Magic Under Stone Read online

  “I know you need time to grieve,” she said. “But let it out, and let it go. Take it from my own experience… you will feel better if you take action, in any small way you can right now. Keep working on your magic.”

  “My magic?” I snapped. “For all the good it does. ‘Oh, Erris, let me keep you warm while a jinn blasts you into the next world!’” My eyes welled with furious tears. I didn’t know if I was more furious at the jinn or the fairy king or myself-but it was Annalie I wanted to lash out at, Annalie, who didn’t care about Hollin, who apparently didn’t care about anything.

  I went to my room before I said things I didn’t mean, or didn’t want to say-it was hard to tell the difference just now. I cried long and hard, but no matter how much I let it out, I didn’t know how I could ever let it go.

  THE WOODS, LORINAR

  It was some time past midnight when Violet stirred.

  “Have-have I been sleeping long?”

  “Almost five hours, I think.”

  She fidgeted. “Ouch! I’m stiff. Where are we going? How long are we going to be riding on this horse? Do you think we really ought to be out in the cold for so long? Don’t you need sleep?”

  “Not much. You’ll be all right with me.”

  “Well, I’m hungry.”

  Ifra took from his pocket the last of the dried apples the fairies had sent him off with and put them in her hand. “There.”

  She unwrapped the paper. “Apples? Can’t you conjure a feast or something?”

  He shook his head. “Conjuring is only for the three wishes. I could manage an illusion, I suppose, so you think it’s something else.”

  She gasped. “Could you make it chocolate cake?”

  He frowned. “I don’t think I’ve ever eaten that. How about… well, we don’t have a bowl, so it needs to be something firm. How about a steamed beef and onion dumpling?”

  “Ugh. What about pie? Raspberry pie!”

  “I’ve never had that either.”

  “You’ve never had anything. Where do you come from?”

  “A faraway land without chocolate.” He gave the sad lump of dried apples the appearance of a soft, warm beef dumpling. “Try that.”

  She took a very tiny bite, and then a larger one. “Well… all right.”

  He still was somewhat concerned about what to do with her. He could work his magic on her, like the horse, so she wouldn’t need rest or food or heat until he delivered her to Luka, but she wouldn’t like it, and even the northern fairy gate was a few days’ ride away, with Telmirra another week at best. If the weather held.

  He spread his magic, sensing for those pockets of heat in the surrounding countryside that meant life. Much of the inhabited land was behind them now, in Cernan, but there was another town to the southwest, with scattered farms around it. The farms were preferable, he thought-less chance they’d have communication with Cernan.

  “I’ll find us a place to sleep soon,” he told Violet.

  She got quiet again. She smoothed a mitten over the books in her arms. “My father will get back and I’ll be gone.”

  “When is he coming back?”

  “Spring.”

  “Maybe everything will be sorted out by then. You can send for him.”

  She settled a little closer against him. “Ifra, you remembered me. When you went away. Do you remember… everything about when we met?”

  “I remembered because you gave me your hair ribbon.”

  “Well, I wanted you to remember me,” she said.

  “I think I remember everything,” he said, teasing around the answer she wanted.

  She took a quick breath. “They said you were dangerous, though Celestina hardly even saw you. I tried to tell Nimira it wasn’t your fault, but she pretty much just laughed at me. And Celestina acts like she knows everything and I don’t, but I don’t think she’s ever had a beau either.”

  He could identify with her loneliness, but he found her naiveté vaguely annoying. He’d had to work hard and grow up fast-or at least, try his best to grow up fast. Sometimes he felt like he’d done a poor job of it. “They were right, you know. I am dangerous. I don’t want to be, but that doesn’t change things. I don’t want to scare you, but… perhaps Celestina and your father had a point in keeping you isolated. The second King Luka found out about you, look what happened. And it could have easily been that Belin brought him a mean and nasty jinn, and that mean and nasty jinn would have a hold of you right now.”

  “But I wouldn’t have given that jinn my hair ribbon.”

  He sighed.

