Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  In a flash, Seraphim felt as though the real division in this room was not between himself and Marlon, though their tastes in bed companions might be very different, and though Seraphim could not possibly imagine taking a lover and making him a living-dead object.

  But he understood the way Marlon both wanted to defend himself against the charge of keeping what remained of his lover for sexual purposes, and his dreadful horror of speaking of his private life to near-strangers. In an insane world in which Seraphim’s life was more like Marlon’s, he could imagine feeling that dread, that conflict of pressing needs.

  On the other hand, Jonathan was something quite, quite different. He was, unlike Marlon or Seraphim, an uncomplicated man, who enjoyed carnal pleasures and took the world with hedonistic innocence. If he’d done something like what Marlon had done – or was accused of doing – he’d have done it for the simplest of all motives: to see what it felt like. And he might be pursued by the law, but he would not feel guilty.

  Seraphim found that he had clamped his hand over the honorable Jonathan Blythe’s mouth. “Not another word,” he hissed at the brother of his erstwhile – was she erstwhile? – fiancée, in defense of the man he didn’t even like, the man whom he, for years, had suspected of corrupting Gabriel. “Not another word, Jon, or so help me, you’ll have to do with me.”

  “Why? I only want to know how it feels to–” Jonathan said, as Seraphim’s hand lifted. The hand clamped down again.

  “You’re disguised, Jonathan. What’s more, you’re taking liberties. We are in Mr. Elfborn’s home, and it’s not for us to do him the gross injustice of accusing him of the worst.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” the irrepressible Jonathan said as soon as Seraphim let go, knowing it was impossible to cover Jonathan’s mouth forever and, faith, wringing his neck was probably one step too far. And besides Seraphim liked him, even though he disapproved of him.

  “For heaven’s sake,” Jonathan repeated. “How can I accuse him of anything worse than necromancy?”

  “Just so,” Marlon’s voice said, from the sitting area. “How could you? So let’s establish that I’m a necromancer. I don’t think that is a great insult, since I was proven to be so in a court of law, which is why there is a price on my head. Will you sit down, gentlemen?”

  Feeling his back prickle as he turned away from the corpse, Seraphim did so, as did Jonathan following him. They sat, side by side, with Marlon sitting on a chair facing them. Marlon poured, asking civil questions about cream and sugar with the equanimity of any gentleman receiving friends.

  “All very well,” Jonathan said, as he held the cup of tea in both hands. “But I only wanted to know what it is like to tup–”

  “Jon,” Seraphim said. “Do you want to face me with pistols?”

  Something like a suppressed cackle escaped Marlon, and Jonathan stared at Seraphim dismayed. “What? No. Good God, man. I’m no match for you.”

  “Good. Then please let’s keep our talk to matters of the coil I and my family find ourselves in. And let’s try to be civil to our host.”

  Jonathan looked baffled, but Marlon was giving Seraphim a long, appraising look. “Pardon me, Your Grace,” he said, at long last. “I think I’ve misjudged you all these years. I never realized you were kind.” He was still pale, and his face had a sort of rigid immobility that signaled, to Seraphim at least, that he was pushing himself beyond the boundaries of his comfort as he said. “And, for what it’s worth, Mr. Blythe, I could not answer you in any way. I know as much about, how did you put it? Ah, tupping the undead as you do.” His eyes crinkled at the corners, as though amusement crept through despite everything. “Perhaps less.”

  Jonathan looked astonished. He shook his head. “They said–” he started, then shook his head again. “Well, then, it’s very strange, when you’re already under sentence for necromancy, what else could they do to you?”

  Despairing of explaining to Jonathan that there could be restraints on a man other than external, Seraphim looked at Marlon and said, “Pardon Jonathan. He’s one of nature’s own pagans.”

  “I see that,” Marlon said, and something to his eyes told Seraphim that he did. He wasn’t horrified or reproving of Jonathan. He was worried about where Jonathan’s careening mind might lead, and also vaguely amused by such disregard for conventions and society, and perhaps a little jealous.

