The Wounded Ones

by G. D. Penman

  “You do not quake. Are you going to try to escape? Without magic, you are harmless. You are nothing. Shall we take it from you permanently? I have not completed that operation so far. You could be my first success. Your body is mine. Your mind is mine. Shall I make your magic mine also?”

  She could feel the Fairie’s presence. Not like she did with magic, rather just the sensation of air displacement as it leaned in close to her face. She opened her eyes, saw the oily black orbs of the Faerie filling her vision and she swung her fists.

  The cold iron chain wrapped around her knuckles took the brunt of the impact. The Faerie staggered back and hit the wall. Sully felt the ache of the punch on her own face. The Fae was still in her head. She leapt after it, letting the chain fall from her grip. She looped it around the creature’s wrist as it tried to flick her away and whatever magic it had been trying to call up died. Without waves of glamour rolling off of it, this “Fair Folk” didn’t look nearly as imposing. Sully drove her forehead into its midsection and it doubled over. There was something spongy and moist about the texture of the creature, like it wasn’t flesh but fungus. Sully grinned and looped her chains around the creature’s neck. She rode it to the ground, catching tiny glimmers of its thoughts when the chain broke contact. She could feel herself being suffocated for a moment, but it was only that moment before the chain bit in and she got some good leverage. The Faerie clawed at her hands with those horrid fingers, but they had no strength. The Fae had nothing without their magic. Sully still had herself.

  It stopped flailing after a few minutes, and after a few more Sully was pretty certain that it was dead, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She looped the chain around its neck properly, then sawed the cold iron back and forth until it had cut all the way through. The Fae had no blood or bones. They were the same pasty material all the way through. If Sully ever saw tofu again, she would probably throw up, but that wasn’t a huge departure from her usual response to tofu.

  She kept low as she ran through the maze of bookshelves and filing cabinets. Her memory of her arrival was a little hazy thanks to the Faerie’s mind-altering interference, but it didn’t take long for her to orient herself and head for the portals. Blackwood wasn’t at his desk but the portal back to London was still open, so he hadn’t been gone for long. He would be back to debrief the Faerie soon. The first interrogation was always a short, sharp shock to see if your perp would talk without a greater effort. Sully dithered for a moment, then started digging through the desk drawers, hunting for the key to her shackles. She found more files than she knew what to do with.

  The original file about “The Manhattan Insurrection” was written on what felt like animal skin instead of paper; newer files had clearly been typed on a computer and then printed off. Her own file came in several parts, each one chronicling another of the lives she had lived before the British took it away from her. If they thought that she was their enemy before, they had no idea what they were in for now. Sully had never had much time in her life for revenge. Most of the people that wronged her were either so protected by layers of society that she couldn’t touch them, or they were dead. Now she had the loss of two happy marriages and two decades of freedom to even the scales for. She had never known why she was so angry before, but this seemed like a pretty good explanation. Even if she had forgotten.

  She abandoned the search for the key after dumping out the contents of every drawer and carefully mixing up the pages of every file. She would have to find another way out of the cuffs and she was painfully aware that every second that ticked by was another moment when she could be recaptured. With one last backward glance at the Archive, she drew in a deep breath and stepped through the portal back to earth.

  November 12, 2015

  Sully walked directly into Lord Blackwood as he tried to come into the room. He opened his mouth to cast and found that it was suddenly full of chain links. His head was in a vice-like grip and Sully’s face was rushing toward him with an expression of unreserved glee plastered across it. This time when she head-butted the secret ruler of the British Empire in the face, it felt right. His nose collapsed, he made a squawking noise that was going to keep her warm through the cold winters’ nights, and the best part was that she was holding onto him by his ears, so she could do it all over again. “Hello, Blackwood, fancy meeting you here. I hope you’ve got the keys to these cuffs because otherwise this is going to get embarrassing and painful for you quickly.”

