From Fairies and Creatures of the Night, Guard Me

by Emily de Courcy

  Even the magical horses didn’t seem to make up for it after a while, so he’d put away his velvet robes and gone into Historical Runes instead, where no one expected him to do things with bits of dead ghoul.

  That job did come with the thankless duty of trying to get the future Erlking to sit still long enough to memorise a basic summoning, and occasionally he’d even had to speak to Queen Asdis herself. For this reason, he considered surviving all the way to his retirement relatively unharmed, with all his limbs attached and without having been turned into a statue, to be an extremely laudable achievement.

  Hliff, who did not much care for cities, had never seen Queen Asdis, but she had certainly heard stories, and seen pictures in the papers, and she couldn’t help but wonder what had finally made Maelstrom leave his post. He said he was simply getting too old for the job and that it was nice to not have to live in a tower anymore. Hliff wasn’t remotely convinced that he’d told her the whole of it, or ever would, but she never pried. They had that sort of friendship.

  So they met every month and talked about baking, magic and the very latest article in the Magister’s Journal. Thankfully, they hardly ever agreed on the latter, which made for many happy hours of squabbling and academic one-upmanship.

  That particular Tuesday, it was raining outside and they were in the kitchen of Maelstrom’s cosy house. The parlour was out of bounds on account of a of flock of chickens which he had brought in out of the downpour.

  “You’ve got to admit that these biscuits are much nicer without the cat hair,” remarked the wizard, taking a drink of his tea.

  “Stuff! Lumpkin was only being friendly, Tim.” The old witch gave him a level look over her own cup. She never called him ‘Maelstrom’, and she did not take his criticism of her cat to heart: she had glimpsed him feeding Lumpkin a bit of cookie once, when he’d thought her out in the garden.

  “Not at all a suitable pet for a fire witch, you know,” the wizard continued.

  “I am not a fire witch. I am just a witch who happens to be passably good at fire glamour – it’s not at all the same thing. Besides, you think that the only appropriate pet for any sorcerer is a fire-breathing dragon,” Hliff pointed out. “Or a chimaera – and those make such an unconscionable mess of all the rugs.”

  Tim looked a little affronted. “Nothing wrong with dragons! Very interesting companions – keep you on your toes! I had a firebird once, do you remember? A whole flock. Of course, it was a frightful fuss whenever the rains hit: firebirds don’t do well in the rain, you know. It always makes their feathers grow dull and they get rather aggressive.”

  Hliff scoffed. She remembered the firebirds quite well. Maelstrom had quarantined his entire kitchen into a make-shift firebird sanctuary whenever it so much as drizzled. “You keep chickens now, and with good reason.”

  “Only because that tall, blond fellow on a quest stole my flock! Chickens are much less in demand by heroes wishing to trade for their true love, I am told. They’re not generally considered to be very magical.”

  Maelstrom had been thoroughly disconsolate for months after his favourite pets got carried off in a potato sack only minutes after he had let them out for their evening walk.

  “Now, dragons have much better defences. You won’t see anyone putting them in sack. Which reminds me! It is your birthday coming up – I didn’t forget.”

  He never did. Not even when he’d been away in the city, dissecting dead ghouls for his practical physick exams.

  Hliff watched warily as her oldest friend got up from his chair, somewhat creakily, and reappeared from the pantry with a large basket of woven reeds.

  Something in the basket rustled and gave a faint sneeze just as the wizard lifted a very fluffy woolly blanket, looking supremely pleased.

  Hliff found herself staring into big, yellow eyes. They had a narrow dark pupil and an unmistakably sly expression.

  “This is Pickles,” said Maelstrom, confirming the witch’s long-held belief that he should never have been allowed to name anybody at all. “Isn’t she just hopelessly charming? She won’t grow much bigger, you know. A miniature – they’re all the rage with ladies in town. The duchess – I don’t remember which one – has a whole six. And she was the very last the trader had left – he’d come all the way from the North.”

