by Nunn, PL
“But my world doesn’t have magic. Not like you have here?”
Ashara smiled at her sadly. “It used to. Oh, never to the extent that we do, but your realm used to be filled with magic. There was a time before your ancestors decided to go the route of science and dispel the mystic, when magic flourished. When shamans and witches and magicians were common place. When legend was not legend and fey beings wondered the lands of earth. We used to love earth. Oh, we were not always benevolent in our visits. There are always those with mean spirits who relish in playing upon the fears of the less powerful. The doorways were many then and there was little to harm us, or drive us away. Humans accepted us as we were. They worshiped some of us, or made us into superstition. They would leaves plates of food and drink for us, or garlands of flowers in return for our benediction. Sometimes we invited a chosen few back to Elkhavah with us, sometimes we mated with humans on earth. There still may be, in some hidden recess of your world places where the fey hold some small power. The places where your technology cannot breach. The most rugged and unsavory of places.
“You see, science displaces magic. Technology banishes legend and myth. You can not have one and still hold faith in the other. You, Victoria, up until a short while ago, did not believe that there really was such a thing as magic. Your religion tells you not to, your science proves that it is nothing but a hoax. Tales to frighten children into obedience. And you need faith to really use magic in a world of machines. The thing is, Victoria, that unlike faith in a religion, where if no one believes anymore the religion dies and the gods go unworshipped and are forgotten, magic does not go away. The earth makes the magic. The magic is always there for the earth’s children to use. Only on your earth, men have destroyed so much of nature that the magic has no place to go. If men used it, it would be fine, but men have no belief in it anymore. So it grows. And it strains at the boundaries of your realm and spills over into ours, where we cannot use it. So it grows and grows and interferes with the winds of our earth magic. And I think, it has found a home in you.”
“Why me?”
“If the sorcerer who opened the door way was competent at all, then he would have caused the rift to open to the most powerful human in your realm. The one most suited to using the human magic. You.”
“Me?” she repeated in a tiny voice.
“But…But they weren’t after me. It was Alex they wanted. I was just there so they could use me against him. They said so.”
“If they came upon the two of you,” Aloe said, sitting cross legged beside her.
“How would they know? Whoever claimed ogres had intelligence?”
“Of course,” Ashara agreed. “They came upon a boy and a girl. The first and usually the wrong assumption is that the male is the more powerful.”
“What will they do to him when they find out?” she whispered.
“We don’t know who has him,” Ashara told her. “There’s no way of knowing.”
“We’ve got to find him. What if…what if they do something terrible? There’s got to be some way of finding him.”
“There might be,” Neira’sha said. “If you lend me your memories of him, perhaps I might be able to find a trace of him.”
Victoria stared, uncomprehending.
“For me to look for him, I must know him. Only you know your Alex here, so only you can supply me with the images I need. To do that, I need to go into your memories. If you trust me, lower your shields and allow me in. I promise to go no further than your recollections of Alex.”
Uncertainly, she looked to Aloe, who merely shrugged. No help there. She stared into Neira’sha’s eyes. Gentle green eyes, with all the patience and solitude of the forest. She had planted this forest they sat in and the larger one outside the keeps walls. She had brought all this beauty to life. It was inconceivable to imagine her using that gentle power to harm, to betray.
Like a gardener, she would weed out the poisons and cultivate the good.
“All right.” Very carefully she lowered her clumsy shields. There was a feather light flutter of sensation. A warmth and gentleness that touched her mind. She thought of Alex. She remembered him when they were teenagers going to the same high school, all the nights they stayed out later than they were supposed to, driving in his brother’s car. Making out under the stars at the old mill outside of town. Planning their life together. She remembered him going to war, determined to do his duty, determined to live up to his father’s expectations, regardless of hers.
She remembered him coming back, hollow eyed and haunted. A wounded animal that needed her protection, even though he denied it vehemently. She was crying. The tears slipped down her cheeks.
Neira’sha was gone from her mind, gone from the glade, her eyes closed and her body still. Ashara and Aloe looked on watchfully. Victoria wrung her hands and prayed. She felt something of the questing.
A mind and will flung far from the body, searching out a particular scent like a hound on a trail. There was skill there.
Skill that only untold amounts of time could grant. The ancient sidhe was still for a dozen heartbeats, then her breathing increased. Her eyelids trembled and her lips tensed. Suddenly she gasped and stiffened. Her lids shot up and her green eyes stared sightlessly for a moment, then Neira’sha filled them. A fragile hand went to her breast as she calmed her breathing.
She turned wide eyes to Ashara, then to Victoria. Victoria was on her knees, fingers digging into the soft moss.
“Did you find him? What happened?”
“I found him,” Neira’sha whispered.
Ashara’s brows were drawn in worry, her hand found the elder woman’s knee and clenched.
“But?” she demanded.
Neira’sha drew a deep breath, patted Ashara’s hand and whispered a name.
“Azeral.”
