Free Novel, Witchfinder, chapter 41-42

NOTE: We were without computers for a significant part of the morning, as we had a power outage.  I know I promised another post today, but I don’t feel like it, I don’t wanna, and I’m not gonna do it.  The sun is shining and I’m going for a walk and maybe a mini-golf game with the boys.

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

Healing

How odd it was, Caroline thought, that Akakios had seemed so much smaller, so much younger in the cage.  From the moment he’d got hold of her and galloped with her across the clearing, she’d known him for what he was.  Young, yes.  Probably too young to count as an adult in the world of centaurs, but some years older than her.  She’d guess him to be nineteen or twenty, or maybe a little older.  Strong with it, too, despite his injuries.  He lifted her effortlessly, and his gallop faltered only once, when crossing the clearing, the type of almost tiny missteps that a horsewoman learned to identify as a sign of the mount being tired.

He had deposited her amid the other centaurs, and then she’d let her control over the unicorns slip.  She could hear them tramping and baying – an odd sound, unlike anything she’d ever heard before – in the direction from which she’d come, but the magic clearing where they lived seemed to hold them in their perimeter.

And Caroline, sitting on soft grass, beneath a canopy of trees, closed her eyes as the pain of her injuries hit her.  And undefinable time later, she became aware of two people arguing loudly next to her.

“– Already risked too much.  I will not let you,” the centaur chief was bellowing.

“In the great cause, I risked too much?  What have you risked, father?” and though she’d heard his voice only once before, she was absolutely sure this was Akakios.

“Everything but my one remaining son,” the chief answered.

“Ah.  And then it will all be for nothing, won’t it?” Akakios said.  “My brother’s sacrifice, everything we’ve done to restore the balance and bring the land under control?”

The chief sighed and Caroline thought there must be two sets of lungs at work there, because mere human lungs could not hold enough air for that long a sigh.  “Let her go with someone else.  Agapius or Thanos or… me, even.  There is no rule that says you must be the one to go through the forest of dread to free the stranger.”

“Just ast there was no rule to say Aniketos must be the one to risk himself to bring back the princess to Avalon.”

“And you know how that ended, you fool,” the chief said, his voice now bellowing out with a sense of outrage.

“He didn’t follow the rules.  He didn’t make it public what he’d done and why.”

“Something happened to prevent it,” his father said.  “You know he’d never–”

There must have been a sign somewhere, because their voice stopped abruptly and Caroline realized she’d opened her eyes, and was looking up at a bright blue sky through a canopy of leaves.  She also realized her skirt was hiked up, and her petticoats with it, and had a moment of dreadful fear.

Looking down, she saw a very odd face so close to her, that she let out a strangled scream.  It was broad and dark, crisscrossed by scars, surrounded by straggly white hair, ornamented by equally straggly white beard and, with all that, the possessor of the brightest, merriest pair of eyes she’d ever seen in any face.

It was the eyes that stopped her scream, and in the next moment she realized the smile that shaped the lips beneath the eyes was one of the kindest she’d ever seen too, and that the centaur – for it was a centaur – who was kneeling on the ground and had hiked up her clothes, was in fact doing something to her leg.  The something had made the pain go away entirely.

Caroline half sat up and looked down.  There were flasks of something green and herbal on the ground.  The elderly centaur had yet more flasks in a sort of sling across his middle, which had been fitted with little rings from which small bottles filled with varicolored liquids depended.

There was also a little pouch, from which the centaur now extracted a long roll of white cloth, which he started to wind about her thigh.

“Hello, Lady,” he said, when he saw her looking.  “I am Eleftherius and I am a healer.  I have mended your thigh and it should be strong enough to walk on in a very few hours.”

She blinked at him.  Her throat fell so dry that she thought she would die of thirst, but she remembered the injunction never to eat or drink anything in fairyland.  He gave her a smile, as though reading her thoughts.  “I can take care of that, too,” he said.  “Of your thirst and your hunger, lady, but it is a dangerous game, and one that could cost you your life.”

“My life?”

“Yes, for you see, if you don’t feel it, you might not know when you’ve run through all your reserves and your body is dying.  I can’t make you not hungry or not thirsty, you see.  I can only make you stop feeling it.”

