Rogue Magic, Free Novel, Chapter 47

 

*Yes, why, I do know the meaning of “sinfully late” — sorry.  I wish I could say I was in a writing fog all day, but no.  The day got eaten by domestic stuff and shopping — not for anything exciting, no.  Just… food, because we were fairly out.  Sorry.  At least the stupid sinus headache is gone.*

The prequel to this — Witchfinder — is now up on Amazon.

This novel will get posted here a chapter every Friday or Saturday, or occasionally Sunday.  If you contribute $6 you shall be subscribed for the earc and first clean version in electronic format.  I think it will probably take another three months to finish.  Less, if I can have a weekend to run through and get ahead of the game.  It hasn’t happened yet.

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

 

 

Wolfe Merrrit, Manager of Manufactories for the Earl of Savage:

 

There are things you can do and things you can’t. And there are bargains you are offered in earnest, and bargains which you are offered but which the other side has no intention of following.

Most of the later bargains you are offered by normal human beings. Look, it’s not that fairyland won’t cheat you. You could say its very nature is deceptive, though I suspect you’d be wrong.

I think by their lights they deal perfectly fair. It’s just their lights aren’t ours, and we’re really very different sorts of creatures.

An old man I met once was convinced that all power in the lands of men was derived from blood of fairy. I didn’t argue. After all, everyone is entitled to becoming a little odd in his old ae and who was I to dispute with a stranger? But the power of humans and fey is different. Humans are physical beings who can – certain of them, can, at least, at certain times – command the power of magic, the kind of power that must have fueled creation itself. Those human beings who have magic must learn to control it, because it interacts oddly with our all too physical beings, our all too fallible wills.

But for the fey it is different. Some of this I learned through living with my wife, and more, much more of it, I’d learned through coming into fairyland to claim my son, whom she’d taken with her.

Coming into fairyland had been necessary precisely because my son was mostly human and humans in fairyland die or go mad, if they tarry too long. In his case probably he would have gone mad. As it was, from his days in fairyland, something remained not quite human in him. Something had broken.

Because, you see, though we interact with them, and they with us, the fey are not of the same kind of … creature. Oh, sure we can breed with them. We’re similar enough. But we arrived at similarity from different ends of creation. They are, you see, mostly magic. The energy that was present at creation, the burst of power, of will of “this be done” in them is shaped into creatures – creatures that often have trouble holding the same shape for any amount of time.

Humans are made of what the Bible pleases itself to call clay: the common elements of the human world, just like all the animals. Into this common clay the creator infused soul and spirit and a bit of magic, a big of ability to create with our minds and our hearts. At least in our version of the human world.

The fairy world, too, was different – a thing of that same burst of creation – as I thought about it, as I stared at my long-lost wife, I wondered if all the worlds were not only separate in space but in time, if fairyland was all the human worlds combined, as they’d been at the moment of creation, or shortly after.

Some very learned magic experts said that the suns and stars and worlds all had been created in a burst of energy. The big bang, they called it. I wondered if that was what Fairyland was, the moment after the bang, when all the energy, all the magic, was still fluid and ungelled, and all the worlds of men were contained in fairyland in potentia. Which would explain the wildly changing landscape and the different passing of time, and also why they contained so many creatures that had haunted humans at their beginning.
Something in me whispered Careful now. It was as though those thoughts were in themselves dangerous or slippery. I had the feeling a man has, when running in pitch dark, he stops just before pitching headlong into an abyss, and leans back, and takes a breath, and determines to be very careful until he’s safe.

Aloud, I said, “No bargains Feidlimid, and no trades. And the lady Helen is nothing to me, but my employer’s daughter, whom I must protect and get back safe.”

Feidlimid looked at me a long time. Her eyes were emerald and sparkling but they had the feel and the look of something like an insect. There was no human response in them, no human understanding.

This is what I mean when I say we’re made of quite different stuff. She was all the will and the magic, all the strength of a burst of creation.

I didn’t think she was making a bargain with me, or if she was – even if I were willing to trade my son for the lady Helen, which I wasn’t – she wouldn’t keep it. She would keep to the letter of it, but that would be worded in such a way that what I’d get would not be the lady, safe and sound, and I would surely lose both her and my son.

I had no intention of performing in this play. I’d lived with Feidlimid, and I knew her weakness, and I knew her fear. And I had no intention of letting her play me for a fool.

I could feel the fog of fairyland, like a living but cold thing creep around me, and I could feel her glamour wash over me in waves, trying to bend me into her willing slave.

It was not going to happen. I’d fought through layers of delusions before, when I’d been here. Delusions only work when you don’t know they’re there.

There was power to being the mere course stuff of human kind. And more power yet in knowing one had a hold over this glittering creature.

Feidlimid had a little smile playing on her lips. She was doubtless thinking of something interesting to do to me. I sighed. “By the power over you Feidlimid, by the part of you you left buried in the world of men—”

“Stop,” she said. She gave a little scream. “Stop.” Because she hates the thought that part of her was left behind, to become part of our soil. I remembered midnight and burying it beneath the oak tree at the green, just by the crossroads. At the time I was thinking of nothing but keeping the child safe, but I’d done the right thing by blind instinct. The crossroads confused the fair folk and the oak too, ancient and anchoring was a presence she could not wish away. Nor could she get back what she’d given up that night.

“By the part of you left behind in Avalon, I require that you—”

She didn’t let me finish the incantation. I didn’t think she would. There was a scream, and a sound of tearing, and I was standing in a green meadow and heard hooves.

There was an army headed for me. Horsemen.

Then I blinked. No. Centaurs. They were riding towards me, in massed ranks.