Moonlight Binding Magic

by Charlotte Munich

  I walked into the moonlight, through the tall grass, and towards the wood cabin, slowly making out its shapes: a woodshed, a small well, a pen that probably held sleeping chickens. The front door was on the other side. A crown made of tree branches, leaves, and dried fruit was nailed to the door. Fat little cloth and leather pouches hung from it, held by braided strands of wool in different faded shades of blue and red. I debated knocking, until a feminine voice called from inside.

  “Come in!”

  So I pushed the door and did as asked.

  Inside, it was cozy and warm, and it smelled of herbs and wood fire. The ground was made of big, uneven slabs of stone that were more or less flat, and the walls were rough wood. There was only one room, but it was so crowded that it was difficult to see around the objects hanging from the ceiling—pots, pans, bags, dried herbs, unidentified pieces of cloth—and really look in the corners. Because of that, it took me a while to spot the woman, even though she was sitting right by the fire, on a three-legged wooden stool.

  She wore a nondescript black dress and a black cape, but she looked young and pretty, with very long, thick, dark hair and deep blue eyes. Her skin was very fair and her lips a delicate shade of pink. When I came closer, I noted how similar to Tristan’s her eyes were. The blue looked almost purple, and depending on how the light of the fire struck them, they shone with that strange red glow.

  “Come sit with me. You must be Victoire.”

  That stopped me in my tracks.

  “And you are?” I asked.

  She laughed. She had a very musical laugh.

  “I’m Marianne. Tristan’s sister.”

  “I didn’t know he had a sister.” He’d told me everyone in his family was dead or estranged.

  She smiled. “Well, he doesn’t have me anymore.”

  It was such a strange way to put it.

  “Where are we? Why am I here?”

  “You and I have some important matters to discuss,” Marianne said.

  Did we, now? I tried to sum things up.

  “Your brother and I have been trying to figure out why I called him for help.”

  Marianne nodded. “In fact, it’s the quite the opposite. I called you to come and help him. But no one needs to know that.”

  I tilted my head.

  “Can you explain?”

  She grinned. “I’ll try. Come, take a seat.”

  She gestured towards a tree trunk near the fire. I stepped forward and sat down, facing her. It was nice, warm, and cozy here by the fire after that short walk through the cold and humid dark forest.

  For a long minute, Marianne only studied me, looking at me closely.

  “Do you know why I called you specifically?” she asked.

  “I have no freaking clue. In fact, I would very much like to know.”

  “Well, I thought my brother would like you. But that’s not the whole story. Do you know what you are, Victoire?”

  I thought about it. “I’m a musician, an artist. And I’ve always been a pretty lucky girl.”

  Marianne nodded. “You’re right. You are lucky.”

  “At first, I thought it was my ukulele that brought me luck, but in fact, it may just be me. Tristan said I carry the mark of death, but I’ve avoided it twice now.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’m impervious to some charms. I don’t always have to obey the rules of your magic.”

  “Good analysis,” Tristan’s sister approved. “Otherwise, you would never have been able to come and see me here.”

  “Where are we?” I asked again.

  And, again, I got no answer, except for a sad smile.

  “Okay,” I said. “Why don’t you explain it to me? What do you expect from me?”

  She smoothed the fabric of her long dress.

  “I really need you to watch over Tristan,” she said.

  Before I could protest, she went on. “I know you don’t understand it, and we have little time to go over the details, but I’m convinced you can help him. He needs someone to watch his back. I’ve been his guardian angel for a long time, but I can’t hold that job anymore, and he really needs someone.”

  “To watch his back?”

  She nodded again. “He’ll explain this far better than I ever could, but you’ve seen his estate, his castle. You have a notion of his wealth. The power he holds, though, is hiding in the woods.”

  “The spirits of the forest,” I whispered, and she nodded.

  “Yes. Exactly. This forest holds a lot of magical power, and a lot of people in our world want it. For now, Tristan holds the title over the estate, but he has cousins.”

  “Like Hughes.”

  “Yes. And others. And they are not good people, Victoire. They cannot get their hands on our lands. It would be very bad for Tristan, obviously, if they got rid of him to steal his lands from him. But it would also be catastrophic for the forest itself and its inhabitants, and for the human world. Did Tris tell you about human blood?”

  “He hinted at its use as fuel in dark spells,” I said.

  “Yes. Blood holds a lot of power. Except our kind has rights, so we can’t go about killing each other left and right. But the humans…they don’t benefit from the same laws.”

  “So what? What does it have to do with the forest?”

  “The forest holds something Hughes and others desire very much. I used to guard it, but let’s just say I’m not the woman I used to be. If they find what they’re looking for, they’ll feel entitled to powers they should not be wielding. They will feel they’re entitled to sacrifice humans. I can almost guarantee it.”

  “And we don’t want that happening.”

  “No, we don’t.” She offered me a feline smile. “We love humans. They make wonderful companions.”

  “Oh, great,” I muttered. “You think we’re pets, too.”

  “Not pets. We need you. Our worlds are connected.”

  I tried to sum things up.

  “So, what do you want me to do? Watch over Tristan? How am I even supposed to do that when I’m in way over my head? And what am I even?”

