*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday. If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side. Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post. When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.
Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense. It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *
For previous chapters, look here: https://accordingtohoyt.com/witchfinder/
Mirror Mirror
The dressing room smelled heavily of rose water, as though every surface had been scrubbed with it, every one of the frothy dresses hanging from a rod at the back, dipped in it, every one of the ornate paintings on the wall painted with it.
The smell of roses mixed with other cloying scents: powder and grease paint, wax candles and a trace of the incense that climbed in a thin blue thread of smoke from the mouth of a dragon-shaped incense burner to the ceiling.
The Twin was in front of the mirror, applying makeup with quick, deft gestures. That’s how Barbara, Dowager Duchess of Darkwater always thought of her Fey double as The Twin. She knew the woman had a name, something soft and liquid and running to excessive syllables, but she didn’t know it, just as she didn’t know Gabriel’s elf name. Elves were born with their names, as attached to them and as much a part of their anatomy as a hand or a foot, and as important as their own heart. She knew too that in the human world The Twin went by the name Maryalys Penn, the last being the surname of her first husband, discarded a long time ago, but in Barbara’s mind she was always and forever The Twin – that creature like herself and yet not whom she had first glimpsed for a few moments after she’d been brought back from Fairyland, and before The Twin was sent back to it.
Time had made differences between them, of course. The Twin hadn’t aged from whatever age she’d been when she’d come out of Fairyland with Gabriel. Thirty? Somewhere around there, Barbara thought, thought it was thirty in elf terms, which means she looked very much like the Duchess at seventeen, with pale, creamy skin, rose touched cheeks, plump lips that rested in a smile, and midnight black hair loosed down her back. Only their eyes were different. They’d always been different. The Twin might have been formed from birth to echo the Duchess, which one understood was how Changelings were created, but the eyes, though they might have the same shape and color and be nestled beneath the same dark, arched eyebrows, were not Barbara’s. They managed to be both much, much older than any human who ever lived, and somehow not human. Like the eyes of a bird of prey, glittering and hard.
Had Gabriel had eyes like that, Barbara would never have allowed him into the house, no matter if he was just a child and had been living rough on the streets to escape the fate that The Twin had planned for him.
And now that Barbara thought about it, that was likely to be a point of contention between them. After all, Gabriel had been The Twin’s to dispose of and to do with as she pleased. Or at least The Twin would think so. She could not have approved of the Duke taking him away. And she would hold it against Barbara. No matter.
As The Twin’s gaze met hers in the mirror, for just a second Barbara read surprise in them and then a thread of fear. There were many reasons The Twin might fear her human counterpart, of course, but the quick flicker, quickly subdued, gave Barbara a sense of hope. There was something there. And The Twin was involved in it.
Aloud, she said, “Good evening, Mrs. Penn. Are you preparing for a performance. I beg your pardon interrupting you at this time, but I must have some information from you,” She spoke casually, and adjusted her gloves on her fingers as she spoke, as though this were a social call and she were merely verifying a detail or two. It was probably all to naught. She had never fully known what elves could do – no human did – but she had an idea that Gabriel could smell much more acutely than normal humans, perhaps even smell magic. She’d seen him detect people in falsehood with no other indication. And she knew he could hear far more sharply than normal humans since he’d used that talent all through childhood to cover whatever mischief Seraphim and himself were engaged in at the time.
So this creature could probably hear the frantic beating of Barbara’s heart and surely she could smell the uneasy perspiration as Barbara hoped with all her might that Caroline would stay where she’d left her, at the door to the dressing room and behind some fantastical wheeled horse used in plays, where no one was likely to see her or bother her. Please, let Caroline not come in. Let her not be exposed to The Twin.
None of this mattered. Barbara’s composure must be maintained as much to keep Barbara from breaking down as to fool any external person.
The Twin’s eyes glittered at her from the mirror. “I fail to see in what I might help you my lady,” she spoke, her voice also a perfect imitation of Barbara’s at seventeen or eighteen, dulcet and cultured. “What of mine you wanted, you had already taken: my lover and my child. What more could you want me to give you.”
