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Cover credit at the end

Witchfinder

Sarah A. Hoyt

© 2011 Sarah A. Hoyt

 

His Grace

If anyone were looking closely at the gentleman as he approached the double doors of the  ballroom, it would be noticed that he held himself somewhat stiffly, as though he were excessively careful of all his movements.

The two uniformed footmen exchanged a look before opening the doors.  His grace, the look said, was a trifle disguised.  Which explained his being so late to the ball.  He’d clearly been out drinking and had drunk far too much.

Neither of them would have dared say it was just like His Grace, and – if it came to that – a lot like His Grace’s deceased father, but it was plain that they both thought it.

As his Grace, Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater paused in the doorway, in the full glare of the brilliant magelights positioned all around the walls, all eyes turned his way.

This was not because of the exquisite tailoring of his green evening attire, that showed off his muscular body to great advantage, or even because of his commanding height and stately bearing. That he was possibly the handsomest man in the room, with his thick, raven black hair, aquiline features, and dazzling emerald eyes, was a part of it, as well as the fact that he was His Grace, Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, one of the oldest and most prestigious magical houses in the kingdom, not to say in the world.

But the real reason his entrance gained the attention of all in the room was because this party was being held in his honour, and he was unfashionably late. His mother had almost given up all hope of his appearance, as had his betrothed, Lady Honoria Blythe.

The betrothal had as yet to be formalized but everyone present expected the announcement to be made sometime approaching midnight. Whispers that he planned to cry off had already traversed the room.

After a pause that was so silent it appeared as though the orchestra had stopped playing – which it certainly hadn’t — the conversation and dancing resumed. Darkwater walked into the room, still moving with exaggerated care, reached for a glass from a tray held high by a passing footman, and tossed the champagne back in one swift move.

From across the room, his mother saw it and flinched.  The Dowager Duchess of Darkwater was a petite woman.  Her mother had been French, and Lady Barbara showed it in her small oval face, her dark eyes, her clearly marked, arched eyebrows, and in a certain air which spoke of a quick temper, quickly tamped down.

She approached her errant son, maintaining every appearance of outward calm, even if her gaze couldn’t help but reproach his lateness and his state.

“Really Seraphim!” she said as soon as she could be sure of not being heard by other people. “After I have gone to such trouble putting on this ball for you, the least you could do is arrive in a timely manner. Dearest Honoria has withstood it all without a crack in her perfect demeanour, but I have been ready to faint from anxiety.”

Darkwater glanced across the room to where Lady Honoria stood, the picture of poise and elegance. She smiled at him, a calm smile that showed no emotion at all, neither anger nor relief, neither disdain nor caring. He sent her a stilted bow and a smile that gave as little away as her own. “She is to be commended for her good sense,” he replied. “And you, Mama, are to be commended for not fainting. That would have set the tabbies’ tongues wagging.”

His mother clutched his arm and he winced and reeled a little, as though the force of her small hand clasping his sleeve were enough to unsettle his carefully guarded poise. “Seraphim – tell me you are happy with this match. If you are not, you should not go through with it. There is time to back out now, without injuring Honoria or the Darkwater pride.”

“Back out?” he asked as he stepped away from her. “Why should I want to do that?”

“Because you are not in love with her. I had always wanted a love match for you, not to see you give yourself up to increase the family fortune. Our magic is still strong, and with your brother’s new inventions, our fortunes will rally.”

“Father expected otherwise,” said Darkwater curtly. “An alliance between Ainsling’s Arcana and Blythe Blessings was the old Duke’s greatest dream.” He reached for a sparkling crystal glass from another passing tray. “Love is a fairy story, at any rate.”

“So instead you drink yourself blind?” asked his mother. “You are making a good job of hiding it, but I can see you are unsteady on your feet.”

“Hardly, Mother.  Please do not fret.”  Almost reeling, he managed to visibly exert utmost control upon his rebellious body, bowed politely to his mother, and turned to cross the room. “If you will excuse me, I believe Honoria is entitled to at least one dance with me.”

Seeing him bow to Honoria and offer his hand to be enveloped in her cool, gloved little one, his mother could but clench her two hands together.  What she had endured from her husband – his careless disregard for her and her position – only she knew.  She had exerted her discretion, her pride, the very last shreds of the love that had once drawn her into an unadvisable marriage, to keep her husband’s missteps secret.

His debts at the gaming tables, she’d covered without a word, his frequent inebriation, she’d hid by talking of his “complaint”, his mistresses she’d paid off, his byblows, she’d taken care to set in the way of good positions, his children she’d borne without complaint.

And all that time, her one consolation had been that neither Seraphim, nor his ten-year younger brother, Michael, nor even her single surviving daughter, Caroline, Michael’s twin, showed the slightest tendency to imitate their father.  Michael was perhaps the steadiest of them all – his mind given very early over to the perfecting of magic and the creation of magical engines to improve daily life.

But Seraphim, though a rather more spirited boy, forever climbing trees and riding out on horses that were too impetuous for any other rider, had shown early enough a tendency to assume responsibility for the family, and to respect the worth and importance of his title and position.

Only in the last a year and a half, it had all fallen apart.  Rumors of his wild gaming and wenching, his wild living, his pride in his riding and shooting prowess – a prowess no one else could see a shred of – had reached even the ears of his mother.

No one had asked her to settle his debts.  Yet.  No one had laughed openly about his mistaken pride in his physical abilities.  Yet.  No light skirt or edge born baby had sought her protection.  Yet.

But in that ballroom, watching her son hold himself too stiffly and carefully, Lady Barbara Ainsling, Dowager Duchess of Darkwater felt much like Sisyphus, who, having pushed the rock up the slope sees it rolling back again.

Seraphim, his early character not withstanding, was turning into a copy of his father.

Two Brothers

Darkwater lay sprawled across a low chaise in his dressing room.  By the wavering light of two mage globes fixed on either side of the mirror  above his dressing table, he looked like the picture of debauch.  With his coat – tailored to a nicety to fit his broad shoulders and narrow waist like a second skin – unbuttoned;  his curls – in wild disarray –  framing his pale, sweaty face, he presented a most disreputable aspect.

No one who saw him now would doubt the rumours that he’d been drinking heavily before the ball  at which his engagement to Lady Honoria Blythe was to be announced.  And no one would doubt that this was the reason the announcement had not, in fact, been made.  And by morning the tongues would spread everywhere the story that one or the other of them meant to cry off.

Right then, the Duke was thinking nothing about the rumours, or how he looked.  His mind was dark, his breath coming in fast gasps, his brow creased with a pain he had not allowed anyone in the ballroom to suspect.

When he spoke to his attendant, who was rummaging through the drawers of the dressing table, his voice was little more than a croak, animated by no more energy than could be provided by extreme pain.  “Penny, curse you.  Can you not set about it?”

The valet spared him a look over his shoulder, gracing Darkwater with a frown that was much like his own.  In fact, Gabriel Penn – whom only His Grace dared call Penny – was well known to be a byblow of his Grace the former duke, a full year to the day before Seraphim’s birth.

That the two had been brought up together almost as true brothers, and that Penny was now the trusted confidant and closest servant to his grace showed Lady Barbara’s forbearance and her unusual turn of mind.  Or perhaps, some said, it just showed that she knew a high magical power when she saw it, and thought it best not to have Gabriel run wild and untrained amid tenants and farmers.

“I’m shifting as fast as I can Duke,” he threw impatiently in Seraphim’s direction.  Though in public he called him His Grace and showed him every respect, in private he took liberties no one who knew Seraphim’s stiff-necked propriety would believe.  He called Darkwater Duke or Seraphim, or occasionally, you damned fool.  Right then he said the first as if he meant the last, and added, “Because if you think that coat is coming off without being slit, you’re a fool.  And more of a fool for having squeezed yourself into it and gone out there to the ball, instead of calling me to you first.”

Seraphim gave a gurgle that might have been an attempt at laughing.  “I couldn’t disappoint Honoria or humiliate her that way.”

“What I think of your Honoria…” Penn said, turning with a sharp razor in his hand, and cutting the sleeve of Seraphim’s coat with a skill that showed he’d often done just that.

“No one has asked you,” Seraphim said, in the blighting tone that never worked on Penn.

This time, though, Penn did not answer him, as his cutting away of the coat, revealed not only a blood soaked sleeve, but a mass of ill-wrapped bandages – all of them equally tinted blood-red.

The stain, as he pulled away the remnants of the coat and tossed them, showed itself to continue all across the Duke’s shoulder and over-spread his chest.

“Seraphim!” Penn said, as he cut away the shirt and the bandages, to reveal two jagged, irregular cuts, one extending all the way up the arm, almost to the shoulder, deep enough to show the glimmering whiteness of bones in its depths, and the other starting at the shoulder and stopping just short of the heart.

“My ribs deflected it,” Seraphim said.  “It was my heart the villain was aiming for.  Spelled dagger.”

Penn set his lips tight, in something that might be anger or concern.  His countenance, always white like Seraphim’s, had gone two shades paler, so that even his lips appeared to be glaring white under the mage lights.  He swallowed and nodded, as if he were swallowing the reproaches he would normally have made.  His concern showed in his creased forehead and in the depths of the green eyes both of them had inherited from their common father.

Turning, he rummaged in the drawers again.  A quick question of “I suppose you couldn’t close it magically?”

“No,” Seraphim said.  His voice had devolved into a whisper. His good hand clenched the arm of the chair so hard that its knuckles shone white.  “I told you it was a magical dagger.”

Penn nodded and set on the dressing table certain articles that even the duke’s mother would be very surprised to know were always kept in its drawers: needle; catgut thread; ligatures and lint.

From a smaller table nearby, where it sat next to the annotated volume of Plato’s republic which Darkwater had been reading before the alarm had called him away, he grabbed the bottle of brandy and, as if as an afterthought, a large glass.

He splashed the brandy liberally into the glass and handed it to the Duke, saying with unwonted force, “Drink.”

“After all the champagne I had in there, my dear Penny?” Darkwater rasped.  “I shall be disguised.”

“Good,” Penn said.

Darkwater raised his eyebrows, but tossed back the brandy without further comment.  Penn had kept the bottle of brandy uncapped, and now set the top down on the table.  Possessing himself of Darkwater’s hand, he stretched the duke’s arm, leaving his wound exposed and up-turned.

“Must you?”

“If it’s a magical wound,” Penn said.  “Magic won’t close it or disinfect it.  We don’t need you being carried off in a fever.  You take care not to rouse the house.”

“Have no fear,” Darkwater said, turning his head away.

Indeed, as Penn poured the caustic liquid along the open wound, then splashed a like amount into the chest wound, only a very faint complaint escaped his Grace’s mouth.  This was probably because he had taken the care of muffling any possible screams with his good arm.  And, as Penn returned the now half-empty bottle to its stand, only the red marks of Darkwater’s own teeth on his wrist showed what effort it had taken.

Penn said nothing, as he set about threading the needle.

Only as he started to sew the ragged edges of the wounds together, did he speak.  “I can,” he said.  “Put a pain reducing spell on it.  As soon as I’m done.  Not before, or it will retard the healing.”

Seraphim nodded, then spoke, in a bewildered tone.  “It was a trap.  There were, according to my…”  He swallowed.  “My foreseeing showed a boy and a girl, about six years of age, first coming into magical powers, and being condemned to death for them.  I tried to… intercept… but there was a trap.  And no children.”

“What world?” Penn asked.

“Oh, the pyramids,” Seraphim said and tried to shrug, before letting out a faint moan.

The pyramids was, if Penn remembered, the world where they sacrificed children with magical powers to their barbarous blood-gods.  He didn’t remember what the cartographers of their own world called it.  Possibly something inspired like 435-65-A.

Most the Earths, spread out along the magical continuum of several universes, blocked from each other only by the thinnest of energy veils, called themselves Earth.  And most of them thought they were quite unique – the only Earth in the only universe, inhabited by the only humans.  Avalon, their own Earth, knowing there were many had given itself that name.  Legend maintained that it was the oldest of the Earths, the one from which all the earths had fractured away, when Merlin had been captured and imprisoned.  The occluding of his world-encompassing power had caused magic itself to fracture and the Earth to copy itself over and over – most of the copies retaining no magic, and those that did retain it often undertaking to forbid it.

Avalon citizens were not allowed to travel to other worlds.  King Arthur XXVII had confirmed the prohibition first instituted centuries ago.  Even the kidnapping of the princess Royal — the only child of the king — out of her cradle, when Seraphim himself was a nurseling, presumed to have been a plot from another world,  hadn’t lifted the prohibition.

And because the cartographers’ designations didn’t suit his mind, Seraphim gave names of his own coining to those worlds to which he travelled routinely in an attempt to save from death as many magicians and witches as possible,.  There was Pyramids and Swamp – which was not one, but a foetid world mired in superstition and covered in vermin – Slum and Desert and – for a particularly noxious world – Madhouse.

Penn frowned.  “”An ambush!  They know of you then!”

“Yes.  No.  I don’t know.  I suspect they don’t know who I am, nor where I came from.  I suspect they were simply trying to stop the rescues…”

“Enough to set a trap?  And interfere with your foreseeing?  Take care Duke.”

Seraphim made a noncommital sound, in the back of his throat and, seeing that Penn had finished sewing his wounds, he sat up straighter.  “Give me a shirt and a coat… the… green one,” he said.

Penn cast a doubtful eye at him.  “You can’t mean to go back to the ball.”

“Of course I can.  I must.  An announcement must be made by midnight.”

Penn cast a curious look over the Duke.  Seraphim looked pale but composed, but– Almost without thinking, Gabriel raised his hand, and cast a pain-dimming spell over Darkwater.  He could see Seraphim’s features relax almost immediately and he looked easier, as he stood.

“At least let me help you wash,” Penn said.  “You reek of brandy.”

Darwater chuckled.  “So long as they think I’m such a desperate drunk as to come to my apartments for brandy before resuming the ball, they won’t suspect what I’m really doing.”

Penn clicked his tongue, as he wrapped Seraphim’s arm and shoulder in a thin layer of bandages.  “Take care Seraphim.  One day you’ll go a bridge too far.”

But he helped Seraphim into his shirt and coat, and removed his watch and accoutrements from the pocket of his ruined coat.

As he passed them to the duke, Darkwater’s pocket watch emitted a loud whine, which almost caused Penn to drop it.

Darkwater reached for it, swiftly, with his good hand, and flicked it open.  He swore under his breath.  “Pyramids.  Give me my crystal ball, Penn.”

“Your Grace,” Penn said, using both the title and the tone of deference he rarely used except in public, and continuing, in tight-lipped, scolding tones.  “You cannot mean to go rescuing anyone right now.  You could barely rescue yourself!”

“My crystal ball, Penn, and do me the favour of being quiet.”

The Foundling

“Miss, Miss,” the cracked voice of the landlady called from outside Nell Felix’s lodging.

It wavered, breaking on the high pitches and making an awful descant to the pounding of the landlady’s impatient fist on the door.  Like cats mating inside drums, Nell thought, and her little, dark face, which was rather like a cat’s itself, twisted in an expression of distaste, as she put her long-fingered hands over her ears.  She leaned forward toward the complex chalk drawings on her floor and the bowl of water placed in the middle of them.   Lord Siddel had told her to find what Seraphim Ainsling was up to.  But he must be using some magical protection, because it was easier said than done.  So far the bowl had shown her no more than a murky fog with occasional glimpses of blood and cut flesh.  And while this didn’t reassure her that his Grace of Darkwater was on the right side of the law, it was hardly an indictment.

“Miss Felix.  Miss!”  The pounding and the voice, each competing – and somehow managing – to be louder than the other penetrated the ineffective barrier of Nell’s hands and shattered her concentration. The wavering image she’d been able to conjure in the water – of a green jacket seemingly bobbing about mid-air – vanished all together, leaving nothing but water and cheap china.  Cracked cheap china, Nell thought, noticing the chip out of the side and the wandering crack that descended like a yellow scribble towards the center of the bowl.  “Yes, Mrs. Sharyl,” she said.  “I am coming.”

The screaming did stop, but the pounding continued, if more subdued now, a tap, tap, tap, as though to remind Nell the landlady was waiting.  Not that I’m likely to forget, Nell thought, as she got up and strode across the room to the door, being careful not to step on any of the chalk lines.  She was careful too to make sure her body obscured Mrs. Sharyl’s view of the floor.  Not that witchcraft was illegal or even uncommon – though more uncommon in the lower classes, of course – in Avalon, but the landlady was the type of person to worry about the floorboards.

Mrs. Sharyl stood squarely in the middle of the landing outside Nell’s room.  It would have been difficult to stand any other way, since the landing was hardly large enough to contain her.  Not that she was fat.  No, she was square.  A short, blockish woman, with the sort of build that led one to believe in a past life she had been a clock.  The way she clicked her tongue also sounded much like a clock ticking.

She turned boiled-gooseberry eyes up to Nell, then gave her a careful once over, from head to toe, doubtless taking in the well-tailored skirt and the irreproachable black jacket.  “Dressed to go out, are you miss?” she said.  “And I hope you’re not intending to go for weeks, and the rent already overdue?”

“No,” Nell said.  “I meant to go out for a moment only.”  She regretted not for the first time that she couldn’t tell the truth: places to go, people to spy on.   “On some… errands.  But I will have your rent for you when I return.”  I’d better have it, at least Sidell is not so dumb as to forget it is unadvisable to delay paying your secret operatives.

Mrs. Sharyl bent her head, momentarily, under the weight of this promise, but rattled back into it, game as a pebble, “Only last time you said that, you left for three weeks.”

“I always pay,” Nell said, pressing her lips together and allowing her face to show the mingled impatience and annoyance she felt.

“Yes, miss, but as I own the rooms, and I need to have the pay regular, else how can I meet my own bills?”

“I will do my best,” Nell said, putting on the airs she had learned tended to bring these tirades to an abrupt conclusion.  And then, to reinforce the idea, “I was about to go see my father.”

“Oh,” The landlady said, and her face showed a cunning sort of curiosity.  “His lordship is in town, then?”

Nell only nodded, preserving the sort of distance and secret that the landlady would doubtless expect if Nell were in fact the by blow of a nobleman.  Which she might well be, for all she knew, since, having been left on the doorstep of the Holy Grace convent in Paris, as a newborn, she knew neither mother nor father.  But Mrs. Sharyl had once seen Nell with Mr. Sidell and assumed he was Nell’s father and their relationship a great secret.  It always shocked Nell how little effort was necessary to tell people lies.  They much preferred to tell lies to themselves.

She didn’t exactly despise Mrs. Sharyl for assuming that Nell was of noble blood – she despised her for the reasons she gave for assuming so: that Nell’s features were delicately formed, her hands and feet small and her ankles elegant.  In many worlds, Nell had seen just those features in dirt-poor peasants.  And if I had a sovereign for every fat, blobby princess I’ve known, she thought.  I’d be wealthier than the king.  But there would never be a way of convincing the Mrs. Sharyls of that fact.

“Well, if you’re seeing your father, Miss,” the landlady said, with the sort of sigh more rooted on her despairing of knowing all than in her fear of not getting paid.

“Indeed I am,” Nell said.  “Now, if you’ll excuse me and give me some time, I must write a letter to take with me.”

Before the woman could say A letter, Miss? And try to figure out what the letter would say and to whom it would be addressed, a query that Nell saw all too plainly in her eyes, Nell shut the door in her face, and returned to her work.

Perhaps I drew the right-reverse spiral too wobbly, she thought, doubtfully, as she stared at the drawing on the floor.  She twirled her fingers in her hair, rendering it what Mrs. Sharyl would doubtlessly consider a completely inappropriate coiffure for a gently reared female.

Kneeling down, she erased part of the spiral, then drew it again, slightly differently.  Then she picked the bowl and stared, again, at the vague picture of a green jacket floating midair.

She had to see clearly.  She made passes midair and tried to concentrate.  Seraphim Ainsling.  What was the foolish man doing?  He worried Siddel far too much for it to be innocent.  Siddel had a second sense about these things.

Seraphim Ainsling.  She remembered his haughty expression, his aquiline profile from a party at which he had resolutely looked through her.

Her fingers ran through her hair again.  Right.  The Duke of Darkwater.  I am beneath his notice.  If town rumor was right, he was getting engaged to Lady Honoria Blythe of Blythe Blessings.  An Earl’s daughter.

His profile was now firmly in her mind, the green eyes looking at her intently, and she stared at the water bowl again and saw him clearly, wearing the green jacket, and holding up a pocket watch, and saying the final words of a magical formula.

Too late, she realized what the formula was.  A transport spell.  Far too late, she realized she’d let her mind get enmeshed in it and in his magic.

There was a flash; a magical blast that hit her like a punch midbody.  And then she felt the transport spell pull her through the betweener and into a destination not of her choosing.

Her bowl of water fell and cracked apart, erasing all her careful chalk markings.

The Lion, The Witch and The Pyramids

Seraphim looked at his watch, and then at his crystal ball.  They were not strictly necessary.  It was possible to use only one or the other.  But the one thing his father’s diaries had taught him was that it was never a good idea to rely only on one method.  And Seraphim, rushing to the last alarm, had found that relying only on the watch might be the last thing he did.

The Others were perhaps no more cunning than himself, but they were infinitely better armed, and there were more of them and they would have more magicians who could fake better alarms.  And that was without counting the legitimate agents of his majesty, whose job it was to enforce laws forbidding citizens of Avalon from traveling abroad and who had once or twice come close to catching Papa.  They too must be looking for Seraphim.

Seraphim got the coordinates of the talent at risk from the watch he’d inherited from his father, then tried to raise an image in his crystal ball to corroborate it, but all he could see was the shadow of his valet, standing determinedly between the light and the crystal ball.  He obscured the light magic could use to form images.

“Penny, for the love of God–” Seraphim said, half in exasperation.

“No.  You are in no fit state.  You should not be standing up, much less going on a rescue mission where you might get stabbed again.”  Penny squeezed his lips into a thin line.  “Or worse.”

Seraphim clenched his lips tight.  He wanted very much to answer, but he tried to avoid being rude to Penny.  Penny could not answer in kind, and that made it churlish of the Duke to abuse him.  “We were not put in this world… in any world,” he said.  “To take our ease while innocents die.”  Realizing he’d just repeated something his father had written in his diary, very shortly before his father had committed suicide, Seraphim suppressed a shudder.

“There is a dire difference, Seraphim, between taking your ease and risking yourself foolishly.  I beg you to consider what will become of your mother, your sister and your brothers should you–”

Before he could finish, a scratching at the door was followed by Lady Barbara’s voice.  “Seraphim?  I would have a word with you.”

Seraphim looked at the basin filled with bloody water, the discarded, blood soaked garments, the evidence of his injury strewn around the room, then his eyes met Penny’s, and he realized that Penny’s thoughts had followed the same trend.  “No,” Penny’s lips formed, though he didn’t say it aloud.  “I will make your excuses.”

The valet went to the door and opened it.  Seraphim heard him speak in a low voice, and could imagine what he was saying.  His Grace is indisposed and other such rot designed to make Mama think that Seraphim had passed out.  He heard Mama say once, impatiently, “Penn, he can’t be that–” followed by a renewed flood of Penny’s words in a sensible, persuasive tone.

What Seraphim should be doing was clearing the room of evidence of his injury and then attending to his Mama.  But there was someone in need.  Someone who would probably be killed without his intervention.  He looked at his watch.  It was very definite about someone in need of his help on Pyramids, someone with a very high magical talent and too ignorant to shield it.  He didn’t know how the watch worked.  It had been created by his papa, possibly before Seraphim’s birth.  But he did know that it was rarely wrong.  And that The Pyramids was a horrible world to have magical talent in.  They put to death anyone who revealed talent or shape shifting ability as soon as it was detected, and their thaumaturgic police was ruthlessly efficient.

But sometimes the alarms had a safety margin built in.  Even in Pyramids, a few hours, a few days might pass before the new talent was spotted, and a couple of hours would give him enough time to go to the ball, announce his engagement, plead fatigue, and return to his room.  Then he could go to Pyramids at his leisure.

He looked at the crystal ball, taking advantage of Penny not being there to obscure it, and he concentrated all his attention on it and on seeing the person at risk.

A breath, two, his eyes crossed and the lights and shadows arranged themselves into coherent images: a young boy running, pursued by …  Royal Thaumaturgic guards in their dark green uniforms.  They carried magic guns, the discharge from which would severely wound or maim anyone with magical talent.  To shifters they were outright lethal.

Seraphim cursed under his breath.  Then, with Penny’s murmurs growing more urgent by the door, he started to say the transport spell that would take him to Pyramids, hurriedly as he must perforce do, if he was going to be out of here before his mother forced her way in the door, or before Penny realized what was happening.

Just as he said the capstone word that closed the spell and activated it, he felt some other magic touch his.

With the awful feeling that this was yet another trap, he tried to unsay the last word, but its echoes in the air could not be called back.

He heard Penny scream, “Seraphim, you bloody fool!” and his mother gasp, “Seraphim” and then he was hurtling through cold and burning hot, and landing on his face in hot sand.

Breath was knocked out of his body.  He blinked, hard, at the bright light of sun on sand, and thought that at least this looked and felt like Pyramids.

And then someone fell on him.

She must have knocked him unconscious.  At least, later, he would think that, because all he remembered was the horrible pain to his chest and arm, as a heavy body fell on him, and then – some undefinable time later – being aware of soft feminine hands pulling at his arms.  It renewed the infernal pain in his injured shoulder and arm, but he concentrated on her face, which was small, dark and panicked.

“Oh, please, don’t tell me I killed you,” she was saying.

He felt as though he would throw up, but controlled it with all his might, and managed to say in something that passed for a creditably steady voice, “Don’t be ridiculous.  I’m not that easy to kill.”  And then, somewhat more sharply, “Please stop shaking me.”

“You must move,” she said.  She glanced over her shoulder.  “Or the lion will get us.”

“Lion?” he said.  The surprise carried him into sitting up and looking in the same direction she’d glanced.  And there was a lion.  A young lion, whose huge paws and skinny sides betrayed it was nowhere fully grown.  But the tawny eyes looking out at Seraphim betrayed intelligence and fear no lion had ever known.  And the light around the animal’s head was the power glow of a magical creature.  The boy, Seraphim realized.  He was not a witch, but a shape shifter.  Of course, those were even more feared.

“It’s not a lion,” he said.  “Merely a boy in lion shape.”  And standing up, he extended a hand, hoping the child was enough in control of his feelings not to act like the wild animal whose shape he’d taken.  He spoke, clearly, loudly.  “I am here to rescue you.  I mean you no harm.”

In the tawny eyes confusion and fear played out against a strange sort of hope.  The lion lowered its head and looked poised to walk toward Seraphim, when a voice called out, “Stop in the name of the king.  You are harboring a dangerous fugitive and our instruments indicate you are practitioners of illegal magics yourselves.  Surrender now and we will be merciful.”

Seraphim barely had the time to jump out of the way as the boy dove to hide behind Seraphim.  As for the woman, she tried to take a step in front of Seraphim, even though her eyes showed panic fear.  “Who are they,” she said, as Seraphim gently pushed her out of the way.  “What do they want?”

“What passes for law in this miserable land,” he said, pulling from the pocket his own magical, charmed stick.  “And they want to kill us.”

“What? Why–”

“No time to explain,” he said.  He looked around.  They were on a parched red plane, strewn with boulders and intercut by pyramids.  The pyramids, built in steps, were temples to gods that forbid magic, the same guards to whom magic users were sacrificed.  The soldiers’ promise of clemency was a hollow one.  Whether they were shot multiple times with the painful magic-blighting weapons of the soldiers, or the soldiers captured them and bound them hand and foot to take them to the pyramid and sacrifice, there was no way to avoid pain.  Except, perhaps…  “Can you say the transport spell?” he asked.  “Have you enough power on your own, without attaching to mine?”  He glanced quickly over his shoulder at her.  “Yes, I can see that you have.  Start saying the spell for Avalon, and center on the point I departed from.  Include me and the child-shifter.”

As he heard her say the first words of the spell, he looked around, and found – by the magical brilliance – a soldier hidden behind a nearby boulder.  Seraphim shot towards it, then towards another one near it.  The magical power found its mark, once, causing a man to scream.  As long as he had charge, he could keep them at bay.

He wished the stranger would hurry up with the spell.  And that she wouldn’t betray him and take him to captivity.

At the last moment he wondered for whom she was working.  Hitching on his spell had been no accident, that much was sure.  But was she an agent of the Others?  Or of his majesty the king?

The Trouble With Heros

Seraphim Darkwater could feel the spell assemble behind him, tendril by tendril, with a sure hand.  The woman’s magic was odd.  Avalon in origin.  He’d swear to that. In the last year he’d come across enough power from other worlds to identify the markers of Avalon.  But the magic had odd overlays, as though she’d learned it in some barbarous, ignorant place and had reinvented the whole discipline from the ground up.

A part of him, the part that had been a studious young man, rivaling the knowledge of many of his professors at Cambridge when it came to history and theory of magic, wanted to turn around and watch her cast the spell, while the strands of magic were woven in the air.  But he could not.  Seraphim had been trained – born – to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves that was what his great position meant.  His mother, his nannies, his professors, all had told him that his great wealth and power were to be used to protect others.  None of them had said he was only supposed to protect those in his world or his domains.  So these people were his to protect and right now, he was the only one in possession of a mage-charged stick.

He shot at a soldier running towards him from behind a rock.  Then he shot again.  And again until he hit the man, who screamed and fell, spasming a little as the magic charge hit him.

The soldier wouldn’t die.  Seraphim never charged his mage sticks a lethal amount, mostly because he never knew when the people he might defend himself against might be the agents of his majesty the king, enforcing the just laws of Great Britain in his native world.  A lot could be forgiven a high born and high spirited young man, even minor assault on an officer of the Empire.  But, should he let those high spirits carry him so far as to commit murder, that would be a trespass too far.

As the man fell, twitching and spasming, Seraphim stepped back.  And all at once he realized two things.  The man had been a decoy, likely a volunteer sent to run at his mage stick and keep him fully occupied as a party of guardsmen sneaked behind and around the rocks to his left.  Now he caught a glimpse of golden braid in the gaudy uniforms, and realized they were too near, and there were two many of them.  And one of them was pointing a magical gun at them, of the type that could disable witches and warlocks, but could kill shifters.  The boy-shifter.  Seraphim must protect him.

He turned around. There were too many of them for his stick to be an effective defense, so he must take them out of here, and take them out fast.

The woman behind him had set up almost the entire spell.  Only the capstone lacked, and the coordinates.  Perhaps she couldn’t have set the coordinates from his arrival.  Perhaps her odd learning hadn’t taught her that.  Or perhaps it was all part of a plan to trap him.  Seraphim didn’t know, and, right then, he couldn’t care.  Instead, he poured his own magic into the working, and set the capstone on it, with the coordinates of his bedroom, coordinates as familiar to him as the back of his own hand, or the sound of his own voice.

The portal opened – gaping – and Seraphim, realizing the impossibility of throwing a lion through it, poured more of his magic at the young shifter to make him shift back into human, out of the lion form.  The child shifted and twisted, writhing and moaning in the pain of changing bones and flesh, all at a speed that would never happen naturally.

Barely had the boy

s form stabilized, and Seraphim was grabbing his skinny arms and throwing him, bodily through the portal.  Seraphim knew, in doing so he was hurting his own shoulder and arm, but he couldn’t feel pain yet.  Or anything but the urgency of getting them all through the portal and onto safe territory.  Through the portal he could glimpse Gabriel and hear faint echoes of his talking to the boy.

Seraphim reached for the woman.  She stepped back from him.  “No,” she said.  “You go first.”

“They have magic guns,” Seraphim said, keeping his voice restrained, but letting urgency leak through.  “They are near-lethal.  You go, then I after you.”

But she shied away from him, tried to step in between him and the moving ambush.  Stupid on her part.  She wasn’t armed.  He took a deep breath and mentally apologized to his mother and to his nanny who had taught him that a woman’s body was sacred and not to be touched without permission.  Then he grabbed her by the waist and, deftly avoiding her kicking feet and ignoring her voice saying, “Let me go,” he tossed her to the portal and – as far as he could see through his sweat-stung eyes, more or less on top of Gabriel.

The portal wouldn’t stay open much longer.  But it didn’t need to.  Seraphim leapt towards it.

The ray of the magic gun hit him in the shoulder.  Pain shot through his body, seized his mind.  His body shuddered, one long shudder, as his heart seemed to lose the rhythm of its accustomed beats.  He heard a hoarse scream, and was sure it was his.

The fall across the threshold of the portal, one half on either side, jarred his shoulder further.  He gritted his teeth against the chattering that threatened to bite his tongue in half.  He forced his shivering, shuddering body to obey him.  He ignored the pain that coursed through his veins like fire and bit at his nerves like the edge of a well-sharpened sword.

The portal was going to close.  He must get into one world or the other, or his body would get sliced in half and end up one half in each reality.  He must crawl across the portal and to the safety of his room.

For long moments, his body did not obey him.  His hands made frantic motions, but failed to push against the ground, his knees wouldn’t stay under him.  it took a superhuman effort to get them under control, to get them to pull him along the floor. He pulled himself forward one step.  Two.

He felt hands at his ankles, and heard a triumphant scream from behind.  He didn’t turn to look.  He could feel the portal starting to close.  He keened with frustration and told himself he would not cry.  He would die as a man.

From the fog clouding his senses, somewhere ahead of him, he heard a woman’s voice say, “Oh, please, you must help him.”

And he heard Gabriel’s familiar voice say, “Damn you Duke,” then. “Here, take this mage stick.  Lay into them at will.”

Seraphim tried to reach for the mage stick, but he couldn’t even see it, and his hand would not obey him, and he could feel the mage-field of the portal pressing against his middle.

Then strong, warm hands grabbed his hand and pulled.  Seraphim screamed as the pain to his shoulder increased a hundred fold.

Then darkness engulfed him.

The Price of Heroism

Nell hated heros.  Years ago, when he’d first taken her from Earth, Antoine had told her that he despised heros who were men who would give themselves airs, and throw themselves in the breach with great pomp and circumstance, for the pleasure of pinning medals on themselves, no matter how many people died for their glory.

Her fury and surprise at Seraphim’s taking the spell from her and putting his own capstone on it was nothing compared to her fury at his insisting on her stepping through first and on protecting her with his body.  Why would he do that when he didn’t even know her?  If it was a bid for her gratitude, it was a foolish one.  She would never again, that easily, feel indebted to a man for the services he claimed to have performed for her. And her months in Avalon, chafing against the arrogance of noblemen and gentry, made her want to scream at his assumed gallantry.

None of this was improved by his throwing her bodily across the portal and on top of a tall man in neat, understated attire.  Disentangling herself from the man who blushed furiously as he looked past her at the portal with an horrified expression, she didn’t see Seraphim hit.

But when she turned around, there was no doubt he’d been hit by a magic gun.

She’d never seen one of these in action.  They were illegal in Avalon, and of course, of no use at all on Earth.  Or at least not that anyone knew.  But she’d heard of them, and Sidell had once shown her a confiscated cache of them and described their effects.  She could still hear him in her mind as he told her how the gun would kill a shifter at the barest touch, but was survivable to a mage, provided he or she was in good shape and got treatment immediately.

Only Seraphim wasn’t getting treatment.  He was fallen half across the portal, whose shifting light indicated it was about to close.  Around his body shimmered the blue-yellow lights of a disturbed magical pattern, as clearly visible to her mage-sight as his outstretched hands scrabbling in vain at the oaken floorboards.

He made inhuman grunts that seemed like the result of effort beyond his capacity.  All the while – and it seemed forever to Nell – the man on whom she’d fallen, stood there, his arms akimbo, staring, his mouth open, at the duke about to get sliced in half by a portal.

Seraphim’s hands found purchase at last, and he pulled himself, a tiny amount into the room, and then the men on the other side reached him, grabbed his ankles, and pulled him back far more than he’d pulled himself forward.  She had heard of those step pyramids in that world.  She’d heard they performed sacrifices there.  And besides, they’d shot him.

She found her hands were beating frantically at the impassive arm of the motionless man near her, “Oh, help him.  You must save him.”

As though her words had rushed him to action, he stared at the scene before him, and said in a tone of true rancor, “Damn you, Duke.”

When he reached into his vest and pulled out a mage stick, Nell had a moment of frozen certainty that he was going to shoot Darkwater.  But the man handed her the stick instead, and said, even as he bent down to grasp Seraphim’s hands, “Lay it into them, good and hard.”

She obeyed, almost without thinking, mowing down the soldiers grabbing Seraphim’s ankles and feet, while the stranger pulled the duke into the room by his hands.  A guardsman from the other world tried to plunge in just behind, but Nell shot him with a bolt of magic, and he fell back twitching.  None too soon, as her mage stick was spent.

She let it drop from a nerveless hand and turned– To see the stranger taking a knife to the Duke.  The sound of his voice saying “Damn you Duke,” came to her.  She didn’t pause to think or to consider the consequences of her actions.  She raised a foot, high, and only slightly hampered by the dress and under dress kicked with all her might at the knife wielding hand.  The knife went flying, and Nell dropped back, hands raised, ready to grab furniture or books or something to defend herself.  Or to send a magic spell against the man, when he came after her.

He didn’t come after her.  He didn’t even seem to notice her at all, though he looked dismayed when the knife went flying from his hand, and he shook his hand, once, twice, as though to rid himself of pain.

But then the took his hands to the duke’s coat, and pulled.  The coat tore down the front, to reveal a shirt all covered in blood.  And Nell realized the man had been about to cut Seraphim’s clothes away from him, so he could minister to the duke.  At the same time, the realization hit her that this stranger looked a great deal like the duke and might very well be one of his brothers, though Nell had believed his brother was much younger.

She walked to where the knife had fallen, by a blue-velvet covered table stacked high with books, and noted without giving it much thought, that the covering was a little lifted and anxious eyes were peeping from under it.  The eyes were familiar.  It was the boy-lion.

Without a word to him, she retrieved the knife and walked back to the man kneeling by the duke and now trying, ineffectually, to tear the blood soaked shirt.  She handed it to him, handle first, and he said, “Thank you, Miss.”

She watched him cut the shirt to reveal, beneath it, a chest cris-crossed in ligatures.  The man said, under his breath, “Oh, the damn fool,” and Nell found herself agreeing.  Only a fool or a madman would take it upon himself to go into another world and get into a fight when he had suffered what appeared to be very serious injuries.  And most injuries were serious in Avalon, whose magic could at the same time perform healing feats that would startle Earth, and be totally ineffective against infections.  People might regrow an  amputated limb, but they would surely die of the infection, if the amputating instrument hadn’t been properly sterilized.  And she doubted the implement had been properly sterilized before it had made those gashes, now revealed on the Duke’s chest and shoulder, as the stranger cut his ligatures off.

“I…  Is there anything–” she was about to ask if there was anything she could do, and then she realized that the stranger was muttering under his breath, a steady stream of arcane words.  As those assembled in her mind, she realized what they were.  A resurrection spell.

Her eyes opened wide, as she stared at the duke.  He wasn’t dead.  But the force of life around his body had ebbed so low it was like a flame that a careless breath might extinguish.  Used in these circumstances the resurrection spell, forbidden otherwise, as it only brought life to a soulless body, was much like the paddles with which, on Earth, people tried to stimulate a failing heart.  And she could do nothing but stand there, clutching her skirts.  She’d never done the spell, she’d only heard of it.  She now watched, rapt as the stranger poured a not inconsiderable amount of magic into Seraphim Darkwater, in a desperate effort to save his life.

The stranger himself must be a considerable magician.  Either that or he would end up in almost as bad a shape as Seraphim.

One time the spell was said.  Twice.  Its force flared and fizzled, pale blue against the dying flames of Seraphim’s life which had ebbed down to a dirty sort of orange, like flames that have fed on oil.

Once more, and the force surrounded Seraphim’s body, and it looked for a moment as though it would re-light the force of his life.  But it died down yet again.  The stranger’s face grew stern, his features seeming to become all sharp planes and angles.  He looked more than ever like Darkwater, a Darkwater determined to be brave and strong against all costs.  Yet another damned hero, Nell thought, and it seemed to her she heard Antoine’s derisive tone in her thoughts.  And yet, she couldn’t bring herself to dislike or despise this man who was pouring his magic and his strength so unstintingly into the dying body of … his master?  His brother?

The stranger raised the spell yet a fourth time, and Nell told herself she’d seen it now and she’d take it next, rather than let the man commit suicide through generosity.

But this time, as the blue flare went out and surrounded the duke, the orange, dying flame of his life, caught and sparked, then grew into a pale yellow-white flame.  Not quite healthy life, but abundant, reigniting his vitality fully.

In the dead quiet of the room, she heard the Duke take one breath, then another.  And then his rescuer took a breath, which curled upon itself in a sob, which, in turn, quieted abruptly, as if – hearing himself show a sign of weakness – the man had cut it off.

He lowered his head and shook, and Nell found that she, herself, had not breathed in too long a time, and took a gasping breath.  Then she thought that the man looked very ill, waxen-pale and shaking, with the effort and reaction of a resurrection spell so oft repeated.

It wasn’t just that it took a lot of magic, a lot of power, a lot of strength.  No.  It was more than that.  When using such a spell there was always the danger that between sending it forth, and its hitting the target the target might die.  And if such a thing happened, then the mage’s duty was to kill his creation immediately.  In fact, in Avalon not to do so was punishable with death, though she’d heard that the law was rarely enforced.  But it was certainly punished with exclusion from all polite society and magical association.

The stranger shook, and his dark hair was pasted to his head with sweat, and Nell surmised that he would not want her to see him in this state.  Men were proud everywhere, but in this world more than anywhere else – particularly the gentry, which this man might very well be, as much as he looked like the Duke.

She fell back on the expected role of women in this time and place.  Going to the wash basin set in a corner, she was relieved to find that it was supplied with an ever-filled ewer, the water magicked in – probably from the well of the estate – as soon as it was emptied, and kept warm in the container, by means of a spell.

She poured it into the basin, and grabbed a bar of soap and a pile of the folded linen towels left by it.  With the towels under her arm and the soap caught her under chin, she walked back carrying the delicate porcelain basin, with the pink and blue roses painted around the edge, and set them on the floor next to Seraphim, who still looked dead, but who was breathing regularly.