  Marlon took a sip of his tea, set the cup down still mostly filled and said, “Now, for the matter at hand. We knew you and Gabriel – your whole family – were in a serious coil of trouble.”

  “You can say that again,” Jonathan said.

  “And you said…,” Marlon hesitated, “that my fa– that Sydell is half dragon? How do you mean that?”

  Jonathan blinked at him. “Why, I suppose in the usual why. His father slept with a dragon. Not that I blame him. It is said dragons are–”

  “Eminently tuppable, yes,” Seraphim said, anticipating what Jonathan would say, and feeling like he’d fallen into a mad dream. He didn’t say these things. He didn’t discuss these things with other people. But then partly that was because dukes didn’t do that. And if he was no longer a duke, then he need no longer exercise restraint. But he was called to reality as Elfborn said, “I didn’t know that,” in a strained, sober voice. “How could I not know that? I didn’t know he was raised in a foundling home, and how could I not, when I was raised in one?”

  Jonathan made a dismissive gesture, drank down all his tea, noisily, and then extended his cup for more. Marlon poured, without looking, as though he did it automatically.

  “Why should you? Unless you made a study of Sydell. And even then, you might not know it. He’s taken great care to cover his tracks. I only know it because my father has known him from the time–” A hiccup broke Jonathan’s talk, and he put the back of his hand against his mouth. “Pardon me.” He took a sip of his new cup of tea. “—has known him from when Sydell was claimed by his grandparents, on his father’s death, and so he remembers the scandal. M’father is maybe three years older than Sydell, but enough to remember, because Sydell was twelve or thirteen or some such when his father hanged himself.”

  Marlon’s cup rattled in the saucer. His eyes were huge. Seraphim remembered, or thought he remembered, hearing that Sydell was Marlon Elfborn’s father. It seemed an impossible thing, for one because Sydell was a perpetual bachelor, and it was rumored that he shared Marlon’s – and Gabriel’s – interests. But there had been that half started, “My fa–” and looking at him, now, Seraphim detected some resemblances to the king’s left hand.

  “Hanged–?” Marlon said.

  “Oh, yes.” Jonathan drank his tea, quite oblivious to the discomfort he was causing. “It’s all the grand tragedy, you know. Worthy of an opera. My father says that old Marcus Sydell found out that his son was… that is, that he had, somehow, commandeered a dragon maiden out of Fairyland and that they were–” He hiccupped again. “—that they were involved, and he was furious, because he was trying to arrange his son’s marriage, so he arranged for a banishing spell, restricting the creature to Fairyland. Costing a king’s ransom, of course, but it worked.” He frowned. “Or at least, Sydell had already been born, and his grandfather hushed it up and put him in a foundling home for magic children. Saint Patrick’s, I believe, because they handle–”

  “Half dragons, yes. And then,” Marlon took a deep breath, “Sydell’s father?”

  “They don’t handle half dragons well,” Jonathan said, frowning. “Damme, what I mean is, no one but dragons handles them well. The discipline needed–”

  “Yes? Trust me, well aware. But what happened to my– to Sydell’s father?”

  “What? Andrew Sydell? The father of the current Lord? He hanged himself.”

  Marlon blinked. “How?”

  “In the usual way, I imagine. No, wait, I heard of it. With his belt from the entrance chandelier. Devilish thing, and his father was hard put to hush the scandal because, of course,
all the servants saw it, what? But it can’t be denied that all who… who get involved with Fairyland in that way lose their mind a little, and there it is.”

  “There what is?” This was Seraphim.

  “Though he married his heiress, he was not happy, never had children, was taken with melancholy, and then hanged himself. I don’t see what you want me to explain more.”

  Marlon was rubbing his upper lip with his index finger as though lost in a world of his own. At Jonathan’s explosion, he looked up. “Nothing. You’ve explained things I’ve longed to understand my whole life.” Then he looked towards the corner where Aiden Gypson stood. “And why some disasters… but that’s neither here nor there. Tell us,” he leaned forward. “Tell us in detail what my dear papa has been doing in this whole coil, for it’s a knot we must uncoil.”

