Rough Magic

by Jenny Schwartz

  I had to interrupt. With Rory being werewolf and me human we didn’t know what that would mean for our children. In theory, according to Faerene scientists, we were biologically compatible. Fertile. But any syndrome with the word agony in it was cause for concern. “What about non-elves?”

  “Elves only. Our special hell. My test showed that I don’t carry the cluster. Anton’s test showed the same. We both presented our certificates and acquired our marriage license. If one of us had been found to carry the cluster, we would have both had to vow not to have children. We could have fostered or adopted. Surrogacy and other alternative arrangements are forbidden.

  “After ten years of marriage, we decided to have a baby. Elves live for centuries, so we tend to space out our life events. Children are rare. There are none in the Migration. All the elves involved chose to delay till they were settled on Earth before adding a child to their lives. Anton was keen to be a father.” Her lips compressed.

  I could guess where this story was going, and the betrayal that had cut deep.

  When she resumed speaking, it was with a little gasp. “It took three years of trying before I learned I was pregnant with twins. I was so happy. Elves rarely have twins. My beautiful boys would grow up with a close sibling. Bastian and Guido were adorable. Not identical. Each with their own vivid personality.”

  For a second her maternal love and pride shone in her eyes. Then she squeezed them shut. “Elven children show their magic at age four. Late developers have until six before parents worry. Our children mature physically and mentally at the same rate as goblins, as humans, until sixteen, then the elven teenager’s rate of ageing slows.

  “By six, Bastian and Guido showed no signs of using magic. We took them to a pediatrician. She discovered that both of my boys had magic, lots of magic, but that they weren’t using it because it hurt. That’s what magicka agony syndrome is. The use of magic creates a backlash of intense nerve pain in the sufferer.

  “I was devastated. I didn’t know how this had happened, how we could protect our boys, how we could help them to lead happy lives.”

  Her mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “But Anton had guessed the doctor’s diagnosis. He’d prepared for it. He disappeared for a day, and when he returned, it was to our house, full of his family and mine, and our two frightened, hurting boys. Anton returned with a second certificate stating that he was clear of the magicka agony syndrome cluster. He accused me of faking my own certificate. That I had caused this heartbreak. In front of our sons, he said that I’d given him defective children. He broke my heart and he broke theirs, but he got what he wanted. He fixed in people’s minds that he was the innocent victim.

  “I was his victim. I never even bothered to get a second screening. It was Bastian and Guido who mattered, and I couldn’t fight the power of Anton’s family, who all supported their supposedly devastated son. I retreated to my family’s market garden. As Bastian and Guido grew, so did their sensitivity to magic. It went beyond not being able to use it. They couldn’t even be around it. We ended up living in an old stone building that we made weathertight using physical labor. Light came from oil lamps. Water was pumped up by a windmill. I lived what elves on Elysium considered a brutally primitive life so that Bastian and Guido could live without pain. I nurtured an acute sensitivity to magic to protect them.

  “Anton remarried after vowing he’d never have children because I’d broken his heart and his trust. He never visited his sons. I’d like to think that he avoided them out of guilt. But I doubt it. I think he discarded them as he discarded me. He knew he was a carrier of the magicka agony syndrome cluster when he married me and tried so early in our marriage to have children. He rolled the dice. It was a fifty/fifty chance, with our children paying the price. He lost.”

  She stared at me through the slate with haunted, grieving eyes. “I loved Bastian and Guido. We were so close. Living without magic, all we had was each other. I’ve never regretted my boys, only their suffering.” She inhaled raggedly. Exhaled. “When they turned sixteen, when elven teenagers’ rate of ageing slows, Bastian and Guido began ageing faster. They died of old age in their mid-twenties.”

  I pressed my hands to my mouth. Any words I could offer would be inadequate.