She dipped a towel in the water and, very gently, started swabbing at the Duke’s blood-covered chest.  She was relieved to find that he was not nearly as wounded as it looked from the blood.  His wounds were, in the main, two, one in his chest and one on his arm.  Not that it mattered.  In Avalon, you could die of a scratch if it were not sterilized in time.  And the Duke’s wounds were no scratch.

“Thank you, Miss,” the strange man said, in the tremulous, breaking voice of a man pushed beyond physical limits.

She didn’t look up.  Instead, she smiled a little, while wiping the blood from Seraphim, and noting those wounds had once been sewn together, though the stitches had now been torn out.  “My name,” she said.  “Is Helena Felix,” she said.

“Miss Felix,” he said.

“But no,” she said.  “You must call me Nell.”  And sensing, even without looking up, his shock at being invited to call her not just by her first name but by a nickname, she smiled again.  “We have fought together.  You would not call a comrade in arms by his last name would you?”

His breath showed an hesitancy.  She looked up to see him open his mouth, then snap it closed.  “I might,” he said.  “If he were well born.  You see, I don’t know what you– That is, you must know my name is Gabriel Penn, and I’m his Grace’s of Darkwater’s valet.”

It was Nell’s turn to be shocked.  She fought having her mouth drop open in surprise, and instead managed to say in a creditable show of composure.  “I see.”  But the truth was that she didn’t see at all.  Not only was the man an enormously powerful magician – she herself doubted she’d have the stamina to do the resurrection spell four times in a row – but he was undoubtedly trained.  And while there was always a chance of byblows — men being what they were — so that servant having some form of magical power was not surprising.  But bastards never – at least in Nell’s experience – had as much power as this man had.  And those who did were never taught to use it.  Certainly not the riskier spells.  Who were the Darkwaters?  Seraphim went looking for fights in worlds where he had no business, in direct contravention of his majesty’s laws, and this other man who looked so much like Seraphim, but who was a servant, used spells no one but a Gentleman could have been taught to wield.

“I see,” she said again, and cleared her throat.  “I shall call you Gabriel then.”

He opened his mouth, then seemed to think better of it, and got up to go to the drawer in the dressing table.  When he returned, he carried a box which, when sat by the side of the Duke’s unconscious form and opened revealed needle and thread and what looked like a complete surgeon’s kit.

“You might want to look away,” Gabriel said.  “Miss.”

“No, I don’t believe so,” she said.  “I’ve seen blood before.  You’ll want to disinfect the wound first, though,” she said.  And realized he’d already laid hold of brandy and was pouring it over the Duke’s wounds.  She was about to tell him pure alcohol was better for that, when she decided the man knew his business as well, if not better than, her.

Instead, she watched as Gabriel sewed the first of the Duke’s wounds closed, then started to slather it with a thick grey ointment that seemed to be infused with healing magic.  “Give me the ointment,” she said, firmly.  “I will do that while you sew his chest wound.”

He inclined his head, saying nothing.  “You’ll pardon me,” Nell said at last.  “But what business had he to go about like that when he was this seriously wounded?”

The man made a sound that might have been an hiccup, the beginning of a laugh, or a smothered sob. “None,” he said.  “But no use trying to prevent him.  When he thinks something is his duty– A great one for duty is the Duke.  If you knew how many times– Oh, never mind.”

But Nell had caught both the exasperated affection and the mingled admiration and anger in Gabriel’s voice, and realized it was the feeling of an older brother for a younger brother who was inclined to biting off more than he could chew.  The Darkwaters were unusual indeed.  Clearly Gabriel knew these spells because he had been educated in magic.  And given the aplomb with which he used them, he must have been educated in Cambridge, alongside his legitimate brother.

Because she knew better – had learned better over her time in this forsaken world – than to question legitimacy or the bond of blood between men of two such different classes, she said, instead, as she slathered the newly-sewn wound, and Gabriel finished cleaning the duke – or as much as he could clean him given the inability to submerge him in water, “The young man who came in with us is under the table there.”

Gabriel nodded.  “Good.  I hope he’ll stay out of the way till I can call the housekeeper to get him clothes and, hopefully, to take him to her cousin’s cottage for a spell.”

Nell hesitated.  “He…  That is, he is a lion shifter.”

Gabriel nodded again.  “A lot of the rescues are from that world.  Seraphim usually pays their way into a shifter seminar in Bath.  There are two, one for young ladies, and one for young gentlemen.  All the teachers are shifted and therefore equipped to train the young people in the ways of control of their magic, and in the ability to shift at will.  But I understand they teach them other trades, usually as clerks or secretaries or the like.”

Nell shook her head at the idea of a shifter secretary.  Back in the day when she’d worked in computers, their group’s administrative assistant had looked much like a weasel, but she supposed here it would be more obvious.

“And the housekeeper knows about this?” Truly the conspiracy to breach the sovereign shields of other worlds was extensive.  And law said all of them were due death.  She couldn’t imagine denouncing Seraphim or Gabriel and seeing them beheaded and hung respectively.  No. She had seen Seraphim almost die.  But if she lied on her report and they found out, surely they would hurt Antoine?

“She’s my godmother,” Gabriel said, as though that meant something.  “Now, Miss, if you’d step aside.”

Miss stepped aside, wishing in an annoyed sort of way that the proper Gabriel would call her Nell, a feeling that was dissolved into shock as that man who had just done four resurrection spells, lifted Seraphim in his arms and carried him to the bed.

Oh, the bed was only three steps away, and Gabriel did totter under the weight of the duke, but that he could lift him at all – when both were well-matched for weight and height – much less after the ordeal Gabriel had inflicted on himself, was near-unbelievable.

Yes, the Darkwaters were an odd family.  And they might be made of more-than-human stuff.

Gabriel laid the duke down, and waved his hand at the mage light on the bedside bringing its glow down.  “And now we wait,” he said.  “And pray if we remember how.”

But if there was anyone listening to prayers at that moment, they must have turned away, because – before Nell could answer – the door to the room jiggled, then flung open.  Framed in the doorway stood a small, dark woman old enough to be the duke’s mother.  It seemed to Nell that was exactly what the woman was, in fact.  Nell had memories of seeing portraits.

But unlike the portraits, the woman wasn’t smiling.  She had her opulent dress clutched in either hand, lifting it away from the legs as women of this world did, when they must move swiftly.  And she was saying, “Seraphim, I demand that you explain…”  The words died, as she looked towards the bed and Seraphim, sprawled on it, unconscious.  And then she said, “Oh.”

The Coils of Duplicity

Of all the ridiculous situations to be caught in, Gabriel Penn thought.  And then he wanted to laugh at the idea that he would call this ridiculous.  Seraphim had almost got killed, a strange woman was in the room and a dragon shifter under Seraphim’s book table.

It was too mild a word and too inappropriate.  It was like when, at some grand affair, the most ridiculous things would run through his mind while he leaned against the wall, all but invisible to the company.  If he said half the things he thought, he would be …  No, he wouldn’t be turned out of the house.  The dowager would never do that, and neither would Seraphim.  But they might very well shut him up in the attics to which gothic novels relegated insane relatives.

The situation was disastrous.  The more so, as he saw the Dowager Duchess’s expression grow grave, her eyes pinch, and her expression acquire that hint of dismay that used to accompany her looks at the husband she doted on, and who was never faithful to her.  She looked at the bed, intently.  Then back at Gabriel.  “Gabriel,” she said.  Unlike Seraphim, unlike what anyone else would have done, she never called him by his surname.  She never treated him as a servant.  She treated him… Not as her son, exactly, but not much different.  “Gabriel.  You will tell me what has happened to my son.”

Gabriel opened his mouth, then closed it.  The words had been more than a demand, a certainty.  For a moment, the world shifted under Gabriel’s feet.  He couldn’t remember what he’d told the Duchess before, to excuse Seraphim’s using a transport spell, right in front of his mother.  He didn’t know how to justify Seraphim’s near-mortal wounds or the presence of Miss Helena Felix.

And then he thought again how much like his father’s imbroglios this was, and how if this had been the old lord, the reason would be something like he had to run out for an assignation with a married woman, whose husband in turn had challenged him for a duel and who–

And Gabriel had found his feet.  When caught in something unlawful, you knew better than to try to make himself sound completely innocent.  Unlike Seraphim, he’d had to learn to lie very early and lie very well.  In this house, he, like Seraphim, had been told to speak only the truth.  But in the years before the Duke had found him and brought him home, he’d learned well enough to survive by any means necessary.  The advantage of not being legitimate, of not being the heir, and certainly not being normal is that you were to an extent free of the constricting bands of honor that imprisoned those of the lawful world.

“Forgive me, your Grace,” he said, and let his nervousness leak through, and his exhaustion.  His exhaustion, he realized, was immense and soul crushing.

He intended to let the Duchess know exactly how gravely her son had been hurt.  That way the best of care could be contrived.  And Seraphim was going to need the best of care.  Gabriel would risk both their honors and their reputations rather than his half-brother’s life.  “You will remember I told you that Seraphim had to go to London with all possible speed, to… to take care of a matter of business, and that he would be back upon the instant.”

“You told me he had to go on a matter of gambling.”

“It comes to the same for Seraphim, whose gambling is a debt of honor and who–”

“Cease.  I know the excuses.  But how come he–” the Duchess took a step to the bed, and stared at Miss Felix.  Gabriel stepped in front of her.

“Well, it turned out the betting… well… it went wrong.”

“You will not tell me that my son cheated.”

“No, Your Grace.  But the man he bested thought so.  And challenged Seraphim to a duel, which– His opponent used a spelled knife and– and a magic gun.”

The Lady Barbara reeled.  She stepped backward, taking her hand to her lips, in a gesture of fear, then walked around Gabriel and to the bed.  Now, Gabriel let her.  He would have spared her the pain of realizing how close to death Seraphim had come, but he must not.  The Darkwaters were all magical talents, at least as good as his own and perhaps better in a different way.  And it would take all of their talent to get him through this.

He turned around and watched as the Duchess took her son’s hand in hers.  She looked, Gabriel thought, perfectly composed, serene.  It was something he envied Seraphim.  A mother who, without being cold, could be controlled.

Her magic working – which Gabriel was sure she was doing – did not show, nor could he read it by more than a feeling of magic in the air, a sensation on the edge of sound that energy had been sent forth and absorbed.

The Lady Barbara looked up.  “Which of you?” she said, and looked from the young woman to Gabriel, then again.  “Which of you used the resurrection spells?  Four times?”

“Mister Penn did, Madam,” Miss Felix said, with such disarming honesty that Gabriel didn’t know whether to respect her for it, or to hate her for making his life yet more complicated.  She must be gentry, he thought.  And legitimate too.  Only someone raised in the strictest bonds of respectability could be so stupidly honorable.

“Gabriel?”

He looked down and let go the will power keeping his immense tiredness hidden.  “I had to, Your Grace.  I couldn’t let him die.”

“No,” the Duchess said.  “But you could have called me.  I have…”  She looked pensive.  “Some experience in saving the lives of the foolish men close to me.”  And, before Gabriel could ask her what she meant, she looked at Miss Felix, “And you are?”

And here, Gabriel consigned his soul to perdition once and for all.  He knew that if the young lady spoke, she would say something disastrous, such as that Seraphim had saved her from the Pyramid world.  Or worse, that Seraphim had saved her and a young lion shifter.  If she was in the habit of uttering the truth with no regard for the circumstances, likely she’d tell it now.  And Gabriel could not allow that.  Not even if it called for the most outrageous lie of his untruthful career.

His voice shook with the sheer enormity of it, but probably made it all the more convincing, as he said, “Miss Felix, Your Grace, is… a personal friend of mine.  With– With the ball in the house, we’d expected to have privacy, you see, and … and we expected to be able to … talk undisturbed.”

The expression of shock in the Duchess’s eyes, as she turned back to look at Gabriel was only half that in the eyes of Helena Felix, and Gabriel felt unaccountably gratified that he had managed to pay her back for the position she’d put him in.  He gave her the hint of a restrained smile.  If he was going to burn in hell for eternity, he’d amuse himself while he could.

The Duchess looked at him a long time.  After the shock, a flicker of something in her eyes gave Gabriel the uneasy impression that she knew all too well all that was likely to have happened was talk, but then she cleared her throat and said, in a shaking voice, “Well…  Well…  I’m sure that…  That is, you wouldn’t bring a woman of ill repute into the house, so you and Miss Felix shall let me know when I am to wish you joy.”  She gave him the once over, and there was the hint of incredulity in her eyes again.  Or was Gabriel imagining it?  He did tend to think that he was glass fronted and everyone could see right through him.  “You’ve been very sly and kept it all from us, but I’m glad that Miss Felix was here, to help you save Seraphim’s life.”  Her look at both of them told them she didn’t believe a word of it.

“Now,” she said, taking off the long gloves that had protected her hands and forearms during the ball.  “If you and Miss Felix will leave, I will look after my son.  Tell Martin to send for Doctor Wilson.  And–”

And Gabriel, in a sweat of apprehension, thinking of the boy shifter under the table, and of Miss Felix, who, for all he knew, had nowhere to go in this world, plunged madly into the breach, armed with nothing but his knowledge of etiquette and his experience of living so many years amid the truthful and the honorable.  “Your Grace cannot stay here,” he said.  “I beg your pardon,” he added, to Lady Barbara’s shocked expression.  “But Your Grace cannot.  Your Grace must see that if your grace were to disappear now, with the guests not having left yet, this would become the most astonishing rumor of the season, and no one would cease talking about it… oh, for a year perhaps.  Particularly since the Duke didn’t announce his engagement as everyone expected.”

Lady Barbara favored him with a darkling look.  It was not quite a look of reproach, it certainly wasn’t a look of dislike, but it was the look that told him she knew very well he was manipulating her behavior for her own good, and that she didn’t enjoy it.  “Whenever you start larding your speech with Your Graces, Gabriel,” she said with the disarming frankness she had passed on to her son, “it is a sure thing you’re trying to fool me.  I have not forgotten the forcing house incident.”  She pressed her lips together, if at the memory of the most spectacular mishap of his and Seraphim’s childhood or at the present situation, Gabriel couldn’t guess.  “But much more the worse is that you’re correct.  I cannot gratify my feelings by staying here, and thus risk humiliating Lady Honoria, who will be humiliated enough that Seraphim has as good as jilted her in our own ballroom.”  She sighed.  “I shall say Seraphim is indisposed.  They will understand he’s drunk enough to be well and truly disguised –quite out of his mind.  And no one will doubt it, considering the way he smelled and acted in the ballroom.”  She sighed heavily, and leaned over her son on the bed.  Touching her lips to his forehead, she sighed again, then straightened.  “Don’t trouble yourself with sending for the doctor, Gabriel.  I shall do so myself.  Stay by Seraphim’s side, until Doctor Wilson arrives.”

She was out the door before he could get over the feeling she knew very well what manner of lies he’d imposed upon her.

“The forcing house incident?” Miss Felix asked.

“Oh.”  He took a deep breath and wondered if he could find the strength to talk.  He was so tired that he thought this must be what it felt like to be ninety.  Not that he expected to ever make it to that age.  “I was …  Nine?  Perhaps ten.  I’m not… precisely sure of my own age, only that I’m older than Sera– His Grace.  Probably a year or so older, and conventionally we consider my birthday the same as his only a year before.  That was Sera– His Grace’s idea.”  He saw she was looking at him in confusion, and tried to call all his strength to him and order his thoughts.  “I arrived on his birthday, you see, and he wanted to share the party, which when you consider that I came into a dining room full of the children of the nobility in the rags in which… in which the old duke had found me–” He saw her eyes widen and decided he was going to far.  No need to tell this stranger from another world about Seraphim’s longing for a brother close to his age, or how he’d decided that Gabriel would be that brother, even when they were both too young to realize they were related by blood.

“Never mind that.  His Grace was kind and generous even as a child.  At any rate, he said it was to be my party too, and therefore it was decided my birthday was the same as his.  And I was allowed to have a piece of the cake and the celebration…  After the housekeeper gave me the most thorough bath of my life, before or since.”  He caught himself up again, knowing he was saying too much.  Curse his weakness and his depleted magic.  “I had lived here about a year, or maybe a little more than a year, when Seraphim and I decided to practice a growing spell we’d seen one of the farmers perform on the strawberries in the forcing house.  We were both, you see, inordinately fond of strawberries, and it was March and the plants just set in the soil.”

“And it worked?”

“After a fashion, Miss,” he said.  “We did grow strawberries, but we must have got something wrong, because they grew to astonishing size.”  Her gaze was interested.  “And exploded.  And we had to clean the inside of the glass with rags.  For five days.  But not for lack of my making up an elaborate story involving robbers and an attack with exploding strawberries.  Her Grace was indulgent, because, I suppose, she feels sorry for me.”  And, plunging as quickly as he could away from that, he said, “But none of this matters, Miss.  What matters now is to find you a place to stay before the doctor arrives.”

She looked surprised.  “I don’t need a place to stay,” she said.  “I need a minute’s calm to put together a transport spell.”

“Miss?”  Was she not aware that she’d been brought to a different world.

She blushed, from the neck up, till she looked the rough color of a turnip.  “I beg your pardon,” she said.  “I suppose you assumed I was from that horrible desert world, with the pyramids?  Well, I was not.  My magic simply got entangled with the Duke’s and it pulled me into that world and… It was why I was half out of my mind and not thinking clearly.  I went out of the world and back into it again in less than a few minutes.  And, as you know, magical entanglements are painful and confusing for both people.  It cannot have helped his Grace’s reactions, either.”

“What didn’t help His Grace’s reactions,” Gabriel said, aware that his voice colored the honorific in irony.  “Is that he’d already lost too much blood and was in a considerable amount of pain besides.”  Which was the only reason that Gabriel could think of why Seraphim hadn’t realized that his magic had become entangled.  But it made no sense.  “The thing is, Miss, that entanglements don’t happen, unless– ”

A knock at the door and a voice called out, “Doctor Wilson is here, Mr. Penn.”  It was the voice of the housekeeper.  “He’s coming up the stairs.”

Gabriel felt both relief and annoyance.  Relief that he could now get the young shifter out of the room and into the capable hands of Gabriel’s Godmother, and annoyance that he would not be able to question this young woman till after the doctor left.  But there was no time to lose.  He lifted the table covering, and offered the boy his hand, which the boy took, allowing Gabriel to lead him to the door.

The housekeeper, a kind woman of middle years, who still treated Gabriel as though he, himself, had been an urchin, looked from him to the boy when he opened door.  “I thought there was as good a chance as any that there was someone,” she said.  “If the Duke is took ill.”  She looked at the boy.  “I shall put a damping spell on his shifting, shall I, until he learns to control it.  And the poor boy as naked as the day he was born.  No worry.  I’ll get him into the blue room and bring him clothes.”

Since the blue room was right next door, the empty room reserved for the wife Seraphim would eventually take, Gabriel knew it was safe enough.  The relief of it must have made him weak, because he leaned against the door frame to recover his breath.

When he opened his eyes again, Doctor Wilson was saying, “And what have you been doing with yourself, Penn?  Don’t tell me it is nothing, because you look in need of my services, though it was the Duke I was called for.”

Gabriel managed a weak laugh.  “It is nothing, compared to His Grace’s wounds, sir,” he said.  And as he led the doctor into the room, he realized that Miss Felix was no longer there.  He felt vexed he’d not prevented her transport spell, which she’d told him she would use, then relieved she was no longer there, and he didn’t have to worry about what she might say.  It didn’t matter if she’d gone somewhere.  He wasn’t fooled into thinking her presence accidental.

And there were always ways of finding out who she really was and where she’d come from.  Many of those ways would have to wait until Seraphim recovered consciousness.  But they would work.  And he and Seraphim would discover who this woman was who took so much interest in the Duke of Darkwater.

A Step In The Dark

Nell concentrated on the coordinates of her room and stepped through.  There was the moment of bitter cold of the betweener, the sense of winds howling around her, even though in fact wind could not exist in this dimension that was wholly devoid of air or any other element needed for life.

And then she was stepping into the familiar confines of her room, almost on top of chalk drawings and a bowl shattered on the floor.

She surveyed the chalk drawings, with dismay, noting that the water had splattered out to mark the floor indelibly with the chalk dust. This was going to be very hard to clean, and before she was done she might very well need to scrub the entire floor and wax it, lest the landlady get upset.  Which she would.  Particularly since Nell had also broken one of the bowls.

It had taken Nell quite a while to truly believe that common belongings were considered precious, or that they were as expensive as they were.  A simple glazed bowl, a platter, anything like that would have been thrown out on Earth the minute it became cracked.  Here, even when broken, the shards would be collected in the hopes that the plate mender might fix it when next he did the rounds of the neighborhood.

She picked up the shards of the bowl carefully and stored it in the cupboard in the corner, hoping to mitigate her landlady’s annoyance by telling her she’d saved the shards to be mended.

On Earth Nell had had plenty of friends who read fantasy and it had been assumed in almost any novel that a society with magic was by necessity prosperous and clean and all the other things real, pre-industrial societies hadn’t been.

But this one wasn’t.  Though Nell wasn’t sure if it was in the past in relation to the world in which she’d grown up and which she still considered the real Earth, this Earth seemed to be stuck somewhere around the regency.  Time was hard to pin down exactly, because this England didn’t seem to have any of the same monarchs.  Or rather, it had the same monarchs up to a point, that point being around the time of Arthur, who in this world was a real documented king, with his prime minister and court magician, Merlin.  In fact, Seraphim, Duke of Darkwater, was supposed to be descended from Merlin and Morgan le Fey.

The thought had brought her right back to the subject her mind had been hoping to avoid.

Having come to it, she realized she couldn’t avoid her obligations another moment.  Taking a pocket watch from her desk, she looked at the time.  Yes.  She had to see Sidell.  For one, he would be expecting a report.  Which would mean that he would be in the park down the street, standing by the lake and scaring the mothers and nannies and the children they supervised by glaring at all of them, taking out on them the fact that Nell was now three minutes late.

Sidell counted punctuality a virtue, one of the many things upon which he and Antoine seemed to disagree violently.  Antoine had told Nell, very early in their acquaintance, that the only appointments worth keeping were those to which both heart and mind concurred and that if an assigned meeting didn’t inflame your heart with wild excitement it wasn’t worth keeping.

The appointment with Sidell, so far from inflaming her heart with wild anything, gave her a strong feeling of having been encased in ice and wishing to run away.  But if she had to hazard a guess, she would imagine that Antoine would actually wish her to keep this one.  Else…

Else, she wasn’t sure exactly what, but she was sure it wouldn’t be pleasant.  Antoine had been arrested the night they’d first set foot in Avalon.  She’d never been told why or what he had done to deserve that fate, but she thought it was no criminal matter so much as something between Antoine and Sidell – some old vengeance or some unfinished game – because Sidell hadn’t told her that Antoine would be going to trial, or that he would have to serve some sentence for some determined set of time.  Instead, he’d told her that he, Sidell, was holding Antoine D’Argent at the pleasure of the king.  Which pretty much meant, if Nell understood properly, what used to be called in France, in her world, before the revolution, a lettre-de-cachet: that is something that said to apprehend an individual, keep him indefinitely and tell no one where he was.

At the time she hadn’t realized this, and she’d been too numb, too confused, wondering why Antoine would take them to a world where he was likely to meet with such a reception, to be able to even ask how to free him.  Fortunately Sidell had told her, unasked.  You’ll work for me, he’d said.  Three years, three days and three hours.  You are a competent witch and, as the king’s spymaster, I am always in need of one such who can nose out illegal use of magic, crimes against the innocent of unprotected worlds or other things against our law.  You serve me well and you and your paramour will be able to leave Avalon in peace.

Am I arrested then? She had asked.

Detained, you mean?  No, you are not.  You can leave this very moment, if you wish.  But then your paramour cannot go with you.  And his freedom will be entirely dependent on my benevolence, of which I have very little towards Antoine.

Nell sighed.  Yes, Antoine would definitely want her to keep this appointment.

She picked up her cloak and wrapped herself in it.  It was, like most of her clothes, serviceable.  It had looked Romantic and interesting when she’d first arrived here and all their clothes seemed to be like something out a fairytale.  Now it was just a cloak, a little threadbare, bought second hand because Sidell’s stipend rarely extended beyond the bare necessities of food and lodging.

Clasping the cloak in front, she picked up her reticule and headed out the door, closing it carefully behind her, lest the landlady discover the damage to her floor and decide to throw Nell out without ceremony.

On the way to the park she tried to set it in her mind what to say.  Normally, when Sidell had asked her to find out what someone was doing, she found things she didn’t mind telling him about.  Like that woman a few months ago who was sacrificing newborns in order to use their hearts in love potions.  Nell had felt absolutely no qualms about turning her in to Sidell’s justice even though she suspected Avalon had horrible penalties for her kind of crime.  No.  She hoped Avalon had horrible penalties for her kind of crime.

But then there was Seraphim.  His crime was terrible by Avalon standards.  Because, from what she understood, Avalon was such a strongly magical world, doing business in other worlds was strictly forbidden.  And doing business could be interpreted as merely visiting for some minutes.  But taking people or things out of those worlds – or bringing them in – definitely fell within the definition.  The penalty for that sort of infraction was death.  And the death penalty for Dukes might be beheading, supposedly a quicker and more dignified death than hanging, but someone who was beheaded was still very thoroughly dead.

Yet Nell could see, in her mind’s eye, the boy-shifter pursued by those horrible men with the magic guns, and Seraphim risking his life to save him.  Risking his life to save her.  And then Gabriel Penn, risking his soul for Seraphim.  She shook her head.  She couldn’t imagine turning either of the men in.  But then, she couldn’t imagine not turning them in.  What could she tell Sidell that would satisfy him?  If he thought she hadn’t fulfilled her part of the bargain, what would Sidell do to Antoine?  At various times, the King’s spy master had intimated that only Nell’s good behavior kept Antoine alive.

“Ah, Nell, in a brown study, I see,” Sidell said. Even before she looked up, she knew he was in one of his moods.  It was in the voice which had the biting edge of a chill wind.

Looking up only confirmed it.  Sidell was a man of maybe forty, with black hair, carefully combed back from his forehead, in the style at the moment fashionable for men.  His clothes were as exquisitely tailored as Seraphim Ainsling’s had been: tight coat of blue superfine, so carefully fitted to his powerful torso that she thought it might require a spell to get him into it, and butter yellow breeches, so tight that wearing them in public should constitute an offense against morals.  His cravat: tall and arranged in graceful folds about his neck, was a thing of beauty.

But the face of such a carefully attired gentleman was pale and at the moment peevish, his lower lip slightly advanced, his eyes darting daggers in her direction.

The park – filled with mothers and nannies and children from those so small they were in carriages, to the ten year olds chasing each other around the lake or feeding the ducks — was a place of life and sound, but everyone seemed to avoid Sidell’s periphery.  Everyone but Nell, and she only because she couldn’t avoid it.

She bobbed a curtsey by habit and with no thought.  It was amazing how quickly such habits developed.  “I beg your pardon, Sidell,” she said.  “I got myself… accidentally enmeshed in a spell, and it took a while to extricate myself.”

He frowned at her, then his lips curved quickly upward, not in a smile so much as in what seemed like pleasure at her having suffered a delay.  “Well,” he said.  “Well.  What workings did you get involved in?  Was it Darkwater?  What has the Duke been up to.  Tell me without delay.”

And that was Sidell all over Tell me without delay was his version of “please make a report” and delivered with even less ceremony than that would have been.  Unspoken and hanging between those words was the sense that what it all actually meant was “Tell me or else.”

But she could not tell.  She thought of the Duke on the floor, his life-force ebbing away, and of Grabiel Penn desperately pushing strength and magic into the duke with his resurrection spell.  She could not let them be arrested.  Oh, they’d broken the law.  They’d assuredly broken the law.  But it was for a good cause, was it not?

She had a notion her argument was slippery, yet looking at Sidell’s pale face, his frosty glare she couldn’t imagine that he would be on the side of right in this.  Instead, she reached, desperately for the story that Penn had told the Duchess.  She’d tell the same story.  Something that juicy would be about town in no time, and the two lies, meeting somewhere in the middle would corroborate each other.  Sidell would never suspect and it would give Nell a little longer to study Darkwater and to find out whether, indeed, anything nefarious hid behind the Duke’s seeming benevolence.

She put a smile on her face and told Sidell, “Nothing of consequence.  It’s so diverting.  I don’t know what you thought Darkwater was doing, but what he is doing is what you expect of a wastrel of his kind.  You see, he left in the middle of his own engagement party to meet with a … a married woman.  And I got pulled into his transport spell, and fell atop the lady’s husband who was hiding in the bushes, and the whole thing got blown out of proportion… or perhaps into proportion.  The offended husband demanded satisfaction, and the Duke got wounded, just as you would expect, and then he transported into his room, and his valet tended to him, and I took the opportunity to return here before anyone asked my name.”

Sidell brought up the cane he’d been playing with, an elaborate affair of varnished mahogany, topped with heavy silver, in the shape of a wolf’s head.  What he said was “I see.”  But what he did was twirl the wolf’s head, as though absently.  “And what was this lady’s name?  Or her husband’s?”

Nell forced a laugh that she hoped sounded like an amused giggle, “How would I know?  You are very well aware I know nothing of the fashionable of your world.”

Suddenly Nell felt dizzy and swayed on her feet.  She blinked, and had a sense that a lot of time had passed.  The small park, with its duck pond, had gone marginally darker and colder, and there were noticeably fewer children than just a moment ago.

“My dear,” Sidell said, and the coldness in his voice belied the apparent meaning of that word.  “You should know that when you travel between worlds, there is magical residue left on your clothes.  You should also know that I am a very hard man to fool.  Next time, do not make me resort to outrageous measures to get the information you owe me.”  He got out a small pouch and handed it to her.  “Here is your stipend, Miss Felix, and do try not to give me difficulties next time.  You will continue keeping an eye on Darkwater, for now.  We need more evidence to bring the case before the king.”

It wasn’t till Sidell walked away that Nell’s mind cleared enough for her to realize he’d put a truth spell on her and got her to tell all.  Truth spells were much more effective than any truth serum on Earth.  They were also almost a dark art, something no honorable magician would use.  Of course, she’d long ago realized that the king’s spymaster might be an honored man, but he was probably not an honorable one.  An honorable man wouldn’t use her lover’s captivity as a lever to move her in whatever direction he wished.

Then another thought came on the heels of that.  A case against Darkwater.  That meant that they were thinking of persecuting him.  And that Nell had just handed Sidell evidence against the Duke.  She must go back to Darkwater.  She must warn those two men of what was about to befall them.

Two Attacks and an Alarm

Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, woke up with a sense of foreboding.  For a moment, floating on the edge of consciousness, he thought he was a child, in the nursery in the attics of the house, with nanny hovering by, and that he’d been very ill.

Then he moved in the bed, and the feeling of his body belied the illusion.  Not nanny.  And yet there was someone nearby singing, singing in a high voice.  That was what had given him the impression that he was in the nursery.  Nanny used to sing to him, in a high but not unmelodious voice.  Only nanny had never used words that felt like fire distilled through his bones and woven through his nerves, raking his conscience like unsheathed claws.  Words he didn’t understand.  Words that felt wrong.

The scream of “stop” tore itself from his lips as he sat up.  The voice stopped, immediately, and in its place there was a scream, answering his, a voice much like his own, “Seraphim!”

He opened his eyes to Penny running towards him, and in less than a second, Penny’s hands were on his shoulders, Penny’s voice too loud in his ears, “Damn it, Seraphim.  You’re not well enough to sit.  You–”

He was in his room, his adult room, of course, and it was the middle of the night.  Or at least the window, directly in front of his bed, showed only darkness, which meant it was night.  Though both the bed and the window were equipped with heavy brocaded curtains – somewhat faded since the old duke’s profligate spending hadn’t allowed expenses such as replacing furnishings – Seraphim never let either set be closed.  He believed in the virtues of fresh air.  He also believed in keeping an eye on his surroundings, both within and without the house.  Perhaps if his father had done so–

And then he remembered what about his surrounding, just before waking, had caused such a violent start.

“Who was singing?” Seraphim asked.  “What were the words?”

“What?  There was no one singing.  You were dreaming.  It was a dream.”

Seraphim shook his head.  “No.  Someone was singing.  Working magic on me.  A woman.  Where’s the woman?”

“The– If you mean Miss Helena Felix, the lady you brought back with you, she left,  presumably whence she’d come.  I have a feeling we’ll know all too soon where.”

Gabriel Penn felt at Seraphim’s forehead with the back of his own, then did one of the minor passes that allowed one to evaluate the state of health of another, and frowned.  “You have no fever.”

“Of course I have no–” Seraphim would never be able to say how he had seen the attack, much less how he was able to react so fast.  One moment he was looking at Penny, trying to decide if it was possible at all that Penny was had been playing some sort of trick, and thinking to himself that if Penny had been singing in a woman’s voice and performing such unclean magic as those words felt like, then it was time to take him to an exorcist and find which entity had claimed his half brother’s soul.  The next moment he caught a reflection on the glass, behind Penny’s shoulder.  Something.  He could never say more than that he’d been aware of movement.  And he’d reacted.

Perhaps he would not have reacted so quickly, if he’d not wakened to unclean magic.  He couldn’t say.  What he could say and do was cast a protection spell so quick his fingers smarted as the power left them, even as he pulled at Penny’s arm, and made him fall, awkwardly across the bed.  At the same time Seraphim rolled, so he was in a different place.

Through the confusion, and a sudden burning feather smell, he was aware that his protective shield spell had failed and the pillow was now on fire.  He was also aware of Penny across his legs, struggling to get up.  But neither took up his thought, and certainly neither got his attention because he was drawing all his power, all his reserves, and sending them after the spell that had just come in.

There was a moment – he remembered well from his studies at Cambridge – when right after a killing-magic-spell, the kind banned in all civilized countries, it was possible to follow it with one of the same kind and potency, even if you didn’t know from whence it came and certainly if you didn’t know how to cast such a spell, as no civilized man knew, such spells being forbidden in all right-thinking lands.  It was allowed too.  The only time it was allowed to loose a killing spell that was not contained in a mage stick.  It was right of self defense, secured to the English barons by the Magna Carta, and to all English citizens by the Land and Men act of Richard IV.

None of this occurred to Seraphim of course.  His reaction was instinctive.  Hee seized the feel and magic of what had been hurled at him, and hurled it back as fast as he could.

The power washed out of him in a great wave, and the room swam before his eyes.  He would have collapsed back onto his pillow, but the pillow was on fire, so he collapsed sideways, at the same time that Penny finally managed to rise, got hold of something from the bedside table, and flung it at the pillow, putting the fire out, but adding markedly to the smell of the room with an odd scent of cooked meat.

As Seraphim managed to draw himself up and catch his breath, something about his expression must have given Penny the idea that his action was disapproved of, as he said, “Broth.  For your dinner.  I’m afraid.”

Seraphim, though his mind was on everything but his dinner, managed a smile.  “Better that than the contents of the chamber pot!”

A quick smile flitted across Penny’s lips, then he frowned, as though coming to himself and realizing the import of all that had happened.  “Someone… Did someone send a killing bolt of magic through your window?”

“I’m afraid so,” Seraphim said, and, rolling off the side of the bed managed to hold onto it, though barely.  Confound it.  He was too weak.  The reason why came to him, in bits and disjointed pieces.  The damn pyramids; the woman; the boy.  How had he let himself be caught so off guard?  Perhaps he should have heeded Penny.  Perhaps he’d been too weak to go off world on a rescue mission.

“And you sent a killing bolt after it!  Seraphim.  It’s illegal.”

“Not according to the law I studied at Cambridge.  Self defense, Penny.”  Seraphim tried to make his way to the window, by means of grabbing now onto a small occasional table, now onto the back of a sofa.  But before he reached there, Penny had guessed his intentions and stood in front of him.  “No, Seraphim!”

Seraphim took a deep breath, “Penny, we must find out who it was, and where the bolt hit.  You know such killing spells have to be line of sight, so he was line of sight when he loosed it.  Or she, if it was that infernal singer.”

“No one was singing!  And you can’t mean to show yourself at that window when someone just tried to kill you.”  He had Seraphim by the shoulders again, which was a deuced stupid habit for him to have acquired, and was trying by main force to push him down onto a rosewood-framed loveseat.  Unfortunately at the moment the force was in the main on Gabriel’s side, and Seraphim had to allow himself to be pushed down.

He was not, however, so lost to all reason that he would allow Penny himself to go to the window.  To prevent this, he held fast to Penny’s sleeve and said, “Not you either, then, you damnfool.  We don’t know which of us that bolt was aimed at.”

Penny looked exasperated.  “Seraphim?  Why would anyone try to kill me?  I am not the duke.  I am not–”

“You are your mother’s son,” Seraphim said, and suddenly something that had been bothering him connected in his mind.  “And I have a very good idea that the song I heard as I was waking was in the language of your mother’s people.”

Gabriel Penn went so still his features might very well be carved out of marble.  He stood straighter, and swallowed hard, so hard that it was audible in a room that seemed, of a sudden so quiet that even the crackle of wood in the fireplace sounded as loud as an explosion.  “My mother–” Gabriel said.  He shook his head, looked towards the window.   “Impossible.”

But all the same, Seraphim saw Gabriel’s hand move and from the very faint tracery of light visible only to mage sight, he could see Gabriel setting a protective spell in place.  Nothing like what Seraphim had done in the haste of the moment, but something stronger, harder.  Something odder, too, all angles and askew logic.  Something not human.  And Seraphim knew that despite that “impossible” Penny found the threat possible enough to guard against it.

“I’d swear to it, Penny.  I don’t know the language, as you … Curse it, I never thought of it, but you must know the language.  You were not an infant when…”

“I know the language,” Penny said.  He looked wary and tired.  Very tired.  So tired that ten years at least appeared to have fallen on his features.  He dropped to the rosewood seat, next to Seraphim.  “Blast it all, Seraphim.  It is impossible.  The treaties and the binds are unbreakable.”

Seraphim cleared his throat.  “I don’t know the language as you do,” he said slowly, deliberately.  “But I know the sound and feel of it.  When your mother’s people came, shortly after you came to live here, remember?  When they came to the door–” He stopped.

“Yes,” Gabriel said.  And how was it possible Seraphim thought, that Gabriel seemed to be quieter than silence and more still than stone, and with it convey a sense of urgency so great that it could not be expressed in word or movement?  A sense of urgency that pressed on Seraphim like the knowledge of a life and death race?

Seraphim took a breath.  “Well, this language had the same feel, and I can’t very well imagine any other language, anything at all else in the world that would sound like that.”

“No,” Gabriel said, and then, as though recruiting strength, “But perhaps you remembered and dream–”

“It wasn’t exactly the same words, Penny.  This time there was a spell being said.  And unclean spell.”

“Imp–”

Seraphim said two words he remembered from what he had heard, two words so odd and so powerful they seemed to burn his tongue with saying them.

“Stop,” Penny said.  His hand shot out and covered Seraphim’s mouth.  “Stop.  No more.”

“What are the words?”

Penny shook his head.  “Unclean.  And dangerous.”  He waved a hand, again, setting some form of cleansing in place.  A form that Seraphim had never seen.  Then he took a deep breath, loud in the room.

“Two attacks then,” he said, in the same tone as he might inform Seraphim that his carriage was ready or that, alas, the boot boy had ruined Seraphim’s best boots.  “Because that kill spell through the window was all human magic and none of ou– Theirs.  Two attacks.  Aren’t we the lucky ones.  And they are after you, not me.  For two days, Seraphim, you’ve been not only unconscious, but shielded under so many healing spells not one would be able to get a spell on you.  Or to find you with one.  But today, as the healing spells slid off two enemies found you.  It was you they were aiming for.”

Seraphim shrugged.  “Or perhaps you were close enough to me while I was under healing spells, to make you less noticeable also.”

Gabriel rose, “I shall send some footmen down to see who you killed.  There will be trouble over that, mind, self-defense or not.  Death must stand examination and trial.  And the King’s court, because of your damned rank.”

“Tell them to go armed,” Seraphim said.  “There might be more than one out there.”

Gabriel nodded, as a matter of course, then returned to the room.  “As for the other matter, duke, those words you overheard, if they were part of an attack aimed at you would indicate that they think you too have my mother’s blood.  And if they were aimed at me…”  He shook his head.  “Did you ever tell anyone?  About me, I mean?”

“Which of the many things about you?” Seraphim asked suddenly cautious.

“Any of them.”

“My dear Penny, I don’t tell your secrets to anyone.  Oftentimes not even to myself.”

A Mother’s Heart

They were keeping secrets again.  The Dowager Duchess knew this, though she couldn’t tell about what exactly.

For the two days of her son’s illness – of his lying beneath healing spells, swaddled in blankets and force fed broth – she’d wondered how it had come to this.  And she’d wondered what Gabriel knew that she didn’t know.

Something it was, that she could be sure of.  For one, Gabriel’s face was always easy for her to read.  Had to be, as much as he resembled her own son.  The reasons for that, though she’d tried to forget them, couldn’t but confuse her feelings towards the boy.  She both loved him, almost like her own son, and she hated him as a reminder of a dark time in her own childhood and of the misadventure that had almost lost her to the world of humans.

It had been the same since the moment her husband had brought Gabriel in, and the truth was that if Gabriel hadn’t been a year older than Seraphim, and a few months older than their marriage, the dowager would have insisted on claiming him as a son and brazening the world and the ton with some excuse about one of a pair of twins stolen by magical beings.  But Gabriel was the elder, his age could be found by magical means not too difficult to employ, and there was no way to make that lie convincing.  Not when at the time of Gabriel’s birth the, then, Lady Barbara Hartwit had been dancing the night away at various soirees and balls, slim as sylph and still unmarried.

Also, they couldn’t risk Gabriel inheriting.  Not with the blood in him.  Most other people would not have been sure about allowing him into the house.  She remembered her husband asking her “Are you sure Barbara?  We don’t know, after all, how he will turn out.  There are some who say–”

But all she’d done was nod, because he’d told her what he’d taken the boy from, and what fate waited him if his mother’s people got their hands on him, and Gabriel looked so much like Seraphim even then, that Barbara could not imagine consigning the child to death, or worse.  So she’d taken him into the house, and raised him as a fosterling, letting everyone know he was her husband’s son and that some provision would be made for him in the fullness of time.