  “You’ll do great. You don’t need to know much in order to fill this very important task. Just promise me you’ll protect him.”

  That was an unexpected turn of events. Me, a big bad bodyguard? Heh. It was funny, really.

  “Okay. If you’re sure he needs it, and I can do something.”

  He’d taken on the job of protecting me without knowing anything about me. It was a strange decision to make, but I felt that if I could reciprocate, I wanted to, very much.

  “Why me, though? Why do we care about each other so much when we have nothing in common? Is it because of a spell? Did you do that?”

  Marianne smiled again. Something in my questions seemed to please her.

  “I don’t really know how or why. I just asked the forest to find a protector for Tristan. The forest called you, and then you called Tris. We’ll figure it out in the end.”

  I nodded. It was weird, but I believed her.

  “He can’t know about it yet,” she said. “I’m afraid he’ll do something chivalrous and stupid and spoil our chance of really learning something about the threat. He still has these weird views about humans in general and women, sometimes. I’m not saying he’s a bigot, but you may have noticed how humans are considered in our world. It’s easier to pass you off as a pet. It might ruffle your pride, but it will actually offer you a lot of freedom.”

  I gnashed my teeth. “I don’t like that.”

  “I know. Just try and be smart. At least until we’ve figured out the threat. Can you do that?”

  “And the boxes? What are the boxes about?”

  Marianne sighed. “I don’t know. From what I’ve seen, they came into the picture after you met Tris. They might be an attempt to get at him through you. Be careful.”

  She wasn’t helping me much, I thought.

  “I’ll watch from afar,” she said, without indicating how s
he would do that. “If you need to contact me, use the heart pendulum.”

  “You mean Tristan’s pendulum?”

  “Yes. Steal it.”

  “What should I tell him about this conversation?”

  “Tell him you met me, I’m all right, and I said hi. Tell him you have my blessing to work together.”

  23

  “Victoire! Victoire. Wake up.”

  I did hear Tristan’s voice in the distance, but it was a moment before I could react to it. I was still sprawled in the velvet armchair, by the fire. The air smelled of ammoniac and wood fire. I tried to raise my hand to let him know I was all right and barely managed to move.

  “Oh, thank goodness. I thought you’d had an accident,” Tristan said when I opened my eyes and looked at him through fluttering eyelashes.

  “I’m okay,” I whispered. “Accident?”

  I was completely exhausted. This weird dream seemed to have sucked all energy out of me.

  He handed me a cup of steaming hot coffee that smelled of whisky.

  “Drink.”

  I took a sip. This very basic gesture seemed to take up most of my strength.

  “What happened?” he wanted to know.

  “Your sister says hi,” I managed to enunciate.

  He frowned. “My sister?”

  “Marianne. Is she not your sister?”

  The coffee and whisky did help a little. At least I could keep my eyes open now.

  “She was,” he said. “But she’s been dead for years now. Victoire, where the hell did you disappear to?”

  “Oh. I’m sorry for your loss. I didn’t know. I was in the forest with her. Do you think it was all a dream?”

  He shook his head.

  “Stop dismissing everything you see. I sent you on a real path, so what you saw was real somehow. If Marianne was there, then you need to listen to what she told you. What did she want?”

  I shrugged and lied a little, as Marianne had asked me to. “She just said to tell you she’s all right, and we have her blessing to work together. Whatever that means.”

  He looked puzzled. But in the end, to him, the hypnosis session was only the third “failed” experiment of the morning. There was nothing much to do but let it go, so we moved on to other things.

  Tristan looked at his watch and declared that we needed to have lunch, since everything must be ready by now in the dining room. We’d come back afterwards to finish the job, whatever the job was.

  I followed him back downstairs, through another set of impressive hallways, to a narrow room that held an impossibly long table. Lunch was set at one end, near a lit fireplace. Electrical torches all along the walls contributed to the lighting, since there was this huge wall of windows, but it was still dark outside.

  “Wow,” I said, taking it all in. “Two questions. How many people does this room seat exactly, and when is the sun actually going to rise over that forest of yours?”

  “Up to fifty if we squeeze ourselves a little, and never.”

  “Never?”

  “This place hasn’t seen the light of day for ages.”

  “What? How?”

  He shrugged. “It may have been cursed.”

  Holy bandoneon.

  “Wait. Do you mean people shed their lifeblood so the sun would never shine on this place?”

  “Yes. Me and my kind, we don’t bear sunlight all that well. Some of us are heavily allergic to it, although it’s not my case. I just don’t like it. It strains my eyes.”

  “What, you mean like vampires?”

  “I can see where our lives may have inspired the myth of vampirism, but vampires don’t exist. We do.”

  We’d made our way to the end of the table, where fine plates and silver cutlery were waiting for us. Lunch was held warm in a big porcelain bell dish. It was hand-painted with a beautiful hunting scene that looked nothing like the one on Bertrand’s stove at his goat farm. The hunters in this scene only carried arrows and big knives, and they were facing a monstrous, red-eyed boar and a stag so big that his antlers grazed the clouds.

