The Faerie King

by Ash Fitzsimmons

  “You’re fifteen. Everyone hates teenagers.”

  He sneaked a look at my expression from the corner of his eye, and then, apparently satisfied with what he saw, socked me in the arm.

  The blow caught me off guard, and I rocked on the fence, saving myself from a fall into the mud in time to see Aiden flash a quick grin.

  I tried to remember the last time I’d actually liked a member of my family and extrapolate from that relationship what the proper response should be. Finding myself going back centuries, however, I instead settled for punching Aiden in turn. “This is how you treat your elders?” I asked as his smile widened. “Trying to beat them into submission?”

  “Yeah, you’ve seen my mad attack skills.”

  “You know,” I offered, “if you want, I could teach you to not punch like a girl. No magic necessary.” I turned at the sound of approaching boots and added, “And when you’re finished with that, Joey will teach you the basics of stabbing things for fun and profit.”

  Joey held up his empty palms, which now bore bright red stripes. “Blisters first, then swordplay, and Val wants to kick my ass.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “‘Val’? You got away with that? And I realize church Latin is a disaster, but you do know he pronounces his name with a W, right?”

  “He didn’t strike me dead, did he? Hi, there!” Joey extended his raw hand to Aiden and smiled. “Heard there was a newcomer out here. I’m still pretty new, too,” he added, leaning conspiratorially toward my brother, “but at least I know where the bathrooms are, eh? And I see Colin’s breaking you in gently with the most screwed-up livestock management system in the universe.”

  Aiden met his handshake and chuckled. “It’s pretty weird.”

  “You hang around this guy long enough, and that becomes the norm. So,” he said, leaning on the fence between us, “by any chance, do you like dragons?”

  His face lit up. “I saw it when I came by, but it was dark in the barn—”

  “Her, not it,” Joey corrected. “Her name’s Georgie, and she’s expecting you. Also, she’s telepathic, so think happy thoughts.” With that, he tugged Aiden off the railing and pushed him toward the barn. “Go on, go say hi. I’ll be along in a minute, okay?”

  Aiden gave me a last uncertain look, and when I waved him on, he dashed toward the open doors, splashing mud with each footfall. I slid off the fence and shook my head, then muttered, “Thank you.”

  “I got the quick version from Val, and Georgie filled in a few gaps. She said something didn’t feel right, so she helped herself. Guess someone’s going to have to talk to her about minding her own business eventually.” He folded his bare arms against the breeze, protecting what his T-shirt failed to cover. The sleeves had grown tighter, I noted—Joey had changed in more ways than one in the months since he abandoned seminary.

  “He’s had a rough time of it,” I said, keeping my voice too low for Aiden to hear.

  “Staying here for a while?” Joey asked.

  “That was the plan.”

  He nodded. “You all right?”

  “Who, me? Why?”

  “I don’t know, Greg just sprung a kid brother on you. That would throw me for a loop.”

  “It’s…sinking in,” I replied, glancing at the barn. “And now it looks like I’ve got a bright, awkward, magically inept teenager on my hands. What do I need to know?”

  “What do you mean, what do you need to know?” he echoed.

  “You’re only ten years his senior, yes? Anything pertinent?”

  Joey thought for a moment, then nodded again. “He can’t legally drink.”

  “That is the best advice you can give me?”

  “Not necessarily the best,” he said with a wry smile, “but for you, I’d say it’s pertinent.”

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  Meggy would have understood if I’d cancelled our date, but Joey was more perceptive than he realized—I needed a moment of normalcy, and that season, normalcy meant Meggy. Joey assured me that life would continue in my absence, and as for Aiden, he was too absorbed with Georgie, who had flopped onto her back for a belly scratch, to be bothered by my departure. “I’ll keep an eye on him,” Joey quietly assured me at the barn door, “and he’ll keep an eye on everything else,” he added, tilting his chin toward Valerius, who lurked in the far corner of the barn, watching uncertainly as the hatchling’s forked tongue lolled. “What could possibly go wrong?”

