by Jeff Wheeler
“Marjory, my dear!” Loosestrife exclaimed. “Why, but a moment ago I saw you chatting to Martin Willowlimbs. What in all the realms could have possessed you to so hastily abandon one of our most important guests? Was his conversation not frivolous enough?”
Marjory smiled. “Quite, quite, he has a very fanciful way with words indeed, which kept me quite entertained. However, I had to tear myself away to consult with Obtuse here about the small matter of the canapés. You see—”
But Loosestrife simply waved his hand in dismissal. “I leave all that up to you, my dear. But do remember to hurry back. I have been told that my company is entertaining, but even I cannot be expected to singly keep a whole parlour of faeries enthralled for an entire evening.”
And with that he left to attend to the guests.
* * *
Having returned to the far-less-than-adequate ballroom and taken up my customary position on the mantelpiece, I was pleased to overhear the following conversation between the Countess de Winter and the aforementioned Martin Willowlimbs.
The Countess: How strange this house is, my dear Martin. I have never seen the like. Why, everything is so orderly! I must confess it to be the dullest house I have ever seen. And they say Loosestrife has gone up in the world . . .
Willowlimbs: Indeed, Countess, his wife, too, speaks of the most dreary topics. She’s almost as bad as Long Wind.
The Countess: Is that the Greenteeth girl? Yes, what a strange slip of a thing. How unfortunate for her father to be so overcome with relatives like that.
Willowlimbs: How do you deal with them, my lady? I hear you have a large family yourself, and yet your wealth does not seem to have been leeched from you.
The Countess: Oh, swiftly, and sharply. They ask for much less money when they have no heads, you see.
Willowlimbs: Indeed, indeed, a wise course of action.
Loosestrife: Enjoying yourself, Squire Willowlimbs, Countess?
Willowlimbs: Quite, quite, my dear Loosestrife. But tell me, what is this strange way you have renovated your brugh? It is, uh-ha, somewhat dreary, is it not?
Loosestrife: Ah! You noticed. Well, my dear squire, Countess, you shall find out the cause of it soon enough. I have something of a surprise for you all, you see. Proof positive that I have indeed gone up in the world.
Tom Thistletop: A surprise, you say?
Jack Catkin, Marquess Arumhall: What’s this about a surprise I hear?
Loosestrife: Now, now, everyone, your lordship, my lady. All in good time.
Lady Arumhall: Oh, Loosestrife, don’t make us wait. Come now, show us your surprise.
Countess: Yes, do.
Willowlimbs: Go on, be a good fellow and show us!
Loosestrife expelled a long, considered sigh. “Oh, very well,” he said with apparent reluctance (although he could not, in truth, have hoped for a warmer reception to his surprise).
He marched to the head of the room, and stood on a stool in front of the fireplace. He picked up a miniature bell from the mantle, and when he shook it, it rang as loudly as the tenant of any belfry (it, too, must have escaped the attentions of the servant, Obtuse), dampening the chatter of those in attendance beneath the weight of its peals. The music stopped, the dancers came abruptly to a halt.
“My lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses, gentlemen and crones. As you are all aware, I have recently found myself going up in the world. From humble beginnings as a simple weaver of lightning thread, I worked diligently, investing my earnings in many sundry ventures, which have, as good fortune would have it, made me a man of not inconsiderable wealth. I built this most excellent brugh, acquired a friend who rides my coattails, and decorated my abode with the most frivolous furniture in all of Faeriedom. I have held parties and gatherings well-received and attended by the most prestigious guests”—here he paused to smile benignly upon them all—“but one thing I have been missing, one thing that will convince even the most staunchly feudal among you, that I, Loosestrife Foulweather, have a place among you.”
He rang a service bell. “I present to you, Obtuse, my new human servant.”
Gasps rose up from the crowd.
“A human servant! Why, there hasn’t been a new human servant in Faerie since Cottingley.”
“Offa’s Dyke! This is marvellous. A new servant in Faerie—why, I haven’t seen a human in decades!”
