Bound Magic

by Jenny Schwartz

  Magic had to play a part in a griffin’s launch into the air. Istvan defied gravity with his speed and elegance. He flew westward, further from the hall.

  Lajos rose from his knees to his feet. “Don’t be fooled by Istvan’s pose of effortless accomplishment. He and Piros led the effort to seal the Rift, and now Istvan’s taking control of his magisterial territory. No matter how he makes it look, he’s incredibly burdened. Everything he does is calculated, with extraneous elements of his life excised. Depositing you with me means he thinks the two of us need to talk.”

  “About what? Herbs? The hall gardens?” I frowned at the garden beds Lajos had marked out.

  “I imagine Istvan wants me to explain Tineke.”

  Chapter 12

  Lajos’s current accommodation was a tent with a cooking fire out front and a couple of logs to serve as seats. It was primitive by anyone’s measure. He had coffee, though, and he didn’t rush making it.

  I stood to the side and surveyed the activity occurring on this bank of the river. In town, the buildings were the biggest story, but here, it was how the land was being used that mattered. Fields further out were being prepared for winter crops and fences were going up to contain livestock, or to keep it out.

  Lajos had marked out his land as a knot garden. Three quarters of it was laid out with paths and key plantings. Tall trees stood as sentinels at path crossings and endings. Magic had to have been used either in their growth or in transplanting them, they were so robust. The fourth quarter was untilled and contained his campsite.

  A wrongness nagged at me as I glanced from the ground to the sky. I’d assumed that the defining cross that delineated the quadrants aligned with the cardinal points of the compass. But it didn’t. Not quite.

  I’d need to consider the moon or stars or even leylines to understand the principles underpinning his design. Or I could question Lajos.

  Although, not now.

  He scowled as he passed me a mug of coffee. “Sit. Tineke would like to be your partner. Istvan’s duties as a magistrate have to be his priority. Tineke would prioritize helping you to integrate with Faerene society.”

  The tin mug was hot. I took a sip and set it down on the ground. “Tineke is already helping me with that. She made sure I had suitable clothes and learned that freedom song.” I picked up the mug. Burning my fingers and tongue was preferable to spilling out my sudden thought.

  I don’t think elves can read minds, but Lajos gave a sharp nod as if I’d shouted my thought. “The real question is whether you should integrate with Faerene society.”

  I grimaced. “I only just thought of that.”

  “And it’s a question you alone can answer. What sort of future do you want? You’ve gone along with the flow of events, occupying the place Istvan has made for you in his household, but sooner or later—” He broke off. Head tilted to the side, he regarded me in silence for a couple of minutes.

  I contemplated the question of my future. Did I want to integrate into Faerene society? Forget whether I had a choice or what was best for Istvan or anyone else. What did I want?

  I’d spoken to Rory last night because I was afraid I’d take advantage of him, of his strength and his kindness as offered to a prospective mate, when I didn’t know if I wanted a serious relationship. My future was so unclear that I was scared to try and make room for loving someone.

  The dragon Cervene hadn’t just happened to want to meet with humans and chosen at random the town of Apfall Hill as a point of contact. Istvan had deduced a vulnerability in me—my family—and established casual oversight for my family’s protection.

  If I didn’t know what my future held, how could I keep the people I loved safe?

  Across the river, a red dragon took to the skies from the roof of the magistrate hall. Piros flew west, the same direction Istvan had taken. One flap of his wings carried him over where we sat.

  When I straightened from craning my neck to follow his flight, I’d accidentally tipped over my mug, spilling the last of my coffee into the dirt.

  Lajos was watching me, but hadn’t tried to prevent the spill.

  I picked up the tin mug and moved my boot to avoid the spreading coffee mud.

  “Tineke is a reclamation specialist,” Lajos said. “She feels a lot of guilt, misplaced guilt, because of the massive casualties humanity has suffered in the rebalancing.”

