Enchanted No More

by Robin D. Owens

  Jenni clutched the picture to her chest, wailing breaths pounded her body. Again Aric was there, arm curving around her, gently moving her down the hall. They passed doors on the right and left that belonged to her siblings—rooms that Jenni was glad were closed. She yearned to open them, but knew the pain would be beyond bearing.

  They stopped at the landing, and Aric pressed her to descend, but she balked.

  “Come, Jenni, enough of memories. We have work to do. We must find Rothly’s notes.” Aric had tucked his photograph into a large pocket that had appeared in his coat, then vanished.

  “No.” She pivoted in the circle of his arm and paced away to the door at the far end of the hall and the little room—the smallest in the house, as she’d been the youngest—and stood there. She steadied her breath and her emotions, once again groped for the mass of tissues that Hartha had put in her coat pocket. Foresightful brownie.

  After cleaning herself up again, she stared at the door. “I need to do this,” she said in a cloggy voice. “H-he— Rothly—threw silver and salt at me.”

  “At us, and he was wrong.” Aric laid his arm once again across her shoulders. “We did nothing to be made dead to him.”

  Jenni shrugged off his arm. “I didn’t get to the ritual dancing circle to open the portal on time.”

  “You didn’t get there early,” Aric corrected. “As your family did, and they didn’t call you when plans changed. We would have been on time. But the Lightfolk moved the opening of the portal up.”

  There was the faintest note of cool satisfaction in his voice that reminded her that he’d been her family’s guest for the great event. He wasn’t anywhere close to being high enough status to have been invited on his own. No, he wouldn’t have been late for the dancing circle to open the portal.

  Unwanted shades of memories flitted near. She didn’t intend to take a closer look at them. “They opened the portal while we were having sex.”

  “While we were enjoying each other. None of that is a reason for guilt.”

  Jenni blinked away sticky tears that clung to her lashes, peered at him. He sounded completely reasonable. He didn’t feel any guilt—hadn’t ever—about being in bed rolling around with her having sex when her family was being cut down by Darkfolk.

  She didn’t want to think of memories, so only stared at the barrier to her old room. She couldn’t bring herself to touch the knob and open the door. Aric reached around her, twisted the knob and flung the door open. Her room was empty and painted a white as stark as clean bones.

  Air whisked from the place into the hall, carrying a faint searing scent. Jenni knew in that moment that Rothly had called on his djinn fire nature to flash-incinerate everything in her room, including the bed that her grandfather had made for their mother when she was a girl. Jenni’s breath was stolen again and she rocked back. Aric’s arm curled around her waist and he drew her against his body, pulled the door shut with a slam. He inhaled a lungful of air. “Rothly burnt your things!”

  “I know,” she said thinly.

  “He’s your brother.”

  A terrible smile formed her lips. “No. He threw silver and salt at me, disinheriting me, making me dead to him. Since he’s older than me and so the head of the family, he made me no longer a Mistweaver.”

  “You will always be a Mistweaver.” Aric’s hands curved around her shoulders and he gave her a small shake. “The Air King was angry with you yesterday when you baited him, but I double-checked the official lists. You and Rothly are still both listed as Mistweavers.”

  Jenni just closed her eyes, and went dizzy as Aric swung her up in his arms. He took her back to the landing and clomped down the stairs. “And you can still move into the gray mist, the interdimension, and weave elemental energies to make the land and Folk more powerful. That makes you a Mistweaver.” He set her on her feet with a little jolt, handed her pack to her. She was glad to be back in the light they’d left on the ground floor. “Let’s do what we must do and leave this sad place,” Aric ended.

  Her chest hurt and breath came short from all the emotions pressing inside her—grief and anger and guilt. She slid the photo into her backpack. With even steps she walked to the center of the entryway and raised her arms above her head, called on her djinn nature and fire. She could do something else here for Rothly—more, for the memory of her parents. She could send a cleansing wind through the place and remove every particle of dust. She tapped her foot in the right rhythm, conjured the sound of finger cymbals, a thumping drumbeat began and she saw Aric tapping both hands against the sturdy wooden stair banister. “I helped your mother occasionally,” he said.