They’d been more than ready to make provision, too, despite their straightened circumstances.  They’d sent him to Cambridge with Seraphim, and were ready to stand him his beginning in a small magic business, or, perhaps, in law.  Even the church, if he had a bend for it, though considering the magical trouble the boy got into, that seemed like a forlorn hope.

But now, standing in her room, pacing, Lady Barbara realized that had been the first sign of trouble. Gabriel had been sent down from Cambridge, for an offense that her husband would not speak about, that Seraphim claimed to be sworn not to disclose, and that Gabriel himself turned pale but refused to speak of it.

Something had happened there.  For a time, the Duchess had nurtured suspicions, but not if Gabriel was in a fair way to being engaged.

The problem was that she didn’t quite believe he was in a fair way to being engaged.  Not to Miss Felix, at any rate.  She didn’t know who the woman was, but she would bet she was not who she’d said.  For one, the Duchess could feel Miss Felix’s magic quite well.  And it was not the kind of trifling magic that would fall to the lot of an illegitimate daughter or the daughter of a poor family.  A woman who brought that kind of magic with her could aspire to the highest families in the kingdom.  She would not be considering Gabriel, such as Gabriel’s position and expectations appeared to be, and she would not be meeting with him on the sly.

No.  The girl was something to do with Seraphim.  And Gabriel was hiding what he knew of it, and what he knew of Seraphim’s injuries, too.  And it was no use at all denying it.  She’d marked how Gabriel stinted sleep to stay by Seraphim’s side and listen for any stray word, any casually dropped hint that might have told the dowager more than they wished her to know.

She took a deep breath.  She was afraid for the boys.  This time, whatever trouble they’d managed was far more severe than the forcing house.

A scratch at the door called her attention.  It was the sort of gentle scratching that she’d taught her daughter to employ, instead of the far more brash knocking.  “Come in,” she called.

Caroline came in.  She looked like a younger replica of her mother, her features small and well place in her oval face. Only her eyes were the same as her brothers’, the large, intensely green eyes of the Ainslings.  Right at the moment, they were wide open, and her skin, which tended towards a more golden color than that of the boys, had gone pale.  The dark hair which she wore in demure braids had become lose and she was clutching the skirts of her white muslin dress in great handfuls, probably as a result of having run up the stairs, “Mama,” she said, without preamble.  “There was someone…”  She swallowed hard.  “There is someone killed in the garden.”

The Duchess clutched at her skirt, in an involuntary reaction, “There’s been an accident?” she asked, and then as it occurred to her that the hour being late, her fifteen year old daughter, barely out of the nursery, and certainly not out of the school room, should not be up.  “And pray tell, where were you?  And why are you not abed this late at night?”

But Caroline only looked at her as though the dowager had taken leave of her senses.  “I was looking for Michael,” she said, as though that were of little or no importance.  “But Mama, there was a death.  Seraphim killed someone.”

“Impossible!  Seraphim is in no state to–”

“Pray, listen, Mama.  Just listen.”  The girl was far too high spirited, and now she would carry her point in the face of her mother’s disapproval.  “I went out to the garden, to look for Michael, because he is not in his room, and I thought he might be in his tinkering shop.  You know how he can get absorbed in his magical machines, and forget the hour.  He didn’t come for dinner, either, so I thought I’d go and drag him indoors to eat and go to bed.”  She paused.

The dowager nodded.  Her daughter’s attachment to her twin was well known, though why she should fancy herself as though the boy’s mother, Barbara Ainsling would never understand.

“He was not in the tinkering shop,” Caroline said.  “And I thought perhaps he’d come in and was in the library doing some research.  So, I came in through the side servant entrance, and that’s when I heard the footmen going out there.  They went by me in the second floor landing, and have no fear, Mama, they never saw me, for I knit myself with the wall, but they were talking, and they said his Grace had sent out a killing bolt.  That they’d felt it.  And it was no use at all Mr. Penn saying it had been in self-defense, because how could it be, when it must have sought out the poor bas– the poor victim at the bottom of the garden, as the cook had seen it fly, true and fiery all the way there.   It had to be a targeted murder, and his Grace probably had done it while out of his mind with fever and knowing no more what he was about than he’d known in his ramblings these last two days.”

“And you came to tell me of what you heard?” the Duchess asked.

Caroline looked faintly shocked at the idea, “Oh, no, Mama.  Nothing so cowhearted.  I followed them, of course, in the dark.  No, Mama, don’t scold, I promise they did not see me.”

At any other time, the Duchess would have scolded the hoydenish behavior, but now she could only say, “And then?”

“What do you think?  They got a man from the bottom of the garden.  A very well dressed man, Mama.”

“Alive?” the Lady Barbara asked, on a sudden impulse of hope.

“Oh, no, Mama, very dead.”  Caroline pulled back her hair, which had loosened completely from her braid and fallen in front of her eyes.  “And I’m sure it was done with a killing bolt, Mama.  It had that feel.”  For the first time fear superseded excitement and she added, “Only…  Mama, Seraphim can’t have known what he was doing.  They can’t hold him responsible, can they?”

Only the Duchess wasn’t sure that her son wasn’t responsible.  There was the something he and Gabriel were holding secret.  But the time for hesitating was over, “I don’t know,” she told Caroline.  “But I intend to find out.  You go to your bed.  You did well in telling me, but not well in wandering about the house at this hour.  Go to your room and to your bed, and leave me to find out what happened.  I’m sure your brother wouldn’t do such a thing unless there were a legally defensible reason for his actions.”  At least she very much hoped so.  As was, a problem of this magnitude, legal or not, might be the end of all his chances with Honoria, particularly on top of the shamefully delayed engagement announcement.  The unworthy thought that perhaps this was planned crossed her mind.  But no.  Why would the boy insist on the engagement, then seek to escape it by dangerous means?

She kissed Caroline’s head and said, “Go to bed now, child.”

The Duchess was out of her room and halfway down the hallway to Seraphim’s, before she heard her daughter’s voice at her back, “But Mama!  I still have not found Michael!”

The Spider And The Web

Nell woke up.  She woke up with no consciousness of having been asleep, of any time having passed.

It was rather like waking or dreaming she’d wakened, and not being sure which.  Had she slept before, when she’d imagined herself in the sunlit park with Sidell?  Or did she sleep now?

Now she was in the same park, but it was the dead of night, and the park was deserted.  Strangely, it was winter too, though it had not been cold when she’d been there during the day.  Now there was frost on the trees – or at least something white frosted the branches.  The lake stood motionless like a mirror.  There was no sound, either, though the park was not that large and from where she stood she should be able to hear the noise of carriages trundling through the night, or at least the noise of swans splashing in the lake.  Any noise.  Anything, even the rustle of leaves or grass blades.

Instead, everything was very quiet.  It felt as if she were trapped in one of those dreams where silence has a physical presence and can envelop all.

She took a step forward, and that too was like walking in a dream. I don’t like it she thought, but the truth was that she didn’t have to like it.  She didn’t have to give consent to it.

“I am asleep,” she said, but the words came to her oddly, and she knew she wasn’t.  Each step she took seemed to weight too much and take too long, and she walked all the way to the edge of the lake, slowly, very slowly.  Every step seemed to take a million years.  Each moment was unnaturally prorogued.

“I must think,” she told herself.  “I must think where I am and how I came to be here, and what I must do.”

“Sidell.  I met with Sidell and he rifled through my mind and took from it all the matters pertaining to Seraphim Darkwater and to whatever it is he’s doing with the other worlds.  All of it.”  And that was bad and she knew it was bad, but she didn’t count on the surge of panic that followed those words, on the feeling that there was more in her mind than pertained to the fate of two very nice, but let’s face it, somewhat hapless young men who had broken the law in pursuit of justice as they saw it.  No, there was more there.  Enough, she thought, that could tilt the universe on its axis and make the world a very dangerous place indeed.  Antoine had told her–

But when she tried to pursue what Antoine had told her, it receded before her mind, and she couldn’t pin it down.  Something about her mind and its memories.  Something about locking them from prying eyes.  “But you should have taught me how to do it, Antoine,” she said, talking to the still air, the silent night, the cold-frosted trees standing, their pale branches gleaming in the moonlight like lost souls begging for mercy.  “Because without you, my mind has got rifled through and picked, and whatever Sidell found in it caused him to send me to–”

To send her where?  She’d reached the edge of the lake and looking down she saw the water.  It was water, but it was unreally smooth, like a mirror, so smooth that it might well be solid, like glass calm and unreflective.

And from a place a long time ago, when she’d been just a young computer programer, who seemed to have fallen into a fantasy novel and in love with a powerful wizard, she heard Antoine’s voice talking.  “Sleeping Beauty,” he said.  “Why do you think she slept a hundred years?  And never woke?  And never tried to fight her enchantment?  Why do you think all those around her slept?  The brambles never grew.  That is a silly invention in your world.  And no mice nested in the cupboard, no rat nibbled the sleepers.  Do you know why?  There are worlds in between the worlds that exist anew each ticking of the clock.  Each time the clock ticks, reality hesitates and wavers, as many possible futures rush in and solidify into one.  Just one present.  Unending futures.  From such unending worlds, though a magical accident, the multiverse’s many worlds were created.  But in each of these worlds, the infinity of futures coalesces to just one second of present.

“And between those many futures and the solidified present lies a unit of time.  It’s so brief that in it your heart would not have the time to beat once.  It is so long that, to someone caught in it, it will last forever and the future will never arrive.

“A strong enough magician can spin another human – usually just one.  One shudders at the thought of what it would take to really spin an entire castle and all its inhabitants into that space.

“– into that time.  That time between future and present.  That time that will never be present nor future nor past, but a place apart from time.  In them no one dies, though it could be said no one really lives, ever.  And you can stay forever, imprisoned.  Alone.”

Alone, Nell thought, looking at the water still like glass.  Alone.

But there was a way out.  There had to be.  Sleeping beauty had come back.  The prince had kissed her.  But that would need a prince, would it not.

“So I’m out of luck, since all I have is a duke.” she thought and wanted to laugh, which is how she knew she was really tired and really scared, because laughter was inappropriate in here.  Laughter had no place in this land where nothing would change and where she would be a prisoner forever.

No.  No.  there had to be a prince and a kiss.  There had to be a way of attracting him.

The problem of Earth, she thought, and the problem of growing up on Earth was that one never got the to learn how to get out of these kind of situations.  If you could believe the people of Avalon, the Earth and Avalon, and the hundreds of other earths had all spun from the same unified Earth.

The theory of when it had spun apart varied, and some maintained it had happened well before human history begun, and others that it was as recent as a few hundred years ago.  Yet others, saner, thought that it had taken place at different times for different worlds.

But all of them believed they’d all come from common stock and had common legends.  And that these legends, perforce, came from similar events, or encoded similar knowledge.  And by and large that was true in Avalon, where one could learn from the perils of Cinderella – although mostly what one learned, at least according to Antoine, was not to perform love-spells involving one’s own father and a nice-seeming neighbor lady, when one was a very young and inexperienced witch.  And as for Little Riding Hood, that charming cautionary tale had prevented many a young girl from giving her pet dog characteristics of her human playmates in order to have him better play house.

But Nell didn’t think that anyone had ever told her what the real meaning of Sleeping Beauty was.  And in the world in which she’d been so fortunate as to grow up, the best known version said that she should send blue birds or something of the sort to call Prince Charming to come and get her out of this bind.

She snorted loudly.  So much for Prince Charming.  If he only answered to dial-a-blue-bird she’d be lost in here forever, and he’d never know where she’d gone.  Because, after all, nothing moved here.  No bluebirds.  No wind.  Not even air.  And she only remained alive because she couldn’t die.

But she could move, her mind protested.   She was an intelligent being and she could move, even though the rest of this world might be locked between past and future, never being present.  And if she still had the ability to think and to move, then the only thing that she could use to call someone to her rescue was … her own mind.

Part of her wanted to rebel and to say that she needed no one for rescue; that she was a self sufficient woman; that she’d been taught to rescue herself.  But the old legends didn’t work that way.  They were older than mankind and certainly older than any vestige of self-determination, than any idea of females being embarrassed for being beholden to a male.  The legends, and the puzzles they encoded went all the way back to the beginning, when a human without a tribe was lost, and when a tribe was often just a man, a woman and their offspring.  In those times, in that place, you needed the rest of them to rescue you.

That meant… that meant, she thought, that if she had bonded with someone, preferably someone male, she would be able to now call her to him by magical means, and he would break through the frozen stillness of this nowhere place and rescue her.

But she had never bonded with anyone.  Well, not that way.

“Perhaps Antoine,” she said, aloud, and tried to take it seriously, but she knew it wasn’t.  Antoine was just a dream.  He had been the dream of a young girl – the extraordinary, enchanting wizard who existed even though all the laws of the world said he shouldn’t.  She’d been just twenty one when he’d found her.  They’d spent seven years traveling through the magical worlds.  But lately, just as they landed in Avalon, she’d started to wonder if he was truly all she’d thought, if he was as powerful, as urbane, as learned, but most of all if he was as good as she’d willingly dreamed him.

She didn’t know the answer to that.  She still didn’t.  But she knew that having doubts had severed the connection between them.  If there had ever been a connection.  Now when she tried to reach for Antoine’s essence, for his magical strength, she felt nothing.

It was like pulling at one end of a rope, which was supposed to be tied to solid rock, and instead feeling the rope come up, all of a sudden, slack and too light.  It was like taking a step in the dark and finding nothing under one’s foot.

Antoine would not work.

Gabriel, perhaps?  Gabriel Penn had seemed a good solid man.  She’d liked his strength and his persistence, and his refusal to let his half-brother die.  Given what the society was, and the difference in their positions, she could only imagine how many slights and insults Gabriel must have endured, and yet he was willing to risk it all for the legitimate heir.

Yes, he could be a rock in times of trouble, and though she’d not perceived any attraction from him to her, he had told the duchess they were engaged.  Perhaps that was a sign of a wish he dared not express?

She looked at the lake, in the frozen not quite light of the not quite night.  It wasn’t she realized, that it was nighttime here, but more that the light that was here had solidified like water.  It was light on the trees, not snow.  And yet she felt colder just thinking about it.

Her mind, gently, carefully, quested in the direction of Gabriel Penn, thinking of him and of the power she’d perceived from him, and trying to establish a connection.  Even if the connection was no more than a vague interest from him, that and her good will ought to establish a bond strong enough to–

To what?  To have him ride up to her rescue?  No.  She didn’t think so.  She suspected it was more that establishing a bond would make it possible for her to pull herself up to where he was, to drag herself from this frozen never-was to the present.  Wherever he was and whatever he was doing, as embarrassing as it might be, at least it was somewhere alive.

Her questing mind met with something.  It wasn’t like looking for Antoine and finding nothing where his mind and power should be.  Gabriel was a solid presence in her magical quest, taking up a solid portion of her magical map.  But when she tried to pull up, to pull to him, to feel him – her mind careened into a blank wall.

No, not a wall, a gate.  She could see it in her mind’s eye – tall and made of something hard and cold.  Metal, or perhaps stone.  And locked.

For a moment she thought of shaking the gate, of rattling it, but realized it was less than forlorn hope.  The gate dwarfed her and loomed over her, and there was nothing in her human form that could open that.  From beyond it came a disturbing song, in a language she couldn’t understand.

She had the impression quite suddenly that the real Gabriel Penn was someone quite different, quite other than the servants he appeared to be.  It was nonsense, but…  She felt him as almost an alien being, someone she couldn’t hope to comprehend.

That left…  She gritted her teeth and through her mind passed in review the many people she had met in her time in Avalon.  Most of her meetings with men were less than inconsequential.  Other than Sidell she’d had no constant male contact.  And Sidell had sent her here.

So that left…  Seraphim.  What possible contact could he have with her?  Well, he’d risked his life to save her.  But he’d risked his life, too, to save the lion boy, and yet she didn’t think that he had any interest in lions.  Or in boys, for that matter.

But he was kind and he was – if she guessed his character properly – hard put to resist the claims of someone in need.  And she was in need.  So, if not with her attraction, she could forge a bind with her need.

Thinking of her great need and that without him she would be locked in here forever, worse than a ghost, neither dead nor alive, till she went slowly mad in an eternity of solitude, she reached for the power she’d seen as Seraphim Darkwater’s.  At the same time she called the duke’s aristocratic profile, his laughing green eyes to her mind.

For a moment it felt like she’d met with the same wall that surrounded Gabriel, only if Nell had to picture this one she’d picture it as those brambles grown around Sleeping Beauty’s castle.  A profusion of defensive thorns, things to keep others away.

“But I need help,” she said, and cringed to say it, and yet – desperate – pushed her need at him, forcing him to see that without him, she was barred from life forever.

Whatever was holding her broke so suddenly that she had the impression of being picked up and lifted, then thrown bodily into the water.

She started to sink, under the weight of her skirts and petticoats, then managed to paddle enough to keep herself afloat as she struggled to remove the water-logged petticoats before they pulled her under.  As she did, details sank in – the murmur of the wind in trees around this lake, and something else.  The lake was full of boats, the boats filled with men who looked like gardeners or stable boys and who carried a lantern a piece.  Each boat held two men, one of whom rowed while the other stood, other holding the lantern aloft and trying to look into the murky depths of the lake.

There were two boats making for her as fast as the men rowing could make it.  The man with the lantern called from the nearest one, “It is not him.  Not the young master.”

“Who is it then?” the standing man from the other nearest boat called.”

“It’s a lady,” the nearest man called.  “Someone tell His Grace there’s a lady in the trout pond”

Lady In The Lake

Seraphim sat in his sofa, wrapped in a dressing gown which made no more than a pretense of keeping out the cold, but did so magnificently, in shimmering green silk with a pattern of flying dragons.  He’d asked for his cane with the silver top.  But even such an obvious means of support hadn’t convinced Gabriel to let Seraphim get up and be about his business.

No, instead, Seraphim had to sit on the sofa, his hands on the dragon-head top of the cane, his mind trying to follow, by sound, the very strange events in his household this evening and, more difficult, trying to make sense of them.

And Gabriel…  Gabriel had entered what Seraphim, with the cruelty of an older brother, even if he was in fact the younger, had been known to call his housekeeper mode.  He had marshaled the housemaids to remake the bed, he’d got someone to bring in a bowl of sweet and magically harmonious potpourri to disguise the stench of burnt feathers and scorched broth.

He’d threatened to have more broth brought in too, but Seraphim had negotiated that distressing sentence down to a glass of cold milk, which he supposed must be making its way from the kitchens.

And Gabriel had set the gardeners down in the lake, with crystal balls affixed at the end of lanterns.  The attack had come from near the lake, or at least the would be assassin had been found near it.

Seraphim should have thought, as Gabriel obviously had, that any body of water that large, around which serious magic was made, would have recorded the sequence of events and the strength of the attacks.  And since it would come to a high court, the least Seraphim could do was make sure that there were crystal balls imprinted with whatever had been recorded in the water, to present to his majesty when the time came.

But Seraphim hadn’t thought of it, and Gabriel had, which was probably why Gabriel was the one to whom word was brought of whatever the new disturbance was.

The first sense of it the duke had was a shiver across the surface of his magic, as though someone had opened a portal between words nearby.  But it could not be a full portal between worlds.  It was something more attenuated and lighter.

Then there had come a knock at the door, and Gabriel opening it and mumbling something to a man outside, who mumbled something in response.  And then Gabriel started to close the door, and Seraphim had had just about enough.

“Penny, open the damn door and let the man speak to me.”  He understood well enough – perhaps better than other people in the household – Gabriel’s penchant for taking charge, for being useful.  He remembered – and wondered if anyone else did – what Gabriel had looked like when he’d been brought in, as Seraphim had then thought, as Seraphim’s birthday gift.

Though older than Seraphim, and obviously very similar to the heir of the Ainslings, Gabriel had looked gaunt almost to infirmity, his face had been bruised and he’d appeared terrified.  As though he’d been threatened with something even worse than the hunger and the violence he’d endured so far.  Seraphim had seen the look on Gabriel’s face as he encountered each of the features of life at the Darkwater estate: regular food, toys, a warm and secure bed.  He remembered Gabriel’s delight at the roaring fires in the hearths that first winter, his amazed joy at the sweetness of fruit in winter.  And he knew Gabriel tried to make himself useful, because at the back of his mind, somehow, he still thought the Ainslings would send him back where they’d found him.

He’d been afraid of being sent back after that shocking business in Cambridge too, though if Darkwater had been asked – he hadn’t – Gabriel had been more sinned against than sinning, and the fault lay with that damned Marlon fellow, who hadn’t lasted much longer before crossing over to the dark arts, either.

But as much as Seraphim loved and understood his half brother, this was the outside of enough and he would not stand for it.  He would not be treated as a cross between an excitable maiden aunt and an invalid grandfather in his own house, “Penn,” he said, in a warning tone, as Gabriel hesitated, his hand on the door.  “Let the man in, I said.”

The man came in.  He was one of the older gardeners, and Seraphim felt peevish annoyance that he couldn’t remember his name and that Gabriel probably knew it by heart.

The man wore a crushed felt hat, a dingy coat, and pants that were obviously worn while working, judging by the dirt adhering to them.  To this was joined an overall dampness, and scraps of what might be aquatic plants here and there.  He removed the felt hat – he should have done so on entering the house, of course, but even in a ducal house, the garden personnel was sometimes insufficiently educated in manners.  Clasping it in his hands and turning it over and over as he approached Seraphim, he bowed, “As I was telling Mr. Penn, sir, it is the lady in the lake, and a right mess she caused with our recording of the magic sir.”

This speech caused Seraphim to wonder if the reason they were treating him as a doddering and senile grandfather was that he had, in fact, gone around the bend.  Because none of this made sense.  He had to admit ignorance, of course, but he admitted it in the most haughty manner he could conjured.  “What are you speaking of?” he asked.  “I do not have the pleasure of understanding you.”

“The lady in the lake,” the man said, as though the matter were obvious.

“Unless she brought a sword with her, then it is unlikely it is the lady in the lake as such,” Seraphim said.  “And even if she brought a sword with her, she would have to be an impostor, as I’m sure the first Arthur’s sword is still where it resides, in the royal armory.  So, kindly explain.”

Gabriel huffed.  It wasn’t very audible, and the gardener probably missed it, or else, if he heard it he would have thought nothing of it.  But Seraphim heard it clear as day and knew exactly what it meant: that “huff” was Gabriel’s way of telling Seraphim to stop terrorizing the servants and being hard to please, and close upon it, Gabriel lost what patience he’d tried to summon.

As the gardener continued to twirl his execrable hat in his filthy hands, and stammer something that never amounted to a full word, Gabriel interrupted, “if it please your grace, what Marson is trying to tell you is that a woman fell into the lake, as they were using the magic recorders.”

“Fell from where?” Seraphim asked, turning his inquisitive glance on Seraphim.  “The trees?  And is she a woman or is she–”

“She is Miss Helena Felix,” Gabriel hastened, cutting what he presumed – truthfully – was Seraphim’s question about the magical nature of the intruder.

“Ah,” Seraphim said.  “The capable Miss Helena.  She stayed behind, then, while I was ill?”  He was trying to imagine what Gabriel must have told his mother to justify such a thing.  Good heavens, by now he might very well be engaged to the woman.  He started to open his mouth, then closed it, because he remembered suddenly that he didn’t even know if he was in fact engaged to Honoria.  He had to get Gabriel alone and ask him a few home questions without being attacked by maniacs with bolts and spells.

“No.  It appears she found occasion to come to us again, though,” Gabriel said.  “Marson has taken her to the housekeeper’s rooms, to change out of her soaked clothes and get a cup of tea, while they finish the recording in the garden.  And he’s given orders that the gentleman who … ah… got unfortunately killed by the bolt you sent out in self defense be put in the ice house, till royal officers can take charge of–”

“No,” Seraphim said.  And looked at Gabriel’s surprised face.  “No.  I must see them both.”

Gabriel’s eyebrows shot up.  “Both?  Miss Felix and–?”

“The dead man,” he said, and continued.  “Penn, if you please send one of the housemaids to tell Miss Felix I require her presence immediately.  And Marson, kindly have four under-gardeners carry the deceased gentleman up.”

“What?” the gardener said, clearly shocked.  “To your grace’s room?”

Seraphim allowed himself a smile.  “If I were feeling more myself,” he said.  “I’d go down and look at the corpse myself.  As is, though, I don’t feel up to taking the flights of stairs down, yet.  And the description I was given of his being a gentleman of average features, with dark hair, and richly dressed, you must understand it tells me very little about who he might be or whether I know him.  As such, I’ll thank you to bring him up.  You can carry him down again, and fast enough.”

“Yes, sir,” Marson said, but left with the sort of haste that betrayed his suspicions about Seraphim’s sanity.  His haste did not escape Gabriel.  As both the maids and the gardener left, he closed the door softly and turned to Seraphim, “I hope you’re satisfied, Duke.  Your servants will now think you have gone irrational, or perhaps that you intend to dabble in necromancy.”  But it was obvious it was just a joke, and, his face sobering, Gabriel told Seraphim, quickly, everything that had passed between the time of his coming back from the pyramids and the present.

“And you claimed Miss Felix was your fiancé?”

“You see how important it was to know what your mother knows about me?”

Seraphim sighed.  “Knows, nothing.  Understands, I suspect near all.  You know she always detects you in falsehood.”

“Perhaps,” Gabriel said, trying to appear unconcerned, but he bit the corner of his upper lip, something he only did when he was concerned.  He opened his mouth as though to say something, but at that moment there was a knock, and on Seraphim calling “come,” the door was opened by two maids who curtseyed then stood one on either side of the door, looking like statues.  In between them, a woman walked in.

She wasn’t ugly, Seraphim realized, now that he saw her without either anger or fear distorting her features.   She looked concerned, and she was soaked to the skin, her hair clinging to her head like a dark bonnet.  And she was wearing a voluminous grey blanket draped over whatever clothes she’d worn when she’d fallen in the pond.  But through it all, it was obvious her features were good, and that she had grace and poise worthy of a princess.

Miss Felix made that blanket seem like a trailing royal cloak, as she walked in to stand a few steps from him and curtseyed.  “I was told your grace wanted to see me,” she said.

“I did,” he said.  “I would like to know how you came to fall in my pond.  I presume it was not simply a matter of leaning too far over a branch.”

Miss Felix looked over her shoulder at the maids by the door, then back at him.  Seraphim nodded.  “I believe, madam, he said, that inconvenient though they are, your chaperones must stay.  You can’t be in a room alone with two men.”

She looked impatient.  He’d swear she rolled her eyes, and he could not reconcile her air of obvious quality with this unconcern or ignorance of the social rules.  “Very well,” she said, at last speaking in an undertone.  “But the thing is, your Grace, that I don’t know what to tell you.  To own the truth, the secret I could tell is not mine, and on it depends the life of someone whom I once thought–” She stopped.  “No.  On my silence depends the life of someone who might have his defects of character, but who, I’m sure, has done nothing to deserve death.”

Which, of course, was when the second knock on the door sounded, and on Seraphim authorizing entrance, as Nell stepped a little to the side and turned to look, Mr. Marson came in, leading four strapping boys, who carried, between them, a pallet on which was a form covered in a blanket.

The pallet was lowered in front of Seraphim, and the blanket pulled back at the same time a lantern was brought near that he might better examine the face of the deceased.

Seraphim saw a face that looked wholly unknown, and much as had been described to him: dark hair, regular features, a certain appearance of gentility.

And then Helena Felix leaned forward towards the corpse and gasped.  “Antoine!” she said.  She sounded more shocked than saddened.  “It is Antoine.”

Before Seraphim could ask her what she meant, and who Antoine might be, he heard running steps and someone burst in through the door, without asking.  It was his sister Caroline, her dress rumpled, her hair in a mess.  She curtseyed hastily, and looked around as if shocked at the mass of people in the room.  Her gaze raked the corpse on the floor, but she seemed not to be at all surprised, more annoyed, as though all these people were here for the purpose of annoying her.

“Seraphim,” she said, in a scolding tone.  “Seraphim, it is the most unlucky thing for you to have everyone here, because you must come with me right away.”

“Caroline,” he said, and was about to scold her on her lack of manners.  He had no time.

“Yes, yes,” she said.  “I know I’m being very shocking, and it’s all very bad, but Seraphim, we think Michael was taken by the elves.  They left a changeling in his place.”

Changeling

Nell clutched the blanket tightly around herself and wondered what madness she’d fallen into.  The entire night – indeed, the entire time since her interview with Sidell had acquired a feeling of unreality.

She had to be dreaming.  Antoine could not be dead, lying cold and pale on the floor, on that makeshift pallet, staring at the ceiling with unseeing eyes.  Antoine had been…

In her mind she remembered the first time she’d seen him, dressed in jeans and a pale blue t-shirt and looking very much like a twenty something year old computer repairman.  Which was what he’d said he was, that first time he’d taken her out for coffee.  But then there had come the hints that not all was as it seemed, you have great power he’d told her, and, by the time he’d shown her how to open a portal, by the time he’d given her a glimpse of other worlds, it had become obvious to her that he didn’t mean this as a metaphor.

Perhaps the dream started then, she thought.  Perhaps if she closed her eyes and believed really hard, she’d wake up back at her desk, in front of a computer running some routine.

“Caroline,” Darkwater said.  He spoke very softly, his voice all the more terrifying for seeming so unnaturally calm.  “What do you mean by a changeling?”

Nell didn’t want to know what he’d been doing, or what had been happening in this household since she was last year.  It was clear to her that though Seraphim had recovered from his near-brush with death – or at least this time Gabriel Penn didn’t seem to be making desperate attempts at reviving his half-brother, he still looked near death.  He was pale, his green eyes surrounded by dark circles, his lips looking dry and colorless.  And the aura of magic around him looked faded.

This was all the more puzzling since Nell gathered that more than a day had passed since she’d been here.  His power should have recovered more, unless–

Unless something else had happened to make him lose strength.  She remembered the talk by the lake, about how someone had attempted against Seraphim’s life.

The gardeners, the under-gardeners, and for all she knew the stable boys, all those men who had been on those boats, in the lake, had been – if what she understood of their talk was right – trying to record the event, so that Seraphim would not be condemned for murder.  But that meant that he had been attacked by Antoine.  Or at least he thought he had.

She felt vaguely sick.  She didn’t know when she’d stopped being in love with Antoine, but she’d never suspected him– No, that was not true, either, over the last months she’d suspected him of perfidy often enough.  She simply had never been sure enough of it to consider doing anything that would endanger his life.  It seemed like a very foolish thing to condemn a man to death simply because he might not have been straightforward with her, or because he had deceived her by telling her he loved her.

But she had suspected he had lied to her, and more.  First, because it seemed very unlikely that he’d come to Earth in search of her power, her aura of power, as he called it, guided through different worlds by the call of it.  Since she’d been in Avalon, Nell had gathered that her power was indeed strong, and indeed large.  But to call someone between worlds?  That didn’t even make sense.  Even the stronger magicians, even with scrying powers, had to be looking for something specific before they homed in on a pattern among universes.  Simply having a strong pattern didn’t call anyone.

Second because she’d seen for herself that Antoine was strong and accomplished, and knew his way across the multi universe.  And if that was true, how could he be so foolish as to transport into Avalon without a care, and let himself be caught in Sidell’s trap.

No, there was more there than he’d told Nell.  He had come here for some reason, and if it hadn’t been to fall into the trap, still it had to be for some reason more important than that he found the world fascinating and wanted to show it to Nell.

But still– But still Nell didn’t think that Antoine deserved to die, and now, she couldn’t think or believe that Antoine was an assassin.  Myriad ideas combated in her mind.  What if this weren’t real Antoine, but a clever simulacrum?  What if this was all designed to make her break and tell all to Darkwater?

Except Darkwater wasn’t even looking at her, but at the intense dark haired young woman, who looked so much like the Dowager Duchess.  “How do you know it’s a changeling, Caroline, and not simply Michael in a trance?”

The girl they called Caroline shook her head.  Her hands pleated nervously at the skirt of her robe.  “It’s not Michael,” she said.  “It can’t be.  Even in a trance he would wake up when I came in.  He would react to my magic.  Seraphim, he is all pale and his eyes are blank, and he looks… well, he looks more perfect than any normal human can look.  And …  And…”  Her voice rose in a wail of distress.  “Mama says it is a changeling.”

After her outburst, she took a deep breath and exhaled forcefully, and thrust her head and chest a little forward, as though she expected her brother to challenge her.  Darkwater didn’t challenge her.  He opened his mouth then closed it, then opened it again to say, in a voice that was little more than a whisper, “Mama?”  He looked up and to the side, to where Gabriel Penn stood beside the sofa, seemingly keeping guard over his wounded master.  The two men exchanged a glance that contained in it volumes of information Nell would give something to acquire.  Both of them looked grave, and whatever wordless communication between them, it didn’t dispel their fears, as both looked even more worried after it.

“One moment, Caroline,” Seraphim said.  “I will come with you, in a moment.”  He glared over his shoulder at Gabriel’s exclamation, and Nell could see Gabriel making an effort to prevent himself from further outburst.

Darwater turned away from his half-brother, and to the two men with the pallet on which Antoine lay.  “Take him to the cold room,” he said.  “We must notify the coroner of the death.  Send Jem, on a fast horse.  Tell him I will be available for interviewing no later than tomorrow afternoon.”  He looked back at his sister, “And now, Caroline, I shall come with you.”

“Your grace,” Gabriel said.  “You are not well enough to–”

“There are duties,” Seraphim said, ostensibly talking to no one in particular.  “Which one cannot delegate, no matter how tired or ill one is.”  He made an attempt to rise, supporting himself on his cane, then turned to look at Gabriel.  “Give me your arm, Penn.  I believe my strength is not equal to what I’d like it to be.”

His strength was not in fact equal to much of anything, Nell said, as she noticed how Gabriel Penn not only allowed the Duke to hold onto his arm to rise, but put his arm around the Duke’s waist to support him.  How ill was the duke, and why?  Had he really sent the killing bolt that killed Antoine?  She shivered at the idea, and, as the gentlemen who’d brought Antoine’s corpse in prepared to take him out again, she realized she’d been forgotten.

The Duke and Penn were following Caroline Darkwater out of the room and Nell thought she could stay here, until Darkwater had solved whatever problem had now visited his house, and came back to his room, and remembered Nell existed.  Or she could go with Antoine’s body and keep up some sort of vigil in the cold room – perhaps try to discover if that truly was Antoine’s corpse or some contrivance that looked like it.  Or…  Or she could follow Darkwater and Gabriel Penn and find out what had happened to the Duke’s younger brother and what else might be behind the turmoil in this household.

She pulled her blanket tighter about herself.  It truly didn’t make her any warmer, because her hair was dripping wet.  But it made her feel somehow more protected.  And then she started behind the Duke and his half-brother, as though she had every right to follow them.

The gardeners were waiting, with Antoine’s body, but she thought that the maids, stationed on either side of the door might stop her.  So she threw her head back and looked very haughty indeed as she went by them.

The maids didn’t move.  They didn’t even look at her as she walked past.  She’d have suspected magic, only she’d learned in Avalon the value of a good pretense and a good display of arrogance surpassed all logic.

The maids didn’t even follow as she walked after the Darkwaters and Penn down a long, marble-paved hallway.  Really, the one thing about this world that kept astonishing her was how the houses of the noblemen looked more magnificent than anything she’d ever seen on Earth.  Take the way the hallway ceiling arched above, painted a deep blue and sprinkled with gold stars.  It was like something out a theatrical set, rather than something you’d find in real life.

It would testify in favor of this being a dream, except that in dreams one’s feet didn’t ache with cold and slosh in shoes that felt like they’d fall apart every time she took a step.  And in dreams it was very rare for one’s hair to drip down ones back in a disconsolate, icy dribble.

They walked down the hallway, then up a curving staircase, then down another hallway.  As Nell tried to orient herself, she realized they were going towards the southern wing of the house, and, from what she remembered of the house’s exterior – which wasn’t much as she’d only ever seen it from the back, while approaching it, the other two times she’d magically transported into and out of it – to a little tower that protruded out of it at that corner.

She knew she was right when, ignoring the hallway to the southern wing, Seraphim, instead, opened the door to the tower.

The Darkwaters, followed by the quite disregarded Nell, entered a huge, circular room.  The tower might look small from the outside, but that was, Nell judged, because it was dwarfed by the other elements of the massive Darkwater house.  Inside, the tower was one vast room.  Vast enough that on Earth it could have passed as the lobby of a very large hotel.  Its architecture too resembled something one might find in a hotel lobby, being largely unimpeded: just one vast circular space, going up far more than one story to–

For a moment Nell looked up, disbelieving because it seemed to her as though the tower had no roof, but, instead, were open to velvety dark summer night sky, with naught but a golden spider web of some sort, between them and the night.  Then she realized the golden spider web was a framework for glass, and that the tower was one vast observatory or perhaps some sort of conservatory.  And that roof had to be held together with magic, because with the technology of this world there was no way to keep that much glass up with so little metal.

Then she looked down and realized that there was more magic at work here than the roof.  The space might be free of architectural abstractions, but it was filled with machines, and … contraptions, for which Nell had no name.

In the way of this world, these machines, no matter how utilitarian they tried to look, were made of polished brass and leather and wood, and their rounded shapes couldn’t help but looking pleasing.  And they were animated.  Arms moved, gears turned.  Something that looked like a giant telescope pointed at the ceiling, gyrated slowly on a frame, clicking gently in a steady rhythm, while a mechanical arm attached to it wrote steadily with a quill on paper.

In the middle of all this, perched on what looked remarkably like a high barstool made of brass, sat a young man, probably Caroline’s age or a little younger.  He was so young, one might still be able to call him pretty without offending too badly.  He looked like a version of Darkwater, or perhaps of Gabriel Penn, made of clay that had yet to harden, or like a sketch of one of them done hastily and left too smooth and soft.

He didn’t turn to look as the party approached.  The Dowager Duchess, who stood next to him, looking at him, intently, as though he were an object that must be puzzled out, did turn to look at them.  “Seraphim!” she said.  Then she hastened towards them, hands extended.  “You shouldn’t have come.  Indeed, you look very ill.  And there is nothing you can do here, you see.  Michael has been taken.  They’ve left this in his place.”

“Mama, are you sure–” Seraphim said, and stopped.

Nell was sure he had stopped because, like her, if he unfocused his eyes and brought his mage sight to bear, he could see that the thing on the stool was not and had never been a human adolescent.  It was more akin to an animated sculpture made of ice, or perhaps intersecting nodes of light and power.  Something that could only impersonate a human for those with no mage-sight.

Changeling.  That was a thing the elves did, wasn’t it?  Was this creature an elf then?  Or merely a construct the elves had left behind?

The Duke’s Duty

And now this.  Seraphim stared at the thing on the seat.  Were it not for his ability to unfocus his eyes and to look just so at that he would think it was Michael, but it was not.

The question was, how long had his brother been missing?  Would this sculpture, this animated construct always have been like this, listless and unresponsive?  Or was there a way it could have acted like Michael and Seraphim not have known, or – more importantly – the household not have known, while Seraphim was unconscious?

He looked towards the Duchess and narrowed his eyes, “Mama, they’ve always told me… that is… I’ve always heard it tell that you knew about changelings, and that this related to something in your childhood, but no one ever told me what?  It was all whispers and then ‘well, you know, because of her childhood’ and when I pursued the information they told me I was not to speak of it.” He looked steadily at his Mama, hoping that she wasn’t about to tell him this was not to be spoken of.  He knew he was making poor Penny damned uncomfortable.  He could tell without turning to look, without Penny saying a single word.  He knew whatever the mystery with changelings in Mama’s childhood was related directly to whatever and whoever Penny was.  That Penny would not in fact be here today but for mama and whatever had brought her in the presence of elves in her childhood.  “How did you know, Mama?  What is it with changelings?  Have you seen one of these before?”

The Duchess looked at the thing on the stool and sighed.  “It is not,” she said.  “A changeling like the one they left for me, when they stole me to fairyland as a child.”

A long breath, with a sound on the edge of keening escaped Penny, but Darkwater didn’t turn to look, and instead kept looking at his mother, who spoke like one in a dream.  “This is a construct, animated.  It looks like, and probably is, ice.  Water that someone poured in the rough shape of a young man, and then left overnight to freeze, then animated and gave your brother’s look by magic.  It is not alive.  It has no feelings.  It–”

“Stop,” Gabriel Penn said.  And what was so strange was that Penny had told the Dowager to stop, something he’d never done before.  “Stop, Your Grace,” he moderated, and sighed.  “It will not do.  We should discuss it, yes, but not here.  Not in … its presence.”  He waved towards the changeling, who remained, impassive, on his stool, looking blankly at the world.

“But Mother says it’s not animated,” Caroline said.

Penn sighed again.  “No, but still.”

“What should we do with it then?” Darkwater asked.  It seemed to him foolish to leave the thing alone, as though it might get up to mischief on its own.

“Nothing,” Penn said.  “It is losing its magic and will presently melt.  But if you feel better, Duke, we shall lock it in the closet.”  He took the creature’s arm and led it, and it let itself be led, to a cupboard in the wall, where Michael kept his chemicals and his vials.  Penn pushed the creature in there, closed the door and locked.  Then closed the closet to sight and sound with a carefully aimed spell.

Then he turned to the room, “Shall we speak, now?” he asked.  “This is one of the safest rooms in the house to discuss such things in, since Michael has hardened it against magical interference, so no rival houses could see his designs.”

“But that thing got in,” Caroline said.  And Penn smiled at her.  “Yes, Caroline, it did, but not through here.  My guess is that Michael has been gone for days, perhaps before Seraphim was injured.  These changelings have a certain programing and seem more real and solid, and interact with everyone normally for a few days, and then wind down and become whatever material they were.”

“Then why didn’t you allow us to speak in front of it?” Seraphim said.

