Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  But he didn’t know where his broom had gone, nor the last time he’d swept. He felt tired, as if he’d spent the whole day sweeping...but then why hadn’t he gone home?

  His bare feet plodded along the pavement he couldn’t quite see through the mist, and his steps slowed down. Somewhere, up ahead was…. He couldn’t remember, only that he was supposed to go there, that he meant to go there, but he didn’t know why.

  He shivered in the mist and wondered if his mother had locked the door because she was with one of those friends who paid money, and if he’d somehow wandered out so tired that he’d stepped, unwary, into Fairyland. But no, surely not. He’d been thrown out of Fairyland with his mother. He remembered it. And he had never wanted to come back.

  A shiver ran up his spine at the memory of his last days in Fairyland, of what he’d had to do, how he’d had to find the will to resist, just to be thrown out.

  Perhaps his uncle wanted him back? To serve as a source of magic and a– He cut the thought off, and continued walking.

  If only he weren’t so hungry. Starving, really, which shouldn’t surprise him, since it had been his condition for most of his time in the Earth of mortals, at least since Mr. Penn had left Mama. But it surprised him, or rather, it felt unaccustomed to his body, as though he’d been well fed and well taken care of for a long time, and this discomfort felt like an outrage. It made tears prickle at the back of his eyes, and it made him feel scared and fragile in turns.

  The smell of cake came from somewhere to the left, away from the path he’d been following. He didn’t remember why he’d been following that path, and though he was in Fairyland and knew therefore that directions could change without warning, and that the image the smell of cake invoked, of a bakery window piled high with treats, was not true. All he could think was that the bakery near his mother’s house sometimes threw out cake that had gone so stale that it could be used for no other purpose. He’d often found it in the rubbish bins behind the shop.

  His steps changed almost without his meaning them to. The first disturbing change was that he felt as though the tendrils of fog had now become personal, intimate. They seemed to insinuate themselves into his clothes, attempt to crawl into his skin. The touch disturbed him, repulsed him. It felt too close, too… tight… too much of not letting him alone. It awakened memories he could not quite focus on.

  As he walked on, still in fog, the smell of cake got stronger, and the light grew too. Quite suddenly, he was standing in a plaza amid shops. It was London, he thought, but not the London he lived in, with its decaying hovels, its narrow streets. Once or twice, he’d walked beyond his neighborhood and glimpsed something of this: clean facades, prim maids going about their business in starched, frilled aprons, and the window-shops filled with dolls and toys, with cakes and hams and all manner of good things.

  The shop windows were there and laden, but there was no one in sight. The street was quiet, probably because it was nighttime. But in the center of the little plaza, a table was set with a sparkling white table cloth. On the table sat cakes and pies, and candy in big piles. The light pouring on it from the gas lamps above sparkled on sugar decorations and put a mellow gold color on the sweet buns.

  Like Seraphim’s birthday table, Gabriel thought. That first time. But when he tried to pursue the memory, it retreated before him, and he couldn’t remember at all who Seraphim was.

  Instead he approached the table, slowly, with the certainty that this much food, freely displayed, had to be some sort of trap. Even wild beasts knew that much.

  He half expected it to disappear, but it didn’t, and with his eyes fixed on a certain, particularly colorful, piece of candy, he imagined it melting in his mouth, sickly sweet.

  But when he was almost within reach of it, the fog hardened like a prison and held him. “No,” the fog said, whispering in his ear in a sweet, cloying tone. “No, little boy, there is a price.”

  Gabriel caught his breath in shock, on recoil of that voice, on memories that he couldn’t reach, and yet that made him feel uncomfortable. “Please, sir,” he said. “I’m just hungry.”

  And as he said so, it seemed to him he’d said these words before, and that what followed – He stepped back, recoiling from the sweets, but the fog was there again, not letting him run.

  If the table weren’t there, with its tempting sweets. If his stomach didn’t hurt with hunger. If—

  He felt willpower leave him and went limp in the grasp of the fog.