  “Please don’t tempt fate while I’m away,” I muttered as a mirror appeared. My wardrobe was appropriate—and after a once-over, mud-free again—but re-creating the face I used each time I visited Meggy required a bit of work. Applying the glamour took no effort, but getting the details right necessitated a certain degree of skill. I had been lazy in the beginning, slapping together something vaguely late-thirties to match Meggy’s assumed face, but after a few weeks, one of her regular customers had asked when I’d had work done. I’d weaseled out of an answer by blaming the lighting, but I’d taken greater care since then, though my appearance was only the minor half of the glamour. Far more important was the enchantment that my modified features made believable: no one in Rigby, save my former neighbor and my bartender, recognized me as the young man who had formerly run Ex Libris. For Meggy’s sake, the glamour couldn’t be allowed to fail.

  Much of magical practice is physical, the art of effecting change on the world through the judicious use of a force unseen, unfelt, unquantifiable, and unwieldable to all but a tiny percentage of mortals—and even then, the freakish few often require something like a wand to channel and amplify the little ability they possess. But even with their limitations, they do get by, and a well-trained wizard with a fair amount of talent can be a powerful opponent. (Not for me, of course—not in a few centuries, and certainly not since Mother’s demise—but there was a time when I preferred running to taking my chances with a pack of Arcanum assassins.) A strong wizard can hurl his opponent across a room, bury him in an avalanche of bricks pulled from midair, and cap off the rout with a lightning bolt from the blue if he’s feeling particularly peeved. Even a middling wizard should be able to play with fire, temporarily levitate, and shield a shot. Physical magic takes discipline to master, but it’s not an impossible task.

  It is, however, exceedingly rare to find a wizard who excels at mental manipulation, the subtler and more delicate work of fucking with others’ heads. Here, at least, is where a hefty dose of fae blood confers a significant advantage—we’re innate masters of glamour, a skill most wizards will never learn. If I wish to walk about appearing as anything other than a pale twenty-something with unruly hair, all I need do is create the appropriate glamour—taller, older, balder, female—and under most circumstances, the illusion is indistinguishable from reality. The bags under my eyes, the beard I’ll never be able to grow—they’re real to sight and touch, and, conveniently enough in this age, glamour extends to cameras. Physically, though, I’ve done nothing. Once the illusion drops, my face remains my face, largely unchanged since, oh, about a decade after a certain charter was signed at Runnymede.

  Personal glamour isn’t the extent of mental magic, however, and I’ve had plenty of time to hone my skills. In Meggy’s case, that meant shoring up my cover story with the aforementioned enchantment, which gave me a clean slate even among people whose faces I’d known for years. Sure, they remembered the guy who’d sold used paperback romances and slunk into Slim’s on a nightly basis, but they couldn’t recognize me as the same person, albeit slightly aged.

  The enchantment helped keep awkward questions to a minimum for Meggy—she’d told her new neighbors that she’d been given the bookstore by a cousin, and having said cousin show up and behave with more than familial affection would have proven problematic. More importantly, though, the enchantment helped keep our daughter’s true memories safely locked up, which was the only way she would ever have consented to live with her mother. When I bound the girl who had been molded into
Moyna into the girl who could have been Olive, I had effectively erased myself from her past, giving her a doting, if dead, father and a childhood spent happily with Meggy. Moyna knew me and despised me, but to Olive, I was merely an annoyance that had come with the move to Rigby, and I intended to keep it that way. Meggy had lost her child once—I wasn’t going to put the stability of the bind in jeopardy by dropping my illusions around Olive.

  And so, once I was confident that no one in coastal Virginia would give me a second look, I produced a pair of leather gloves, ignored the realm’s wordless displeasure at my imminent departure, and opened a gate to the back of my old building, where my appearance was less likely to be noticed. After closing the gate behind me, I straightened my shirt, ran a hand over my hair once more for good measure, and carefully started up the fire escape to the second-floor apartment. Night was falling, and a false step would mean tumbling straight into the metal stairs—and I didn’t need the tingling in my sheathed hands to remind myself of the staircase’s composition. Extended iron- and silver-free periods in Faerie had begun to spoil me, but as a side effect, my metallic warning system hadn’t been so sensitive in ages.