“Because sometimes they are rigged so as to transmit sight and sound to whoever made them.  I have shut it in the closet and blocked all sound magically.  We are safe now.  And I believe,” he said.  “First I will let Her Grace tell us what happened to her in childhood.”

It occurred to Seraphim, for the first time, that Penny spoke as though he knew what it was.  He said so, and Penny pressed his lips together.  “Indeed, Seraphim.  Perforce I know.”  And though Seraphim didn’t know why perforce, in fact couldn’t think of any reason for Penny to know, save that, of course, his mother was an elf, and changelings were connected to elves, he kept quiet.

“I will tell,” his Mama said.  “But let us sit.  Seraphim should not remain standing long.”  He allowed his mother to lead him to a little sitting area around a large, glimmering sphere whose purpose Michael had never succeeded in explaining fully, but which seemed to interest the heads of several magic houses.  There were three straight backed chairs, a chaise and a sofa.  He refused to lie down on the chaise, but allowed himself to be led to the sofa and sat down on it, glad only that no one had brought an invalid’s shawl to drape around his shoulders.  Mama sat in one of the straight backed chairs.  Caroline half-reclined on the chaise.  Penny remained standing, but Seraphim wasn’t about to challenge him, suspecting it had to do with his idea of preserving the appearance of his position, while in public.

Then he realized there was someone else with them.  They’d been so absorbed in their conversation that he hadn’t noticed her before.  Miss Helen Felix had come with them, trailing her grey blanked.  The woman must be freezing, even with the blanket, and indeed looked very pale and tired.  He looked at her, “Miss Felix?  Should we have private talk in front of you?  Two whom do you report?”

She gave something that wasn’t a half laugh.  “To no one, Your Grace,” she said.  “Up until this mor– No, up until the day I left here, whenever that was, I worked for Sidell, spymaster for the king.  Then I would have said I reported to him.  But all that was severed first by his betraying me, and then by his killing the man he was holding hostage for my good behavior.  I am now, Your Grace, entirely a free agent, and as a free agent, I confess I’d like to do what I can to bring your brother back.”

Seraphim didn’t know whether to believe it.  After all, the king’s spies were trained and paid to lie.  He hesitated.

“She can hear my story,” his mother said, quietly.  Seraphim noted that the Duchess didn’t protest that Miss Felix was Penny’s fiancé.  “It is nothing so secret that she can’t find out the general outlines of it simply by talking to anyone old enough to have listened to gossip or practiced magic when I was a child.  It is not normally spoken of, because people are afraid to give me pain, not because it is not known.”

Seraphim looked at Penny, “And you?  Since I presume you’ll be talking, also?”

Penny looked surprised, then glanced at Miss Felix and shrugged.  “Oh, she can hear mine too.  There is nothing in it that cannot be gathered with some sleuthing, and I suspect the king’s secret services know it well enough.  If I’ve kept it secret at all it was to spare your family shame by association, but I judge in the trouble we face that is the least of our worries.”

“When I was five,” the Duchess spoke.  “I was stolen away to fairyland.  No one knows why.”  She spoke a little too loudly, a little to cheerfully, as though trying too hard to sound normal.  And she’d barely let Penny stop talking before she started.  “I had magic, of course, but no more than my brothers and sisters, and no more than a hundred other children in the immediate vicinity of my parents’ estate.  But whatever it was, and for whatever reason, it was a well planned thing.  You see.”  She looked up at Penny, and her eyes unfocused.  Not as though she didn’t want to see him, but more as though she knew what she had to say would touch him very nearly and were trying to pull herself away from it, and not to dwell on the pain she was giving.  “You see, the changeling they left in my place was not a construct, but a little girl.  A little elf girl they had to have shaped from very early on to look exactly like me and behave exactly like me.  For days – weeks – my parents didn’t know I was missing.

“For myself too,” she said.  “It was hard to tell.  I lived mostly in the nursery, with nanny and the nursery maids.  My life was surrounded by toys and I was an imaginative child.  As such… Well, I thought simply that my toys were more alive than before.  For a long time, I didn’t notice that I was in another realm and then…”

“And then?”

“And then I started to feel cold.  Not physically.  I don’t think fairyland is any colder than here.  It is, after all, like another world in the multiuniverse, just one that never fully separated.  So while it is in a way attached to our world, it is also a copy of it.  It has the same climate at the same time.  But there is… Everyone in fairyland is cold.”  She shrugged.  Penny was walking back and forth across the little sitting area, as though he couldn’t sit still, but he nodded when she said that.  “It’s not that they don’t show emotion,” she continued.  “It is that they don’t know what emotion is.  They are like humans without the…”  She shrugged.  “I’m sure Gabriel can explain it better than.”

“Yes,” Penny said.  “Yes.  But not just yet, pray go on.”  He paced.  She looked up at him.

“I realized that I was in a way absolutely alone, like… like a child raised by wolves would be alone.”  Penny shuddered, as though in response to her words.  “But I was too young to know what had happened or to seek to escape captivity.  I could not, and as such, I would have remained forever captive in fairyland, but…  But my parents had an hostage.  And they did what has always been done when a real changeling, a living one is left behind in place of the child taken.  They tortured her.  They subjected her to various discomforts, until I was brought back.”  She took a deep breath.  “I’m sorry Gabriel.”

He paused in his pacing.  For a crazy moment, Seraphim wondered if the changeling had been Gabriel, such the tone of his mother’s voice.  Could elves change their gender?  He’d never heard tell of such a thing.  And besides, Penny was around his age, was he not?  Could he have been kept in some stasis, so he didn’t grow?  But no, Penny was Seraphim’s half brother.  He had the Darkwater look, the Darkwater magic, and Seraphim’s own father had recognized him as such.

“What is there to be sorry for, Your Grace?” he asked, pausing in his pacing to look at her.  “Oh, perhaps, yes, perhaps it was that torture, which, though, from what I heard was very mild, at least for an elf, which led her to never quite fit in fairyland again.  But I don’t think so.  I never told you why we were thrown out, she and I, have I?  I told my father when–” He shook his head.  “I beg your pardon.”

“You beg my pardon?  For admitting the duke was your father?  Or for mentioning it in my presence?  Of all the things your father did, Gabriel, siring you was probably one of the most worthy.  Don’t scruple to admit it.  He admitted you openly, even if he never changed the name your mother gave you, since nothing could be gained by saddling you with Ainsling, when no title and no fortune accrued with it.”

Penny only nodded, though Seraphim wasn’t sure to what.

“My mother was the changeling left in place of Her Grace,” he said.  “She was also the child of the deposed king of fairyland.  No, don’t ask me how or why.  There are revolutions in fairyland, and civil wars, just as there are here.  And I think at the end of the last such war, when my… I suppose, my grandfather, the then sovereign of fairyland was deposed, he left behind his young daughter.  It was thought that by sending her as a changeling to the world of mortals, it would dispose of her, I think – though the thinking of elves is not the same as ours and it is hard to fathom at times.  However, in the time she was away, there was another revolution and my… I suppose my uncle, became the sovereign of fairyland.  he could not allow a princess of fairykind to be tortured in the world of humans and therefore, reluctantly – and I do feel it was reluctantly, though I can’t explain why – he gave Her Grace back to her parents and took my mother back.  But he had children of his own to inherit after him.  And my mother was ever odd.  Oh, I don’t think they did more than threaten her and make her uncomfortable, and perhaps make her work – the things that legend says one should do to changelings, though some people make the poor creatures sit on live coals or worse – and strangely, from what I know of my poor Mama, I don’t think that’s what changed her.

“Just like Her Grace could not survive in fairyland, not without noticing the exceptional coldness of elves and would have been changed beyond repair had she stayed in there longer, my mother had experienced the warmth of humans and it had changed her, so she no longer responded like a real elf.

“And she could not live in fairyland, not fully.  Instead, she would escape to the world of men.  Which is how she met with Arden Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater.  And she returned to fairyland expecting me.”

“And meanwhile, Darkwater found me, was enchanted by my resemblance to his vanished elf love, and started courting me,” the Dowager said.

Penny hesitated, looking like he would apologize, then inclined his head.  “Only I fit in even worse than my poor Mama.  I was more human, you see.  There is… there is sport the elves engage in.  They will capture some child out of doors on a dark night, or some lost creature, and they will torture it.  When I was three or four, I tried to rescue a puppy that was being tortured for the amusement of the court.  My mother and I were flung from fairyland and unworthy.”  He was silent a long while.  “When my father found me, we were living in a tenement and Mama…”  A long, deep breath.  “I begged to supplement our income.  It wasn’t until I had lived in this house for two years that they tried to reclaim me, and only because they couldn’t allow me to live as a commoner among humans.  They didn’t want me to keep me.”  He looked up, and a sudden fierce light burned in his eyes, such as Seraphim had never seen.  “They didn’t want me for me, or because they cared for me, or even because they honored me, or my lineage.  They’d probably have killed me once they’d got me back to fairyland.  But they didn’t want me to live among humans and perhaps come to value my human heritage over my elven one.”  Another pause.  “I don’t know why they took Michael or what for, but I swear to you, all of you, that I will do my outmost to bring him back, and – if I can – to bring fairyland down with it.”

The Fear Of Darkness

Nell looked at Gabriel as he proclaimed his willingness to take down fairyland if that was what it took to bring his youngest half brother back.  For a moment, for a brief breath, she caught a look in Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater’s face, as he looked at his half-elven sibling, nominally his valet.  She didn’t know what that look was.  It might be surprise or awe or fear.

Nell knew, however, with absolute certainty, in that moment, that Seraphim hadn’t known the details of Gabriel’s ancestry.  He might have known Gabriel was half-elf but not that he was what could be termed a prince of fairyland, nor why he’d left fairyland.  And he definitely hadn’t known how strongly Gabriel felt about elves and the king of fairyland.

It was just a moment, and then Seraphim looked away, his eyes half-lidded, hiding his expression, and is face went back to the impassive, reserved look she’d seen on it before.

Training, she thought, as though it were a novel idea.  The man had been trained to hide his feelings.  He’d been trained to behave impeccably in public.  He’d been brought up to fulfill his role and his role required that he follow a protocol in public and show nothing of his inner thoughts or feelings and, particularly, show no doubt no fear and no pain.

Once having realized that, she could detect things in his expression: pain mostly, and tiredness.  Though he looked alert and aware, she realized there were fine lines at the corner of his mouth, as from holding his features unnaturally serene against suffering.  And his shoulders were held too square and straight, as if he were afraid they’d sag under tiredness.  And his hands held the head of the walking stick far too tightly.

She looked at him until she caught him giving her a long side glance, and then she looked at her feet.  She hadn’t yet decided what to tell him.  What could she let the Darkwater’s know about her origins, her work, her involvement with Antoine, let alone her involvement with Sidell?  What and how much did they need to know?  And how much would endanger them?  She didn’t know enough to know what she could tell and to whom before they became targets for the secret service.

Now that Antoine was dead – something that didn’t seem quite real, yet – she didn’t even know how much of what she thought had happened since she’d landed in Avalon was true, and how much had been a lie perpetrated on her.  The idea that Antoine would try to kill Darkwater made no sense.  Certainly not when Antoine was supposed to be in a dungeon, his life dependent on her good behavior.

Once more, she caught the Duke of Darkside’s glance on her, and she looked down at her feet.  The Darkwaters talked around her.  It seemed as though they had little more thought than she did on how to rescue someone from the clutches of elves, and on this she had very little to hide from them.  She’d had some idea that elves were real here, and their magic here, as opposed to being – as on Earth – mere legends and rumors.  But she knew nothing else.  She’d heard of treaties between the two realms, but had never sought to inform herself of the details.  Her assignments had been among humans.

It seemed as though the conversation was winding down when Gabriel said, “I will speak to my mother.”  From the way he set his jaw after saying it, the quick, concerned glance Seraphim shot him, and the more openly concerned and pitying look given him by Caroline, it was obvious that this was neither an easy nor a safe task, but no one said anything to dissuade him.  The Dowager Duchess said in a tone of someone who relieves her mind, more than someone who says something that needs saying, “We must get Michael back as soon as may be.”

And Gabriel said, automatically, as though he’d been asked whether he intended to wear clothes outside, “Yes, Your Grace, of course.”

Then Darkwater’s voice rose, composed, forceful, “Miss Felix?”

She looked up at him.  She remembered the charade the two brothers had played for the benefit of Darkwater’s mother, and now she wondered if the Dowager Duchess had yet realized there was more to the two of them than they’d been letting on?  Or if she’d known it all along?  Or if she just now noticed that Seraphim’s wastrel ways, his dissolute living were, at most, a mask upon his real activities?  Or perhaps not, Nell thought.  Seraphim wouldn’t be the first man to be both heroic and a libertine.  The two were so far from being opposed character traits that it wouldn’t even be that unusual.  She must remember that when dealing with the two brothers, no matter how much she admired their courage and mutual loyalty.  Until she could find a way to make it back to her native world, she must play by Avalon rules, and by Avalon rules her reputation was both valuable and easily lost, so she must keep undeserving males at bay.  “Your Grace?” she said a trace of reserve in her nature.

Darkwater’s glance slid sideways at the Dowager Duchess.  So, she either didn’t know of the two brothers’ full adventures or Darkwater thought she didn’t know and wished to protect her.  She watched as he frowned slightly, then shook his head as though to himself.  “There is absolutely no reason for me to ask you questions tonight, he said, though I will have to ask you.  I beg you to hold yourself at our disposal.  It’s been a very long… few hours for me, since I woke up, and I don’t believe I can stay awake and speak with any semblance of rationality for much longer.  I would enjoin you not to teleport anywhere.  We would prefer not to fish you out of the trout pond again.”  He glanced at his sister.  “Caroline, if you would take Miss Felix to the blue room, on your floor, and arrange for it to be made up for her use.  Miss Felix, I shall see you at breakfast.”

Nell understood it as what it was: dismissal.  She didn’t try to argue it.  She knew enough of this world to know that Dukes weren’t argued with.  She guessed even that she was being got rid of so they could speak privately, which was probably the point, too, of having Caroline leave with her.  As the youngest female, she would be protected by her older brothers, though Nell guessed that not much escaped Miss Ainsling’s shrewd eyes.

The girl opened her mouth and said, “But Michael–” and must have read something in Darkwater’s look, because she stopped her protest and said, “Yes, Seraphim,” and bobbed a curtsey, then waited while Nell did likewise.

Nell followed her down a series of broad passageways and down two grand staircases, before Miss Ainsling opened her mouth to say, “I despite my older brother.  My older brothers I should say, since it’s no use their pretending Gabriel isn’t one, as his story made perfectly clear.”

“Despise?” Nell said.

“Oh, yes.  They are so stuffy and full of their own consequence.  And the way they try to keep me from doing anything, simply because I’m a girl and young is not to be borne.  Do you have any brothers, Miss Felix?”

“No,” Nell said.  Then sighed.  “That is, I don’t know.  I was adopted, you see.”  And then she thought in terms this world would understand.  “I was a foundling, I mean.  Abandoned.  I don’t know my true parentage.”

Caroline Ainsling sighed.  “Oh, that’s lucky.”

Nell must have made some sound – some gasp – in reply.  She wasn’t aware of it, but Caroline Ainsling laughed, a brief burble.  “I mean, you must understand, that growing up as the Duke of Darkwater’s daughter, and then sister, I was forever being judged by what they did and how they behaved.  I understand papa was terribly shocking, and Seraphim is in a good way to being so.  And then when Papa…  That is, after Papa died, everyone looked at us with pity and wonder, and you know, we were the center of attention, and we could not shed it.  I often wished to just go somewhere and hide, but of course, there was nowhere where I wasn’t known.  Michael is lucky because he can hide out wiht his machines, as it were, and abstract himself from the real world, but I…”  She shrugged.  “I shouldn’t be speaking of these things.  I am conscious of my good fortune in having a family and a position in society.  And I should worry only about recovering Michael, safe and sound.  I am a wretch.  But so I’ve always been.”  And she sighed again, though there was a theatrical element to her chagrin.

But wretch or not, despite her young age, Caroline Ainsling was competent at mustering the staff to make the room assigned Nell very comfortable indeed.  It wasn’t – of course – by any means a room such as she’d have had on Earth.  There was no bathroom attached.  The watercloset – Caroline said, lushing slightly as she pointed – was down the hallway.  There was a basin and a hewer of water from which it could be filled, the hewer perpetually renewing, Caroline said, with warm water.  And the bed was made with clean freshly aired sheets, and the bedspread was velvet and soft.

Nell suspected that were it seen by daylight and not soft magelight, the room would look shabby.  She remembered stories of Darkwater financial difficulties, and she remembered shabby fabric and worn furniture.  But by magelight this room looked luxurious.

When all was ready and the servants retreated, Caroline said, “And Seraphim will want to talk to you, of course, which is a great bore.  But I’ll have the maid wake you with tea in time to get you down for breakfast in the morning.”  And then, as though realizing for the first time that Nell remained in her wet clothes and wrapped in a blanket.  “What fools men are.  No one gave you time to change.”  A self-conscious smile.  “But then, neither have I.”  She gestured towards the closet.  “There is a night dress and robe in there which should fit you.  And there are many dresses from which you can choose, come morning.  Mama used to keep many in different sizes in all the rooms assigned to ladies.  I understand when Papa was alive, we had many house parties, and ladies would slip into the pond or tear their flounces or… there you have it.  One of them should fit you.  If not, ring the bell and tell the maid what you need and it shall be found.  A maid will be sent to dress your hair for breakfast.”

Nell started suspecting the Darkwater house was far more formal than she was prepared to endure.  Then she thought that, perforce, it must be.  After all the man was a duke.

A moment later Caroline was gone, saying, “I shall have hot chocolate brought to you.  You must be very uncomfortable in those soaked clothes.  Do you need a maid to help you undress?”

Nell assured the girl she didn’t, and as soon as Caroline was gone, undressed herself quickly and laid out her clothes by the fire, to dry.  They were, of course, ruined, but she could wear them to return to London, she supposed.

She had just dressed in a nightgown and dressing gown, both of which smelled faintly of mothball, when there was a scratching at the door.  The hot chocolate, Nell thought, and called out, “Come in.”

The door opened, but what came in had never been a maid.  She saw him first in the mirror, very pale, his eyes half-lidded a lingering smile in his pale lips.  She turned around and said, “Antoine!”

Bump In The Night
“You should be asleep,” Penny said.  And Seraphim knew that it was true.
He sat on the bed that had been freshly made and changed.  The smell of burnt feathers and the broth used to quench the fire was gone from the air.

And Penny, with bright efficiency, closed curtains and did other things.  He probably thinks I can’t see his magical work, Seraphim said.  That I don’t see him erasing the greasy feel of dark magic in the air, effacing any residual bad smell and making the entire room feel safe and secure.

It should be safe and secure too.  Penny knew his arcana, and at any rate he’d as much power as Seraphim, if of a different bend.  He could not secure the entire house, but surely, now that he was aware of danger he could secure this room.

But something still nagged at Seraphim, a sense of something gone very wrong, something unwinding, something…  Something he couldn’t quite pinpoint.  Making a stab at his feeling of uneasiness, he told Penny, “I’m not sure I can sleep, with Michael gone.”  And realized he was being uncharacteristically open.  It was not normal of him to talk about his missing brother.  To think about it, surely, and to mind his disappearance, of course, and to be restless in his longing to find Michael and save him.  But not to talk about it.  Seraphim had learned long before he became head of the family that too many people depended on him – as opposed to his volatile father – to allow him to show weakness or excessive concern.  He managed to discipline his face and say, “I beg your pardon, Penny.  I must be more tired than I realized.”

Penny nodded.  “What is amazing is that you’re not dead,” he said.  “As for Michael, we’ll find him,” Penny looked, in turn, very tired.  “There are certain things I can do.  And my mother might know something I can use as leverage to discover what has become of Michael, but most of all…”  He pressed his lips close.  “There is such a thing as single combat, and if it’s needed I will challenge my uncle.”  He closed his mouth again, his eyes flashing menace, and Seraphim was shocked to hear his own mouth pronounce, “Would you want it, Penny?  The throne of fairyland?”

Penny’s chuckle surprised them both.  At least it surprised Seraphim and it was followed by such a startled expression on Penny’s face that it would have been funny under other circumstances.  He smiled, after the surprise, and shook his head.  “You were not attending,” he said.  “There is this thing you mor– That people who have never visited fairyland or never lived there, and who have no elven blood in their veins, think, this idea that all fairyland is is enchantment and beauty and effortless magic.  You know that fairykind does not work the land, and does not make machines, and none of the contrivances of everyday life for a human, and you assume that it must be beautiful in the land of fairies, where no one ever need work, where nothing ever need decay, where no one ever grows old.

“To me it seemed like a cruel joke from the beginning, to hear it talked of as the isles of the blessed or the summer land.  It is beautiful, perhaps, as a naked sword can be beautiful in the sunlight, but it is…”  He hesitated.  He stood by the window where he had just drawn the windows closed, and now he turned to face Seraphim, and Seraphim noted how harsh Penny’s eyes looked, and how glittering, like the eyes of a man suffering from a fever.  “I can’t describe it, but if you can imagine a very sweet poison, or a very beautiful torturer’s chamber, you’ll be closer to understanding fairyland than most who never experienced it.  King?  I’d rather live forever among humans, cast off.  I’d rather be a beggar in London than a king in fairyland.”  He shook his head and took a deep breath, and Seraphim got the impression that he was disciplining his expression and his emotions to the realm of what was acceptable.  “Rest, Seraphim.  Tomorrow will be time enough to worry and to try to find Michael.  And that will be hard enough if you’re well.  With you ill and weak, it is hopeless.  And I know you know your duty to family and house too well to allow yourself the uncertainty and despair that will render you useless to them.  Someone is trying to kill you – and possibly me.  The fairyland is somehow enmeshed in these plans, and I forebear to guess on which side, though I doubt it’s mine.  And Michael is missing.  I thought, at first, that all of this, including getting you trapped in the betweener was just a side-result of our activities in other worlds. I thought someone, perhaps the Others that we’ve detected in those worlds, had tried to eliminate us and stop our bothersome rescues.  But now I think it’s much more than that – something so big that the borders of it seem to reach everywhere, and the tangle at its heart seems too huge and convoluted to make sense.  Still there is sense in it, and we will find it.”

He came over to the bed and reached for the mage light on Seraphim’s bedside table.  It extinguished at his touch, but then, as though thinking better of it, he brought it back to a dim glow, just enough to see the contours of the room.  Seraphim didn’t comment, but he had not kept his magelight on, even this low, since the age of ten at least.  So why would Penny think Seraphim wished it on now?  Or perhaps Penny was trying to assuage his own fears.  He turned to Seraphim now, “And the woman, Miss Felix, is mixed in it somehow?”
“On whose side?” Seraphim asked.
Penny shrugged.  “Well, she knew the man who tried to kill you,” he said.  “But perhaps we shouldn’t hold that by itself against her.  After all…”  He shook his head.  “I sense no harm for her.  And no fairy magic, before you ask.”

Seraphim wasn’t going to ask, but now that Penny had said it, he couldn’t get it out of his head.  He looked at his half-brother as he turned and said, “Well enough, now, I too must get my rest, and then we’ll see what we can do tomorrow in the light of day.  I’ve put wards in place.  Call me if you need anything.”  And then he was gone, which was good because for a moment Seraphim had feared that Penny meant to sit up all night by his bed, ensuring that another attack didn’t find Seraphim.

And I might very well not be able to sleep with him in the room, Seraphim said, and felt guilty about it.  He didn’t remember when he’d first found out that Penny had elf blood.  Not that first day surely, and not the second.  He suspected he’d discovered it either by listening to servant gossip – years ago, before they’d come to know Penny well, all the servants had been a little afraid of him – or by Penny himself telling him about it.  It felt as though Seraphim had always known it, though surely that wasn’t true, since at the very first he’d thought Penny was his full brother, brought into the family as a gift to him.  All of which showed Seraphim’s understanding of human reproduction had been both lacking and fanciful.  But all the same, he felt as if he’d always known that Penny was part fey.

And yet, in his heart, he’d never thought of Penny as anything but his brother.  Oh, his valet too, he supposed, particularly as they’d got older and had to learn to act their respective positions in public.  But most of all his brother and his friend.

So what had changed, now, that Penny’s presence in his room while he slept would feel less reassuring that vaguely threatening.  Was it all due to Seraphim’s memory of the chant in inhuman words?  Or was it…  Yes, it was Gabriel’s sudden slip of tongue, his almost referring to “mortals” to signify those unlike him, his talking about you as opposed to himself.  As though he didn’t consider himself human.  Wasn’t he?  Was Gabriel Penn some form of immortal?

And what did he mean by telling Seraphim – who’d never thought of it before – that Miss Felix didn’t have the blood of fairykind.  Seraphim didn’t like that preemptive denial.  Was it true?  Or was it part of that “me” and “you” that Penny suddenly seemed to divide the world into?

Oh, Seraphim believed Penny about the throne of fairyland.  At least he thought he did.  There had been too much loathing in Penny’s voice to be false.  But would he feel the same way about a creature like himself, half human and lost in the world of humans?  And was Miss Felix such?  There was something odd about her magic, Avalon born but learned by utterly alien means not even normal in any civilized world.

Seraphim stifled a groan as he sat up in bed.  He knew he was about to do something he’d regret.  He regretted it already, in fact, and yet it must be done. His silver-headed cane was resting against the bedside table.

He grasped the head and rose with the aid of the cane.  Getting on his feet was more difficult, but he managed it.  Putting on his dressing gown was only difficult because he must hold onto the bed with one hand or the other.

One of the advantages of having known Penny since they were both very young is that Seraphim knew exactly where Penny would have placed the spell that told him if Seraphim tried to leave the room.  And also that, having learned the earliest spells together, Seraphim knew Penny’s magical habits and how to disarm his traps.  At least he was fairly sure that if an alarm went out to Penny telling him his  magical alarm had been rendered ineffective, it would be delayed.

He walked down the hallway as fast as he could.  He must go to Miss Felix.  Somehow, it all hinged on her.  The world had been rational before her path crossed his.

“Antoine,” Seraphim heard, as he approached Miss Felix’s room.  He heard it clear as day, sounding through the closed door, and he stopped, swaying a little as he balanced on his feet and his silver headed cane, and looking at the door in puzzlement.

She’d said the same word – ad used the same tone – when she’d seen the corpse.  Seraphim wrinkled his forehead.  Was she talking about the corpse?

The next words “Oh, Antoine, no,” made him wonder if she was lamenting the corpse’s death.  Stupid if so.  Well, perhaps he was not in the position to judge.  He’d never been in love.  At least, he didn’t think so.  There had been that cook’s assistant when he was twelve, but he rather thought that his interest in her had been predicated more on the currants that she had it within her power to dispense than on her own, very young and charmless, person.

However, he’d seen in his time, how men – and possibly women too – could become utter fools over love, or what they believed was love.  Even Gabriel Penn, one of the people Seraphim knew best in all the world, had thrown over his academic career and the possibility of making his independent way in magic or law for the sake of love.

But at that moment words echoed through the thick oak door which might be related to love, but were not related to mourning a dead lover, “No, Antoine.  Stop.  You cannot do that.”  The last words were a scream, and there was real terror behind them.

Seraphim didn’t think he could use enough magic to unlock the door.  Not in his present weakened condition.  And he didn’t think he could put his shoulder to the door, either.  He opened his mouth to call for help, but – this far, in the guest area of the house – he doubted anyone would hear him.  Oh, of course when they had a house party they staffed this part of the house, but not when it was merely a guest and an unexpected one at that.  There would be a bell in the room, but–

He put a hand to the doorknob.  To his surprise, it opened at his touch.  He threw it open, and stepped into the room before he realized he was staring at the back of a man, who loomed large, standing up, and cornering Miss Felix, who, in the corner of the room, held her fingers crossed in a gesture of aversion.

“Step away from the lady,” he yelled, even as he thought that corpses were not supposed to be wandering the house in the night.  The man was dead.  Seraphim had made sure of that.  The magical bolt he’d thrown at the creature would have felled anyone with even a particle of magical talent.  And the man had magical talent.  Had to have it, else he’d not have been able to attack Seraphim.

So, this man, Antoine, had to be dead.  And dead men didn’t walk, except in the fantasies of sickly old maiden aunts.  Or unless, of course someone had used the resurrection spell.  And that would mean someone in Seraphim’s house.  And it would mean, of course, that Antoine, whoever he was, would still be dead, just an animated corpse.

The idea made Seraphim’s hair stand on end.  The man? Corpse? Hadn’t reacted to his shout.  Animated corpses were notoriously hard to deter.  As Seraphim watched, the creature took one step closer to Miss Felix, whose whole face had drained of color, and whose eyes looked too wide as she looked up, in sheer terror.

Seraphim grabbed the nearest object – one of the decorative vases atop a nearby table – and threw it with force at the creature’s head.  The creature started to turn and Miss Felix ducked under its arm, and ran towards Seraphim.  “I’m so glad,” she said.  It was almost a scream.  “Oh, thank you,” as she grasped his arm and almost toppled him with the force of her terror.  “He’s dead, you know.  Quick.  Let us–”

Before she could say what he should let them do, the creature who’d been threatening her had spun around, and Seraphim grabbed for his cane, and took in breath, horrified.  There was no doubt that Antoine was dead.  He looked exactly the same as he had while lying on the pallet which the gardeners had carried up from near the lake.  His face was pale and immobile, his lips drained of color.  His eyes, as far as they were open, showed only a sliver of white.  There was no expression to the slack features.

Seraphim pushed Miss Felix behind him, with barely a qualm as he remembered she seemed to have objections to being protected.  “Stay,” he said.  “What was he– it doing to make you scream?”

“Chasing me,” she said.  She must be mad with terror, because she made no effort to assert her ability to care for herself.  “Trying to corner me.  He should not be alive.  Why is he alive?”

“Someone must have made a resurrection spell,” Seraphim said, as the creature shambled towards them.  “Someone in the house.”  The idea was alien and obscene.  “Stay behind me,” he said.  “I won’t let it hurt you.  You must remember he is not your friend.”  He had no idea how he would not let it hurt her, considering that he felt as week as a newborn kitten.  But, he thought, though it was true that only the man who’d done the resurrection spell could undo it, it was also true he should be able to set a small magical restraining spell and stop this creature from coming closer.  Once enclosed in a magical cocoon, it would be unable to follow Helena Felix, and Seraphim should be able to question her about how this situation came about.  More, he should be able to find out who, in his house, had dared use an illegal spell to rewaken someone who’d tried to kill Seraphim.  And if Seraphim couldn’t, Penny could for sure.

The thought of the circumstances under which Penny had last been involved with resurrection spells made Seraphim hesitate, but he shook his head at his own foolishness.  Gabriel Penn might have been a fool for love.  Gabriel Penn might be an idiot when it came to loyalty and friendship, even, but the one thing Gabriel Penn wasn’t was a traitor to Seraphim.  Half elf, perhaps, capable of his own designs and his opinions that would shock the polite world, almost certainly.  Too smart for his own good, assuredly.  But Gabriel Penn would not betray the Darkwaters.

The creature shambled towards them, and Seraphim put out his left arm, to keep Helena Felix behind him, while he raised his right hand that held the silver-tipped cane, and, using it as a magical wand to concentrate his power said the first words of the cocoon spell, “Miras, enax–”

He got no further.  The animated corpse facing him stopped at the first wound of the words, the first feeling of the power leaving Seraphim’s body and flying forth.  But that was only in the first second.  A breath later, there was a feeling as though a line that linked Seraphim to the corpse had gone taunt.

Later, neither he nor Helena could decide exactly what had happened.  Each of them had different accounts, and both accounts were impossible.  Seraphim remembered – he doubted he could ever forget – the thing’s eyes opening fully and sparkling as though there were a fire lit behind them.  Its mouth too opened, wide, wide, wider, impossibly wide, till they’d fallen into it, he and Helena both.

And that made no sense at all, because in his memory, either the corpse had grown very large, or they’d grown very small, both of which were impossible, and then he and Helena had stumbled together, falling into that dark vortex of a mouth, falling, falling, head over heels, like flying leaves or tumbling sticks, falling, falling, falling, falling, in darkness and cold.

He was so shocked it took him a moment to recognize the in-betweener and by that time they were past it, and dropped, head first into light and music and sound flailing and screaming.

As they landed on the ground, hard, he was aware of people all around and something ahead of him.  He blinked… an elephant?

It was all the time he had before someone screamed, pointing at them.  He was not sure where they were, or what had happened, but he knew one thing: in nine out of ten worlds, what they’d just done, falling out of seeming nothing, in a public place, was enough to warrant their death.

Barely able to stand, feeling as though the entire world had fallen on him, he stood.  His mind in turmoil, not knowing where they were or how they come to be there, he reached back and grabbed Helena Felix’s wrist, and pulled.

He ran away from the elephant, away from the press of people, and into the first dark space his blurry and stinging eyes could find.    In Darkness And Despair

Gabriel Penn sat up at the feeling that his spell had been disrupted.  He’d left an alarm spell in Seraphim’s room, and it was supposed to trip and wake him if Seraphim left the room.

What he felt instead was the sensation that the spell had been tampered with, and that muffled and distant.  Which meant whoever had interfered with his magic alarms had done it in such a way, and with such sure knowledge of how Gabriel set spells that he could disable it and delay Gabriel sensing it had been disabled.

Because Gabriel’s magic was an amalgam of the human magic he’d learned in Cambridge and that elven magic he’d learned when very young at his mother’s knee, only one of the human magicians in this house knew it well enough to disable it and to muffle the realization it had been disabled.  Seraphim.

Cursing under his breath, Gabriel reached for his dressing gown, which he’d flung across the foot of the bed before laying down.  He slipped it on by touch, then said the one word that brought the magelight on the bedside to full glow.  It illuminated the full extent of his room – a tiny servant’s room containing a narrow single bed, the trunk he’d taken to Cambridge and brought back again, and which contained all of his clothes, and a desk, pushed up against the wall and piled high with papers.  From the mess on the desk he extracted his magic wand.  He rarely used it these days, but he had a bad feeling over this whole situation – a persentiment of disaster, he thought, and he didn’t like these feelings.  Given his origin and avocation they tended to be all too accurate.

Holding the mage light – fully lit – in one hand, and the magic wand in the other, he opened his room door and, not bothering to close it, pelted down the hallway and up the stairs towards Seraphim’s room.  He muttered under his breath, continuously, a word that would have shocked the ladies of the house very much if they’d heard it.  It would to be honest, probably have shocked them, too, to see him running down the hallway in an ill-tied dressing gown over his underwear, which was all he’d worn to bed.

It didn’t matter.  He’d rather shock them, or them the female servants, than have the feeling of dread in his mind be justified.

He ran up the stairs, two steps at a time, and down the hallway.  But Seraphim’s room was empty, the door open, the magic spell broken.

Gabriel stood in the hallway, his heart beating so loudly he could barely hear himself think.  And then he felt it, coming from the guest wing, where they’d lodged Miss Felix: magic. A big discharge of magic.

He started running again, mindlessly, pleading with some nameless divinity to let him be wrong.  Just this once, please let him be wrong.

But before he reached the room, he knew he wasn’t.  He felt the magical discharge of a trap going off, the pull and suck of a vortex opening between worlds – a portal not activated by the people thrown into it.

And turning a corner, he saw Seraphim and Helena Felix being sucked into a maw of darkness.

As the magical fog and darkness dissipated, he realized what was left behind was perhaps even worse than having lost your legitimate brother, the duke, to a magical trap that had taken him who knew where.

In the middle of the guest room stood an animated corpse.

“Shit,” Gabriel Penn said, loudly and emphatically.  And raised his wand.

A Strange Land

It was an alley, Nell realized, as she took a deep breath.  An alley bordered by tall brick buildings, which could be an alley anywhere in Avallon, or – for that matter – in any large city on Earth.  But the structure at the end of the alley was not something she’d ever seen either in Avallon or Earth.  It was purple – bright purple – and it looked like it was made of glass.   It was also roughly egg shaped, with a hole on top and an odd sheen to it.

Her first instinct was to think of it as a dumpster, but if so, these people kept the cleanest dumpsters in any of the worlds she’d visited while out with Antoine.

And on the heels of that, she tried to think of all the worlds she’d visited with Antoine.  And not to think of anything else – anything else – relating to Antoine.  Like, for instance, she truly didn’t want to think of his livid skin, his staring eyes, his … No, she wouldn’t think of it.  Or of what type of horrible spell could make a man walk and talk when he was – when he should be – by all rights dead. Much less what kind of trap this might be.

At any rate, speaking of livid skin and staring eyes, she found that Seraphim too could fit that description.  He was wearing a dressing gown.  A very pretty dressing gown, she thought, though she suspected on Earth most men would be worried about wearing something that bright and silky.  Never mind.  She knew Avalon tastes, and for Avalon tastes, it was a very refined dressing gown indeed.  He was also barefoot.  And he was clutching the loveliest black-cane-with-dragon-head.

This looked completely out of place in what seemed to be a largish city in the middle of the day, but she put that out of her mind, because, really, how did she know what people here wore.  One of the worlds she’d visited with Antoine, before coming to Avalon, had been apparently a nudist colony.  Puzzling, since England in that time was really no warmer than England in any other time.  And in another they seemed to wear vast rolls of shag carpet.  For all she knew, in this world, men dressed for business in ankle length white shirts topped with resplendent silk dressing gowns, and always carried a cane.

What worried her more was the fact that Seraphim looked distinctly unwell.  *No, really, let me think about this.  In the space of a few days, he got wounded, then he got attacked with a mage gun, and almost died, or came so close to it that the ressurection spell had to be used.  And then, not only did Antoine…  Antoine…* She took a deep breath. *Not only did someone attack him again, but he had to perform magic to defend himself.  And to defend me.  And then he was dropped head first into a weird world.  He should look completely chipper and well!*

“Your Grace,” she said.  “Your Grace?”  His eyes were trying to close, and she could hear noise coming from the head of the alley, a long way away.  The kind of noise people would make if they were looking for two oddly dressed people who might be refugees from a mental hospital, and possibly dangerous.

“Seraphim?”  This got her a little more response than *Your Grace* in that his eyes fluttered and he could be seen to visibly make an effort to wake up.  But he sagged against the brick wall and made an odd sound like a sigh.  And from the entrance of the alley came voices in an oddly accented English.

No accent could disguise the fact that someone said, “Is this where the witches went?” nor the tone in which someone else answered that perhaps they should call the police.

So, they were looking for witches, presumably the two of them.  And Nell didn’t think it was to wish them luck and give them a box of chocolates.  If she had to guess this was one of those worlds where witchcraft was forbidden for whatever reason.

She and Antoine hadn’t actually come across many of those.  Possibly because Antoine knew the general lay of the land and what kind of worlds would be best to avoid.  They’d come across worlds like Earth, where magic was disbelieved, ignored or not used, but not too many worlds where it was forbidden, much less under penalty of death.  And when they came across one by accident, Antoine got them out very quickly.  But Nell had heard of them, aplenty, particularly in Avalon literature.

It seemed that the policy that Avalon much not interfere in other worlds, to the point of letting witches and wizards be killed in other worlds, was new.  Or at least literature from a century or so ago talked about lots of rescues and daring do in other worlds.

Seraphim Darkwater sagged further and started sliding down the wall and she realized he had lost consciousness.  At the same time, from the mouth of the alley came a voice saying, “Here, Gnarr, I’m glad you got the authorities.  We’ll now get those witches, right and proper.”

She put out an arm to hold the Duke up and realized that the man was, in fact, very heavy, and that she wasn’t going to be able to carry him.  Hell, she couldn’t even drag him behind the shiny purple thing.  The best she could do was magic them somewhere.  But where?  And what if she got them somewhere worse?

There would be no time to open a magic portal to take them out of this world.  Besides, she had a strong feeling whatever the magic used to bring them here had been designed so they couldn’t return.  She still made a half hearted feel in that direction, but the betweener felt as though shut tight.

In a panic, as voices came closer, she thought she should simply use the coordinates of her room in Avalon and take them to the equivalent location in this world.  From there, she could take them elsewhere.  How much worse could it get?

Blindly, her eyes closed, her arm aching from supporting the Duke, she heard someone say “Come on out and give yourself up and it will go–”

And she thought of the coordinates and pushed.

Magic flared like fire all around her. The purple thing at the back of the alley seemed to explode.  And then she was falling head first into a body of water.

She had time to think *Not again* before she kicked up with her legs and came to the surface for a deep breath, which was when she realized that Seraphim hadn’t surfaced.

Diving back down, she saw the bright dressing gown and dove for it.  Grabbing it by the back, she dragged him to the surface, thanking the buoyancy of the water that allowed her to tow a weight considerably greater than her own.

Even so, and even after she managed to get his head above water and, hopefully breathing, it took all her strength and concentration to drag him to the edge of the water.  Fortunately it was not very far, or she’d never have been able to do it.  Even more fortunately, the river – she didn’t remember when she’d determined it was a river, but she was sure of it by the time she was pulling Seraphim out of the water – had a gradual, soft-sand bank, and she could drag Seraphim up it by stages by sitting on the sand and holding him up and pulling as she shuffled up the beach.  Had the river had steep banks or even rocky ones, the Duke would have drowned.

As it was, when she dragged him all the way out, so only his feet remained in the water, and his body lay stretched on the sand like a great beached whale, she wasn’t so sure he hadn’t drowned.  She was very tired, granted, and he was very wet, and also – she thought – very ill.  He’d been very ill even before falling into the water.  But shouldn’t his chest be moving?

She felt the side of his neck, looking for a pulse, and couldn’t find it.  His lips had a faint blueish tinge.  She put her hand on top of his mouth and couldn’t feel him breathing.  A hand pushed between the folds of his dressing gown felt no hint of a heartbeat.

Her mage sight, brought to bear with much difficulty, seemed to show a faint glow of life and magic around him, but that often subsisted at that level for a few moments after the person had stopped breathing.

*If I had a mirror,* she thought. *I would be able to tell if he was breathing.* Her own laughter startled her, as she thought that if she had the right machines, she would be able to tell if he had brain activity too.

She could use the ressurection spell.  Arguably she should.  But what if he were already dead?  She risked making him like Antoine.