“My husband was never your lover,” Barbara said, then caught herself. No use speaking half truths around elves. They could always twist them. “No more than in the carnal sense, and there he was many women’s lover. He laid with you, sure. Desired you too, I am sure, since he married me, and I’m sure he saw in me an echo of you, but it is not love. If you don’t know the difference between those, Mrs. Penn, you know not the least thing about being human and all your time amid us has been wasted. As for your son, he was not yours when he came to us. From what I understand he had deserted you more than a year previous, and been living as a beggar in London.” She saw The Twin open her mouth to speak and said, “But that is neither here nor there, Mrs. Penn. What I wish to know is, Where are they? And why?”
Again the stab of fear came. Again the sharp pang of something like panic, behind the hard, inhuman eyes. And The Twin’s voice was a trifle too unconcerned, a trifle too light, as she said, “I have not the pleasure of having the slightest idea what you speak of.” She tapped her chin lightly with a puff with some white powder, and said, brightly. “And now, if you excuse me, I have commitments which I must keep. I’m playing principal female in One Thing And Another, and I must–”
Barbara raised her hand, and let the spell fly. And knew the moment she’d done it that it was a bad idea. It was a minor spell, not very strong, just a compulsion to tell the truth, with a hint of punishment to come. She’d never meant to use it. She’d never have used it, if she’d not got scared. Something she knew, which her husband had told her; yes, and her father too, after he’d recovered her from fairyland. “If you go fighting elves, you must use all the force you can command and not a iota less. Because anything else they’ll eat.”
She’d not known what eat meant till this moment – only as her spell hit The Twin, The Twin absorbed it, swallowed it, and it made her alien elf magic shine more brightly around her preternaturally young form.
And then The Twin Attacked. There was a sense of rushing, and the scent of roses increased till Barbara felt she was choking on them, her mouth and nostrils and everything stuffed with cloying, redolent petals. As she gasped for breath, her body was slammed backwards against a wall, with enough force to rattle her brain. Into this, feelings poured into her, odd feelings: the feeling that she was nothing, that she had never deserved her husband or her children, that she had rightful stolen all those from The Twin, that she was old and useless and not beautiful, a spec of dirt on the face of the world, and one, moreover, that should be dead and gone a long, long time while the glittering creature before her continued to be vital and young and to inspire love and passion.
Barbara’s grandchildren, and her grandchildren’s grandchildren would be dead and long gone, and The Twin would still be beautiful and young and enticing.
Coupled with this came the strong suggestion that Barbara should stop cluttering the Glittering Twin’s world, that she should efface, go, do away with herself.
The Duchess felt both the push and the desire to vanish, but at the same time, she clawed back with her own mind, that no, she had loved her husband and been his true wife, despite his infidelities and his frailties – none of them unusual in one who’d early been elf-touched. And she deserved her time upon the Earth which at any rate belonged more to her than to The Twin, a creature who’d never been fully alive and therefore could not be fully here.
She managed to choke out “No” thought the cloying scent of roses, but she couldn’t lift her hand to make any sign of protection, she couldn’t command her mind to let a spell fly, and she couldn’t breathe. Her heart strained against her chest and she knew presently she would lose consciousness, and then the Twin could dispose of her as though she were an inanimate object. She would too. Even if elves had qualms about murder, they wouldn’t have those against killing humans.
The Twin stood before her, her hair standing in a dark hallow around her head – beautiful like an angel and triumphant like death. For a fleeting moment, Barbara wondered if this was the last sigh her husband had seen, then told herself it was nonsense. Darkwater had committed suicide. Killed himself over gambling debts and women. She had to believe it.
The door blew open. “Mama!” echoed in Caroline’s most outraged accents, and Caroline stood there in the doorway, as young as The Twin looked, but a lot more vital, a lot more alive somehow. “Mama!”
Barbara tried to choke out a warning that Caroline should go, that she should hide, that this creature would get her too, but she had no time. Caroline’s accents were frosty. “Well,” she said. “This is a great deal of nonsense.” Calmly, as though this were something she did every day, she spoke liquid, tripping syllables, which fell onto Barbara’s ears like burning fire, but had an even stronger effect on The Twin.