“Thistletop won’t be happy about this. He’s always been proud of being the last faerie to have had a working servant. Now an upstart from the shires has one! And not he! Such a scandal! Such a marvellous scandal!”
So were the mutterings of the Faerie gentry while they awaited the arrival of the human servant. But when minutes came and went and no human servant appeared, Loosestrife began to show the merest hairline fracture of concern.
“Tobias, would you tell my wife to fetch Obtuse, please,” he asked of me, sweat beginning to bead on the larger of his eyebrows.
“Your wife, Loosestrife?” I replied. “I know not where she is.”
“She is not here?”
“No, my friend, she is not.”
“Fornicating fauns! Then I’ll go and get them myself.” He grasped me by the shoulders and hauled me off the mantle. “You keep the guests entertained,” he said in a voice hoarse with panic, before rushing to the serving pantry to find his wife and servant. But no one was there. He rushed to his quarters, but no one was there. He rushed to every corner of the house, but his wife and his servant were nowhere to be found. Only, nailed to the front door he found a letter, written in two separate hands.
In a script clumsy and smelling slightly of cheese was written: To my former master, Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject them without his consent. I bid you farewell.
And below it, in the clear, sensible hand of his wife: To my former husband, I wish to be treated as a rational creature, I wish to feel the calm and refreshing satisfaction of loving, and being loved by, someone who can understand me. Adieu.
Loosestrife sat down upon a very reasonable seat in the very reasonable drawing room of his now thoroughly reasonable house. The guests slowly departed, and he said not a word to them as they left, though they certainly had plenty to say about him (of which I shall not repeat here for fear of setting your ears alight). He sat in the chair for many hours, while I, once more, took up my position on the mantle.
When the sun began to rise, he sat there still, and it wasn’t until the rays fully illuminated the world outside the house that Loosestrife realised he no longer looked out on Faerie, but rather on a strange and uniform landscape of closely tended gardens and dull square houses, lined up in neatly regimented rows as far as he could see. The sound of bells rang across the brightening morning from the tower of a nearby church, and strange dark forms wandered hunched along the streets, boarding oddly shaped carriages, which rumbled and roared in the morning air and left clouds of grey fog in their wakes.
A knock, suddenly, came upon the door.
“Marjory? Obtuse? Is it them, do you think, Tobias?” he asked me, rising from his chair and rushing from the drawing room before I could answer.
How peculiar I felt in that new morning light, as though my whole body had ossified—from exhaustion, I surmised, following all the recent excitement.
I heard him open the door. And a voice, not Marjory’s, nor that of Obtuse, came galloping down the hall.
“Mornin’, Mr. Fowler. How are you today?”
“Excuse me, miss, I . . .” Loosestrife began, but the voice had already entered the drawing room (now much smaller than I recalled it ever being before) and revealed itself as belonging to a young woman wearing what appeared to be a sky-blue housecoat. Loosestrife followed her, and I must admit that now, in the fullness of the morning light, I could see how the strain of last night had changed him. His face was wrinkled and veined much like the cheese we had used to coat Obtuse’s wooden frame, and his posture was as crooked
and contorted as the walls of his house had once been.
“Now, then,” said the woman. “I’ll give you your medicine first, and then I’ll make you a nice cup of tea. Then we’ll get you washed and dressed; how does that sound?”
“What is she talking about, Tobias?” he asked me, his eyebrows quite nearly leaping from his head.
The bluebells outside rang in the wind—but wait, it was not the bluebells; the ringing came from the intruder. She dug about in her pocket and lifted what looked like a pink snuff box to her ear.
“Hi, babe,” she said, apparently addressing an infant that had somehow entered the room unannounced. “Yeah, I’m at Mr. Fowler’s house now. Yeah, I’ll be done in about half an hour, all right? I’ll drop it round for you after I’m finished.”
“Tobias! What on earth is going on here! Who is this woman?”
“What’s that, babe? No, that’s just him talking to that flippin’ Toby jug on top of the fire. Yeah, yeah, all right, babe. T’ra.”
