Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  She could no longer remember what the story was about, or whom it spoke of, but she understood this now applied to her situation. She had chosen to come into Fairyland to find and free Michael. If she wanted to fulfill that mission, she must help three people – or three creatures – who needed her help. Akakios was the second of those.

  The task might not be of her choosing, but the mission was. If she died, she would die in pursuit of her mission.

  Gritting her teeth against the unbearable pain, she realized she was using the sword to help support herself as she crossed the clearing. What an ignominious use for an eldritch weapon.

  She found herself near the cage an eternity later. She couldn’t have told exactly how she got there, only that she had. A moment of panic, through the stinging sweat in her eyes, as she realized she had no key to open that lock. And then in desperation, she raised the sword, and inserted it between the bars, and pried….

  The cage door opened. Akakios jumped out. Relieved, Caroline let go a little of her iron will… and the unicorns snorted and reared.

  “Lady,” Akakios said. His arms were around her, unexpectedly powerful. In her confusion she thought that she shouldn’t let a centaur embrace her. They were dangerous. They–

  “Lady, let me take you out of here, before you lose your control over the beasts.”

  And then she was held in his arms, as he galloped to the edge of the clearing.

  How odd, she thought. He looked much less young and helpless now that he was out of the cage.

  The Duke’s Duty

  “Centaurs?” Seraphim asked. He felt shaken to the core at the realization that Gabriel had committed a crime, and a capital crime at that.

  Oh, he’d known – hadn’t he? – that Gabriel was in love with the necromancer. Seraphim had tried to tell himself it was no such thing, but it was not just Gabriel’s refusal to form any other connections after he returned to Darkwater. There was also… the look in his eyes when anything relating to the debacle at Cambridge had been mentioned. Like a man driven into the desert and away from his heart’s desire.

  And yet, Seraphim had convinced himself it had been seduction. More, it had been seduction of one too young and innocent to know what was forward. And that the necromancer bore sole responsibility.

  But if Gabriel had used a compulsion spell… Seraphim shook his head. No. There was no time to think about it now.

  Gabriel might not be who or what Seraphim had thought he was – maybe. There was more to a man than the follies he committed in love. Seraphim’s own father had committed follies enough in love, the siring of Gabriel being perhaps the smallest one. Which hadn’t made him, as Seraphim had found out when he’d discovered Papa’s secret papers and his even more secret activities, less of a hero, or less of an honorable man. Only children thought creatures came in perfect packages, all good or all evil.

  Judging Gabriel’s soul was not Seraphim’s job, at any rate, something for which he would be eternally grateful. Judging him temporally might be, as his Lord and head of his house. But that was neither here nor there, as Britannia’s legal system didn’t apply here.

  Instead, what was Seraphim’s duty, left to him by his father, was to keep every member of his family safe, and at that Seraphim had been failing miserably. If someone were to be judged here, Seraphim would receive the harshest judgment of all.

  So he sat down and asked the necromancer, “Centaurs?”

  The man looked up and had the decency to give him an anguished look. “I thought there was no harm. Of course the king forbid anyone to travel into another world, even to rescue his daughter. I even understand the justification for it. The balance of power is such that the least magician in Avalon can control vast portions of other, less magical worlds. But the centaurs were not asking me to come to this world – or any world. They just wanted to know where the princess was. So I scryed and found her.” He stopped and made a face. “I swear it was not till afterwards – that I realized that this must have meant they wanted to send someone for her. To rescue her?”

  “Antoine,” Nell said. It wasn’t a question. She said it with decision, with absolute certainty. And Seraphim nodded and looked at Marlon again. “When did you realize it? And don’t tell me it was just a thought. Something happened, something that told you why they wanted her location, and what they meant to do with it.”

  “Yes. Well—I checked later, and I found she was in our world. You see, they sent someone, an emissary of theirs, possibly a centaur, to find her.”

  “A centaur?” she said. “Antoine was not a centaur.”

  “You wouldn’t have known,” Seraphim said, cutting off her protest, and continuing as he saw her open her mouth. “So they sent someone to goad her into traveling to the kingdom. Why? In the name of what?”

  “I don’t know,” Marlon said. “Except that I know my father is involved in it. As are the Blythes.”

  “The Blythes?” Seraphim asked, feeling suddenly frozen, as though someone had poured a bucket of cold water over him. “Of Blythe Blessings?”

  “Yes,” Marlon said. Gabriel made some sound and looked at Seraphim and Seraphim, feeling a headache coming on, could only think that he’d found the note in his father’s writings that an alliance with Blythe’s Blessings should be procured at all costs. He’d thought it meant… He reeled back a little. Had he been that wrong?

  “For heaven’s sake, man, what can all this cryptic stuff mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Marlon said. “My exile made it difficult for me to investigate. All I know is that there is a plot and that you and your family have now got ensnared in it.”

  Seraphim cleared his throat. That much had also become obvious to him. And he’d let them be ensnared, even though they were his responsibility. He cast a look at Nell’s profile, grave and attentive as she looked at Marlon.