~~~
The children played in the grass-carpeted courtyard. Lights danced around them mischievously, tapping a unsuspecting shoulder here, tweaking a small backside there. There were yelps of surprise and the laughter of those who had not been taken unawares. It was a game of sorts, to escape the light-bound creations of playmates, to tag another with the small points of magic. There were so few children. Only eight or nine total. And no more on the way in the near future. The sidhe’s matings were frequent, but fertilization was far and few between, and even then, the term for pregnancy was years instead of scant months. The price of immortality, one supposed, was a race that procreated rarely. It was a system of checks and balances. It had to be.
Otherwise the world would be teaming with folk that would not die. Not of natural causes.
But they could die. Victoria doubted also that immortality meant forever.
Otherwise there would be no traces of age, and there were. Not in wrinkles and failing psychic, but in a sort of transparency to the skin, a lengthiness of the bones. And the eyes. The oldest sidhe, the ones like Neira’sha had eyes that encompassed eternity.
One of the children sent a spiraling point of light towards her. She caught sight of it out of the corner of her eye from where she sat on the gentle root of a ornamental tree. She smiled, pretending she did not see it, letting it get almost upon her. Casually, with no more effort that she might have used to blink, she formed a small shield and stopped the point of magic energy inches from her, then netted it with her will and burst it into a dozen smaller spheres of colored light. She sent them all dancing and whirling towards the children in maniacal glee. The children screamed in excited pleasure and scattered from her assault. She tagged each of them, then sent the whole of the small army of light towards her attacker.
“Picking on the younglings?” a soft voice inquired. She looked up into pale blue eyes and a face that spoke of patience and generosity. Beautiful and masculine, expression filled with warmth as he watched the children. One of them belonged to him and to his life mate, Ashara, lady of the keep.
“The younglings know more tricks than I do songs, Okar. I’m just a l
ittle wiser I think.”
“And a good deal more powerful,” he added. “Even for a novice. I think you could out magic quite a few of us adults too.”
She looked down, tracing a pattern in the bark. How strange to be considered an equal among folk such as these. To be accepted into the warmth of their family.
And they were a family, those that lived in Ashara’s keep. An extended family, eighty or ninety strong, that included every one from the lesser sidhe who lived side by side with their higher brothers to the one human woman and her gulun cub who had found themselves adopted by the coalition.
And just as they did the children of their flesh, they taught her. Neira’sha and Ashara and sometimes the elder male, Venaimar, took her in hand and drilled the basics into her mind. It was tiresome and boring sometimes, the tutoring, and often showed no results that made up for a day spent listening to Venaimar’s high pitched voice droning on at her. But she learned. It was not a raw display of power that told of skill, she was informed. It was the ability to shape the power, to rein it in even though it burned to be released and direct it on some chosen path, be it as wide as a river bed or as narrow as a strand of spider’s web. She did not think she could ever have the skill for the later.
When she opened herself and summoned the earth magic it consumed her. It beat at her insides with relentless fists demanding to be released in the quickest mode possible. More than once, her tutors had called a shaky end to the lessons after one of her bursts. It had rained for two days after her first session. A rain that Ashara herself had not been able to drive away for two nights. And Ashara was the most powerful weather wizard among her folk.
Victoria knew they walked with cat feet around her. She knew they were wary of her human magic and she knew how hard they tried to make her feel comfortable and trusted. She ached for their generosity. She felt guilty over their thoughtfulness. They sought to help her understand herself and she fantasized about fleeing their kindness and finding her lost love. Dreamed about taking the raw power they tried so hard to teach her how to control and releasing it all in one raging flood against the creature that had caused her to be here, the creature that held Alex.
Ashara would not talk of him, this Azeral. Her lips thinned at his mention and her shields thickened to fortress-like stature. Neira’sha would say little more, only that this Azeral was high sidhe like themselves. But Dockalfar to their Liosalfar. Dark to their light. Evil to their good. Sadism to their kindness. That he and his lived far away in the shadow of the Desney mountains, where he ruled his part of the world with an iron fist. That he was a power to be reckoned with and an intellect darker than the Liosalfar liked to dwell on.
She looked up at Okar as he watched the children. Pale gold hair snaked across his cheek. He looked very much like his heart mate and very little like his brother, the boisterous Alkar.
“Are the Dockalfar more powerful than the Liosalfar?”
He blinked down at her, the question catching him off guard. It took him a moment to orient on the topic. He chose his words carefully.
“They would go to further lengths. There are things they would do to achieve a goal that we would not.”
“So they are?”
“I did not say that.”
“Why won’t anyone tell me about this Azeral?”
His lips tightened, so close to his heart mate’s response to the same questions. Was Azeral a distasteful subject to everyone here?
“His is not a name to be carelessly bandied about, Victoria. He is very old.”
“As old as Neira’sha?” she asked, bright eyed.
“No. Older than Ashara, though.”
“He’s very strong then?”
“Very.”
“Why would he want human magic then, if he’s so powerful? Why would he need it?”
“You ask me to decipher the workings of his mind. It’s not a task I’m equipped for or inclined to undertake.”
“Why won’t Ashara talk about him?”