  When Tristan lifted the bell, mouth-watering smells grabbed me, and my stomach growled. It was a stew of some sort, with meat, vegetables, and a lot of interesting-smelling herbs that I didn’t think I’d encountered before.

  “Yes. Please,” I exclaimed, sitting down and grabbing my fork, which made him laugh. “Is that venison?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you didn’t hunt.”

  “We ask for meat,” he explained rather cryptically, and I didn’t press the matter. I was far too hungry to mess with my own head about this dish.

  Lunch, as it turned out, was exactly what I’d needed. Half an hour later, after wolfing down an obscene amount of food, I was reclining in my seat, both my hands cradling my very full stomach.

  “Feeling better?” my host asked.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  In fact, I hadn’t eaten anything that good for ages.

  “Where’s your cook, so I can express my infinite gratitude?”

  “Oh,” he said, “I don’t think she would like that.”

  “Why? What is she? A house elf?”

  He didn’t get my joke. He frowned and explained, “No, there are no such things as elves. It’s just that she’s shy and she’s had some bad experiences in the human world, and it’s best for now if you don’t meet the people who work here. They wouldn’t understand what you’re doing here.”

  Talk about a major downer. I’d felt completely blissed out, and here he was again with his mysterious rules and constraints. I sighed and dropped the matter entirely, choosing to focus on the next subject instead: my official backstory.

  “What should I tell Hughes? Can I just let him believe that I’m an ordinary human, that I like you because I have that huge fantasy/paranormal fetish, and it’s working for us? You’ve been too lax and permissive with me because, as you said the other day, my naive cheekiness titillates you. I’m a brat. I have no magical abilities whatsoever. It’s all your doing. I came to Dora’s because she’d invited you, and you extended the invitation to me, because I’m your pet and I bring out that inappropriate side of you. I never communicated with Hughes in his thoughts. I didn’t summon you. We just met when you decided to invest in the barn, because you needed a break from your lonely castle life, and you thought it would be fun. I’m just an additional perk.”

  Tristan looked surprised.

  “Playing the pet doesn’t bother you anymore?”

  “I’ve thought about it, and…well.”

  The truth was, now that Marianne had tasked me with Tristan’s protection, everything felt different. I could play dumb as long as I knew what I was doing. I could play the “pet” if I knew I really wasn’t one. My ego would survive it as long as I was in control of the story.

  “Hughes hates me,” Tristan protested. “Admitting that we know each other might just hurt you.”

  “But see, he might already know we are connected. Dora might have told him…”

  “Dora wouldn’t betray me,” Tristan said.

  “Or, more plausibly, Hughes might have targeted me because we know each other. Since we’re not related, why would Hughes have sent me these boxes, unless it was to get to you? That’s what your sister thinks, and I’m starting to see it makes much more sense.”

  “Oh, Marianne thinks that?” he said, narrowing his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Tristan, but things are too complicated already. If I’m going to play an act, it needs to be very simple.” I batted my eyelashes at him. “You know, I’m only human. My brain is very small.”

  He puffed his cheeks.

  “All right.”

  “Great.”

  I was on a roll. What was next on the agenda? Oh, yes, evasion techniques. Plan B.

  “Now you teach me how to make a stylish escape, and everything’ll be ready for tonight.”

  24

  “I don’t know how much of it applies to you, but here�
��s the theory about portals,” Tristan started.

  We were back in his office near the music room, with him sitting behind his desk and me in the other armchair facing him. Although I was already full, I’d accepted a slice of that beautiful pastel cake, and I’d been right. It was raspberry and pistachio flavored, and it tasted heavenly. Sweet and light, crunchy and perfect. I moaned discretely.

  “Sorry,” I told Tristan, because he was giving me a weird, annoyed look, no doubt for inconvenient pet behavior. “I’m listening. Please keep going. You need to bleed someone dry in order to teleport. That’s what I know.”

  He shook his head and set his cup of coffee on his desk.

  “It takes energy, a lot of it, and blood happens to be a fantastic source of energy. But you, Victoire, seem to be getting it somewhere else.”

  “Where? How?”

  “A natural resource, maybe. A crystal. Or you could be diverting it from another powerful spell.”

  “Would there be a way to know which one?”

  “I hoped a good circle would tell us, but obviously, we tried that, and it didn’t work. So, no. But there’s still a risk that somewhere, a portal is closing because you’re stripping it of its energy.”

  “And that’s not good?”

  “It depends. In any case, I’d rather understand what you’re doing.”

  I was starting to get why I needed to know the theory, even if I wasn’t doing everything by the book.

  “The reason why you need tremendous energy for portals is that realms and worlds don’t normally exist on the same plane of reality. Even though it only took a short drive for you to get here, this place is nowhere near Dompierre. And I couldn’t even point Dora’s realm for you on a map. It’s not how things work in our world. We have to establish paths between things ourselves, create our own geography, so to speak. It’s very handy and very complicated at the same time. In order to open doors and roads between places, we need to create portals.”

  “Aren’t there other people who can just skip across, unh, planes like I’m doing?”

  “Victoire, I’m still not convinced that this is what you’re doing. Even master planeswalkers don’t do that. It’s a very sophisticated art.”