphim didn’t hold with the sort of fellow who gave a respectable girl a slip on the shoulder.
And despite the odd clothes, and what he was sure was a very odd society, Seraphim would have put hands in the fire that Nell Felix was or had been a respectable woman. He chided himself on the "had been." It was different in Britannia. If a girl lived with a man as lovers, and it became known, the doors of society would close to her, and she would cease being treated as a respectable girl. But he wasn’t sure at all this truth held here. In fact, just as a feeling, he had a sense it didn’t. So she was still a respectable woman. And Antoine had lured her away. He was sure of it. But he wouldn’t say it. Instead, he played with the edge of the blanket, and Nell, perhaps noticing no answer was forthcoming, said, “I know I was a fool, you don’t need to tell me, but I… well… was very young. And I’ve been prattling on, and making you tired. You’re not well yet. Sleep. Tomorrow, if you’re feeling better, I’ll show you around the farm.”
But it wasn’t till the next day that she showed him around the farm. Frankly, showing him around the kitchen had been a near fatal shock. He started to understand why these people had no servants. Who needed servants, when machines kept food cold, when stoves lit at the flick of a button, when machines even washed dishes?
After a while, he’d asked for pen and paper and started making notes. “For my brother Michael,” he said. He sat at the broad, golden oak kitchen table and drew schematics on his paper, and made notes. “We can’t hope to harness this electricity you speak of, or at least not fast enough to–”
“It’s not that,” she’d interrupted. “It’s more that electricity interferes with magic. Even mine is not as powerful as it is in Avalon. I think, generationally, if you introduced electricity in your world now, you’d be devoid of magic in a hundred years. Or have it only at that low level Earth has it.”
He nodded. “I suspected there was something like that,” he said. “Some worlds have less magic naturally, but I didn’t feel this as being true on Earth. And so I don’t propose to introduce electricity to Avalon, something for which I doubt Ainsling’s Arcana has enough capital, and that’s supposing something terrible hasn’t happened to my estates. I have a feeling….” He shrugged. “At any rate, my brother Michael is very inventive and gifted at designing magical machinery. I’m sketching the ideas for him, and hopefully he can design them to run by magic.”
She tilted her head sideways, which he’d learned meant that she was thinking something she was afraid of saying out loud, for fear it would pain someone. He’d seen her look like that when her grandmother had said something about Nell now staying home where she belonged.
He understood what she wouldn’t say and said, “I know, I know. You mean that Michael has been stolen away to Fairyland and that he might never come back. But…never fear. We will find him and rescue him.” He’d looked at her, his eyebrows arched. “I keep getting the sense that there is something very bad afoot in Britannia, that I was got out of the way so something could be done to my family. Today I had a feeling Gabriel was trying to find me. I dreamed….” He made a face. “If I weren’t still so weak and my power weren’t still so impaired, I’d scry to see what is happening there and study where we can return.”
“As to that,” Nell said. “I can scry though the power is limited here, if you–”
At that moment her grandmother came into the kitchen, from the door to the basement stairs, “Nell, I was wondering if Mr. Ainsling, since you say he’s been in so many worlds, would be able to tell us where the basket and fabric you were found in came from.”
Seraphim submitted in good part to being shown a wicker basket – of fine manufacture, but nothing special, and two unexceptionable blue blankets. Wool, and fine wool at that, but it meant nothing. “It’s very little to go on,” he said, “unless I scry. She wasn’t wearing any particular clothes, I gather?”
“Only a diaper,” her grandmother said. “Linen, but no marks on it.”
“Then I’m afraid there’s nothing to tell me. It could be any of a dozen worlds,” he said. “I think she’s from Britannia, of course, but I would perhaps think that.”
The two women exchanged a look. Her grandmother sighed. “Well,” she said. “When my daughter-in-law pulled the blankets off Nell, something fell off. We don’t know how it came to be there, but … when Nell was young she made up stories about her real mother putting it there to recognize her by, but it makes no sense, since every other identifying detail seems to have been removed.”
“Something?”
Nell ran up the stairs to her room, which Seraphim had learned was next to his. She came back moments later with her right hand tightly closed. When she opened it, a gold medallion shone in it.
Seraphim’s heart skipped a beat and his breath caught. But he didn’t say anything till he picked the medallion in his palm, and saw upon it, on one side, a figure of a crowned lion, and on the other, a stylized apple tree. He tried to speak several times before he managed it. At last, after clearing his throat, he managed, in a thread of voice, to start in the most irrelevant place, “I bet this pendant managed to find its way into your clothes no matter where you left it, until you were about ten.”