  “Bastian died seven months after Guido. Lajos came to his funeral. Lajos had grown up on the farm next door to my parents’ market garden. He’d been away since before the twins’ birth. He was a psychiatrist then, working at a remote military station on methods of sensory input and deprivation to heal trauma. Manage it, he says. Trauma can’t be magicked away. It’s part of life.” She was obviously quoting him, the elf who loved her devotedly.

  “Lajos hates injustice and he’s like Rory. They’ll suffer anything to protect the vulnerable and those they love. I was both. Lajos did what none of my family and friends or I had thought to do. We’d accepted Anton’s lies. But Lajos used his connections in the military and medical communities, and among clandestine intelligence groups, and he had Anton secretly re-screened and after that showed Anton as carrying the cluster, Lajos pushed for an investigation. Lajos brought Anton to justice, and shamed him and his family. Anton’s brother had supplied the clear sample and participated in paying off the screening technician.”

  Tineke unbraided her hair and pushed her fingers through it. “They accepted me for the Migration because I’m a strong magician and trained engineer, but mainly because I’ve lived without magic. It’s unsettling, Amy. For you, learning that magic was real and part of you were the big shocks. For the Faerene, to have our magic fail us or turn on us, as it did with Bastian and Guido, tears the ground from beneath us. Family and friends wouldn’t visit me because they’d have to live an hour, one solitary hour, without magic. They found the lifestyle that allowed my boys to live without pain to be unnatural. But with the current crisis, the Faerene of Earth can’t escape the wild disturbance of their magic. They can’t make it someone else’s problem and excise that person from the community.”

  So much bitterness spilled from her lips and showed in her tortured expression. Tineke had been holding in this pain for too long. She’d refused to share it—hugged it to her—when Lajos would have been there for her.

  “I’m sorry you lost Bastian and Guido,” I said quietly. “I would have liked to meet them. Maybe they’d have found Earth suited them.”

  “Ha! The Migration selection committee would never have accepted them.”

  “Stupid of them, then. Thank you, Tineke, for trusting me with your story. I will remember that elves aren’t all wise and that the rough magic scares, as well as potentially scars, Faerene. I…have you heard that Harold has put me on the Fae Council?” I provided the change of topic if she wanted it.

  She did. “Challenging.”

  I huffed a breath of rueful laughter. She was too exhausted, though, for me to discuss my worries and whether Harold’s action would save or damn me in Faerene eyes. When the crisis was resolved, there’d be an accounting for activating the orb. I hadn’t been a member of the Fae Council when they’d ordered it. Would that become one of those facts that got lost to history?

  A human could make a handy scapegoat.

  “Tineke, there was one important difference about my situation and yours. The apocalypse wasn’t personal. What happened, what the Faerene had to do to seal the Rift, wasn’t directed at me alone. Whereas your ex-husband’s behavior was a personal abuse of your faith in him. That’s harder to recover from.”

  She avoided eye contact through the slate.

  In comparison to Tineke I was far too young and heart-whole to give advice. Nonetheless, I couldn’t leave her in emotional agony. “Anton broke faith with you, but out of his betrayal came the wonderful gift of Bastian and Guido, and you found a way for them to live without pain. You’re a good mom, Tineke.”

  Finally, I understood why she’d reached out and almost forced our friendship at the human familiar trials. It hadn’t simply been friendship she’d offered
. It had been subtle, careful mothering for me as I tried to survive among the Faerene.

  The raw honesty of her story had dragged me to my own new level of maturity. “We’ve both been betrayed. You worst of all, but me by my father. It hurts, but you know what? We kept going. We kept believing that life could be good. You held onto so much hope that you came to a new world.”

  “I couldn’t stand the old one and the people in it,” she muttered.

  I laughed, suddenly confident. “I love you, Tineke. But not as much as Lajos loves you or as much as you love him. I just realized. It’s not Lajos you don’t trust enough to risk a relationship. It’s yourself. Ask him, though, and he’ll tell you that you’re worth any risk. Go on and ask him. There’s lots of things you can do without magic, after all.” I grinned wickedly and ended the call.