  Through his mind, unbidden, came a voice, a glimpse of an adult in a classroom, standing by a chart that represented the worlds that touched Avalon and saying, “The power of Fairyland is in childhood. It reaches into this, feeds on it, in the manner of a leech or parasite. This makes Fairyland a parasite leech upon the worlds.”

  Gabriel had a moment of wanting to protest that it wasn’t true, that the power direction was all wrong, and then he couldn’t remember what it was all about. What a strange dream. He’d never been in a classroom like that. Classrooms like that were not for the likes of Gabriel Penn.

  “Will you pay?” the fog hissed.

  Gabriel looked at the table, at the candy. His stomach roared its hunger. How bad could it be? He had an idea that it could be very bad, but also that he’d survived it in the past. He closed his eyes. A voice came from somewhere in his memory saying, “An’ you can do whatever you want with him, governor. No one will care. He’s elf born and got only a crazy fairy mother. You can even kill him if it pleases you.”

  From somewhere too, came a memory that they’d almost had, but then Father had burst in and—

  But the memory vanished as if it had never been, leaving only the certainty that it could be survived. But hunger might not be. When had he eaten last? How long could he keep walking with no sustenance?

  He closed his eyes. He said, “I will pay.”

  And then the fog was on him, in him, touching every single pore of his being, while strange, alien thoughts poured into his mind.

  Gabriel Penn found himself falling to his knees, while darkness and cloying sweetness consumed his mind.

  The Weight Of The Crown

  They’d no more hit the ground, running, than Nell realized she couldn’t run on home. Even if she wanted to. She had no idea where “home” was, or for that matter which home she should go to: Earth, which she still thought of as home, or Britannia, where, supposedly, she’d first come from?

  The place where they landed – running – seemed to be made of black shiny stuff, like really polished glass, and they were running along a corridor made of the stuff. It was hard not to slip, even in running shoes, and she worried that the less well-designed footwear of Avalon wouldn’t be up to it at all.

  The air that pumped into her lungs felt so cold it singed them. It was like walking in a snowstorm back in Colorado, the air icy and dry, and feeling like it burned its way down your nasal passages and made your chest hurt.

  Nell tried to think – hard to do while running and hurting. She remembered again that most things in Fairyland were illusory and could be changed by the mind. She tried to think of running elsewhere – on a meadowland path towards an open portal to Earth, for instance – but nothing happened. She tried again, throwing her magic at it, and still nothing happened.

  If she couldn’t dent this “reality” imposing itself on her and her friends, then she must be in a type of trap like the net. And that meant… that meant they needed extraordinary magic to get out of it. She wasn’t even sure that their running was taking them anywhere, or whether they were just running in place on a slippery, never-ending black-glass trap.

  “I’m tired,” a voice said behind her, and she recognized Caroline’s voice.

  “You shouldn’t be,” came the voice of the young man with her. “You shouldn’t be. We gave you the magic potion that–.”

  “I’m tired,” she said again. “And I’m thirsty.”

  And now Michael’s voice came, sounding exactly like Serap
him’s, only younger, at that age when male voices haven’t fully acquired the depth of adulthood. “Lady, Miss, I don’t think my sister can go much further.”

  Nell stopped and turned. Behind her, she heard her companions stop. She turned around to face them. There was Caroline, and a young man holding her hand, and she looked like she was going to faint, while he looked full of concern.

  Michael, on the other hand, just looked pale, and was panting a little as if from the long run.

  For a moment, something in the young man to whom Caroline clung called Nell’s attention. He looked like someone…. The resemblance formed in her mind, fixed in disbelief and, finally, horror. Antoine. He looked like Antoine. But he … he couldn’t be…. And yet why not? Had not Antoine come from Avalon? Or from some other world that had connection to Avalon?

  “Madam,” the young man said, and his voice too echoed the memory of Antoine in her mind. “Milady, you see, my people gave Miss Ainsling a potion that should have prevented her feeling hunger, thirst, or tiredness. If she’s feeling that, wherever we are, then something is leaching the magic and virtue of the potion she took. And nothing should be able to. I think, Lady, that this is a trap.”

