“You know my family?” Charles asked in surprise. Who was this woman?
“I did, once. Poor little Persephone.” She shook her head. “I wish I could help her.”
Charles blinked. “Then you don’t want her to marry your son?”
The veiled woman drew herself up. “I am not his mother. His father…took me after his first wife died.”
So Margaret was the fairy lord’s half-sister. That made sense. But who was her mother? “Ma’am,” he began, but she had taken Margaret’s hand and was drawing her away.
“Not now. We shall talk another day. I…I am tired now. Good-bye for now,” she said.
“I’ll come and find you later,” Margaret called over her shoulder.
Charles started to protest as they hurried away—they couldn’t stop now, before he’d found out who she was! But then he saw the fairy lord striding back down the field toward him and wondered if that had anything to do with their precipitate departure. His questions would have to wait for another time.
He went to meet his new master and bowed respectfully to him. If he was going to do this, he might as well do it right.
“Well, little wizard,” the fairy lord said, looking at him with that amused expression again. “What do you think of my land so far?”
“I don’t know. It’s…um…a little dimmer here than I’m used to,” Charles said diplomatically.
He inclined his head. “You’ll soon grow used to it, and wonder how you endured the burning light of your own world. Now, come. It isn’t good for someone unfamiliar with these lands to linger out here alone. Especially not a human.”
“Why isn’t it safe for me to be alone, sir?” Charles looked around him as they went up the hill toward the house. Knowing what might be lurking out here when he tried to sneak back through the door to get help for Persy would be helpful.
“Because there are beings in this world who would find an unwary human an almost irresistible quarry. Until you learn our ways and folk, you must be very careful, even if you are possessed of magic.”
Charles nodded. “Yes, sir. I have no desire to be anything’s dinner.”
“There are even worse things than being eaten for dinner, little wizard.” The fairy lord’s eyes glinted. “Be glad you do not know what they are.”
There seemed to be no good answer to that, so Charles held his tongue. The fairy lord led him into the house through a pair of doors guarded by two more of his warriors. Beyond the doors was a great hall, empty just now, with columns that looked like living tree trunks growing directly out of the stone floor. They walked the length of this room, their shadows dancing grotesquely in the light of the few torches left lit, and went through another set of doors with another pair of guards. Charles eyed them curiously.
“You have a lot of guards,” he observed.
“I do, because I just defeated an invading force and chased them back into their own lands, and they resent that. I won’t take any chances now that the mother of my children is here,” he replied.
They were ascending a spiraling staircase now, which opened onto a broad passage hung with tapestries and lit at intervals by some sort of lamp—at least, that was what Charles guessed they were.
“Here. You may have this room,” the fairy lord said, pushing open a door. “I don’t think anyone else is using it right now. You may sleep for now.”
“But—but shouldn’t I be doing something?” What did a page do, anyway, besides standing about near his master?
“Why? Is there something you’d like to do?” The fairy lord looked at him inquiringly. “I have work to do and do not wish you getting in my way, which is what you will do until you’ve learned how we live.”
“Don’t you sleep?”
“Not very often. I am generally too busy.”
Drat—that put a bit of a damper on his trying to find ways to help Persy. He glanced around his small, rather spartan room. “Am I supposed to be wearing your livery or something?”
“Would you like to? I suppose we could find something for you to wear.” He loomed over Charles, and fixed him with a stern look. “Sleep now, little wizard,” he said softly, and suddenly Charles felt as if weights had been attached to his eyelids. For a few fleeting seconds he thought about resisting it. But it was probably better not to give his new master any sign that he could resist…and besides, the narrow bed in the corner draped in soft white blankets looked exceedingly comfortable….
He awoke suddenly, his eyes popping open. Where was he? He’d just been in the middle of a dusky field, holding someone close against his chest while soft tendrils of her hair tickled his nose. He strained to see in the darkness, and an oblong of violet twilight some feet away made him sit up and stare.
