Rogue Magic, Free Novel, Chapter 49

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

 

Paths

 

Wolfe Merrit, Manager of Manufactories for Jonathan Blythe, the Earl of Savage:

 

There are two ways you can deal with being in the middle of two armies about to clash. One is to run away. But running away in this case meant making for the edge of armies that stretched as far as the eye could see.

The other– The other was to go a little crazy.

I indulged myself for a breath in the idea that my wife hadn’t really sent me to a battlefield but only gave me the illusion that she had.

It was a brief illusion, though one that often grasps mortals in fairyland. When everything you touch, and everywhere you are might dissolve at a moment’s notice, it’s hard not to believe it is so much the stuff of immaterial soap bubbles. But it’s not. I’d once seen someone killed in fairyland; the friend who was fool enough to accompany me when I came to recover Jimmy. We’ll just say that he was just dead as if he’d died in the mortal world. More, perhaps.

So after my reassuring breath, I knew that the things riding towards me were real. Which meant my only chance at saving myself was to run at one of the approaching armies and join it in its assault.

On one side was an army, mounted on fairy horses. I know enough of fairy – I married into it! – to identify them as high lords of fairy and their retinue. The ones who rode horses largely kept their shapes and they looked as you’d expect elf lords to look, most being too beautiful for mortals and slim to fragility.

The ones on the ground and running fast? Ah, those were something else again, and changed shapes as they ran, some of the shapes being perfectly terrifying.

On the other side, the army approaching, or at least the first rank of it was – I blinked – not men on horseback, as I’d first thought, but centaurs.

This being so, my way was clear. Centaurs are of fairyland, but one of the saner species there. Short of changing into humans, which they do, they remain immutable, and their home life, their cultivation of fields, even their societal arrangements are something one could understand. I’d stayed with them for a week, with Jimmy, as I recovered from– Never mind. As I recovered. And it had been much like staying in any rural village.

Centaurs were understandable. And far preferable to the things on the other side.

I ran to them. Or rather, I ran determinedly at one of them, to the side of the main chief leading the assault.

If I had had time and leisure to think of what I was doing, I daresay I’d have checked. Centaurs, like it is said of the ancient gauls, and like certain tribes in the American colonies, or so I hear, ornament for war. They tie horns and feathers to their head, as well as multicolored fabric and ropes. And they paint their faces in a most fearsome way, with blue and red and black.

The gentleman at whom I was aiming and who, from his position, had to be a relative to the king of Centaurs, looked very young – this was good. You try to jump a full grown centaur – and wore a confusion of multi-colored silks woven with his – I presume – black hair, the whole standing up in a very intimidating way, yet perhaps not wholly suited to a charge where someone might get hold of it. He had painted his face mostly blue save for red under his eyes. And he held a lance that streamed silks, also.

He was a most frightful sight, and had I looked at him full on, I’d surely have run. But I didn’t. I had to run somewhere, and he was it.

I ran full tilt at him, and he – fixed on the opposing army – noticed me at the last minute, and tried to check. It was a good thing he only noticed me then, because had he reared it would have been the end of me.

But he didn’t rear. Instead, he fixed his front legs, and his human torso sort of moved back, and then I was on him, grasping him against his naked middle. Good thing most of them didn’t wear anything in battle, because I sort of used his human body as a place to hold onto, while I swung myself onto his horse back.

His fellows were by then streaming around us, and from the distance there was a clash of weapons.

He should have reared and thrown me off. Battle mad centaurs are really not much better than drunk centaurs, and neither is known for rationality. But I had got a thinking centaur. Perhaps this was his first battle, and he was more than a little afraid. He panted a bit, then straightened himself. Then he said “Who are you? And what do you wish?”

“Wolfe Merrit,” I said. “Supervisor of Manufactories to the Earl of Savage, sir, at your service.”

He said, “You’re what?” as though I’d told him I was a three headed gorgon. No. That he’d surely have taken in stride.

But at the same time a male voice in my head said, “You’re all wrong. That is not your place. You have your own path to walk.”

And like that, I was in the middle of a piney woods, their smell fragrant in my nostrils, and a sense of peace all around, a sense one should never trust in fairyland.

Up ahead, someone was singing.