  “Your people?” Nell said, more perturbed than she wanted to admit by the young man’s resemblance to Antoine, even as she scanned the walls of the tunnel. She could now see it was not a tunnel but a box. There was more black glass at either end. Had it always been there, or had it appeared when the little group had stopped running? And if it had always been there, how had they been kept running in place?

  “My…. My name…. The Lord—” Something that sounded like an elf name. “—whom you know as Gabriel Penn called you Princess…. Are you?”

  “I am told I am the princess of Britannia,” Nell said, miserably. She didn’t want to be. More than ever, now, she didn’t want to be. Back on Earth, when she'd been a young woman, fantasy adventures had seemed so romantic and exciting, but now all she wanted was to go back to Earth, go back to her job as a code monkey, and live a life of complete and ordinary lack of adventure.

  His eyes widened. “My people,” he said. “Have long been in search of you and… and of the real king of Fairyland. We’ve worked long and hard to find you. My brother—” He stopped for a moment, his voice gone watery, and Nell thought he had stopped to get his emotion under control before dissolving in tears. “My brother died in that quest. The prophecy said he would. I will, too, probably. The prophecy said if my father wanted to rescue both worlds he could do so, but it would cost him all his descendants. No more would those of his blood run in the woodland glades of Fairyland.” The young man set his chin, all jutting angles, beneath a face still endowed with childhood softness and dark eyes swimming in tears. “He still did it. He still did what was right.”

  And now the hair at the back of Nell’s head was trying to rise, and there was a feeling of dread, but she had to know, “Your brother’s name was… Antoine?”

  The young man blinked at her. “No, but he used that name when he went among men and didn’t want to be known for what he was. His name was Athanasius.”

  “But… he used Antoine?” There was a distinct buzz in Nell’s ears. Were the walls moving closer? “When he went among… men? What…?”

  “My sister, Lady, do you have water? Your Highness?” Michael asked.

  She got her backpack down and without thinking passed a bottle of water and some crackers to Caroline, then more to Michael. She continued staring at the Greek-looking young man. “Who are you? What are you? What was your brother?”

  “My name is Akakios,” he said,” and I’m a prince of centaurs, only heir to my father, now my brother is gone.”

  She looked down at his very human bare feet, on the floor, “Centaurs?”

  “We can change shapes.” He sounded tired. “All centaurs are male. All our mothers are human. We don’t become centaurs till we’re five or six. And we can change back, though it takes some effort. Lady, the walls are closing in on us.”

  “Yes, I think so too,” Nell thought, as in her mind the idea that Antoine had come to find her on Earth in service of some Fairyland prophecy, that he’d, in fact, sacrificed his life to bring her back to Britannia, put a whole other perspective on their involvement. He might have lied to her, and he might have had things in mind he wouldn’t share, but he’d done what he’d done in service of an ideal and not because he'd wanted to seduce her. And he might have even loved her, for all she knew.

  “It’s a magical box,” Michael said. “We must get out of it.”

  “Yes,” Akakios said.

  “It will take your power, you know,” Michael said. “Because it can’t be fully controlled, since your father didn’t swear fealty.”

  “And hers,” Akakios said. He looked at Nell. “Yours, Your Highness. You must use the power of your ancestors. Your connection to Britannia. You must be the one who forms the connection. The… the true king told you to run along home.”

  She didn’t have time to instruct them to do anything. Their hands linked, and on one side Caroline’s cold hand, on the other Michael’s sweaty one, took hold of hers.

  In the middle, Nell felt all their powers given to her – trustingly given. Michael’s power, and Caroline’s brilliant and dazzling power, and Akakios’s all-odd shapes and yet reminiscent of Antoine’s.

  “Now, Lady, now.”

  And Nell, who’d been brought up to think that kings and queens and princesses were quaint things of the past, now tried to reach for what should be in her blood. For kings and queens and princesses long dead.

