Rogue Magic, Free Novel, Chatper 54

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

 

The Last Magic

Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage,

When I was very little, when mama and papa tired of me they used to send me to stay with dad’s father.

This fearsome personage, known variously as “his lordship” “the old lord” or Old Nick, all of which, to those under his rules, meant “the old devil,” was … well, he was a rogue.

At the time, my being very young, I didn’t fully understand people’s whisperings about no village maiden (and very few village lads) being safe with him. I thought perhaps he took them somewhere and killed them.

I was, of course wrong. For one, no one would accuse grandfather of being a danger to lads as such. Or lassies. When they said that they meant rather older people. For another, grandfather didn’t feed on blood sacrifice. Whether or not he might have fed on the other greatest impulse for life in the humankind, I refuse to say. For one, it was said he had elven blood.

Now, in the middle of fairyland, and standing next to a bewitching woman who came from yet another world, neither Earth nor fairy, I wondered if that was true. There was something… I won’t call it a scent, for it wasn’t physical, but something about Ginevra Mythborne that reminded me of grandpapa. In fact, I thought, that might be what first interested me in her, though not exactly what first attracted me, because there couldn’t be anything more different between Miss Ginevra’s shape and grandpapa’s.

But in another way, grandpapa, you see, had been one of the anchors of childhood. It’s not that I loved him. At least I don’t think I did. And I certainly didn’t feel safe near him. I very much doubt anyone felt safe near him. There was a reason for those nicknames and he positively exuded all kinds of danger one can exude.

And yet I understood him. I understood him in a way I didn’t understand mama or papa. I understood also that he’d never lie to me. Because he didn’t. He told me the shocking truth, bald as day, and he never thought one should water down things for children.

He’d told me things like “if someone gives you something for free don’t take it. Likely it will cost more than you can spare.” Or “Three things are likely to be lies: a pretty woman, a perfect horse, a crying orphan.”

But beyond that, he liked telling me frightful stories,and he’d taken me to the old stones, the ones the locals called King’s men, and had not told me the story of warriors transformed mid battle. Instead, he’d told me that there was a time men were bery weak and powerless, and besieged by magical creatures in their own world, they’d turend to the blood for protection. He’d told me that now it was illegal, and it might always have been immoral (grandfather was honest enough to never preach of morality) but how in the end blood magic was the most true of magics, and everything else a mere allusion and invoking of it.

And now, in the middle of fairyland it came to me. Something – something that used Ginevra as an agent, probably the mythworld – was gathering rogues from all over, and intended to use us, somehow, for power.

The hair stood at the back of my neck. In the end, the only way to get power from someone else was the blood. It was always the blood.

But then…

The thoughts came rushing upon me, like many fast horses converging on a central point. But then …. Ginevra, myself, the king of fairy and whoever else had fallen into this trap, including probably my misguided sister and yes, Wolf Merrit…. We were all people out of place in our circumstances, people fighting or accepting fate, but out of place in our destiny. And the mythworld was gathering us in.

Well, it bloody well wasn’t to give us a box of chocolates.

I wondered if my fair charmer knew. Looking at her, I said, steadily, “You realize, Miss Ginevra, when they tie us to the sacrificial stone, you’ll be right there along with us?”

She shook. Her lips opened. She started to say, “No! Not–”And then frowned at me, as her eyes widened. “How could you know?”

I should have felt fear or confusion, but her widened eyes, her parted lips, her whole look of confusion made me cackle and say, “Got you now my pretty.”