Rogue Magic, Free Novel, Chapter (probably) 52

*I haven’t gone through all of the backlog — I am also working on through fire and editing The Musketeer’s Servant.  And I still haven’t figured out replicating magic — so there will be inconsistencies.  the only thing I can promise is to fix those as I finish going through it.  It is also probably going to be third person but so “close in” the difference is academic.*

 

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 Caroline Ainsling, Sister of the Duke of Darkwater,

 

Nymphs Sighs, the cookies, as baked by my future mother in law, the centaur queen, were possibly the lightest and best treat I’d ever had. And when you consider my papa hired the best cooks, and that we were always allowed to go around to the kitchen and get cookies, and Michael and I were ever the cook’s great favorites, that is saying something.

I sat at the table, with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk, and found it mildly amusing that we were served this treat, and not tea proper, since surely we were old enough for tea. Then I looked across at where my betrothed – and if truth be told, my beloved, though mama had told me that ladies of quality didn’t say that about their fiances or husbands – was dipping his cookies into the milk, then slurping at the soggy end, and giving quite a good impression of being about two.

Looking up from Akakios’ enjoyment of his food, I met his mother’s eyes, and in them such an exact replica of my feelings of exasperation and tenderness, such an understanding that men, strong and imperious as they can be, had a little-boy side which was charming and disarming, that I smiled at her.

She nodded a little. She was, I thought, the oddest mix of regal and peasant.

Sitting here, in the kitchen, with the cat sleeping in front of the fireplace, and eating cookies at a scrubbed pine table, I might have been sitting in one of the farms belonging to papa’s tenants. Only at the same time, the furniture was just a little too good, the house a little too clean, when there seemed to be no servants about. And there was to the queen of centaurs a suggestion of regal bearing that could have put our very own queen Cecily to shame, even dressed in her royal robes and sitting on the throne.

It came to me in a flash that you couldn’t, or not sanely, compare a society that was mostly magic to a society that wasn’t. You couldn’t, not sanely, compare a kingdom carved out of fairyland to a kingdom like ours where people must still produce most things with the labor of their hands.

I thought that from the outside this village of centaurs looked like any hardscrabble, forsaken village, the houses mostly huts.

But inside the house, it felt much larger than the outside. And I would bet, from the look of the people, that they neither worked sun to sun out on those fields, nor did they have the occasional famines that blighted pastoral communities. I thought this was more like the idea that rich people in my world had of farm life: relaxed and gentle, but with all the strife, the hardscrabble choices taken out of it.

I looked at the cookie in my hand and thought that it might not be such a bad thing to be stuck in this portion of the fairyworld. It had to be better than the school I was consigned to, not to mention the one that poor Akakios had to endure.

As I thought this, Akakios’ mother sat down and got a basket, from which she pulled something upon which she started sewing. I thought it would be some mending, but when I looked closer, it was an intricate tapestry in varied colors.

From the sharp look Akakios gave it, I wondered if it was just a tapestry or something else entirely. After all, magical weaving – using the loom to replicate movements of magic and influence the world – was well known and in fact an art taught in my school, not that I was any good at it, because I wasn’t. Magical embroidery might be just as practical.

Akakios finished the cookie he was eating and licked milk and milky crumbles from his fingers, before wiping his hands on the napkin next to his plate. I’d say I blushed for his manners, only I didn’t. He had quite decent manners – better than mine – when he wished, but now he was home, at his childhood table, and a creature must be allowed to be himself sometimes. I thought too that he probably missed running with the herd, which had seemed to me a remarkably free life.

“Mother,” he said, his voice suddenly grave, for someone who seconds before had been playing with his food. “What do you mean about Night Arrow? Why do you call the king That Poor Boy?”

“He is, isn’t he?” she said, looking up. “When the forces of another, and predatory world come looking for you, and your only chance is to fracture and hide pieces of yourself so many places even you can’t find them all—”

“Is that what he did?” Akakios said. “And why?”

His mother sighed. “Yes. It is what he did, to keep himself from being caught and the world from being destroyed and ripped and eaten by the mythworld.”

“Eaten?”

“Eaten.”

“But mother, if that is possible, if the mythworld can attack ours, why has it never done so before?”

The lady paused, and threaded her needle, then looked up, her lips pursed in a way that showed deep concentration. “Because we never before had such a reluctant king. A king who is divided against himself. Most kings of fairyland have to fight hard to get to the throne, and when they do, they find they like it very well indeed. But Night Arrow would, I think, have preferred to stay in Avalon, with his family and his lover, even if he must be a servant there and is a king here. The mantel of kingship fits uneasily on his shoulders, and the only way he bears it is by visiting Avalon often and being able to play at being mortal.”

“You’re saying his natured created a weakness the mythons will explore?”

The queen pursed her lips some more, forming a little o as though she were getting ready to whistle. But instead she grimaced. “No, not that. In some ways I think his division makes him stronger.   You know how besieged we were under…” she seemed to struggle for words, as they did when trying to translate their names “Glitter Orb, the former king, because as his mind unraveled, so did fairyland. But Night Arrow keeps his mind orderly by visits to a world where logic prevails and causes have consequences. No. It is more that the tension within Night Arrow, his… struggle with himself, makes him the ideal sacrifice to restore the Myth world to its full power. The fact that it would destroy fairyland along with our king is inconsequent to them, of course. People of the Elder world don’t ever consider any other land quite real.” She looked up, and into her son’s pale and shocked face.

“Sacrifice?” Akakios said. “Sacrifice to… the gods?”

“Why are you so shocked? The elder world has ever lived on blood and death and sacrifice. It’s just that…” She sighed. “They feel themselves weaker than before. Fewer of the multiworlds offer them sacrifice. They view this as their one chance at survival. In fact, they’ve been gathering sacrifices from all the worlds, people who have the same… tension as Night Arrow. They plan a grand sacrifice, but for that, they must capture our king. So he divided…”

“And plunged the world into war.”

The Queen shrugged. “Supporters of Glitter Orb maintain that it’s all because we let Night Arrow take the throne. True in a way but beside the point, since Glitter Orb would surely have destroyed the world by now, were he still in power. His mind was disintegrating. But now… now they say he’s all put together again, and that—”

“But the former king is dead!” I said.

She shrugged. “Death in fairyland is rarely permanent my dear.”

“I see,” I said.

“So my husband has gone to fight on the side of Night Arrow, because … we’ve sacrificed a son to get him on the throne, and if Glitter Orb reigns again his vengeance on us will be terrible.”

“But…” Akakios took a deep breath and stood, suddenly, extending a hand to me. “But that means that Caroline and I are those who are unsatisfied with our roles and were lured here…”

“To be part of the sacrifice, of course,” his mother said. She set her embroidery down on her lap. “But son, if the other side wins no one will be safe, on any of the worlds.

With a smooth movement she unfolded her tapestry across the portion of the table that had no food upon it, and I swear the table grew to support it. It was an odd pattern, like nothing I’d ever seen before, like a landscape in tones of gold and silver, but at the same time, with an overlay showing people and things. And the people and things it showed moved, as though they were alive.

Then I realized they were alive, and this was a mirror spell of some sort, because there were armies of centaurs clashing, and—

“So we should find the king and gather him together?” Akakios said. “Or help hide some pieces of him?”

“No,” she said. “Neither. You are to go here,” she pointed at a mountain peak. “And stop this representative of the myth world, before he ferrets out where all of the king’s pieces are.”

Akakios nodded. “You will look after Caroline for me, while I am gone, mother.”

At the same time I let out an outraged protest, his mother said. “No, my son. The lady of the pure magic must go with you. She’s your only chance at survival.”