Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  Gabriel frowned. “You must be spun by the king from my memories, but… I’m not quite sure….” Then he stopped. The man’s clothing, too, was soaked, dripping with water from every fiber, even as rain continued to pour down to soak his hair and plaster it to his fine-featured face. The fact that he stood there, under the cold downpour, grinning and looking debonair, as though he’d just emerged from the opera, made everything worse, Gabriel thought.

  As he watched, the man removed from his sleeve an immaculate white handkerchief hedged around with lace, and monogrammed with AG. Then, ignoring the fact that the handkerchief was as soaked as everything else, he mopped at his face with it, and said, “Do you like rain, O King?”

  “I am not king,” Gabriel said, and frowned a little, because if the man were his uncle’s creation, then the rain would not affect him at all. The rain was Gabriel’s and the weaker effect. To think his uncle might be pretending that rain affected his own creations was to go one step too far. Gabriel knew the sort of mental state his uncle was in – none the better as he thought he’d been in his uncle’s mind and about to dissolve into it. It simply was not coherent enough for that kind of fiendish cunning.

  So…

  “Truly?” the man said. “Are you not? Then why are you here? What are you doing?”

  “My uncle—” Gabriel said. “The kingdom– The prophecy—” He couldn’t quite find a coherent point to make his start.

  “You know the kingdom of Fairyland goes by magic and power and the one who can hold it coherent and whole. Under those rules your uncle has lost it long ago—before your birth, in fact—and his continued holding of the nominal crown will destroy it and all of us.”

  “All of us—” Gabriel said. “You don’t mean…. That is, you are one of us?”

  An eyebrow quirked, and the man gave him a smile between puzzled and amused. “You don’t remember me at all, Gabriel Penn. Do I look so different then?”

  Through Gabriel’s mind ran half-remembered lapses of judgment. There had never been very many, and none of them had meant very much or gone very far. He’d been too afraid of sullying the Darkwaters by contagion, particularly after his incident with Marlon and how close it had come to being public. But there had been the man who’d kissed Gabriel – and soundly too – when Gabriel had brought him his horse after one of the Darkwaters’ parties. And there had been that man who’d stayed over and who’d—

  But the thing was, the gentleman who’d kissed Gabriel had been so drunk, he’d probably not been aware that Gabriel was not female. Or else, he’d thought he was kissing Seraphim, something that made Gabriel smile even now. And the others…. None of them had looked like this man. Gabriel would have remembered someone who looked somewhat like him.

  Something fluttered at the back of his brain, like a bird trying to beat its way out of a cage, and Gabriel frowned and shook his head. “I don’t remember,” he said.

  This got him a broad grin with a hint of malice…. No, not malice, but malicious amusement, as though Gabriel were being particularly dumb and this delighted the stranger. An immaculate white hand was pushed forward. “Aiden Gypson at your service, Your Majesty.”

  Gabriel had got hold of Aiden Gypson’s hand, which felt warm and smooth and alive in his, but the name made him let go of it and take a step back, with a strangled cry. “You’re not– You can’t be—”

  “Why not?” he asked. “The problem is that my soul remains tragically attached to my body, because my soul isn’t able to die… to transition in the way souls do when the body dies. And this is a place of the soul and the mind, so here I am wholly alive. What?” he said, at what Gabriel felt must be the look of frozen horror on his own face. “Did you think I didn’t know? Did you think I was a passive victim? He never told you, did he? Of course he wouldn’t. He’s three parts foolish and one part– Never mind.”

  “He never told me what?” Gabriel said, his throat closing. “Marlon—”

  “He never told you why he did what he did or why it went so horribly awry. You should be aware that it betrays bad judgment on Marlon’s part. He clearly has a taste for cowards.”

  Gabriel was too shocked to be offended. “I beg your pardon?” he said.

