Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  “I am Elfborn,” he said, after a while, when he could get his speech, “because I am unacknowledged by my father, though I grant you, I could have forced him to admit to me, but the game was not worth it. I don’t want people to know I have his blood in my veins. I would much rather not know I had his blood in my veins, if I could undo the knowledge.”

  “He is human, then?”

  “Oh, yes,” Marlon Elfborn said, and his voice echoed bitter and low. “He is Lord Sydell.”

  “Sydell!” Nell said, at the same time that Seraphim said, “The King’s ears.”

  “Yes, indeed, and his eyes, and his secret hand too,” Marlon said, and the malevolent look was back in his eyes.

  “But…,” Nell said, “I worked for him. I mean, after Antoine was captured, I was forced to work for him.”

  “Were you now?” Marlon said. “I wonder why, and what he planned that he had to wait for, thereby keeping you close and yet captive. I wonder – I very much do – what my dear papa can have been thinking, and why he didn’t thrust you back to Earth as soon as he could.”

  “Because he couldn’t.” That was Gabriel, quietly. “Because her power wouldn’t allow him to do so, not once she had touched the soil of Avalon. And that meant that he had to keep her subdued and hidden until he could… dispose of her more permanently. Which might very well be what all this is about.”

  “All this? The coil ensnaring your family?” Marlon asked. “My dear, I think that involves far more than disposing of her Highness. For one, you and I know all too well it involves Fairyland.”

  “But–” Seraphim said. “What are you two talking about? You can’t mean that Sydell, the king’s right hand or at least his left had anything to do with…. You can’t mean the princess….”

  But in his mind things were assembling in an all too clear pattern. Who could make sure that the princess’s wards were perhaps not as strong as they should be – the king’s spy chief and head of protection services. Who could make sure that any spells to trace or protect the princess were ineffective? – Blythe’s Blessings, which specialized in that sort of thing and had been in charge of the business.

  But why? If Nell stayed disappeared, the throne might – though it would take many many other deaths to do so – come to the Darkwaters, but it would never come to the Blythes.

  Seraphim couldn’t say that had been part of the plan, to kill everyone in the way until his house inherited and Honoria Blythe married him. He couldn’t say that because it was nonsensical. So many deaths would need to happen that the amount stopped being serious and started being farcical. And beyond all that, they couldn’t be sure he’d marry Honoria, certainly not back when Nell had disappeared. And beyond that, Honoria had brothers, and surely her father would want them to inherit if inheriting were to be done. No. That was not to be considered.

  But something the Blythes had meant, and something they had done. And the snare into which Seraphim had fallen had scattered his family and might have been designed to kill him – and Nell – off world. In fact, now he thought about it, both their meeting and the trap set in Antoine’s body, had taken them to situations where they SHOULD have died.

  He took a deep breath and announced suddenly, loudly, “I don’t think we’ll be able to figure out anything more tonight. I think we should go to bed and sleep on it.”

  They looked surprised, but they did not argue. Which was good. He had no intention of sleeping on it. But he did intend to transport quietly to Britannia and have a long-delayed chat with Honoria.

  The Ties

  “Wait,” Marlon said, as Gabriel headed out the door, after Seraphim and Nell.

  Gabriel wanted nothing more than to continue heading out the door, to continue out and away, but he turned. “Yes?”

  “I can’t go upstairs,” Marlon said.

  “No. I shall ask her Highness if we can procure you a blanket and maybe soap and… other necessities you might wish for the night. Anything else?”

  “Stay.”

  “Pardon me?”

  Marlon’s face animated with something near to a manic rictus. “Stay. It can’t be any more comfortable upstairs for you than it is for me. You too are half-elf.”

  Gabriel frowned. It wasn’t comfortable… not exactly. But he hadn’t felt like his entire power was disintegrating, dissolving in Earth’s odd anti-magic field. “I wonder why,” he said, then to Marlon’s look. “It is not comfortable, exactly, Marlon, but it is not – either – the lethal effect it seems to have on you. I wonder what your mother was, what kind of magic mix you are? But I’m just half elf. I can go upstairs, and I can sleep, and I intend to do so.”