  She felt as though a great weight rested on her. People thought that power over people was… power. That you could tell people what to do and they would. True, a lot of politicians thought so too, but those weren’t the good politicians.

  Public power wasn’t glamour and glitz, ball gowns and being worshipped. Real kings, she felt, and, yeah, princesses too, served. They shouldered the burden because someone had to, and they used it to make sure the unthinkable didn’t happen to those who trusted in them.

  She felt the imaginary crown like a band around her head, but she knew what she had to do. Gathering all their magic, she thought about the palace in Britannia. It was by rights her home. They couldn’t keep her out.

  The glass box shattered with a sound like a note of music so high it hurt the ears. They were falling, hands still linked, from somewhere near the ceiling of a large room. A large room with a tree growing in the middle of it, two dragons, and a confusion of people.

  The splinters of the cage, falling ahead of them, managed to hit the floor, where they stuck, vibrating, without actually hitting anyone.

  And Nell fell in the middle of them, just beside Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater.

  Mirror and Crown

  A surfeit of sweetness, a cloying lack of self. For a while Gabriel Penn was suspended in both, his mind more a memory of having a mind than a real thought, or real memories.

  Then, from this place with no past, no future, no self, came the sound of footsteps, punctuated with the sound of a cane tapping cobblestones, not in the way of someone who needed help walking, but in the way of a dandy on the way to a concert or the opera.

  That image – that memory – summoning up the very idea of memories and images and a world outside Gabriel’s head—brought with it other images. He saw himself as an unfortunate fly, surrounded by a cocoon, suspended from a web, being devoured. He saw himself as a spun-sugar figurine dissolving in a puddle in between cobblestones, on a street more familiar than it should be.

  He put his back to that street, to that memory. Like a man bracing himself against a physical object in order to leverage his physical power, he put his mental back to that street – the streets he remembered, the streets that he’d seen, just before—

  He was in the middle of the look-alike London, empty as the real London had never been. It was raining. Rain guttered from the roofs, fell into the street, san
g merrily along the gutters to join the other, overflowing effluvium.

  Gabriel was an adult, and his clothes were soaked. He understood the necessity of the rain. The phrase “a bucket of cold water” ran through his head like a clue, but he didn’t need it. He needed the feel of cold on his skin, the clammy feel of his soaked wool trousers clinging to his legs, the feel of that trickle of water from his head down the back of his neck and his spine, under his already soaked shirt. He could feel his hair plastered to his scalp and his face. He imagined he must look like a drowned rat. But what he looked like didn’t matter. He was not, in any sense of the word, somewhere physical.

  He was in Fairyland. The thought crossed his mind, with all the strength and urgency of a warning, and was followed by another: he’d been damn near dying in a trap. He was in a trap still.

  The awareness of this made him even more intent on the steps and the tap-tap of the cane approaching. He was in Fairyland. Only two things operated here: his own mind, and the mind of his uncle, his opponent. One of them would emerge victorious from this struggle, and it must be Gabriel. It must, because Gabriel was needed for Fairyland to go on existing. And Fairyland was needed… His thought cut off. He wasn’t sure why Fairyland was needed. He suspected it was something he could not know until and unless he ascended to its throne. But he had a gut-deep intuition that it was needed. Else, why not have destroyed it, long ago?

  So – where he was now, only two minds worked: his and his uncle’s.

  “Not… quite,” an educated male voice said, and Gabriel spun around.

  The man who stood between two buildings, as though he’d just emerged from an alleyway, was strangely familiar in a way that Gabriel could not place. He did not exactly look like Gabriel, but he was of the same type: dark hair, light eyes – in the man’s case a greyish blue – features that could be considered beautiful but that were still, undeniably, masculine. And his build was also the same, tall and slender, with powerful shoulders. When Gabriel looked up from surveying the man to the man’s face, he found the man was smiling. “Well?” he said, in the tone of someone who asks the answer to a riddle.