Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  But even in his present state, he couldn’t imagine Gabriel doing anything heinous without dire need or without its being for a materially necessary purpose, and one that involved saving someone or something else, at that. He was, in fact, unable to imagine Gabriel being evil on his own and without need. He was, if truth be told, missing his brother horribly.

  It turned out that Seraphim, who was used to thinking of himself as the pinnacle of society and free, might have been more limited by his position than Mr. Penn, who, as a gentleman’s gentleman could very well go high or low in society, provided he didn’t presume to mix with the toffs on equal terms.

  For instance, Seraphim had no idea how to penetrate the royal palace and find his way to the princess’s chambers. He might have been disguised so no one would recognize him, but surely not every bourgeois or clerk could enter the royal palace?

  Turned out they could, to an extent. Marlon had indicated to him the service entrance at the back, and primed him with the name of a resident and told him to say he was delivering a message. So far so good. Seraphim had managed to go up a flight of stairs into a large salon.

  And from there, he’d not managed to move, since each of the doors to the interior seemed to be guarded. What happened, perforce, was that each person in turn asked for the person he was supposed to see, and then when the person came out or sent word he’d see the visitor, the visitor was allowed in.

  Here Seraphim stopped, because he had a feeling that if he asked for the man Marlon had named, the man might expect to receive a real message. And if there was a person in the royal palace for whom it was a habit to receive messages from a wanted necromancer, it was more than Seraphim wished to know. And the person, certainly, was more than Seraphim wanted to meet. Besides, from Marlon’s expression, the name had been a throwaway one, used only as a means of passage….

  That Marlon hadn’t thought further than that had upset Seraphim momentarily, but then he’d shaken his head. No, he, himself, hadn’t thought further than that. And it was his adventure. He had in the past gone into strange worlds and—

  and there on the tip of his tongue was the name he could use to gain access. There was a young maid in the palace, someone he’d rescued from a world where even her small amount of magic was enough to get her killed. He’d brought her to Avalon where, after some adaptation and a lot of training by the housekeeper of the Darkwaters, she’d found a post in the royal palace.

  Seraphim – feeling some trepidation at the act, even though Marlon had assured him that Marlon’s power, continuously spun, would keep him disguised – approached the superior, uniformed footman at one of the entrances and asked if perhaps he could see Miss Valerie Arthur, whom he believed to be in charge of the East receiving rooms.

  From the look the footman gave him, Seraphim deduced that Miss Arthur was far too superior a personage to involve herself with the likes of him. And then—

  and then he was asked to give a name. If he gave his own, Valerie would see him on the instant, but even just his unusual first name was enough to get him arrested. So, shaking a little, he gave the name of his housekeeper as someone from whom he’d brought a message.

  As soon as he spoke it, he was afraid that his housekeeper too was on the wanted list. She would have been, had it been widely known she’d turned a blind eye and helped place all these people coming from other worlds. But the footman asked Seraphim to wait, and then called over a runner.

  What seemed like an eternity later, Valerie appeared. She came out into the room, looked at Seraphim, and obviously wasn’t taken in by the disguise or the magical blurring. The later probably because Seraphim, after all, wanted her to recognize him.

  She was a slip of a woman, smaller than Nell, with light-brown hair severely confined under a lace cape, and a completely unremarkable countenance that, nonetheless, suffused with pink at the sight of him. She went to drop a curtsy, but stopped it in time, running her eyes over his suit, and seeming to understand that he couldn’t be here as himself. She opened her mouth in a silent O.

  And Seraphim did the only thing he could do. He stepped forward, both hands extended, and took her little, cold hands in his and said, “Valerie! Do you not remember me? It is I, Joseph. My mother said I was to call on you and see how you were faring.”

  To her credit she rallied. She blushed further, looked at her hands as though she couldn’t believe his, holding them, and then said, “Your… mother, to be sure. How kind of her. I have… a small… that is, there is a parlor where we’re allowed to receive visitors, if we take care to keep the door open, but I– Well, it is a good thing I am taking a few hours– Please come, Joseph.” In all confusion, she led him past the door into a shabby corridor. Seraphim could not correlate these worn hallways in need of a painting with the sumptuous parts of the royal palace he’d seen when he visited.

  It also appeared to him, after a moment, that if Valerie were taking him to a receiving parlor, she was taking a very odd route, because they abandoned the plain and somewhat shabby hallway for even shabbier stairs, and went all the way up those to what appeared to be a level of servant rooms, then through a door almost hidden in a corner of the hallway, and up a set of distinctly old and uncared for stairs, into an attic that was filled with objects, swathed in dusty grey cobwebs, looming in the darkening gloom.

  On the way he tried to question, “Valerie, where—”

  But she’d put her finger to her lips and shaken her head.

  Now she closed the door to the attic and turned around. “I wouldn’t have done this,” she said, "if I didn’t owe you my life, but…. What are you doing here when you have a price on your head? What are you doing here obviously magically disguised? What can have possessed you to risk that?”

  “I must,” Seraphim said, "see the nursery from which the princess disappeared.”

