Free Novel, Rogue Magic, Chatper 42

*Sorry to be late.  WordPress kept crashing while I was trying to put this post up.*

The prequel to this — Witchfinder — has been removed.  I do promise to go through the copyedits as soon as humanly possible and send the advance copies to those who pre-ordered.  You’ll know when that’s eminent because I’ll remove scattered chapters from this blog.  I do hope to manage it next week, but I’m not promising as I’m still finishing a novel under contract to Baen. Meanwhile, if you donate $6 and note it in the field, you’ll get advance-subscribed to this novel.  I do, however, understand it can be a long time to wait, and if you want to, do so.  I will continue to post chapters here, roughly one a week.

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

When It All Crashes Down

Wolfe Merritt, supervisor of Manufactories for Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage.

I didn’t like the looks of it.  Look, to be bluntly honest, if I had not been in fairyland before, I’d think I’d been plunged headfirst into hell.  Sometimes I wonder if the theological difference between the two is so much that it would admit of inserting a definition as thin as a paragraph between the two.

I read in an old book of my grandmothers that in the old days, before magic was properly systematized and rationalized, people thought that the people of the hills were same as the souls of the dead.  This to my purpose sounded about right.  Except that I hated to think of any mortal souls captured eternally in this land.  And also, considering how often humans – and I myself – mated with inhabitants of fairyland, it bore the unpleasant feel of necrophilia.

So I contented myself with thinking that while fairyland wouldn’t be hell, or at least not hell as we’d learnt about it in church, it shared some uncommonly uncomfortable properties with the mansions of the damned.  Among them that space could change around you while you stood perfectly still, and that the sane rules of reality you’d known your whole life were likely to change with no warning.  If you dropped an object, it was as likely to float up, or to hit you in the face as to fall down.  Unfortunately, it was equally likely to turn into a bird of prey and attack your nose.

I’d often thought that the reason the inhabitants of fairyland were stark raving mad – or appeared to be to humans is that this place was madness incarnate. It was in fact impossible to imagine living in this place for more than a few days and not going insane.  Which might be why it was said if you stayed in fairyland you’d end up belonging to it.  I’d always wondered if the eating or drinking the food of fairyland was any part of it, or if that was just a justification.  After all, if you stayed there long enough, you’d have to eat or perish.

None of which mattered, since on my last visit I’d been very careful to eat and drink nothing, and on this one and I had no intention of eating or drinking anything at all.

But as I stood there, and the landscape moved around me, as though I were running down a road from light to dark, I confess I felt chilled to the bone.  And not just because what had seemed a sunny day changed to dreary overcast, then to snow, and then to a frozen landscape, the trees on either side of the road frozen like penitents, their bare branches stretched out to an indifferent ice-pale sky.

No, what put ice in my gut and fear in my heart was the realization that the last time I’d been here I’d stayed sane for one reason only.  I’d been here to get Jimmy.

I was fully clad in my paternal love and my paternal rights, sure it was not only my duty but my right to get my son back from this infernal place, I might not have made it out.

I’d had a clear purpose and kept it mind, and that had seen me through and out the other side.

But now… I was here against my will and looking for nothing except to get out of here, and to get the lady Helen out of here and safely too.  What her brother would say…

I could imagine that in vivid detail, having been privileged to hear his grandfather rake a tenant over the coals, once.

And on cue, at my thoughts, I heard the lady Helen cry from the roiling darkness beneath the frozen trees, “Save me… Oh, save me!”

I grit my teeth.  You’d think a man my age would not be such a gudgeon, would you not?  First, it was unlikely to be the real Lady Helen, because it had come too pat on the wake of my thoughts about her.  And second, if it were the Lady Helen, how could I save her if I left this path.  More likely to be taken myself.

The path in the fairyland realms is a thing of magic, and it’s not so much a road as a protection.  You can be transported other places, or at least you can be made to believe you’re in other places.  But if you don’t step out of the path willingly, fairyland can’t touch you.

I remembered that and grit my teeth, even as a wind with grit in it blew all around me, ripping my clothes to tatters and abrading my skin.

“You dare intrude again, son of Adam?” a voice asked out of nowhere, a voice that was all breath.

The problem was this: even all breath, even without sound behind it, I could tell whose voice it was.  My wife’s.

“Feidlimid!” I said, which was a bad idea.  I can only say that after being pulled about by magic for so long I was not in my right mind and could not tell what I was doing.

The wind that had been rushing about me, rushed faster, and now the grit carried by its movement was ice crystals, chilling me to the marrow.

My eyes felt abraded and frozen.  I could not keep them open, so I closed them.

And suddenly the wind stopped and I was touched by a warm breeze.

I opened my eyes.  Feidlimid sat in the middle of an airy terrace, with columns all around.  Through the columns, I could glimpse a wide and silvery ocean.

Feidlimid wore a semi-transparent shimmering tunic, and had her wheat gold hair down her back, streaming lightly in the wind, while she combed it with a golden comb.

It was an image out of legends, but if she’d looked like that when I’d first met her, I’d never have brought her home.  It was her pitiful soaked state, under the rain as if she knew not how to shield herself, and the lost look in her wide green eyes that had been my undoing.

If she’d smiled at me, as she did now, then I too would never have been at danger.  Yes, her smile was sweet and beautiful, but she opened her mouth a little and I could see the sharp teeth, like a mouse’s.

“Hello Feidlimid,” I said.

She looked at me.  “Have you come to plead, mortal?”

“Plead?  What for?”

“For your fancy lady’s life.”  She smiled.  “Give my son to me, and I might let her live.”