  “Your… papa?” Jonathan frowned.

  “Sydell.”

  Marlon had managed to stop Jonathan’s mouth. He looked at Elfborn in shock. “Sydell? You are…?”

  “The result of a spell gone horribly wrong? Yes, I believe so. But let’s move to relevant matters.”

  “It is a relevant matter,” Jonathan said, aghast. “If you are… then what… then that was how he got access to–”

  Seraphim’s mind had put together things that he wasn’t even aware of knowing. “That was how he got access to Fairyland magic, and managed to send the princess royal to another world, as well as use that magic, behind the king’s back to… what? What does he aspire to, Jonathan? The throne of Fairyland or of Britannia?”

  Jonathan frowned. “Why,” he said. “Both, I imagine.”

  The Princess And The Precipice

  Running in Fairyland, Nell thought, was perhaps not the brightest of ideas. Not that she knew much about Fairyland, but what Avalon knew – or thought they knew – it had occurred to her often that they were sure in knowledge they couldn’t possibly have acquired in any rational way. Thus far, they were just like Earth.

  In Avalon they said that Fairyland was a parasite universe. Somehow spawned when the universe had split due to some cataclysm at the dawn of time, it drifted in a time and place of its own, now touching this high-magic universe, now another, and vampirizing energy, magic, and emotion wherever it went.

  Of itself, it was too low-energy to have a coherent organization or internal structure. Its only power, its only existence, came from the minds of men. That meant that it was a crisscrossing of ideas and thoughts, of legends and beliefs.

  But before she could think, before she could realize the dangers of her location, Nell had run into the fog. Her mind was quick enough, and it had put together the voice and the circumstances of Gabriel Penn. Perhaps it was too much to be certain of this on so little, but she knew, she could feel that Gabriel Penn had ended in Fairyland and that he was facing a relative of great power.

  She ran, feeling hilly terrain beneath her feet and moss-slippery covering on that terrain. The cold fog seemed to sting her throat as she ran, but she knew she must help this poor man. If it was true – and she could not doubt it – that she was the crown princess of Britannia, then all of this, somehow, gyrated around her. Had she never existed, this would never have happened.

  It took a few moments to realize that she didn’t even know if she was running in the right direction. The scream had stopped abruptly, and around her there was only silence, like being enveloped in cotton wool or wrapped in nothing. A doubt assailed her, suddenly: did she even have existence here?

  And then she dropped.

  There was no other way to describe it. Like in a dream of falling, it wasn’t so much that the ground gave out under her, as it was as if there had never been a ground – as though she were one of those cartoon characters, running perfectly fine along ground that didn’t exist, until they suddenly looked down and saw that there was no ground at all. And then they fell. And she fell.

  Just as the image appeared, she banished it. Fairyland was shaped by men’s thoughts, men’s beliefs, men’s fears. And women’s too at that. And though she’d enjoyed the vintage cartoons as much as any other kid, on a Saturday afternoon, with a pack of DVDs, she had no intention of being caught in a world that expressed itself through dumb coyotes and Acme inventions.

  She groped madly for something that would make sense of her situation and give her more than darkness and the sense of endless falling.

  Stories ran through her mind – the princess and the pea, the herder of geese—but all of them were tainted with blood and pain at the heart and she thrust them away. Besides, she’d never learned them very well. They weren’t in the weave of childhood on Earth. Not anymore.

  And then she thought she had fallen through a rabbit hole.

  Suddenly her fall had texture. There were earthen walls on either side, and here and there roots that had grown in from above. Before she had time to blink at it, she’d fallen into a little cave. No. A little room – with an earthen roof, but a wooden floor polished and covered by a Persian rug. There was a grandfather clock in the corner, a comfortable armchair in the other, and – over the armchair – a portrait of a white rabbit dressed in Victorian attire.