  I hadn’t heard the process of sealing the Rift and keeping it sealed called rebalancing, but thanks to Melinda’s teaching at the trials I understood what it referred to. The Faerene believed that life had to cycle, that linear progression damaged the healthy seal around a world by relentlessly drilling at it. They believed that there had to be loss as well as gain, and that both were beneficial.

  In the last six months, humanity had lost and lost and lost.

  “Everything is growing so well because of all the matter the Reclamation Team has returned to the earth.” Lajos gazed across the fields and woods. Fall was the dying time, the preparation for winter, but he was right. The land around Justice didn’t look barren.

  “Oh blast.” Elbows on knees, head in my hands, I shuddered in abrupt realization. At Fort Farm, and in Apfall Hill generally, we’d been so proud of our summer gardens and abundant harvest. Six sevenths of humanity had died and the Faerene had returned their bodies to the earth, vanishing corpses overnight. I hadn’t thought—had carefully not considered—that the fertility of the land had increased not by our diligent farming or the breakdown and return of technology to the earth, but by involuntary human sacrifice.

  The coffee I’d just drunk pooled sourly in my stomach. “Blood sacrifice, like to an ancient fertility god.”

  “Rebalancing is a healthier term,” Lajos said dispassionately.

  Perhaps it was his ability to distance himself that had led the Fae Council to choose him to manage the human familiar trials.

  If I wanted sympathy, he wasn’t the person to seek out. Why had Istvan left me with the elf?

  I stood. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “You’re like the town.”

  I swiveled back to him.

  He hadn’t moved. Still seated, with dirt flaking off his trousers, he stared across the river. His green hair was cut short, the color of it several shades yellower than his skin. Sticking up, it was like sun-dried grass.

  If I pressed my hand to the top of it would it feel like crackly, unwatered summer lawn?

  “Justice is springing up fast,” Lajos said. “Far faster than anyone anticipated when we ran Migration scenarios back on Elysium. We had so many questions. How long would it take for word to get out about a new town, for people to arrive, for buildings to go up, and for local government to be established?”

  He threw away the dregs of his coffee, grabbed my abandoned mug, and stood. “We underestimated the pent up energy of the Faerene. For six months we feared whether the Rift could be sealed. People had to hold back on using resources, including magic. Now, there is a chance to establish themselves and people are seizing it. That’s why Justice is progressing so rapidly. The town is the focal point for people’s energy, schemes and hope. So are you.”

  “No.”

  He ignored my protest. “I thought Tineke had latched onto you due to her trauma over humanity’s suffering. Instead, she saw the forces converging on you clearer than I did.”

  “There are no forces converging on me. Okay, so your Fae Council is concerned about my magic, and now, there’s the question of whether it will increase or decrease due to my partnership with Istvan, but calling their interest ‘forces’ makes it sound ominous.”

  “Or filled with potential. All that potential and energy that we predicted would be unleashed when humanity truly joined with the Faerene to create a new world, it’s there in you now, not in future centuries.”

  The reminder that some Faerene lived long enough to think in centuries didn’t shock me anymore. Thinking of myself as some sort of catalyst did.

  �
��I’m going.” Istvan and Rory hadn’t been letting me walk around town alone, but I didn’t care that leaving Lajos behind meant I’d be without an escort. I felt safe in Justice. People knew me.

  The thought crawled in: what did they expect of me?

  I needn’t have wasted time contemplating walking home alone.

  Lajos fell into step with me.

  “You should stay and finish planting whatever it is you’re planting.”

  “Ice yams.” He kept walking.

  I broke the silence between us when we reached the bridge. “You’re wrong, you know. If I was that important Istvan would have told me. He wouldn’t have left it to you.”

  “Istvan and I aren’t friends.”

  I glanced sideways at him. The bridge was plenty wide enough that even with a cart laden with sacks of cotton bolls rattling toward us, we could walk side by side with space between us.

