by P. D. Kalnay
I took deep breaths and calmed myself as my grandmother had taught me. Then I let my senses flow into the ground around the building. Thousands of interconnected symbols ran all the way around. They didn’t produce a barrier like the ones on the balcony. These formed an enchantment that was more reactive. The protection was perfect. I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew. You couldn’t even land on the roof or dig under without setting them off. I told Ivy.
“Then we should leave this alone,” she said. “It’s too dangerous to trifle with.”
I was barely listening.
“Why do you think the fire burned my clothes, but not me?” I wondered aloud.
“You’re too careless for someone who knows less than a child would about this world,” Ivy said.
“Whose fault is that?”
“I already apologised.”
She had. I was being a jerk.
“What don’t I know now?”
“You have petrathen skin. It’s largely impervious to flame.”
“I’m fireproof?” How awesome was that!
“You’re only half petrathen, Jack. I suspect your wings aren’t the least bit fireproof. You’d be wiser to look more than you touch until you learn your limits.”
Gran had said exactly the same thing before I’d left. I found it annoying coming from someone my age.
I studied the enchantment surrounding the building again. The way the protections worked and fit together was obvious. It was like looking at the schematic for a piece of simple machinery. This part did this, that part did that, and together…
“It needs a key,” I said.
“You’re sure?” Ivy sounded sceptical.
I had just blown myself up.
“Yeah, the key must be placed here in front of the door. That would reroute the flows of energy—or whatever this is—around it. Then, you could just go in. There’s no lock on the door.”
“Do you know how to make a key?” Ivy asked. She sounded as though she still wanted to leave.
“No, there’s more to it than that. You’d also need permission, like the doors outside the workshop. I might be able to figure out the key through trial and error, but whoever made this would still have to grant me permission to use it.” I stopped talking, really hearing my own words and looked back at Ivy. “Don’t you think it’s weird that I can tell all that just from looking?”
“It’s part of what we are.” She gave me a sad smile. “You aren’t a human anymore.”
Ivy made it sound as if that was a bad thing. I couldn’t imagine why. Except for the wings, which were no heck, everything else seemed like an improvement: better night vision, flame resistance, the ability to interact with the world (in ways I’d never have imagined possible), not to mention the multiple centuries we’d live. Granted, our new home was a major fixer-upper, but we had some serious time to fix it.
“If you can’t break the enchantment, we should leave it alone.”
“I can’t open the door properly,” I said. “The bonds are made to be unbreakable from the outside without the key.”
“Then?”
I patted the handle of my knife.
“You said this will sever any bond, right?”
Back at Glastonbury Manor, Ivy had told me that my knife was incredibly dangerous and that it was capable of severing any tie, physical or otherwise. I never intended the knife to fill the role of magical crowbar, but…
“That’s insane! Didn’t you feel your knife when you drew it yesterday?” Ivy’s tiredness appeared to have vanished.
“It was unpleasant–”
“That’s the most ridiculous understatement in the history of understatements.”
Ivy was getting excessively agitated, but she wasn’t wrong.
“It’ll only take a second, if it works. You guys should wait across the road, just in case. It might not do anything.”
“This is a stupid risk.”
Ivy gave me a final glare before crossing the street with One, Two, and Three. She muttered unflattering things about me as she went.
I didn’t draw the knife until I stood back in front of the doors. My weapon was fairly awful, and I wanted to minimise how long it was out of the sheath. When I’d decided where to cut, I unsheathed the knife swiftly, but carefully. Three times as much blade as should have fit into the sheath came forth in all its midnight horror. Most of the new things I sensed were interesting or weird; the knife/sword was a three foot long nightmare.
Half of the symbols were just under the ground, and the rest were suspended in the air. I cut through the middle of the closest wards. To the naked eye, the knife appeared to pass through empty air. It left a long, deep grove, a little wider than the blade, in the cobblestones at my feet, and the stone provided no more resistance to the blade than the air. The connections between the symbols around the building snapped back like a tight cord that had been cut. Then they vanished from my second sight. I sheathed the blade and breathed a sigh of relief. There’d been a small chance that the whole place would be consumed in a white-hot inferno.
I poked the door handle tentatively. Nothing happened.
“All good,” I shouted to the others.
They were across the street, but my hearing had improved along with my eyesight. I heard Ivy call me a reckless idiot under her breath. One helpfully explained that ‘The Master can do anything’ as they crossed the road, which only made her angrier.
“See, it worked,” I said.
Ivy glared at me without answering. I opened the doors, and we all went in. The last warehouse of the day was small, but completely packed. Wooden boxes filled the length of the building, stacked high from floor to ceiling, with only one narrow isle left open down the middle. The boxes had a perfect uniformity that we’d not seen elsewhere. They were also fancier looking, crafted from smooth-grained pale wood, sanded, and varnished. On Earth, those boxes might have contained expensive luxuries like fine cigars or old scotch.
