Rogue Magic, Free Novel, Chapter 48

*I should have posted this last night, but I woke up with the world’s worse sinus headache, and by the time it was gone, I had stuff that I needed to do.  Sorry.  It was mostly written from last week, but not quite.  So now I’ve finished it. The chapter, not the book!*

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

Lady Helen Blythe, sister to the Earl of Savage

The child’s hand was moist in mine, and had overheated feeling children get when they’re in a panic.

I’m not good with children. It’s not as though I don’t like them. I suppose there could be a child I liked well enough, except that I’d never met him or her. My nurse said I just didn’t like my younger siblings, or at least I was annoyed by them which is perfectly normal. Or at least Nurse said so. Of course she also said when we were all grown up we’d be the best of friends, which just meant to me that she really hadn’t looked at my sisters too closely, because how anyone could be best friends with sickly sweetly Harmony was beyond me.

But I could imagine, in some distant future that I might, perhaps, get married, and if my children didn’t take after my siblings, I might even like them and wish to spend time with them. Perhaps.

Still it made me nervous to be the only adult and have this confiding little boy with his dark, curly hair and green eyes. It should make me nervous, of course. We were in fairyland, which meant he’d probably turn into a dragon or an ogre, or turn out to feed only on human eyes, or something equally disgusting.

I held his hand gingerly, thought it seemed no more disgusting than the average child’s hand. He smelled the same way. I mean, like an average child about that age. For some reason children around that age always smell to me like pastry and pencil shavings.

“Where do you live?” I asked. I kept in mind that on the paths of fairyland, you must help three people in need before you find your way home. “I mean, how can I help you?”

He turned green, intent eyes on me, and made me frown, because his eyes reminded me far too closely of Seraphim Ainsling’s the prince consort’s.

“I… I don’t know,” he said.

“How can you not know?” I wasn’t ready to give up the idea that he might be some kind of eye-eating monster.

He smiled at that and spoke with the suavity of an older man, which of course, might very well mean he was an eye-eater. “Very easily, madam,” he said. “I simply don’t remember.”

“Why not?” I asked him. I was not so trusting that I would take him at his word. Nurse always said that part of the reason the younger ones didn’t like me was that – in her words – I crammed them, as one would a horse. I cornered and asked them questions, and didn’t observe any sort of protocol or delicacy.

The problem, you see, is that I remember being their age. I think most adults don’t. Most adults go weak at the thought of a lost six year old, but I remembered very well being six, and the things I could connive and contrive were as bad – if not worse – than what any adult could think on. And I remembered that being asked direct questions, that didn’t assume I was a little simpering dolt, didn’t allow me time to make up cover stories.

His hand twitched in mine, and for a moment I thought he’d run away. But then he said, in a voice that sounded much, much older. “I don’t know, you know? I have a strong feeling I forgot it on purpose.”

“Oh,” I said. This, despite his much more adult voice, resonated with me. You see, I had been almost there. Not quite. But close enough. I’d never willingly forgotten who I was or where I was or for my sins, where home was. But I’d spent a good part of my childhood daydreaming about being just about anyone else. And I don’t mean by this I fantasized about being the Princess Royal, who was then lost. Oh, I did that too. I suppose every girl about my age did. I knew objectively I was younger than the lost princess, and I knew I looked like Jonathan. At least my features did, if not my color. But I could pretend I’d been hidden by magic, kept like Sleeping Beauty, from the world and from aging. And even that my appearance was contrived. Besides, the queen was dark as I was.

But those were dreams every girl had, when lessons were difficult or one’s nurse or Mama said one shouldn’t do something. I had others. And by others I mean I fantasized being everyone, and everyone’s lot seemed better than mine. The begging girl at the corner would, as I knew, having been instructed to give alms and feel compassion, often go hungry and cold, and even suffer the brutality of passerbyes. But few, even beggers, would go through life with the pretense of love.