  “Tineke respects him,” Lajos said. “Istvan’s style of justice appeals to a lot of people. There is surety in it. He has a vision of a just world and he prunes to fit it.”

  I turned the last sentence over in my mind. No matter how I examined it, justice and pruning didn’t go together for me.

  “It’s difficult to explain things to you, to any human. We encountered that brick wall at the familiar candidate trials. We assume that the reality we grew up with, us Faerene, is the reality of magic that you have to learn. Yet Earth is a different world. For all that Faerene society here will echo and respond to our home world of Elysium, it will also develop its own identity. So if we teach you based on our past, we’re not necessarily fitting you for the future on Earth. And the realities that are our baseline for understanding how a magical society operates don’t exist here. Yet.”

  “Headache time,” I warned him.

  “All right. Let’s simplify things.” Lajos displayed remarkable patience. We halted in the middle of the bridge while he ticked off points on his green fingers. “First, Istvan and I are not friends, but he is a good person. Fair. He could teach you everything himself, but by asking others to contribute to your education you’re exposed to alternative views from the beginning.”

  He flicked his second finger. “On Elysium, maybe fifteen to twenty percent of Istvan’s work related to dealing with non-sentient magical happenings. The vast majority of his cases involved people squabbling with magic or exploiting it. Here on Earth, those proportions are reversed. This early in a Migration people are policing themselves. The magical troubles Istvan has to address are those spontaneously arising from magical flows and events.”

  Fortunately, my research over the last few days enabled me to understand him. Faerene notions of justice were far broader than humanity’s. We applied justice to one another. The Faerene applied it to the natural—including the magical—world as well.

  A barge pulled away from the dock, drifting below the bridge and downstream, adjusting course lazily. The elf at the tiller saw me watching him and waved a greeting.

  I used the same two finger flick at my right temple, which was the Faerene maritime salute.

  Lajos scowled. “You blend in too well. That’s good for Istvan. Maybe not so good for you.”

  “Stay on topic,” I rebuked him, and won a tiny crinkling of his eyes that might have passed as a hint of a smile.

  “Fine. To continue my second point, Istvan has a vision of a balanced magical world. When happenings explode he serves justice by cutting them back. Sometimes that is the appropriate response. Other times the happening could be allowed to continue, even to evolve and worsen.”

  “Why?”

  He shivered.

  Belatedly, I realized that whilst standing on the bridge above the cold river might be all right for me in my thick sweater and jeans, Lajos hadn’t grabbed his jacket before accompanying me. He’d catch a chill in his shirt and trousers.

  I started walking. The sooner we reached the hall the sooner he could either get warm or be free to jog back to his garden. “Why would you allow bad things to happen?”

  “Because uncontrolled magic isn’t bad. Even Istvan allows for some in his picture of the perfect world. As for the consequences…bad things happen, people suffer, even when we do our best. You can’t make a decision for justice on the basis of how the consequences will affect people.”

  “Justice and mercy go together.” I bit my tongue. This time it was me getting distracted. “Back to your point. If you think magic should be free—”

  A goblin walking toward us looked up sharply from the notebook he’d been studying.

  “I did not say magic should be free,” Lajos snapped. And to the goblin. “The human familiar is confused about the nature of magic.”

  Ha! Put the blame on me. But I didn’t protest aloud.

  “Magic is as free as the air we breathe and the life we relinquish,” the goblin assured me gravely.

  “It’s a quotation from a temple book,” Lajos explained. “It means that magic has consequences and limits.”

  The goblin nodded and strode on.

  “Different question then.” I’d had a chance to regroup. “If you’re against Istvan ‘pruning’ magical happenings, why is your herb garden so rigidly laid out? Isn’t the design meant to enhance the plants’ magical aspects? Why don’t you let them develop as they will?”

  I expected his answer to be something along the lines of replicability and commercial realities. He surprised me.

