Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  She was briefly scandalized. “Mr. Penn shaves you?”

  Seraphim looked as surprised as he had when the plastic had melted, then started burning with a merry flame all over the gas burner. “He is my valet,” he said. “And besides… I don’t know that I’d feel really confident with anyone else using a blade that close to my neck.”

  “But who shaves him?”

  There was a moment of almost shocked hesitation. “Himself, I presume,” Seraphim said at last and, once more proving to her that he was very far from stupid, he smiled, disarmingly. “I can shave myself too, Miss Felix, and I take your meaning, but he does it better than I can do it, and in my world there is the expectation that a person of rank–” A shadow passed over his face. They hadn’t talked about her origins, not since he’d discovered them. Instead they’d skirted around them like a burned cat walking around fire. In a way they’d both tried to pretend it had never happened, and more often than not he called her Miss Felix, even if there was, sometimes, an almost palpable hesitation before the word. Grandma, too, had not mentioned it, but there was that look she gave Nell sometimes that made Nell wonder what she felt. Was she afraid of losing Nell forever? Nell was her only descendant and it had always been assumed, on Grandma’s side at least, that Nell would inherit the farm, particularly since mom and dad had died.

  But now Seraphim looked at her and sighed. “As you’ll doubtless learn, once we reclaim your position.”

  “Are we going to reclaim my position?” she said, softly, sitting across from him.

  He looked at her a long moment. “You are very wise, you know?”

  “Am I?”

  “You are. You’re neither overjoyed at the idea of being a princess, nor foolish enough to tell me you don’t need to go back, or you don’t want to go back, and that you’d rather live your life out here, as it’s been.”

  She sighed. “I’m not sure,” she said, deciding confession was good for the soul, "that I am so much wise as cowardly. I’ve avoided discussing it, because I didn’t want to think about it. It goes without saying that I don’t wish to claim my inheritance in your world.”

  “Why does it go without saying? And it is your world too.”

  “Because… It’s not my world. Not really. I was not brought up there. It feels uncomfortable, and odd, and I know enough, thank you so much, Your Grace, to know that at the higher levels in society there is even less freedom than in the other classes. I know that if I were to become your princess, I’d find myself married off to someone I don’t love. I’d probably be bundled off to some country where I don’t even speak the language, because the family I don’t even know needs a treaty or something.”

  He looked at her a long time, his bewildering green eyes very intent. “Did you ever see the king, Your… Miss Felix?”

  She shook her head. “There was,” she said. “Some sort of ceremony once, and you could say… I mean, I saw him from a distance. Tall man. Grey hair.”

  “In family… even in the extended family, which we are, and in private, not in his capacity as king, he goes by Richard, though I believe my mother might call him something absurd like Ricky. They… my father and he were playfellows and when my father married my mother, she learned to address the king the way my father did.”

  “In family. You really are related.”

  He gave her the bewildering smile again. He seemed to have forgotten what he was sketching and instead, his pencil moving as if of its own accord, had started sketching a face on the side of the paper, shading it in. “Not really. No more than all nobility in the isles is at some level. If we didn’t often import brides we’d all have two heads.” He shrugged. “But we are distant cousins, and because my family is one of two important magical families–” He frowned a little, and she wondered if he was remembering that the other family was that of his erstwhile fiancée. Or were they technically still engaged? That particular bit of etiquette was bewildering beyond belief. “But because my father and Richard were friends, my father being one of a select group of youths allowed to play with the prince heir, they remained close. And given the status of my family, we were often invited over to … for family dinners, of a sort.” An amused smile again. “It would still all seem unbearably formal to you, but to the royal family it is our version of winding down. I don’t see how I didn’t realize it before,” he said, looking at her. “Except of course, one doesn’t expect lost princesses to drop into one’s lake… or on top of one. But you look a lot like your mother, Queen Cecily. Cecilia, I believe is her birth name.”

  “Cecily,” Helena said. Useless to say she didn’t want to know her mother or hadn’t nurtured questions about her parents. “I… I never knew that was the Queen’s name.”

  “No. Most people just refer to her as her majesty the Queen. But she looks like you, though in smaller point. you inherited some of your father’s more substantial look. She is… was… a princess of Italy and married your father when she was barely a teenager. Or at least married him by treaty and came over to learn our ways and our magic. They married officially in their twenties, and had a long string of stillborn infants, before they managed to produce you. Their magic, you see, is somewhat incompatible, which is a danger when marrying far from home.” He was now carefully shading the features. A woman’s face, Nell decided. “But the advantage of course is that any infant who survives will be very magically powerful. As you are.” He looked up. “Understand, they are a very happy couple. You are correct. At our level of society normally marriages are made for reasons other than mutual affection, but Richard and Cecily love each other. Lucky for them, of course. They’re both of a quiet, bookish disposition, and on winter evenings they’ll both sit in his office. She reads while he works. They could be any middle-aged couple. And of course, they wanted to have children.” She realized with a shock that the face he’d drawn was her own and, having shaded it in, he as now busily giving her a crown. “They wanted to have children for the crown, but most of all they wanted to have children for themselves. I don’t actually remember the princ– your disappearance, not as such. I was very young myself. But I do remember your baptism because there was a procession, and I was one of a few children allowed to carry your train… the… the edge of the cape attached to your christening gown.” He sighed. “At any rate, I have heard from my parents how overjoyed Richard and Cecily were, then how distraught at her– your disappearance. How they tried to follow all leads in vain, only to find you were carried out of the world. And then, the king asked permission of parliament for an exemption from the prohibition of traveling to other worlds, so that he might send investigators to find you.