The tear that fell on his already-soaked hair surprised her because she didn’t realize she was crying.  She put up a hasty hand to wipe at her eyes, and in that moment, his eyes fluttered open and he looked at her in shock.  He coughed, once, twice, then blinked.  “Why…”  He cleared his throat.  “Why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying,” she said, hearing the tears in her own voice and not sure why she was crying, unless it was tiredness and relief.  And then she added, as justification.  “You were dead.”

“I was?” he said, surprised.  And blinked again.  “I don’t think I was?  Unless, of course…”  He took a deep breath.  “No.  This is not the result of a resurrection spell.  I’m not a reanimated corpse.”  He took a deep breath.  “No.  I see what it is.  I… I went to your room, and then…”  His eyes widened so far they looked like they were going to split.  “There was a trap,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, soberly.  “That much I’d already realized.”

He dragged himself up to sitting, though he swayed a little with fatigue.  He looked at her as if she were a long way away and he had trouble focusing at that distance.  “I drank an awful lot of that river,” he said.

“I know,” she said.  “I dragged you out as best I could.”

“Thank you,” he said, but his expression remained distant, as if trying to think through a very difficult problem.  “Miss Felix, please tell me that there wasn’t a magic detector at the end of that alley.”

“Magic–”

“Vast purple crystal egg?  Detects magic being performed in the vicinity and imprints the pattern so the authorities can look for it.”

She nodded, dumbly, and his eyes widened more, which shouldn’t have been possible.  Then he said something that sounded like “Muffin” which apparently was a bad swear word, because he immediately looked abashed, “I apologize.  I’m sorry.  I should never– Only…  It’s the world of the priest-kings, see.  The Priest Kings of Okkar.”

“Is that bad?” she asked.  “Do they sacrifice magic users as they do in pyramids?”

“No,” Seraphim said.  “They only execute anyone with magic who isn’t related to the royal family.”

After The Bird Has Flown
There was no worse feeling, Gabriel thought, than arriving to close the door of the birdcage a moment after the bird had flown.
Not that Seraphim and Miss Felix were birds, or that the odd portal – was it a portal?
– to another world was a cage door.  For one, Gabriel was almost sure that neither Seraphim nor Miss Felix had meant to go through it and into– Where?
And then, in that split second after he realized he’d lost track of his legitimate brother, the head of his house on whom,  in fact, his entire family depended, he realized that he had a bigger problem
The corpse was shambling towards him.
He’d had some experience in Cambridge with reanimated corpses.  He wouldn’t say that was what had put paid to his one and only love affair, but it had certainly exploded the whole thing into the public eye and had forced him to leave Cambridge in disgrace.
Normally the only way to kill a reanimated corpse was to get the person who’d first animated it to help.  That had been the problem, really, back then, though perhaps Gabriel hadn’t dealt with it as sanely as he should have.
But now, ten years later, he still had no idea how to deal with it.  You couldn’t put an animated corpse down without the collaboration and the help of the person who’d reanimated it.  Who could have animated Antoine?  It had to be someone in the house?  But who would have done it and set him up as a magical trap to send Seraphim and Miss Felix– Where?
He backed up as the corpse shambled forward.  He raised his wand.
And then, as if a switch had been turned, Antoine’s corpse closed its gaping mouth, swayed, and fell, forward, with all the grace of a sack full of sand.
Gabriel realized he was shaking and sweating, standing alone in the empty guest room, staring at a dead man and wondering where Seraphim and Miss Felix were.  Always, that question came back.  What had happened to Seraphim and Miss Felix?  And what would happen now?
Gabriel backed up, until his back hit the wall of the hallway, opposite the door to the room.  For a moment – for just a moment – he thought he’d go back in and pull the bell pull and call for help.  But what help could he call?  The Duchess?  Already fearing for the life of her younger son, and perhaps for his sanity, lost in fairyland, what could she do about the loss of her older son?  Caroline?  Caroline was a mere child.  Oh, precocious beyond her years, but how much help could she be?  Worse, how much help should he ask of her.  They were very likely to be dealing with forbidden magics here, before it was all said and done.  Travel to other lands, for sure, and probably meddling in their affairs too.
Worse, he realized, with a feeling as though a leaden weight had settled on his stomach, some people – perhaps even the duchess, almost certainly not Caroline, but surely every servant in the house – would suspect him of having done this.  The magic was so odd, the animation of the cadaver, the portal.  Fairy magic, they’d say, and they’d talk about him behind their hands.  He’d once again meet the odd looks that focused on him for a moment, then slid sideways, and know, know as he did in his first days in the house, that behind their backs they held their fingers crossed, an impotent attempt at stopping the evil magic he had no intent of using.
What could he do?  He couldn’t leave Seraphim lost.  Or Michael.  Or possibly even Miss Felix, if she was innocent in this.  His mouth went dry in a panic, and at first he thought the loud banging was coming from his head or from his heart.
Then he realized it was coming from the front door.  Someone was pounding on the door, loudly, and shouting something.  Sound of running feet echoed through the house, and distantly, Gabriel heard the front door open.
There were shouting voices, one of them almost for sure the buttler’s.  Here, in the guest wing, where every room was unoccupied, there was a great silence, but the shouting voices continued, and now there were many people coming in, at least if Gabriel was interpreting the voices correctly.
Gabriel was the only son left in the house, even if he wasn’t a son of the house, properly speaking.  He must protect the dowager and Caroline.
He ran towards the noise, but before he got there met with a maid running in the other direction, towards the family wing.  He stopped her, daring – an unwonted familiarity in him – to put his hand out to her shoulder.  He couldn’t remember her name, though he was sure he knew it.  Bessie or Annie or something like that.  All their names swirled in his head, and what came out of his mouth was, “Please, you must tell me.  Please, what is happening.”
If she was shocked at being touched, she didn’t show it, though she did drop back and drop him a courtesy.  It seemed to be unspoken etiquette of the house to treat Gabriel as an upper servant and to give him the deference they gave the butler and the house keeper, just short of the deference they gave Seraphim or the family.  “Sir,” she said.  “Sir.  It is the constables.  And the king’s magical police, and they want His Grace.  They said as he done murder, and the murdered man, killed by magic is in the house!”  Her mouth worked and no words came out.  “Sir.  And they say as you helped, sir.”
There are moments when a man’s life hangs on a thin thread of decision.  Gabriel was the only man left in the house, the only male descendant of the late Duke of Darkwater, who might protect the women in family.  But he was also half fey, easy to paint as a villain in this tale that had spun itself out to ensnare his family.  Not that he minded, or not too much.  He’d grown used to it, if not easy with it, over the years of living amid the mortals.  But in this case, what he was, who he was, could be used to taint all of the Darkwaters.
If they were going to argue that Seraphim had killed this stranger for no good reason, they’d need to get the closest witness out of the way, and that was Gabriel.  Who also happened to be the only witness to the fact that Seraphim had disappeared against his will.  And Gabriel would on top of all, make people mistrust the family that had harbored him – his family.  After all, people that took a half-fairy child into their home, would surely do any sort of stupid thing, any sort of criminal thing.
Gabriel swallowed hard.  He put his hand out again, and this time held onto the girl’s arm.  Given how leery he was, usually, of touching anyone at all in the house, it should have alarmed her but it didn’t.  Instead, Gabriel found her gaze fixed intently on him with a sort of puzzling expression.  Was it hope?  Did he add to all his sins the broken hearts of housemaids?  He removed his hand slowly, and raked back his hair which somehow had fallen forward over his face, “Listen, Annie,” he said, and in that moment knew the name was Bessie, but didn’t want to correct it.  “Tell Her Grac– No, tell Caroline, Miss Ainsling, that I’ve gone to… to avoid the… my presence can only hurt them.  Tell Caroline that Seraphim was pulled into another world, and I’m going in search of him and find him or die trying.  Tell her and then…” he thought, and suddenly realized for the girl’s protection itself, there was only thing he could do.  He put magic behind his order, to make both parts a compulsion.  “Tell her immediately, and then forget it.  It never happened.  You never saw me.”
He let the girl go, and watched her walk – no, run – towards the family wing in that half-mechanical gait of people under a compulsion.  And then he ran the other way, towards his room.  He ran faster than he’d ever run.  He ran as though the fires of hell were burning at his heels, the hounds of hell pursuing him.
He could hear the voices of strangers in the house.  He could hear the tones as the Buttler tried to keep them from coming in further.  He’d have to use a spell to leave.  That would leave a signature, but never mind.  He’d go to London, where the magical trace was harder to find, and then he’d transport from there.  And then he’d stop long enough to figure out how to find Seraphim.
Blindly, he pulled his luggage from under the bed.  Blindly, he threw clothes into it, both from the trunk at the foot of his bed, and from the peg on the wall.   There were steps on the corridor, and his mouth was dry, and his heart was pounding.  And now there was a knock at his door, and a voice calling out, “Mr. Penn?”
And the voice was not one he knew.
Without looking, without turning, he lifted his hand and threw a lock spell at the door.  It wouldn’t hold any sort of constabulary for long.  Not if they had a magician with them, which they would.  Surely, they would.  But it would slow them down.
He looked down at himself and realized he was still wearing only his underwear and his dressing gown.  His feet were bare.  There was nothing he could do about that, and it was almost funny that he should leave this house as he had entered, grossly underdressed for the weather.
He lifted his hand and with a pass, opened a portal, and found himself, between one breath and the next, in the betweener, and then, suddenly, again, on an alley in London.  Nearby, a baby cried.  Somewhere, further off, a woman laughed, a full throated laugh that reminded Gabriel of his mother.
London was a criss cross of magical comings and goings, and it would take them a while to track him here, but how long was a while?
In his mind, the events of the last day had assembled.  Someone had tricked Seraphim into committing what could be construed as a crime, and then they’d taken him away, so he couldn’t demand king’s justice.  They’d taken Michael too.  And now he, himself, had had to leave.  Why?  What did they want?  Access to the house?  Possibly.  Or just to destroy the family?  Possibly also.
But whatever they wanted, and whoever they were – perhaps the shadowy cabal he and Seraphim had encountered in distant worlds and nicknamed The Others – they would not be stopped by something like the difficulty of tracing someone in London.  They’d barely be slowed down.
In his mind’s eye, he saw his room’s door smashed down.  Now they’d be tracing him… now.
There was only one place he could go; only one place he could hide.  Marlon, curse him, had a tight enough lock on his lodgings that in ten years of living outside the law, no one had caught him, nothing had emerged about his wereabouts.
And Marlon, curse him, would take Gabriel in, though the price would be more than Gabriel would ever pay for himself, by his own choice.  But to save the only family he’d ever known?  There was no price too high.
He lifted his hand and, loathing himself, loathing his necessity, opened a portal to secret coordinates he’d promised himself he’d never use.

A Rude Wakening

Barbara Ainsling, Dowager Duchess of Darkwater woke up without a sound.  Before she woke, she knew that something was wrong – very wrong.
Normally she woke with her personal abigail, Jane, bringing in a tea tray.  It had become a ritual, and the Duchess’s first consciousness came with the sound of the tray being set on the little table by the bed, followed by the sound of calm footsteps across the floor which in turn was followed by the sound of curtains being drawn back.  Then light filtered gently past the sheers and the Duchess woke, composed and ready for her day.
Today there was no light, no tray, no calm footsteps.  Instead she had awakened to the sound of the door opening, then closing, stealthily.  It was followed by the sound of someone panting rapidly, as though in a panic.
Barbara Ainsling had for many years been a Duchess, surrounded by both comfort and propriety, hemmed in by the precise politeness of her position.  But she’d not forgotten her years as a child in a vast wooded estate in Derbyshire; her years of climbing trees and fishing with the tenant sons.
The much younger daughter of a large family, whose next youngest child was a full ten years her senior, she had learned to make her entertainment and had bid fair to become a hoyden, if not a tomboy, till the lure of her mirror, and how well she looked in ball gowns, and the effect she had on boys had called her to more feminine pursuits and thence to marriage.
But even at forty four, inside she often felt she was still that same wild girl she’d been.  So she sat up, instantly alert, and reached, silently, for anything she could use as a weapon without moving much.  Unfortunately the only thing she could reach without getting up was the coverlet over herself.  It would have to do.  It was Barbara’s experience that very few people could be nepharious while trying to extricate themselves from a blanket.
She clutched at the coverlet with both hands.  And then the person panting in the shadows gulped and said, “Milady?”
Barbara let go of the blanket, and, half careless, made the gesture for the spell that brought the magelight at her bedside to full power.  By its unblinking light, she saw Jane by the closed door, both hands clutching at her apron which, by the look of it, had been twisted between those clutching hands.
Jane was a most superior servant, abigail to milady and about Barbara’s age.  In fact, she’d been helping Barbara dress and arrange her hair since they’d both been fifteen or sixteen.  Barbara trusted her so much that she had disdained to hire a dresser, as most ladies of her class were wont to do.  No, for Barbara’s purpose, Jane must do very well.  And normally she did.  And normally, on demeanor alone, anyone looking at two women would easily take Jane for the Duchess.
But now Jane looked discomposed and ill, her face blotchy as from crying, her hair disarranged.  She had dressed herself, and even put on her largely decorative lace apron.  But she hadn’t combed her hair, and her cap was altogether missing.  “Milady,” she said again, and gasped, her eyes full of tears.
“What is it Jane?” Barbara said, trying not to sound as worried as she felt.  The truth was that she’d never seen Jane this discomposed.
Jane swallowed again, audibly, and let air out, slowly, between her half-parted lips.  “There are constables in the house, Your Grace, and men from his majesty’s magical enforcement force.”  She swallowed again, convulsively.
Barbara’s mind flew to Seraphim and, with only a little delay, to Gabriel, to Michael missing, and thence, in a moment, to her husband’s suicide, to that horrible moment they’d found him in his dressing room, his gun fallen from his nerveless right hand, his pocket watch clutched convulsively in his left, so hard that it had taken a wait for rigor mortis to pass and his fingers to let go.  It clutched, aimlessly, at shadows and hints: at her sense that her husband had always been doing something far more complex, far worse, in a way, than mere affairs and infidelities – even if he’d done that too.  And lately Seraphim had been secretive and Gabriel had, of course, been helping.  And they were involved in something.  And there had been a man killed by magic.  And Michael was missing, perhaps kidnaped into fairyland.
Oh, those boys, she thought, those careless boys, and surprised herself with thinking it, as though Gabriel and Seraphim, and perhaps Michael too, were about five and heedless, and not grown and almost grown men and playing with something very dangerous indeed.
She became aware that Jane was speaking, in between gulps and sobs.  “It is the man as was killed, madam, you see.  It is the man who was killed.  They say as his grace done him in purpose because he was the lover of that woman as– Well, they say his grace done it for jealousy and not in self defense, and they are– ” she swallowed.  “They’re demanding to take his grace before king’s justice, and Mr. Penn with him, as well as Mr. Michael.”
“I see,” Jane said.  “And His Grace says?”
“Well, that’s just it, Your Grace, as they say he’s run and that’s a sign of guilt.”
“Run?  Seraphim?” Barbara said.  If there was one thing she couldn’t believe Seraphim would do was run.  Charge ahead foolishly, perhaps.  But run, never.
Jane nodded.  “I don’t see how it can be, Your Grace, but they said as he and the young–  The young person, Miss Felix, transported from the room where she– That they transported to another world, Your Grace, as is forbidden under the law.”
Yes, Barbara could see how that story would assemble itself, in the servants’ minds, and in the minds of the magistrates too.  They’d think, of course, that Seraphim had been in the young woman’s room, when he heard the constables come in, and had transported them both to somewhere safe.  And she could well imagine the construction placed on his being in that room, in the night.
Barbara didn’t believe it.  Not for a minute.  Oh, it was possible that Seraphim was romantically involved with the woman, though Gabriel had claimed she was his fiancé.  For that matter the strange liaisons that men engaged in with a certain sort of woman were not something she wanted to probe.  But something sounded very wrong in all of this, including the fact that Barbara didn’t get the feeling Miss Felix was that sort of woman.  Or not precisely.  For that matter, though no one had ever told her exactly, she didn’t think Gabriel Penn was the sort of man to be engaged.
The whole thing felt wrong, a sort of scene concocted to deceive the eye, but not very deeply thought out at all.  A story to deceive onlookers.  She heard herself say, hollowly, “Something is very wrong with that story.”
Jane started, then nodded.  “Yes.  I thought so too,” she said, slowly.  “Because it doesn’t explain how the corpse got to Miss Felix’s room.”
“The corpse?”
“The corpse of the man as the gardeners say attacked his grace, the one his grace … killed.”
“Ah.  Yes.  He was in Miss Felix’s room?  No.  That is not explained at all.  I don’t think that anyone would carry him there, would they?”
“No, miss.  And he looked like he had fallen there, after walking, you know.”
Barbara didn’t know, but she could well imagine.  “I see.  And what does Gabriel say about all this?”  Because if anyone knew anything, it would be Gabriel.  Gabriel was and had always been Seraphim’s willing accomplice, his faithful dog’s body.  Seraphim wouldn’t do or know anything that Gabriel either didn’t know or couldn’t guess.
A deep breath from Jane foretold that the news there wouldn’t be good, and Barbara felt a stab of foreboding.  “He’s missing, isn’t he?  Mr. Penn?”
“He’s …”  Jane swallowed.  “Emma, you know, the kitchen help, well, her room is directly above Miss Felix’s guest room, and she says that she heard him… that she heard him say something very loudly from… from the area of Miss Felix’s room, just as the pounding first came on the door.”
“What did he say?” Her Ladyship asked.
Jane colored and opened her mouth.  “I wouldn’t like to repeat it.”
“I’m sure I’ve heard the word, whatever it is.”
“Well… he said … shit.”
“I see.”  She didn’t in fact, see.  She couldn’t imagine Gabriel shouting anything of the kind loudly enough to be heard through the floor into the upper floor.  But she was sure Jane wouldn’t repeat it, unless she were certain it had been correct and properly heard.  “And what does he say to that?”
“No one can find him,” Jane said.  “His room…  His traveling bag is missing, and his personal effects, at least some of them, and–”
“And?”
“Well, then, Mr. Penn locked the door on his room and… transported out.  They are trying to sense where he went, but they haven’t traced him beyond London and– ” Jane stopped.  She looked like she was holding back tears by an effort of will.
So.  Seraphim was gone.  And Gabriel had followed.  She didn’t know how or why Seraphim had left, but she was sure it wasn’t because he had run.  Not in any sense of the word.  The only reason she could imagine for Seraphim to have left, at all, would be if his staying could only make things worse for his family.  In that, he was like his father, who, despite his multiple sins against matrimony, had always tried to protect his family and his estates.
And Gabriel too, for all his sins, would never have left – would certainly not have left without leaving them word of where he was going – without good reason.  The reason being that his staying would make things worse for all of them.
Michael was missing.
That left the family house, the servants, and Barbara and Caroline to look after themselves.
Without Barbara knowing, the decision had made itself in the back of Barbara’s mind.  The constables and for that matter the magical enforcers would do nothing to the servants and the house.  Nothing, that is, beyond ransaking the house and having the servants keep it up.  At worst, if judgement were brought in against Seraphim, the house would be confiscated.  The risk was to Seraphim, who would be beheaded, but not to the house or the servants.  She shook her head.  That part she didn’t need to worry about.  So, what was there to fear?
The only thing she could think of was that she and Caroline could be used as bait to bring Seraphim and Gabriel back.  And to lead to their being executed.  No.  That couldn’t be allowed.  And so Barbara Ainsling, who, like her son, would not run from danger to herself, must put herself and Caroline away from danger.
She’d go to her brother.  No one would dare penetrate her brother’s estate in Derbyshire.  “Jane, can you go to the stables?  Are there… are there law… people, there?”
Jane’s eyes grew large.  “As of yet, no, Your Grace.”
“Very well.  Then go there, and wake Johnson, in secret if possible.  Ask him to get the small traveling carriage together, with the match black horses, and to arrange for escorts for myself and Miss Ainsling.  As quietly as possible.  Tell him… yes, tell him to get the carriage ready in the alley outside the walls.  Without, if at all possible arousing our… ah… illustrious visitors.  Tell him – in the greatest secrecy of course – that Miss Ainsling and I will be going to Lord Hartwitt’s in Derbyshire.  Can you, Jane, and keep it quiet?”
“Well, of course,” Jane said, and bobbed a courtesy.  “What shall I pack for you?”
“Nothing.  I shall travel as swiftly and as quietly as possible, and I’ll acquire whatever I need on the way.”
Jane blinked.  “Oh, no.  I must go with you.  And, Your Grace– ”
“No, Jane.  This is likely to be very dangerous.  I can’t allow you to risk yourself.  Go, and tell Johnson to have the carriage ready.  I’ll take a carpetbag with my absolute necessities.”  As she spoke, Barbara got up and started to brush her still mostly black hair and pin it back.
“Your Grace!” Jane said again, in a tone of shock.  But Barbara was Barbara again and not just the Duchess of Darkwater.  For years now, since she’d married the Duke, the bright, sparkling woman who’d been Barbara Hartwitt had been subsumed in the Duchess, the mother, the wife.  Now…
“Leave it, Jane,” she said.  “I can take care of myself.  And send Miss Ainsling to me, as quietly as you can.”
“Your Grace,” Jane said again, in the tone of one who doesn’t quite believe what she’s being told to do.  She apparently, from her expression, could also not quite believe what she was seeing, as Barbara selected her most plain and sturdiest traveling dress and, with nimble fingers and hands still quite capable of reaching behind herself, started lacing herself into it.
“Now, Jane, there’s not a minute to be lost, if we’re to save something from this debacle.  And should the magical… ah… gentlemen ask, you know nothing of where I went.”
Jane moved then, bobbing another courtesy, and heading for the door.  Before she opened it, though, the door opened, and Caroline came in, fully dressed.  “Mama,” she said.  “Oh, I’m so glad you’re up.”
Jane hesitated, looking at Barbara but at Barbara’s quiet, “Go then, Jane, take care of that matter,” she nodded and scurried out.
Caroline closed the door behind Jane, and turned to Barbara.  “We must leave, Mama.  And quickly too.  You see, Gabriel sent me a message through a compulsion on a maid, and he said that Seraphim was pulled by a trap into another world, and Gabriel himself was leaving as fast as possible, so he couldn’t be used to bring an accusation of magic malfeasance against Seraphim.”
“Yes,” Barbara said, gratified she’d reconstructed the situation properly and trying not to think of the cold feeling, in the pit of her stomach, because of what the boys were risking, and because of the trouble coming down on all of them.  “I realize that.  And I thought it best if we left too, and could not be used against them.  I’ve given orders to have the small traveling carriage prepared, in secret, so that you and I can go to my brother, in Derbyshire.”
Caroline’s eyes widened.  “Mama!  You must be all about in your head.”  And then, realizing how improper what she’d said was.  “I beg your pardon, but you see it must be so.  How can you think we’ll escape in the carriage?  Mama!  They’ll find the carriage easy enough.  All they have to do is send a fast rider.  And no matter how much you tell Jane or the coachman to keep the secret, they have magical compulsion and the right to use it by royal decree, and they– ”
“Jane, credit me with some thought.  We shall leave, in the carriage, and then transport from it while it’s moving.  They will not be able to trace the transport spell, unless they can pin point exactly the place in space from which we transported.”
“To your brother’s?  In Derbyshire?”
“No, of course not.  I confess that was my first thought, but then I realized…”
“You realized?”
“While we might be safe at my brother’s, it’s too much like running away, and the Ainslings do not run away.  It’s obvious someone is trying to entrap your brother– Your brothers, and bring this house down.  And fairyland is involved, which is …  We must find Michael.  And Seraphim.  And there’s only one person who can help us.”
She looked at Caroline’s blank expression and almost laughed.  “We shall go pay a visit to Mrs. Penn,” she said.  And by way of explanation, “Gabriel’s mother.”

A World of Hurt
They were in deep trouble.  That much Seraphim knew, and he wished he didn’t feel as though he’d very much like to sleep for the next several months.
He felt weak and vaguely ill, not to mention nauseated as though he’d swallowed a good portion of this particular alternate of the Thames which might not have as many houses around it, but probably was none too wholesome to drink.  And they were going to be pursued.  There was not the slightest doubt about that.
As though cued by his thoughts, he sensed magic groping towards them, the feel and gentle probing of the magical police in this world – he didn’t know much about them, but he and Gabriel had once had a brush with them and – he seemed to remember they were called the Imperial Pures.  He allowed himself to mutter a word between his teeth, and was amused to see Miss Felix’s eyes open very wide and her cheeks tinge a dark pink color.  So, she was female and delicate enough to be shocked, was she?  And what kind of insanity had possessed him that made her look devilishly alluring in soaked night clothes and with her hair plastered to her face?
On the other hand, the soaked nightgown was terribly revealing of her curves, and he almost wanted to laugh at the thought that perhaps he was his father’s son after all: he couldn’t be ill or tired enough not to react.  But he tried to keep it from showing on his face, and instead he said, all propriety, “I beg your pardon, Miss Felix, but they are looking for us, and we must escape.  I’m not absolutely sure what we can do, but I can think of only one place I can take us.  Only one place they won’t dare follow us.  It’s terribly dangerous, as it is a world where magic is absolutely disbelieved and, in fact, where only a very strange kind of magic works.  I will be utterly helpless there, but the chances of anyone trying to find us there are close to none, and even if they try, there is a good chance they will not be able to find us, because the world is choked with iron and therefore it is hard to find anyone there.  In fact, it is dangerous to any magical pattern but the strongest.”
Her eyes looked into his, and a small frown was forming, making a vertical wrinkle between her dark, arched eyebrows.  “But–” she said.
“No,” he said.  “Do listen to me.  I don’t know how long I have, and I would have you understand what I’m trying to do.  If I transport us there, it will use the last of my magical strength.  If I should die–” He watched her opening her mouth and put his hand up, to stop her talking.  “No.  If I should die, which is possible, though not probable, or not merely from the spell, I wish you to keep track of how I transported us, and use those coordinates, in reverse fashion, to take you back to Avalon.  There you are to evade capture, and procure…”  He seemed to think for a moment.  “Gabriel Penn’s help, but if you fail at that – as I think the concerted effort to bring down my house might include him – then you are to procure my fiancé, Miss Blaine, and tell her what happened to me, and to seek redress before the king’s high justice.  Trust me, she will be anxious to do so, as she will not want her name to be linked to someone who has broken the law by willingly traveling to other worlds.  And then you are to convince the king to find who was at the back of the conspiracy and to do your utmost to recover my brother, Michael, from Fairyland.”  He recalled himself, and, this time, gave a startled laugh.  “Listen to me,” he said.  “Laying down the law to you, as though I had the power to compel your obedience in the case of my death.  I absolve you from all responsibility in following my wishes, of course, only beg you to consider that without me, or Michael, my house will devolve to a distant cousin, and the family will be left destitute.  But of course, my transporting us and saving you,” he added, urgently.  “Has absolutely no conditions.  If we are captured here, my family will just as surely be disgraced and thrown into poverty.”  He inclined his head to her.  “But I would appreciate–”
Something like a look of dismay crossed her features, and she protested, “Of course I’ll do what I can to save your family.  Only tell me why you think you might die, but not immediately?”
“In my weakened condition,” he said.  “Being in a world with so much cold iron and so hostile to magic will–”
At that moment, he felt the probe again, and this time, felt the end of it fasten on them.  Through the probe came a voice, unctuous and fullsome, as the voice of a functionary who has completed a difficult task, “I found them, oh, gracious one.  The witches are–”
Seraphim took a deep breath.  He called the last of his magical strength to him.  He could feel his power fighting, his instinct of self preservation attempting to keep him from doing such destructive magic, which could only result in his death or at least in serious damage to his magical power and his shields.  It didn’t matter.  If they stayed here, she would have to fight for him.  And that, he doubted she could do.  Then they would both die.  This world, one of them at least might survive.
He reached with the last of his strength for the coordinates of the world he and Gabriel had called the Madhouse, the world he and Gabriel had sworn never to visit again, not since the last time when the sheer amount of cold iron had almost killed them.
At the last minute, as he was reciting the transport spell, he heard Miss Felix say “Oh!” and reaching in, reaching right into his spell and… twisting.
It was still the madhouse, he thought, frantically, even as the spell activated.  But she had set different coordinates.  What could she be thinking?
The cold of the inbetweener hit him, and then he felt himself fall onto a hard surface, even as the sapping feel of cold iron leeched at his magic.
As consciousness ran away from him, he heard Miss Felix pound on something – sounded like a door – while screaming “Grandmother.  Grandmother.  Please, help me.”
Into The Lion’s Den
Marlon had been reclining on a rosewood sofa upholstered in blue velvet, with a book on his knees.
Gabriel’s first thought was that he’d changed not at all.  His second thought was that he’d changed completely.  And both were true.  Marlon’s hair remained that blond on the edge of red – the flame about to catch – and as unruly as it had been at Cambridge, whisps of it standing on end and forming a hallow around the oval face.  His body remained long and lean, and he wore – as he’d tended to do at Cambridge – blue pants of some serviceable material and a shirt that looked too large for him.
But at Gabriel’s arrival, he looked up.  And in that moment Gabriel sucked in air, remarking the difference in his erstwhile friend.  Marlon had grown almost gaunt, and his blue eyes looked haunted, as though he’d looked too closely at horrors he couldn’t forget.
*Good,* Gabriel thought. *He also didn’t escape unscathed.* And immediately despised himself for it.
After the first start, the shock that widened his blue eyes, Marlon controlled himself and looked as though Gabriel transported into his house every day and twice on Sunday, and not as though they were seeing each other for the first time in years – and after they’d parted in anger and bitterness.
He flowed from the sofa, with slow calculated movements, his fingers between the pages of the book, holding the page he’d been reading.  Standing he came to a little above Gabriel’s shoulder, but managed to give the impression of towering over him, and also of distant, cold dignity.  As though he were the offended one, and not the guilty part.
“You honor me with your visit, prince,” he said, in extremely polite tones.
Gabriel opened his mouth to protest the title, then bit his tongue.  When he spoke, he’d brought his own abominable temper under control, though nothing could stop his heart pounding, or the vague feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach.  All the furniture here, everything, was what had been in Marlon’s room at Cambridge, and it remained only the question: where was it?  Where was that which had once been Aiden Gipson?  Gabriel took light breaths, feeling as though, should he breathe deeply he would smell the faint scent of corruption in the air.
“I came to you,” Gabriel said, with as much dignity as he could muster.  “Because you told me I could always come to you if I ran out of places to go, and if I had no one else to help me.”
Marlon’s eyebrows went up.  They were the exact same color as his hair, and when they rose like that they gave the impression of twin flames, dancing above his eyes.  “No where to go, prince?  You astonish me.”
“Don’t call me that.  You know very well I am not a prince.  I gave up my dignity and my power long ago.”
“Oh, I don’t think you can give it up.”  A smile without myrth, an absolutely ghastly grin as unpleasant as a corpse’s bared teeth, contorted Marlon’s face.  “I think if you’re born to it, you will always be a prince.  Not like the rest of us, who are born to less exalted positions.”
“For the love of heaven, cut the tomfoolery,” Gabriel said, impatient.  “None of– None of what happened had anything to do with the fact that my mother was an elf princess or your mother a mere elf commoner.  As different as those are, we still have more in common than with– Than other people.”  Which had been more than half of what had thrown them together.  The other half…  Gabriel looked down, trying to discern any hint of the easy laughter that had once sprang between them, or that wordless understanding that had allowed them to communicate without the need for sound.  He found nothing.  All of that had shattered, years ago, when they’d last seen each other.  “You told me I could come to you, if I were out of all other resources.”
“Your high born brother abandoned you then?” Marlon asked.  His look was almost hungry.  “The Duke’s family has disowned you?”
In the face of that hunger, Gabriel hesitated.  How much could he trust Marlon?  If he told Marlon exactly the trouble he was in, would Marlon betray him?  Run to the authorities?
But at that moment, he caught sight of it: the mortal remains of Aiden Gipson.  In life, he’d been a tall man, and much of Gabriel’s build.  In death, his look remained the same, and he wore what Gabriel presumed were clean clothes – since the smell was not that obvious – in this case a serviceable brown suit.  Above it, Aiden’s face remained as it had been in life: the well formed features, the dark green eyes, the narrow, high nose.  Only the eyes looked lusterless, and the lips receded slightly to show the teeth.  It took more than that, though, and the yellowish wax-like pallor to know the man was dead and had been brought back to life with a resurrection spell.  You wouldn’t know that he couldn’t rest until the man who’d made that spell allowed it.
But if you were a mage you could see it and you could smell it: the not quite physical smell of the dead flesh that had not been allowed to decay and instead sparked and fizzed with unholy magic.  And if you were a mage, you could see that more horrible thing: Aiden’s spectre, just behind the body, attached to it by a thread of spell, faded and impossibly-tired looking.
How could Marlon live with that ghost?  How could he?  When he’d met Marlon at Cambridge he’d heard of Gipson and the odd, too-close relationship Marlon had had with Gipson until Gipson’s death.  But it had taken him more than a year to find Gipson, where Marlon had hid him, in the attic room of his lodgings.  And to realize what Marlon had done.
In sick waves of horror, Gabriel recalled how – in shock – he’d given the whole thing away and how the only reason Marlon hadn’t been arrested and Gipson destroyed was that the two had vanished.  Gabriel, himself, had been sent from Cambridge in disgrace, though nothing could ever be pinned on him.  And weeks later he’d gotten the unsigned letter with the coordinates of Marlon’s hideout and the line “when you run out of places to hide.”
Well, he’d run out of places to hide, but Marlon could not denounce him or call the authorities on him.  Or on Seraphim.  Necromancers were at as great a risk as those who traded with unauthorized worlds.
In a rush, one eye on Gipson who stood, knit with the shadows against the wall, half-immersed in shadow, he told Marlon a very brief version of the events.  What he and Seraphim had found of their father’s activities.  How they’d resumed them, helping rescue witches from the forbidden worlds.  And then the catastrophic cascade of events of the last few days.
Marlon showed surprise only once: when Gabriel mentioned the role that the elves appeared to have played in it.  And that in a way was a relief.  The thought of Marlon in league with the fairy realm was terrifying.  And though his mother had been a low-born elf, thrown out of fairyland for getting pregnant by a mortal, it didn’t mean that fairyland wouldn’t use her son, and willingly too.
When Gabriel came to the end, he was quiet a while, and Marlon said, crossing his arms on his chest, “And what do you want of me, prince?  Am I supposed to hide you?”
Gabriel shook his head.  “I could have hid myself,” he said.  “That is, I’m not so witless that I could not have contrived to.”
“Ah.” Marlon said.  “Then what am I to understand you to want?”
“Oh, curse you,” Gabriel said.  “Stop playing games.  This is not funny.  You know very well what I want.  I want you to find where Seraphim went.  I want you to find where Michael was taken.  I want you to help me recover them and discover who is at the back of this, and why, and what they intend for my– For the Duke’s family.”
Marlon was very close now, looking up and somehow contriving to give the impression of looking down.  “And what’s in it for me?” he asked.  His voice was harsh.
Gabriel felt a spasm of revulsion, but said, his voice controlled, “Whatever I need to do to convince you to save Seraphim and Michael and… and their mother and sister.”
Marlon laughed, a short bark.  “You couldn’t DO enough,” he said.  “It’s more what you need to give.”
“Give?” Gabriel asked, as his stomach lurched.  And, uncomprehending, “Give?”
“My price, sweet prince, is you.”
“Me?”
Marlon was now so close, that Gabriel felt a though he couldn’t look away, even as, by the corner of his eye, he followed Gipson’s movement as he emerged from the shadow driven by who knew what random impulse.
“You,” Marlon said.  “Body and soul and magic too.”
“You do have a penchant for trying to own people!” Gabriel said, before he could stop himself.
Marlon narrowed his eyes.  “It’s my price,” he said.  “Pay it or seek help elsewhere for your precious family.”
Gabriel felt as though his throat had gone very dry, his mind lurching into horror, his body hovering on the edge of nausea.  But Marlon was the only person he knew whose power was as strong as Gabriel’s own.  And Marlon was ten times as knowledgeable.  And there was nowhere else Gabriel could go.
“Which one is it going to be prince?  Yes or no?”
Feeling as though he had to force his body to obey him, Gabriel lowered his head and hissed through clenched teeth, “Yes.”