  There were redcoats on the other side of the door but Blackwood’s skinny frame was blocking them from getting a clear shot at her, which was just delightful. His hands were flapping at his sides as she reared back with his blood running down her face. “Keys. Now.”

  He let out a muffled scream into the chain and the redcoats pointed their guns around the doorframe.

  “Keys, or they shoot us both.”

  He scrambled in his pockets until he produced the tiny key to her manacles. “Good boy. Put it in my hand.”

  He reached up slowly and did as he was told. Sully caught him by the wrist and with more practiced movements than she would care to admit, Sully undid the cuffs and then snapped them onto Blackwood, never stepping out of the cover he provided for a moment. As soon as she let go of the metal, her magic was there again as if it had never left. Relief flooded through her. Sure she was in a secret underground bunker in the middle of London with about a million soldiers between her and freedom, but at least now she could throw a fireball at them.

  She called to the redcoats, “All right, boys, we’re coming out.”

  Then she cast her traveling spell.

  She didn’t have Mol Kalath’s power to fuel her this time, and she hadn’t adjusted her usual calculations by much more than aiming upward and hoping for the best, so it came as a small surprise when both she and Blackwood landed on a hillside with a clap like thunder rather than plowing into a solid object and dying like she had half expected. Blackwood fell to his knees and it was only pure determination that kept Sully from toppling right down with him. She dragged in a breath and tried her damnedest to remember her own name. The long dreadful moment stretched out, an echoing silence in her head as she desperately tried to retrieve anything except her knowledge that she hated the man on the moss beside her, then her memory snapped back and despite the migraine it had brought with it, she heaved a sigh of relief. She really had to be more careful. Blackwood was talking again. “You know that there is no way you will get away with this. Every soldier in the British army will be searching for me, every Magus and redcoat in the entire Empire will be scrying to find us.”

  Sully grinned. “I’d better kill you quick then.”

  “You wouldn’t dare!”

  She squatted down beside him and let him get a good look in her eyes. “You read all those files about me. Do you really think I wouldn’t dare?”

  He had started to go red as he got into his rant but now all the color drained from his face. “It—it doesn’t matter. I am not the only keeper of the keys. I am not the only custodian of the Empire. Another will take my place and Britannia will prevail as she always has.”

  “I wonder about that, actually. How many times your beloved Empire actually won and how many times it was just you liars changing the story after the fact. I bet even you don’t know anymore.”

  He opened and closed his mouth. “All that matters is victory.”

  Sully cackled. “Oh, she is going to love you.”

  “Who is?”

  “My mother. I’ve just worked out where we are.”

  She gave him a kick in the ass that knocked him off his knees and into the dirt, “Come on, it isn’t far to walk. Even for a city boy like you.”

  He bristled, but he got back on his feet and was led down the hills toward the thickets and swamps that Sully had spent the first years of her life calling home. She tried to muster up a little bit of nostalgia, but
all that she managed was contempt bred of familiarity. It didn’t take long before the trees started to remind her which way to go. That copse had been struck by lightning once. The stream that Blackwood had just splashed through in his fancy leather-topped wingtips used to run on the other side of a big rock that looked like a rabbit if you squinted. The air felt so different here that Sully had to stop and just breathe for a moment. There was that undercurrent of decay and rich earth in the air, the peaty aromas of the cycle of rebirth. All the poisons of the city were missing. She had spent her whole life trying to get away from this purity. She still loathed it from the bottom of her heart, but now she wondered how much of that hatred had been planted there by scum like Blackwood and his cadre of liars.

  The sky started to darken as they moved down amidst the leafless trees and boot-sucking mud. Sully sincerely doubted that it had much to do with the setting of the sun. She couldn’t remember a single moment of sunshine in her mother’s house, just the chill misting rain and the rich darkness of perpetual midnight. There was a certain point in the swamp where the old standing stones that might have drawn a casual explorer that far all sank out of sight and marsh-lights danced over the waters. From there she kept a tight grip on the back of Blackwood’s collar to keep him walking only where she wanted. There were more bodies in that hungry water than she could guess at, and there would be more before all was said and done. Even when they left the land behind and waded out into the stagnant water, Sully’s feet never left the path of slippery stones just beneath the water’s surface. After all this time her body remembered the way, even if her mind didn’t. Something shifted under the surface of the water up ahead, sending ripples dancing toward them, and Blackwood almost fell over in fright.