Of course, at his words, hunger had joined the torment of thirst, and now she couldn’t think of anything else, couldn’t do anything else, but obsess about when next she would get water or food.  She had to be able to think.  She’d done two good deeds.  At least she hoped freeing Akakios counted as a good deed.  By the laws of fairykind, if she saved one more person, rescued one more victim in trouble, she should get her heart’s desire, which was to get Michael out of fairyland.  It couldn’t possibly take that long.  “Do it,” she said.  “Whatever it is you can do for my present relief.  I must be able to think.”

The centaur selected a flask from the array at his chest, carefully tore out a piece of cloth, soaked it in something blue that smelled faintly of aniseed, and put it against the back of Caroline’s hand.  It felt cool and wet, and she thought it was very silly as a means of stopping hunger and thirst.  But then there was a tingle of magic coursing through her, and she realized the liquid was more than some herbal medicine.  The need to eat and drink vanished.

And then, sitting up fully, she looked down and saw the medicine on her leg was magic too.  She should have known her.  Such a stab wound as she’d had could not be healed that quickly.

She looked over to the side, from which Akakios voice had come and she thought that Akakios too was festoned in white bandages and looked more lively than he had before.  “It was the iron cage,” he told her, as she looked at him.  “While we are not, like fairies or elves, or even dragons, incapable of touching or being near cold iron, and in fact many of us travel to non-magical worlds, iron will cloud our minds and hurt our bodies over time.  And I was in it so long, concentrating only on making my bleeding slow down, that I would have died very shortly.”  His voice vibrated with a strong emotion as he said, “I owe you my life, Lady Darkwater.”

“No,” she said.  And to his confused expression.  “Lady Darkwater is my mother.  I am Miss Darkwater or… or…” she reasoned thinking that he was some sort of prince, for unless she was very wrong indeed, his father was the king of all centaurs.  And if he was a prince, even of a different species, surely she ranked below him.  “Or Caroline.”

He inclined his head, a curtain of dark curls hiding a face that looked less pretty than it had when he’d been in that iron cage, but for all that not less attractive, with its beak of a nose and the intent dark eyes on either side of it.  “Caroline,” he said.  “I owe you my life.”

She didn’t know what there was in that statement to make his father draw the sort of breath only a centaur’s lungs could draw, seeming to gust on forever like an approaching storm.

Eleftherius the healer made a sound like chuckling, almost at the same time, only it was like chuckling and clucking your tongue all at once, and he said, his voice seeming to vibrate with some private joke.  “I shall give a bottle of this elixir, m’lady, the one that allows wounds to heal quickly.  You and prince Akakios will, perforce need it.”

“Yes,” Akakios said.  “Yes, thank you Euftherius.”

And at the same time his father said, “No.  No, I tell you, he shall not go.”

“Still fighting against the oracle, my kind?” Euftherius said with a chuckle to his voice.  “What good is it, when it was the oracle cast at your wedding, before either of your sons was born?”

“They said–” The king said, then let his breath out, again with a sound like gusting.  “They said there was a way out.”

“Only if you’re willing to let things lie as they are,” the centaur said.  “And for fairyland to wither and the worlds unending with it.  If you want to stop it, though the oracle told you what the price would be.”  His voice sounded like he was repeating memorized lines.  “You shall lose both sons, oh, king, nor shall your line ever again tread the glades of fairyland.”

The Lord’s Duty

Seraphim felt as though his world had plunged into madness.  First there was Nell’s being the lost princess of Avalon.  And she’d been in Avalon for over a year.  And no one knew.  That should have been impossible.

Princess, aye, and anyone of the blood, had more spells laid on them at birth than should be possible to contravene in any way.  Safety spells, sure, but locator spells too.

And yet, someone had got her out of the royal nursery, surrounded as it must have been by locator spells and spy spells and discouragement spells.  Someone had got her out and dropped her in the Mad– On Earth.  He was starting to learn that Earth was less of a madhouse than a world that moved according to rules Avalon wouldn’t be able to understand.  It wasn’t the same as having no rules.

As far as that went, it made perfect sense.  On Earth she would be out of the reach of mind probes and location spells.  But how had they got her out of the nursery to begin with?  And how could they have dropped her back in the world without anyone noticing.

He found he was chewing the corner of his lip, while Gabriel, the necromancer and Nell continued talking around him.  Half of his mind monitored what they were saying, but there was nothing new in it for him.  Nell was telling them of her reading, and was being told by Marlon, with insufferable, didactic patience, that her casting had been too broad to be meaningful…  Which Seraphim had known, he supposed, though he thought the casting had been useful, nonetheless.