Mirror Mirror
The dressing room smelled heavily of rose water, as though every surface had been scrubbed with it, every one of the frothy dresses hanging from a rod at the back, dipped in it, every one of the ornate paintings on the wall painted with it.
The smell of roses mixed with other cloying scents: powder and grease paint, wax candles and a trace of the incense that climbed in a thin blue thread of smoke from the mouth of a dragon-shaped incense burner to the ceiling.
The Twin was in front of the mirror, applying makeup with quick, deft gestures.  That’s how Barbara, Dowager Duchess of Darkwater always thought of her Fey double as The Twin.  She knew the woman had a name, something soft and liquid and running to excessive syllables, but she didn’t know it, just as she didn’t know Gabriel’s elf name.  Elves were born with their names, as attached to them and as much a part of their anatomy as a hand or a foot, and as important as their own heart.  She knew too that in the human world The Twin went by the name Maryalys Penn, the last being the surname of her first husband, discarded a long time ago, but in Barbara’s mind she was always and forever The Twin – that creature like herself and yet not whom she had first glimpsed for a few moments after she’d been brought back from Fairyland, and before The Twin was sent back to it.
Time had made differences between them, of course.  The Twin hadn’t aged from whatever age she’d been when she’d come out of Fairyland with Gabriel.  Thirty?  Somewhere around there, Barbara thought, thought it was thirty in elf terms, which means she looked very much like the Duchess at seventeen, with pale, creamy skin, rose touched cheeks, plump lips that rested in a smile, and midnight black hair loosed down her back.  Only their eyes were different.  They’d always been different.  The Twin might have been formed from birth to echo the Duchess, which one understood was how Changelings were created, but the eyes, though they might have the same shape and color and be nestled beneath the same dark, arched eyebrows, were not Barbara’s.  They managed to be both much, much older than any human who ever lived, and somehow not human.  Like the eyes of a bird of prey, glittering and hard.
Had Gabriel had eyes like that, Barbara would never have allowed him into the house, no matter if he was just a child and had been living rough on the streets to escape the fate that The Twin had planned for him.
And now that Barbara thought about it, that was likely to be a point of contention between them.  After all, Gabriel had been The Twin’s to dispose of and to do with as she pleased.  Or at least The Twin would think so.  She could not have approved of the Duke taking him away.  And she would hold it against Barbara.  No matter.
As The Twin’s gaze met hers in the mirror, for just a second Barbara read surprise in them and then a thread of fear.  There were many reasons The Twin might fear her human counterpart, of course, but the quick flicker, quickly subdued, gave Barbara a sense of hope.  There was something there.  And The Twin was involved in it.
Aloud, she said, “Good evening, Mrs. Penn.  Are you preparing for a performance.  I beg your pardon interrupting you at this time, but I must have some information from you,” She spoke casually, and adjusted her gloves on her fingers as she spoke, as though this were a social call and she were merely verifying a detail or two.  It was probably all to naught.  She had never fully known what elves could do – no human did – but she had an idea that Gabriel could smell much more acutely than normal humans, perhaps even smell magic.  She’d seen him detect people in falsehood with no other indication.  And she knew he could hear far more sharply than normal humans since he’d used that talent all through childhood to cover whatever mischief Seraphim and himself were engaged in at the time.
So this creature could probably hear the frantic beating of Barbara’s heart and surely she could smell the uneasy perspiration as Barbara hoped with all her might that Caroline would stay where she’d left her, at the door to the dressing room and behind some fantastical wheeled horse used in plays, where no one was likely to see her or bother her.  Please, let Caroline not come in.  Let her not be exposed to The Twin.
None of this mattered.  Barbara’s composure must be maintained as much to keep Barbara from breaking down as to fool any external person.
The Twin’s eyes glittered at her from the mirror.  “I fail to see in what I might help you my lady,” she spoke, her voice also a perfect imitation of Barbara’s at seventeen or eighteen, dulcet and cultured.  “What of mine you wanted, you had already taken: my lover and my child.  What more could you want me to give you.”
“My husband was never your lover,” Barbara said, then caught herself.  No use speaking half truths around elves.  They could always twist them.  “No more than in the carnal sense, and there he was many women’s lover.  He laid with you, sure.  Desired you too, I am sure, since he married me, and I’m sure he saw in me an echo of you, but it is not love.  If you don’t know the difference between those, Mrs. Penn, you know not the least thing about being human and all your time amid us has been wasted.   As for your son, he was not yours when he came to us.  From what I understand he had deserted you more than a year previous, and been living as a beggar in London.”  She saw The Twin open her mouth to speak and said, “But that is neither here nor there, Mrs. Penn.  What I wish to know is, Where are they?  And why?”
Again the stab of fear came.  Again the sharp pang of something like panic, behind the hard, inhuman eyes.  And The Twin’s voice was a trifle too unconcerned, a trifle too light, as she said, “I have not the pleasure of having the slightest idea what you speak of.”  She tapped her chin lightly with a puff with some white powder, and said, brightly.  “And now, if you excuse me, I have commitments which I must keep.  I’m playing principal female in One Thing And Another, and I must–”
Barbara raised her hand, and let the spell fly.  And knew the moment she’d done it that it was a bad idea.  It was a minor spell, not very strong, just a compulsion to tell the truth, with a hint of punishment to come.  She’d never meant to use it.  She’d never have used it, if she’d not got scared.  Something she knew, which her husband had told her; yes, and her father too, after he’d recovered her from fairyland.  “If you go fighting elves, you must use all the force you can command and not a iota less.  Because anything else they’ll eat.”
She’d not known what eat meant till this moment – only as her spell hit The Twin, The Twin absorbed it, swallowed it, and it made her alien elf magic shine more brightly around her preternaturally young form.
And then The Twin Attacked.  There was a sense of rushing, and the scent of roses increased till Barbara felt she was choking on them, her mouth and nostrils and everything stuffed with cloying, redolent petals.  As she gasped for breath, her body was slammed backwards against a wall, with enough force to rattle her brain.  Into this, feelings poured into her, odd feelings: the feeling that she was nothing, that she had never deserved her husband or her children, that she had rightful stolen all those from The Twin, that she was old and useless and not beautiful, a spec of dirt on the face of the world, and one, moreover, that should be dead and gone a long, long time while the glittering creature before her continued to be vital and young and to inspire love and passion.
Barbara’s grandchildren, and her grandchildren’s grandchildren would be dead and long gone, and The Twin would still be beautiful and young and enticing.
Coupled with this came the strong suggestion that Barbara should stop cluttering the Glittering Twin’s world, that she should efface, go, do away with herself.
The Duchess felt both the push and the desire to vanish, but at the same time, she clawed back with her own mind, that no, she had loved her husband and been his true wife, despite his infidelities and his frailties – none of them unusual in one who’d early been elf-touched.  And she deserved her time upon the Earth which at any rate belonged more to her than to The Twin, a creature who’d never been fully alive and therefore could not be fully here.
She managed to choke out “No” thought the cloying scent of roses, but she couldn’t lift her hand to make any sign of protection, she couldn’t command her mind to let a spell fly, and she couldn’t breathe.  Her heart strained against her chest and she knew presently she would lose consciousness, and then the Twin could dispose of her as though she were an inanimate object.  She would too.  Even if elves had qualms about murder, they wouldn’t have those against killing humans.
The Twin stood before her, her hair standing in a dark hallow around her head – beautiful like an angel and triumphant like death.  For a fleeting moment, Barbara wondered if this was the last sigh her husband had seen, then told herself it was nonsense.  Darkwater had committed suicide.  Killed himself over gambling debts and women.  She had to believe it.
The door blew open.  “Mama!” echoed in Caroline’s most outraged accents, and Caroline stood there in the doorway, as young as The Twin looked, but a lot more vital, a lot more alive somehow.  “Mama!”
Barbara tried to choke out a warning that Caroline should go, that she should hide, that this creature would get her too, but she had no time.  Caroline’s accents were frosty.  “Well,” she said.  “This is a great deal of nonsense.”  Calmly, as though this were something she did every day, she spoke liquid, tripping syllables, which fell onto Barbara’s ears like burning fire, but had an even stronger effect on The Twin.
The Twin tripped backward, like a ragdoll that has lost its stuffing, and fell into her velvet-upholstered chair, in front of her vanity, looking rather like she was indeed a ragdoll, arms and legs asprawl, mouth half open, expression blank.
Barbara, finding that she could breathe, took a deep aching breath and stepped away from the wall.  “Caroline,” she said, in shocked accents, and was even more shocked as her daughter turned an admonitory look on her.  “Not now, Mama,” the chit said, looking and sounding for all the world as though she were the adult and her much-tried mother the child here.  “Afterwards, I’ll explain anything you might well want.”
“Now,” Caroline said, turning to the Twin.  “Madam, if you please, and if you don’t want me to use worse upon you, be so kind as to tell me where my brother Michael was taken and by whom and why, and also where Gabriel and Seraphim might be.  And do not even think of lying,” Another string of liquid, elven syllables.  “There, that will prevent it.”
The Twin flickered.  It was like watching the flame of a candle, which now glowed yellow now blue.  She flickered, between the human form that looked like Barbara, asprawl on the chair in front of the vanity, to something glittery and hard and bony, like an insect, with an ivory carapace.  It as only a moment, and she flickered back to human aspect, her eyes wide and terrified.  They looked like a wounded bird of prey’s brought down and about to be rent by dogs.  Barbara wished she didn’t enjoy the expression in them quite so much.
The Twin took a deep, raspy breath, and spoke in a deep, raspy voice that sounded somehow reedy and not quite human, and which had lost all its allure and glamour.  “The– Fairyland wanted the young one.  Your… Your shadow– No.”  She seemed to be struggling with the human language, suddenly, and pronounced, with exaggerated care, “Your twin brother.  My brother wanted him.  I sent him there.”
“I see,” Caroline said.  “What did they want him for?”
The twin made a hissing sound, and then another, and then – apparently unable to hold information any longer, and as Caroline moved her hand midair, in a gesture that her mother didn’t quite understand – whimpered and said, “To mine.  To pull from… to… to… eat.”
“Eat!” Barbara said outraged, and of course, one heard things, about elves feasting on human children, but she’d never believed it, and besides, Michael was not a child, not in that sense.
“Hush mama,” Caroline said.  “You mean to mine him, like a metal source?”
The Twin nodded.  “I see,” Caroline said.  She looked pale but steady.  “You will kindly give us the coordinates and the way to reach him.”
“Don’t know… way to reach him.  Coordina– Yes.”  She let out a series of the words that could be used as magical coordinates to the location of another world.
Caroline seemed to run it through her mind, or perhaps to memorize it.  Barbara, still shaken from her experience, could not concentrate on it, but she knew it was a place in fairyland because of the truncated fifth locator.  Fairyland was not a real place, a world like their own and separate from it.  Instead it was a parasite universe, a flea riding on the back of the other universes.
She wondered, too, what they meant by mining Michael, and felt as though a cold hand tugged at her heart.  They would find him.  They would rescue him.  But where had Caroline learned to do all this?  Barbara was very sure it hadn’t been taught at the Academy for Young Ladies of Distinction where Caroline had been sent for two years after the school room.
“And my brother Seraphim?” Caroline asked, coldly.
“He has escaped us,” The Twin said, in a squawk of fury.  “We sent him to the world of the priest kings, but he escaped.  He…  We cannot find him.  It was she who–”
Caroline had taken a deep breath.  “And my brother Gabriel?”
“He’s not–”
“My brother Gabriel, by virtue of shared blood, of shared upbringing and of shared fraternal affection.  Where is my brother Gabriel?  Where have you sent him?”
The Twin’s laughter rang in the room, like a peel of bells.  Before Barbara could recover from her shock at this, The Wing said, “He’s gone where he’s always wanted to go.  Back to the necromancer.”
“The necro–” Caroline said, and Barbara who had an inkling that this was something she did not want Caroline to dwell into, who had a feeling in fact that this was at the back of whatever had got Gabriel expelled from Cambridge, said, firmly, “He is on his own, then?  You have not sent him?”
“No,” The Twin said.  “And I cannot tell you his coordinates, because the necromancer keeps his location zipped up.  But I’m sure he’s very happy, seeing as he–”
“Stop,” Barbara commanded.  “No more.  Caroline, I don’t believe you wish to pry into Gabriel’s affairs.”
“No, mama,” Caroline said, meekly.  She made a gesture with her hand, and suddenly The Twin went limp, her face blank.
“You killed her,” Barbara said, shocked, more shocked perhaps for a secret feeling of gloating.
“No, Mama,” Caroline said.  She put out a hand and held onto Barbara’s forearm, pulling her.  “She’s merely in a trance state, where she will stay until she wakes remembering nothing of our visit.”
“Caroline!”
“Yes, Mama?” Caroline said, as she pulled her mother out of the Twin’s dressing room and along a narrow corridor.
They’d exited onto a rather smelly alley when Barbara managed, “If you don’t tell me how you learned this very strange magic, and what you just did to the… to Gabriel’s mother, and with what power, I will have strong hysterics.”
“Yes, mama,” Caroline said, then giggled, as her irrepressible spirit took over once more.  “You must forgive me.  But it is so funny that I should know something you don’t.”  She looked at Barbara and sighed.  “It was Gabriel, when Michael and I were three.  That,” Caroline made a head gesture towards the back of the theatrical building they’d just left.  “Came prowling around.  Not after Gabriel.  After us.  Michael and I.”
“But–”
“Gabriel told us who it was,” she said.  “And he taught us how to defend ourselves.  He said she often came prowling around because daddy–” she stopped abruptly.
“Yes,” Barbara said, her voice raspy.  Internally she thought of Arden.  She rarely thought of him by that name, the name she’d called him in private, the name by which she’d fallen in love with him.  Arden conjured up the name of the dashing young gentleman he’d been, looking a little like Seraphim and Gabriel, but oh so infinitely more dashing and daring and… everything a young man should be.
Thinking of him as Arden made her heart clench.  It made her wonder if she’d ever truly known him, or had his love.  Despite what she’d told The Twin, she wondered if in his heart it was The Twin he’d always loved.  Elf love was a like an illness, she’d been told.  A fever that never fully passed.
It was almost a relief to hear Caroline ask, the prurient curiosity vibrating in her voice, “Who is the necromancer?  Who has Gabriel always wanted to go to?”
“I understand he had an unsavory friend in Cambridge, who was… accused of some illegal magic.  But as to his always wanted to go somewhere I would place no credence on what the creature said.  You know she lies as she breathes.”
“I see,” Caroline said, giving Barbara the uncomfortable feeling she very well did.
Before she could say any more, Barbara interrupted.  They were now walking along a main street, well lit, but they were getting veiled glances from other passerbyes.  It was not normal for a well dressed mother and daughter to walk along the street at this hour, unaccompanied even by a footman.  And if there was a conspiracy of some sort – what else could it be that had made both Gabriel and Seraphim disappear, and which had stolen Michael from the home – then sooner or later someone would spot them.  “Caroline,” she said, in little more than a whisper.  “We cannot go on in this way.  Someone will notice us or recognize us.”
“I know,” Caroline said, with the greatest calm.  “I’m just looking for an easy transition point to take us into fairyland.
Madhouse
Seraphim woke up aching, on a strange bed.  Not only a strange bed in the sense that it was not known to him, but in the sense that it felt odd beneath him, not like the feather mattresses and pillows he was used to.  The blankets above him, too, felt oddly light but very warm.
He struggled from the shadow land he’d wandered in his dream, and heard a moan escape his lips before being awake enough to control them.
“There, Mr. Ainsling,” a voice said.  It had an odd accent, and it sounded like that of an elderly woman.  Then it said in a matter of fact tone.  “You see, he’s coming around.  I told you he would.  A good thing too.  If he hadn’t awakened we must have taken him to the hospital.”
The voice that answered this first was familiar.  It was Miss Felix’s voice, though it sounded more relaxed than it ever had.  “It wouldn’t have been possible.  In his state, he’d just have died there.”
“Would he really?  But why?  He’s not that ill, you know?  A minor infection which the antibiotics will take care of, and very tired, that’s all.”
“I know.  But their magic is not like that of Earth.  They have, I think, a good bit of elf or fairy or something, or perhaps their magic is different and older.  They react badly to what they call cold iron.”
“But surely the Victorians used an awful lot of iron,” the older voice said.  “You can’t  tell me that they have that level of civilization without–”
“Oh, no.  But they use spells in the forging so it doesn’t affect them.”
Seraphim tried to pry his eyes open and to protest, but he couldn’t, and presently, darkness overwhelmed him again.
He woke up being moved.  This indignity puzzled him for a moment, because he was being bodily dragged by two women – he was sure of it by the hand size and the awkward way in which they pushed him this way and that.  He could discern no rhyme or reason to the movement until he felt cool fabric under him.  Then he realized they were changing the bed under him, and wondered why they hadn’t called a man-servant to move him to a chaise or a sofa while that was done.  And were the two women making the bed Miss Felix and… he remembered her calling as they landed in Madhouse– her grandmother?  Had they no maids, either?  Had he landed in a poor cottager’s family?  He must be giving them the devil of a time.  He must awake and go home.
With an superhuman effort, he brought his eyes open, just as the two women pulled a sheet and something else – something that looked like a colorful patchwork quilt – over him, but which felt much lighter and warmer than any quilt that Seraphim had ever seen.
He was reclining against pillows – very soft pillows – in a bright room.  It didn’t look like a cottage, or smell like one either.  The scents in the air were clean with a hint of flowers, and the room was as large as most workmen cottages, and furnished, besides, in style, if sparsely.  It had a dresser up near the window and it was a vast, polished dresser, with a mirror above.  The bed on which Seraphim lay wasn’t curtained, but it looked well made and almost new.  There was also a bedside table, and what appeared to be a desk under the window.  He blinked.  “Where– ”
“You’re at my grandmother’s house, your grace.  This is my grandmother, Mrs. Lilian Felix.”
He looked at the older woman, and was almost shocked, when she failed to curtsy and instead smiled at him, amused.  “Your Grace, is it?  What is that, a Duke?  Well, we don’t have those, so don’t get all bent out of shape if I call you Mr.  Nell says your name is Ainsling.”
“Seraphim Ainsling,” Seraphim said, while trying to figure out what she meant by their not having dukes.  Surely it couldn’t be …  They didn’t sound French.
She smiled.  “Well.  Seraphim is an odd name.  It’s plural, isn’t it?”
Seraphim felt like he really had fallen into a Madhouse.  Never had he and Gabriel bestowed a more appropriate name on any place.  “My father named all his sons after angels,” he said.  “And his first legitimate heir seemed to demand something more, so he named me after a whole order of angelic beings.”
“I see,” the older lady said, coking her head sideways.  She looked nothing like Miss Felix, being very fair where Miss Felix was dark, and having brilliant blue eyes that reminded Seraphim of a certain kind of enamel.  “I can’t very well call you Seraphim, though, so you shall be Mr. Ainsling.  I apologize, but I haven’t paid any attention to forms of address to the nobility, not even when I was young and read an awful lot of very bad regency romances.”  She smiled brightly at these nonsensical words, then added, “I’ll go get you some food, shall I?  I bet you’ll be very glad to eat something solid, instead of the milk we’ve been tipping down your throat, and maybe you’ll feel well enough afterwards to take a shower.”
There followed the oddest two hours that Seraphim had ever lived through, and that included both trying to calm Gabriel after he found the still living body of Aiden Gypson in Marlon’s attic closet, and the hour that had followed that one, when Seraphim had tried to challenge Marlon to a duel and had it sternly pointed out to him that it would only fan the flames of scandal.
This time, there was nothing as shocking.  It was more that all of life was both very familiar and completely odd.  Take the meal they brought him: bread and broth with a little bit of cheese, followed, after some discussion, by a pot of strong, black tea.
None of the foods was alien or repulsive, like the fried bugs they ate in at least one of the worlds that Seraphim and Gabriel had visited.
But the bread was whiter and softer than any bread Seraphim had ever eaten, the broth was completely clear, as though it had been many-times strained, so that there were no bits of meat in it.  It tasted of hints of garlic and spices, too, not normally something given to an invalid.  The dishes, too, were odd, being fine and clearly new or at least very white and never mended.  Yet, they were served upon a wooden tray, even if the tray was adorned with a lace cloth.  He could not make sense of the signals he got about the Felix’s station in life.  The house felt roomy and clean, but he had yet to hear of a servant, much less to see one.   The dishes were new, and very good quality, but they didn’t seem to command silver or even pewter.  It was like being caught in the middle of a puzzle he couldn’t solve.
And then there had been the bathing facilities, which had completed confusing him.  The bathroom, next to the bedroom – which was odd by itself.  What did the people in other rooms do when they wished to wash? – had a sink and a bathtub, but it also had a square enclosed in glass and floored in tile.  that both the sink and the square – and the bathtub too – had running water and running water whose temperature could go from freezing to very hot with adjustments of two handles, shocked him to his core.  He could not feel the magic by which it had been done.  Then there was the toilet with the flushing mechanism.  He’d heard of such, but he’d always thought they’d be inconvenient and smelly.  Turned out no smell escaped.
However, he had his work cutout for him, making both women leave the bathroom and not help him use the appliances, or remove his clothes.  They seemed very matter of fact about it, and afraid he’d fall, so that what would have seemed gross indelicacy at any other time, now seemed an excess of quasi-maternal concern.  Which did not make him feel any better.
At length he’d showered, in gloriously warm water on the edge of hot, and washed his hair and body with the products that had been indicated to him.
He was dry and had put on a dressing gown, which they’d left for him – and which seemed to be a severe blue affair, made of the same material as the towels – when someone knocked at the door.  At his call to come in, Miss Felix bustled in, bringing him something that looked completely alien, and which she handed to him with the look of someone who has completed a long quest, “Grandma says you’ll want to shave.  She’ll pick up a cheap electric razor at the drugstore when she goes into town later, but for now this is the best I can do.  Sorry it’s pink.”
The object looked like it was made of some sort of pliable shell, or perhaps hard jelly, and it was definitely pink, though it bore no resemblance whatsover to a razor, Seraphim thought.  As he looked at it, puzzled, she giggled and took it back, “I suppose you’ve never seen a safety razor.”  She pointed to the little glint of metal.  “These are the blades.  Here.”  She got something from a compartment behind the mirror, a cylindrical, metallic container, and sprayed a dot of white foam on her arm, then ran the apparatus over it, removing the foam and a little bit of the almost invisible hair on her arm.  “Like that.”
She’d stayed, surveying him and helping with instructions when he got confused, but perhaps he should be grateful that she didn’t help him.  By the end of it, he was exhausted, and all too glad to be led back to the bed, where he laid, recovering his breath.
For the first time, it occurred to him that not only Mis Felix but her grandmother too were very oddly dressed.  They wore blue pantaloons of some sort, and light blouses on top, so fine that one could see the shape of their body, and the contours of what appeared to be a garment for controlling the bosom.  Seraphim felt himself blush just at the thought.  He was no halfling, but what seemed most shocking about these garments was the fact that the women wore them casually and not at all like they meant to seduce anyone.
“Miss Felix,” he said, at length.  “I see we came to world I meant to come, but you changed the coordinates.  I presume it was because… I mean, you’ve indicated you know this world?”
“ Oh, sure,” she said.  “I grew up here.  I had to bring you here, because… well… because Grandma knows magic, and taught me some of it, so I figured she’d understand why you couldn’t go to a hospital, because that’s in larger population centers and there would be too much metal for you in your condition.  But also–”
“Yes?”
“Grandmother is semi-retired, but she’s a vet.  A veterinarian, I mean.  She treats animals.  So I knew she could still get prescriptions for antibiotics, and I could tell you had a raging infection and fever.”
“Antibi–”
“Tablets that cure infections,” she said.  And then quickly sketched for him the level of civilization of this world.  She was clear and concise, and could have no idea how much she shocked him.  The other worlds without magic that he’d seen were mired in the dark ages, with none of the comforts of civilization.  These must be a very ingenious people indeed, to have made all these changes to their way of life, and without magic, too.
“But…” he said, at last.  “It sounds like a very comfortable arrangement.  How came you to leave it?”
“I wanted to know where I came from,” she said.

And The Dead
Gabriel felt as though he’d gone back in time.  These new lodgings were not the ones at Cambridge, but they were not so much different.  In fact, from sounds of children at play and the occasional carriage going past the shuttered windows, Gabriel guessed that they were in a city of medium size.  Perhaps Bath.
The inside of the house, too – at least this floor – had the same layout of the house in Cambridge.  The front room served as a reception parlor for visitors, perhaps not so much here, but it contained the same furniture, the rosewood sofa and lounge chaise, the golden oak bookcases lining the walls, crammed with books that ranged from ancient falling-apart leather bound books to cheaply printed folios with no cover at all.  They also ranged, Gabriel knew, from the most difficult books on the occult and magic to the latest novel making the rounds of young ladies circulating libraries.
A great part of the attraction of associating with Marlon had always been the books.  They were everywhere in the house; there was nothing Marlon didn’t consider worth reading, and nothing he didn’t consider worth discussing.
The parlor gave way, to a smaller room, which could be cut off by shutting a pocket door.  The pocket door was open, and this room, though in the same position as the dining room at Cambridge, did not have the same furniture.  Instead, it was crammed full of furniture that had been in Marlon’s offices at Cambridge: a workbench took up the entire length of the wall under a shuttered window.  Above the workbench hung a stuffed crocodile.  Against the wall to the right was a set of shelves with jars filled with magical substances.  In the middle of the room, in the place taken by the dining table at Cambridge, was a massive golden oak desk, at least twice as large as any other desk that Gabriel had ever seen.  It was covered all over in papers and books with marks in them, in notepads with a note scribbled on it, in correspondence that, if Gabriel knew Marlon, might very well be the same correspondence that had remained unanswered when the desk was in Cambridge.
As Gabriel was turned when he answered Marlon’s question – had he truly just agreed to sell his soul? It didn’t matter.  He owed Seraphim that and more – he could look at the desk, and its papers and did look at them, rather than look at Marlon as Marlon’s finger traced the line of Gabriel’s jawbone.
For a moment, with the tip of his finger just touching Gabriel’s chin, the silence lengthened between them.  Then Marlon stepped away.  A quickly barked word seemed to have an affect on Gypson who had been drawing closer and closer, and now stopped, and walked back, to stand against the wall, the scrap of soul clinging to it almost invisible in the semi-darkness.
Marlon looked Gabriel over and made a noise at the back of his throat.  “Awakened in the middle of the night and no time to dress?” he asked.
“Not really awakened,” he said.  “I’d barely gone to sleep.”
“Upstairs,” Marlon said.  “There is a room to the left.   I just had a fire lit in it so it will still be chill, but the water in the basin will be warm.  Wash and dress.  I’ll be in the kitchen,” He pointed towards a door to the back of the house.
At least, Gabriel thought as he took the stairs two by two, he wasn’t being forced to share Marlon’s bedchamber.  He wasn’t sure how he felt about that particular detail.  There were so many worse things one could do to someone whom one magically owned.
The room itself was tiny but larger than Gabriel’s room with the Darkwaters.  And the fire was burning cheerily in the fireplace.  Gabriel could tell it had been set and lit by magical means and wondered what Marlon was playing at.  It was dangerous to use magic in such trivial matters.
But when he went down to the kitchen, after a quick wash and dressing, he found Marlon himself just finishing making tea.  The tea service was his old Cambridge one – silver and polished.  Marlon used to say, joking – at least Gabriel assumed it was joking – it was a legacy from his mortal father.  It had to be a joke, since Marlon’s father had never acknowledged him and at least no one in fairyland knew his identity.
He nodded to Gabriel, as Gabriel came in, then carried the tray into the next room, where he set it on the table in between the sofa and the chaise.  Gabriel stepped forward to pour, but Marlon waved him back.
It wasn’t until Gabriel had a steaming cup of tea in his hand, that he said, “You’re using magic for household matters.”
Marlon shrugged.  “It wouldn’t do otherwise, would it?  I can’t exactly hire servants.  Or I could, but considering that every local magician knows who I am and that I’m a wanted criminal, it wouldn’t answer.”
Gabriel didn’t say anything, but his eyes went involuntarily to the wall, where Gipson stood, immobile, save for the vague flap of his soul against the darkness surrounding him.
“As a servant?” Marlon said, answering the unspoken words.  “One doesn’t use the remains of someone one once loved as a servant.  One doesn’t use slaves, Gabriel.  Drink your tea, Gabriel.  I should have asked you if you preferred wine.  I beg your pardon.  I’ve grown quite unused to company.”
“Not wine in the middle of the night and after all that’s happened,” Gabriel said.  “I try not to tempt fate.”
“Wise that,” Marlon said.  “You said you want to rescue your… brothers.  What do you wish me to do?”
“I want to take Michael from Fairyland,” Gabriel said.  “That is the first imperative.  Seraphim…”  He paused, to control himself.  “Seraphim is an adult, and should be able to protect himself.  Though he could very well be dead by now, as ill as he was when he fell into their trap.”
Marlon gave him a look with raised eyebrows.  “Prince, do you know what you’re up against if you ever step foot in fairyland again?”  He shook his head.  “Or I for that matter.”
“I know what I’m up against.  And that’s why I needed you.  I might have more raw power, particularly on the other side, but you know more.”
The eyebrows raised impossibly more.  “Perhaps,” he said.  And then, “And Seraphim isn’t dead, not if what I sense is true.  Though we might not be able to get to him.”  He sipped his tea, then lifted the cup, staring within, and Gabriel knew he was reading the tea leaves left on the porcelain.  “He was sent to pyramids, but transported from there, very rapidly, to a world where magic is low.  It must be an odd world, because there’s a sense of… iron about it?”
“Oh.  The madhouse,” Gabriel said.  “Or one of the worlds in that series.  I think, you know, they have magic, just a different type of magic.  When Seraphim and I went there, it was full of animated carriages that went by themselves.”
For a moment he thought Marlon was going to call him a liar, but instead the older magician shook his head.  “Some day, Prince, you’ll have to tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself these years.  It sounds terribly fascinating and more than a little addle brained.”
“My father committed suicide and Seraphim and I discovered–”
“Someday, Gabriel, means not now.  I know you dropped out without finishing semantics, but I assure you that’s what it means.”  Marlon stood up, with an appearance of unfolding, and, setting the tea cup down on the tray, and waving a hand, to make the whole thing disappear, walked over to this work bench.  “You want to go to fairyland, we shall go to fairyland.  After all, you know, I hadn’t anything planned for the next sixty years or so of life, so it makes no difference if it’s ended prematurely.  First, let’s locate that tiresome youngest brother of yours.”
Locating Michael proved far harder than it seemed.  Working with fairyland was always hard.  Scanning fairyland was harder.  No one who had no elven blood could hope to do it, but even with elven blood there were easier things to do.  Extracting blood from stones, for instance.
But more than that, after using his crystal ball and a not inconsiderable amount of magic, Marlon fetched a book from the shelves, and tried another approach.  At this point, Gabriel could tell his magic was running down and quite worldlessly provided his own to lend force to the endeavor.
He was rewarded with a brief, brilliant smile.  And then Marlon sighed.  “It is occluded,” he said.  “I can’t see.  OH!”  The oh was loud and echoed dismay, and his hand went up to his forehead.  “Oh,” he said again.  He looked at Gabriel, with a look of almost dismay.
“Tell me, Marlon, damn you.”
“He’s in the royal dungeons,” Marlon said.  For the first time there was a hint of fear in his voice.  “They’re strip mining his magic!”
“Well then, we must rescue him from them,” Gabriel said, even as his heart thudded fast and he felt, incongruously, cold as ice.
“You’re ready to face the assembled armies of fairyland in the name of rescuing your misguided brother?” Marlon asked, with something like a hollow laugh.
“Yes, yes, I am.”
The hollow laugh became louder.  “Very well then,” Marlon said.  “We can die but once.”

Mystery On Mystery

“What do you mean?” Seraphim asked.  “You came from Avalon?”  He remembered the pyramid world and the feeling that she was a citizen of Avalon who had learned her magic in some far off and desolate place.

She blinked at him.  “No,” she said.  “No.  I simply knew I came from somewhere other than Earth.”  She turned around and paced towards the window, and looked out of it at the farm outside.  He’d caught a glimpse of it when he was walking from the bathroom and had a vague idea of a broad plane drenched in sun with mountains in the distance.  He had tried, of course, to place those mountains in his own world.  Landscapes that existed in one place existed – after all – in the other and this was often a good way to guess where in this world corresponded with his own world.  But the mountains were wholly unfamiliar to him.  Yet, since Miss Felix and her Grandmother spoke English, he had to assume they were somewhere in the North American colonies.  But he could not place it in any of the English speaking portion of them.  Not that it should matter.  Sometimes different peoples occupied different places in alternate worlds, but it bothered him all the same.

“What would make you think you weren’t from Earth?”  Seraphim said, then cleared his throat.  “Did you have a memory from another world?  Or is the knowledge of other worlds that well known in this one?”  There were a few worlds, he knew, where knowledge of magic and of magical alternates to the world they lived in were quite normal and in fact subjects anyone might discuss.  But in the Madhouse, where magic seemed not to be used at all?

“No.  I think I was brought over as a newborn or very little more,” she said.  “And no, belief in other worlds is not widespread.  It’s just that…”

She turned away from the window and towards him.  He was struck by how beautiful she looked.  And he shouldn’t have found her beautiful at all, not in her outlandish clothes.  In Avalon clothes she had struck him as comely enough, but not extraordinarily good looking.  But here in her native – or not her native – world, in those blue breeches that molded her figure, in a shirt so light and plain that a lady from Avalon would consider it too light for underwear, she looked magnificent.

He thought it might be that he was weak and therefore susceptible.  Then he thought no.  It was that her small, delicate features, her dark hair, all of it lent itself to far simpler styles than anyone in Avalon would dream of wearing.   He shifted in bed, lest his attraction should become obvious.  But she was looking into his eyes.

“A little more than twenty five years ago,” she said.  “My parents were childless and … well… very upset about that state.  They wanted children, but there seemed no hope of conceiving one.  Adoption in our world, in our region is, for various reasons, a complex and difficult process, or a costly one.  You can’t have one without the other.  Also, father’s income was irregular as he was a classical musician, and…  No, never mind that, it would take forever to explain.  They finally managed to conceive, but the baby was still borne.  As a way of bringing mother out of a very deep depression, father took her to Paris when he went there to play.

“They were walking outside the convent of Holy Grace, in Paris, when they saw a basket appear on the steps.  The basket contained a girl: me.”  She gave him a brief, brittle smile.  “One of my father’s friends knew a doctor in Paris, and they arranged to have it claimed mother had given birth to me, and for me to have a birth certificate, which allowed them to bring me home at the end of father’s engagement in Paris six months later.”

He tried to make sense of her story.  “But surely,” he said.  “That doesn’t mean that you are from another world.  I mean, if your parents didn’t believe in other worlds, surely–”

“No, listen, when they found me, they saw me appear on the steps.”

“But–”

“They were walking under a steady rain, with an umbrella, you know?  That’s why there was no one around.  But, and my wraps, were no more wet than if we’d been under the rain for only one second.  And that, you see, is why they thought I’d come from elsewhere.  They didn’t quite put it at another world, but the idea of parallel worlds is not completely alien here, and there are stories of people appearing or disappearing out of nowhere.”

“I see.  So you thought you might have come from elsewhere, and you wanted to find out from where?”

“They didn’t even tell me I was adopted,” she said.  “Not till I was fourteen, and then they didn’t tell me.  Only they died in an accident, driving to a new job with a philarmonic in Kansas.  I’d stayed behind, with grandma, to finish out my school year.  Anyway…  When they died grandma told me.  As you’ve found out she has some magic, and she’d taught me some magic.  It is of the sort that peasants do in Avalon, you know, healing minor ailments and such.  I took what she gave me, and I built on it, and of course, my magic is much stronger–”

“Strong enough for a noble woman in Avalon.”

She flashed him a smile.  “Yes, my landlady in Avalon has the persistent idea I’m some nobleman’s byblow.”  And then quickly, as he felt his cheeks heat.  “Oh, I beg your pardon, I’m back on Earth, see, where no man would find it embarrassing to hear that, not even from a woman’s lips.  Anyway, her illusions amused me because surely… but never mind that.  I don’t even know if I come from Avalon.  I might come from another world more magical than Avalon, where a peasant has as much power as a nobleman in Avalon does.  No.  But yes, I had more power, and after a while, grandmother thought, perhaps my origins explained it and so she told me.  Therefore, I was … primed you might say, the first year I was living away from home and working at my first job when Antoine appeared in front of me, on a deserted street.  And I was prepared to learn magic from him and to…”  She blushed.  “And to accept his invitation to go and see the other worlds.  He said it would be fun,” she said, wistfully.  “And it was for a time.  Gloriously fun.”

Seraphim guessed at what she didn’t say and didn’t think much of the Antoine fellow.  Even if he hadn’t tried to kill Seraphim himself, and if his corpse hadn’t been the reason that Seraphim found himself in these straits, Seraphim didn’t hold with the sort of fellow who gave a respectable girl a slip on the shoulder.

And despite the odd clothes, and what he was sure was a very odd society, Seraphim would have put hands in the fire that Nell Felix was or had been a respectable woman.  He chided himself on the had been.  It was different in Avalon.  If a girl lived with a man as lovers, and it became known, the doors of society would close to her, and she would cease being treated as a respectable girl.  But he wasn’t sure at al this truth held here.  In fact, just as a feeling, he had a sense it didn’t.  So, she was still a respectable woman.  And Antoine had lured her away.  He was sure of it.  But he wouldn’t say it.  Instead, he played with the edge of the blanket, and Nell, perhaps noticing no answer was forthcoming, said, “I know I was a fool, you don’t need to tell me, but I… well… was very young.  And I’ve been prattling on, and making you tired.  You’re not well yet.  Sleep. Tomorrow, if you’re feeling better, I’ll show you around the farm.”

But it wasn’t till the next day that she showed him around the farm.  Frankly showing him around the kitchen had been a near fatal shock.  He started to understand why these people had no servants.  Who needed servants, when machines kept food cold, when stoves lit at the flick of a button, when machines even washed dishes?

After a while, he’d asked for pen and paper and started making notes.  “For my brother Michael,” he said.  He sat at the broad, golden oak kitchen table and drew schematics on his paper, and made notes.  “We can’t hope to harness this electricity you speak of, or at least not fast enough to–”

“It’s not that,” she’d interrupted.  “It’s more that electricity interferes with magic.  Even mine is not as powerful as it is in Avalon.  I think, generationally if you introduced electricity in your world now, you’d be devoid of magic in a hundred years.  Or have it only at that low level Earth has it.”

He nodded.  “I suspected there was something like that,” he said.  “Some worlds have less magic naturally, but I didn’t feel this as being true on Earth.  And so I don’t propose to introduce electricity to Avalon, something for which I doubt Ainsling’s Arcana has enough capital, and that’s supposing something terrible hasn’t happened to my estates.  I have a feeling…”  He shrugged.  “At any rate, my brother Michael is very inventive and gifted at designing magical machinery.  I’m sketching the ideas for him, and hopefully he can design them to run by magic.”

She tilted her head sideways, which he’d learned meant that she was thinking something she was afraid of saying out loud, for fear it would pain someone.  He’d seen her look like that when her grandmother had said something about Nell now staying home where she belonged.

He understood what she wouldn’t say and said, “I know, I know.  You mean that Michael has been stolen away to fairyland and that he might never come back.  But… never fear.  We will find him and rescue him.”  He’d looked at her, his eyebrows arched.  “I keep getting the sense that there is something very bad afoot in Avalon, that I was got out of the way so something could be done to my family.  Today I had a feeling Gabriel was trying to find me.  I dreamed…”  He made a face.  “If I weren’t still so weak and my power weren’t still so impaired, I’d scry to see what is happening there, and study where we can return.”

“As to that,” Nell said.  “I can scry though the power is limited here, if you–”

At that moment her grandmother came into the kitchen, from the door to the basement stairs, “Nell, I was wondering if Mr. Ainsling, since you say he’s been in so many worlds, would be able to tell us where the basket and fabric you were found in came from.”

Seraphim submitted in good part to being shown a wicker basket – of fine manufacture, but nothing special, and two unexceptionable blue blankets.  Wool, and fine wool at that, but it meant nothing.  “It’s very little to go on,” he said.  “Unless I scry.  She wasn’t wearing any particular clothes, I gather?”

“Only a diaper,” her grandmother said.  “Linen, but no marks on it.”

“Then I’m afraid there’s nothing to tell me.  It could be any of a dozen worlds,” he said.  “I think she’s from Avalon, of course, but I would perhaps think that.”

The two women exchanged a look.  Her grandmother sighed.  “Well,” she said.  “When my daughter in law pulled the blankets off Nell, something fell off.  We don’t know how it came to be there, but …  When Nell was young she made up stories about her mother putting it there to recognize her by, but it makes no sense, since every other identifying detail seems to have been removed.”

“Something?”

Nell ran up the stairs, to her room which Seraphim had learned was next to his.  She came back moments later with her right hand tightly closed.  When she opened it, a gold medallion shone in it.

Seraphim’s heart skipped a beat and his breath caught.  But he didn’t say anything till he picked the medallion in his palm, and saw upon it, on one side, a figure of a crowned lion, and on the other a stylized apple tree.  He tried to speak several times before he managed it.  At last, after clearing his throat, he managed, in a thread of voice, to start in the most irrelevant place, “I bet this pendant managed to find its way into your clothes no matter where you left it, until you were about ten.”

“How did you know?” Nell said.  “I ended up wearing it on a chain because I could not get rid of it.”

“Until you reach the age of reason, it’s spelled to accompany you everywhere, in case you get lost, so you can be identified without doubt.  I suspect someone thought they’d neutralized that spell, or perhaps didn’t know about it.  You have to be related to know, I think…”

“We’re related?” she said, sounding shocked.

He let out a bark of laughter which shocked him, because he didn’t feel in the least amused.  This added a complication he wasn’t ready to contemplate.  “Very distantly, your highness,” he said at last.  “I believe I’m your sixth cousin.”

“Your–” she said, and blanched.

“Yes, Nell, I’m very sorry, but I believe you’re the lost princess of Avalon.”

All The Paths

No matter how hard Marlon tried, he could not open a portal into fairyland.  Gabriel watched him do it, and watched him exhaust himself and at some level couldn’t help admiring him for not giving up.  It was much like watching a man beating against a closed door long past his beating had become feeble and his voice had gone hoarse from shouting.

Circles appeared beneath the dark blue eyes, and the flame-colored eyebrows drooped, but Marlon kept trying.

But then, Gabriel reasoned, with a glance at Aiden, Marlon didn’t seem good at giving up.  After a while Gabriel slipped away to the kitchen, where he washed the tea things and made fresh tea and brought it out, and waited till a pause in Marlon’s incantations to say, “Tea.  With milk and sugar.  You need it.”

Marlon made a face.  It was a face that Gabriel remembered.  Marlon took his tea black.  But he ran a hand back over his unruly hair, making it more so, and shambled towards the tea table, his walk no more lively than Aiden’s.  “There is no path,” he told Gabriel.  “No way to… to get to fairyland.  There is nothing I can do.  It won’t open to us.”

“How not?” Gabriel said.  “Though I believe I was thrown out of fairyland with the specific injunction not to come back, I believe you weren’t even born when you were thrown out.”

Marlon set his cup down and rubbed at his nose between the eyes.  “It’s not like that.  Not… specific to us, I mean, but to any magicians of a certain level of power, particularly those of mixed magic.  And, Gabriel, I regret that I have to give you bad news.  Something I learned through my scrying of the paths of power.”  He did look sorry, his tired eyes almost as lusterless as those of his animated lover’s corpse.

“What?” Gabriel asked, and for a moment felt the dark, unremitting despair of waiting to have Seraphim’s death announced to him.  He didn’t think he could live with himself having allowed Seraphim to be killed, and his whole house lost with him.  “Tell me.”

“Your…  The dowager Lady of Darkwater and her daughter Caroline have gone into fairyland.  They were allowed, or perhaps trapped, into going in.  I don’t know what they mean to do with them, but it can’t be good.”

“Caroline.”  Gabriel discovered he’d put his own cup down, and that he was clutching frantically at the sleeve of Marlon’s shirt.  “For the love of God, we must go and rescue her.  She’s just a child.  She– I taught her some defenses but not nearly enough for what she’ll meet with there.”

“No,” Marlon said.  “And I did not mean to tell you until we could get in.  But I don’t think we can or at least…”

“At least what?”

Marlon’s face had acquired a pinched look, and Gabriel realized he was clutching the magician’s arm hard enough to bruise the flesh beneath.  He withdrew his hand and tried to compose himself.  “I beg your pardon, but–”

“No.  I understand.  They are your family.”  A pause.  “You know, I think part of what fuled my anger at you all these years, other than your incredible stupidity in alerting the authorities or your idiot brother’s insistence on fighting a duel with me, after finding me through magical means he shouldn’t be able to use–”

“Seraphim? He what?”

“Assure you.  Fought a duel with me.  For your honor.  As though–” Marlon shook his head.  “At any rate, more than any of that, what fueled my anger at you was knowing that you had a family, and I never did.  It was knowing you were loved by at least your father and not born of–” He shrugged.  “And that they counted to you.”  He looked up at Gabriel and gave the impression of being so tired he would presently sway on his feet.  “And that you mattered to them.  Foolish, I know to hold it against you.  It is not your fault I was not born in the same circumstances.  But I was envious.  Deadly envious.  And it distorted all my feelings.  It made me…  Never mind.”

But Gabriel’s mind was spinning dizzily over this duel, if it had happened.  “Seraphim fought you?  For my honor?  But… what did my honor have to do with your practice of necromancy?”

He got back a level stare.  “No.  Idiot.  Not the necromancy.”

“Oh.  But–”

“Don’t ask me to explain what goes on in his Grace’s mind.  I’m sure I couldn’t tell you anymore than I can bring the moon down to Earth.  I’m common as dirt, remember.  He informed me in no uncertain terms that if I ever had any other contact with you, next time the bullet would go between my eyes.”

“The bullet?”

Marlon pulled his shirt casually down, to reveal a puckered red scar on his shoulder.  “As you see.”  Then suddenly the tired blue eyes danced with devilish amusement.  “As soon as I’d recovered enough, I sent you the letter with my coordinates.”

Gabriel had to cover his eyes for a moment, because it was impossible to think coherently through the desire to laugh and cry at once.  “And yet, you’ll help me rescue him?’

“Naturally.  But for a price remember?”

“How could I forget?  Now to return to the paths into fairyland.”

“The famous Darkwater accumen returns!”

How could he, Gabriel wondered, at the same time admire the man and want to punch him unconscious within the space of less than ten seconds?  How was it possible that Marlon would both be willing to help the people who had mistreated him, and yet not be able to keep from mocking Gabriel himself?

“Indeed,” Gabriel said, keeping his own temper under control.  “Now if you please, to speak plainly.  You said there was no way in, only– Only what?”

Marlon sighed.  “Only there might be.  I get a feeling what is keeping us out is not a shutting charm.  I don’t think they could do that against someone of mixed blood anyway.  Those with blood of fairyland can ever go back, can we not?  I have the strong impression what is keeping us at bay is…  A cat’s cradle working.”

Gabriel poured tea for both of them again.  The cup he pressed into Marlon’s hands was picked up without comment, and then Gabriel himself took a sip of his tea.  The magical worlds – and Avalon was one of the more magical ones – all had lines of power which wrapped the world in a tight shroud of magic.  Into these lines of power smaller and more mobile lines of power were attached.  Each magic user had his own, and through his life he wove a pattern upon the surface of the world.  Those powerful enough changed the nature of the power with their design and those powerful and active could even move one or more of the lines and alter the nature of the world’s magic forever.  This was why necromancy was forbidden.  Because it could make the bright lines dark, and blight whole areas of magic.

A cat’s cradle working was managed with the lines of magic themselves, which were intertwined and twisted in such a way that someone with normal magic could not follow them.  “The major lines or the minor ones?” Gabriel asked.  To twist the minor lines was what was called a fate work, not savory, exactly, but often employed by village witches making love spells, or by well intentioned Hearth wizards making it so that a sailor would return from the sea or a soldier from war.