  Her brain rattled from the suddenness of her fall, Nell blinked at the portrait thinking that now she had gone definitely mad. Then she looked at the table, where there was a plate with something that looked like pancakes, and a little metal flask. The pancakes had a note card in front of them, of the type that was used for fancy dinner parties, but on this one, instead of a name, was inscribed with two words, the words she knew would be there: “Eat me.” And the flask had one of those chains around its neck that liquor bottles had, and a little plaque inscribed with “Drink me.”

  Okay, she knew how this story went, and she got up and approached the table and reached for the pancake. Then stopped. From somewhere at the back of her mind came a confused recollection of things she had heard and read. Something about fairies not being able to bake, or use yeast, so all they ate was pancakes. In the story of Alice she had read as a little girl, what Alice ate was a cookie, but this was definitely a pancake, looking like the unappetizing buckwheat pancakes grandma had forced on her when she was going through that health-food phase years ago.

  In fact, there was a theory that the UFO sightings on Earth were actually sightings of fairy denizens, under heavy disguise, and probably a little maddened by Earth’s iron content. They also, inexplicably, had given the humans they wished to beguile some form of whole-grain pancakes.

  Nell’s hand was almost touching the pancake, and she glared at it. Alice, after all, had been led a merry dance through her adventures, and though she supposedly woke up at the end, was it true? The multi universe had truncated legends and confused, many-world stories. In some worlds things ended one way, in some another. She would never, ever, be able to think of the ending of Little Red Riding Hood in Avalon without stomach-churning disgust.

  Persephone on one seed of pomegranate had been condemned to spend half her life in Hades. What if the stories never told were that Alice kept getting pulled into Fairyland, into the mad world of upside-down riddles, for the rest of her life? And… forced to marry the king of fairy?

  The idea came out of nowhere, but it put a chill up her spine. She was the Princess of Britannia. The heir to the throne of a kingdom where the throne meant more than state power, and land meant more than a lot of soil where you could grow things.

  She barely understood how things worked, but she knew that there had been a ritual marriage between the mythical Arthur and the land. In Britannia Arthur was not mythical and the marriage might have been more than ritual. She didn’t presume to understand it – she doubted anyone did. Like particle physics on Earth, it was the domain of a few, rarefied intellects, but it still affected how everything worked. And the kings and princes of Britannia – and to an extent every relative of the Royal line, like even Seraphim Darkwater – would have some of the land mixed into their very being, influencing every breath they took, ev
ery thought they had.

  In the same way, the king – or princess – affected the land. If she ate this and belonged, even part time to fairy land; if she were married to the king of fairy, wouldn’t that make Britannia a dependency of Fairyland? Fairyland could attach to it as a leech to an animal, and drink its fill, till either it killed Britannia or… Or all of Avalon burst.

  She looked at the pancake, and then said, with bright malice. “I am a princess, after all. Alice wasn’t. Shouldn’t the offering be more suited to my status?”

  And before her eyes, before she could even blink, the pancake changed into the reddest, most appetizing apple she’d ever seen.

  Even knowing what happened to princesses in fairytales who went about biting beautiful apples; even never having been the type of person who longed for a good, crisp apple, Nell couldn’t help feeling her mouth water.

  Fortunately, she also felt a surge of anger: strong, blinding anger, affront that they thought she would be so easily tricked, and a blank rage that they dared – they dared do this to Avalon. She had never thought of it as her world before, and perhaps it wasn’t, perhaps she was just its princess. But one way or another, she belonged – and she might be their last defense.

  “Ah, no you don’t,” she said. Her voice echoed, unhinged and high in the small, proper, Victorian chamber, and it seemed to her that the rabbit portrait raised its eyebrows. Nell grabbed the apple, and threw it at it, hard, dead center.

  The portrait exploded, bits of apple – far more than a single fruit could contain – and earthen wall flew at her, giving her barely the time to cower on the Persian rug, her hands over her head.

  When she rose, shaking off dirt and pieces of apple, she was looking at a white, marbled hallway. From somewhere down it came the sound of working machines and a voice she thought she recognized said, “No, no. It is not supposed to work that way.”