  He had. As Rothly’s friend, he had come to stay now and again.

  Jenni nodded at him, started the nasal chant, then began to spin. Soon the room was only a blur, as she gathered air and fire around her, then let it go with a spell and the snapping of her fingers. The fire-wind whistled from her and shot up the stairs, doors opened and closed, the whole atmosphere of the house vibrated and by the time Jenni crossed to the stairs and sat down to rest a little, it was done. The house was clean.

  Aric sat beside her and it was almost companionable.

  He took out the other photograph he’d chosen from the top of her parents’ dresser, leaned his arms on his knees and they both looked down at it. Another jolt through her chest into her heart.

  He’d chosen the picture they’d all had taken before the mission in the elegant clothes they’d purchased for the event. Aric himself was in the picture, arm in arm with her, smiling with easy charm. He really was photogenic.

  Another frisson slipped through her. She looked as if she’d been in love.

  For a moment she sat frozen. Why had Aric chosen this photograph? Because he was in it? Because she was?

  “I didn’t get to say goodbye to them.” His voice had the native lilt of a Treeman. He used his sleeve to clean off lingering dust. “And there was that party the night before the portal opening.” He smiled and it was beautiful and almost like an old one that she remembered. Surely he’d lost that original smile as she had most of hers. “We all got a little drunk on mead.”

  She remembered. She’d stayed to the end of the music, but retired before he, knowing that he would come. They shared a room in those days. When he’d arrived later he’d been singing some Treefolk song that she couldn’t understand. They’d loved then, slept in later than they should have, and had loved again…until they’d heard screams.

  Jenni rose. “Let’s see if Rothly left any sign of his exact path.” She grimaced. “Though I still think that the Eight could find him if they tried. They are, after all, the most powerful beings on Earth.”

  Aric didn’t defend them. He stood, looked down at her with an inscrutable face, then moved from the stairs down the main hall and turned toward her father’s study.

  She glanced upstairs, wondering if she could face the second floor again.

  “I examined Rothly’s bedroom.” Aric’s words carried to her through the echoing house. “Nothing there.”

  Nodding to herself, Jenni snagged her pack, then joined him.

  The den was different than she remembered. The overflowing shelves were gone and Jenni understood with a shock that her father’s friends and colleagues would have wanted some of his collection. She vaguely recalled her parents joking about making wills, but hadn’t considered any legacy she might have until this moment. A grudging anger at her brother took more edge off her grief.

  She shook herself from her thoughts to see Aric leafing through one of the opened books on the wide desk. He glanced up at her, tapped the book. “Atlas open to Yellowstone, Wyoming, but no papers showing Rothly’s exact route.” Aric’s green gaze glanced off hers. “But we knew he’d gone to Yellowstone.”

  “We did?” she asked, but not in as neutral a tone as she’d wanted. She recalled her recon mission to find Rothly. Northwest of Denver. Yellowstone, it fit.

  “No notes,” Rothly continued in
a steady voice. Then a corner of his mouth lifted. “If it had been you, I’d be looking for electronics, but there isn’t any kind of computer here.”

  He was right. Jenni scanned the room. All of them had grown up with books, of course. Books and family journals and personal papers. Her parents had been reluctant to take up electronics, as was her oldest brother. The rest of them had enjoyed the new electronic toys, including Rothly, but there was no sign of his personal computer.

  Naturally he’d taken it with him. But would he only have one? Jenni had three herself, all state-of-the-art, not counting the little one she carried in her pocket. “He must have backup drives somewhere.” She’d never go anywhere without leaving saved information behind…and uploaded…and emailed to someone. That just wasn’t her personal procedure, it was the whole family’s. Her father had been a scholar, studying Lightfolk magic, elemental energies and the Mistweaver gifts in particular.