It wasn’t good magic as such, because it restricted the will power and actions of others, and it could be dark magic, depending on what fates you were twisting or why.  But to twist the major ones would take both an immense amount of power which would snap back at any moment, without warning, and it would probably cause a deformation in the magic.

If the Cinderella story were true – and Gabriel doubted it, because it was far easier to lay a spell on coachmen to take someone to a ball in a borrowed carriage than to spell mice and WHY pumpkins? – the change back in coach and mice would be what happened when lines snapped back.  The question though, was how long it would take to snap back.

Marlon squinted, as though thinking.  “Both I think,” he said.  “And before you tell me how dangerous it, remember I used to teach magic.  But it’s entirely possible it’s only minor lines that are involved, just so many of them and so strongly bound that it feels like major lines.”

Gabriel nodded.  “So you are saying, if we can unwind the lines of fate – all the fates – we can discover a way to get into fairyland.”

Marlon made a sound that might be laughter, or else it might be a cough.  “Indeed, but–”

“But?”

“The lines include those of the king.  And my father, and your brother, Seraphim, who is in this other world we might not be able to access.”

“Your FATHER?”

Marlon’s face went blank, almost wooden in its lack of expression.  “Indeed.  My very honored father.”

“But I didn’t know– That is, I know he never recognized you, which is why–” Which was why the official name Marlon used was Elfborn, the name of every bastard kicked out of fairyland, and attached to a certain stigma, to a definite untrustworthiness.  That he’d managed to get an education, much less to become a professor, despite all that, had been one of the things Gabriel admired about him.  And perhaps that was one of the reasons that Marlon had been tempted into necromancy.  If everyone assumes the worst of you at all times– But no.  Damn it.  He would not find excuses for the man.  Marlon had chosen that one dark path of his own accord.

At that moment, Gabriel realized the expression on Marlon’s face was ghastly enough that Marlon himself could have been many years dead.  The smile that contorted his lips was closer to the grimace of a corpse.  “Oh, but he did recognize me, Gabriel.  I made sure of it, though it almost killed us both.  Legally I have my father’s name.  For all the god it did me, since I had to go into hiding that same week.  I had hoped– Never mind that.  I chose not to publicize his name, though I owe him no respect and little gratitude.  I had to force his hand to recognize me, to threaten to reveal that what happened to my mother was not consensual but the result of dark magic and of entraping an elf and then–” He shook his head.  “My father would kill me, if he could.  It is a good part of the reason I’m still so fiercely hunted these many years after, and when my acts of necromancy amount to a ressurrection spell said two seconds too late.”

Gabriel looked towards the corner “Is that why–”

“Damn it,” for the first time there was fury directed at Gabriel in Marlon’s voice.  “What did you think it was?”

“But– But then why didn’t you–”

“Kill him again?  Don’t push Gabriel.  There are things you should understand without being told.”

And Gabriel, who understood nothing at all, could only take a deep breath, wondering what he should understand.  That Marlon couldn’t kill Aiden?  But surely Marlon could see that tattered soul attached to the not-quite-alive body?  Surely he could see its suffering?

Then suddenly he did see.  If what Marlon said was true, then the magician had been born of rape.  That meant his mother had gotten expelled from fairyland, as well as Gabriel’s mother had, but that she had never wanted to leave.  He’d never asked Marlon exactly what his mother was.  There were many creatures in fairyland, from elves to centaurs, from the high-powered and princely sovereigns and noblemen of elves to the nayads and dryads and centaurs that the Romans had mistaken for minor divinities.  Depending on what Marlon’s mother had been, she might not have lasted long outside of fairyland.  And, regardless of what she had been, she might very well have abandoned her human child behind and gone back, to face whatever punishment would allow her to be part of the magic lands again.  “Your mother…”

“Never met her,” Marlon said.  “Not consciously.”  He rubbed at the tip of his nose, and seemed to be oddly confused about the turn in the conversation.  “I was raised in an orphanage for magical children.”  He made a face.  “What does that have to do with any–”

But Gabriel’s mind was still following its own thought.  Orphanages for magical children ranged from the very good to the appalling and he wasn’t going to guess which kind it had been.  Marlon had survived childhood, so it couldn’t be one of the very worst ones.  Instead he pursued that thought.  Marlon had never belonged to anyone.  He’d had no family, no kin, and probably no friends either, because even weres were afraid of half-fey magic.

Gabriel thought of the fear that had met him in the eyes of the servants, the looks of dread, when he’d first gone to live with the Darkwaters.  He imagined growing up with that, living with that, your whole life, unremitting.

Then there had been Aiden Gypson, who had been– “You were friends with Aiden for a long time.”

A face.  “We were both charity pupils at his majesty’s charity school for magically gifted young gentlemen.  I think we were twelve when we became friends.  What are you getting at, Gabriel?”

Nothing, Gabriel thought.  Nothing at all save that your foolishness has epic proportions to it.  But then why should I be surprised?  Do you not do everything, always, larger than life.

“I think we should sleep,” Marlon said.  “Because unraveling these fates will take us off into each of the places the people involved are.  And you know, and I know that we’ll have to do a major working, which should not be undertaken as tired as we are.  We’ll need some hours of sleep at least.  And you know time in fairyland doesn’t run at the same rate, so your brother’s fate is not as urgent or it’s perhaps more urgent than–”

“Who is your father?” Gabriel asked.  It had to be someone despicable, if he’d taken advantage of a female elf bound in a working, yet it had to be someone important enough to be enmeshed in this working – whether important in the human or the magical world.

“My dear Gabriel!  What does it signify?  We must rest and then we’ll do our working.  You are very odd asking me where I met Aiden, and then asking who my father is.  It makes me feel like you’re some girl in her first season, or else the girl’s mama checking on my antecedents.  I assure you when I said we should sleep I meant just that.  There is strenuous magic to be done and I–”

“And you speak a great deal of nonsense, Marlon.  Who is your father?  If he’s involved in this working, we must understand how and why before we start.”

“The fact he’s involved has nothing to do with being my father.  Far more to do with his being an ambitious man.”  Marlon tried to smile, but it didn’t quite work and he sighed.  “Has anyone ever told you, my dear Gabriel, that you have the most unpleasant habit of fastening on to irrelevant details and holding onto them buckle and tongue?  First there was your calling the authorities merely because I lacked the cour– Because I kept Aiden about.  And now this obsession with my father.  And you’re not going to let me go up to bed until I tell you, will you?”  He looked up into Gabriel’s eyes, and whatever he read there made him sigh again.  “Very well, Prince.  If you must know, my father is Lord Sydell, his majesty’s spy master.”  And then, with a near sneer, “There, are you happy?”

Waking And Dreaming

“Don’t worry about it,” Arden was saying, his voice very steady.  “Don’t worry about it, Barbara.  The girl will be fine.  She’s full of determination, that one.  The strongest of our children, and she had to be the girl.  What a boy she’d have made.”  And then, with a smile.  “Or perhaps not,” he said. “Imagine all the duels he’d fought and how many liaisons he’d have embroiled himself in.”

Barbara, the dowager duchess looked at her husband, walking by her side, in this path in fairyland, and wondered what to make of his presence at all.  He was dead.  She knew he was dead.  She remembered the study, and his corpse, and blood everywhere.  It had taken them weeks to remove the blood stain from the floorboards, using all magical means available.  She remembered the shock, and the pain at knowing she’d never see him again, in the flesh, no matter how much grief he’d brought into her life.  He’d brought joy too.

The joy was now obvious in those green eyes, squinting at her with something like deep and secret amusement.  It was the amusement that made her snap back an answer, as she’d so often done when he’d been alive, “Mind you,” she said.  “Your boys are not much better.  Michael is, I suppose.  He wouldn’t get embroiled with anything unless it came with magical gears and perhaps a steam engine.  But Seraphim!”

“I don’t think it is what you think, with Seraphim,” Arden said.  “At least, I think he and Gabriel found my papers.  I’m sorry, Barbara.”

“Your papers…  Yes, I’ve for some time now been worried that you were involved in something … something worse.”

“Oh, I was, which is why I’m here,” Arden said.

“You mean dead?” She asked, and her heart beat very fast, afraid he’d tell her, yes, he was dead and that she had now joined him.

But he frowned at her.  “You know, I don’t believe I am.  No, no, it’s true, this is not my body beside you.  I’m not absolutely sure where my body is just now.  It doesn’t seem to matter much in fairyland and after a while…”

“But I saw you dead.  I saw your body, I–”

“Surely, you of all people know about changellings.”

“Oh,” Barbara said. And then, “I am dreaming.  I was just walking with your daughter, and we didn’t turn, we didn’t veer.  Only we heard someone crying and…”  She frowned unable to remember when Caroline had disappeared or when Arden had appeared beside her.

“Yes.  That’s her path.  Not yours.”

“But we didn’t part.”

“In fairyland, all paths are alone, Barbara, for those who don’t belong.”

Out Of Time

When Nell had been much younger and read everything she could get her hands on, she’d gone through an old suitcase full of time travel romances from the eighties, stored in one of the farm’s outbuildings.

She now knew they were completely wrong.  Forget the big things, such as the fact in one of those the woman gets to take her tape player and tapes back to the middle ages, and since her music is the only thing she missed, lives there happilly ever after – which had left Nell, even at eleven, scratching her head and wondering what they planned to use for electricity.  No, what she hadn’t realized before was wrong was how a person from the past would adapt to the present day.

In the books there were one or two funny incidents and then the dislocated person started behaving exactly like a modern day man – it was usually a man – save for one or two run-ins with tech, which were more amusing than scary.

She knew from living in his time that His Grace, the Duke of Darkwater was not a stupid man.  In fact, she’d judged both him and his half brother to be damnably acute.  And she knew, because it had taken her forever to figure out how to navigate it, even though she had the advantage of having read books set in a similar time period, that his social etiquette was far more difficult than anything she’d ever learned.  However, she’d never have known it by the way he behaved in this time period.

It wasn’t even the puzzlers – like the existence of toilet paper, compounded by his archaic manners which made him almost incapable of speaking of that sort of thing – or the fact that, in trying to be independent, he’d in fact managed to melt grandmother’s plastic mixing bowl all over the stove, when he’d thought to boil water in it – it was the fact that he kept tripping over things so basic and fundamnetal that Nell had learned them before she was conscious of learning anything.

The result was that over the next few days, she ended up being as much a nanny to him as though he were a two year old infant stumbling from peril to disaster.  The worst of it, of course, being when he thought he was adroit enough to do for himself, or perhaps even help.  She’d barely stopped him using clothes detergent on his hair, and shuddered at the thought of what the people in his world would think if he had to shave his head after turning his hair into a hay pile.

But that had brought her around, after four days, to thoughts she didn’t want to have.  She knew the royal symbol of the Royal family of Albion – the local name for the British isles – in Avalon.  And she knew it was the same as the symbol on her medallion.  She’d just never thought about it.  And besides, she thought, surely there were many such royal families in that many worlds.  It didn’t mean it was that one.

That in turn had brought her to what a coincidence it was that she should end up in Avalon.  And then with a sick lurch in her stomach, she knew it was no coincidence.  It strained the limits of credulity that she’d both end up in the world where she’d originated and be involved in what was clearly an attempt to get rid of the Darkwaters.  And the Darkwaters had been involved in something, too.

She looked over at Seraphim, looking startlingly modern and startlingly archaic, both, in a pair of Jeans grandma had procured from town, sitting at the kitchen table, sketching the automatic shaver on a cheap note pad and making notes on how it worked.  She didn’t know yet, whether the fact that his tongue protruded from the corner of his mouth, as he sketched made her like him more or less.  It was such a terribly undignified for a Duke to have.

And despite the Jeans he managed to look like the cover of a romance novel, with his obviously well-muscled torso doing violence to one of her white t-shirts, and his dark hair severely tied back.

Instead of dwelling on how he looked, she cleared her throat.  “Do you really think your brother will be able to reproduce a shaver with magic?  I mean, one that works automatically?”

“It might looking quite different,” Seraphim said.  “When he’s done.  But if he sees the principle of how it works, he’ll probably have an idea for how to do it.  And it would be no end of relief for Gabriel not to have to shave me.”

She was briefly scandalized.  “Mr. Penn shaves you?”

Seraphim looked as surprised as he had when the plastic had melted, then started burning with a merry flame all over the gas burner.  “He is my valet,” he said.  “And besides…  I don’t know that I’d feel really confident with anyone else using a blade that close to my neck.”

“But who shaves him?”

There was a moment of almost shocked hesitation.  “Himself, I presume,” Seraphim said at last and, once more proving to her that he was very far from stupid, he smiled, disarmingly.  “I can shave myself too, Miss Felix, and I take your meaning, but he does it better than I can do it, and in my world there is the expectation that a person of rank–” A shadow passed over his face.  They hadn’t talked about her origins, not since he’d discovered them.  Instead they’d skirted around them like a burned cat walking around fire.  In a way they’d both tried to pretend it had never happened, and more often than not he called her Miss Felix, even if there was sometimes, an almost palpable hesitation before the word.  Grandma too had not mentioned it, but there was that look she gave Nell sometimes that made Nell wonder what she felt.  Was she afraid of losing Nell forever?  Nell was her only descendant and it had always been assumed, on grandma’s side at least, that Nell would inherit the farm particularly since mom and dad had died.

But now Seraphim looked at her and sighed.  “As you’ll doubtless learn, once we reclaim your position.”

“Are we going to reclaim my position?” she said, softly, sitting across from him.

He looked at her a long moment.  “You are very wise, you know?”

“Am I?”

“You are.  You’re neither overjoyed at the idea of being a princess, nor foolish enough to tell me you don’t need to go back, or you don’t want to go back, and that you’d rather live your life out here, as it’s been.”

She sighed.  “I’m not sure,” she said, deciding confession was good for the soul.  “That I am so much wise as cowardly.  I’ve avoided discussing it, because I didn’t want to think about it.  It goes without saying that I don’t wish to claim my inheritance in your world.”

“Why does it go without saying?  And it is your world too.”

“Because…  It’s not my world.  Not really.  I was not brought up there.  It feels uncomfortable, and odd, and I know enough, thank you so much, your grace, to know that at the higher levels in society there is even less freedom than in the other classes.  I know that if I were to become your princess, I’d find myself married off to someone I don’t love.  I’d probably be bundled off to some country where I don’t even speak the language, because the family I don’t even know needs a treaty or something.”

He looked at her a long time, his bewildering green eyes very intent.  “Did you ever see the king, your…  Miss Felix?”

She shook her head.  “There was,” she said.  “Some sort of ceremony once, and you could say… I mean, I saw him from a distance.  Tall man.  Grey hair.”

“In family…  Even the extended family, which we are, and in private, not in his capacity as king, he goes by Richard, though I believe my mother might call him something absurd like Ricky.  They…  My father and he were playfellows and when my father married my mother, she learned to address the king the way my father did.”

“In family.  You really are related.”

He gave her the bewildering smile again.  He seemed to have forgotten what he was sketching and instead, his pencil moving as if of its own accord, had started sketching a face on the side of he paper, shading it in.  “Not really.  No more than all nobility in the isles is at some level.  If we didn’t often import brides we’d all have two heads.”  He shrugged.  “But we are distant cousins, and because my family is one of two important magical families–” He frowned a little and she wondered if he was remembering that the other family was that of his earstwhile fiancé.  Or were they technically still engaged?  That particular bit of etiquette was bewildering beyond belief.  “But because my father and Richard were friends, my father being one of a select group of youths allowed to play with the prince heir, they remained close.  And given the status of my family, we were often invited over to … for family dinners, of a sort.”  An amused smile again.  “It would still all seem unbearably formal to you, but to the royal family it is our version of winding down.  I don’t see how I didn’t realize it before,” he said, looking at her.  “Except of course, one doesn’t expect lost princesses to drop into one’s lake… or on top of one.  But you look a lot like your mother, Queen Cecily.”

“Cecily,” Helen said.  Useless to say she didn’t want to know her mother or hadn’t nurtured questions about her parents.  “I…  I never knew that was the Queen’s name.”

“No.  Most people just refer to her as her majesty the Queen.  But she looks like you, though in smaller point.  you inherited some of your father’s more substantial look.  She is… was…  A princess of Italy and married your father when she was barely a teenager.  Or at least married him by treaty and came over to learn our ways and our magic.  They married officially in their twenties, and had a long string of still born infants, before they managed to produce you.  Their magic, you see, is somewhat incompatible, which is a danger when marrying far from home.”  He was now carefully shading the features.  A woman’s face, Nell decided.  “But the advantage of course is that any infant who survives will be very magically powerful.  As you are.”  He looked up.  “Understand, they are a very happy couple.  You are correct.  At our level of society normally marriages are made for reasons other than mutual affection, but Richard and Cecily love each other.  Lucky for them, of course.  They’re both of a quiet, bookish disposition, and on winter evenings they’ll both sit in his office.  She reads while he works.  They could be any middle aged couple.  And of course, they wanted to have children.”  She realized with a shock that the face he’d drawn was her own and, having shaded it in, he as now busily giving her a crown.  “They wanted to have children for the crown, but most of all they wanted to have children for themselves.  I don’t actually remember the princ– your disappearance, not as such.  I was very young myself.  But I do remember your baptism because there was a procession, and I was one of a few children allowed to carry your train… the… the edge of the cape attached to your christening gown.”  He sighed.  “At any rate, I have heard from my parents, how overjoyed Richard and Cecily were, then how distraught at her– Your disappearance.  How they tried to follow all leads in vain, only to find you were carried out of the world.  And then, the king asked permission of parliament for an exemption from the prohibition of traveling to other worlds, so that he might send investigators to find you.

“It was denied, because it was felt it might upset the delicate magical balance of the universe and…  And my mother says that your parents aged ten years in a week.  I don’t know if it’s true, but I know that–”

“Yes?” She said.

“That the two of them, though they’re not actively unhappy, always look to me as though a part of them is missing.  It’s as though…  As though they should be living a completely different life, one in which they have children and the hope of grandchildren, and instead, that part of them was taken away.  It’s as though… they are shadows of themselves.”

“Damn you,” she heard herself say, before she knew what she was going to utter.  “Damn you.  You know very well I could have refused the claims of the kingdom, but I can’t refuse the love of my parents.”

He didn’t say anything.  His pencil had given her an elaborate crown, and was now sketching a body in royal robes, a hand holding a scepter.  After a while, he breathed deeply.  “Understand, Your Highness, you do have a claim to the kingdom too.  Someone kidnaped you and sent you to a world where our scrying didn’t work.  Someone too – maybe the same person – made sure to find you later, as an adult and bring you to Avalon for some time.  And someone again, who knows how or why, sent you away, with me, to a world where you were likely to get killed quickly, had we not taken extraordinary measures.

“Unless the person doing all this is mentally ill, it can’t be the same person.  So the question is, who are the two forces warring over you?  How and why was I pulled into this strife?  What do these people have to do with my family?  And how can we uncoil this confusion?”

Nell looked at him a long time.  She wanted to scream and tell him his kingdom’s problems were no issue of hers, or that she didn’t care, or that she’d stay here and he could go back.

But in her mind was the image of the royal couple – her parents – who had mourned her loss for more than twenty years and yet had adhered inflexibly to their duty and the laws of their land, even when their position allowed them to impose their will.  She thought of how Seraphim described them, as if a part of them were missing.  She thought of Seraphim himself and his family, that bond she’d seen between the members of his family, even the illegitimate one.

She was close to grandma, perhaps that close, but it was just them and had been since mom and dad died.  But if she had more family, family who missed her…

“What if I go back?  With you?  We just transport into the palace and… find my parents…”

He tilted his head sideways, and looked at her through narrowed eyes, the way she’d learned he did when appraising magic.  “You might have enough power to do it,” he said.  “And the commotion might even be worth it.  But there might very well be traps set for you, should you return, and besides…”  He sighed.

“Besides?”

“I’m fairly sure I’m wanted, and that a blade might slipped into my back before you’re even established…  Face it, we have a powerful enemy.”

“Yes,” she said, slowly.  Then bit her lip.  “How can we figure out… at least some of what is going on there?  Sooner or later, you’ll want to go back.  You’re almost well.”

He pushed the notepad away.  “I want to go back very soon.  I’ve been having dreams about Gabriel and I think he’s in trouble.  Bad trouble.  But you are right.  To go back blind might be death.”  He paused.  “I could try scrying.”

But she had a feeling that he couldn’t scry very well, not from a world with so much iron and so little magic as Earth.  She sighed.  “No.  I’ll do it,” She said.  “I’m used to the magic here.”

That got her the odd tilted look again.  “Crystal ball?” he asked, as though this were somehow amusing.

“No,” she said.  “I’m self taught, remember?”  She got up leaving him to ponder, and went into the dining room.  On the drawer was the pack of cards her grandmother used for her occasional bridge nights.  She came back and set it on the table.  It amused her that his eyes widened. Playing card scrying, in Avalon, seemed to be a parlor trick type of thing, almost a joke.  “You cut or will I?” she asked.  She was about to show him what she could do.

Cat’s Cradle

Gabriel woke to the sound of curtains opening and of a tray being set on the table next to the bed.  For a moment, for just a moment, before opening his eyes, he imagined he was back at Darkwater and that everything was as it should be: the intervening events had been some horrible, inscrutable nightmare.

Then he opened his eyes.  Sunlight came through mullioned windows.  The room was small, but not as small as his room in the Darkwater house.  And the person standing by the tray, having just set it down, was not some benighted apprentice house maid, with her cap all askew, but Marlon Elfborn, his clothes no more rumpled than normal, his eyebrows raised as though someone had asked him a preplexing question, and a sort of questioning smile on his lips.

Gabriel squinted against the sun, stared at Marlon a moment, and then – somewhat to his horror – heard his own mouth say, “Rufus.”

Marlon blinked at him.  “I beg your pardon?”

“Your hair,” Gabriel said and sat up, and even as he said it, he knew that it wasn’t true, that Marlon’s hair wasn’t red.  Not really.  Nothing about Marlon was really.  Not good, not bad.  Not dark, not light.  Gabriel groaned.

“Hardly,” Marlon said, crisply, and sounding indefinably amused.  Not that it matters much, does it.

“It might,” Gabriel said, his mouth still independent of his conscious thought. “I wonder if your mother was a salamander.”

And now Marlon’s eyebrows went high, really high.  “A fire spirit?  Unlikely.  It is not how my power trends, and besides, I’d like to see the human, no matter how magical, to impose himself on one of those.”  He shook his head.  “None of which matters, does it?  I have laid out the instruments we’ll need downstairs, but I could use your help.  I remember you can’t wake without tea and I remembered also,” He looked like a school child caught at fault.  “That you didn’t like magic used around the house for chores.  So I brought you tea and toast.  There is food in the kitchen, should you wish for it.  Stasis field, on the serving board.  I’ll be ready to work in half an hour.”

And like that he was gone, so fast that he might as well have teleported.  Gabriel ate his toast, with just a touch of the marmelade provided in a small porcelain dish, and he drank down his tea.  It was strong and a little stewed which, in his experience, was how Marlon had always made it.  Not unpleasant though.

There was a bathing room and a water closet next to his room, in between his door and what he presumed was Marlon’s, Gabriel found it by dint of looking, and took care of his morning hygiene and hasty shaving.  One thing that Marlon had never understood, Gabriel thought, annoyed, as he tied his necktie by touch, was that other people didn’t spring from sleep fully awake and dress in next to no time.

But by the time he made it down the stairs, Marlon was too absorbed in disposing objects around the room to pay much attention to Gabriel, much less to reproach him on being slow.

The objects were objects of power, but an odder assemblage of them than this, Gabriel had never seen.  There were stone spheres, vast and polished, swirling with metallic veins and crackling with barely contained magic.  There was one very large, very ancient shell that looked as though it had been corroded by the tides of an ancient sea.  There was too an old crown, brown and worn down that looked as though it had been buried for very long and had possibly been steeped in blood, besides.

Marlon disposed them as pieces on an elaborate game tray.  He’d pushed all the furniture out of the way to arrange things, and as he pulled a particularly ugly little statuette of a wolf over one way, for just a moment Gabriel saw the thread of power stretching between objects.

Marlon looked up then, dusting his hands, as though to cleanse them from hard work.  “There,” he said.  “Do you think that reflects the tangle, Gabriel?”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” Gabriel said.  “I presume you wish to represent the tangle of magic lines, but … I never learned to do this.”

Marlon made a sound of annoyance.  “It’s very simple, really.  We’re representing the world as it is – or rather, the mess that someone has made of magic lines as it is.  And then after we determine that we can twist them back – or at least to a less tense state.  It’s simple sympathetic magic, Gabriel and you must have learned it in grammar school.”

Gabriel heard himself say, “We had a tutor, Seraphim and I,” as though that explained everything, then walking gingerly down the stairs and into the magic field.  Walking into an area where workings were being done was always dangerous, but Marlon hadn’t completed a wall or a defense barrier, or anything of the kind, and other than a vague zapping at the bottom of his feet, Gabriel felt nothing else.

Then looking around at the objects, he felt it and saw it, the tension that was built up in some of the lines being pulled out of position.  “Oh.” He said.

“Yes,” Marlon agreed, as though he’d said a lot.  “They are at high tension, at least some of them, but we have to reflect what they are, rather set them in the natural positions.  I suppose the feeling of wrongness overwhelms you and you can’t do that.  Yet.  It’s difficult the first time.  Very well.  I think I have them right.  Now, let’s close the working, and then we can move the lines.”

“You didn’t close it to set it,” Gabriel said.  He’d just realized Gypson’s body was nowhere around and wondered where it could be.  At Cambridge, Marlon had kept it in a closet in an attic room, which seemed cruel, but somehow Gabriel would much prefer.

“No.  See you, I had to be open to the influence of the world and to the currents as they were. But now we can close it.  Do you wish to do the honors of the knife?  I shall call the guardians.”  He handed Gabriel his working dagger, a piece of ancient metal probably inherited from some teacher.  Working knives had to be inherited or have another reason to be held in affection.  They were supposed to be, in a way a part of the magician’s own self.  Gabriel felt a pang at realizing he’d somehow forgotten his own dagger at home, at his work desk.  It had been a gift from his father.

He took Marlon’s though, and walked a quarter circle, slicing at the air.  “I cut this working from the world, into a space between the worlds,” he intoned, in his best learned-ritual-voice.

Marlon stood next to the piece and called to the guardian of the North, “Guardian of the North, ice and cold, we call to you.  Protect this portion of our working that no undue influence can intrude.”

They repeated it at each of the cardinal points.  Gabriel watched Marlon very carefully to make sure no strange magic crept in.  Once a man had dabbled in necromancy – had he really said it was not intentional – it was only a matter of time till other dark workings came into his daily magic.  Or at least that was what Gabriel had been taught.

Finally the circle was closed, and within the circle, they turned and looked at each other.  Neither would willingly break the circle, because doing so would endanger those who set it.  Since they both had, it would be double jeopardy.  The circle would need to be opened before it could be broached.  For now, they were in this space, in some undefinable way between realities, which gave them the opportunity to perform magic that would be dangerous in any world.

“Right,” Marlon said.  “Now, if you please, we may start moving the lines.  We’ll start with that one there.”  He pointed at the wolf image.  “My oh so dear father.”  He squinted at the wolf statue.  “I think it should go here,” Stepping nimbly among the lines, he tapped his toe on the ground.

Gabriel acquiesced but, to his shock, it took his help for Marlon to move the statuette he’d casually carried around moments before.  As they both pulled at the statuette with all their might, Marlon saw the expression on Gabriel’s face and laughed.  “We’re dragging fate and magic with us.  Did you expect it to be light?”

Once they set the wolf down, Gabriel reached for the crown.  It was the next highest point of tension.

“The king, I presume,” he said.

Marlon nodded and reached for the crown himself.  But, before he could touch it, a flash of darkness came through the shuttered windows.  That was the only way that Gabriel would ever be able to describe it.  A flash of dark as strong as any flash of light, robbing the room of ambient light.  It was followed by a rumbling, as from a subterranean tremor.  With it came a smell, a feel.  Gabriel wouldn’t have named it before, but he knew it was elf magic.  He made a sound at the back of his throat and stepped backwards.

Marlon grabbed his wrist and pulled him in.  “Watch where you walk you fool.  Don’t step out of the circle.”

“But… it’s elves.  They’re outside,” Gabriel said.

“I know,” Marlon said, his voice annoyed and softer than it should be.  “I should have known they would find us where humans failed.  They have stopped my … They ripped the disguise form my home, and yes, they’re surrounding us from outside, and I suspect from underneath too.”  This said, as another tremor started.

“Do you think…” he said.  He felt his mouth very dry.  “What can they want with us?”

Marlon shook his head. “This working can only be done with the help of elf magic.  The working we’re undoing.  They won’t want it undone.  As for why – even I don’t understand elves.”

They reached for the crown again, and managed to move it to the right place, despite various rumblings.  Marlon then pointed out the perfect green marble sphere near the north cardinal point.  “Your honored brother next, and that will be hard, since he’s off world.”

“Will this move him back?” Gabriel asked.

“Not… immediately.  But it will hasten his coming back.  Or move things … to the place they would have been had he never gone away, is more accurate.  The futures will merge, instead of diverge to the world where he never went away.”

Seraphim’s marker was heavier than the others.  Maybe because he was in another world.  It took all of Gabriel’s and Marlon’s strength to lift it two inches above the ground.

They were both thus, bent to hold it, when the rumbling hit from beneath, stronger than ever.  The floor rocked, and lifted.

Gabriel realized he was going to fall across the line, and lifted his hand, letting it drop in one of the emergency circle breaks allowed.

It wasn’t in time, and it wasn’t careful enough.  On the one hand, the jolt of magic as he fell across it was not a killing blow, which it would otherwise have been.  On the other hand, as he fell backward and across it, he felt as though he were being sliced by a thousand knives and his vision went momentarily dark.

When it cleared, he and Marlon were both on the floor on their sides, holding the stone that represented Seraphim between them.  There was a trickle of blood from Marlon’s forehead, and his eyes looked wild.  “Are you … are you well,” Gabriel asked, since asking someone who is looking at you if he’s alive seemed quite outside sanity.

Marlon nodded.  “Not, well, to, but… They’re throwing magic at us.  They’re…  Oh, damn.”

The in-betweener hit like an icy wall running somehow through them.  It left them lying somewhere quite different and, as they strived to stand, Gabriel found they were kneeling in the middle of a field, and there was a strange horseless carriage burying down towards them.  No.  A horseless cultivator.  This could only be one world.  They had their hands on Seraphim’s marker and– “The madhouse.”

Marlon looked demented as he grinned, a grin with no joy at all.  “Where his grace is?  Splendid.  He gets to try his marksmanship again!”

Straying

Caroline hadn’t left the path.  She was sure of it.  She set her jaw in what a young man once had told her was a very daunting expression.  Not that it thought it was true, only the young man had strayed from a ball held at Darkwater and had found her in the garden area just outside the nursery.  Caroline supposed that this meant he had thought her an easy mark, since she was only fourteen and not yet come out.

Afterwards, Seraphim had told her the gentleman was a desperate fortune hunter, his pockets prodigiously to let, and had been trying to seduce a girl he thought was a naif, and also had a pretty fortune.  He’d been wrong on both counts, and Seraphim and Caroline had ended the night by laughing over cups of hot chocolate in the governess’s rooms, about the surprise the fine young dandy would have got, had he managed to seduce Caroline.

But of course Caroline was not a fool and knew better than to believe claims that she was the fairest woman this man of the world had ever seen, or that, in her plain muslin frock, with the ribbon trimming, she eclipsed the belles of London.  She might have been fourteen, but she’d never been stupid.  She’d set her jaw just like so, her teeth clenched against all his compliments, and she’d carefully set a don’t-touch spell between herself and the young man.  As it happened it had been the yelp he gave when reaching for her and meeting the painful barrier which felt rather like a bite, which had got Seraphim’s attention, and Seraphim had escorted him off the grounds, with stern words, before coming to speak to Caroline.

Caroline wondered if Seraphim had fought the man.  It seemed hardly worth it, as he had not in fact touched her, but he might have.  The code of honor of men was a closed book to the young woman.

She scratched her nose.  But the one thing that was absolutely sure was that Seraphim could not in fact fight a duel with all of fairyland for having led her astray.  Though doubtless he would try.  He could be very foolish that way.

Caroline felt like she wanted to cry, and instead set her teeth hard and rehearsed her wrongs.  She had not strayed from the path, nor left her mother.  They’d heard a cry – from a woman they thought – and they’d made it a point of going to help her.  This made perfect sense.  What made no sense whatsoever was for her to now find herself alone, her mother nowhere in sight.

“Mother?” she essayed.  And then “Your grace?” just in case other rules applied here that didn’t apply in the normal world.  And then again, in a high, hopeless voice, “Mother!”

But her mother didn’t answer, and Caroline set her jaw again and determined she would be brave.  After all, fairyland might very well be able to take her tears and do something horrible with them.  She couldn’t tell.  She’d once heard a conversation between Gabriel and Seraphim.  She’d been hiding – or at least not quite hiding, but in a place she couldn’t be seen – in the library.  She’d wiled a snowy afternoon away there, in a window seat half-hidden in the shadow of the fireplace.  Wrapped in a woolen shawl, she’d read all afternoon, and then woken to find that Seraphim and Gabriel were there and talking, and that neither of them had any idea she could hear them.

She supposed she should have said something; given the alarm in some way.  But the truth was that listening to the two men talk, when they thought she wasn’t about, had been like opening a window into a vista that she’d never been allowed to gaze upon.

She supposed she’d always known that Gabriel was their brother.  At least she couldn’t remember not knowing.  He was the son of their father, and a fairy lady.  The same scary fairy lady who’d come around when Caroline was very small.

But she’d never seen Seraphim and Gabriel behave as brothers, as they did that afternoon.  There was nothing much to it.  Or at least, most of their conversation went above her head.  But it was clear that Gabriel was teasing Seraphim by making comments about Seraphim’s magic that she supposed would be a terrible insult in anyone else.  And Seraphim laughed at them and, in return, called Gabriel “Penny”, a nickname that Gabriel said was utterly revolting.  In the middle of the conversation she remembered, most of which might have been more understandable if it had been spoken in Chinese, she’d heard a sentence clearly uttered and ever afterwards remembered, “Fairyland feeds on emotion.”

If that was true, she would do her best to control hers.  Let them starve.  She assumed by some magic, they’d taken her from one path and onto the other, and left her mother upon the other.  She hoped her mother would be well, then smiled at the thought that she was worrying about someone who had far more magical experience and power than she did.  Yes, she’d been helpless before her magical doppelganger, but that didn’t mean that the Duchess didn’t very well know how to take care of herself.

She continued following the path – difficult as a rosy fog grew with every step.  She had to feel about with her foot, until she found the edge of the path.  At one point, for just a moment, the path cleared, and what she saw through the fog made her more determined than ever not to stray.  Because what she saw through the fog was nothing.  Not darkness, not a chasm, but nothing – a howling emptiness such as must have existed before creation.

And then the path veered and widened, and suddenly she was before the person crying.  Person was a matter of speaking, in this case.

Caroline took a step back, hastily, barely managing to stay on the path, and gulped hard.

She was in what would otherwise be a charming clearing – a broad opening in between low trees that looked rather like a gardener had just got down trimming them.  It was carpeted in soft, even grass.  On the grass lay…  She blinked.

A dragon.  It was enormous, and reddish-orange.  Now more red, now more orange, the colors chased each other across its sparkling scales, giving it the look of a lake ruffled by the wind.  Its huge paws were stretched in front of it, to accomodate a massive head.  It was crying.  From its fanged mouth came distinctly feminine sobs.

Caroline didn’t even know that dragons could cry, much less that they could shed tears, and now, having found out, she was torn between empathy and fear.

After al, what would make a creature this size cry?  And if he was one of the tree she was supposed to help on her path, what could she do to help this outsized grief.

She stepped back and must have made a sound, because the dragon looked up, and its tiny, stubby wings fluttered upon its back.  “Oh,” it said, in a distinctly feminine and lady like voice.  “I did not mean to…  I beg your pardon.  I must have alarmed you.”

Which was when Caroline realized that its wings were not short and stubby.  Well, not naturally.  Instead, they had been cut across, crudely, with some sharp instrument.  The ragged edges still bled.

“Oh,” she said.  “Does it hurt?” The dragon had the most disconcerting violet-blue eyes, fringed by dark lashes which looked at Caroline in absolute incomprehension.  “Your wings?

The dragon sniffed.  “I beg your pardon,” it said again.  “I’ve forgotten myself.”  And then, like that, it set up and… shifted.  It was the only way that Caroline could put it.

In front of Caroline and completely naked, and seemingly not caring, was a very pretty young woman, her hair the color of the dragon scales, and rippling with color in the same way.  She sat herself in the sort of pose one expected of mermaids waiting for wayward sailors, and smiled through her tears at Caroline.  “I’d like to put a frock on, only I don’t have one here, and I’m afraid I can’t leave here.”

“Why can’t you leave?”

“Because of my wings,” the woman said, and her voice went all watery again.

“Who cut your wings?  And why?”

“For trying to leave fairyland,” she said.  “The king said I should never do so.”

“But I thought elves could leave and… and possibly elf dragons too,” Caroline said, confused.  Because the truth was that she’d never heard of shifter dragons in fairyland.  Most shifters were completely human, even when their forms were mythological.  But she’d heard that there was such a thing as fairy horses, so perhaps there were fairy dragons, too.  She refused to speculate further.

“Oh, yes, but you see, I… I went out and I became pregnant, and the kind punished me by saying I couldn’t leave fairyland.  And when I tried to leave anyway, he cut my wings and confined me to this clearing.”

Caroline gulped.  “Why would you try to leave, against the king’s will?”

“To find my baby.”  The woman’s arms made a cradling motion.  He was thrown out as a newborn, and I thought I could find him, if …  I thought I might find him before he died, abandoned, on the street.  But now it’s been two weeks and–” she gulped.  “If he’s not been found, he’s dead.”  She sighed and the tears started again.  “I just realized it and I…”

“Don’t cry.  Very few children are left to die on the street.” Though homes for magical orphans were often not much better.  “Don’t cry.  Tell me, instead, what help can I give you.”

The woman controlled her tears with an effort.  “I see.  You’re walking the path, then?”

Caroline nodded.

The woman bit her lip.  “You can give me my wings back and then, before the king finds that they have grown, I can go out and find my baby and raise him.  I don’t care what I have to do.  I don’t want him raised by strangers.”

And that at least was something Caroline could understand and approve of.  “I can’t take a look at your wings – or at your back, I suppose, in this form, without leaving the path.  If you approach and turn around.”

The dragon lady did so, facing away from Caroline.  On her back there were two cruel gashes, just starting to scab over.  And Caroline had a problem.  She had used healing spells before.  And she could make these wounds close and stop paining the woman.  What she couldn’t do – had no idea how to do – was make the lost parts of skin which she supposed became the dragon wings, grow back.

She started explaining her predicment to the woman, but the dragon-lady interrupted, “Oh, please.  You have to be able to.  There must be something you can do, or the paths wouldn’t have brought you to me.”

Caroline considered the possibility the paths had been wrong, but in her experience magic rarely went wrong that way.  Instead, she thought, best think of what she could do that would serve.

A glimmer formed in her mind, something that she’d once watched Gabriel do to a still-live bird the cat had brought in.  Gabriel had told her, then, that such a spell was dangerous, more so for full-humans and that if he ever caught her doing it, he would give her the hiding of her life, even if the dowager Duchess killed him for it.

Caroline set her jaw and ground her teeth.  Well, then, Gabriel wasn’t here, and neither was her mother.  She would do what she had to do to get Michael out of captivity in fairyland.

Symbol and Sign

She cut cards like a card sharp, and it caused him to raise an eyebrow at her, before he knew what he was doing.  Heaven knew she’d not be the first member of her family to have a wicked addiction to the gaming tables, but the disaster that had been her great great grandfather’s reign didn’t need a reprise.

But she looked up as she brought the deck back together and grinned at his expression.  “You need not look so dismayed, your grace.  I was not weaned on betting or card games.  Please remember Earth is different.  Mostly I learned to play Go Fish with my grandmother’s friends when they visited.  And one of her friends taught me to cut cards.”

“Go … Fish?” Seraphim asked, wondering if she was trying to insult him in a subtle way.  But no, it didn’t have that tone.

“Oh.  Yes.  I imagine in Avalon even quite young children of good houses play Faro and loo in the nursery.”

“Not silver loo,” he said, in the hopes of making her laugh, and it worked.  Her silvery laugh rang out, though she looked as though not quite sure he was joking.

“Well, in my world,” she said, softly and seemingly unconscious of knowing this was not quite her world.  “Children don’t play for money.  I think Go Fish is primarily designed to help you learn the suits.”  She disciplined her features, amusement banishing.  “Now, if you excuse me, even my poor methods require me to concentrate before I scry.”

She took a deep breath and steepled her hands over the playing cards. Elegant hands with long slim fingers, and Seraphim saw them bedecked in rings, and for a moment, wondered if he was having a premonition.  Then he realized her hands resembled those of the Queen, which he usually kissed, when he visited.  The Queen, of course, usually wore rings.

Something like a non-physical pain seized his middle making his breathing difficult.  After Nell went back to Avalon, after she was returned to her family, all he’d see of her were those evenings when his family got invited in to discuss important magic policy points.  She’d give him her hand to kiss…

He realized his eyes wanted to fill with water, and he refused to allow it.  Stupidity.  Of course she was the princess of Avalon and of course she had to go back.  He might have used her parents’ grief to get her to understand this, but her parents’ grief was true nonetheless.  And also, the kingdom needed her.  Without her…  He refused to think about it.

The king had refused to name a successor because, of course, naming a successor was the same as admitting his only, beloved daughter was either dead, or gone so far from this world that she might as well be dead, for all she’d never come back.