  “The garden is balanced. Or it will be, once complete. I draw a distinction between magical happenings affecting the cosmological balance, and the desirability of composing our individual endeavors to respect the cycle of life, death and rebirth.”

  He rubbed at his arms. As we turned a corner and the buildings blocked the wind off the river, his pace slowed. “My turn for a question.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What was your mantra through the last few months? What did you repeat to yourself, belief and words, to get you through?”

  A burst of laughter came from the Customs House behind us. I glanced back to see Yana talking with a trio of elves and a goblin.

  She glanced at me, with a quick question in the look.

  I nodded. I was okay in Lajos’s company.

  She turned back to her group and whatever business they were transacting.

  “I didn’t have a mantra,” I said to Lajos. He hadn’t turned around at the laughter. In fact, he was studying me closely. So closely that I was provoked into a more complete response. “I just did what I had to to survive. For all of us to survive.”

  “That ragtag collection of people you call your family?”

  I halted, furious with him.

  He raised a yellowy-green eyebrow.

  Two deep breaths, snorting breaths, and I’d calmed enough to recognize manipulation when it hit me over the head. He wanted me angry. Forget the old Latin phrase, in vino veritas. The truth lay not in drunkenness, but in emotionally charged, unconsidered speech. “They are my family,” I said evenly. “We chose one another. We agreed to be there for one another. You can’t survive the end of the world on your own.”

  His quizzical eyebrow lowered. He resumed walking toward the hall.

  After a second, I joined him.

  “That’s part of your mantra,” he prompted me. “Never alone.”

  “Go along to get along,” I quoted under my breath.

  His head swiveled sharply in my direction. “Pardon?”

  “Years ago, a camp counsellor said it to me. He was talking about surviving a disaster. He said we’d need to join up with others and prove our worth. Vance used to say it was a lesson for life generally. Go along to get along.”

  Lajos exhaled loudly. “There we have it.” He didn’t mean the magistrate hall, although we’d arrived. We stood at the base of the steps. He gave me a look that nailed me in place. A look that said not only there we have it, but what are you going to do? “That’s what’s been guiding your behavior. Still is. You’re self-awar
e enough to work out what that means for your future yourself.”

  I grabbed his arm as he turned to depart. “What was your profession on Elysium?”

  A mischievous grin transformed his serious face. “Psychiatrist.” My grip loosened in shock, and he walked away, his pace quickening to a near jog either to escape me or because he was cold. Or because Istvan and I had interrupted his day and he had a garden to grow.

  “Psychiatrist? Well, damn.” Before the apocalypse that had been my goal: college, med school, and finally, psychiatry.

  “You all right?”

  I jumped because I hadn’t seen Yana join me. She must have approached just out of range of my peripheral vision. “You’re sneaky.”

  She smirked. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Thoughts and emotions jostled in me like corn kernels popping. “Yana, do you have an hour free?”

  “Yes. And since maybe no one’s spelled it out for you, Istvan has rated you as a priority with the magisterial guard unit. If you need us, your request takes precedence over anything but responding to high level happenings.”

  I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead. “Too much.” I wasn’t sure if I meant Istvan’s rating or everything else. “I need to move, something that requires total concentration. Can you train me? Is it possible to defend myself against your three forms?”

  “Combat training!” Her shout was gleeful. Heads turned. The hall was crowded. With Yana’s hand locked around my wrist, we plowed through the mob. “Oh yeah. It’s possible to take out a werewolf, even without claws or magic of your own. Let me show you.”

  “Your laughter is evil.” But my mood was improving.

  Her laughter increased. “You don’t mind a few bruises?”

  One of the clerks looked up, shocked.

  “It’s fine. I’m fine,” I said hastily.

  In the kitchen, Peggy halted our hurried progress. “Stella is wonderful! A lovely lady, and so practical. We have had a good conversation.”

  Behind her, two of her staff rolled their eyes. One added a hand opening and closing in the universal sign for talked and talked and talked.