by D. D. Chance
To what?
What had happened to all those witches? And how had a necklace with barely enough magic to serve as a healing stone and a ward somehow convinced Celia and her mom that they could shift? Because Celia had shifted, dammit. She had become a Seline cat! I’d managed to shift because of the crown and shackles and my connection to Aiden, but Celia hadn’t had any of that. So how was her shifting possible?
I pursed my lips tightly. Was there more magic than we realized tucked deep into the Hogan stones that we had given out to so many witches, hoping only to keep them safe? How could my great-grandmother have left us so unprepared!
“Mistress Belle?” Jorgen’s soft voice made me jump, my hands spasming on the book I was reading, nearly tearing the page out.
“What?” I demanded as he flowed gracefully forward, his lower extremities giving the illusion of feet, though, as a djinn, he didn’t require them. I still appreciated the gesture.
In his arms, he carried a short stack of books, and my pulse jacked at the sight of them. They looked old, and surprisingly small and nondescript. But in a world given over to illusions, I knew better than to believe my eyes at first glance.
He flowed up to me and settled the books on my desk, already helpfully bookmarked to pages he’d designated. “You are the first Hogan to ask about these records in two hundred years,” he informed me. “Even your great-grandmother didn’t care about the ancient enemies of the Fae. She was too busy trying to escape King Orin to see the bigger picture.”
Startled, I dropped my gaze to the tomes. “Seriously?”
He nodded. “Not all the witches who came to teach the king hated their role—and all of them were content to work within it, rather than focusing on ending the need for Hogan magic altogether by conquering the Fae’s ancient enemies. A few fancied themselves in love, and when they left, the king had to wipe their memories and return them to their realm, where they could continue the Hogan line.”
I frowned, but mostly because I hadn’t given the matter much thought. Now, with more careful reflection, I recognized that anomaly for what it was.
“The witches fell in love with the various kings, and the kings just…let them go? They didn’t care?”
Jorgen’s gaze was gentle. “They are the Fae, Mistress Belle, not human.”
“Yeah, but…” I shook off my reaction. Aiden had let me go too. I’d begged him to do it, and he had—so how much could he have really loved me? Had he somehow figured out that he’d be better off without me, that all the Fae would be? Had he hoped I’d stay away in the end? Had he—
Oh, for freak’s sake. I rolled my eyes and shook myself back to the problem at hand. This wasn’t helping things.
I refocused on Jorgen. “How did the witches fare once they returned? Is there any information on that?”
The djinn lifted an elegant hand, waggled it back and forth. “Those who had been in love in the realm forgot why they carried a shadow of sadness back into their human lives. But the emotion remained. Far better off were the ones who did not enjoy their period of instruction. Not every king made their lives easy, and in some cases, it wasn’t even the king who dictated their departure. It was their own approaching death that whisked them out of the realm and back to their own. It was always most important that the Hogan line continued.”
My brows shot up. I hadn’t thought about that. “So if I was on the verge of death in this realm, that would be a Get Out of the Fae Realm Free card, right?”
“Theoretically, yes. Though you could be found again if the king decided that the terms of the contract had not been fulfilled.”
I heaved a disgusted breath. “Well, the contract doesn’t matter anymore. Aiden freed me from it.”
“Ha! Would that it were so easy,” Jorgen said lightly. I looked up to see him smiling at me, unconcerned. At my continued stare, his brows went up. “Mistress Belle, surely you couldn’t think—he couldn’t think…”
He broke off, and I barely kept from leaping out of my chair and strangling him to death. “What, Jorgen? What are you talking about? The contract was between the Hogans and the Fae. Why can’t the Fae king cancel it?”
“It’s simply not that easy,” Jorgen protested, as if I were being the unreasonable one. Twin flags of color darkened his cheeks, and his light brown eyes seemed particularly intense. “The contract must be held by both parties, read aloud, and torn asunder—it’s a Fae contract, Mistress Belle. This is a race who live and die by their rituals. Surely King Aiden knows that too.”
“Fuccccck,” I muttered, sagging back in my chair. But in my heart of hearts, I wasn’t surprised. I had feared this almost from the beginning.
And…and was I relieved too? Secretly glad that I was bound, that my choice about my service to the High King hadn’t actually been returned to me?
I shoved that thought away as soon as it formed, ashamed to stand before the generations of Hogans who’d fought so fiercely for our family’s freedom. “That damned contract,” I muttered. “I need to see what it says.”
“You would be in the marked minority of witches wanting that,” Jorgen said mildly, once again surprising me. I narrowed my eyes at him, and he gave me a half smile. “We are all the products of our environment, Mistress Belle. There was a time in the human realm where the rule of the coven was law. You might not like it, you might hate working within it, but you never questioned its right to structure your days. Its boundaries were absolute, and your task was only to determine how far you could push those boundaries or circumvent them, not to question the validity of them to exist.”
“Different days,” I muttered, and Jorgen nodded.