  Part of his confusion, Seraphim thought, had come from his attraction to her, the attraction he hadn’t even wanted to acknowledge. Much good it would do him, he thought, to want the Princess Royal, the heir to the throne of Britannia.

  It was time to stop being as foolish as Gabriel, and for as impossible a love. Perhaps it ran in the family.

  But Gabriel wasn’t the head of the family. Seraphim was. This would be as disastrous as his love for Nell. More. Nell was human and could be hurt.

  Time to stop acting like a moon calf, and start protecting those who were his to protect.

  Healing

  How odd it was, Caroline thought, that Akakios had seemed so much smaller, so much younger in the cage. From the moment he’d got hold of her and galloped with her across the clearing, she’d known him for what he was. Young, yes. Probably too young to count as an adult in the world of centaurs, but some years older than she. She’d guess him to be nineteen or twenty, or maybe a little older. Strong with it, too, despite his injuries. He lifted her effortlessly, and his gallop faltered only once, when crossing the clearing, the type of almost tiny missteps that a horsewoman learned to identify as a sign of the mount's being tired.

  He had deposited her amid the other centaurs, and then she’d let her control over the unicorns slip. She could hear them tramping and baying – an odd sound, unlike anything she’d ever heard before – in the direction from which she’d come, but the magic clearing where they lived seemed to hold them in their perimeter.

  And Caroline, sitting on soft grass, beneath a canopy of trees, closed her eyes as the pain of her injuries hit her. An undefinable time later, she became aware of two people arguing loudly next to her.

  “– already risked too much. I will not let you,” the centaur chief was bellowing.

  “In the great cause, I risked too much? What have you risked, father?” and though she’d heard his voice only once before, she was absolutely sure this was Akakios.

  “Everything but my one remaining son,” the king answered.

  “Ah. And then it will all be for nothing, won’t it?” Akakios said. “My brother’s
sacrifice, everything we’ve done to restore the balance and bring the land under control?”

  The king sighed and Caroline thought there must be two sets of lungs at work there, because mere human lungs could not hold enough air for that long a sigh. “Let her go with someone else. Agapius or Thanos or… me, even. There is no rule that says you must be the one to go through the forest of dread to free the stranger.”

  “Just as there was no rule to say Athanasius must be the one to risk himself to bring back the princess to Britannia.”

  “And you know how that ended, you fool,” the king said, his voice now bellowing out with a sense of outrage.

  “He didn’t follow the rules. He didn’t make it public what he’d done and why.”

  “Something happened to prevent it,” his father said. “You know he’d never–”

  There must have been a sign somewhere, because their voice stopped abruptly and Caroline realized she’d opened her eyes, and was looking up at a bright blue sky through a canopy of leaves. She also realized her skirt was hiked up, and her petticoats with it, and had a moment of dreadful fear.

  Looking down, she saw a very odd face so close to her that she let out a strangled scream. It was broad and dark, crisscrossed by scars, surrounded by straggly white hair, ornamented by an equally straggly white beard and, with all that, the possessor of the brightest, merriest pair of eyes she’d ever seen on any face.

  It was the eyes that stopped her scream, and in the next moment she realized the smile that shaped the lips beneath the eyes was one of the kindest she’d ever seen too, and that the centaur – for it was a centaur – who was kneeling on the ground and had hiked up her clothes, was in fact doing something to her leg. The something had made the pain go away entirely.

  Caroline half sat up and looked down. There were flasks of something green and herbal-looking on the ground. The elderly centaur had yet more flasks in a sort of sling across his middle, which had been fitted with little rings from which small bottles filled with varicolored liquids depended.

  There was also a little pouch, from which the centaur now extracted a long roll of white cloth, which he started to wind about her thigh.

  “Hello, Lady,” he said, when he saw her looking. “I am Eleftherius and I am a healer. I have mended your thigh, and it should be strong enough to walk on in a very few hours.”

  She blinked at him. Her throat felt so dry that she thought she would die of thirst, but she remembered the injunction never to eat or drink anything in Fairyland. He gave her a smile, as though reading her thoughts. “I can take care of that, too,” he said. “Of your thirst and your hunger, lady, but it is a dangerous game, and one that could cost you your life.”

  “My life?”

  “Yes, for you see, if you don’t feel it, you might not know when you’ve run through all your reserves and your body is dying. I can’t make you not hungry or not thirsty, you see. I can only make you stop feeling it.”

  Of course, at his words, hunger had joined the torment of thirst, and now she couldn’t think of anything else, couldn’t do anything else, but obsess about when next she would get water or food. She had to be able to think. She’d done two good deeds. At least, she hoped freeing Akakios counted as a good deed. By the laws of fairykind, if she saved one more person, rescued one more victim in trouble, she should get her heart’s desire, which was to get Michael out of Fairyland. It couldn’t possibly take that long. “Do it,” she said. “Whatever it is you can do for my present relief. I must be able to think.”

  The centaur selected a flask from the array at his chest, carefully tore out a piece of cloth, soaked it in something blue that smelled faintly of aniseed, and put it against the back of Caroline’s hand. It felt cool and wet, and she thought it was very silly as a means of stopping hunger and thirst. But then there was a tingle of magic coursing through her, and she realized the liquid was more than some herbal medicine. The need to eat and drink vanished.