(I have done my utmost to transcribe her eccentric way of speaking, but I make no claims on its accuracy. It was indeed a most babbling and incoherent dialect.) She continued:
“Right, then, Mr. Fowler. Let’s get you that cup of tea, shall we?” She smiled a sweet smile, and left the parlour. I heard her going down the hallway to the kitchen.
“Tobias,” Loosestrife said to me, quickly approaching the mantelpiece. “I think this may be our replacement servant. Oh, yes. Oh, yes! Now everyone will see how I’ve gone up in the world. Another party, do you think, dear friend?”
To this I said nothing. Having experienced quite enough excitement of late, I thought it best not to encourage my friend any further in his fancies. I merely stared, and chewed on my pipe in silence.
About Dafydd McKimm
Dafydd McKimm was born and grew up in the glove-shaped valleys of South Wales but now lives in the East Asian metropolis of Taipei, Taiwan. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction, 600 Second Saga, Flash Fiction Online, and Syntax & Salt. He tweets, now and again, @DafyddMcKimm.
THE WIZARD'S
GRANDDAUGHTER
By Christopher Baxter | 11,500 words
Dwyn felt her spells react to the explosion before she heard it. She dropped the flask she’d been about to fill and darted to the window just as a dull boom rattled her cottage. Across the garden stood her grandfather’s tower. Guided by her spells, flames roared out of the narrow chimney that poked up from the steep roof. The rest of the tower seemed unharmed, not a stone out of place.
The wards should have protected her grandfather, but she wasn’t positive she’d gotten everything right; they had been very complicated to create. She turned to sprint for the door. Then she paused to ensure that her pots were all simmering at safe levels—she felt guilty for taking the time when her grandfather might be hurt or worse, but if she didn’t, then she risked a second explosion right there in the cottage. It only took a moment to satisfy herself that everything would be safe, and then she took off down the hall.
A foot from the front door, Dwyn tripped and nearly fell, barely catching herself against the wall in time. As she opened the door, she glanced back to see what she’d tripped over—it was a stack of newspapers, the South Wales Echo. Several matching stacks stood along the wall. When had her grandfather left those there? She’d just cleared the room out the night before.
She sprinted along the gravel path between her home and the tower. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a few of her neighbors peeking over their fences. They were used to odd noises from the high wizard’s tower, but that one had been louder than most. A car had stopped in the street, and the driver was leaning out the window with his bowler tipped back on his head.
Dwyn yanked open the tower’s heavy oak door. A narrow staircase ran up along the curved outer wall, made even narrower by the stacks of papers, boxes, and clothing as high as her waist that crowded the left side. She cursed her grandfather’s traditionalism as she scrambled up the four flights to the top. Most wizards those days lived in simple houses or flats in the city—why couldn’t he?
“Grandda?” she shouted as she burst into the uppermost room of the tower. “Grandda!” She couldn’t see him over the piles of junk that filled the place. Somewhere in the room, his old radio was blaring, dry old newsreaders discussing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in dusty but deafening voices. But when their speaking paused, she could just barely make out the sound of coughing and grumbling. She sighed in relief. If her grandfather was grumbling, he was probably not seriously hurt.
She took a moment to catch her breath, relief warring with irritation and guilt. She shouldn’t let him make potions anymore—disasters would just keep happening. Then she snorted and shook her head. How was she supposed to stop him?
She edged down the one relatively clear path through the stacks of junk, occasionally tiptoeing in a vain attempt to see her grandfather. It didn’t look like anything in the room was on fire; the wards had worked, though they’d left more smoke in the room than she’d have liked. The explosion had also knocked things into the narrow pathway through the junk—an old burlap doll here, a bundle of brown weeds there, and a box of dried plum pits beyond that.
Dwyn carefully stepped over it all, fanning herself with her hand. Whenever she went in there, the piles of junk seemed to loom in toward her, crowding her space, and the smoke made it even worse. The blaring radio was beginning to make her head pound. She bit back curses. That was it; she was going to clean the whole tower out.