  When I sidestepped the last of Meggy’s potted ferns and reached the top landing, I rapped on the kitchen door and waited, momentarily wondering if I should have had flowers at the ready before I spotted Olive’s silhouette against the semi-sheer curtains. She flipped the latch and cracked the door open, then gave me a disdainful once-over before flouncing back the way she’d come.

  “Hello to you, too,” I called after her. “Is your mother home?”

  “Downstairs!” she yelled, and slammed her bedroom door.

  With Olive obviously in no mood for social niceties, I let myself out of the apartment via the inner staircase and wandered down to the bookstore on the ground floor. A quick survey of the room revealed Meggy behind the old wooden counter, resting her folded forearms on the worn oak as a younger brunette in a black hood began to pick at a cloth-wrapped package. Meggy brushed a red curl from her eyes and held out her hand in offer, but the brunette shook her head and continued her slow work.

  “Open late again?” I asked from the stairway.

  Meggy beamed. “Hey, stranger,” she called back. “Come on down, I want a second opinion.”

  The brunette—who was wearing not a sweatshirt, as I had first imagined, but a floor-skimming cloak—frowned and paused in her unwrapping, but Meggy motioned her on. “An expert,” she said, nodding toward me. “If you have what you claim to have, he’ll know.”

  The girl’s fingernails were lacquered the color of old blood, and her cloak was clasped about her throat with a silver broach formed into a Celtic knot. A witch, I surmised, a nervous witch with a treasure wrapped in oilcloth, afraid someone was going to take her toy away.

  I held up my hands to show her I was unarmed. “Been in this business a while,” I said, making my way past an overflowing rack of cookbooks, “and I’ve seen just about everything. What did you find?”

  “I didn’t find anything,” she snapped, bending back to her task. “I inherited it. It’s legitimate, I’m not a thief.”

  “No one said you were,” Meggy soothed. “It helps if we know the provenance and history of these things. Makes them more easily sold.” The girl looked up at her blankly, and Meggy explained, “Easier to check for residual spells if you know who last had it.”

  “My grandmother,” she muttered, and finally exposed the brown leather beneath the wrappings. “She bought it because it looked good on a shelf. Never made it work.”

  Meggy inspected the book without touching it, then produced a pair of white gloves from beneath the counter and slipped them on. Next came a set of green foam wedges—softer than the counter, and far easier on the book’s binding—and a light-up magnifying glass. With practiced care, Meggy extracted the volume from its bindings and peered at the embossed spine. “Okay, at least the spelling’s right,” she murmured, then placed the book on the blocks and carefully opened it to the front matter.

  “What are we dealing with?” I asked, switching my gloves for Meggy’s spare cotton pair.

  “It’s a Roux,” she replied, peering at the script through the lit glass. “Aegis. And if my Latin is up to snuff, this is, as promised”—she glanced up at the waiting witch—“his treatise on wardwork.”

  “First edition,” the witch replied. “Perfect condition, as I said—”

  “Good old Déodat,” I interrupted, sliding next to Meggy. “Prominent in the late fifteenth century, head of an Arcanum splinter faction, executed by the grand magus as a witch—so inconvenient when your primary rival is also a bishop, isn’t it?” I leafed through the first few pages, then looked across the counter at Meggy’s eager seller. “First edition, you say?”

  “Says so right at the bottom,” she pointed out, jabbing her uncovered finger at the bottom of the book. Meggy flinched, and I blocked the witch’s hand before it could reach the paper.

  “It’s in good condition,” I said, gently pushing her back, “but it won’t be if you keep getting oil all over it. And yes, this is a first printing.” Her brows knit, and I pressed on. “Déodat Roux was widely reviled by the Arcanum, and not only because he wanted to overthrow the king. It wasn’t until after the Revolution that any French wizard bothered giving his work proper consideration. As it turns out, once you get past the politics, the heresy, and the slight twinge of, for lack of a better term, magical racism, Roux was a brilliant theoretical wizard. This work,” I said, closing the book, “was one of his finest, and still a foundational text. Which you would know, were you Arcanum.”