The Twin tripped backward, like a ragdoll that has lost its stuffing, and fell into her velvet-upholstered chair, in front of her vanity, looking rather like she was indeed a ragdoll, arms and legs asprawl, mouth half open, expression blank.
Barbara, finding that she could breathe, took a deep aching breath and stepped away from the wall. “Caroline,” she said, in shocked accents, and was even more shocked as her daughter turned an admonitory look on her. “Not now, Mama,” the chit said, looking and sounding for all the world as though she were the adult and her much-tried mother the child here. “Afterwards, I’ll explain anything you might well want.”
“Now,” Caroline said, turning to the Twin. “Madam, if you please, and if you don’t want me to use worse upon you, be so kind as to tell me where my brother Michael was taken and by whom and why, and also where Gabriel and Seraphim might be. And do not even think of lying,” Another string of liquid, elven syllables. “There, that will prevent it.”
The Twin flickered. It was like watching the flame of a candle, which now glowed yellow now blue. She flickered, between the human form that looked like Barbara, asprawl on the chair in front of the vanity, to something glittery and hard and bony, like an insect, with an ivory carapace. It as only a moment, and she flickered back to human aspect, her eyes wide and terrified. They looked like a wounded bird of prey’s brought down and about to be rent by dogs. Barbara wished she didn’t enjoy the expression in them quite so much.
The Twin took a deep, raspy breath, and spoke in a deep, raspy voice that sounded somehow reedy and not quite human, and which had lost all its allure and glamour. “The– Fairyland wanted the young one. Your… Your shadow– No.” She seemed to be struggling with the human language, suddenly, and pronounced, with exaggerated care, “Your twin brother. My brother wanted him. I sent him there.”
“I see,” Caroline said. “What did they want him for?”
The twin made a hissing sound, and then another, and then – apparently unable to hold information any longer, and as Caroline moved her hand midair, in a gesture that her mother didn’t quite understand – whimpered and said, “To mine. To pull from… to… to… eat.”
“Eat!” Barbara said outraged, and of course, one heard things, about elves feasting on human children, but she’d never believed it, and besides, Michael was not a child, not in that sense.
“Hush mama,” Caroline said. “You mean to mine him, like a metal source?”
The Twin nodded. “I see,” Caroline said. She looked pale but steady. “You will kindly give us the coordinates and the way to reach him.”
“Don’t know… way to reach him. Coordina– Yes.” She let out a series of the words that could be used as magical coordinates to the location of another world.
Caroline seemed to run it through her mind, or perhaps to memorize it. Barbara, still shaken from her experience, could not concentrate on it, but she knew it was a place in fairyland because of the truncated fifth locator. Fairyland was not a real place, a world like their own and separate from it. Instead it was a parasite universe, a flea riding on the back of the other universes.
She wondered, too, what they meant by mining Michael, and felt as though a cold hand tugged at her heart. They would find him. They would rescue him. But where had Caroline learned to do all this? Barbara was very sure it hadn’t been taught at the Academy for Young Ladies of Distinction where Caroline had been sent for two years after the school room.
“And my brother Seraphim?” Caroline asked, coldly.
“He has escaped us,” The Twin said, in a squawk of fury. “We sent him to the world of the priest kings, but he escaped. He… We cannot find him. It was she who–”
Caroline had taken a deep breath. “And my brother Gabriel?”
“He’s not–”
“My brother Gabriel, by virtue of shared blood, of shared upbringing and of shared fraternal affection. Where is my brother Gabriel? Where have you sent him?”
The Twin’s laughter rang in the room, like a peel of bells. Before Barbara could recover from her shock at this, The Wing said, “He’s gone where he’s always wanted to go. Back to the necromancer.”
“The necro–” Caroline said, and Barbara who had an inkling that this was something she did not want Caroline to dwell into, who had a feeling in fact that this was at the back of whatever had got Gabriel expelled from Cambridge, said, firmly, “He is on his own, then? You have not sent him?”
