Dockalfar (20 page)

“Poor child,” the other said. “You have been through quite a bit, if Aloe is correct in her telling.”

She stared at the ancient one, blinking. Neira’sha. The name came to her. This was Neira’sha, the one the wood the keep was nestled within was named after.

“Aloe says you can help me,” she blurted. “You’ve got to help me.”

“Calm,” Neira’sha whispered. “We will help you, child. But you must stay calm, for even in your slight agitation the winds of power gather around you.”

“We’ve felt you for some time,” Ashara explained. “We were not quite certain what was among us. Your power is alien…”

“But not unfamiliar,” Neira’sha interjected.

Ashara nodded and continued. “We have been searching for you. What utter luck that Aloe should find you and bring you to us.”

“Why?”

“Because, child, you’re dangerous. You don’t begin to realize the magic you control, and you don’t begin to realize how to control it. If we’re to rest easy at nights, then we most certainly have to see about teaching you how to manage power.”

“But how did I get it, this power?”

Victoria wailed. “I was just fine one day and then the next and I was seeing soul lights and creating storms.”

“The power is always there,” Ashara told her. “It’s everywhere. Power is what the world runs on, what it produces to give energy to its children. From grass to sidhe, to the most powerful of earth spirits. Some of us are born to wield it. Some more than others. You have a very great capacity, I think. It was always there, it just took something special to open the way. Something to ease whatever protective barriers you had up against such total release.”

“The dance,” she whispered. “The fairy dance.”

Ashara and Neira’sha exchanged glances. “The music,” the elder said. “The dance. It is often an aphrodisiac for magic as well as other things.”

“Hmmm, yes,” Ashara agreed. “Each of us has a certain trigger for our greatest power. A time when we’re more open to it than others.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Victoria said. “I want to understand. I want to have some inkling of why this is happening to me. Why am I here?”

“Why don’t you start from the beginning, child, and tell us how you came to be here.”

Victoria drew a shaky breath and plunged into the tale. From that dreadful night when the sanctity of her home had been invaded by something out of her nightmares to her most recent meeting and journey with Aloe. Ashara and Neira’sha sat silently through it all.

“Who could it be?” Ashara finally asked, when Victoria had finished and sat looking at them hopefully. “Who would dare cross to the human realm on such a mission? Peurshi Ilkiron has the power and the services of a Ciagenii, but he’s always repelled the humans. I can’t see him crafting such a notion.”

“I agree,” Neira’sha drew her brows.

“Helana Kah and her lot might consider it, but to use the doorway at the End of the World is a bit far from her territories. And I don’t recall hearing that she had a Ciagenii.”

“Is it even sidhe?” Ashara suggested.

“There are others. The dark country has strange notions.” She looked to Victoria. “And they told you absolutely nothing? No mention of a name or a destination?”

“Nothing. What did they want with us? And why us?”

“What they wanted is fairly obvious. Too obvious. I’m surprised some over-zealous high lord has not tried it before. Earth magic. Human power. So much of it spills over from your realm to ours. It’s tremendous, that unused energy and totally useless to anything not of Earth. Just as you could not take the dormant power of Elkhavah and use it, I could not take your earthly magic and bend it to my will. But if I were canny enough and unscrupulous enough, I could bend you to my will and have the human magic in that fashion.”

“But my world doesn’t have magic. Not like you have here?”

Ashara smiled at her sadly. “It used to. Oh, never to the extent that we do, but your realm used to be filled with magic. There was a time before your ancestors decided to go the route of science and dispel the mystic, when magic flourished. When shamans and witches and magicians were common place. When legend was not legend and fey beings wondered the lands of earth. We used to love earth. Oh, we were not always benevolent in our visits. There are always those with mean spirits who relish in playing upon the fears of the less powerful. The doorways were many then and there was little to harm us, or drive us away. Humans accepted us as we were. They worshiped some of us, or made us into superstition. They would leaves plates of food and drink for us, or garlands of flowers in return for our benediction. Sometimes we invited a chosen few back to Elkhavah with us, sometimes we mated with humans on earth. There still may be, in some hidden recess of your world places where the fey hold some small power. The places where your technology cannot breach. The most rugged and unsavory of places.

“You see, science displaces magic. Technology banishes legend and myth. You can not have one and still hold faith in the other. You, Victoria, up until a short while ago, did not believe that there really was such a thing as magic. Your religion tells you not to, your science proves that it is nothing but a hoax. Tales to frighten children into obedience. And you need faith to really use magic in a world of machines. The thing is, Victoria, that unlike faith in a religion, where if no one believes anymore the religion dies and the gods go unworshipped and are forgotten, magic does not go away. The earth makes the magic. The magic is always there for the earth’s children to use. Only on your earth, men have destroyed so much of nature that the magic has no place to go. If men used it, it would be fine, but men have no belief in it anymore. So it grows. And it strains at the boundaries of your realm and spills over into ours, where we cannot use it. So it grows and grows and interferes with the winds of our earth magic. And I think, it has found a home in you.”

“Why me?”

“If the sorcerer who opened the door way was competent at all, then he would have caused the rift to open to the most powerful human in your realm. The one most suited to using the human magic. You.”

“Me?” she repeated in a tiny voice.