  He looked at Hliff expectantly, waiting for approval.

  Hliff looked at the dragon, wondering what on earth Maelstrom thought she was going to do with one. She couldn’t be having with pet dragons at her time of life. She lived in a wooden hut. Lumpkin would shamelessly bully the poor thing on sight.

  The witch sighed and gave Maelstrom a weary smile.

  Pickles kept curiously poking her head out of the basket all the way home.

  *

  Two weeks later, it was still raining. It had been raining for days on end, and would go on raining forever it seemed. Hliff supposed she’d jinxed it when she ventured out to water the garden. She always felt every drop in her bones. It was all the fire magic, which objected to rain on sheer principle. She had been a passable sorceress in her time but there wasn’t a single charm that could take the nagging ache out of her old bones.

  Pickles the dragon was chewing on a woollen stocking. She’d taken to sleeping on the very highest bookshelf, where Lumpkin couldn’t smack her with her paws or give her yet another enforced bath. Lumpkin lay indolently stretched out by the fire, one eye lazily open and pointedly ignoring the dragon.

  Hliff waved a hand, feeding the fire a little more to keep out the miserable chill. The ceiling of her hut was dripping. The thatch needed fixing and there wasn’t a spell for that either, but at least she could make sure the fire didn’t smoke. She had always been good with fire.

  She had always supposed her career would go the way of other sorceresses – a tall, rickety tower somewhere, robes enchanted to look like the night sky and handsome heroes vying for her attention. Instead, she had apprenticed to the local witch and found that her talents lay firmly in flames and potions, which was undeniably practical but not at all glamorous.

  She smiled a crooked grin at that. Heroes had very little interest in potions. All in all, this was probably for the best. She had never been any good at being a seductress: never even tried very hard, if she were honest. Besides which, heroes tended to be on the dull side, generally speaking. You’d certainly never catch one reading the Magister’s Journal.

  Even in her younger days, Hliff had always worn heavy robes, and spent a lot of time bent over fat tomes detailing the use of dittany in warding charms. She had worn the sort of thick boots that would surely never catch on at court, despite the fact that they had frequently saved her toes from being scorched by exploding cauldrons and showering sparks. Her hair had never known a dab of powder or her hand a silk fan.

  Any hero would have been positively taken aback at her unkempt locks, lovely as they had once been. Her own late husband had never minded her lack of silk gowns, but then he had been a scribe and not the least bit inclined towards embarking on perilous quests. Hliff didn’t even go in for the sort of swirling robes Maelstrom felt he ought to wear just because he had studied at the college of sorcery.

  Being the village witch wasn’t a very dazzling job, not like wizardry, but someone had to do it. So she stayed and she did it. She had never even seen a real sorceress’s tower. Besides, these days she didn’t much care for heights.

  The truth was that there wasn’t much she was good at that was even remotely wizardly, aside from fire. No self-respecting magisterial wizard would trade charms to passing travellers. And she almost never went in for love spells or lightning, knowing well the devastation that either of those could bring. Hliff had never cared for the trapping of spirits, the minutiae of alchemy or brewing draughts of eternal youth.

  But she had always wondered, just a little.

  And she felt so old now – she couldn’t quite believe how quickly it had come upon her. It didn’t seem at all right. She couldn�
��t stand very straight any more, and her hands weren’t as nimble as they had once been, chopping, weaving and binding. It took twice as long to walk down to the village now, and she had to rest many times along the way. But Pickles wanted walking, hurtling and flying and so Hliff was forced to go out twice a day and take in exercise, though she would really rather have stayed at home.

  She found herself fretting over mixing her own dragon food and baking her own dragon biscuits because shop-bought stuff wasn’t quite the same. And she would watch indulgently as Lumpkin tried to lift the dragon by the nape of the neck.

  It was just like Maelstrom to have figured out her weakness for unwanted things, the last of anything. He’d always had the cheek to guess these things and call her on them. It was therefore justly deserved that she should make him walk Pickles now and then. It served to make a point.