  “What in the blazes was that?”

  “Nothing to worry about, just a snake.”

  “There are no snakes in Ireland. Everyone knows that.”

  “Everyone knows that?” she smirked, “Because some Saint came stomping around, driving out all the witches and wyrms? Look around you. We’re still here.”

  He fell back into sullen silence for the rest of the hike.

  The cottage was easy enough to find. There was a ring of time-worn standing stones on a hillock in the middle of the swamp, still pulsing faintly with magic even after millennia of disuse. From there Sully just followed the trail of scrawny trees until they came upon the next patch of solid ground. Nothing had changed about the cottage since Sully had left. There was still a dip in the middle of the thatched roof and the slimy mold creeping up the walls showed no signs of clearing up without some serious intervention. Oily black peat smoke was rising from the chimney stack, although there was no other sign of life inside. Sully pushed Blackwood ahead of her like a shield as she ducked inside and the sense memory of her childhood in this dark enclosure came rushing back. The fire was the only light, and it set all the shadows around the house flickering. There were animal bones mounted on the walls and scattered all over the place. Books too, if you were willing to dig around a little. Far more books than you would expect to find in a battered old hovel in the middle of a swamp, anyway. Winter was coming on, so Sully wasn’t surprised to see a bedroll and a heap of furs down by the fireside, although she was dismayed to see that there were sparks and embers on the hearthstone right beside them. With a grumble she started over to pull the guard around the fire when the heap of furs moved. Sully froze. “Mother?”

  Gormlaith O’Sullivan didn’t look her age. Nobody with magic ever did. Sully herself looked like she was barely pushing thirty despite having been around for half a decade. Her mother’s face was a mass of wrinkles stretched over a far-too-prominent skull, topped off with the surviving wisps of a once full head of bountiful red curls. She looked at least a century old, but that didn’t reach halfway to the truth. There were ridiculous rumors that Gormlaith had been there to see the first ships of the British occupation arriving on Irish shores. Sully knew for a fact that she had seen and supported every uprising against the invaders over the last two centuries, at least. The old woman slithered out of her bed and rose to her full height, in a tattered patchwork dress and weighed down with strings of bones. She stood chin to chin with Sully. Her voice had lost none of its power since Sully left. She still sounded like she gargled with gravel and whiskey every morning, although only half of that was true. “Never asked you back.”

  Sully didn’t snap at her. Just met her milky stare. “You didn’t need to ask me back.”

  Gormlaith stabbed a finger at Sully’s chest. “I’ll not be forgiving you. Not for abandoning me. Not for abandoning our people when they needed you.”

  Sully sighed. She had hoped that she might get a whole minute before all of this kicked off. “Forget about that for now. I brought you a present.”

  Gormlaith sniffed at the air. “Papers and ink. Leather and wool. Cold iron and silver.”

  “Lord Blackwood, I’d like to introduce you to Gormlaith O’Sullivan. I hear that you are a fan?” Sully smirked. “Mother, this is the English twit who handled all of the Empire’s deals with the hells.”

  Despite the circumstances, Blackwood tried gamely to be polite. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you, madam. I am a great admirer of your work.”

  “Why did you bring that bull’s pizzle into my house, Little I? Are you trying to impress me with the lofty cocksuckers you’re rubbing shoulders with?”

  Sully let out a bark of laughter. “He’s my hostage, actually. Have you stopped paying attention? The Americas have seceded. We’re at war with the British. Same as you.”