  “I said, Marlon has a taste for cowards. He picked me and then you in quick succession. And I, you see, found it impossible to bear the double weight of not being quite human and never fully fitting in. He came home to find that I had just killed myself – the idea that I’d died of an illness was his, and he was the one who put it about. Being a fool, he tried to bring me back. Only, I am, as much as he, elf born. My mother was a naiad who– Never mind. He couldn’t quite bring me back, and once he’d done the magic – not being in full control of his own magic – he couldn’t kill me. And so we came to my problem. I’m afraid,” he said, and looked at the nails of his right hand, which Gabriel remembered as yellow and desiccated and protruding from dried flesh, but which were now white and buffed and carefully trimmed, “it will take the king’s touch to set me free now.”

  “But … How does that make me a coward?” Gabriel asked, and wanted to protest it wasn’t fair, that he would not be here if he were a coward, that he was here not out of his own ambition, but out of his wish to protect his family– that he—

  “Well, King, if you aren’t a coward, why would you spend so many years running from yourself? So many years pretending to be just human. So many years hiding and playing at what you’re not. And why would you now choose to let yourself be killed by a madman who can barely hold his kingdom together rather than take what is yours – the crown and the strength and the life of Fairyland? Why wouldn’t you acknowledge what is yours and make it part of you?”

  Gabriel opened his mouth. “Because I’m not—” he started, but that wasn’t quite true. He couldn’t say he wasn’t mostly magical, because he knew he was. The last few hours had shown that to him, if nothing else. “Because I can’t—” but at the back of his mind he knew that wasn’t true either. He could. It would just take… wanting it. Really wanting it. His uncle wanted Fairyland because without it he’d cease to exist. Gabriel must want it like that. He must, like a man at the races, take a final bet and stake all. But he still thought Aiden had no idea how vulnerable Gabriel was, how wounded. “You don’t know what my childhood was.”

  “Don’t I just? Do you think the orphanages for elf children are wonderful places, then? Has it occurred to you they might be worse?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No, King. Know yourself for what you are. Then take your crown.”

  Gabriel blinked. He knew the man was right, and yet….

  “First,” Aiden said, his voice clear, "set me free. And then go to your battle with my blessings. What remains of me in this world, hopefully a very little and for a very short time, will go with you, as will all my good wishes.”

  “But I can’t—” Gabriel said, and then realized that he could. He could see a tangle as though of loose threads behind Aiden, and he knew they were the lines of magic holding him to his body and the world. Elf magic. So strong that the setter himself couldn’t break them.

  He reached with his hand, tried to break them. Nothing happened. Then Gabriel took a deep breath and told himself he was the king of Fairyland, this was his loyal subject, and he could.

  His fingers moved forward as though of their own accord and pinched the threads. For a moment an expression of utter relief painted itself on Aiden’s face, then his fading form bowed and he said, “Farewell, O King,” and he was gone.

  Gabriel turned. He waved a hand. He didn’t need the rain. He didn’t need the street.

  He narrowed his eyes to see the truth, the nebulous pathways of what remained of his uncle’s mind.

  A hallway of spun sugar seemed to form. Brittle and cloying, Gabriel thought. About right.

  But he waved that away too, and willed himself to see clearly, to see the true form.

  It was time he claimed his crown.

&n
bsp; The Land, The King, The Magic

  Nell couldn’t make much sense of where she’d fallen. She was sure of only two things: There were two dragons in the room, and one of them was attacking Seraphim.

  The second impression she got was that there were too many people, too many factions, a woman-shaped oak tree – or perhaps an oak-shaped woman-tree – growing branches towards one of the dragons, the other dragon reaching out a claw.

  In the middle of all this, she was conscious of one thing: Caroline, and the centaur Akakios and Michael, all young, were all under her protection and her responsibility. In this room of intersecting attacks, she could not protect them—or not enough.

  Across the room, Seraphim’s erstwhile – or was she still official? – fiancée stopped pounding on the dragon wing and rounded on Nell, raising her hands in the initial invocation of power of every witch.