  Hliff also made him walk with her while they took in the country side, though at a slower pace than they had done as children. It would be good to see the old tree house again – she hadn’t been that way in several years, surely, which was a great shame.

  Hliff supposed it was extremely fortunate her magic was still on hand, even if her fortitude was not. The magic never left, never fizzled out. It was the one sure thing in the world – possibly, the only sure thing. She could feel it just as she had done as a child of seven, coursing through her veins, warm and strong – whispering of potential. Her fingertips crackled with fire at a thought, and when she looked into her scrying plate of polished silver, she could see that her eyes had hardly changed at all. Still sharp and quick and amber-hued. Still flaming.

  It didn’t seem quite right that magic only grew with age.

  But at least it meant she could fireproof the house.

  Nepenthe

  There was a potion that Hliff the witch sometimes made. It was one of a great many potions in her repertoire, because she knew potions better than she did her own name. People came from all over the Hinterlands to see her, sometimes setting out from their grand cities to seek her help, and sometimes stumbling across her hut quite by accident, soaking in a storm or wandering, dazed, on a sunny day.

  She made potions for happiness out of daisies, captured rainbows locked in prisms, and things she wouldn’t divulge except to an apprentice who proved themselves capable. She brewed memory potions and potions for finding lost things. It could be any number of lost things: but you did not always find the lost thing that you had meant to. She sold false hopes to those desperate enough to barter for them.

  Hliff enjoyed brewing. There was something relaxing in the chopping and the measuring. She liked the way ingredients combined and recombined in her head, lining up like the formulas of wizards: it was a moment of poise, her recipe a thing of perfect balance and sense. The knowledge was all there in her head, waiting to be dredged up and improved upon.

  Sometimes, she sang as she worked: ditties, lullabies and bits of heroic epic all weaving one into the next, a never ending melody staying very tenuously in key as she reached for the drying witch hazel hanging overhead. She would hum tried to remember where she had set down her little silver knife, or went out to set traps for moonbeams.

  Hliff had seen a picture once, in a book of magic which her friend Maelstrom, a retired wizard, had left on his coffee table, of a young sorceress, with a strong chin and long, wild, red hair which brushed her heels. She’d been dressed in silks and furs, her feet bare, as she worked a casting. It was the work of a famous mortal painter, Maelstrom had informed her. It had made Hliff smile and chuckle.

  She would never dream of brewing barefoot. Protective gargoyle or dragon hide slippers were the only way to keep one’s toes from being accidentally melted. And even in her youth, when she had been reckless, she would never have let her hair hang unbound over the cauldron. Any number of disasters could result from that. She’d kept her hair pinned well back, and dressed in sensible, thick, dark dresses and an apron.

  Hliff was never careless about potions. Magic mishaps were always potentially deadly. Not to mention, a dreadful bother to clean up, and a waste of perfectly good ingredients. There was one in particular with which she was especially careful, however, and she never liked giving that one out. Her heart broke a little every time she had to brew it, both for the poor soul who would be drinking it, and for herself. Hliff was old now, but not so old that she could not remember being in their shoes once.

  Back then, she would wear her hair unbound when she walked through the woods and the village, and her exceptional aptitude for spellcraft could well have rivalled that of the unlikely sorceress in Maelstrom’s picture. Back then, she had been a little less cautious with her heart than she had been with her potions, and she could well remember the grief when it got broken.

  There had been shock, tears and the numbing sorrow that went far, far, beyond tears. She could remember lying on her narrow bed, and wishing to curl into herself, more and more, until she could disappear. It had been hard to move, or brew, or do much of anything else.

  She paged through countless books, even the mortal ones, that promised a cure for her particular ailment. Ovid’s Remedia Amoris proved to be of little help despite the promising title, full of mortal fancies as it was.

