by Lucia Ashta
My question surprised him. “I’ve never thought to move it from where it is. My great-great-grandfather hung it here, and it hasn’t been moved since.”
Long Beard looked at the tapestry again. “He was a dark magician. He amassed a valuable collection of dark art.”
Involuntarily, I shivered at the thought of more art like this displayed throughout the castle. I was for once grateful that the castle was not better illuminated. I didn’t want to see the brothers’ ancestral collection of valuable dark art.
“Is that all you need to ask me now?”
I recognized humor in Long Beard’s voice, and I thought a barely visible smirk bent his mouth.
I couldn’t tell if he was poking fun in a way that bothered me or not, so I decided to hurry on and take advantage of what might be a rare opportunity. There were many concerns that pressed on me, begging for relief.
“Will Marcelo be all right? Will he recover? He’s been very ill. I’ve been terribly worried about him.”
Long Beard smiled at me pleasantly, and I decided that he hadn’t been mocking me before. His braided beard jiggled as he spoke. “Chances are very good that Marcelo will ultimately come out of this well. Mordecai is with him now. He’s a very skilled herbalist and magician of the healing arts. Just don’t ever let him know I told you that.” A mischievous twinkle skipped across his eyes.
“Is Marcelo awake then?”
“Oh no, not yet. As you say, he’s been quite ill. His situation is still grave. The fever has a firm hold on him, and it’s reluctant to relinquish its power. But I know my brother well. I feel confident in saying that he’ll help Marcelo through this. Mordecai doesn’t lack motivation. Marcelo is like a son to him. He’ll do all he can to help him and, rest assured, that’s quite a lot.
“Don’t worry about Marcelo any longer. You can put him out of your mind. You’ll see him again once he’s healed, but that may be quite some time. No need to waste your mind thinking about him.
“I do, however, thank you for bringing him to us. Had you not, he’d be dead now. That’s a certainty. My brother would have been very sad. He can’t afford to lose another one.”
It seemed that every question Albacus answered sparked more within me, and now I wondered if he was dismissing me. Had he thanked me for bringing Marcelo to Irele to insinuate that they no longer required my presence here?
“Do you want me to leave now?” I asked, hoping hard that he wouldn’t say yes. As much as the castle made me uncomfortable and as far away as I was from everything I was familiar with, I didn’t want to go out all alone into a world that might not welcome me as a part of it anymore.
“Goodness, no, child.”
I was certain my relief was visible.
“We’re only just beginning,” Albacus said.
Beginning what exactly? I wondered. But before I could ask, I remembered something that had floated around the periphery of my awareness while I aimed for Irele, vying for my attention. It was as bothersome as an insistent fly, but I was too absorbed by worry and weariness to give it the focus it wanted.
“Why didn’t Marcelo do magic to save himself from our attackers? Why did he allow himself to be beaten so severely? Why didn’t he do something, anything at all? He’s a magician, isn’t he? Why didn’t he do magic when he needed to most?”
“Oh yes, Marcelo’s a magician. A very good one too. If Marcelo didn’t use magic to ward off your attackers, there must have been a good reason for it. I can think of a few possibilities, but to save you from the ponderings of an old man, it may be easier if you tell me what happened.”
I didn’t want to bore Albacus with dramatic details I doubted would interest him. I tried to make the story as succinct as possible, and I had only spoken for a minute before he stopped me.
“Aha! There’s your reason, right there.”
“What? Which part of it?”
“You said that Winston and his men dragged Marcelo from his horse, overpowered him, and immediately tied him up with rope.”
“Yeessss.” I wasn’t catching on. Why would that keep Marcelo from doing magic?
“After the men tied Marcelo, he didn’t even try to do magic, did he?”
“No, I suppose he didn’t.”
“Well, there you go.”
I sighed. He was going to make me ask. “And why does any of this prevent Marcelo from doing magic?”
“Ah, I’ve been a magician for so long that sometimes I forget what the novice doesn’t yet know. Marcelo couldn’t do magic once your attackers bound him with the rope. He knew that so he didn’t even try.”
“And why couldn’t he do magic because he was tied?” I hoped I wasn’t coming off as dense, but I just wasn’t getting it.
“My dear, it’s impossible for a magician to do magic when he—or she—is tied. We’ve all tried many times before, as an exercise, but there’s no way around it. The act of binding physically also binds the magician’s power. We aren’t sure why exactly, or how this began, but it’s the way it’s been for as long as we remember.”
I finally understood why Marcelo had done nothing to defend us, and why it had been me, the initiate who couldn’t control her powers, that saved us.