  My grin disappeared as I rubbed my hands over my face. I’d expected Istvan back before now, however, given the emotional devastation of Tineke’s story, I was grateful for, rather than upset by, his absence.

  Bitter cold would shock me back to normal, or some facsimile of emotional balance, and outside the night was freezing. The Faerene had built the nearest toilet block for the human familiar trials at a distance from the cookhouse, which was sensible, but not particularly welcome right now. I belted my coat and picked up a candle. I hated the idea of having to relight it, fumbling with a flint striker in the cold and dark in the bathroom, so I walked relatively slowly while guarding the flame.

  The water was so cold my fingers ached when I washed them. Someone had left half-used bars of soap behind, but no towels. I wiped my hands dry as best I could on my clothes and picked up the candle again. My left hand as it cupped the flame protectively was smugly warmer than my right. I’d swap them mid-walk. A bath and clean clothes were a problem for tomorrow. I certainly wasn’t taking an icy shower, tonight.

  In fact, why was I trying to keep the candle alight? There was a fire in the cookhouse for illumination and I could see the ground enough to risk a jog. It wasn’t as if the campsite was full of gopher holes. The sooner I was back in the warmth, the better.

  I inhaled a mouthful of smoke as the candleflame died. Two minutes later I was back inside the cookhouse with my coat spread wide open to catch the heat from the stove. The skin on my face prickled as I defrosted. I sniffed. Then sniffed again rather than find a handkerchief. It’s hard to maintain standards in the wilderness.

  I made a small pot of tea, just for me.

  Where was Istvan?

  Chapter 4

  With the magic flaring badly, Istvan couldn’t risk flying, which meant that a fish dinner was out. On foot, the Black Sea was too far away. Instead, he caught a deer and ate till a bit past satiety. He wasn’t sure what tonight would ask of him. Better that he be fueled for it.

  Maintaining the steady flow of magic into and around the orb had exhausted him. He hadn’t anticipated it being such a struggle. Nor had Quossa. The unicorn had been concerned, with reason. Istvan had been strong enough to lead the Faerene mission to seal the Rift. Yet an hour of effort protecting the orb from rough magic while also navigating its mysteries had strained him.

  Amy had noticed his exhaustion, but hadn’t comprehended the reasons for it. She had a fledgling’s understanding of magic. She used it at a level barely above instinct. A Faerene magician comprehended and manipulated magic at a far deeper level. Magic was a sense distinct to itself, not a copy of vision, sight or hearing.

  Operating at that level, Istvan had fended off a battering of magic flows that had converged on the orb after he’d activated it.

  Magic wasn’t a simple force like gravity, which acted in a single direction. Magic was more like air currents.

  That simile brought to mind the dragon Soma who’d crashed into the bazaar at Civitas. For a dragon to lose control of magic while flying was unthinkable.

  Each of the people of the Faerene was born with a unique instinct for magic. For griffins, as for dragons, their minds understood magic as a framework for flight. As a dragon, Soma should have been able to shape even the roughest magic flows to enable his controlled descent. That he’d plummeted to his death, all magic ripped away from him, was unnerving.

  Istvan’s claws dug into the dirt of the forest. He’d had a two minute battle with that absence of magic in the cookhouse. The magic flows had suddenly reversed and flung away from the orb as if repelled by it. Istvan had channeled magic through his wings and beak to maintain his connection to the orb. Not his physical wings and beak, but the mental concept of himself that he utilized to center magic. Then the magic flows had abruptly stopped resisting, and battered at the orb again.

  Maintaining a steady flow of magic into the slate for dictation hadn’t taken a fraction of the same effort, which was a matter he needed to discuss with Nora and Quossa. Obviously, slates were simple magical constructs that required minimal magic to operate, and that might be the explanation for the difference. But it could be that the slate was Faerene technology, and as such, even if unconsciously, was designed on principles that aligned with his innate approach to magic. In other words, by instinct he could use it easily. Whereas the orb was a product of human mages, and their instincts for magic were fundamentally different to his.