“No,” The Twin said. “And I cannot tell you his coordinates, because the necromancer keeps his location zipped up. But I’m sure he’s very happy, seeing as he–”
“Stop,” Barbara commanded. “No more. Caroline, I don’t believe you wish to pry into Gabriel’s affairs.”
“No, mama,” Caroline said, meekly. She made a gesture with her hand, and suddenly The Twin went limp, her face blank.
“You killed her,” Barbara said, shocked, more shocked perhaps for a secret feeling of gloating.
“No, Mama,” Caroline said. She put out a hand and held onto Barbara’s forearm, pulling her. “She’s merely in a trance state, where she will stay until she wakes remembering nothing of our visit.”
“Caroline!”
“Yes, Mama?” Caroline said, as she pulled her mother out of the Twin’s dressing room and along a narrow corridor.
They’d exited onto a rather smelly alley when Barbara managed, “If you don’t tell me how you learned this very strange magic, and what you just did to the… to Gabriel’s mother, and with what power, I will have strong hysterics.”
“Yes, mama,” Caroline said, then giggled, as her irrepressible spirit took over once more. “You must forgive me. But it is so funny that I should know something you don’t.” She looked at Barbara and sighed. “It was Gabriel, when Michael and I were three. That,” Caroline made a head gesture towards the back of the theatrical building they’d just left. “Came prowling around. Not after Gabriel. After us. Michael and I.”
“But–”
“Gabriel told us who it was,” she said. “And he taught us how to defend ourselves. He said she often came prowling around because daddy–” she stopped abruptly.
“Yes,” Barbara said, her voice raspy. Internally she thought of Arden. She rarely thought of him by that name, the name she’d called him in private, the name by which she’d fallen in love with him. Arden conjured up the name of the dashing young gentleman he’d been, looking a little like Seraphim and Gabriel, but oh so infinitely more dashing and daring and… everything a young man should be.
Thinking of him as Arden made her heart clench. It made her wonder if she’d ever truly known him, or had his love. Despite what she’d told The Twin, she wondered if in his heart it was The Twin he’d always loved. Elf love was a like an illness, she’d been told. A fever that never fully passed.
It was almost a relief to hear Caroline ask, the prurient curiosity vibrating in her voice, “Who is the necromancer? Who has Gabriel always wanted to go to?”
“I understand he had an unsavory friend in Cambridge, who was… accused of some illegal magic. But as to his always wanted to go somewhere I would place no credence on what the creature said. You know she lies as she breathes.”
“I see,” Caroline said, giving Barbara the uncomfortable feeling she very well did.
Before she could say any more, Barbara interrupted. They were now walking along a main street, well lit, but they were getting veiled glances from other passerbyes. It was not normal for a well dressed mother and daughter to walk along the street at this hour, unaccompanied even by a footman. And if there was a conspiracy of some sort – what else could it be that had made both Gabriel and Seraphim disappear, and which had stolen Michael from the home – then sooner or later someone would spot them. “Caroline,” she said, in little more than a whisper. “We cannot go on in this way. Someone will notice us or recognize us.”
“I know,” Caroline said, with the greatest calm. “I’m just looking for an easy transition point to take us into fairyland.
Madhouse
Seraphim woke up aching, on a strange bed. Not only a strange bed in the sense that it was not known to him, but in the sense that it felt odd beneath him, not like the feather mattresses and pillows he was used to. The blankets above him, too, felt oddly light but very warm.
He struggled from the shadow land he’d wandered in his dream, and heard a moan escape his lips before being awake enough to control them.
“There, Mr. Ainsling,” a voice said. It had an odd accent, and it sounded like that of an elderly woman. Then it said in a matter of fact tone. “You see, he’s coming around. I told you he would. A good thing too. If he hadn’t awakened we must have taken him to the hospital.”
The voice that answered this first was familiar. It was Miss Felix’s voice, though it sounded more relaxed than it ever had. “It wouldn’t have been possible. In his state, he’d just have died there.”
“Would he really? But why? He’s not that ill, you know? A minor infection which the antibiotics will take care of, and very tired, that’s all.”