  “Is that meant to make up for it then? Is this meant to pay back all those long years I didn’t know if you were breathing or not? You’re finally fighting the British? You were meant to be fighting them thirty years ago when you were in your prime. You were meant to set us free and instead you ran. You’ve your father’s cowardly blood in you, no doubt. I see none of me. I tell you that for nothing.”

  Sully took a deep breath. “Mother. Can you stop? We’re on the same side. We want the same things.”

  Gormlaith spat in the fire and it roared to life. “You’re a coward, and you’ll run the moment the road gets rough. I’ve no use for you.”

  “You’re my mother.” Sully hissed through clenched teeth.

  “Blood? You want to talk about blood? My piss runs thicker than blood these days. I’m the only one still fighting this war,” She crept around the room as she spoke, as if Sully weren’t there, snatching up bits and pieces from the shelves and out of baskets amidst the chaos. “You ran away, signed on with the enemy, lived it up in some big city with your fancy girls and now you want to come back here like you matter a damn to anyone? You don’t matter. Not to me. Not to Ireland.”

  She came over to Blackwood with a pair of rusty scissors in her hand and snipped a lock of hair from his nape while he stood frozen in fear. She bound the hair to a little sack-cloth doll with some black thread as she strolled back to the fire. Sully kept her anger at a low simmer and asked, “What do you want, Mother?”

  “Want? What have I ever wanted? You were meant to be a general, and you settled for being nothing. You were given all the power you could need; you were given protections you couldn’t even understand. You were kissed by the fire like every Irish witch of my line stretching all the way back to the Queen of Ravens herself and you left us. You coward. You weakling. You had everything you would ever need and you ran from the fight without throwing a punch. You’re no daughter of mine, Little I. My daughter would have stood in her place at my side and she would have burned the British off the face of this land. She would have made this country ours again. Made us masters of our own destiny instead of slaves to the Empire. I want what I’ve always wanted. I want a free Ireland.”

  Sully expected a rush of anger. She expected to scream and possibly to throw some spells around. This was exactly what she had always expected if she re
turned home. It was the nightmare that had kept her away. Now that she was living it, there was no half-remembered bogeyman of a swamp witch screaming hatred at her. There was a sad old woman who had lost her daughter and her dreams on one bad day. Sully looked into Gormlaith’s blind eyes and she couldn’t muster any rage at all. She sighed, “Don’t tell me. Tell him.”

  Gormlaith opened her mouth to spit some more poison, but Sully cut her off. “I mean it. Give him a list of your demands. He is a hostage, but he’s the man in charge, too. He can negotiate for his own safe return.”

  Blackwood had been edging toward the door, but he froze in place when the witches looked at him. “I mean . . . I am not certain that I . . .”

  Sully grinned. “He gave me a big speech earlier about how he makes all the decisions. He is the British Empire all packaged up in one poorly fitted suit, and he wants to make it out of this alive. Right?”

  Both Gormlaith and Blackwood nodded. “He thinks that he is going to go back to the Fae and wish this all away anyway, so it doesn’t matter to him what he has to give you as long as he gets to go home. He’ll give you anything.”

  The mounting glee vanished from Gormlaith’s twisted knot of a face in an instant. “The Fae? The Fair Folk?!”

  Sully rolled her eyes. Of course, her mother knew more about everything than anyone. “The British needed to replace the demons after I took them away. They put in a call to the Far Realms.”

  Gormlaith covered the distance to Blackwood in the blink of an eye and the back of her hand caught him across the face. The personification of the British Empire fell on his ass. Sully winced in sympathy. He might have been the enemy, and a real prick, but that old woman had hands like mahogany.

  Gormlaith crouched over him and screeched, spittle flying from her mouth and blind eyes bulging. “You worthless pox-bottle. Do you even know what you’ve done? You can’t make deals with the Folk. You can’t reason with them any more than you could reason with a storm. You can’t trade with them because there’s nothing they won’t take without a thought. They’ll take whatever they want. They’d skin a babe alive just to hear it wailing and you geebags invited them in?!”