  The witch’s lips tightened to white, and she drew herself to her full height. “At least I have the gift. You people resell greatness, unable to ever reach it yourselves. Scavengers, really,” she said with a little sneer. “Picking at the leavings of the dead.”

  I leaned on the counter and rested my chin in my hand. “Do tell.”

  She took the bait. “All this power, right here,” she said, tapping the cover, “and to you, it’s just another book. Sure, you know your history,” she added, smirking, “but what’s that compared to the power to change the universe? The sheer, boundless power to—”

  “To do nothing. You’re obviously a witch, you can’t work the most basic spell in that book, and you’re probably broke, which is why you’re trying to pawn it off.” I met Meggy’s eyes, which implored me to cut it out, and forced myself to be civil. “Yes, you have a first-run Roux on your hands,” I told the witch. “One copy of about two thousand, most of which are in the private collections of Arcanum-affiliated wizards. There’s a market for this book.”

  “I sold one three years ago for five thousand dollars,” Meggy added. “The leather’s a little worn on this one, but the paper appears intact. I’ll give you four and a half.”

  The witch’s cheeks blazed. “That’s robbery! A first-edition Roux is worth half a million, easily!”

  “A first-edition would be extraordinary,” I agreed, cutting her rant down before it could flower. “But this book is only from the first printing.” I leaned toward her and permitted myself a trace of a smile. “As I said, Roux wasn’t a popular fellow. He wrote Aegis, and he made a copy for his second in command, Pons Charron—a handwritten copy. The two are nearly identical: red ink on mid-grade vellum, written in Latin, bound in white lambskin. They’re indistinguishable but for a few strike-outs in the original, which, if I’m not mistaken, is still kept at the Arcanum outpost in Glastonbury. The Charron copy made its way into the hands of Pons’s granddaughter, Gabrielle…” I paused, looking for a sign of recognition on the witch’s face, and found nothing. “Who renounced her grandfather’s beliefs and became grand magus. She gave the book to the Arcanum collection to keep it away from suggestible practitioners, not realizing the extent of Roux’s genius.”

  The witch seemed to deflate before my eyes.

  “A first-edition Potestas et Sententia, of which there
are five copies, went for nearly ten million dollars—in 1903.” I let that sink in, then said, “You can’t put a dollar value on Aegis, though, because if you have a copy to sell, you’ve stolen it from the Arcanum, and you’re about to be able to discuss Roux’s theories with him in person, if you know what I mean. But fortunately for you, this is only from the first printing, and Ms. Horn is willing to deal. I’d take it, were I you.”

  She hesitated, giving the book a final stare, then nodded. “Yeah, sure. Fine. I’ll sell it.”

  Meggy opened the locked drawer in the counter that had served as my cashbox, briefly glanced my way, and dropped a quick wink as several neat stacks of twenties filled the empty space. “Here,” she told the witch, pulling bundles free, “all cash, so you won’t have to worry about bad checks. We’re square.”

  The witch riffled through the bills, and then, satisfied as to their authenticity, stuffed them into an oddly mundane messenger bag hidden under her cloak.

  “And here’s your receipt,” Meggy added, scratching out the transaction details on a slip of paper. “Thanks for coming by.”

  This, too, was crumpled into the bag, and then, with a last baleful look in my direction, the wizard let herself out into the night, cloak swishing in her wake.

  When the doorbell tinkled her departure, Meggy exhaled and pulled off her gloves. “First-edition Aegis, my ass. I knew it couldn’t be, but I couldn’t tell over the phone whether she was ignorant or a con artist.”

  “I never knew you read Roux,” I replied, tossing my borrowed gloves onto the counter beside her pair.

  “I haven’t. But if you’re going to deal in magical books, you’ve got to learn your subject.” My eyebrows rose, and Meggy grinned. “Toula gave me the hot list years ago. What about you, stalking the Arcanum’s collection?”

  “Nothing so sinister. I…may or may not have drunk Déodat under the table at a little inn near Avignon every night one summer,” I replied. “Not a bad sort when the wine was flowing.”