He could not doubt that Nell was the princess.  It wasn’t just the medallion, perhaps the last hereditary line of magical defense, which nothing short of destroying all of Avalon’s system of magic could have stopped following her as an infant.  It was also her resemblance to the queen.  While a man might have bastards aplenty, and – had she resembled only her father – she might have been no more than a royal byblow, queens were in a different position and not many had unacknowledged children.  Oh, there were always legends, of course, but it didn’t apply here, because now that he knew what she was, he could see the power she had as the unlikely blend of her parents’ type of power.

No, Nell was the princess, right enough.  The necromancer had found her, too, before this.  But what did it all mean?

Out of the mess in his mind, a thought came, something Marlon Elfborn had said that made no sense.  “Your father?” he asked turning to the man who had been explaining to Nell how spells should be cast.  “You said your father and the Blaines were involved in this.  What did you mean by that.  Your name is Elfborn.  You are a magical halfling of no known parentage.”

The look that Marlon gave him was almost odd – half open mouth, as though a laugh had frozen halfway through emerging, and an arrested and yet somehow malevolent look to the eyes so strong, that Seraphim started to clench his fist in the ancient sign against the evil eye, before he realized the look was not really directed at him.  Marlon’s eyes might be turned in his direction, but he was really looking past Seraphim and at something or someone else entirely.

“I am Elfborn,” he said, after a while, when he could get his speech.  “Because I am unacknowledged by my father, though fain, I could have forced him to admit to me, but the game was not worth it.  I don’t want people to know I have his blood in my veins.  I would much rather not know I had his blood in my veins, if I could undo the knowledge.”

“He is human, then?”

“Oh, yes,” Marlon Elfborn said, and his voice echoed bitter and low.  “He is Lord Sydell.”

“Sydell!” Nell said, at the same time that Seraphim said, “The King’s ears.”

“Yes, indeed, and his eyes, and his secret hand too,” Marlon said, and the malevolent look was back in his eyes.

“But…”  Nell said.  “I worked for him.  I mean, after Antoine was captured, I was forced to work for him.”

“Were you now?” Marlon said.  “I wonder why, and what he planned that he had to wait for, thereby keeping you close and yet captive.  I wonder – I very much do – what my dear papa can have been thinking, and why he didn’t thrust you back to Earth as soon as he could.”

“Because he couldn’t,” that was Gabriel, quietly.  “Because her power wouldn’t allow him to do so, not once she had touched the soil of Avalon.  And that meant that he had to keep her subdued and hidden until he could… dispose of her more permanently.  Which might very well be what all this is about.”

“All this?  The coil ensnaring your family?” Marlon asked.  “My dear, I think that involves far more than disposing of her Highness.  For one, you and I know all too well it involves fairyland.”

“But–” Seraphim said.  “What are you two talking about?  You can’t mean that Sydell, the king’s right hand or at least his left had anything to do with…  You can’t mean the princess…”

But in his mind things were assembling in an all too clear pattern.  Who could make sure that the princess’s wards were perhaps not as strong as they should be – the king’s spy chief and head of protection services.  Who could make sure that any spells to trace or protect the princess were ineffective?  – Blaine’s blessings, which specialized in that sort of thing and had been in charge of the business.

But why?  If Nell stayed disappeared, the throne might – though it would take many many other deaths to do so – come to the Darkwaters, but it would never come to the Blaines.

Seraphim couldn’t say that had been part of the plan, to kill everyone in the way until his house inherited and Honoria Blaine married him.  He couldn’t say that because it was nonsensical.  So many deaths would need to happen that the amount stopped being serious and started being farcical.  And beyond all that, they couldn’t be sure he’d marry Honoria, certainly not back when Nell had disappeared.  And beyond that, Honoria had brothers, and surely her father would want them to inherit if inheriting were to be done.  No. That was not to be considered.

But something the Blaines had meant, and something they had done.  And the snare into which Seraphim had fallen had scattered his family and might have been designed to kill him – and Nell – off world.  In fact, now he thought about it, both their meeting and the trap set in Antoine’s body, had taken them to situations where they SHOULD have died.

He took a deep breath and announced suddenly, loudly, “I don’t think we’ll be able to figure out anything more tonight.  I think we should go to bed and sleep on it.”

They looked surprised, but they did not argue.  Which was good.  He had no intention of sleeping on it.  But he did intend to transport quietly to Avalon and have a long-delayed chat with Honoria.