  Over the last few weeks, Istvan had studied Amy as she operated magical constructs and during her lessons in magic. He’d given her the same lessons a griffin fledgling received—minus the flying—and superficially it had seemed that she worked through them as a fledgling would. The crucial difference showed when she relaxed or lost her focus.

  When a griffin lost concentration on a magic lesson, they dived into the flows of magic. They instinctively reacted to the magic around them as if they flew through it. Great griffin poets had written odes to magic and love with the metaphor of flight.

  When Amy lost concentration on her magic lessons, she began knotting the flows of magic.

  The idea had been so strange to Istvan that he’d taken days to find the conceptual framework and words to describe what he observed. Then he’d observed some more. He was protective of Amy, his familiar partner. Before he discussed her innate approach to magic with Nora—as the scientist appointed by the Fae Council to study human mages—he’d wanted to know that he wasn’t risking Amy’s magical development and future.

  Moreover, he needed to discuss Amy’s magic with Amy, first.

  They had to have that discussion, tonight, because he suspected that his insight into her human instincts for magic tied into the orb’s mention of the world spindle.

  He was no scholar of magic. Those that were would spend years teasing out the implications of humanity’s unique approach to magic, if his observations of Amy and his conclusions were accurate.

  “Istvan!”

  He’d been absorbed in his thoughts and hadn’t heard Nora’s approach. Somehow, whether while hunting or musing, he’d wandered onto the path from the bunker to the campsite. He extended his senses. Nora was alone. “Where’s Quossa?”

  “Advising Vila.”

  Istvan recalled the bunker chief. The nymph had his sympathy. Hers was a heavy responsibility while the feral magic ran wild.

  Nora pushed her head against his, wearily, like a nestling seeking comfort. “We were arrogant, Istvan. Now we’re suffering for our hubris. Dragons falling from the sky. Griffins grounded. We thought me knew everything about Earth, but first the emergence of human mages surprised us, then the bathumas, and now, the planet itself is punishing us.”

  She raised her head. “Not that I believe that last point, but others are saying it. Chad is talking with Fiona, who is monitoring the mood of our people.” Fiona was the goblin member of the Fae Council and responsible for communications. “Apocalyptic thinking. The longer the magic remains unstable, the worse the trauma. Our confidence in the immutability of our magic has been broken. We’ll be a long time healing.”

  “So will the humans, from their apocalypse,” Istvan said.

  Her br
eath whistled in a sigh. “Yes. Many humans would rejoice if they learned of our troubles.” She flicked her wings out and refolded them. “We should return to the cookhouse. We left Amy alone. Do you know, I never even considered that we left her to guard the orb?”

  Istvan’s crest raised high. Nor had he.

  “Nor did Quossa.” Nora clacked her beak in rueful amusement. “She is one of us.”

  But much more vulnerable. Istvan set a swift pace back through the trees. However, at the edge of the campsite, he halted. He couldn’t hear or smell intruders.

  He considered how Melinda, his unicorn therapist, might advise him. “Nora.”

  “Hmm?” She halted beside him.

  “I intended to discuss the nature of Amy’s magic first with her, but I might be wrong, and besides, you have a better understanding of such things. You’d be better at describing it to her. Explaining it.” He recounted his observations of Amy instinctively knotting streams of magic. “Humans are dexterous in physically creating and manipulating objects. They have fingers and opposable thumbs.”

  “Elves and goblins have hands, too,” Nora objected. “And the orcs. The nymphs.”

  Istvan flicked his tail. Her protest was valid. His counterargument began in a different place. “Dragons are the powerful magicians of Faerene myths. Drako brought magic into the world, exhaling it as smokeless fire from his mouth.”

  “That’s merely a story,” she said uncertainly.

  “You were taught, as I was, that stories which are remembered are remembered because of the truth they contain. It may be a hidden truth.”

  “And what truth does Drako, the first dragon mage, represent?”