“I know. But their magic is not like that of Earth. They have, I think, a good bit of elf or fairy or something, or perhaps their magic is different and older. They react badly to what they call cold iron.”
“But surely the Victorians used an awful lot of iron,” the older voice said. “You can’t tell me that they have that level of civilization without–”
“Oh, no. But they use spells in the forging so it doesn’t affect them.”
Seraphim tried to pry his eyes open and to protest, but he couldn’t, and presently, darkness overwhelmed him again.
He woke up being moved. This indignity puzzled him for a moment, because he was being bodily dragged by two women – he was sure of it by the hand size and the awkward way in which they pushed him this way and that. He could discern no rhyme or reason to the movement until he felt cool fabric under him. Then he realized they were changing the bed under him, and wondered why they hadn’t called a man-servant to move him to a chaise or a sofa while that was done. And were the two women making the bed Miss Felix and… he remembered her calling as they landed in Madhouse– her grandmother? Had they no maids, either? Had he landed in a poor cottager’s family? He must be giving them the devil of a time. He must awake and go home.
With an superhuman effort, he brought his eyes open, just as the two women pulled a sheet and something else – something that looked like a colorful patchwork quilt – over him, but which felt much lighter and warmer than any quilt that Seraphim had ever seen.
He was reclining against pillows – very soft pillows – in a bright room. It didn’t look like a cottage, or smell like one either. The scents in the air were clean with a hint of flowers, and the room was as large as most workmen cottages, and furnished, besides, in style, if sparsely. It had a dresser up near the window and it was a vast, polished dresser, with a mirror above. The bed on which Seraphim lay wasn’t curtained, but it looked well made and almost new. There was also a bedside table, and what appeared to be a desk under the window. He blinked. “Where– ”
“You’re at my grandmother’s house, your grace. This is my grandmother, Mrs. Lilian Felix.”
He looked at the older woman, and was almost shocked, when she failed to curtsy and instead smiled at him, amused. “Your Grace, is it? What is that, a Duke? Well, we don’t have those, so don’t get all bent out of shape if I call you Mr. Nell says your name is Ainsling.”
“Seraphim Ainsling,” Seraphim said, while trying to figure out what she meant by their not having dukes. Surely it couldn’t be … They didn’t sound French.
She smiled. “Well. Seraphim is an odd name. It’s plural, isn’t it?”
Seraphim felt like he really had fallen into a Madhouse. Never had he and Gabriel bestowed a more appropriate name on any place. “My father named all his sons after angels,” he said. “And his first legitimate heir seemed to demand something more, so he named me after a whole order of angelic beings.”
“I see,” the older lady said, coking her head sideways. She looked nothing like Miss Felix, being very fair where Miss Felix was dark, and having brilliant blue eyes that reminded Seraphim of a certain kind of enamel. “I can’t very well call you Seraphim, though, so you shall be Mr. Ainsling. I apologize, but I haven’t paid any attention to forms of address to the nobility, not even when I was young and read an awful lot of very bad regency romances.” She smiled brightly at these nonsensical words, then added, “I’ll go get you some food, shall I? I bet you’ll be very glad to eat something solid, instead of the milk we’ve been tipping down your throat, and maybe you’ll feel well enough afterwards to take a shower.”
There followed the oddest two hours that Seraphim had ever lived through, and that included both trying to calm Gabriel after he found the still living body of Aiden Gypson in Marlon’s attic closet, and the hour that had followed that one, when Seraphim had tried to challenge Marlon to a duel and had it sternly pointed out to him that it would only fan the flames of scandal.
This time, there was nothing as shocking. It was more that all of life was both very familiar and completely odd. Take the meal they brought him: bread and broth with a little bit of cheese, followed, after some discussion, by a pot of strong, black tea.
None of the foods was alien or repulsive, like the fried bugs they ate in at least one of the worlds that Seraphim and Gabriel had visited.