“Different days. But each witch eventually returned home to meet her mate and produce a child. I think perhaps that last dictate was what turned your great-grandmother so bitter. She loathed King Orin, that was clear enough, and he threatened her on more than one occasion, though he feared her. But the knowledge that she was destined to deliver a child into a future potentially worse than what she was enduring was, I think, her breaking point. A combination of self-service and service to a child who did not yet exist.”
“Or she could have decided not to have a child,” I pointed out, but Jorgen shook his head.
“The line of Hogan witches will continue unbroken unless death takes one, and the High King is duty bound to keep the witch alive, or at least not orchestrate her death in her own realm. Believe me, there have been times where that rule has been tested.”
“But I thought you said the kings always let them go. Like, that was an ironclad thing.”
Jorgen shrugged. “It wasn’t always the king. Sometimes it was their council, if a king decided he didn’t want to spend even a moment of waning power, or was too jealous of his own offspring and the magic they might experience under a new witch.”
I curled my lip. All this was definitely helping rededicate me to my great-grandmother’s cause. “How did such a line of assholes come to power?”
Jorgen chuckled, spreading his hands over the assembled books. “It takes a certain strength of will to lead in trying times. Not every king rose to power during times of absolute peace, and even those who did were faced with other challenges. And then, of course, there was the ancient threat that slipped and slid behind the walls and through the earth and trees, underneath the mountains and across the watery seas.”
He said the line almost a snippet of a long-lost poem, and I blinked at him.
“The Fomorians have come up before to challenge the high Fae? I thought that was recent.”
“What’s recent is their boldness. But there have been threats before—not so great during the time of the Hogan witch, of course, which is why these tomes all date to eras before the first Hogan came to the realm of the Fae. But the Fomorians’ will to rule is only barely secondary to their will to survive. They are constant in their search to regain their position. They just have never been so successful before.”
He waved a hand, and t
he books fluttered open, each to a different page. “There have been three different attacks from the sea that we can safely say are Fomorian driven, but the last one was centuries ago. Which raises the question, what have they been doing all this time?”
I pulled the nearest book toward me, squinting down at the elegant brushstrokes of the Fae language. “Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like the answer to that question?”
14
Aiden
I stalked down the corridor toward the excited voices, recognizing them only vaguely as cousins or the children of cousins. Laughing, happy, carefree. The way children’s voices should sound—and definitely not the voices I grew up with, the harsh shouts of Fae warriors pressing into battle.
The classroom was full, to my surprise, and as I scanned the faces, I realized I only recognized maybe a quarter of them. Because I had deliberately muted my presence, they didn’t turn to gawk at me, wondering why the High King was poking his head into their fun, but what I saw at the front of the room arrested me all the same.
Young Alaric, the teenage son of my cousin Lena, stood in front of Gwendolyn, one of the djinn teachers who came with the academy. His hands were lifted high, his eyes saucer wide beneath his mop of dark hair, his mouth open in a soft O of surprise as Gwendolyn gestured to a bright circle in front of him, almost a mini portal, though I didn’t think that its purpose was to provide a door into another location—more a window, I suspected. Still powerful magic indeed. Alaric continued to stare at it, rapt, as the djinn turned back to the class, clasping her long-fingered hands at her waist.
“But we can do more than look out into the world. We can change how the world sees us. Perception magic is a type of illusion magic, but it is much more insidious, and therefore much more useful to wield,” Gwendolyn instructed. She was a slender sylph of a djinn, her brown hair in a long plait down her back, her simple cream-colored dress as unassuming as her quiet voice. “An illusion is an outbound casting of an image that can be seen and understood by a multitude. For instance, Amina?”
A second djinn I hadn’t at first noticed stepped forward, drawing the classroom’s attention. She brushed her long blonde hair back over her shoulders, then gave a little goodbye wave. Slowly, inexorably, she disappeared. First her feet, then her legs all the way up to her knees, then the rest of her body up to her chest, until there was nothing but mist and the shoulders and head of the djinn girl, smiling as the students gaped. Then she disappeared altogether.
“Amina is still there, but to every student in the room, she has disappeared,” Gwendolyn said. “This is only a form of illusion magic, though. With enough training, this magic is easily accessible to all of you born of the High King’s line. It is your birthright.”
Excited murmurings broke out across the students, along with a quelling hum. I slanted my glance sideways to see that Lena sat at the back of the room, her eyes bright, but her demeanor stern. My cousin was as beautiful as always, with her dark hair swept back in a complicated weave, her gown a deep, royal purple, but there was no missing her censure. The murmurs broke off. I noticed she also had fixed her gaze on Alaric, who remained at the front of the room, peering into the window that Gwendolyn had etched for him.
Gwendolyn continued. “Perception magic, however, is best tailored specifically to a single individual. It’s more powerful because it is more focused, and it also borrows information from the person you are targeting to help increase the impact of the spell.”
A hand shot up, a young girl with white-blonde hair, who practically bounced in her seat.
“Borrow it how?” she asked breathlessly. “Are you stealing their souls? I read once that other races are afraid of us for that, that that’s how we can make them do what we want.”
I expected Gwendolyn to deny it. I certainly had never used magic such as this. To my surprise, however, she merely tilted her head.
