Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  Anything that big was worth dying for.

  He was now crawling through a tunnel so narrow that he could barely breathe. It couldn’t go on much longer. His uncle must be somewhere ahead. Should he go forward? Or was he unwilling to pay the price?

  Ahead, in the dark, he saw red, glowing eyes, like a trapped rat’s.

  He thought back to an Autumn day in Darkwater, walking in the garden, and seeing the gardener pour something into a hole. He remembered the day so clearly – it had been shortly after his father had brought him there – that he could feel the strange comfort of the woolen overcoat, the softness of the muffler around his neck, and feeling quite odd in these clean clothes, and in the half-deference the staff gave him – because everyone knew whose get he was. Even if they were in fear of his fey nature, there was no denying, with that face, he was the lord’s son, and therefore they’d called him Master Penn and touched their hats at him.

  And the gardener had done just that and said, “As it is rats, Master Penn, and they’ve been going all under the forcing houses, the way to get rid of them is to stop all their entrances and exits with pitch, and to let them starve.”

  He thought, I’m stopping the entrance and the exit. And then realized he was wrong. Yes, this tunnel was Fairyland, and his uncle’s mind was at its end, starved and stoppered. But to starve him – to stop his exits…. It meant cutting off his food – cutting off… his access to Fairyland, stopping everything he was, and everything he could be.

  “Yes,” Gabriel said, and reached for the threads leading from his uncle to everything that was Fairyland.

  It came to him the only way to cut those threads was to attach them to himself. To make himself the center, the spin of them. To let them eat him alive.

  “Yes,” he said, though it felt like his lips had gone ice cold with saying it. Tears tried to spring to his eyes, but it was too late. Everything in Fairyland that needed feeding – and that was everything – attached to him: to his mind, to his body, to his essence.

  He felt more than heard a scream from his uncle, the scream of a starving creature. Gabriel had starved. He felt a pang of pity.

  But then he thought of the spun sugar, the cloying sweetness, the adults – and children – enticed, like wasps to a poisonous trap. Not let go till they were quite dead.

  And he pulled the rest of Fairyland to him.

  He heard a shriek as all the force went out of the old king. If his father hadn’t, however belatedly, done his duty, Gabriel wouldn’t be alive, and wouldn’t be here. Well, Gabriel was his father’s son and late to his duty, but he meant to fulfill it, so that others might live.

  And then Fairyland exploded outward, into groves and rivers, into sacred glades and centaur meadows.

  And Gabriel was in a white room, in the middle of a white palace, on a throne made of crystal, looking out over a vista of the realm that owned him.

  He closed his eyes and bid farewell to his humanity.

  Fire and Flood

  After the Dragon flame came and seared away… Caroline didn’t know what...she felt that for a moment she saw the whole royal nursery illuminated from the inside, like the words of the scripture about the day of judgment when the secrets of every heart shall be laid bare.

  She herself was not affected. She’d come through dragon fire once, and she felt like there was nothing left to burn, and she turned to Akakios and saw him, for a moment just as he was, young man and centaur both and something else, something that might be his soul – something shining and… something she belonged to.

  It was hard to put in words that which was not designed for words, not even those spoken only in the mind. She reached back her hand, in the flood of fire, and found his hand reaching for hers, warm and alive and very human.

  And in the next moment the dragon turned on the sobbing woman who’d been – perhaps still was – Seraphim’s fiancée, and concentrated the fire on her.

  Honoria screamed and fell to the ground on her knees. Just as when inside Akakios Caroline had seen his true essence, Honoria’s looked smaller, and sad, and defenseless – at least for a moment. And then that seemed to shrivel away and leave nothing….

  The dragon looked at her with a pitying look, and then it shifted. Where it had been there was a woman, the woman that Caroline had helped in the glade. But her eyes were even sadder now, and she looked around and then fixed on Caroline, “You,” she said. “You are kind. Get someone to minister to this unfortunate. She is bearing the child of a dragon, and she is not whole.”

  The dragon shifted again, “But now I must go,” she said. “The new king will require my attendance.”

  Caroline had barely the time to blink, and the dragon was gone, not through the window, but transported. Honoria remained on the floor, crying, and Caroline wondered with horror whether her being asked to look after Honoria – and her child? Caroline blushed at the thought – meant that Seraphim would have to marry Honoria after all. How else could Caroline be expected to look after the woman, if they were not to be related?

  But she didn’t want Honoria to marry Seraphim. If she was pregnant, then she must have behaved – as Mama would say – like a very abandoned female, and with Sydell, yet, who seemed to be at the heart of all this.

  She didn’t even know if Seraphim was alive, and she feared very much that Seraphim would consider it his duty, too, to look after Honoria and her baby, though it were none of his. But her heart turned within her. She didn’t even know if Seraphim were still alive. He’d been transported with Sydell-who-was-a-dragon. Where would he be now?

  A Time To Choose

  Marlon would never be able to tell exactly what had happened as the dryad who was his mother transported him out of the room.