  He’d taught them all, as he’d been taught by his parents and great-aunt, that records of every experiment, every passing notion of an idea regarding elemental balancing must be kept.

  Jenni bumped Aric with her hip to make him move aside from the middle of the desk. She checked under the books—no papers. The piece of furniture was full of secret cubbyholes. Closing her eyes, she tried to visualize Rothly here. Her throat tightened and the damn tears threatened once more as images of her father, mother, various siblings, showed up as memories.

  Rothly! An older, crippled, bitter Rothly. One who couldn’t naturally balance the home and the land just by his presence. One who had more of an air nature than fire. One who disliked being human and wanted to only embrace his Lightfolk side.

  A flash of Rothly as a boy came, lifting the right edge of the desk, putting a pocketknife in the small space. Jenni circled the desk and lifted. There were several drives. Whipping her personal computer from her pocket, she linked them. Before her eyes rolled pages and pages of ancient journals, all scanned. Her heart started thumping hard. She’d thought that she would have to take all the books, read them. Here was the wealth of her family!

  As she watched, red markings came up and she stopped the scrolling, magnified. Rothly’s notes…among others. A sigh escaped her. Her family heritage that she hadn’t understood how much she’d missed and yearned for until now. She scooped up all the drives, hesitated. She shouldn’t take all Rothly’s stash. What if something happened to her, too?

  Turning to Aric, she said, “What kind of personal computer do you have?”

  He dug into his coat pocket and pulled out a sleek device, smiled slowly. “Not yet released.”

  Greed rose in Jenni. “I can see that.”

  “Eight Corp got prototypes. And it has been modified to run on ambient magic.”

  “No way!”

  “Yes. Absolutely no recharging needed.” He handed it to her.

  She turned it over, felt the hum of magic in it, swept her tongue across her lips. It felt like Aric, solid native Earth Treefolk magic. The rest of the elemental energies were nearly equal in balance—someone had done a good job. Now that she held it, she could also feel the little device absorbing magic from her hand in tiny molecules, and from the atmosphere around her. She wanted one.

  Aric had moved to the desk, opened a secret panel he’d obviously recalled, gestured to it. Ancient “floppy” disks were inside, marked with her brother Lohr’s name. Jenni swallowed. Would Rothly have included everything her family had on elemental balancing in his own drives?

  She would have. And she’d bet this house and the land and all her shares of Fairies and Dragons that Rothly had been studying everything he could get his hands on for years to try and regain his magic, or find a work-around.

  They didn’t have time to search everything.

  Aric took his device from her and picked up a couple of the miniature drives. He plugged one into his computer and linked them, loading the information. He glanced at the clock ticking off the seconds of copying, placed it on the desk and began to scrutinize the bookshelves.

  The first drive had loaded onto Jenni’s pocket computer, and she switched it out for the second. She gulped when she saw her father’s very old-fashioned handwriting and the faded ink. These were his earlier journals when the family had first moved to Northumberland from France several centuries before. Then the scrolling went faster and cream-colored pages blurred by.

  “All your father’s reference books on elemental energies are here. I think most of the more esoteric volumes are gone, though.” Aric shrugged.

  Jenni joined him, and noticed for the first time in her life she didn’t have to dodge stacks of books on the floor…and every step in this house caused pain to grind within her at the memories.

  Her pocket computer pinged and she sighed in relief and returned to the desk, swapped out one drive for another and placed the first back into Rothly’s hidey-hole. Then she slid down against the desk until she sat, brought her knees up and lowered her head to them, closed her eyes.

  “I’m sorry this is hurting you so much,” Aric said.

  “I am, too.” She waited a beat, but still knew what she felt the most right now was the pulsing of Aric’s aura. On her outward breath, she whispered, “I’m sorry you’re hurting, too.”

  A longer silence, almost companionable, and his breathing slowed. “Thank you.”

  “Welcome.”

  “Did you plan on balancing this place before you left?” That sentence should have been laden with overtones and subtext, but was perfectly leached of emotion.