  Marlon opened his mouth, closed it. “I had hoped–” he started, though something, perhaps his preservation instinct, prevented his finishing that sentence. “That is, I thought you still had feelings for me, and I–” He took a deep breath. “We’re in a strange world, one that is hostile to what both of us are, and I thought both of us could… that we could find solace or… or help each other.”

  And then something in Gabriel snapped. He would never be able to explain quite what it was, or quite what did it. He’d been a very young fool when he’d gone to Cambridge. Despite his early, rough life at Mama’s hands, he’d been almost indecently sheltered when living with the Darkwaters, and accorded all the comforts of nobility with none of the responsibilities or liabilities. His position, as a child, somewhere between a servant and a member of the family, had been easier to support, since he’d really not been expected to do more work than Seraphim – and it had been the same kind of work, as they’d shared a tutor and learned the same lessons. But no one cared if Gabriel failed them, while Seraphim had been expected to excel. Not that Gabriel had failed them, but he’d felt no pressure to do well.

  And servants had treated him with deference, but not the distance that isolated Seraphim. Not even with his being half elf. Not after that first year in the house when they’d realized he was not malevolent. And… and he’d been an altogether pampered little fool when he’d come to Cambridge.

  The matter of what the cook at their house called “luvering” had never come up. Unlike the footmen and maids, and the anxiously fretting stable boys, no one seemed very sure for what sphere of life Gabriel should aim, when it came to a wife. He, himself, had thought – when he thought about it at all – that he would study for the law, and once he’d established himself he’d find a suitable daughter of a lawyer or solicitor or merchant.

  He knew that wouldn’t be easy. After all, no sane family would want to ally their name to someone who was half elf. On the other hand, he was also half-noble, and the connection, semi-acknowledged as it was, linked him indelibly to one of the oldest, noblest, and certainly most magical houses in Britannia. So the search for a wife would also not be impossible. Enough merchants would be willing to give a daughter to a man who was the by-blow of Satan himself for the chance to say “My son-in-law’s brother, the Duke of Darkwater.”

  When Gabriel had thought of the future, before Cambridge, if he thought of it at all, it was into a vague vista of a comfortable home, a tidy wife, and maybe a couple of children. An ordered existence, quite different from what he’d endured while in Mama’s custody.

  The reason that, even though many servants his age were thinking of future marriage, his isolation didn’t bother him was that after what he’d done to survive as a child, the idea of being touched, the idea of coupling with anyone at all – the idea of nakedness and intimate embraces – repulsed him with near-physical nausea.

  And then there had been Marlon. It had been– Gabriel could still not explain it. It had been partly the friendship and the matter of like calling to like, so that when Gabriel had become aware that what he felt was more than friendship and that his interest had a physical edge, it was too late to draw back.

  Then had come the horror of their parting, and for a long while Gabriel had thought that it was just Marlon – that Gabriel’s wishes might
otherwise be perfectly normal, or perhaps non-existent. But, through the years of separation he’d come to know better. Not that he’d risked such involvements again, nothing beyond the briefest of trysts. But he knew what he thought about and where his eyes were drawn.

  So much for that. He also knew that as far as the heart went he still loved Marlon Elfborn. Would always love him. And forever. And that to involve himself with anyone else, of either gender, would be duplicitous, as well as – he felt instinctively – not far above his connections for pay in his very young days.

  From his mythical picture of his future, he’d erased the comely wife who kept a tidy house, and, perforce, the two children. But that was just as well since, having failed at studying for the law, Gabriel was unlikely to ever leave the employ of the Darkwaters. At best, he could look forward to a future in which he became land manager, or, if Seraphim wanted him closer, butler. No position he wished to offer a wife. And thank all the fates, he did not need to have children. If ever the Darkwater family became desperate enough to count on his progeny, it wasn’t a future in which he wanted to have children, in any way.