  There was a time of infinite slowing, it seemed, when he saw life from the heart of a tree, a creature almost immortal – and full immortal in Fairyland – straining years through the measure of growth rings and sunlight, viewing humans as nothing but passing, ephemeral creatures, the kind you could ignore. They wouldn’t be around very long.

  His human senses, such as he retained, offered him a mingled green view, a passing scenery of centuries, of buildings being erected and collapsing, and none of it mattering very much.

  The tree he was – he thought after a while that what was really happening was that he was sharing his mother’s memories – was in the center of a grove, surrounded by brothers, and sisters, just like it. He felt their thoughts, as slow as his – hers? – and just as close as his own. They were one, that grove of trees. Just enough individuality to be unique, but enough community that it was like being one of a group of twins, with that communication it was said twins had, where they could guess each other’s thoughts.

  He felt the love and joy of the creatures around. And he thought how cruel, how inhumane of his father, to have separated his mother from this for more than two decades.

  It wasn’t that a human could have withstood such magical, solitary confinement well, but that a dryad couldn’t stand it at all. They weren’t meant to be alone, but to live in a grove, roots entwined, a small part of a living whole.

  And then the voice came, like a dream. “This too you could have, my son. This too you could choose.”

  He stood still, within her consciousness. He felt the bark – as it were – form upon his body, as his outstretched arms became branches.

  It should have felt terrifying, but it didn’t. It was more the feeling of coming into your own house, of closing the door after yourself, of entering a space where you were safe and nothing could harm you.

  But that wasn’t true, was it? He stirred, and felt as if the bark upon him cracked. He felt his mother’s mind, rushing to still the panic, but the panic wouldn’t subside.

  His mother had been safe, like this, covered in bark, in a woodland glade, but the dragon had reached in and despoiled her, and taken her away to enclose in an evil spell, animating it and giving it strength. He wouldn’t be safe.

&
nbsp; “The dragon could do so with the connivance of the king,” she said. “But there will be a new king now.”

  But the dragon within Marlon was now alive and awake. Or if not the dragon – he didn’t think he, himself, could actually turn into a dragon—but there was dragon in him. And no wonder all his life he’d been caught between two natures, never sure what he was or what to do, both the dragon and the tree that burns, both the rooted communal being and the individual who longed to nest upon cold treasure.

  But if he became the tree, wouldn’t the dragon rebel?

  And the human too?

  And then he felt his power rushing back to him.

  He’d given his power to Gabriel for his final fight. If the power returned to him, it could only mean one thing: Gabriel was dead.

  Bark and quietness went flying, and the sacred stillness of the grove, as Marlon screamed, “No!” and his scream shattered the illusion and left him – cold and alone – in the middle of a whirlwind of magic.

  Rings on her Fingers

  Nell, in the space she was in, in which she was not Nell at all, pulled up all the defenders of the land, waking long-dead warriors from their graves and bringing up the force of the land against the intruder.

  Suddenly she felt a force join hers, and a polite voice she knew well say, “This too I shall take from you, Princess. I shall manage my own.”

  She recognized Gabriel Penn’s voice, and in the next second, the forces of Fairyland were pulled back, and the land of Avalon was left without intruders, but more, she felt as though suckers had been attached to places of power, and were now being detached.

  “My predecessor,” the exquisitely polite voice said in her mind, "was not strong enough to hold Fairyland, and he let it become a parasite upon other times and other places. I will not continue that practice.”

  The feeding lines pulled back from all the places where they had been attached, and the magic of the land surged, luminous and clear and pure, so much magic.

  In the center of it, Nell let it wash over her like a cleaning tide.

  Once it was past, once the blinding light of it was gone, she pulled at the severed ends of the magic that had once knit land and king, the magic severed by Sydell’s crime and Sydell’s dark magic.

  In a land in which the king is part of the magic of the land, and part of the heart of it, it shouldn’t be possible for an intruder to come between them, and to turn the king deaf to the land and the land against the king.

  That it had happened at all had required unusual perfidy and dark treason, and a man endowed with the magic of two worlds.

  Nell pulled back the threads that had gone into Fairyland, through Sydell’s dragon-nature, and knit together the ends of the king and land.

  For a moment, she was caught in the middle, as the land surged to its rightful sovereign, like a child long separated from its parents.

  And then suddenly, with the surprise of something you know is coming, but which has been so long in arriving that you think will never now come through, the burden was lifted from Nell’s shoulders, the land from her mind.

  The spinning around her of wishes and wants not her own, of places and beings that were, for a moment, like a part of herself, left her shaking. It was a relief, but the sort of relief one feels when a long illness ends in a quiet death.

  She reeled under the blow of the withdrawal of power, and she, who had been multiple and ubiquitous, was suddenly just Nell, in a small body, and all too human.

  She was also, she realized, in the royal palace. At least, the hallway in which she found herself looked like an engraving she’d seen in a book about the royal palace of Britannia.

  Facing her was an elderly couple. Though they were dressed like the upper class of Britannia, it took her a moment to realize they were the king and queen.