  Hliff had wished to forget, and she was terrified of doing just that. She felt like a dry leaf, brown and lifeless, blown this way and that, until the wind carried it away, over the treetops, into the grey sky somewhere too far away to feel real.

  It had been in the middle of the night, in a wild, unexpected fit of energy that she’d risen and gone to her cauldron, and begun to brew. Her silver knife had flashed as she chopped, and she had stirred with a rod of birch, cut by her own hand. There had been tears on her face, pouring freely and unnoticed, staining her crumpled slept-in dress. There had been an ache in her heart that would well have been crippling if not for the strange energy coursing through her every movement.

  It was as if she could somehow summon him back to her, if only she chopped and mixed and stirred with enough frantic vigour and pure longing. His name had been there, always on the tip of her tongue, though she dared not speak it, because she did not trust herself not to break even further, and names were dangerous things. She did not feel like a porcelain vase so much as a clay pot, plain and shattered on the flagstones by the fire.

  The desperate longing had been as painful as the loss, and she had known in a moment of clarity that she would go mad if it were to linger. And so she made the potion: her greatest and most terrible creation. Nepenthe: it was the surest remedy for sorrow, a brew that guaranteed to make one fall out of love, to erase the desperate ache and the jagged pain completely and forever. A draught of sweet forgetfulness. Like a lot of magic, if not all of it, it was brutal and irrevocable, and sometimes it was the kindest solution.

  Hliff did not enjoy extinguishing love, because it was a surprisingly rare thing: especially the deep pure love that usually drove people to such a brink of madness. Love was rare, and, too often, it faded all on its own, without a potion to speed up the process. It grew faint and unrecognisable, until one was left wondering how it had even got to such a point at all.

  But Hliff also knew desolation, and it was that, rather than the nepenthe, that broke her heart anew each time, though what had once been passion and fury had turned to cool reason as the seasons had swept her along. She remembered well the emptiness that threatened to drag the sufferer under a bleak tide.

  Hliff had not had to brew this often. Maybe nine or ten times altogether, in the course of her long life. The witch clearly remembered the faces, the names, and most of the stories, for many felt that even if they forgot, they wanted someone to remember – that there had been love once and that it had ever existed at all.

  So they told their stories to the young witch with the shiny brown hair and the sad eyes, and then, long decades years later, they told the old witch, who looked at them knowingly, nodded in all the right places, and gave them the little glass bottle wit
h a look of quiet understanding on her face.

  The potion didn’t taste like much, and it smelled of the forest. It worked almost instantly, melting and soothing, until tears stopped, breath evened out and the deep ache was nothing but memory, a vague ghost on the edge of consciousness. Not many dared risk this potion, for some wished to cling on to hope even when their world lay at their feet, and others preferred to find their own way out of the darkness. But there were those few who saw no other way open to them.

  There had been lords and ladies, scholars and bakers, and a princess whose gentleman had not waited for her to finish her quest: had not even bothered to go searching for her in the wilderness as she had searched for him for so very long. He had married another, a clever duke’s daughter, and stayed comfortably at home. If he had not been deliriously happy, he had been content and that had been enough for him. Hliff remembered that face well: delicate, beautiful and crumpled. It had made her feel better about her own pale face wearing the same expression so many years ago.

  The princess had looked to Hliff for answers the witch could not possibly have given her. But Hliff had known how that felt also, and she had not looked away.

  She’d said then, in response to the desolate eyes, “You must drink it, or you must not. The choice is yours alone. It is in indecision that your greatest suffering will lie.”

  Her heart had filled with a great and burning pity as the young woman accepted the proffered glass and drank her fill of forgetfulness. She’d taken the potion as bravely and determinedly as she had faced the many terrible trials of her quest.

  Hliff had learned that despair and misfortune seemed almost inevitable where hearts came into play. Lives had a way of getting tangled together so quickly: snagging, and sometimes tearing in places. It took but an instant, and the knots were very hard to undo without tearing anything else.