  Her eyes went very wide then, and she stepped backward, as though looking for a place to sit. She balanced herself with a hand on a long discarded table and turned around. “Is it true, then? Was it your family who kidnapped her and who magically confused things so she was raised as the honorable Honoria Blythe?”

  The Princess And The Power

  “Honoria?” Seraphim said. “No! I was– I suppose I still am– engaged to marry her.”

  Something in his reaction, possibly his genuine shock, seemed to reassure Valerie. She looked at him a long time, as though examining his expression, but her features relaxed. “I see,” she said, at last. “There is a conspiracy, but it is not yours. I thought—” She ran a hand over her face. “But then, I thought perhaps it was because my magic is not of this world.”

  Seraphim had in turn managed to back against an old rocking horse and half-sit on it. He should feel, he thought, scared or outraged, or perhaps confused, but he felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. “Is that what we’re accused of?” he said. “I thought it was murder….”

  Valerie frowned. “It was murder at first, I think. It’s very hard to think about it, but it was undefined, they said, and then…” She shook her head. “And then things changed.” Her frown indicated deep concentration, deep thought. “Until you said that, I didn’t remember it, and now it’s hard for me to think about it. I think they first said you were accused of murder, and I think they couldn’t… I think they couldn’t locate the corpse. And then they said that you, and your father, and your whole family were guilty of conspiracy to kidnap the princess royal and, by magical means, make it seem like she belonged to another family.”

  “But why would we make her seem to belong to another family?” Seraphim said. “Would it not make more sense to keep her to ourselves?”

  “No! Much was made of your offering to marry her, because, you know, if you married her… you’d someday be king. You could not marry her if you were her brother.”

  “No,” Seraphim said. “But we have, or at least we had, friends and dependents, and surely any of them would be more reliable as marriage prospects than our rivals, the Bl
ythes.”

  “Yes, but—” Valerie was visibly fighting something. “I think they did something – something magical. I’m not sure what, and even saying it makes me feel as though I might be going insane, because the amount of magic it would take… and for it to be undetected… but I think they did something to make us believe it. Because, despite all the changing stories, everyone has believed. And the king has recognized the Lady Honoria Blythe as the princess Helena.”

  Seraphim groaned deep in his throat. Urgency came now. Not because Honoria had usurped the place of the princess, not because she would be the heir to the throne of Britannia if this went unchallenged, but because she had taken Nell’s place. The idea of Honoria in Nell’s place was unbearable and near-paralyzing. When he could think again he said, “You must take me to the nursery, Valerie, you must. Trust me, that’s where the spell was first set, and if I can reach the center of the web, I can stop it.”

  She stared at him for a moment, then sighed. “It is only, Your Grace might not know it, but you are—”

  “Wanted? I do know it. But I have a spell on me that makes me unrecognizable unless… unless I wish them to see me clearly.”

  She looked at him and frowned a little again. “I wondered why it made my eyes want to unfocus, but I’d guess I’m not getting the full effect, since you do wish me to recognize you.” A little thought and she nodded. “Can you pretend to be here to measure the nursery? It is, of course, being completely remodeled since the prin– Is she the princess?”

  Seraphim shook his head.

  “I was afraid of that. In any case, she is engaged to be married and therefore the nursery must be remodeled, in the hop—”

  “Honoria is engaged to be married? To me?”

  Valerie looked down. “No, milord, to Lord Sydell. It was of course thought odd, his being old enough to be her father, and not exactly high enough in nobility… but he was the one who rescued her, and the king could not deny him her hand, their being sincerely attached.”

  Seraphim opened his mouth to say that from what he had heard and things he’d glimpsed at certain clubs, he found it hard enough to believe Sydell was Marlon’s father, and the idea of his being sincerely attached to any woman was so unlikely as to border on the impossible. Then he realized he couldn’t shock Valerie with any such implication, and felt a strong pang of missing Nell. Nell wouldn’t at all be shocked. In fact, if Nell had any hint of it, she might blurt out what he was thinking without checking her tongue.

  It would be, he thought, great fun to have Nell as a Princess Royal, even if it made any union between them impossible. Her solecisms and that irrepressible humor would set the palace on end.

  But of course, he might as well wish for the moon. As far as Britannia was concerned, Honoria was now the Princess Royal, and his family the villains who had stolen her. It made no sense to anyone who knew anything of the tracings done at the time of her disappearance, but very few people remained clear on that, and a lot would never have been reported at the time. Just a strong spell over the people in the palace, and it would be carried off.

  And the spell had to be in the room from which the infant Nell had been taken. Any further spell layered on the one that had hid the identity of her captors, any spell designed to make it seem like Honoria was Nell would need to be twisted into the original. He would go and he would pull it apart, if it was the last thing he did.

  “Will you have the power to do anything,” Valerie asked, "if you are spending it to keep the illusion over your features? And the illusion that there is no spell there?”

  He smiled at her, though it felt like his face would crack. “It is not my power being used for that, and I suspect that the one spinning the illusion doesn’t even notice the expending.”