“This limitation has caused countless witches and wizards to suffer. The ignorant townspeople are too cowardly to attack magicians alone, so they congregate in mobs to do their dirty work. If they manage to surprise the magicians, they can often knock them unconscious before the witch or wizard has the chance to react. Once the magicians are unconscious, the mob restrains them, effectively binding their magic as well as their bodies. By the time the magicians wake, they’re incapable of doing magic, and they’ve usually been tied to a pyre.
“The magician dies a terrible, excruciating death by fire. Whenever our kind is present to witness a burning, we use magic to remove the victim’s pain.”
“Why not just save the witch then?” I asked. Why allow the witch to suffer death at all?
“Because it must be this way—for now. If we were to reveal how truly powerful we are, we would be persecuted endlessly. But there may soon come a time when that will change. For many centuries, we’ve been waiting for the right one to come and lead us into an age of enlightenment.”
Did he mean his kind had been waiting for centuries? Or did he actually mean he and his brother had been alive and waiting for centuries?
“The courageous magicians who’ve died at the stake have all taken our secrets with them to the grave, often through unbearable pain, because they understood how important it was that they do so. Imagine if everybody knew how powerful we really are? And then imagine if they realized all they had to do was tie us up? Then they could kill us off easily. But as long as our kind preserves its secrets, we’ll continue.”
The old man narrowed his eyes at me. “You can’t tell this to anyone.”
I startled. His tone of voice had turned violent, and he directed that aggression at me. It was as if he suddenly suspected I would betray his entire kind to a terrible death. I blinked up at him, frightened.
“No one can ever know,” he hissed.
I nodded silently, overwhelmed by the sudden change in this man. Marcelo had warned me the brothers were difficult to deal with, but he hadn’t given me reason to be scared of them.
Albacus continued in a fierce voice, as if the ferocity of how he said what he said would force me to comply. It occurred to me that maybe it would.
“You can never tell another living soul. Our kind has survived for thousands of years because no one who intends to harm us has discovered this one weakness. We hide our weaknesses, and they are few. The repercussions will be swift and severe if you were to betray us.”
He bore down on me with bulging eyes. Taller than me, he seemed to tower over me now more than he had before.
I gulped and managed to squeak out a response. “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”
And just like that, he backed down.
“Goo
d,” he said, in his normal voice. “You now have a duty to protect our kind.”
He said this casually, but I wanted to blurt out: Why? Why did I have all this responsibility I hadn’t asked for? I had no intention to betray anybody, especially unnecessarily, but why was this now my duty?
“We’re all in this together in the end. In a peculiar chain of necessity created by factors such as this secret, the seasoned magician depends on the novice for his safety as much as the novice depends on the practiced magician for guidance and protection. Our kind depends on one another.
“You’ve now become a link in this chain,” he added, as if it were an obvious conclusion, and I suppose that it was.
“And you know that saying, ‘A chain is only as strong as its weakest link?’ Well, this is especially applicable to our kind.”
“Our kind?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
I wasn’t sure if I was ready to hear his answer. Because, in the end, I knew it before he even confirmed it. There were some things I suppose every witch knows somewhere deep down before anyone tells her.
It was one thing to consider myself capable of magic—perhaps, just perhaps, a witch even—but it was quite another to consider myself inextricably entangled to a magical world, a kind, I knew nothing about. I didn’t think I was ready to be a link in a chain that bound me to an underworld fraught with danger and mystery. I wasn’t ready to be one of Albacus’ kind.
Albacus snapped his head back in laughter. It was not lost on me that it had only been a minute since he’d been vicious toward me. I was clearly unable to predict the man’s emotional responses.
“Yes, my child, our kind.”
This time I was certain. His tone of voice was mocking.
“You hover up the steepest mountain around on air, carrying horses, carts, and men, doing magic out in the open without a worry in the world”—I thought that was unfair; I was very worried, doing it all to save Marcelo—“and you wonder whether you are one of our kind? Without a doubt in the world, child, you’re a witch. A magician. One of our kind. Do you understand now?”
I couldn’t decide whether to be angry at his derisiveness, shocked by what I already knew, or one of the other many emotions that coursed through me now. Me, a witch? A real witch? One of a magical kind that had existed for much longer than I knew, with powers I could not yet fathom? Until I met Marcelo, it had never occurred to me, not even as a remote possibility.
“If I’m a witch, why couldn’t I do magic before I met Marcelo?”
Albacus studied me with a curious look on his face.