“It looks as if they all contain the same thing,” I said, moving to the nearest stack by the door. The closest box had a lid sitting loose on top. I picked up Three, and set him next to it, so he could shine a light on the situation. Setting the lid aside, I discovered that the box was full of small crimson bags, made from a silky fabric.
“What’s inside the box?” Ivy asked.
The top of the box was too high for her to see its contents.
“I don’t know. Just little bags of something.”
I took out a bag that felt as if it were full of sand. Setting it on top of a lower box, I loosened the drawstrings and pulled it open. The bag was filled with something that looked like coarse bluish-silver sand. Ivy gasped and covered her mouth.
“Don’t get any on your hands. Don’t even breathe.” She spoke softly and slowly, as though she was forcing herself to remain calm. “Close the bag carefully, and set it back in the box.”
Ivy was terrified. I’d never been much for reading people, but I could tell she was deathly afraid. I did as I was told. Once the lid was back on the box, Ivy dragged me from the warehouse.
“Monstrous,” Ivy shouted. “Reprehensible!”
Then she turned back to stare at the warehouse, and her face went slack.
“So much,” she whispered, shaking her head from side to side.
“Is it poison?” I asked.
Deadly poison, or the magical equivalent of nerve gas, would explain her reaction.
“Of the worst kind,” she said. “I wish to go home now.”
Ivy turned, and walked off down the road without waiting for my response. I followed as fast as I was able, while towing the heavily laden cart behind me. Ivy never looked back once, and I lost sight of her halfway to the apartment.
On the way back, I felt a ticklish sensation, like someone was watching me, but, when I turned around, I saw only the ruins of Havensport. After that, I couldn’t help glancing over my shoulder as I walked. Once, I thought that maybe I’d seen something dart
into the shadowy interior of a building. When nothing more came of it, I chocked it up to an overactive imagination.
I was exhausted by the time I reached the top of the lane where the stairs began. Taking two of the sacks from the pile of loot, and abandoning the rest on the cart, I began the tiring climb. Ivy hadn’t bothered to shut the doors behind her.
Chapter 4 – Stolen Happiness
I found Ivy sitting on the balcony. She was staring northeast, toward the warehouse.
“You could have waited,” I said, “and helped carry some of the stuff.”
I was all for being a gentleman, but Ivy could’ve taken a coil of rope on her way up. She wasn’t listening. I poked her shoulder and got a startled look. Ivy hadn’t heard a word I’d said.
“Are you going to explain?” I asked.
I sat on the stone beside her and waited patiently. Then I started to get annoyed, what with patience not being one of my virtues.
“Many things make sense now,” Ivy said eventually. It was lucky my hearing had improved. She barely whispered the words. “The ships, and the competition to hold this place for a mere seven years, it’s all so… reprehensible.”
Ivy went silent. My stomach rumbled, and I poked her shoulder again.
“You said it’s poison?”
Ivy came out of her stupor.
“A poison which claims everything else, before it takes your life. The contents of that building are more horrible and more valuable than you can imagine.”
I was a pretty good imaginer, but I kept that to myself.
“Shiny sand?”
“That shiny sand is the reason that every ship of our people is searched at every port of call and has been for thousands of years. Even in the worst pirate-filled den of smugglers, inspections are made before a fae ship is allowed to unload cargo or passengers.”
“I thought that with control of Knight’s Haven, the Fae had a monopoly over sea trade?”
“The island is the most economical way of traversing the Endless Sea, and a great advantage, but others still trade along coastal routes. They have to deal with far longer voyages and treacherous waters, which our people can avoid. Over time, we’ve pushed out most of the competition. Sea voyages were already inherently dangerous.”
I thought of the days of sail and steam on Earth and the high numbers of wrecks and lost ships. That was on a world where the sea monsters were only imaginary.
“What is that stuff?”
“The real name is wyspire, but it’s often called closed circle. They say that despair begins the circle and inevitably closes it, creating an inescapable cage of misery.”
Which sounded bad, but wasn’t informative.
“In modern times, wyspire is virtually unheard of in the fae kingdoms,” Ivy continued before I had to prod her again. “Anyone connected to it in any way is executed. Those closest to them may suffer the same fate. It provides strong incentive to turn in a perpetrator, even if they are close kin. I can’t remember hearing of an incident occurring in my lifetime, but it wasn’t always so. In the time before the Dragon Lord led the Order, wyspire was the most lucrative commodity traded by our people, if the least spoken of. Few fae touched wyspire, knowing of its dangers, but they sold it in many lands. A single use is all that is needed to create a lifelong dependency. In the early years, none noted the effects of wyspire, or cared if they did. This world can be cruel. When it brought an end to the Shogaan Empire, a civilisation of prosperity and beauty that had flourished for uncounted millennia, other lands took notice. The ships of our people were unwelcome and wars were waged with our neighbours, creating a discord which has never healed.”
“Is it a drug?” Ivy’s description made wyspire sound similar to the worst narcotics from Earth.
“You could consider it so,” Ivy said, “but wyspire is far worse than any drug, both in manufacture and effect.”
“How is it made?”
“Did I tell you of wysps?” Ivy asked.
