Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  The dragons turned their heads away from him, though he sensed they too were not quite refusing to take his side, but afraid of what the current sovereign might do to them.

  And there hinged the dilemma. He could not fight his uncle for the royal position and the royal power unless he got out of here. But to get out of here, he needed the royal prerogative that would allow him to cut through the net and challenge his uncle.

  It was a paradox, and he was bound more in it than in this net. His hands clutched futilely at the threads of the net on either side.

  He’d need someone who was of Fairyland, but who had walked away, as Gabriel had. Someone who would give him the power to do this. He thought of his mother and shuddered. His mother… He’d never been sure if she loved him or not, or even if she felt anything at all. She’d been thrown out of Fairyland as a changeling at the age of five, and though she’d returned after, yet in her mind she remained a five-year-old child. She could break things without malice or intent, just to know what was inside.

  No, in this strait, his mother was the last person he could trust.

  And the first person? He tried to fight against the thought. All he could remember was that poor animated corpse against the wall. But Marlon had said that wasn’t intentional. Which left….

  Which left the ridiculous binding he’d tried to put on Gabriel when Gabriel had come back. But Gabriel sensed, in a way he couldn’t quite think clearly about, that this was because Marlon had a horrible fear of being left, of losing those he loved. Perhaps not unwarranted. He’d never had many people who loved him back, from what Gabriel had gathered about his truly horrible childhood.

  And despite that fear, he’d removed the bind and let Gabriel go.

  Gabriel was imprisoned, but his mind and power were free. He searched through the worlds, finding Marlon’s familiar mind-touch. Seen through the mind only, he looked younger and less defensive than Gabriel was used to – younger than Gabriel, in fact.

  Gabriel had only a dim awareness of Marlon’s surroundings: A house, a threatening presence. Heavens, was that a dragon? Was Marlon, then, in Fairyland?

  He got the impression Marlon was … busy and in the middle of a knot of magic. But his response to Gabriel’s mind touch was immediate. “Gabriel!” Marlon mind-spoke at him, recognition and gladness in his mental voice, and also the sort of total, shocked surprise that made Gabriel feel a little like he’d been unjust.

  “I—” he said. He’d thought to demand and to order. But that surprise took the rug out from under his feet. He kept his mind and mental voice strictly human, and his request was framed in human words, “I am in trouble, Marlon, and I need to borrow your power to survive this.”

  “My… power?” Gabriel had a feeling of… not reluctance, but almost fear.

  Gabriel let him see the net above, the people in with him.

  “No chance of… waiting? An hour, two?” Again that not-quite reluctance, but almost fear.

  “Uh, as you know… time in Fairyland.”

  “Oh. Yes. And Himself would manipulate it.”

  “Yes.”

  He almost heard Marlon swallow. For some reason the idea of ceding his power just now terrified Marlon, but on the heels of the swallow came an answer. “How do I do this? How can I let you have my power?”

  “You recognize me as your sovereign,” Gabriel said. “You pronounce your power mine to use.”

  “It is yours to use.”

  “No, in elven.”

  “Well, then,” Marlon said and spoke the words, ancestral and inborn, at the back of every elf’s brain, and he used Gabriel’s true name.

  It was like holding lightning. The shock of the influx of magic cut through Gabriel, as well as did, suddenly, a clear view of Marlon’s mind, of where Marlon was. Or what he was doing.

  Oh, hell. Not only had he just taken Marlon’s power away during a duel, but he’d also pulled away his protections from Seraphim and someone else. It couldn’t be helped.

  His power pull would throw people about, too. That too couldn’t be helped.

  What could be helped was using the power to do what it should, and to keep his human self sane as the elf-self, unleashed by Marlon’s fealty, in control.

  It seemed to Gabriel as if all that was him stood in the middle of a black and blue hurricane of howling magic pouring out from his own mind. And the enemy was there, waiting.

  He ripped the net with a wave of his hand and screamed at the others, as he tried to conjure stable ground for them to run on, “Run! Run on home. Run and leave me to my fate.”