  Not long after that, they reached the farmhouse he’d been aiming for. He knocked on the door, Violet huddled beside him. A dog started barking, then two dogs. In another moment, the door was open and the dogs were barking and jumping on Ifra and Violet while a man with a bushy mustache held up a lantern. “Hello! It’s much too cold to be outside! What are you two thinking? Come inside!” He had a merry, rolling accent.

  Ifra hustled Violet in. Calm yourselves! he thought fiercely at the dogs. Thank goodness, they were eager to please and sat right down.

  The man blinked at them. “Mercy. What happened to you boys?” The dogs looked up at him almost apologetically. “I’ve never seen them behave like that before.”

  There was no time for introductions before an awful lot of children-six, at quick count-a wife, and a white-haired woman came down the stairs, and they were all very loud, with a lot of religious exclamations. “Saints alive, what’s all this?” “Heavens!” “God have mercy, who’d be out in this cold at this hour?” The younger half of the children just seemed to be screaming for the fun of it. The dogs started going again, running around the family, a wagging tail almost taking out the smallest boy.

  “My name is Ifra, and this is Violet, and we’re-”

  “Of course, of course! We’ll have none of that! Do you need something to eat? Of course you do! Ma, is the fire still going? Well, we should heat some tea!” The women and the oldest daughter, who might have been sixteen or seventeen, were fretting over Violet at the same time. “You must be half-frozen, child!” “Let me get your wraps!” “Come here, we’ll get you warmed up!”

  Ifra had used a little magic to dampen their alarm and confusion at the sight of two mysterious strangers appearing at the door in the middle of the night, but this seemed excessive.

  The family mostly asked and answered their own questions. “Where’d you come from?” the father asked.

  “They must have come from town, Pa! I bet they got lost!” the eldest son answered.

  “Happens sometimes, when the snow covers up the landmarks,” the old woman said. “Poor dears. Are you new in town?”

  “They must be, I’ve never seen them before. Where are you from originally?”

  “They’re obviously Roscardian. Are you brother and sister?”

  “Sure, look at the family resemblance, Pa. It’s in the ears. People look at eyes and noses, but you can always tell by the ears, really. Look at us, we’ve all got the same ears.”

  Ifra let them go on thinking whatever they wanted. The truth was quite a bit more complicated. His hands were shaking a little, as if his body knew it finally had a chance to rest.

  A cup of tea was put before him, and then a slice of toast. And though he didn’t need the food, it tasted as good as any beef dumpling he could imagine.

  Violet, usually so chatty herself, looked overwhelmed, and slightly irritated, by the noisy family. Her eyes went wide with horror when the sisters of the family said she could sleep with them.

  “You don’t have a bedroom for guests?” she said.

  “Mercy! You must be the banker’s daughter or something. Anyway, it’d be awfully cold,” the mother said.

  Violet started coughing, looking quite cross. Two of the sisters hugged her, one on each side. “Don’t worry!” “It’ll be such fun!” “We have an extra nightgown Lissy’s grown out of!” Ifra knew he shouldn’t smile, but Violet had precisely the ex
pression of a cat being dressed in doll clothes.

  They hustled her upstairs.

  “And you can sleep with the boys,” the father said.

  “The boys” grinned at him. Ifra started to say surely he was too old-but no. Of course he wasn’t. This man still saw him as a boy.

  “I prefer to be alone,” Ifra said. “I’ll sleep downstairs. If you have a blanket to spare…”

  “It’s too drafty in the parlor! You’ll freeze. And we wouldn’t dream of asking a guest to sleep in the kitchen!” the mother said.

  “I will not freeze,” Ifra said softly, meeting their eyes in turn, and a flicker of fear passed through them, as if they had finally noticed that he looked nothing like the people of Cernan.

  The mother stood. “I’m sure we have a spare blanket somewhere.” The boys dispersed, rough-housing their way up the stairs. The old woman gathered the dishes. It got very quiet.

  Ifra waited for them all to leave. He took off his coat and shoes and lay down on the rug before the unlit fireplace. The room was cluttered and a little shabby. It seemed like a wonderful place.