  And thus things had been, until he’d gone back to ask Marlon’s help. Only since then, since that moment, things had been shifting with him – slowly. Almost imperceptibly. First there had been Marlon's putting of a bind on him – as good as enslaving him body and soul and magic. And then there had been an accretion of thoughts, of actions.

  Suddenly, looking at Marlon, he felt as if something had changed irrevocably. The long, slow slide of a few grains of snow on a slope had become an avalanche that had changed the landscape completely, leaving in its wake nothing but scoured land and flattened buildings.

  Anger, resentment, betrayal, it all washed over him like a freezing wave.

  He drew himself up straighter, and he heard the frost in his voice, when he said, “Marlon Elfborn, are you suggesting I spend the night here?”

  Marlon looked surprised, surely not at the words but at the tone of them. “I thought—” he said. “Since I could not come upstairs… I thought you and I… We have a lot to talk about, a lot to … to understand about each other.”

  Gabriel took a deep breath. Even yesterday, if Marlon had received him that way… “We have nothing to talk about, sir,” he said, very calmly.

  “But– But you said– And when you… I mean, you said our very first… I mean, you put a compulsion on me!”

  “Are you going to bring charges?”

  “How can I? I am proscribed in Britannia.”

  “Very well then.”

  “But…” Marlon frowned, and as Gabriel turned to leave, surged out of his seat and grabbed at Gabriel’s sleeve. “At least tell me why.”

  Gabriel pulled his arm out of Marlon’s grasp. “I think you know why. Keeping Gypson in the attics and never letting me know what you’d done, regardless of your guilt over it, created your own situation. And mine too.”

  “But how could I know you wouldn’t be repulsed and run screaming?”

  “As opposed to what happened. You couldn’t have known. But we were friends before we were anything else, and you should have suspected. You should have respected me as an adult and your friend. But you didn’t. You still don’t.”

  “How can you say–”

  “You put a compulsion on me when I came to ask your help. You set one of the most infernal conditions you can set on a human on me. If you demand it, I have to obey you. How is that a relationship of equals or anything approaching friendship, let alone love?”

  Marlon’s eyes were oddly small, contracted with something that was fear and perhaps pain, too. “But– I had to,” the last was a wail, emerging with the force of a two year old’s self-justification. “Otherwise you’d have run! I couldn’t stand to have you run again.”

  “Oh? I’d have run when I came to you of my own free will? Hunted and cornered I was, but I could have gone to any other world, anywhere else. I came to you. I trusted you. And what did you do? You put a compulsion bind on me. And you never even told me that you knew where the princess was, or… anything!”

  Marlon’s eyes now looked dark. He looked like…. In the gallery at Darkwater there was a painting of a duelist, painted the eve of a duel – or at least the eyes had been done then. The man, a very young seventeen-year-old, was one of the past heirs of the Darkwater title. Only he’d never inherited because he was killed in the duel. Family legend said that he’d known that would happen – and the portrait confirmed it, with those bleak eyes that seemed to gaze out at never-ending darkness.

  The same look was in Marlon’s eyes. “How could I have known?” he asked.

  “You couldn’t. Human beings – and even creatures like us who are just somewhat human-like – can’t know how others will react.” And now Gabriel felt he had hit the crux of his anger, the center of what he’d come to realize. “People realize that other people too have the right to think and act of their own accord and that, should others not do what they wish them to do it is something they have to accept. People aren’t puppets or toys.” He narrowed his eyes at Marlon. “I was too young; I didn’t realize it, but there’s too much of them in you – too much of Fairyland. They are the ones who cast illusions and spells to force mortals to dance to their tune.” He opened his hands in front of him. “Well, Elfborn. You have a spell on me, and you can call it, and make me your mindless slave if you wish – but that is all you’re going to get. Do you wish to call the spell?” He waited. Marlon opened and closed his mouth. Gabriel crossed his arms. “Well?”