But the bread was whiter and softer than any bread Seraphim had ever eaten, the broth was completely clear, as though it had been many-times strained, so that there were no bits of meat in it. It tasted of hints of garlic and spices, too, not normally something given to an invalid. The dishes, too, were odd, being fine and clearly new or at least very white and never mended. Yet, they were served upon a wooden tray, even if the tray was adorned with a lace cloth. He could not make sense of the signals he got about the Felix’s station in life. The house felt roomy and clean, but he had yet to hear of a servant, much less to see one. The dishes were new, and very good quality, but they didn’t seem to command silver or even pewter. It was like being caught in the middle of a puzzle he couldn’t solve.
And then there had been the bathing facilities, which had completed confusing him. The bathroom, next to the bedroom – which was odd by itself. What did the people in other rooms do when they wished to wash? – had a sink and a bathtub, but it also had a square enclosed in glass and floored in tile. that both the sink and the square – and the bathtub too – had running water and running water whose temperature could go from freezing to very hot with adjustments of two handles, shocked him to his core. He could not feel the magic by which it had been done. Then there was the toilet with the flushing mechanism. He’d heard of such, but he’d always thought they’d be inconvenient and smelly. Turned out no smell escaped.
However, he had his work cutout for him, making both women leave the bathroom and not help him use the appliances, or remove his clothes. They seemed very matter of fact about it, and afraid he’d fall, so that what would have seemed gross indelicacy at any other time, now seemed an excess of quasi-maternal concern. Which did not make him feel any better.
At length he’d showered, in gloriously warm water on the edge of hot, and washed his hair and body with the products that had been indicated to him.
He was dry and had put on a dressing gown, which they’d left for him – and which seemed to be a severe blue affair, made of the same material as the towels – when someone knocked at the door. At his call to come in, Miss Felix bustled in, bringing him something that looked completely alien, and which she handed to him with the look of someone who has completed a long quest, “Grandma says you’ll want to shave. She’ll pick up a cheap electric razor at the drugstore when she goes into town later, but for now this is the best I can do. Sorry it’s pink.”
The object looked like it was made of some sort of pliable shell, or perhaps hard jelly, and it was definitely pink, though it bore no resemblance whatsover to a razor, Seraphim thought. As he looked at it, puzzled, she giggled and took it back, “I suppose you’ve never seen a safety razor.” She pointed to the little glint of metal. “These are the blades. Here.” She got something from a compartment behind the mirror, a cylindrical, metallic container, and sprayed a dot of white foam on her arm, then ran the apparatus over it, removing the foam and a little bit of the almost invisible hair on her arm. “Like that.”
She’d stayed, surveying him and helping with instructions when he got confused, but perhaps he should be grateful that she didn’t help him. By the end of it, he was exhausted, and all too glad to be led back to the bed, where he laid, recovering his breath.
For the first time, it occurred to him that not only Mis Felix but her grandmother too were very oddly dressed. They wore blue pantaloons of some sort, and light blouses on top, so fine that one could see the shape of their body, and the contours of what appeared to be a garment for controlling the bosom. Seraphim felt himself blush just at the thought. He was no halfling, but what seemed most shocking about these garments was the fact that the women wore them casually and not at all like they meant to seduce anyone.
“Miss Felix,” he said, at length. “I see we came to world I meant to come, but you changed the coordinates. I presume it was because… I mean, you’ve indicated you know this world?”
“ Oh, sure,” she said. “I grew up here. I had to bring you here, because… well… because Grandma knows magic, and taught me some of it, so I figured she’d understand why you couldn’t go to a hospital, because that’s in larger population centers and there would be too much metal for you in your condition. But also–”
“Yes?”
“Grandmother is semi-retired, but she’s a vet. A veterinarian, I mean. She treats animals. So I knew she could still get prescriptions for antibiotics, and I could tell you had a raging infection and fever.”
“Antibi–”
“Tablets that cure infections,” she said. And then quickly sketched for him the level of civilization of this world. She was clear and concise, and could have no idea how much she shocked him. The other worlds without magic that he’d seen were mired in the dark ages, with none of the comforts of civilization. These must be a very ingenious people indeed, to have made all these changes to their way of life, and without magic, too.
“But…” he said, at last. “It sounds like a very comfortable arrangement. How came you to leave it?”
“I wanted to know where I came from,” she said.