And neither the king, nor his father, nor yet his father’s father had had any siblings.  Four generations back, there was a numerous family of seven girls and two boys.  All the girls and the younger boy had been married to royal houses in Europe.  If the king died without descendants – or with no descendant able to come back and claim the throne – the isles would fall pray to the dynastic ambitions of a dozen ducal families in the kingdom itself, who would claim their distant relationship to the king – on the level of Seraphim’s own, at least five generations back and more – was preferable to turning the kingdom over to strangers.  At the same time, the territorial ambitions of Europe would be unleashed too, and he doubted that there would be a kingdom small enough not to send at least a second son to stake a claim.  Even the Portuguese royal family were cousins, he thought.  And the Low Countries too.

Behind his eyes, which closed in an attempt to block out his thoughts, images of armies descending on his beloved homeland and laying it to waste while killing its peasants and raping its magic passed like a blood-soaked painting succeding another.

He was called back from these troubling visions, by a slap of a card on the table.  “This,” Nell’s voice said, slowly.  “Is the questioner, who I think for this purpose must be you, as you’re the only other person present, and one involved in this matter.”  She lay down the king of Clubs and Seraphim grinned at it, because he suspected half of Avalon would expect him to be the king of hearts in any reading.  But clubs was more like it.  His was wealth acquired by work – or at least it would be, if he had his way.  Right now the wealth was largely imaginary.  Even his exalted position – before this adventure – was something precarious that only work could secure to him.

“And this,” Nell said.  “Is myself – since I’m also involved in this matter.”  She lay the queen of Hearts over the top of the King of Clubs, crosswise.   That not-quite physical pain troubled Seraphim once more.  The Queen of Hearts.  A woman who represented home.  As Nell must, being the rightful princess of Avalon.  A woman who represented love– His brain skittered away from that thought.

Over the last few days, he’d been closer to Nell Felix than he’d ever expected to be to a woman not related to or married to him.  She’d helped him with details of every day life and shown him the mysteries of zippers, among many others, which had required a level of closeness he’d not expected to have with a decent woman not betrothed to him.

Truth be told, before his discovery of her origins, he’d thought that he would have to do the decent thing and marry her.  Where this would leave him with Honoria, was not something he wanted to contemplate.  It was quite possible that Honoria had severed her relationship to him in his absence, particularly since he was fairly sure he was now considered a fugitive to justice.  If not, then he must perforce jilt her when he returned, and marry Nell.

He was fully aware that in either case this would cause a rift between the two houses, possibly for generations.  Though he supposed, Michael being sixteen, he could be offered as a husband to Honoria, a sacrificial lamb in Seraphim’s place.  Michael, being who he was, and married already to his inventions, was likely not to notice a forcible marriage, anyway.  He’d drift gently through the ceremony, then disappear into his workshop to sketch a magic powered ring-bearer.

The image made him smile, and then he remembered both that Michael was a captive in fairyland, and might well be dead now, and that he could not possibly marry Nell.  She was the princess of Avalon.  The ROYAL princess of Avalon.  What talk had there been of her marriage, over the years, should she return?  Something about Francis of France.  Seraphim shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He hoped not.  The rumors about Francis were almost as ugly as those about the fellow that Penny had taken up with at Cambridge.  They were definitely as … odd.  Such a marriage, royal or not, was not likely to result in the harmonious union that the current monarchs enjoyed.  It would also probably not result in children.  Unless– He put an end to the thought, quickly, before it could fully form.  He was not his father.

Nell was out of his reach by position and birth.  And anything of an underhanded nature, anything disrupted of the vows of marriage – undertaken for love or by duty – would be beneath his honor.  He sighed audibly, and realized that Nell had lay a row of cards above them.

He stared down at the ace of diamonds; the three of diamonds; and eight of clubs; a ten of clubs; an ace of clubs.  He looked up at Nell and waited for her interpretation, knowing there were as many interpretations as readers, and it was important to know what the one scrying thought it all meant.

“These are the roots of the trouble,” she said, her eyes troubled.  The long, elegant index touched cards.  The three of diamonds, “Legal trouble, or trouble with the law.  I think this is a given, for you and me, both.”  The eight of clubs, “This trouble would seem to result from jealousy and greed – though I don’t know whose.”  The ten of clubs.  “Travel to distant lands.”  Her lips quirked.  Then her finger pushed at the ace of diamonds, bringing it out of the row.  “This one is troubling, because I have no idea what it means – I get a strong feeling it refers to a piece of jewelry.”

“Perhaps it is your pendant,” Seraphim said.

She inclined her head, though apparently not convinced.  “And the ace of clubs.  This represents happiness and wealth,” she said.  “And I fail to see how that can be at the root of our problems.”

This time Seraphim inclined his head, acknowledging his own confusion.

“These,” she said, rapidly slapping cards down.  “Are the people and things who can help us.”

The Jack of clubs, the Jack of hearts, the Queen of clubs, the Queen of spades, and a five of spades.  Nell frowned at this array at the feet of the two original cards, then, rapidly, reached into the deck an covered the Jack of clubs with a cross wise Jack of Spades, and then over the two, slanted, set the four of clubs and the six of diamonds.  Then she seemed to regard this mess, and the whole row with a look of utter bewilderment.  “Uh,” she said, and scratched her nose, in an endearingly young-looking gesture.  “That, I think, your Grace, must stand for your family, but…  Is your mother perhaps contemplating a second marriage?”

“What?” the exclamation was wrenched from him, uncouth bluntness and all.

Nell sighed. “Well,” she said.  “I’d assumed this,” she set her finger on the Queen of Spades.  “Was your mother.  It usually stands for a widowed lady.  And this,” her finger on the Queen of clubs, “I assumed was your sister Caroline, who seems self-willed and intelligent.”

“She is that.”

“And this,” the Jack of hearts, “Would stand for your brother…”  She paused, seeming bewildered.  “Either of your brothers, to be sure.  Since it often stands for a male relative.”

“To be sure,” Seraphim agreed.

“But this,” she pointed to the small pile.  “Is clearly someone about to embark on a second marriage which is fraught with perils and complications.  And, as you know, the Jack, can stand for either male or female.  Usually for young, but not always.”

Seraphim felt a sick lurch in his stomach.  His mother had been widowed long enough and surely she was allowed to marry again.  But what if she chose unwisely?  He would go a long way to keep her from hurt.  She had told him nothing of another relationship.  What would she keep from him?

But Nell’s hands were rapidly slapping down another row of cards: the two of spades, the Nine of Spades, ten of spades, the three of spades and the four of clubs.  Her finger pointed as she said, “Gossip and intrigue; bad luck in all things, destruction and deaths; imprisonment and unwelcome news; unfaithfulness and broken partnership; changes for the worse, lies and betrayal.  That seems to be at the root of our troubles.”

“Intrigue me,” he said.  “I’d have thought that we had been plunged into this by loving kindness and a wish to help us.”

“Don’t be scathing,” she said.  “It is clearly trying to tell us there is a vast conspiracy underlying this all.”

“That too we could have gathered.”

“Undoubtedly.”  The finger poked at the ten of spades.  “This one worries me.  Whose imprisonment?”

“Michael’s maybe,” Seraphim said.  “Or yours being sent to this world.”

“Very possible, and in fact part of it, I sense,” she said.  “But I also sense that’s not complete.  There is more in this.”

“The conspiracy.”

“No, I mean, there are other people imprisoned.”

Seraphim’s stomach lurched again.  “I’ve had dreams,” he said.  “It is very possible that even now Gabriel is in jail.”  He tried not to think of what the law thought of half-elves and how harshly it dealt with those unpredictable creatures.  “It is my ambition to bring him out safely before they can do one of the curious things they love doing to half elves, like stripping him of his magic.”

Nell almost let the pack of cards fall.  “Strip him of– Is that even possible?”

“Very possible.  If you don’t mind destroying the mind with it.”  To her credit, she looked as sick at this as he felt.  “That,” she said.  “Must not be allowed.”

She slapped a row of cards down.  “These are the people arrayed against us,”   The three of clubs, covered by the nine of hearts; the seven of hearts; the nine of clubs; the king of spades.  After a while, and hesitating, she covered the king of spades with the eight of hearts.  “Someone who is making a marriage or attempting to make a marriage to gain advantage from his partner.”  Honoria.  Seraphim’s stomach lurched.  “But it’s covered by the dream card.  This marriage is a key to all this person’s hopes and dreams.”  Honoria.  He really was an abominable cad, Seraphim thought.  Well, he would marry her, then.  It wasn’t as though he could marry Nell.  “And unfaithful, unreliable person who breaks his promises.”  Seraphim’s mind lurched to that damned necromancer that Gabriel had got enmeshed with.  Seraphim should have killed him.  But at the last minute, the man’s gallant deloping at their duel – firing into the air, which admitted his guilt in the matter – had touched Seraphim’s compassion.  At least the cad and the filthy necromancer knew he was a cad and a filthy necromancer.  Seraphim’s hand had deviated a few inches and not got him through the heart.  A mistake that.  He’d make sure the hunt to find him resumed.  Yes, as a half elf, he was likely to be put to death for Necromancy.  But then better that than endangering Penny.  “A new lover or admirer to whom you should not be resistant.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“I don’t know,” she said.  “It’s among the people or things that might either attack us or array to make our life difficult.  How would I know.  It’s probably your mistress or something.”

“I don’t have a mistress.”

“No?  Gossip would have you any half a dozen of them.”

“Indeed.  Carefully laid gossip, m’dear.  The truth is I can’t afford a single mistress, much less six.”

“Very well then,” she said, and pursed her lips, in clear disapproval of his morals, which made his having a mistress or not a question of money, not of heart.  “It might be a relationship for someone else.  I daresay it will become clear.”

“I daresay, like most scrying, probably much too late.”

“Indeed,” she agreed.  “And these.”  She tapped on the juxtaposed cards.  “These are – or is, perhaps – an ambitious, authoritative man and a” she frowned.  “An intruder.  Someone from elsewhere.”

“Covering the ambitious man?”

“Yes, not merely involved with him, which would be crosswise, but covering.”

“Oh,” Seraphim said.  He shook his head.  “Someone from…  An elf?  A changeling?”

She started.  “Yes.  Yes.  Definitely that.”

Seraphim sighed.  “Not a surprise.  They are involved in this to their black hearts, I’d say.  It worries me, because Gabrie–”

At that moment, they both felt it: like a tearing midair that indicated someone had opened a portal nearby.  Nell dropped the cards and ran out the kitchen door, Seraphim following more slowly, out the door, past the small patio, through the gate in the fence, to a field they’d watched the mechanical plows – Nell called them tractors – dig up the day before.

In the middle of the field were two men, one of them standing and swaying on his feet.  “Mr. Penn,” Nell said.  “But who is it with him?”

Seraphim stared, “The damned necromancer,” he said.  “But why is he digging in the dirt with his bare hands?”

The Threads of Time

Caroline knew this was a dangerous spell, but she’d seen Gabriel do something like it.  Not to this level, she thought, as she stared at the wounds on the dragon-woman’s back.  She needed to reach for a time when the woman’s back had been whole, and superimpose it on her mutilated back.

Of course, doing that in fairyland might be more difficult than doing it in the human world.  Or at least more dangerous.  But Caroline had realized long ago that you didn’t have a choice between something you really liked, and something you dreaded.  Or not usually.  You had a choice between two things that were both unpleasant, and you tried to choose between them for the least unpleasant one.

In this case, she could choose to ignore the woman’s need and keep herself safe.  But then it was unlikely she would be allowed to walk the rest of the paths of fairyland till she found Michael.  And even if she were, she wouldn’t have the allies she was supposed to acquire through her journey.  She knew the rules of fairyland.  Everyone did.  They were built in to the earliest stories told to the smallest children.  In fairyland, you had to help three people in desperate straights, and then – after you did that – you’d get where you wanted to go.  Distance in fairyland wasn’t straightforward, or measured in meters.  It was measured in feelings and the heart, and three good deeds were the sacrifice needed to get where she was going.

To rescue her brother Michael.

She pulled back a strand of her thick, curly black hair.  It felt clammy.  All of her felt clammy, as if the clearing had suddenly got very hot.  The dragon woman turned back to look at Caroline over her shoulder.  Her eyes were the oddest Caroline had ever seen, a golden-orange, as though it had flecks of fire burning in its depths.

“I’m going to do something…” she said, and looked into the woman’s eyes, and swallowed.  “I’m going to use magic that might feel odd to you.  Please, bear in mind, I do it only from the best intentions.  It is the only way to heal you.”

The large, fiery eyes blinked.  “Do it, then,” she said, intently.  “Do it and be done with it.  I cannot bear to be captive here while my baby might need me.  Do what you have to do, no matter the risk.  You were sent to me by the paths, they must know you can heal me.”

Caroline wished she could be anywhere near that certain.  She put her hands up and recited the incantory protections for when one worked with time.  For all the good it would do her, here, in the heart of a place built entirely of magic, and while using the magic on a sentient being.

She was going to die of this.  No.  She banished the thought, forcefully, and lifted her hands, to let the magic flow through her palms, onto its destination.

Then she did what she dimly remembered watching Gabriel do.  She remembered seeing it – and she might have – though it would have required her to link to his mind and look through his mind’s eyes.  Perhaps she had.  She had been very young and very unguarded, and Gabriel, too, hadn’t guarded against her.

Because of that, she could remember the mental vision of time as a tapestry.  She’d once seen a tapestry weaving machine.  Michael had wanted to see one of the new manufactories, operated almost exclusively by magic, where men did no more than feed thread to the machines, and clip the finished product, or clean around the working, moving parts of the machine.

She and Michael had escaped through the window of their nursery while their nanny was asleep and walked down to the village, where one of the manufactories was.  It had taken them the best part of the day, and when they’d been found – through a spell cast – Seraphim had collected them in the carriage.  She remembered being afraid he was finally going to give them the spanking that he and Gabriel so often threatened Caroline and Michael with.  In retrospect, though, she thought what he had done: sitting white faced and tight lipped next to her in the carriage for the full hour drive back home, had been far worse.  As had the fact that neither Seraphim nor Gabriel smiled at or talked to Caroline or Michael for a good two months.

The manufactory itself she hadn’t thought about till now.  Michael had been fascinated by the gleaming, moving parts, the thread moving into place, all without the touch of human hands.  Caroline had looked at the people cleaning accumulated lint from the machines, or feeding them the colored thread.  They were children, little older – or perhaps younger – than herself.  It was the first time she’d been aware of her good fortune and her station in life.

Now, though, as she reached for the threads of time, she saw it exactly as that machine in that long ago manufactory.  There were threads – the life of each person, the path of each object everywhere – being fed into time, and what emerged was the completed tapestry.  Reaching out, she touched the mind-seen strands mid-air.  There were Caroline and Michael going to see the manufactory.  There was Gabriel, coming in in the middle of Seraphim’s birthday party, in that outlandish outfit, all rags, with the livid marks of whip marks across his face and the exposed parts of his skin.

Caroline blinked at this.  She’d been born after Gabriel had joined the house, and she was quite sure that, though she’d heard him described as filthy and covered in rags, she’d never heard of whip marks.  Whip marks why?  Who’d dare whip the child of the Duke of Darkwater – even if a bastard son?  She blinked, and shelved the thought for another day.  For a moment that thread, and the one next to it – Gabriel and… she blinked again – Seraphim’s? gleamed with the bright blue of strong magic.  It was tempting to see what was happening to them.  But she could not.  Not in the middle of this working.

Instead, she concentrated on the thread of the dragon lady – a thread of pure fire woven through the tapestry.  It was tangled and twisted, and ran along side two other threads, both of which seemed to merge with those of the Darkwater family.  If Caroline had time–

Enough of this foolishness.  She didn’t have time.  Instead, she ran her fingers along the length of the thread displayed by magic in front of her eyes, but in fact existing in dimensions humans couldn’t see.

There.  There was the last time this … person had been whole.  Now…

Carefully, Caroline took the time thread betweent wo fingers.  She couldn’t cut it and retie it, as Gabriel had done to the bird’s thread.  The bird had just been injured, and, presumably, its thread had touched no one’s fate but that of the cat who had dragged it.  This woman’s fate was enmeshed with various others – men, women, and possibly elves.  If Caroline cut the thread and tied it again, she would do damage to all those fates, and all of those people’s magic and – by extension – her own.  The recoil itself would kill it.

The recoil of this…  She tried not to think about it.  No point in it.  Instead, she took the thread and carefully, deftly, looped it around her fingers.

Touching that much power, that much strength, gave her an almost physical shock.  And as she grasped it to tie it together at the base of the loop, bringing the woman’s whole body in close proximity to this moment, she felt as though her fingers burned with it.  Her every instinct told her to let go, to let the thread fall into its natural position, to leave it alone.

The instincts were wrong.  She must – she must – rescue Michael.  She bit her lip against the pain and the burn that was forming welts in her small fingers, and forcefully tied the knot.

“Oh!” the woman said, and it sounded like some of Caroline’s pain had rebounded on her.  Her face flashed white and drawn, then for a moment it seemed about to change into a dragon’s.  But Caroline did not let go of it the thread.  She was not done.

Holding the thread and the woman’s life and existence through time, in her hands, she closed her eyes and forced those missing parts of her body – the clipped wings – forward through time and in existence in the presence.

She would never be able to explain it, but it felt as though the wings, on their way to the present, passed through Caroline’s own body, and her magic.  Her body they could not have passed through.  Not really.  But her magic, they might have, and it felt as though every sharp bit, every rough surface shredded her magic on the way through, leaving it bleeding and torn, like skin raked by claws and teeth.

Nausea hit afterwards, a nausea so strong that Caroline felt she could neither keep her eyes open, nor focus, nor even stand.  The threads fell from her suddenly lax fingers, and snapped into the tapestry, the loop still in place.  Her fingers hit the grass of the clearing.  She was aware of the threads vanishing from her magic sight, but she couldn’t think, couldn’t concentrate.  She clutched her middle.  She closed her eyes.  Nausea ebbed and flowed in her like a tide, and she groaned with the feeling that her body was made of nausea, a sharp point of discomfort and uncertainty, dissolving and twisting through the currents of time.

I shall dissolve completely and be gone, she thought, and whimpered with fear, thinking Gabriel had been right.  Of course he had.  And it wouldn’t be needed for him to punish her.  She was going to die of this.

“Thank you,” the woman’s voice said somewhere, outside her misery.  “If you need me, at any time and anywhere, call out to the dragon of the fire lake.  I am in your debt.”  And then there was the sound of wings and a feeling of unbearable heat.

Caroline opened her eyes, to find herself enveloped in flames.  Looking up, she saw the dragon, flying just above her, and blowing flames from its – her? – nostrils, which surrounded Caroline completely.

No.  I saved you, she thought.  You’re not supposed to kill me.

But the fire wasn’t killing her.  Hot, yes, but not lethal, it twined around her, an ocean of living flames.  It seemed to move through her, searing.  It was as though every weak place in her magic, every slow place, were burned away, leaving only the best, clear and glimmering in the firelight.

And then it was gone.  There was the impression of words in her mind “A gift of gratitude” and then the dragon was gone, flying away and through, to another time and another place.

Caroline didn’t know what the gift had been, and now she couldn’t asked.  She stood up.  The nausea was gone, but she felt as though she’d run for miles and miles.  Her breath came in short pants, her body was sweaty, the clothes sticking to her.  And her eyes seemed to prickle with sweat that had run into them.  And she was thirsty.  But you can’t eat or drink in fairyland.

On shaky legs, she made to take a step towards where she hoped the path was.

She heard the sound of hooves from behind and before she could turn to look, a male arm twined around her middle, and a voice said, “We have need of you.”

At first she thought it was a rider, and that he was bare from the waist up.  Then she realized it was a centaur who had got hold of her and was carrying her, held only by his strong arm, while his hooves galloped madly into a shifting landscape of fog.

Old Tales

“I came to rescue Michael,” the Duchess said.  “Nothing else could have enticed me to come back here, to come back into this place that…”

“No,” the ghost of Arden Ainsling, late Duke of Darkwater said.  Or at least it wasn’t his ghost.  Not exactly.  She’d found he had physical existence of a sort.  She could touch him and feel his hand, not quite as substantial as it should be, and softer and less warm than it should be, but there, nonetheless.

Somehow they’d ended holding each other’s hands as they walked along the foggy landscape.  “Was it like this, Barbara,” he asked.  “When you were a captive before?”

“I don’t know,” she said.  “Or at least I don’t think I know.  Not clearly.  It was like a bad dream, and I was very young.  I remember things happening that made no sense to me.  I remember…” She was quiet a moment.  “I remember not liking it.  For years, after my return, I dreamed of being lost in fairyland, never finding my way back.  And I’d wake up screaming.”

“Yes,” Arden said, and there was more in that syllable than he could pronounce.  She looked at him, and his eyes looked very intensely green and were shadowed, as though he’d spent several nights without sleeping.

It was a look she knew well for him.  In the past, she’d thought that it meant that he’d spent nights away climbing balconies, or whatever it was he did to get to his ladies of easy virtue.  But surely that wouldn’t apply in fairyland and besides, she thought, he couldn’t – he couldn’t possibly – have just spent his nights climbing balconies.  Not if his suicide had been staged by fairyland.  Not if Seraphim’s taking up of Arden’s work had thrown the entire house into turmoil and ruin.

She squeezed his not-quite-there hand and said, “What was your work?  You say that Seraphim has got your papers, and you say it as though it were a dangerous thing.  What does that mean?  I’d always thought that when you went out for days on end you were philandering, and when you came in wounded it meant that you’d fought a duel or… or that someone had accused you of cheating at cards.  But I’m starting to perceive that couldn’t be it.  So I’m going to ask you, Arden, what does it all mean?  What was your work?  If you had a work, beyond the pursuit of pleasure.”

He sighed, and it seemed to her strange that someone not qutie there could sigh.  It seemed to her he exhaled not just air but particles of light which danced around him for a moment.  “Fairyland is never a safe place,” he said.  “But I’ve learned some things, and while you are with me, it is safe to talk of this.  So I’ll tell you.  I was a witchfinder– ”

She frowned at him.  “A witch–?”  Memories of childhood rose in her, from studying the dark ages, when all magic had been forbidden and men who could detect witches moved around, identifying them that they could be killed.  She remembered her nursery, a small snug room up in the attics of the Hartwitt residence.  She remembered the fire, and the little table before the fire, and her pencils and paper and Miss Heron, the nanny, telling her all about witchfinders outwitted, and witches escaping to learn more about magic and eventually codify the rules of scientific magic that prevailed in the world today.

She remembered stories about how witchfinders still existed in other worlds, condemning young people with magic, and shifters as they came into their powers, to ignominous deaths.  She looked at Arden, sidelong.

Arden laughed.  She had forgotten that laughter.  Seraphim and Gabriel might have inherited echoes of his looks, but neither laughed like him.  When Arden laughed, no matter how bleak the situation, it was as though the sun had come through the clouds, warming her through.  Sometimes she thought it was his laughter – and the way he made her laugh, as well – that had made her fal in love with Arden Ainsling. “Oh, Barbara, what a goose you can be.  No, of course I was never a witchfinder in the old style, destroying magic users.  You could say I was the reverse of that, an honorable mission willed to me by my grandfather.  You see, in our family for as long as there’s memory – certainly as long as magic has been legal in Avalon, there’s been a particular pocket watch–”

“The one you left Seraphim.”

“The very same.  That pocket watch will chime in a particular way when some witch in another world needs rescuing.  And we … rescue them.”

She started so violently that she stopped on the path.  “But Arden, traveling to other worlds!  And interfering in them!”

“Has only been forbidden for the last fifty years, Barbara.  Our mission went on long before that.  When I inherited I had the choice of continuing with it, or letting it drop.”  His hand squeezed hers back.  “I couldn’t sleep at night thinking of people getting killed.  That they were in other worlds made no difference.  I had to save them if I could.”

“Oh,” she said.  “So… you’ve… brought magic users to our world?”

“Most of them children, yes.”

“While I understand… I mean, the king’s edict is to stop our much stronger magic from interfering with–” Arden’s chuckle stopped her.  “It… is not?” she asked.

“Well, it might be, or it might have been.  But the thing I’ve found, Barbara, is that not everyone from our world stopped interfering in other worlds’ magic.  It might occur to you to wonder how the house of Blaine, for instance–”

“Blaine?  Blaine’s Blessings?”

“Of course.  Has it ever occurred to you to wonder how they prospered so magnificently while we didn’t, even though we were always more inventive and better at the magic part?”

“I… no!”

“Well, my dear, what I found is that old Gerard Blaine and a conspiracy of like minds had their fingers deep into worlds where magic doesn’t even exist.  That was when– That was when I had to be out of the way.”

“But you… they said it was suicide.  And you say you’re not dead.”

“No.  I was brought to fairyland and something was done to simulate suicide in the eyes of the world.”

“Can you… can you be saved?”

A curt laugh.  “There might be an outside chance, my dear.  Remember the story of Tam Lin.  It would be easier, though, if I had the watch.”

“Seraphim has the watch,” she said.  “He never lets go of it.”

“Oh, then.  They’ll find a way to bring Seraphim to fairyland…”

For My Lady Fair

The Duke took off running towards the field, and there was very little that Nell could do but follow him.  She had, of course, understood that Gabriel Pen had just ported in from whatever trouble the cards might have indicated – and she could not even imagine what represented him – and that he had someone else with him.  A necromancer.

The idea made her flesh crawl – an expression she’d heard before but never actually experienced.  Only now she had something to associate with necromancy: Antoine’s dead corpse walking.  She remembered the blank look in his eyes, the feel that whatever and whoever Antoine had been was no longer there.  Now, there was just a thing: an empty shell.

That in itself had always made her feel odd, the few times she had witnessed death – mostly of animals – but the idea that the dead meat should walk, move as if of its own volition was obscene.

Even now, the memory made her feel like her throat closed in disgust, and her flesh tried to crawl away beneath her skin.  She took deep breaths of the cool morning air, scented with the familiar smells of the farm, and ran as fast as she could.  If there were a necromancer come to the farm, she must defend the farm – and grandma – from him.  More important, if there were a necromancer come to the farm was it the one who had been responsible for re-animating Antoine?

If so, she would have something to say to him.  She was beginning to think, in light of what her true origins were likely to be, that she’d fallen in a neatly set trap, and that Antoine was part of it, but one way or another, and whatever he might have been, he didn’t deserve what had been done to him.  No one did.

She arrived in the field behind Seraphim.  Impossible not to.  His legs were much longer than hers and besides, she’d been accustomed for her time in Avalon, to be restricted in her ability to run anywhere.

When she approached the group, Seraphim Ainsling was yelling something.  The shock when she understood his words, and also what he was doing, was almost too great to permit her to react rationally.

Seraphim Ainsling, the proper Duke of Darkwater, of whom much was said, but not that he had fishmonger or carter ancestry, was screaming at the top of his lungs at the two men – one of whom was not only completely oblivious to him, but seemed to be attempting to dig to China with his bare hands, and burrow face-first into the hole.

Worse, the one standing was the Duke’s valet, and, Nell presumed, the Duke’s brother and – from what she’d seen of them – one of his closest friends, but the Duke was holding him roughly by the arm and shaking him.

What came at her, shouted at the top of the Duke’s voice, was almost impossible to understand so loud and rapid it was, “– I should wash my hands of you.  Are you out of your senses to be approaching this creature and to fall into his clutches once more?”

“Now, Duke,” Gabriel Penn said, very mildly, but in a tone of worried distraction.  He made as though to take a step sideways to pull his companion out of the dirt, or perhaps to succor him, but Seraphim held him fast.

“No, don’t you go trying to cajole me.  You know what coils this creature embroiled you into and you know he can only bring you dishonor and grief.   Even if he captured you, by dishonorable means, you should know–”

Gabriel Penn’s eyes flashed with a look not unlike Seraphim’s own when animated with near-uncontrollable fury, and for a moment he showed his teeth, pressed close together.  Nell thought he was about to slug the Duke, and for just a second, without thinking, moved to step between them.  Then she checked.  Even on Earth, stepping between two men about to engage in a slugging match was perfectly stupid.  But, stepping between two men from Avalon about to engage in a slugging match might be crazier.  Not only would they slug it out around or over her, but they would also hold each other responsible for causing her to step in.  Their rules of chivalry were complicated, but that one was obvious.

As she checked, Gabriel reached out and got hold of both of the duke’s arms above the elbow, “Your Grace, you bonehead, listen to me: Marlon Elfborn did not capture me.  I went to him to ask for help when I had nowhere else to go.”

“Well,” Seraphim said, struggling to pull his arms away from his brother’s gripping fingers.  “that only proves you’re not competent to run your own affairs.  Further more–”

“Yes, I know, further more he interrupted my education, raised the dead and deflowered the family goat.  Give over Seraphim, you fool, do.  Stop your vendetta and listen to me.”

“He deflowered what?” Seraphim said, stopping mid shout and frowning.

A dark red blush climbed Gabriel’s cheeks.  His eyes darted at Nell, and he actually attempted to bow, which went to show that the training of Avalon men was quite past rationality or sanity even.  “I beg your pardon Miss Felix, I–”

“Not Miss Felix,” Seraphim bellowed.  “Not Miss Felix.  She is the princess royale.”

“Oh, dear,” Gabriel said, and his face looked as though someone had lit a candle inside his skull, and he looked like he would presently join his friend in digging in the dirt.

Which finally triggered Nell’s reaction.  She couldn’t do anything about the Darkwater brothers.  She had a strong feeling whatever had been happening here had been going on for a long while – possibly since their births – and would go on yet longer.  But right now, at this moment, there was a creature who was suffering from either insanity or some compulsion, and she must help him.

She looked at the digging man with her mage vision, and saw…  Oh, dear.  Earth was near-lethal for a creature like Seraphim, even, full of magical power and not hardened from birth to the proximity of what they called cold iron, and which was in fact more what Earth would call technology. But this creature, the red-headed man scrabbling at the dirt, was at least three quarts magical, probably with fairyland blood – no, had to be.  Gabriel had called him Elfborn – but with some other magical blood mixed in as well.

And while, unlike Seraphim when he’d been transported here, he was not ill, and while he should be able to defend himself from the hostile surroundings, he seemed to have been caught by surprise.

He hadn’t intended to teleport here, Nell guessed, and therefore hadn’t shielded himself from the surrounding influence in time.  She would guess Gabriel Penn had had a second longer to shield, and that made all the difference.

Elfborn’s unshielded magic was under attack on all sides, much like a glob of flesh thrown into strong acid.

Acting instinctively, she threw a protection veil over him.  Not a spell.  A spell wouldn’t work for something like this, because it was not alive and would just get corroded along with everything else.  The only protection to extend in this case was a veil of magic, an extension of Nell’s own magic, fortunately hardened the conditions of Earth.

It worked, to an extent.  It stopped the creature’s magic dissolving and disintegrating.  It wouldn’t allow it to regenerate, because she couldn’t build a thick enough wall between it and Earth.  Particularly not since – as the effect hit a second later – to be so linked with him meant that she could feel his pain too.  It was somewhere between a migraine and a whole-body toothache.  She gritted her teeth against it, and turned to the two men, who had stopped arguing and were looking at her, as though she’d just grown a second head.

Gabriel recovered first.  “Thank you,” he said.  He let go of Darkwater’s arms, and like a total idiot, attempted to throw a veil of his own over hers.

“No,” she told him, using whatever concentration she could spare away from her task to magically block his attempt.  “You’re half-elf yourself and you’re not used to Earth.  If you try that, we’ll have you both in the same condition.”

“Well, if you think–” Seraphim Ainsling said, to Gabriel.  She could spare them no look, but something must have passed between them, some wordless argument, because she heard the duke draw a deep breath, and then she felt his power, like barrier, interpose itself not just between hers and the influence of Earth’s anti-magic, but between Elfborn’s and her own.

The pain lessened, receding a pace, and Elfborn’s magic pulsed, once, and reorganized into a coherent, if still fainter than it should be.  He stopped digging and fell back on his haunches, looking dazed.  Which, apparently, gave the other two men an opportunity to start screaming at each other again.

“What in he– Hades do you mean the family goat?” Seraphim started, at the same time that Gabriel said, at the top his voice, “You said she is the princess royale?”

“Please, don’t start screaming,” Nell said, thinking that hot tempers must run in the family.  which made perfect sense, as both the men seemed over-controlled, which they would be, if they knew they were likely to lose control completely, once they unbent.  “The Duke of Darkwater does believe that I am the princess royale of Avalon, Mr. Penn.  I’m not quite sure why myself, except a medallion and some… some other indications, but he says I look like the Queen.  And, your Grace, I presume Mr. Penn said what he did in an effort to derail you so that we could attend to Mr. Elfborn.  Is that so?”

Gabriel Penn opened his mouth as though to say something.  He reddened dark again, and shot his brother a glowering look.  “Yes.  Pardon me, Seraphim, but you– Oh, never mind.  We must get Marlon’s magic stable so he can survive here.  Miss– Er…  Your highness, do you chance to know where there are any standing stones hereabouts.”

“In the United States?”  She saw his blank look too late.  “The equivalent of your American colonies, sir.  We have no standing stones.”

“Oh.  But we–”

“It’s a different world,” Seraphim said, testily, and she thought that his tone was as much the result of whatever animosity he had towards Elfborne, and the not-quite-pain-and-worse-than-any-headache behind the eyes that protecting the man’s magic caused.  “They don’t have openings to fairyland here.  Which, I suspect, is what makes this a safe world for all of us right now, because I suspect, pardon me, Gabriel, that your magical kin’s stinking court politics are at the center of this mess.

“Yes, I suspect so too,” Gabriel Penn said, and turned to Nell.  “And this is why I wondered if you had something like standing stones.  They would have provided a shield for him, even if they’re not connected to fairyland.  They are places of refuge for magical creatures caught in this land, and they would allow him to recover.  He was trying to dig in the dirt, because that would be protection of a kind.”

Nell sighed.  “So, an underground room would help?”

“Somewhat,” Gabriel said.

“Very well.  The house was built in the time of coal heating.  There is a basement with an outside entrance.  There is nothing in it now, but I used to play in it as a girl.  If you’ll follow me,”

She led them around the house to the entrance.  This part of the basement, which had once contained a coal furnace, now dismantled, had been cleaned out and outfitted as her own private refuge when she was a little girl.  She’d always liked it, and liked hiding there to read.  Now she wondered if it was because it had afforded her own magic a respite from hostile forces.

Whatever had driven her to it, her grandmother had aided and abetted it. The little refuge had not only bookcases, a small table and a microwave, but also a loveseat draped over with a colorful shawl that hid the tears in the upholstery.  It also had a tiny powder room attached.  It had been installed late enough – after Nell had claimed it – that Nell knew it had plastic piping.  Just as well.  Sometimes too much metal was a problem for magic in the literal sense.

As soon as she closed the door to the outside, she felt the pressure against her shield over Elfborn abate.  It was like coming in from a raging storm to a place of calm.  Seraphim must have felt it too, because she saw his features sag in relief.

Gabriel Penn had helped Elfborne to the loveseat and dropped him into it, and the man’s eyes were returning to some semblance of understanding.  He looked at Seraphim, and his eyes widened.  Then he looked at Nell and they widened further.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, his voice creaking.  “I understand one or the other of you will wish to kill me.  Might I–” he looked at his dirt-covered hands.  “Be allowed to rinse the dirt from my hands and face, first.”

“Oh, Marlon,” Gabriel said.  “Stop the cheap tragedy.  Seraphim isn’t going to kill you and I can’t imagine why Miss– why her– why the lady would.”

“Will they not?” Elfborne said, something like the light of battle and a rueful look in his eyes.  “You only think that because you don’t know the half of it.”

Prisoner and Guards

Caroline couldn’t think and couldn’t focus.  Not that she wanted to focus.  As the ground seemed to speed beneath her, and she saw the clods and small stones struck up by the hooves just an armspan away from her, she was all too aware only the centaur’s strong arm, its tight pressure beneath her breasts, kept her from falling down and being trampled.

She closed her eyes, but it was impossible to ignore her situation.  She smelled horse and human sweat commingled, she felt the jarring pound of the centaur’s hooves beneath.  After a while she heard yelling, and then the hooves stopped and the movement, and the human arm let go.

Caroline opened her eyes in time to stumble a little, then recover her ballance.  She stood on a clearing, filled with dozens of centaurs, clustering round her on all sides.

The centaur who had brought her pushed her forward, a hand on her shoulder, and said, “I have brought her, you see.  At the council’s command.”

Around her there were many centaurs.  All of their human bodies were swarthy, heavily muscled, and her first impression of them was of a menacing group, particularly as they moved restlessly, their hooves stomping the ground, and calling out words she only partly understood.

“In the sacred ground of our ancestors–”

“The announced one–”

“In this dire hour.”

They spoke now one and now the other, their voices louder and more resonant than normal men’s voices, their heads tossing – just like horse’s heads, she thought, in shock, even if they were atop men’s trunks and necks – their long dark hair sweeping and becoming even more disarrayed.  They had overgrown stubble or outright dark beads.  Some wore necklaces of what appeared to be human teeth.

Caroline wanted to run, but she could imagine this troop of centaurs following her – hunting her down.  She swallowed hard and felt sweat prickle at her eyes.  Her throat was so parched she feared she might not be able to speak, but she had to speak.  If she couldn’t run, she had to do something to prevent these creatures–

To prevent the creatures what?  She could remember, vaguely, from her classical mythology and history that drunken centaurs could get thoroughly unpleasant, in the way of unpleasantness that mama would say Caroline shouldn’t know about until her wedding night – and perhaps not even then.  But Caroline had heard the women of the nearby village talk, and some of the maids too.  And besides, the home farm had livestock.  And Caroline was no slower of mind than she should be.  So she had a pretty clear idea of how unpleasant and in exactly what way centaurs could get.

Though she wondered if it was exact enough to fend it off.  She should have asked Gabriel.  Of all of the adults in the house, he was the only one not likely to tell her she was being unladylike or to turn her mind to more appropriate thoughts.  Michael wouldn’t have told her that either, but he knew no more than she did, and besides, frankly, Michael was not very interested in what went on between centaurs or women.  Or men and women for that matter.  If it didn’t have gears, he was simply not much interested in it.

Which brought her to here and now, and whatever the centaurs meant to do, and the fact she was quite – quite – powerless to defend herself.  Except by trying to do what mama called showing herself a lady and therefore beyond their touch.  She looked at those large hands, at the end of bulging muscular arms, and realized not a few held knives or lances.  She swallowed again, then planted her feet and spoke loudly, “I am Caroline Ainsling, the sister of the Duke of Darkwater, and I want to know what you want with me?”

They moved.  At first she wasn’t sure how.  There was just more stomping of feet, and more galloping, and sounds like a stable.  Smells like a stable too, which made her wonder how human centaurs were, and how animal.  Around the edge of the clearing where the centaurs were assembled, two of them galloped in circles.

“Quiet!”  It was a clarion call of a voice, a voice such as, unleashed in a square in London could have called the whole city to attention.  Caroline trembled, thinking the yell directed at her, but then the voice said, “We are being rude to the maiden, and fools to seek her help but not tell her what we wish.  Agapios, Thanos, cease your mad galloping.  If you insist on behaving like colts, you shall be excluded from the councils of men.”

To Caroline’s surprise, the two madly galloping centaurs stopped, and one of them lowered his head like a schoolboy caught at fault.  It occurred to her that despite their golden skins, the long, dark hair, they were very young.  If they’d been horses, their horse-body would look like a colt’s not fully grown into its height, and if they’d been humans, the human body would have looked too gangly, too thin, not muscular enough.  The sweaty faces were devoid of stubble, and one of them wore his hair pulled back from the forehead with a bit of ribbon, an affection that, for some reason, made him look younger.  She almost smiled at him, then remembered the situation, and that she definitely shouldn’t encourage centaurs with untoward friendliness, and tried to make her face impassive.

“Caroline, Daughter of the Duke, Maiden,” the man who had first spoken, spoke again, and then, to Caroline’s eternal shock, fell on his front knees in front of her, and looked up at her with anguished eyes that didn’t look any less scared for regarding her from under beetling brows.  “We need your help.  My son has fallen in a snare, and you’re the only one who can save him.”

Caroline looked again at the powerful bodies around her.  “I’m the… only one?  But you…”

The centaur shook his head.  “No.  It is not a human snare, nor one such that can be defeated by the hand of a centaur, or the force of our arms.  It is a snare of the mind, a snare of the soul, and we are powerless against it.  We felt your nearness, and we went to get you.  We don’t know if your potency will hold against the local magic, but we hope so.”

Her … potency?  Had they lost their ever lasting mind?  And where were the centaur women?  Unpleasant ideas formed in Caroline’s mind, and she drew herself up very tall – or as tall as her five feet would allow – and spoke in a way that, she hoped, would do the Duchess credit.  “I do not have the pleasure of understanding your meaning.”

“It is my son, Akakios,” the centaur said. “He has been captured.”

“Captured by whom?  Where?”

There was movement again, this time towards her.  No.  The circle that had been all around moved, so in front of her there were only trees and no centaurs.  The centaur who’d knelt before her – the same one who’d brought her here? – now stood beside her, his hand on her shoulder.  Impossible not to follow as he walked forward, though he neither pushed nor pulled her.

He said only “Caroline, maiden!” and at that moment, they reached the edge and she could see through the trees.  She’d thought they were in a large clearing, but the clearing ahead was twice as large.  From the center of it, suspended on what seemed to be a silver chain, that attached soemwhere in the distance, was what looked like a crystal bird cage.  For a very large bird.  A very, very large bird.  Only there was no bird in it, but a young centaur.

His hair was in more disarray than that of his congeners.  His hands were clasped on the translucent bars of his cage.  And his human chest and horse body were crisscrossed with bloody slashes.

He raised his head, as if sensing her scrutiny and looked at her with eyes that were as green as leaves in spring, and that looked like he’d been crying.

Then she saw them: Around the clearing, as though on guard, galloped many unicorns.

They were large, white, glimmering, beautiful.  It took her a moment to realize that the tips of their horns were stained with blood.

To be continued every Friday…

Cover Credit

magic wand © Olga Sadovnikova

couple embracing © Cornelius20

Old Clockwork © Sergey Novichonok

frozen drop (crystal ball) © Dmyla

fractal © Tupungato

Cover arrangement and design Sarah A. Hoyt