  Marlon shook his head. His expression had gone unreadable, blank, like a statue or a wax figure.

  “Is that no? Am I to assume you won’t call the compulsion, then?”

  Marlon took a deep breath. His mouth was raspy and grinding as it came out. “No,” he said. And then, pulling on the threads of his own magic, which he’d set on Gabriel and snapping them with a broad gesture of his right hand. “You are free.”

  Gabriel took a deep breath and felt oddly cold, but also collected and perhaps more himself than he’d ever felt. “Very well then,” he said. “Is there something I may bring you for your present comfort? Beyond a blanket and some soap and sundries?”

  “No,” Still the raspy voice. “No. Not… I don’t need a blanket. I’ll do well.”

  Gabriel felt disposed to argue, but the truth was he didn’t want to come back anyway. Some tectonic shift had taken place within himself, and he wanted time and solitude to think about it before he talked to anyone, even Marlon. Perhaps especially Marlon.

  “Very well,” he said, and opened the door and closed it behind him. Outside, he took a deep breath of cool, clean night air.

  Which was when the explosion hit, the force of it catching him and flinging him forward, away from the house, bodily, like a child flinging a lead soldier full force into soft soil.

  Losing It

  Seraphim came out of the basement with Nell, into the dark, soft night air. There was a smell that reminded him of when he went to the Darkwaters’ home farm: rich soil and plants and something indefinable that said living things were growing all around.

  He took a deep breath of the air. There was something different, too, something he couldn’t define. He thought it was because this place was in the North American colonies. Though Seraphim had always meant to see them someday, it required money. Inside the world traveling to a different continent was hampered by matters of magic that made any jump across water difficult. So it had to be done the old way by ships, or the new way by carpetships, and either kind cost money and, more importantly, time, which the head of his family could ill spare.

  “You’re very quiet,” Nell said. And he wanted to think of her as the royal princess, not the least because that would establish their positions firmly and help him discipline his mind and heart. But somehow, slim in those jeans that he could never think were women’s attire, she seemed whimsical and young. At some level, she reminded him of the Shakes
peare boys playing girls playing boys. Not that there was anything boyish about her rounded figure – or that he wanted it to be – but he thought she looked like a young girl trying to pass as a boy, a child playing comedy.

  Hard to associate that with the court, and high birth and the pomp and circumstance of the occasions in which he’d met the royal family.

  He said, in a contained voice, “Well, you’ll agree that there is an awful lot to think about?”

  “Doubtless,” she said, but now she’d turned to look at him. In the dark, illuminated only by residual light from the windows of the house, and the far more distant moon, her face looked like something glimpsed on a crystal ball, when the image was just solidifying: there was the pure line of the jaw, the straight nose, her dark eyes looking up at him, anxiously, and her lips, a little quirked, as though demanding he account for whatever thoughts or plans he might have. She frowned at him, gathering those straight dark eyebrows over her nose. “But you’re too silent. I wonder–” She paused, as if she’d cut her own thought off. “Is it their arrival?” She gestured with her head towards the basement.

  The trained response, Madame, I don’t have the pleasure of understanding you was upon his tongue, but he swallowed it, and instead said, trying to use the informal, almost familiar tone he’d been using with her before, “I’m not sure what you mean?”

  “You’ve been easy with me,” she said. “And not the duke, as you were recovering. I wondered, you know, because I’ve always seen you– That is, I get the feeling there are two of you, the duke and who you really are. And I think you’ve been yourself while you’ve been alone with me in the world. I suspect it’s someone only your family knows, and probably not all of them. Now you’re the duke again. You’ve gone elsewhere, closed yourself off. I can’t read your thoughts in your expressions. Is it because they arrived? Surely it must be Mr. Elfborn’s arrival, because your brother… he’d know you.” But she hesitated a little when she said it.