Memory came flooding back then. He was in his room in the fairy lord’s palace, here to try to rescue Persy, and the fairy lord had commanded him to sleep—
“I thought all humans snorted like beasts while they slept,” said a voice practically in his left ear. “But you didn’t at all. I’ve been watching you for ever and you didn’t snort once.”
Charles snapped his fingers and muttered “lux!” A soft glow suddenly suffused the room, revealing Margaret seated on a low stool beside his bed, her chin resting on one hand as she regarded him. She no longer wore her feather dress, but a simple, unadorned frock of blue linen. Her silver-blonde hair was drawn back in a plait that hung over her shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded. Good thing he hadn’t stopped to do more than pull off his coat before he collapsed last night—er, whenever it was when he fell into bed.
“I told you. I wanted to hear this funny noise humans are supposed to make when they sleep, but you didn’t do anything, even when I went into your—” she sat back and closed her mouth.
“Er, well…” He looked at her and wondered what she had been about to say, but decided not to pursue the matter. “It’s probably time I got up, anyway. What time is it?”
“What do you mean?” Her brow wrinkled.
“Don’t you have clocks here?” He felt at his waistcoat pocket, pulled out his watch and looked at it. It had stopped, so he gave it a quick wind and held it out to her.
She bent to peer at it. “It’s making a funny noise!”
“That means it’s working. It’s counting time.”
“You can count time? Really?” She examined the watch again. “How? I thought it just…went.”
“Well, it does…but you can divide it into lengths called seconds and minutes and hours…” He trailed off at the incomprehension in her face. In a world without sunrise and sunset to divide time into day and night, maybe watches didn’t make much sense. But they must have some way of marking time—
“Your sister is awake,” she said, banishing thoughts of watches and time from his thoughts.
“She is? Good! Can I see her?” He pushed the blankets aside and sat up. Something fell off the foot of the bed.
Margaret reached over and picked it up. “What’s this?” she said, holding up a bundle of cloth. “It looks like clothes.”
He reached for it. “I think it might be for me. I told your brother I thought I should be dressing more like you if I’m going to live here.”
She frowned. “But I like you in your clothes.”
“But your brother—”
“He won’t notice what you wear. He’s too busy with everything else. I’m surprised he’s paid as much attention as he has to your sister, except that he wants to have babies.” She folded her arms and looked disgusted.
“These could use a wash. I think I’d be more comfortable in something clean.” Come to think of it, he needed to find out if there were baths in the fairy lands.
“I suppose that’s true.” But she looked disappointed.
Charles waited. Finally he said, “I, um, would like to change.”
“Yes, I was waiting for you to.”
She was joking. She had to be. But no, her expression when sh
e looked at him was serene, maybe a little puzzled. He took a deep breath. “Humans—at least where I’m from—like to have some privacy when they do things like bathe or change their clothes.”
“Oh.” She stood up, looking uncertain. “What should I do?”
He stood up too. “Maybe wait for me outside my door?”
“Must I? Oh, all right.” She went to the door and left. Charles breathed a sigh of relief and swiftly changed into his new attire. He straightened his bed, folded his clothes and left them on the chair along with the copy of History and Policy of the Norman and Angevin Kings that was still in his coat pocket—there was no escaping his summer reading, was there?—and went to find Margaret.
“You’re his what?” Persy stared at him from one of the window seats in her room overlooking the fountains in a courtyard, just down the hall from his.
Charles winced at her outraged tone and looked down at his new clothes, a green tabard over brown tunic and leggings. He’d thought they made him look interestingly like someone from one of Sir Walter Scott’s medieval novels…but judging by his sister’s expression, they just made him look silly. Persy was lucky—at least she looked good in these flow-y things.
“His page,” he mumbled. “It was the only thing I could think of at the time.”