  One of the dogs came from the kitchen to stand in the doorway-he heard its nails clicking on the wooden floor. It looked a little shy. He waved it over and the gray beast settled down beside him with a sigh. Ifra wondered if maybe he was the kind of person who preferred animals to people. Maybe he would ask Luka for ownership of his horse, and a few good dogs and cats, instead of a wife. Maybe some chickens as well.

  Somewhere in the middle of his dream list of animals, he fell asleep.

  He woke to a whisper in his ear. “Ifra?”

  “Hmm?”

  Violet was sitting behind him. “I thought those stupid girls would never go to sleep. They snore too, at least one of them does. Were you sleeping? I thought you didn’t need sleep.”

  “I want sleep.” He turned over to look at her. Her hair was down, and all rippled from being in braids. She had a nightgown on that should have buttoned to the neck, but the buttons looked like they’d mostly been torn off by the previous owner, perhaps in some sibling scuffle, baring her neck and the sharp edge of a collarbone.

  The longer he looked at her, the less peevish she looked, and the more anxious… and lovely.

  “I’m cold,” she whispered.

  He rearranged the blanket so he could throw a corner around her shoulder, and she settled down with him, her small body rigid.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “It’s so ordinary here. I mean… these people are nice. Maybe a little too nice. And then when everyone went to bed and I had time to think…” She took a deep breath. “I can’t believe… Uncle Erris might be dead. And I’m going to the fairy kingdom, and… it doesn’t seem quite real. I’m not prepared for it to be real.” She turned to him, stricken. “I don’t want to be a queen! I want to go home.”

  “I’m scared, too, but-”

  “I never knew jinn could be scared. You must have granted zillions of wishes already.”

  “Twelve,” he said. “I guess Luka’s wish for me to serve him was the thirteenth.”

  “Three wishes times four? You’ve only granted wishes to four people?”

  “Well, I’m only seventeen. I haven’t been doing this for long.”

  “What were the wishes?” she asked.

  “I’m starting to forget. When I have a new master, I forget the last ones, mostly.”

  “How do you become a jinn who grants wishes? It obviously wasn’t something you wanted.”

  “It happens to all of us. On our seventeenth birthday. I wasn’t sure what day I was born, exactly, so it was a surprise, but maybe it’s best that way. One day I guess I just blacked out, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up to this person holding a golden oil lamp. My first master was young, I remember that. A boy. Wait-a thief. He’d lost a thumb as punishment for pickpocketing, and he asked for it back.” Ifra smiled a little. “That wasn’t such a bad wish.”

  “And before that… you lived somewhere without chocolate?”

  “We didn’t have a lot of food. There was grass, so we raised animals, and we had milk and yogurt, but we only had about ten fruits and vegetables. The best time of year was when we’d go to the big market and get spices and tea.” His eyes glazed in the dark room, thinking of the colors of the bazaar that were such a striking contrast from the tan rocks and dull green brush he had stared at every day.

  “What about your family? Do you have sisters and brothers?”

  “No. I don’t have a family, not really. My mother is a slave and my father is her master, so a free jinn raised me. I spent the better part of the year on a farm, with a couple that didn’t have any children to help with the crops and the animals. I was good with the animals. Plus, if there wasn’t enough food, they didn’t have to eat as much when I was around, so they never had to starve.” That was a good memory too. Sometimes his magic truly felt like a gift. “Why so many questions, anyway?”

  “I don’t know you. I’m not afraid of you like Celestina and Nimira wanted me to be, but when you came out of the forest, I thought you were immortal and mystical, and you would protect me and say wise things, like in books.”

  Ifra laughed. “I was never like that.”

  “All I had to go on were those books. I had a book of stories about jinn.”

  “Well, what about you?” he said. “I don’t know you either. I know people forget you, and your father wants to protect you, and the people in Cernan don’t even know you exist, so I presume you don’t leave the house much.”