  Valerie inclined her head. “Very well then. I shall take you through back stairs,” she said. “Begging your pardon.”

  “I’d expect nothing else, and remember, I’m no longer a duke.”

  She looked like she would say something, then shook her head, compressed her lips and said, “Please to follow me, Your Grace.”

  Falling

  Saying he’d use the power of a subject of Fairyland was one thing – finding power to use was another. Gabriel Penn, still Gabriel Penn, fighting against the encroachment of something alien and strange upon his mind, and knowing he was both himself and that strange thing and had always been, lay on his back at the center of the sack enclosing them all.

  It seemed to him he was very alone despite his sister and brother, despite the princess and the centaur – Why was Caroline holding the centaur’s hand? Damn the prophecy and damn its casual pulling of people into roles it had prescribed. Seraphim would– He cut the thought off.

  If he gave in, if he succumbed to the prophecy’s demands, he would not have to worry about Seraphim’s wrath. He would not have to worry about wounding Seraphim’s feelings, either.

  It wasn’t just that he would not be going back to Avalon – Gabriel’s memory played over his years in the Darkwater household with a fond nostalgia that might have surprised those who had always thought of him as oddly out of place, neither servant nor family member. But it wasn’t only that that he’d be leaving behind. Part of what made his time at Darkwater idyllic was that, away from his mother, away from Fairyland, he’d been able to pretend that he was human—just human.

  Even his time with Marlon had been the same or close enough: they’d been pretending they were humans together, and it had been a lovely game, down to cleaving to human moral rules or at least to the extent of hiding and pretending.

  But neither of them was human, and Gabriel was something more than a mere half elf. He’d tried to deceive himself for years that the prophecy was not really about him, that the cold, vast entity he felt, at the back of his own mind, the odd knowledge he had, the things he could sense were not – in any way – part of the fact that he’d been born to be king of elves.

  He envied mere humans and their free will. He envied elves and their lack thereof. Created, as angels were said to be – though Gabriel had never met an angel and couldn’t attest to it of his own knowledge – without free will, elves were bound to their fate like slaves to a master. They could rebel, but the rebellion either lasted very little, or it twisted the elf… like Gabriel’s uncle.

  But Gabriel was neither human nor elf, walking between the worlds forever. Which didn’t mean he hadn’t known what his elf fate was, or what he was meant to do…. He’d just thought his human half would help him escape it. And for a while it had. But prophecies were powerful things, especially in Fairyland. And there was more than one person – more than one entity – conspiring with the prophecy to bring him to the point and to make him obey.

  And he’d run himself off his legs – he thought, going lax against the net, feeling the net dig into his back, and looking up at the nebulous dark where the net was hooked, probably to nothing more than a belief that something hooked it.

  He glared at it, probing the fixings there. If he caused the net to fall, could he manage to catch everyone else in here in his power and transport them somewhere, possibly Earth?

  Could he do that and arrange his own death? His mind flinched from self-murder, but it was the only way to avoid his fate; and oh, he wanted to avoid his fate.

  But then he thought of Fairyland, and of the few glimpses he’d had of his uncle’s mind, in recent days, and also of the complications that he sensed extended all the way to Avalon and maybe to Earth, of the Others that Seraphim and he had had to find, to rescue unfortunates from non-magic worlds.

  Something very bad had been happening in Fairyland, and if his uncle continued holding power, it would only get worse. Gabriel had been taught, back on Avalon, that Fairyland was a parasite world, feeding off other worlds, like a leech upon a healthy being. But his feeling, from the thing at the back of his head, was something else. Not something he could fully access or release without also releasing the… not-human personality back
there, but he knew that somehow a healthy Fairyland was essential to all the worlds. As much as he would like to destroy the thing and make it burn, he couldn’t. As much as his human half hated it, the slipperiness of it and its strange ways, he could no more destroy it than he could destroy his human family.

  He narrowed his eyes, looking at the suspended net overhead. No. He couldn’t kill himself or destroy Fairyland. Worse, he couldn’t balk at the prophecy. If he somehow managed to get out of here without letting the thing in the back of his head out, it would still get out sooner than later. The prophecy would push him around and corner him, like a dog with a hare, until it had him just where it wanted him.

  So, let the thing out, a little. Use it a little. Delay the evil moment as far as possible.

  He said “Be ready, Princess,” and was shocked at the odd harmonics in his voice, which seemed to echo with a weird force and bounce off non-existent walls. “When I release you, find your way home with … my siblings and this misguided centaur. Go home. Go home as quickly as you can.”

  She said something, but Gabriel couldn’t hear it. He’d gone inside his own head, searching for the link to subjects of Fairyland.

  It wasn’t unexpected that he found doors barring him – metaphorically. The sacred groves rejected him, and the centaurs too, even though Akakios was his proof that the centaurs, too, were playing the prophecy and risking their lives and their prince to do it.

  Magical fountains edged him off. There were no words, of course, but if there had been, they would have been the classical ones of “Turn away, turn away, for you are not of Fairyland.”