  And Nell realized the crown she’d assumed – in effigy, as it were, to get here—still existed and still weighed upon her. If she were just a woman, any woman, as she’d thought, an Earth woman with some accidental power transported here she didn’t know how, and living in a fairytale, then none of this mattered, and the safest thing for her to do was to transport out and to ignore Britannia and its troubles.

  But not only had she been told, and shown, that this wasn’t true. She could feel this wasn’t true. She didn’t know where this room was, but she could feel it was home. And she’d never had the title or honorifics of a princess, but she knew that she was the princess, the heir to the throne of Britannia. And she’d never been responsible for other people – save Antoine when he’d got captured – but she was now responsible not just for the people in this room, but for all the people in Britannia.

  She wasn’t sure what had been happening here, except she knew someone had kidnapped her as an infant and somehow kept her parents from searching for her – though they'd obviously missed her. And she didn’t know how the intersecting currents of attack and defense in this room went, but she knew it couldn’t be good to have two dragons and a tree-woman in a place her magic identified as home. And she didn’t know what Seraphim had been doing, but he looked very odd, as though – as though he were turning into glass – and there was filthy magic spinning around the room, enough magic to make the entire world dissolve, were it unleashed further.

  Nell hadn’t learned anything about princessing, but one thing she did know: in Avalon, magic was more than a way of achieving this or that result; it was woven into the physical existence of the very world. And kingship was more than a political system; it was intertwined and woven with the magic, one of the pillars of the world, and the reason that her disappearance as true heir had been so dangerous.

  She could only do one thing, and, her eyes fixed on Seraphim’s fiancée across the room, lifting her hands to start an invocation that likely would blow up a room this full of magic, Nell did that thing: she raised her voice; she reached with all her being, she called with mind and magic and heredity. “I call the land. I call the land to my help.”

  From beside her came a smothered exclamation. She was sure she’d misheard, because dukes didn’t swear like that, and even if they did, Seraphim wouldn’t. She’d learned to know him on Earth, and she should know some expressions simply weren’t in his vocabulary. “Oh, shit,” was one of those.

  But before she could think it through, the room shook. No, the entire building shook. Not as an earthquake, but as though the building rested on a rug that had been given a good shake by a concerned housewife. The building rolled. From deep within it, past the door to the room, came screams and the sound like something really large made of glass had shattered in a million pieces.

  But Nell couldn’t react, not even when Seraphim and the dragon vanished, and then Caroline and the centaur prince, and the tree and the man – Marlon Elfborn? – covered in blood. Not even when the other dragon roared, “Where did he go?” and bathed the entire room in a flame that wasn’t a flame but something other, something that seared the mind and twisted the magic.

  She couldn’t move or say anything, even as Seraphim’s fiancée fell to her knees sobbing, and as a man walking with the unsteady gait of a drunkard crossed the room in a shadowy, ghostly way that indicated he wasn’t fully there.

  Nell couldn’t say anything, because in her mind was a voice. Or perhaps it was not a voice but… something… a collection of noises that assembled into words, as though someone had orchestrated the grinding of rocks over millennia, the growing of trees over centuries, the growth of plants over seasons, and the buzzing of brief insects on a summer day into something coherent and joined together, which formed words. “Yes?” the words said. And then “Daughter?”

  Nell turned all her attention inward and tried to answer the call.

  Suddenly, without a feeling of transition, certainly without passing through the Betweener, she was somewhere else.

  Deep underground. Had to be. There were earthen walls all around; it was warm, and Nell was there, alone, at the center of it.

  From somewhere came the sound of a beating heart – a very loud beating heart that, like the voice, seemed to be composed of all sorts of small, natural sounds.

  And then the voice came again, “Approach,” it said. And Nell did, walking forward into the twisting and narrowing tunnel, towards a glow of fire and a feeling of warmth.