Margaret had brought him there, but he’d been driven back by the gaggle of fairy women seated around Persy’s luxurious sitting room, chattering like a flock of agitated sparrows as they sewed and embroidered a new wardrobe for Persy. He couldn’t face their scrutiny or their giggles, so Margaret had gone ahead and distracted them with a nicely-staged temper tantrum over some supposed defect in one of Persy’s new dresses, and driven them off. He’d slipped into the room in their wake, and been most gratified by Persy’s shriek of surprise—imagine, Persy shrieking!—and her launching herself at him, hugging him till he’d protested. But when he’d calmed her down enough to explain that Lochinvar was not with him and that he wasn’t here to take her directly home—at least not yet—her joy had evaporated.
She slumped back into the window seat and shook her head, staring morosely out the glassless window—no glass was needed here in this land of eternal June. “I appreciate your trying to rescue me, Charles, but…but now you’re stuck here too, aren’t you?”
“No, not at all,” he replied with more confidence than he felt. After all, the fairy lord hadn’t actually said so.
But Persy wasn’t listening. “And how could you agree to work for him? Do you know what he’s done to me? I’m bound here. Bound to him. I have been ever since my wedding day.” A tear slipped down her cheek, and Charles guessed from her reddened eyes that she’d been crying a lot since she arrived here.
“And now we’re going to figure out a way to get you out of here,” Charles said fiercely. Seeing his powerful elder sister in such despair was unnerving.
“Charles, you don’t seem to understand. I—I can feel the magic he’s used to bind us. I’ve been examining it almost since the moment I woke up here after he took me from the woods. It’s old magic—very old fairy magic. Breaking it would be like trying to break a mountain—you just can’t.” She swallowed. “Only death can break the bond between us.”
“Oh.” It was a ridiculously inadequate response to such a statement, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say. Then he brightened. “Then we could destroy him. That would release you.”
Persy gave a mirthless chuckle. “What a splendid idea. Would you like to try it?”
Charles remembered the armed folk standing guard around this great house, and remembered too his new master’s slender but powerful build and the magic he’d already seen he was capable of. “Er, well, maybe not. But there has to be something we can do to get you out of here.”
“Charles.” Persy held her hand out to him. He came closer and took it, and saw another tear follow the first one, and then another. “There isn’t. It’s all I’ve thought about, when I have time to think.”
“Look here, I’m not going to give up—and you can’t either. We’ll think of something, but you have to try. Don’t let him win. Keep fighting.”
She regarded him sadly. “But he already has won. He won before we even knew there was a fight.”
“No,” Charles said fiercely and a little desperately. She couldn’t just let the fairy lord win so easily. “I’m not accepting that, and neither can you. What would Lochinvar say? He’s not giving up.”
Persy quickly looked away, and he saw her swallow convulsively once or twice. “Does…does he know where I am?” she asked in a low voice.
“Well, we didn’t know for sure, but we suspected—or at least, Lorrie did. She knows a lot about fairies—she said she’d read lots about them. I’m sure that she and Lochinvar are thinking about what can be done.” If only there were some way for him to get word to them about all this.
“I wish I’d known that before…no, it wouldn’t have done any good, because I didn’t know what was happening. It was like living in a bad dream—he kept calling me, and I had to follow the call….” She shuddered, then lifted her head and looked at him. “Promise me you’ll leave when you get the chance. You have to let them know what happened to me. And as glad as I am to see you, I don’t want you to be stuck here too. It’s—it’s not a fit place for human beings.”
A commotion of feminine voices outside the door made them both look up. Persy sighed. “I think my ladies are back. You’d better go. I don’t see why anyone would mind me talking alone to my little brother, but…” she shrugged and shook her head.
“I don’t know if I can get through that lot. They’re as noisy as a parcel of geese with the gut-ache, but it sounds like they’re all on your threshold.” Charles eyed the windows. “I’ll see if I can climb down from here. Maybe there’s a vine I can climb down.”
“You and vines have a history of disagreeing with each other. Use a hovering spell.” Persy rose and threw her arms around his neck again. “I’m glad you came, but I meant it. I want you gone as soon as possible.”