  Unleashed

  Seraphim felt the power pull before he could think where it had come from or what it meant.

  In panic, he clutched at it, holding, as a forceful pull snatched it clear away. A pull stronger than any human could employ.

  In that moment, he had a picture of Gabriel, of Caroline, of Nell, hurtling through space. No. Gabriel was jumping. But he wasn’t Gabriel, he was… a creature. A giant creature, made of something not human flesh, but something crackling with energy and power. Yet undeniably Gabriel, with Gabriel’s grimace as if he’d just realized whose power he'd pulled.

  Only it wasn’t Seraphim’s own power, he realized with a start. It was Marlon’s power. Marlon’s power, which had served to disguise—

  “Darkwater,” the voice was Honoria’s, raised in startled surprise.

  Seraphim had been in the princess’s nursery, looking around, amid a lot of other workmen and people outfitting the nursery for the next generation of heirs to the throne. The idea that those would be Honoria and Sydell’s children made him want to shudder and abandon the world all together.

  Something else that made him wish to abandon the world was the crisscrossing of power in the room. It would be invisible to most of the workmen and, he would guess, to all the people willingly admitted to that room, at least if Honoria had anything to say about it.

  No simple household magician or maid would know any better, and those higher up who would be admitted would either be screened to make sure they knew nothing of malevolent magic, or else be within the conspiracy to lie to the king about his daughter.

  But to Seraphim’s eyes, to the eyes of anyone who had trained in dark magic – though not for the performing of it – the ropes of dark and filthy stuff across the room and forming a cat’s cradle made him think that no one, not even Sydell’s spawn, deserved to live in this room. Unless he was very wrong, it had taken human sacrifice and worse to create these, and Seraphim did not even wish to think about what the “worse” might be.

  In his guise as a common tradesman, he’d been pretending to look at the drapes, and measure the walls, all the while trying to figure out where, in the center of this, the knot was holding the working in place.

  For a working of this kind, to disguise and deceive people like the king who certainly knew better, it needed something material to hold it in the center. For this filthy a magic, probably a captive human – or supernatural – soul.

  He had been working through the tangle of magical ropes, and thinking only of that, when Honoria’s voice calling his title made him turn. In it, he’d almost lost the squeak from Valerie, which was not quite his name but might have been meant as a warning.

  Seraphim’s first impulse was to hide or fight, but he could do neither, and besides, both would be foolish. After all, he still had his power, and he still had his wits. At least, he hoped he had his wits.

  In power and wits – he’d never deceived himself otherwise – he was Honoria’s superior. What he lacked, of course, was the back up of several palace guards. But he’d been in worse situations, after all, and if worse came to worst, he could port out of here, to another world, and from that other world fight his way back here, to this moment, to confront Honoria again.

  So he looked around and smiled at her, his best, dazzling smile. “Hello, Honoria,” he said. “Or should I call you by the false name you’ve appropriated? Did no one ever tel
l you, Miss Blythe, that pretending to be the heir to the throne is treason and likely to lead to stretching that pretty white neck of yours?”

  She didn’t count on his coolness, he saw, and he immediately perceived he’d scored a hit when her hand went to her neck reflexively. It took her a moment to find her voice, too, and it came out squeaky and high. “How dare you? How dare you? After kidnapping me and giving me to a family not my own? After making me become engaged to you? After—”

  Seraphim had taken note of the fact that the room had gone deadly silent, with every maid and servant hearing this, drinking it in. They wouldn’t remember it, though. Part of the working in the room was to make sure that anyone in here would believe the story that Honoria had put about.

  So he must still find the center of this – though it was akin to finding the tip to embroidery floss the cat had been at.

  And at that moment, on that thought, he remembered Gabriel’s method for doing just that. When Gabriel was young and still out of place in the household, Seraphim’s mother, out of kindness, often called to him to help her disentangle the threads of embroidery floss. Gabriel’s methods were unique. He would break the thread, anywhere, he said, then start rolling it, and when they came to another point that was raveled, fix them together by magical means.