“How did you know?” Nell said. “I ended up wearing it on a chain because I could not get rid of it.”
“Until you reach the age of reason, it’s spelled to accompany you everywhere, in case you get lost, so you can be identified without doubt. I suspect someone thought they’d neutralized that spell, or perhaps didn’t know about it. You have to be related to know, I think.…”
“We’re related?” she said, sounding shocked.
He let out a bark of laughter, which shocked him, because he didn’t feel in the least amused. This added a complication he wasn’t ready to contemplate. “Very distantly, Your Highness,” he said at last. “I believe I’m your sixth cousin.”
“Your–” she said, and blanched.
“Yes, Nell, I’m very sorry, but I believe you’re the lost Princess of Britannia.”
All The Paths
No matter how hard Marlon tried, he could not open a portal into Fairyland. Gabriel watched him do it, and watched him exhaust himself and at some level couldn’t help admiring him for not giving up. It was much like watching a man beating against a closed door long past the point at which his beating had become feeble and his voice had gone hoarse from shouting.
Circles appeared beneath the dark-blue eyes, and the flame-colored eyebrows drooped, but Marlon kept trying.
But then, Gabriel reasoned, with a glance at Aiden, Marlon didn’t seem good at giving up. After a while Gabriel slipped away to the kitchen, where he washed the tea things and made fresh tea and brought it out, and waited till a pause in Marlon’s incantations to say, “Tea. With milk and sugar. You need it.”
Marlon made a face. It was a face that Gabriel remembered. Marlon took his tea black. But he ran a hand back over his unruly hair, making it more so, and shambled towards the tea table, his walk no more lively than Aiden’s. “There is no path,” he told Gabriel. “No way to… to get to Fairyland. There is nothing I can do. It won’t open to us.”
“How not?” Gabriel said. “Though I believe I was thrown out of Fairyland with the specific injunction not to come back, I believe you weren’t even born when you were thrown out.”
Marlon set his cup down and rubbed at his nose between the eyes. “It’s not like that. Not… specific to us, I mean, but to any magicians of a certain level of power, particularly those of mixed magic. And, Gabriel, I regret that I have to give you bad new
s. Something I learned through my scrying of the paths of power.” He did look sorry, his tired eyes almost as lusterless as those of his animated lover’s corpse.
“What?” Gabriel asked, and for a moment felt the dark, unremitting despair of waiting to have Seraphim’s death announced to him. He didn’t think he could live with himself if he'd allowed Seraphim to be killed, and his whole house lost with him. “Tell me.”
“Your… The dowager Lady of Darkwater and her daughter Caroline have gone into Fairyland. They were allowed, or perhaps trapped, into going in. I don’t know what they mean to do with them, but it can’t be good.”
“Caroline.” Gabriel discovered he’d put his own cup down, and that he was clutching frantically at the sleeve of Marlon’s shirt. “For the love of God, we must go and rescue her. She’s just a child. She– I taught her some defenses but not nearly enough for what she’ll meet with there.”
“No,” Marlon said. “And I did not mean to tell you until we could get in. But I don’t think we can, or at least….”
“At least what?”
Marlon’s face had acquired a pinched look, and Gabriel realized he was clutching the magician’s arm hard enough to bruise the flesh beneath. He withdrew his hand and tried to compose himself. “I beg your pardon, but–”
“No. I understand. They are your family.” A pause. “You know, I think part of what fueled my anger at you all these years, other than your incredible stupidity in alerting the authorities or your idiot brother’s insistence on fighting a duel with me, after finding me through magical means he shouldn’t be able to use–”
“Seraphim? He what?”
“Assure you. Fought a duel with me. For your honor. As though you’d have been a despoiled maid–” Marlon shook his head. “At any rate, more than any of that, what fueled my anger at you was knowing that you had a family, and I never did. It was knowing you were loved by at least your father and not born of–” He shrugged. “And that they counted to you and on you.” He looked up at Gabriel and gave the impression of being so tired he would presently sway on his feet. “And that you mattered to them. Foolish, I know, to hold it against you. It is not your fault I was not born in the same circumstances. But I was envious. Deadly envious. And it distorted all my feelings. It made me… never mind.”