  A king was, after all, supposed to be on a throne, and surrounded by majesty and might. Not in a hallway, looking surprised, and clutching at the hand of his equally-surprised looking wife.

  But the majesty hit Nell immediately afterwards. She knew the power she had held, all too briefly, belonged by right to this man. She could feel him – even at the same time that he was just a middle aged man, in a restrained dark suit, being the land, and keeping all the places of power flowing through himself and to the land, defending all magical borders, clearing all magical snags, keeping the land in good order.

  And he did it without letting his emotions affect it, without letting his real life intrude. She’d never be able to do it. Never.

  She realized she’d said all this aloud when the man’s tired face – how tired he looked...no, how ravaged, as the land that has endured the scouring wave of a tsunami will look ravaged and stripped of life and joy – essayed a small smile. “You learn,” he said. “You learn. And I didn’t do so well myself, daughter?” the last was said tentatively, as a question.

  Nell swallowed. She felt the grime of the cave on her hands. She knew her hair was a mess. She was wearing jeans, which must seem very odd to Britannia eyes.

  She was facing the king. And she didn’t feel in the least princess-like.

  “I’m not going to force you to take the crown, you know?” the king said. “I’m not even going to force you to stay in Britannia. The land would be better for you, but God willing there will be time for me to train another successor. There are some cousins—”

  For a moment there was immense relief. It was like having the land lifted from her shoulders. There was freedom. The door was open.

  Nell could leave. She could go to Earth. She could go back to her normal life. She’d had her adventure, as grand, as important as anything she could have dreamed of within the pages of a fantasy novel. She’d had Antoine, who turned out not to be a villain at all, but a noble centaur prince, sacrificing himself for his kind. And if he’d also tried to attach the heiress to the throne to him, who could blame him? He was a prince. Giving up a throne for a throne, and a position of power for a position of power, seemed only fair.

  She had met Seraphim, and she’d known he could love her, and she could love him. She’d seen palaces and hovels and strange worlds most humans couldn’t even dream of.

  Now she could go home, and settle into life at the farm, the life she’d thought she’d have when she was a little girl.

  It was a relief, a great freedom, an inestimable gift. She had had adventure, and now she could have her life back.

  She opened her mouth to speak, and only then she caught sight of her mother. She couldn’t be anyone else – she looked like Nell herself, only aged, both by time and by a broken grief.

  Catching her mother’s gaze, Nell knew the queen had mourned the daughter she’d lost, the daughter she wasn’t allowed to search for. She read in those eyes the loneliness of years, when the queen had tried to imagine how her child was growing up and how – the longing of the empty arms to hold the child she’d held all too briefly.

  And now in them she read the resignation to let Nell go, if Nell must go, and a sort of sadness for the future she would also miss.

  She looked back at her father, and beneath the regal look she caught the same fear, the same pain. The king and queen Nell could have refused. The throne she could have ignored. But not the longing in her parents' eyes. They’d missed her growing-up years, but they might yet see their grandchildren grow up. Would, for sure, see them grow up if nature allowed, because princesses don’t decide their own marriages.

  Farm and normal life vanished. She was the Princess Royal of Britannia, and one day she would carry on her shoulders the burden her father now carried. And her son or daughter would carry it after her. She was not Nell, herself, alone, but a link in an immutable chain, forged before her birth and extending well into the future.

  Slowly, slowly, she sank to her knees. She inclined her head. “Sire,” she said. “Father. I would like to be allowed to resume the duties I should have had, and to learn to carry your burden one day.”

  There was a
moment of silence, and then, to her shock, to her trembling surprise, the king and queen were pulling her up, hugging her, being human and warm and parents. The queen was crying, convulsively, a seemingly-unstoppable spasm.

  “My dear,” the king said at last. “Cecilia. There is nothing left to cry for.”

  “I know,” the queen said. “But sometimes we cry for joy.” From her sleeve, she took a handkerchief and dabbed at her face and then, with what seemed to Nell near-miraculous self-control, she took a deep breath, and the crying stopped. She smiled tremulously at Nell. There was a smudge on her cheek where Nell had kissed her, and Nell’s handprint was on the king’s shoulder.

  The king and queen looked at each other and didn’t seem to notice.

  And then the queen called out, “Come and bring my daughter some suitable clothes, and prepare a bath for her. The princess our daughter has come home.”

  Duke and Duke

  The man on the tomb woke and sat up, and Seraphim realized that, while it was his father, it was his father as he’d never before seen him. He’d supposedly died only a year ago, but his hair was all white, and his face lined. Yet his eyes had the same carefree, roguish shine Seraphim remembered.

  And Seraphim’s mother looked up. It was she who’d stood by the tomb.

  “Your father guided me here,” she said, "when I was lost in the paths of Fairyland. His projection… his spirit, found me and brought me here, where his body was. Here, where he could keep me safe.”

  “His… body?” Seraphim said, approaching.

  Into his half-unbelieving ears, his father poured a tale of how the old king had kidnapped him, to use his magic as fuel for Fairyland. “He left a changeling to die in my place, an aged fey in my form.”