“Did you ever try to do magic before you met Marcelo?” he asked.
I shook my head. Of course I hadn’t. Why would I? It was the furthest thing from my mind. Mother and Father had taught me that magic was a wicked thing.
“You may have always been able to do magic. But it’s equally possible that it hasn’t come about until now because the magic was waiting for you to go through puberty, to see how you emerged. We may never find out. There are times, though they’re rare, when the magic waits to see whether a host of this incredible skill will be receptive to it and whether the required structure has come together to properly support it. You’re… sixteen? Seventeen?”
“I’ll be seventeen soon, on the spring equinox.”
“Really? That’s fascinating.”
But Albacus didn’t say what was fascinating. He seemed to be examining my physical appearance. I reached my hand up to smooth my hair. Within moments, I brought it back down. The effort would be futile. My hair was tangled in offshoots all around my head. Again I thought I must look like Medusa with red snakes slithering around her like a halo. Perhaps there was a painting of this very frightening image in the brothers’ ancestral dark art collection.
I had already come to realize how frustrating conversations with Albacus were. For every question of mine he answered, I discovered two more I wanted to ask. I hoped he had the patience to answer them all.
I wouldn’t receive an answer to the next question I intended to ask, but I would discover that patience was not Albacus’ forte.
“Enough questions for today.”
Without another word, he turned and started to walk away, down the dark entry hall farther into the castle.
I hesitated for only a moment, but then seized it before it passed. “What should I do now?” I called after him.
“What you do now and for the rest of today is your business. Tomorrow, what you do becomes my business.”
What did that mean? It was exasperating.
“Do I stay in the castle then? Will I sleep here?”
“Where else would you go? Tomorrow we begin training. You’ll need all your strength for training,” he said without breaking stride. His voice was becoming more faint with the distance he put between us.
“Training for what?”
“For who you are meant to become.” Then he turned a corner and disappeared.
I wrapped my coat more tightly around me and looked into the dark, silent stone that surrounded me on all sides. I stood alone, in a castle with three magicians I barely knew, far away from everything that was familiar to me.
But somehow, despite all my confusion and discomfort, I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
The Five-Petal Knot - Book 2
Continue Clara’s adventures in book 2 of the Witching World.
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Acknowledgments
I’d write no matter what, because telling stories is my passion, but the following people make creating worlds (and life) a joy. I’m eternally grateful for the support of my beloved, James, my mother, Elsa, and my three daughters, Catia, Sonia, and Nadia. They’ve always believed in me, even before I published a single word. They help me see the magic in the world around me, and more importantly, within.
I’m thankful for every single one of you who’ve reached out to tell me that one of my stories touched you in one way or another, made you smile or cry, or kept you up long past your bedtime. You’ve given me reason to keep writing.
Read more by Lucía Ashta
THE WITCHING WORLD
(Young adult paranormal fantasy - a complete series)
Magic Awakens
The Five-Petal Knot
The Merqueen
The Witching World Omnibus, Books 1-3
The Ginger Cat
The Scarlet Dragon
Mermagic
Spirit of the Spell
MAGICAL ARTS ACADEMY
(Young adult paranormal fantasy - a Witching World spinoff series)
First Spell
Winged Pursuit
Unexpected Agents
Improbable Ally
Questionable Rescue
Sorcerers’ Web
Ghostly Return *
PLANET ORIGINS
(New adult space fantasy)
Planet Origins
Original Elements
Holographic Princess
Planet Origins Omnibus, Books 1-3
Purple Worlds
Planet Sand
Holographic Convergence
Mowab Rider
THE LIGHT WARRIORS
(Visionary f
antasy - a complete series)
Beyond Sedona
Beyond Prophecy
Beyond Amber
Beyond Arnaka
DRAGON FORCE
(Young adult space fantasy - a complete series)
Invisible Born *
Invisible Bound *
Invisible Rider *
POCKET PORTALS
(Young adult paranormal fantasy)
The Orphan Son *
*
(Paranormal fantasy)
Huntress of the Unseen
*
(Time travel romance)
A Betrayal of Time
*
(Magical realism)
Daughter of the Wind
*
(Superhero satire)
The Unkillable Killer
*
(Magical realism)
Whispers of Pachamama
*
(Science fiction)
Immortalium *
(* coming soon)
About the author
Lucía Ashta, a former attorney and architect, is an Argentinian-American author who lives in Sedona with her beloved and three daughters. She published her first story (about an unusual Cockatoo) at the age of eight, and she’s been at it ever since.
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Lucía on the web:
LuciaAshta.com
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