“I don’t think so. I read about fire wisps in Gran’s book on creatures from the Black Wastes.”
Fire wisps were giant, hornet-like creatures that lit things on fire before consuming the ashes. The book said they were rare, but dangerous. That seemed to be par for the course for everything from the Black Wastes.
“Those aren’t proper wysps,” Ivy said. “They’re completely unrelated. We aren’t the only race to inhabit our homelands. Over time florathen, petrathen, and winathen became dominant, subjugating the lesser races, and often making use of them in harsh ways.”
The more I learned about my people, the doushier they seemed.
“Our people are generally considered cold, heartless, and cruel.” Ivy gave me a sad smile. “You’ll discover that’s a fair assessment. Selfishness must also be added to the list of our shortcomings.”
My parents weren’t very nice people, and my Gran was only slightly warmer than ice, but Ivy seemed OK. I told her so. She half smiled for a moment.
“Thank you,” she said. “You should remember that I’m considered a freak among our people and that you’ve only known me as a human girl.”
“Why does that matter?”
“When a person travels along the Tree they change. It isn’t only their outward appearance that changes. You must have noticed this?”
I’d noticed. It was impossible not to notice. Wind currents shifted high in the sky above, damper air was moving in—rain would come in a few hours.
“And?”
“I was told as a child that I was too emotional and too concerned with the wellbeing of lesser creatures,” Ivy said. “Still, the intensity of emotion I felt in my human body was shocking, and it took time to come to grips with those alien feelings.”
I knew what she was talking about!
“Those who travel the Tree are changed forever,” Ivy said. “The degree of the effects may wear off, depending on how long and far they travel, but they are treated with suspicion when they return.”
“I’ve been human my whole life, until a couple of days ago. How will that affect me in the long run?”
“No two situations or people are the same. I hope that you won’t change at all. Such wishes are rarely granted.”
“I still feel like me, mostly,” I said. “If I change for the worse, you can hit me, OK?”
Ivy nodded, and I got another brief smile.
“How are the wysps involved?” I tried to steer her back toward the original topic.
“The wysps are tiny, bright, joyful creatures… everything our people are not. Our people look down on them because they are simple of thought, and often keep them as pets. Wysps are easily lured with sweets and kind words.” Ivy looked down into her lap. “As a girl, I was given a wysp—for my room. I was too young to understand. Later, when I grew old enough to discern its thoughts, I set it free.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven. That joyous being had been caged in my room for four years. When I released it, it bore me no ill will, taking simple pleasure in its freedom. That was the day I began to question the world around me. The wyspire is the joyful essence of the wysps stolen and gathered so that others may take pleasure in it. No one knows who originally devised the enchantments used for making it.”
“What happens to the wysps, afterwards?”
Tears streamed down Ivy’s cheeks.
“Every grain was purchased with a wysp’s life.”
The boxes had filled the warehouse from floor to ceiling. We sat side-by-side in silence for a time.
“So, that’s why so many ships were coming here?” I asked
“I’m certain of it. No fae captain would try to smuggle wyspire into another land. The searches are thorough, and a slow death would be the payment. If others, not directly connected to the fae, were to transport the wyspire they could smuggle it to many places. Payment must pass between those raiders and the nobles who hold this island as their fief.”
“We have seen it, Mistress,”
One said.
Our three little shadows were so silent that I’d almost forgotten they were behind us.
“Tell us what you know,” I said.
“The same ship arrives at the end of each cycle, Master,” One said. “Shortly before the fae abandon the island, it brings the boxes. They are sometimes stored in a different warehouse, depending on what the Great Dragon left standing. The raider, I believe to be the leader, removes those boxes, exchanging them with others. Then they flee before the burning. The first ship of returning fae collects what the raiders left behind.”
“How long has this been going on?” Ivy asked.
“Since the beginning,” One said.
The others nodded behind him.
“The same ship, to keep the secret,” Ivy mused. “There can’t be many who know. Rumour would have spread. I’ve lived in two of the Courts and never heard as much as a whisper.”
“The nobles who run the island must know,” I said. “And the fae forced to keep the place together.”
“Exactly,” Ivy said. She hammered a fist into her palm.
“Exactly what?”
“Why would they need to strand us—or anyone—here, and work them to death, keeping this place viable?” It was a rhetorical question. “Because it keeps the secret. It would make more sense to bring several enchanters for a short time every seven years, but that would mean putting members of our most influential families in reach of their secret.”
“And they’d be afraid of getting caught and executed?”
“Hardly,” Ivy snorted. “The rulers of the Houses must know. It’s more likely that they fear having to share the spoils. Our people didn’t stop the wyspire trade because it was morally wrong.”
“Why then?”
“Janik Whiteblade took command of the Order. He forbade any ship with wyspire from docking in Knight’s Haven. Later, because of incidents, all of our ships were banned for a century. He made many enemies among the powerful of our people.”
“Mr. Ryan doesn’t seem the type to care.”
“No, that much has stayed the same.”
“It must be really valuable,” I said. “This wyspire”