  “It was denied, because it was felt it might upset the delicate magical balance of the universe, and… and my mother says that your parents aged ten years in a week. I don’t know if it’s true, but I know that–”

  “Yes?” She said.

  “That the two of them, though they’re not actively unhappy, always look to me as though a part of them is missing. It’s as though… as though they should be living a completely different life, one in which they have children and the hope of grandchildren, and instead, that part of them was taken away. It’s as though… they are shadows of themselves.”

  “Damn you,” she heard herself say, before she knew what she was going to utter. “Damn you. You know very well I could have refused the claims of the kingdom, but I can’t refuse the love of my parents.”

  He didn’t say anything. His pencil had given her an elaborate crown, and was now sketching a body in royal robes, a hand holding a scepter. After a while, he breathed deeply. “Understand, Your Highness, you do have a claim to the kingdom, too. Someone kidnaped you and sent you to a world where our scrying didn’t work. Someone, too – maybe the same person – made sure to find you later, as an adult and bring you to Britannia for some time. And someone again, who knows how or why, sent you away, with me, to a world where you were likely to get killed quickly, had we not taken extraor
dinary measures.

  “Unless the person doing all this is mentally ill, it can’t be the same person. So the question is, who are the two forces warring over you? How and why was I pulled into this strife? What do these people have to do with my family? And how can we uncoil this confusion?”

  Nell looked at him a long time. She wanted to scream and tell him his kingdom’s problems were no issue of hers, or that she didn’t care, or that she’d stay here and he could go back.

  But in her mind was the image of the royal couple – her parents – who had mourned her loss for more than twenty years and yet had adhered inflexibly to their duty and the laws of their land, even when their position allowed them to impose their will. She thought of how Seraphim described them, as if a part of them were missing. She thought of Seraphim himself and his family, that bond she’d seen between the members of his family, even the illegitimate one.

  She was close to Grandma, perhaps that close, but it was just them and had been since mom and dad died. But if she had more family, family who missed her….

  “What if I go back? With you? We just transport into the palace and… find my parents…”

  He tilted his head sideways, and looked at her through narrowed eyes, the way she’d learned he did when appraising magic. “You might have enough power to do it,” he said. “And the commotion might even be worth it. But there might very well be traps set for you, should you return, and besides….” He sighed.

  “Besides?”

  “I’m fairly sure I’m wanted, and that a blade might have slipped into my back before you’re even established…. Face it, we have a powerful enemy.”

  “Yes,” she said, slowly. Then bit her lip. “How can we figure out… at least some of what is going on there? Sooner or later, you’ll want to go back. You’re almost well.”

  He pushed the notepad away. “I want to go back very soon. I’ve been having dreams about Gabriel, and I think he’s in trouble. Bad trouble. But you are right. To go back blind might be death.” He paused. “I could try scrying.”

  But she had a feeling that he couldn’t scry very well, not from a world with so much iron and so little magic as Earth. She sighed. “No. I’ll do it,” She said. “I’m used to the magic here.”

  That got her the odd tilted look again. “Crystal ball?” he asked, as though this were somehow amusing.

  “No,” she said. “I’m self-taught, remember?” She got up, leaving him to ponder, and went into the dining room. On the drawer was the pack of cards her grandmother used for her occasional bridge nights. She came back and set it on the table. It amused her that his eyes widened. Playing-card scrying, in Britannia, seemed to be a parlor trick type of thing, almost a joke. “You cut or will I?” she asked. She was about to show him what she could do.

  Cat’s Cradle

  Gabriel woke to the sound of curtains opening and of a tray being set on the table next to the bed. For a moment, for just a moment, before opening his eyes, he imagined he was back at Darkwater and that everything was as it should be: the intervening events had been some horrible, inscrutable nightmare.

  Then he opened his eyes. Sunlight came through mullioned windows. The room was small, but not as small as his room in the Darkwater house. And the person standing by the tray, having just set it down, was not some benighted apprentice house maid, with her cap all askew, but Marlon Elfborn, his clothes no more rumpled than normal, his eyebrows raised as though someone had asked him a perplexing question, and a sort of questioning smile on his lips.

  Gabriel squinted against the sun, stared at Marlon a moment, and then – somewhat to his horror – heard his own mouth say, “Rufus.”

  Marlon blinked at him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your hair,” Gabriel said and sat up, and even as he said it, he knew that it wasn’t true, that Marlon’s hair wasn’t red. Not really. Nothing about Marlon was really. Not good, not bad. Not dark, not light. Gabriel groaned.

  “Hardly,” Marlon said, crisply, and sounding indefinably amused. “Not that it matters much, does it?”