  Seraphim didn’t have the need to do that here. He wouldn’t be raveling this thread again.

  So he answered coolly, “I don’t recall making you anything, milady. I made you an offer, and you jumped on it eagerly enough.” He grabbed the nearest thread, and, employing all his power, broke it.

  Honoria’s eyes widened, seeing what he was doing, though to the rest of the room it must look like he clutched at nothing.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  There was no appropriate answer for that, so he tried none. Instead, he yanked on the filthy thread with all his might, at the same time opening a very small gate into a world of fire, where he disposed of such things. He put the thread in it and started feeding it.

  “Guards, guards!” Honoria screamed.

  Seraphim ignored her. He was now pulling on the thread, with both hands, feeding it as fast as he could into the fire.

  Ahead, he saw a knot in it and bit his lip, because it meant he’d have to cut it again.

  Guards approached, running. There were guns pointed at him. Honoria was saying something about being wanted. Valerie, somehow withstanding the magic, was screaming a counterpoint.

  But one thing Seraphim knew was that, by virtue of his birth, no one but the king could order him fired upon. Stopped, sure, but not fired upon. The guards were approaching cautiously. Cautiously because Seraphim must look to them like he was clutching at nothing, and a madman was always to be feared.

  And then the knot was within Seraphim’s hand, only it didn’t feel like a knot, but like a tiny birdcage, of the sort that some people kept crickets in. Jumping out of the way of the nearest guard, Seraphim applied all his magic to breaking the cage so he could keep feeding the thread into the gate.

  It resisted his efforts, and he thought of throwing it through the gate, cage and all, but….

  A guard grabbed Seraphim’s arm. “You’ll come quietly your Gra– Mil– Mr.”

  And Seraphim, in despair, before the other guard, approaching, could use a magic-restrainer on him, put all his strength into crushing the cage.

  It broke like glass, the shards biting deep into his hand, blood pouring down. It didn’t matter.

  The moment the cage broke, all the threads unraveled with a hissing sound like a raging fire. Anyone with magical power in the vicinity felt it like a flail upon the magical sense. Honoria screamed. Valerie covered her eyes. The guards let go of Seraphim, who stepped back, stunned, letting the remains of the cage fall from his wounded hand.

  From the cage, like a fog, a figure emerged and materialized, and looked around with a puzzled expression before saying, “At last! It’s been such a long time in that filthy prison.”

  The Tree, The Dragon, The Drunkard

  There was a moment that Seraphim saw the creature clearly – a beautiful and stark-naked young woman with chestnut hair and… well, the odd thing was that while she was alive and looked like a lovely, vital young woman, all of her was chestnut-colored, and if one looked closely there was a hint of wood grain about her skin.

  Seraphim, feeling as though an odd numbness were creeping up his arm from his palm, had no idea what he was seeing. The woman looked around, frantic. Put her hand to her chest and said, turning beautiful moss-green eyes first to one, then to another, all around the company of the room, “The Forest,” she said. “I must have….”

  An odd sound echoed, like fabric ripping, and in the middle of the floor, just in front of Seraphim, the boards heaved up, nails flying. One struck the guard who was holding Seraphim on the face, making an ugly cut. The man let go of Seraphim and started stepping back, as though he were not quite aware of doing it, till presently he’d backed up to near Honoria, as though looking for protection.

  Honoria’s face was a study in shock, her mouth wide open. Seraphim couldn’t understand why her hair was whipping as if in an unseen wind, until he realized the magic unleashed from the thick, dark ropes had submerged the room. There was so much magic there, they were all in magic, like a fish in water, magic crackling and fizzling on their skins, magic making them stupid with the shock.

  He knew that the spell that had held the various illusions together, down to the final illusion of Honoria being the princess, would be unraveling too, now the sacrifice had been taken from the center of the weaving.