  An Irregular Man

  The Honorable Jonathan Blythe had gone straight home. He found the house dark and cold, which it had been much too much of late—partly, he judged, because of his father’s great ploy. The supposed princess having been raised with them, but exonerating them of all guilt in her kidnapping, was in fact a great social boon for his family. Mama and Papa, and even some of the younger girls, had been invited to parties every night.

  What surprised him, though, was that there was no one waiting in the little room off the entrance hall, which usually had at least Mama’s maid or Papa’s valet sitting in wait for the Lord and Lady to come home. He walked in, and his steps seemed to resonate loudly in the empty house. He frowned. It couldn’t be empty, damme. After all, the children would be in the nursery, perforce. They didn’t go to parties. Little James was all of three years old. And the servants and nurses would be here too, would they not?

  He walked, slowly, into the completely dark house. Rays of moonlight that shone through the magnificently tall windows in the wall of the entrance hall gave him his light as he found the marble stairs and walked up. Because his footsteps seemed lonely, he supplemented them with the tap of his cane.

  Up and up and up, on a whim, all the way up to the third floor, and there, in the nursery, all was empty, all calm – the beds made, the children’s toys neatly arranged. But his sweeping of the wall hooks that normally held the children’s coats made him frown. They were, every one of them, empty. He quirked his brow and moved down the stairs.

  And down there it was obvious that this too was deserted. More importantly, he couldn’t hear any noise, not even from the kitchen, and it wasn’t so late that the cook would have gone to bed. She usually stayed up late preparing the baking for the next day. Jonathan knew this, because he was known to go in via the kitchen entrance and get a tot of cooking brandy and a slice of day-old cake. The cook had never lost her fondness for the little boy whom she used to give currants and biscuits to. Now Jonathan thought about it, Mrs. Whimple, the cook, might be the only reason he bothered to come home most nights. He frowned at this but didn’t dwell on it, beyond being sure that if he stopped coming, the cook would worry.

  He wondered if anyone else would. But he thought – yes, he very much thought – that he was worried about them, too. Something had happened to render the town house this empty, and in the middle of the season.

  He traced his steps back down the stairs and felt at the door. Someone had removed the knocker, as they did at the end of the season, to signal the whole family was gone from town.

  They’d left without telling Jonathan?
Well, that was hardly surprising. What was surprising was leaving so early, so… but now. The house was not totally empty. He could feel it wasn’t.

  He went upstairs, step by step, all the way up to the floor where his parents' rooms and offices were, and he stood there, and sensed. He wanted to be sure, for one, that what he was seeing was not an illusion, that he was in the right house, at the right time.

  From Papa’s office came the sense of someone living, and Jonathan headed there, tapping his cane along with his steps. He hesitated before the door, training and thought telling him he should knock or scratch, while everything else told him he should just open the door. It was probably Papa in there, or his secretary. And in there were probably the papers, the magic, the trace of the conspiracy that Jonathan had been seeking.

  Jonathan opened the door and went in.

  There was a mage light burning on the desk, and Papa sat behind it, with a pile of papers. A blazing fire in the fireplace was almost too warm.

  Papa – who looked like an older and male version of Honoria – looked up, managing, perhaps for the first time since Jonathan had known him, to appear startled. “Jon!” he said.

  “Papa,” Jonathan said. A narrow-eyed sweep of the fireplace with his mage sight showed him that a lot of paper was burning there, and that the paper on the desk, which Papa was sorting, was overlaid with some sort of magic. It wouldn’t show the wrong thing to the wrong eyes. “I see you’re destroying evidence,” Jonathan said, amicably, and went over to the corner cabinet where his father kept the liquor. He opened it, got a decanter, poured himself a glass. He was aware of his father’s exclamation behind him but didn’t turn around until he had a full glass of brandy and his cane and gloves firmly in one hand. He sat on the chair across from his father’s desk and crossed his legs, resting gloves and cane on his lap. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “But after I had shot the cat in an alley downtown, I lost most of the alcohol I need to think clearly. And all Darkwater and his friend would offer me was a damnable pot of tea. What?”