  “It might,” Gabriel said, his mouth still independent of his conscious thought. “I wonder if your mother was a salamander.”

  And now Marlon’s eyebrows went high, really high. “A fire spirit? Unlikely. It is not how my power trends, and besides, I’d like to see the human, no matter how magical, to impose himself on one of those.” He shook his head. “None of which matters, does it? I have laid out the instruments we’ll need downstairs, but I could use your help. I remember you can’t wake without tea, and I remembered also,” he looked like a school child caught at fault, “that you didn’t like magic used around the house for chores. So I brought you tea and toast. There is food in the kitchen, should you wish for it. Stasis field, on the serving board. I’ll be ready to work in half an hour.”

  And like that he was gone, so fast that he might as well have teleported. Gabriel ate his toast, with just a touch of the marmalade provided in a small porcelain dish, and he drank down his tea. It was strong and a little stewed, which, in his experience, was how Marlon had always made it. Not unpleasant, though.

  There was a bathing room and a water closet next to his room, in between his door and what he presumed was Marlon’s, Gabriel found it by dint of looking, and took care of his morning hygiene and hasty shaving. One thing that Marlon had never understood, Gabriel thought, annoyed, as he tied his necktie by touch, was that other people didn’t spring from sleep fully awake and dress in next to no time.

  But by the time he made it down the stairs, Marlon was too absorbed in disposing objects around the room to pay much attention to Gabriel, much less to reproach him on being slow.

  The objects were objects of power, but an odder assemblage of them than this, Gabriel had never seen. There were stone spheres, vast and polished, swirling with metallic veins and crackling with barely-contained magic. There was one very large, very ancient shell that looked as though it had been corroded by the tides of an ancient sea. There was, too, an old crown, brown and worn down, that looked as though it had been buried for very long and had possibly been steeped in blood, besides.

  Marlon disposed them as pieces on an elaborate game tray. He’d pushed all the furniture out of the way to arrange things, and as he pulled a particularly ugly little statuette of a wolf over one way, for just a moment Gabriel saw the thread of power stretching between objects.

  Marlon looked up then, dusting his hands, as though to cleanse them from hard work. “There,” he said. “Do you think that reflects the tangle, Gabriel?”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” Gabriel said. “I presume you wish to represent the tangle of magic lines, but … I never learned to do this.”

  Marlon made a sound of annoyance. “It’s very simple, really. We’re representing the world as it is – or rather, the mess that someone has made of magic lines as it is. And then after we determine that, we can twist them back – or at least to a less tense state. It’s simple sympathetic magic, Gabriel and you must have learned it in grammar school.”

  Gabriel heard himself say, “We had a tutor, Seraphim and I,” as though that explained everything, then walked gingerly down the stairs and into the magic field. Walking into an area where workings were being done was always dangerous, but Marlon hadn’t completed a wall or a defense barrier, or anything of the kind, and other than a vague zapping at the bottom of his feet, Gabriel felt nothing else.

  Then, looking around at the objects, he felt it and saw it, the tension that was built up in some of the lines being pulled out of position. “Oh,” he said.

  “Yes,” Marlon agreed, as though he’d said a lot. “They are at high tension, at least some of them, but we have to reflect what they are, rather set them in the natural positions. I suppose the feeling of wrongness overwhelms you and you can’t do that. Yet. It’s difficult the first time. Very well. I think I have them right. Now, let’s close the working, and then we can move the lines.”


  “You didn’t close it to set it,” Gabriel said. He’d just realized Aiden Gypson’s body was nowhere around and wondered where it could be. At Cambridge, Marlon had kept it in a closet in an attic room, which seemed cruel, but somehow Gabriel would much prefer that.

  “No. See you, I had to be open to the influence of the world and to the currents as they were. But now we can close it. Do you wish to do the honors of the knife? I shall call the guardians.” He handed Gabriel his working dagger, a piece of ancient metal probably inherited from some teacher. Working knives had to be inherited or have another reason to be held in affection. They were supposed to be, in a way, a part of the magician’s own self. Gabriel felt a pang at realizing he’d somehow forgotten his own dagger at home, at his work desk. It had been a gift from his father.

  He took Marlon’s, though, and walked a quarter circle, slicing at the air. “I cut this working from the world, into a space between the worlds,” he intoned, in his best learned-ritual-voice.

  Marlon stood next to the piece and called to the guardian of the North, “Guardian of the North, ice and cold, we call to you. Protect this portion of our working that no undue influence can intrude.”

  They repeated it at each of the cardinal points. Gabriel watched Marlon very carefully to make sure no strange magic crept in. Once a man had dabbled in necromancy – had he really said it was not intentional? – it was only a matter of time till other dark workings came into his daily magic. Or at least that was what Gabriel had been taught.

  Finally the circle was closed, and within it, they turned and looked at each other. Neither would willingly break it, because doing so would endanger those who set it. Since they both had, it would be double jeopardy. The circle would need to be opened before it could be broached. For now, they were in this space, in some undefinable way between realities, which gave them the opportunity to perform magic that would be dangerous in any world.