  Jenni didn’t look up. “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you go ahead? I’ll load all this to our computers.”

  She rose, glanced at him. “Are you going to pass on all the information on your computer to the Lightfolk archives?”

  He hesitated.

  A corner of her mouth quirked. “I didn’t ask you if you were going to give Mistweaver secrets to the Eight.”

  Inclining his head, he said, “Thank you for knowing you can trust me not to do that. I know you do not want the Eight to know everything. But the keeper of the archives has much secret lore and this memory bit can be bound against opening until your…if you…we…are lost.”

  “If I die.”

  “Yes.”

  Jenni nodded. “I’ll say such a spell and you can give the memory bit to the keeper of the archives.” She still didn’t like the notion that the Lightfolk would have access to Mistweaver secrets. There was little enough for halflings to keep as their own.

  “Thank you,” Aric said.

  All the lost voices of her family seemed to protest as if she betrayed them—again—and this time in their very home. She squared her shoulders and toed the bottom line. Knowledge should not be lost. “I’ll be in the sunroom.” No sun today.

  CHAPTER 8

  JENNI STOPPED IN THE KITCHEN TO ZAP A quick mug of the herbs from Rothly’s store, cycled her energy to the correct pattern.

  Sipping the potion she entered the sunroom that ran the length of the south side of the house. There was the humid scent of many plants, and whatever she’d thought of the rest of the house, this area—the sacred space of the Mistweavers—was as wonderful as it had always been. Tall plants pressed hard against the windows, but there was enough light that had the sun been shining, the room would be gold and green.

  Her breath clogged when she saw the wheel engraved on the floor and her insides wrenched. A wheel with eight places. Each person of the family with their own place—including her mother, who couldn’t step into the mist but insisted on being an anchor. Jenni’s lungs unfroze and her breath came fast and ragged and she wanted to turn and run away.

  Instead she walked to the circle.

  Only faint traces of her family lingered as she passed over them. How hard it must have been for Rothly to be here, to try to practice here! He hadn’t wanted her with him, but now she saw that she’d had the better deal. With his twisted and crippled magic, how could he have borne this
room? She moved to the center of the wheel, expecting to feel Rothly—and didn’t.

  She stared, tramped her feet in place. Surely he hadn’t stayed in his own place at the northeast bronze diamond indicator? Walking over to there, touching a toe, feeling the surge of bitterness and fury, she found that he had.

  Jenni withdrew from the bleakness of his spot. With a last sip of her tea, she set the mug due west, symbolizing water.

  Once again she followed the whole of the ritual to prepare herself, hone her skills, though training and tea and spells wouldn’t work if a person didn’t have the inherent Mistweaver talent.

  She crossed to the middle of the circle, did a cleansing pattern of body movement. She bowed in each direction. No matter how Rothly practiced their craft, the place for one person was in the middle. No wonder the house and the land were unbalanced. Rothly’s magic was maimed, his emotions even more sour and negative than her own, and he’d stubbornly stayed in his own place.

  After the chant, Jenni closed her eyes and took the tiniest step to slip into the gray mist of the interdimension. As she did this more often, she would need less preparation time, less potion and even less of the spoken chant. Soon she’d be able to move into the grayness with only a mental word.

  She turned in place to survey the area and saw the dark smudge of Rothly’s spot. Something in the grayness fluttered. Tensing her throat and entire mouth against more useless tears, she got on with her task.

  The sheeting flames of elemental energies hovered brightly near the house, as if they’d stayed after being summoned for so many years and waited to be gathered and used once again. Jenni smiled and let the feel of them imbue her.

  Then she raised her hands and called her magic, matching the texture and the beat and the density and taste of it to each near element—humid air with a touch of salt and forest and hill breezes; rich hillsides with veins of soil and rock; crackling fire of the hearth, of controlled burns, of holiday bonfires; mist and molecules of water in the air, from the sea and streams and ponds.