Coming around a curve in the path, she finally found her grandfather. He was standing next to a table that sat beneath the window, using an old shaving brush to painstakingly sweep fine purple dust off a stack of newspapers.
“Grandda, are you all right?” Dwyn asked as she climbed over a toppled crate. He couldn’t hear her over the radio show, which had moved on to a discussion of the looming threat of war on the continent. She bit her tongue in irritation; that was the last thing she needed her grandfather to hear about. She pushed her way to the radio, a tall, decade-old standing model that poked out of a pile of junk a few feet from her grandfather, and switched it off. “Grandda!”
Her grandfather jumped and turned to face her with a reproachful frown. “Dwyn, there you are,” he muttered, his voice gravelly with a heavy, singsong Welsh accent. “Did you meddle with my protective wards?” He waved a gnarled hand over his head, gesturing to the smoke. “This should have cleared out by now.”
Dwyn sighed. “I replaced your wards years ago, Grandda. I told you about it—you had let them fade.”
“My wards were fine,” he grumbled, hunching his shoulders and turning back to the stack of newspapers.
“Are you hurt?” Dwyn took the old man by the shoulder and turned him to face her. He was a little bit shorter than she was, wrinkled and tan—at least, she hoped he was tan and not just dirty. His hair was disheveled, as though he’d only gotten halfway through combing it before giving up, and he’d missed several small patches of white whiskers when he’d shaved that morning. Dwyn stifled another sigh and straightened the ragged green robes that he wore—the man looked like a beggar.
“I’m fine, Dwyn, leave it alone,” her grandfather said, pushing her hands away and turning back to the stack of newspapers. “If you want to help, you can get the fae dust off these papers.”
“Grandda, they’ll fall apart before you could ever get them clean. Just throw them out.”
“Well, I can’t throw them out until I’ve read them.”
Dwyn leaned over his shoulder to look at the top newspaper: the UK Wizard’s Times from June 25, 1919. “They’re over twenty years old.”
He didn’t reply; she was pretty sure he’d heard what she said and was simply ignoring her. Rolling her eyes, she turned to his workstation.
“What happened, then?” she asked, eyeing the dented, cracked cauldron on his workbench. A towel had been hastily shoved beneath it to s
op up the mud-thick brown goop that was dripping out.
Her grandfather didn’t reply.
“Grandda, what exploded?”
“What?” Her grandfather turned to her, his brow furrowed. “Oh, this blasted cauldron cracked and leaked the potion I was brewing. I’ll tell you, I’m angry about that—I just got it back from McKaeton, and he promised me that it was patched up perfect. Overcharged me too.”
“Blacksmith McKaeton moved back to Glasgow three years ago, Grandda.”
Her grandfather blinked, his face startled. “Oh. Well . . . it must have been another blacksmith, then.”
“Why aren’t you using the new cauldrons I bought you for your birthday?”
“Well, my old one is good enough,” he grumbled, returning to his newspapers.
“Obviously it wasn’t.” Dwyn leaned forward to sniff the puddle of brownish potion on the workstation. Icebark, fourth clover, and . . . mandrake? No, something else, something with a strong scent. Was he trying to make a shapechange potion? “Grandda, which potion is this?”
“The clearthought potion, of course. I managed to salvage enough to fill a flask, though.”
Dwyn’s stomach dropped and her headache seemed to spike. He’d been trying to make clearthought, and he’d ended up with that? She followed the puddle to where it leaked off the back of the workstation, and found the twisted remains of a rusty steel bucket on the floor there. So the potion had leaked into the bucket and reacted with whatever it held, causing the explosion. She picked up the bucket and then frowned, studying the charred remains of plants within it.
“Grandda, was this bucket holding anything other than powderpods?”
“No. I picked them the other day,” he said, not looking up.
“There’s not much that would have reacted with powderpods,” she said, frowning. She turned to search the shelves above his workstation. “What was in that potion?”
“You know what goes in clearthought, Mair. Nothing in there caused the explosion.”