Oh, I don’t know how to tell it, and when I say it it sounds quite foolish, but I think it would have been better for all concerned if Papa had told us aloud, over breakfast, that he disliked the lot of us and had only sired us because it was what one did. And it would have been better if he then washed his hands of us, giving us the minimal to survive and letting us grow up quite wild and unsupervised.

Just as it would have been better if Mama had said she only loved Harmony and Honoria, and the rest of us could go to the devil, for all she cared.

The problem was not that they didn’t love me. I suspect a lot of people, all the pious stories notwithstanding, grow up without having anyone who feels more than duty towards them. And mama and papa might be incapable of loving anyone, which I supposed was not their fault. Mama tolerated the children who most resembled them and she was pleased to think she loved them, and that was not her fault either.

But why must they and all of society conspire to pretend they loved me. It was all “you must show great gratitude to your father for how kind and generous he is to you.” I promise you, I’d rather have been beaten. And it was that feeling that made me want to be anyone else, to slip out of my existence as if I’d never been, and to go… elsewhere.

I’d done it at last too, hadn’t I? And what a fine mess I’d done of it.

“You understand it then?” he asked. “Wanting to run away? Wanting to forget everything you were? Everyone you were.”

“I understand running away,” I said. “But not forgetting. I couldn’t make myself forget if I tried.”

He looked at me, his eyes narrowed, and though his voice was that of a six year old, I had the feeling that he was much, much, much older, as he said, “I could make you forget.”

“Oh,” I said, and let go of his hand and for a moment I almost ran away, because it occurred to me maybe he didn’t eat eyes, but memories.

He looked appalled, as though not sure what he’d said, or why it made me so scared. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that unless you asked me. But you said, you couldn’t make yourself forget and I—”

“And you?”

“I thought I’d oblige you. But you don’t really want to forget do you?”

“Not everything,” I said, reluctantly. I didn’t want to forget Jonathan’s visits to the schoolroom when I was little. I remembered the warmth in them. Or this one time I’d seen a pantomime on pirates, when I was very little and it had seemed to me an enchanted realm. Or the times I’d spent reading, by the fire, on long winter evenings. “To forget everything would mean to lose what you are. I don’t think anyone wants to do that.”

He blinked up at me. “I think I did.” The image of him wavered and fluttered before my eyes, and for a moment I had the image of a much older man, and a feeling I knew him too. “I think…” He frowned a little. “It’s a lot like being a mosaic, you see.”

“Your memories?” I asked.

He started to shake his head, then shrugged. “Imagine that you were taken and broken, and scattered to the four winds and that your pieces were gathered again but with a lot of other pieces, a lot of memories that aren’t yours, that can’t be fit into what you remember, that … that are things you couldn’t or would never do, and yet it all mixes him, and you remember them as if you did it.”

His form had now solidified into a man in his twenties, and he looked like Darkwater, and I thought the prince consort had a brother, the king of fairyland. I said, my voice trembling a little, “It must have been sore unpleasant, your majesty.”

I expected him to vanish on that, since it seems to be in fairyland no one likes to be revealed. But he just frowned at me, and smiled a little and said, “Yes, I think I am, and you can’t imagine unpleasant. It comes with the burden of the memories of everyone who was ever the king. Which is why the king of fairyland is immortal. And more often than not insane.” He ran his hand across his brow, in a gesture I’d seen Darkwater make. “I’m not here. Not me. I mean, not all of me. And I don’t mean just as king. I’m not even here, all myself, as human. But it’s enough to know. I remember. And I remember there is a reason I did this, beyond… beyond my wish to vanish. There was an attack. They can’t capture fairyland till they’ve captured me, because I am fairyland, so I made myself many. But… the young one was unadvisable. He longed for home.”

My mind had made one of those leaps it makes sometimes “You were under attack by the mythworld,” I said. “The gods are looking for power, for… something to do with misfits.”

“Misfits?” he said. And then, “Oh, dear.”

His eyes seemed to grow. I don’t know how to explain it but suddenly there was a green portal, shining with an odd light, and I tumbled into it, head first. The last words I heard were, “This should at least keep one of you safe.”