  And then, sitting up fully, she looked down and saw the medicine on her leg was magic too. She should have known that. Such a stab wound as she’d had could not be healed that quickly.

  She looked over to the side, from which Akakios's voice had come, and she saw that Akakios, too, was festooned in white bandages and looked more lively than he had before. “It was the iron cage,” he told her, as she looked at him. “While we are not, like fairies or elves, or even dragons, incapable of touching or being near cold iron, and in fact many of us travel to non-magical worlds, iron will cloud our minds and hurt our bodies over time. And I was in it so long, concentrating only on making my bleeding slow down, that I would have died very shortly.” His voice vibrated with a strong emotion as he said, “I owe you my life, Lady Darkwater.”

  “No,” she said. And to his confused expression. “Lady Darkwater is my mother. I am Miss Ainsling or… or…,” she reasoned, thinking that he was some sort of prince, for unless she was very wrong indeed, his father was the king of all centaurs. And if he was a prince, even of a different species, surely she ranked below him. “Or Caroline.”

  He inclined his head, a curtain of dark curls hiding a face that looked less pretty than it had when he’d been in that iron cage, but for all that not less attractive, with its beak of a nose and the intent dark eyes on either side of it. “Caroline,” he said. “I owe you my life.”

  She didn’t know what there was in that statement to make his father draw the sort of breath only a centaur’s lungs could draw, seeming to gust on forever like an approaching storm.

  Eleftherius the healer made a sound like chuckling, almost at the same time, only it was like chuckling and clucking your tongue all at once, and he said, his voice seeming to vibrate with some private joke. “I shall give you a bottle of this elixir, m’lady, the one that allows wounds to heal quickly. You and prince Akakios will, perforce need it.”

  “Yes,” Akakios said. “Yes, thank you Eleftherius.”

  And at the same time his father said, “No. No, I tell you, he shall not go.”

  “Still fighting against the oracle, my king?” Eleftherius said with a chuckle to his voice. “What good is it, when it was the oracle cast at your wedding, before either of your sons was born?”

  “They said–” The king said, then let his breath out, again with a sound like gusting wind. “They said there was a way out.”

  “Only if you’re willing to let things lie as they are,” the centaur said. “And for Fairyland to wither and the worlds unending with it. If you want to stop it, though, the oracle told you what the price would be.” His voice sounded like he was repeating memorized lines. “You shall lose both sons, O king, and your line shall never again tread the glades of Fairyland.”

  The Lord’s Duty

  Seraphim felt as though his world had plunged into madness. First there was Nell’s being the lost princess of Britannia. And she’d been in Britannia for over a year. And no one knew. That should have been impossible.

  Princess, aye, and anyone of the blood, had more spells laid on them at birth than should be possible to contravene in any way. Safety spells, sure, but locator spells too.

  And yet, someone had got her out of the royal nursery, surrounded as it must have been by locator spells and spy spells and discouragement spells. Someone had got her out and dropped her in the Madhou– on Earth. He was starting to learn that Earth was less of a madhouse than a world that moved according to rules Britannia wouldn’t be able to understand. It wasn’t the same as having no rules.

  As far as that went, it made perfect sense. On Earth she would be out of the reach of mind probes and locator spells. But how had they got her out of the nursery to begin with? And how could they have dropped her back in the world without anyone noticing?

  He found he was chewing the corner of his lip, while Gabriel, the necromancer and Nell continued talking around him. Half of his mind monitored what they were saying, but there was nothing new in it for him. Nell was telling them of her reading and was
being told by Marlon, with insufferable, didactic patience, that her casting had been too broad to be meaningful… which Seraphim had known, he supposed, though he thought the casting had been useful nonetheless.

  He could not doubt that Nell was the princess. It wasn’t just the medallion, perhaps the last hereditary line of magical defense, which nothing short of destroying all of Britannia’s system of magic could have stopped following her as an infant. It was also her resemblance to the queen. While a man might have bastards aplenty, and – had she resembled only her father – she might have been no more than a royal by-blow, queens were in a different position and not many had unacknowledged children. Oh, there were always legends, of course, but it didn’t apply here, because now that he knew what she was, he could see the power she had as the unlikely blend of her parents’ types of power.

  No, Nell was the princess, right enough. The necromancer had found her, too, before this. But what did it all mean?

  Out of the mess in his mind, a thought came, something Marlon Elfborn had said that made no sense. “Your father?” he asked turning to the man who had been explaining to Nell how spells should be cast. “You said your father and the Blythes were involved in this. What did you mean by that? Your name is Elfborn. You are a magical halfling of no known parentage.”

  The look that Marlon gave him was almost odd – half open mouth, as though a laugh had frozen halfway through emerging, and an arrested and yet somehow malevolent look to the eyes so strong, that Seraphim started to clench his fist in the ancient sign against the evil eye, before he realized the look was not really directed at him. Marlon’s eyes might be turned in his direction, but he was really looking past Seraphim and at something or someone else entirely.