  The sacrifice… As though pulling the magic up into it, the woman had … Seraphim would like to say she had made an oak tree grow in the middle of the floor, only surely that was impossible, even with very great magic unleashed. And yet in the middle of the royal nursery, pushing aside the cradle, overturning the finely wrought rocking chair, upending the chests of clothing, an oak tree grew, here, far from forest, far from soil, far from brook, it grew and greened, loaded down with acorns.

  The woman – nymph – sighed and eased into the tree, like a person easing into a soft bed. She backed into it and made a little “ahh” of relief. You could still see her, sticking out of the tree trunk, and she still looked human, glancing around with wide-open eyes. She looked at Seraphim and said, “You are not he,” and then. “Good for you that you are not he. Where is he—my despoiler?”

  Seraphim had the sense of her reaching back, searching through the world for…. He had a very bad feeling it would be for Sydell. It shouldn’t be possible, and it wouldn’t be possible, not for a normal, human magician. But if this was a nymph – a dryad?—then she would treat the human world as humans treated Fairyland: a not-quite solid overlay on reality, to be rifled through at will for what it might contain.

  And then….

  There was a sound as though of an explosion, and two men fell into the room. The odd thing is that though they both fell from about halfway in the air, and both landed awkwardly, when they landed they didn’t seem to notice they’d dropped or that they were in a different place. Rather, they each rolled, and stood, and turned to each other again, ready to fight.

  This was when Seraphim recognized Sydell and Marlon. His shock was not that, but that Marlon was losing and badly. There were multiple slashes on his arms and his shirt was so torn and bloody it was impossible to tell where he’d been hit or how many times.

  The reason for this became obvious almost immediately. Although both of them held knives, Sydell was protecting himself with a magical shield while Marlon … appeared to have no magic at all. There was no aura of magic around his head. How could he have lost all his magic?

  The puzzlement lasted only a second. After all, it did not matter where his magic had gone or why. All that mattered was that this was a very unequal duel. Seraphim didn’t have magic to match Sydell’s, but he had magic. He threw a shield around Marlon, just as Sydell’s knife would
have found his heart.

  Both men suddenly noticed him. “You!” Sydell screamed, and ran at Seraphim, his knife ready.

  And Seraphim, unarmed, seized on the only thing he had – the shard of the cage that had confined the dryad, which was even now in his hand, even as the splinters of it were making his palm throb like hell’s fire.

  He struck out with it, blindly, while using his other arm to deflect Sydell’s blow.

  His hand with the shard cut at Sydell’s cheek, making oddly black blood bubble up and pour out.

  A roar echoed. A feeling of scorching.

  Before them in the middle of the room, steps from the tree, stood a vast red dragon with Sydell’s expression in his irate eyes.

  And Honoria, for reasons known only to her, was pounding on the dragon’s wing with both closed fists.

  Just when Seraphim thought things couldn’t get madder, they did.

  Another dragon broke through the plate glass window announcing, “I found you at last!” in words that were like roaring fire.

  And Marlon looked Seraphim in the eye and screamed, “I gave him my magic! Your brother. Darkwater, I fear he’s in a battle for his life. I can feel his struggle, through my fealty to him, and I fear he’s losing.”

  Something Sickly, Something Sweet

  Gabriel didn’t know how he’d got back to Fairyland. He couldn’t remember exactly how old he was, and he didn’t know what he’d been doing just before he found himself here.

  But there was no doubt he was in Fairyland. He recognized the mist around him, the weaving, writhing kind of fog that happened only when magic was involved.

  It felt cold and clammy on his skin, permeating the sleeves of the too-small, too-tight suit, which should have been replaced years ago, when he was … six? seven? But which continued to be his only suit, even though his body had grown so much. His wrists showed, bony, exposed, and his hands, small, thin, covered in the scrapes and sores a sweeper boy accumulated keeping the crossing clean for the fine lords and ladies who didn’t want to taint the hem of their clothing with horse droppings.