“You are confusing two different tales of Fae and human interaction,” she said, and now she had my full attention—even Alaric turned toward her, finally distracted from his window out into the realm. “The ancient human myths of changelings, where a sickly Fae was exchanged for a human. In order to make the exchange stick, so the fearsome story goes, the Fae steals enough of the human’s personality—their soul, if you will—so that they can carry off the transition smoothly. But the reality is, no Fae would willingly give up their own child in exchange for human. Fae are strong. It’s humans who are frail. They sicken and die. It’s not a good trade. But the other popular story about the humans and Fae is grounded in a bit more truth. The idea of making a wager or a contract with Fae is always a questionable proposition for the human because of perception magic. Making a human see and believe whatever is most expedient, basically. The strongest Fae can use humans’ perceptions against themselves to get a human to do their bidding, or even convince other Fae of an untruth, if they are strong enough.”
“So we cheat?” the same young girl asked, and I gritted my teeth because there was no dismay in her tone, no attachment to the word “cheat” that implied it was wrong or improper. At the back of the classroom, Lena smirked, and another thread of disquiet rolled through me. How much of our nobility we had sacrificed while living in our rarified Fae realm, and had we sacrificed too much?
Gwendolyn, however, shook her head.
“The Fae are often accused of being cheats, but once again, the reality is more complicated than that. The Fae are very careful with their language, and very precise. They understand the beauty and power of words. While some would perceive this as twisting those words to their own purposes, the Fae would respond, and rightfully so, that words are simply words and how they are used is up to those who are doing the talking. So no, the Fae do not cheat. If anything, they are honest to a fault. Their word is their bond, particularly when they are expressing magic spells. This is an important note.”
She scanned the room, her eyes sharpening as she picked me out from the shadows. She could see me, though my own people could not. Something to manage later, but I was more interested in her important note.
“When you are working a spell, all you who are learning magic so eagerly and with such enthusiasm, take a breath, take a moment, take a pause. Your magic is more powerful because you are Fae. The Hogan witches who have come to your land for all these centuries would be the first to tell you that the magic they bring past your borders is strong, but the magic that is created once they teach it to the high family is transformational. It is the blend that makes it so powerful.”
She turned back to Alaric.
“What do you see?” she asked, and he glanced back to the portal, his expression rapt.
“I see a battle, a long-ago battle between the Fae and a group of dark warriors. They’re fighting on an open shoreline, and they’re tall—too tall, too willowy. They don’t look right.”
I gritted my teeth. The Fomorians.
“And…they have guns. So they’re humans, right? Even though they look so strange? We fought humans with guns?”
I froze, but Gwendolyn merely nodded as if this were perfectly natural. She was wrong, though. This was a battle between the Fae and the Fomorians in a realm where guns existed. That meant the human realm alone. But how was that possible? When the Fae and Fomorians fought, it was at the dawn of human warfare. There were no guns yet.
My mind raced. There still were no guns in the Fae realm, nor in the monster realm. We had no need of them when magic would work far better, and the combustive force of the weapons would bring a swarm of retribution, while the quick slice and cut of a blade or arrows would accomplish the deed silently, stealthily, and without the danger of being tracked. Fae couldn’t use guns. Couldn’t, and wouldn’t.
Then again, the creatures in the Riven District, the Luacra, had had weapons I’d never before encountered. Not guns, not exactly, but definitely weapons beyond a spear or arrow.
“And what were you looking for when you peered into the portal? What w
as your desire?” she asked, lifting a hand to touch Alaric on the shoulder.
He turned, color scoring his cheeks. “I wanted to see something that I had not known before about the Fae, about our strengths, our capabilities. I expected to see a battle, but not one in the human realm.”
He turned to her with excited eyes. “Wait, so we fought against actual humans? Even with their guns, we would totally take them down!”
Gwendolyn regarded him patiently. “You have taken them down, and you have also died by their hand. Humans fight differently from Fae, and the Fae are not as strong in the human realm as they are in their own. But there have been times when we have assisted the humans in their battles, though always for a price.”
“A contract,” chimed in the little girl, while my gaze returned to the battleground. Who were these armed Fomorian? How had they escaped their realm to go anywhere, let alone the human realm? And did the Fomorians bring those infernal weapons to the human realm? “We agreed to fight with them or for them or against them, all based on a contract.”
Gwendolyn nodded, but now it was Lena’s turn to jump in. “But what value would a human contract have with the Fae, such that we would actually take up arms and possibly put ourselves at risk?” she asked with the laconic attitude of an elder feeding a student her next lines. I wasn’t fooled, though. Lena was as curious about the answer as I was.
Gwendolyn turned to her. “There have been those within the Fae kingdom who would seek to augment their position in ways that cannot be easily discerned by those around them,” she said.
Or, better stated, that was one of the things she said. It was the thing she said for me to hear. Even as she spoke, her voice split and the second answer came simultaneously, a third right along with it. My head nearly exploded with the receipt of all three answers, and I understood the truth. One was for me, one was for Lena, and the final one was for the students.