A pertinent question. A sensitive one, judging from Okar’s expression. Wary and just a little sad.
“Victoria, you ask too many questions.”
“Only because no one will tell me what I want to know.”
“It’s no one’s tale to tell save Ashara’s. Suffice to say that she and he are not on good terms.”
“I gathered,” she muttered. “But I think it’s more than that. I think Azeral is a restricted subject because she thinks if I know where he is and what he is, I’ll do something rash.”
“Would you?”
She hunched her shoulders.
Physically she felt small and weak, a delicate female flower. She would be insane to even contemplate confronting the author of her kidnapping. A power as old as mankind and as malevolent as man’s concept of Satan.
“Of course not,” she said, making herself small and helpless, looking up at him with wide, innocent eyes which told clearly of all her fears and reservations.
And behind the eyes her shield was as placid as the surface of a frozen lake. He did not even attempt it. He was too polite.
He merely inclined his head, choosing to take her at her word.
Aloe held a berry up before Victoria’s face. “Safe?” she asked with an arched silver brow.
Victoria drew on a small tendril of power, wound it around the berry’s essence. An inanimate object, not quite alive as she knew it, but far from dead. It was bitter in her mind, acrid almost, and hard. There was something venomous to its essence. She shook her head negatively and Aloe smiled, dropping the small, red offering.
“Correct. Hygloh. Very poisonous. You’re doing very well.”
They were in the grove outside of the keep. Sunlight struggled to dapple the ground. Leaves drifted down from above lazily, decorating the forest floor in their greens and golds. It was amazing that by a mere trifling use of her power she could determine what was safe to forage from the forest, what pool of water was pure and what was stagnant. What plants to avoid contact with, what trees were solid enough to climb and provide shelter for the night.
They had tried to teach her the use of the bow, but she was hopelessly inept at stringing and drawing even Aloe’s lightweight weapon, so they settled for teaching her how to survive off the land.
Everyone should know, Okar had informed her seriously. One never know what might happen. So they took to the woods. Granted the woods were tame and housed no predators or serious pitfalls.
It was not just the plant life they told her about. Not just what a wary traveler could eat or where she might rest safely.
There were other things in the woods and forests of Elkhavah to be careful of.
Avoid toadstool rings, she was told. They belonged to the ‘Little Folk’ and their owners got testy when their toadstools were disturbed. Pools that were secluded and boasted no animal trails to their edges were dangerous. If the animals avoided drinking from them then it was a good chance that something unsavory lived in their depths. The oldest of the oaks were to be skirted around if one was uncertain of what lived within them. Blackthorn trees housed nymphs that were not always friendly to strangers. They told her how to avoid the notice of a banshee and what to do if she could not. It was such a bemusing edition of folklore and legend that the sidhe told her in all seriousness.
She took it all for fact without a moment’s doubt. Doubt in this magical world was the path to downfall.
Okar and his brother, Alkar roamed further afield, silent as shadows, every once and a while appearing to walk beside the women. Aloe was purely at home. She breathed the forest and exhaled it like a drug. The filtered woodland light made her whole. She even went so far as to flirt with Alkar and tussle with him when he went too far. She won the tussle, but they were both grinning and bright-eyed afterward. Both had leaves and debris in their hair.
Alkar bounded about them both, babbling nonsense, which he had a tendency to do when excited. Victoria thought he must be very young for his kind.
There was a certain lack of patience in his eyes, an urgency in his movements that spoke of youth. He told her how to spot game trails, and how to find water without the benefit of magic. They told her about the forest denizens. What to avoid with a passion, what might be of help to a woodland traveler.
“Stay away from the fairy circles,” Aloe told her sternly. “They’re nonsense and you in particular seem infected by them. You could while away seasons dancing with that lot if you let yourself.
Besides which the dance and the music seem to be triggers for your magic. And if you don’t have your head to control it, you’re asking for trouble.”
“I imagine after the last time, the fairies will stay far away from me.”
“They’re not particularly smart,”
Alkar said dryly. “In one ear, out the other.”
“Elves are another matter,” Aloe went on. “Being human, you’re not likely to meet them. They’re shy, clannish and don’t particularly like outside company. They’ve got magic of their own, but nothing like sidhe power. Or yours. They do have terrible long memories though, and hold grudges. If you ever meet any, be nice, be mannerly and do not annoy them. They can be irritating little fiends when their ire is up.”
The four of them walked in silence.
With a little magical effort, Victoria could cover the sound of her passage. It took concentration though, and she often found her thoughts wandering and her feet making all sorts of sounds. It just did not seem worth the effort.
There was a wash of movement from in front of them. A forest-colored figure walked from between the trees. Okar broke into a smile and moved forward to touch fingertips with his heart mate.
Ashara joined their progression. “You’ve been forest bound for days,” she said. “Very hard to talk to.”
“I’ve been learning how to survive in the wilderness,” Victoria smiled. “What did you need to talk about?”
The lady of the keep shrugged. “Nothing serious. I had ulterior motives. Your teachers have been absent too. I missed one of them.” She cast a sideways glance up at Okar.