  “Sometimes in summer, Papa takes me to New Sweeling to buy me new toys and books and clothes. That’s it. I was always sick, anyway, especially in the cold months, so I mostly stayed in bed and read books and made up stories with my paper dolls. Nobody knew what was wrong with me. They thought it might be tuberculosis, and that I would die.”

  “But you didn’t, clearly.”

  “No. Uncle Erris knew what was wrong. He knew things I suppose my mother would have known. I don’t know how much alike they were, but when he told stories about her… I almost wished he’d stop. I didn’t realize, until I heard them, how much I wanted a mother.” She paused. “No, that’s not true. I always knew it. I just tried to hide it away because Papa would be so sad. He was already sad.” She sniffed. “I guess I associate my mother with sadness, but Erris told me she was always cheerful and silly, and she was always getting in trouble, and for the first time I could really imagine her.”

  She wiped her face, rather dramatically, with her sleeve. “But anyway. I mean, it’s no use thinking about that. Except that Erris… he made me curious about being a fairy. I wanted to see where my mother came from. And now he’s gone too. I just don’t understand why the fairy king would want to kill him without even meeting him.”

  “He did meet Erris, when they were young,” Ifra said. “Of course, that still doesn’t explain why he wanted to…” The word “kill” jarred him. Those were not the words of the wish. “No, that’s not right. He didn’t want him killed. He wanted his clockwork body destroyed.”

  “Same thing.”

  “But… it’s a funny choice of words. It would have been easier to tell me just to kill him, but Luka was very aware that jinn can twist the words of wishes, and those were the words he chose.” The way Ifra kept feeling a wisp of Erris back in Telmirra nagged at him.

  Violet’s eyes shot wide open. “Death sleep,” she said.

  “Death sleep? I don’t understand.”

  “We don’t know what happened to Uncle Erris’s real body. Is it dead? But if it was, wouldn’t the fairy king just have asked you to kill him? Wouldn’t it be the same thing?”

  Violet told him a story about poking around her father’s study, finding clockwork mice and a clockwork cat and a clockwork woman, and journals that explained how her father had enchanted automata by putting living creatures in a death sleep and then coaxing their souls elsewhere. “I guess he was looking for
a way to raise the dead, but it never worked,” she said. “Or else… he could have brought back my mother.”

  Ifra sat up and took from his pocket the cravat pin Luka had given him to aid in tracking Erris. “Maybe that explains why I kept feeling Erris back at the fairy kingdom even while I was supposed to track him down at Cernan. I could never pinpoint exactly where his spirit was, so I assumed it was just because he used to live there, and the strange nature of his enchantment. Like a bit of a ghost.”

  “No. He’s alive. He must be.” Violet met his eyes. There was a new brightness to her, an electric sense of purpose. “We just have to find him. And wake him up.”

  THE FAIRY KINGDOM

  Ifra’s sense of the weather was not as sharp as his ability to sense living beings, but he had a little warning of the winter storm approaching. They were not long past the fairy gate. He didn’t tell Violet-didn’t want to alarm her-but aimed for a nearby village. If the storm snowed them in for some days, he didn’t want to impose on an isolated family. Maybe they could find an inn of some sort.

  “Is there a festival going on?” Violet asked, looking delighted by the main street coming into view.

  A bonfire blazed in the town square, with a dozen or so fairies singing and dancing while musicians played merry music. A few brightly painted carts decorated with now-familiar fairy designs of animals, intricate knots, and symbols, sold hot food and drinks, their smells roasty and alluring.

  “Ohhh,” Violet moaned. “I haven’t had real food since the pancakes.” After the hospitality of the farm family, including a generous pancake breakfast with the last of their blueberry jam, Ifra felt too guilty to impose on anyone else. He’d accepted a few of their apples and given them to Violet twice a day, enchanted to resemble the best foods he could think of, which rarely pleased her. They slept in sheds, barns, or abandoned cabins.

  “Wait here.” Ifra dismounted and approached one of the food carts.

  “Hello, traveler. Popcorn?”

  Ifra wasn’t familiar with popcorn, but Violet was clapping her hands. He nodded, digging coins from his pocket. “Is it a holiday?”