“Don’t give up,” he replied, ignoring her behest, and climbed onto the window-seat. “I’ll try to come back soon so we can talk alone again.” The door had started to open, so he swung his legs out the window, took a breath, and started to float down toward the courtyard.
Ha, he’d been right. Ivy, or something like it, did cover the side of the palace here, but it was more fun to use a controlled hover to get down. He’d probably never have magical abilities as good as Persy’s, but at least he could do this—hey!
Something had grabbed his arm.
He twisted around in mid-air just in time to see tendrils of the ivy shooting out from the wall and grasping at him, twining itself around his limbs and pulling him in like a fish on a line. He struggled in its hold, but whenever he managed to snap one slender vine, another had already taken its place.
“Help!” he shouted up towards Persy’s window. But the chatter of her gaggle of ladies drowned out his calls. And now another vine was snaking its way around his neck, pulling him hard against the building. As soon as he touched the mass of stems and leaves on the wall, he felt sharps jabs on any exposed skin…the beastly thing was biting him!
“Persy!” he shouted again, desperately now. But no head appeared in the window, and the vine around his neck was tightening—
“Enough!” an imperious voice called, and all at once the homicidal vines released him, recoiling like springs. Charles gasped and started to fall, but felt a spell catch him and ease him the fifteen or so feet to the ground. He sat there in a huddle for a moment, trying to catch his breath, then looked up. The fairy lord stood over him with arms crossed over his chest, watching him.
“I told you that my lands could be perilous,” he said, not unkindly.
Charles scrambled to his feet and hoped the fairy lord would attribute his red face to his recent exertions. “I know you did, but I wasn’t expecting to be attacked by a plant!”
The
fairy lord smiled. “True. I forget that the plants in your world are much more sedentary. But it’s a very effective guard from intruders, I have found.” He reached out and stroked a vine. The entire mass of ivy rippled and shivered, as if it enjoyed his touch.
“Did seeing you cheer your sister?” he added.
Charles dusted himself off “Sort of,” he said. “But not much.”
He sighed and shook his head. “I had hoped your coming here would help reconcile her to her new home.” He fell silent, studying Charles meditatively, then asked. “Tell me, little wizard—what can I do to make Persephone happy with us? I am very busy tying up the loose ends of our recent wars, and cannot take the time to woo her like some lovesick stripling.” He pronounced the word as if it were in a foreign—and barbaric—tongue.
Charles blinked. By Jupiter, was the fairy lord asking him for advice? “Um…nothing, I’m afraid, sir. She doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be home with her husband.”
The fairy lord looked faintly annoyed. “She has no husband, if you recall. I took care of that.”
“Well, she thinks she does. And she loves him. She’s not going to stop loving him just because she’s here.” He took a deep breath. “Is this what you want, sir? A wife who’ll never be happy with you? Because that’s what you’ll get, if you force Persy to be your—”
“Enough.”
The word was spoken quietly, but it struck Charles like a slap across the face. He fell silent and stared up at the fairy lord, whose brows had drawn down in a frown.
“She will be my wife, and that is that. I will not hear any more such speeches from you, my page.” There was a subtle emphasis on the last two words that made Charles redden again as he remembered what he was now supposed to be.
“Yes, my lord,” he said.
Chapter Seven
For the next few days Charles kept his head down, trying to absorb all he could about the fairy world and not draw attention to himself. It wasn’t easy, as everyone wanted to see their lord’s new human servant. He saw Persy, who looked miserable, several times, but was unable to do more than give her quick, encouraging smiles and nods. Most of his time was taken up by the fairy lord; while his duties weren’t onerous, he needed to be paying attention at all times while he was “on duty,” to serve refreshments or fetch things or answer his master’s questions about life in the human world. The fairy lord had no other pages or indeed many other servants, apart from his soldiers standing guard around the palace. This at first puzzled Charles, until he realized that the fairy lord truly never slept, and so had all the time he needed to manage the affairs of his lands.
Charles Bewitched (Leland Sisters) Page 6