“But…But they weren’t after me. It was Alex they wanted. I was just there so they could use me against him. They said so.”

“If they came upon the two of you,” Aloe said, sitting cross legged beside her.

“How would they know? Whoever claimed ogres had intelligence?”

“Of course,” Ashara agreed. “They came upon a boy and a girl. The first and usually the wrong assumption is that the male is the more powerful.”

“What will they do to him when they find out?” she whispered.

“We don’t know who has him,” Ashara told her. “There’s no way of knowing.”

“We’ve got to find him. What if…what if they do something terrible? There’s got to be some way of finding him.”

“There might be,” Neira’sha said. “If you lend me your memories of him, perhaps I might be able to find a trace of him.”

Victoria stared, uncomprehending.

“For me to look for him, I must know him. Only you know your Alex here, so only you can supply me with the images I need. To do that, I need to go into your memories. If you trust me, lower your shields and allow me in. I promise to go no further than your recollections of Alex.”

Uncertainly, she looked to Aloe, who merely shrugged. No help there. She stared into Neira’sha’s eyes. Gentle green eyes, with all the patience and solitude of the forest. She had planted this forest they sat in and the larger one outside the keeps walls. She had brought all this beauty to life. It was inconceivable to imagine her using that gentle power to harm, to betray.

Like a gardener, she would weed out the poisons and cultivate the good.

“All right.” Very carefully she lowered her clumsy shields. There was a feather light flutter of sensation. A warmth and gentleness that touched her mind. She thought of Alex. She remembered him when they were teenagers going to the same high school, all the nights they stayed out later than they were supposed to, driving in his brother’s car. Making out under the stars at the old mill outside of town. Planning their life together. She remembered him going to war, determined to do his duty, determined to live up to his father’s expectations, regardless of hers.

She remembered him coming back, hollow eyed and haunted. A wounded animal that needed her protection, even though he denied it vehemently. She was crying. The tears slipped down her cheeks.

Neira’sha was gone from her mind, gone from the glade, her eyes closed and her body still. Ashara and Aloe looked on watchfully. Victoria wrung her hands and prayed. She felt something of the questing.

A mind and will flung far from the body, searching out a particular scent like a hound on a trail. There was skill there.

Skill that only untold amounts of time could grant. The ancient sidhe was still for a dozen heartbeats, then her breathing increased. Her eyelids trembled and her lips tensed. Suddenly she gasped and stiffened. Her lids shot up and her green eyes stared sightlessly for a moment, then Neira’sha filled them. A fragile hand went to her breast as she calmed her breathing.

She turned wide eyes to Ashara, then to Victoria. Victoria was on her knees, fingers digging into the soft moss.

“Did you find him? What happened?”

“I found him,” Neira’sha whispered.

Ashara’s brows were drawn in worry, her hand found the elder woman’s knee and clenched.

“But?” she demanded.

Neira’sha drew a deep breath, patted Ashara’s hand and whispered a name.

“Azeral.”

~~~

The children played in the grass-carpeted courtyard. Lights danced around them mischievously, tapping a unsuspecting shoulder here, tweaking a small backside there. There were yelps of surprise and the laughter of those who had not been taken unawares. It was a game of sorts, to escape the light-bound creations of playmates, to tag another with the small points of magic. There were so few children. Only eight or nine total. And no more on the way in the near future. The sidhe’s matings were frequent, but fertilization was far and few between, and even then, the term for pregnancy was years instead of scant months. The price of immortality, one supposed, was a race that procreated rarely. It was a system of checks and balances. It had to be.

Otherwise the world would be teaming with folk that would not die. Not of natural causes.

But they could die. Victoria doubted also that immortality meant forever.

Otherwise there would be no traces of age, and there were. Not in wrinkles and failing psychic, but in a sort of transparency to the skin, a lengthiness of the bones. And the eyes. The oldest sidhe, the ones like Neira’sha had eyes that encompassed eternity.

One of the children sent a spiraling point of light towards her. She caught sight of it out of the corner of her eye from where she sat on the gentle root of a ornamental tree. She smiled, pretending she did not see it, letting it get almost upon her. Casually, with no more effort that she might have used to blink, she formed a small shield and stopped the point of magic energy inches from her, then netted it with her will and burst it into a dozen smaller spheres of colored light. She sent them all dancing and whirling towards the children in maniacal glee. The children screamed in excited pleasure and scattered from her assault. She tagged each of them, then sent the whole of the small army of light towards her attacker.

“Picking on the younglings?” a soft voice inquired. She looked up into pale blue eyes and a face that spoke of patience and generosity. Beautiful and masculine, expression filled with warmth as he watched the children. One of them belonged to him and to his life mate, Ashara, lady of the keep.

“The younglings know more tricks than I do songs, Okar. I’m just a little wiser I think.”

“And a good deal more powerful,” he added. “Even for a novice. I think you could out magic quite a few of us adults too.”

She looked down, tracing a pattern in the bark. How strange to be considered an equal among folk such as these. To be accepted into the warmth of their family.

And they were a family, those that lived in Ashara’s keep. An extended family, eighty or ninety strong, that included every one from the lesser sidhe who lived side by side with their higher brothers to the one human woman and her gulun cub who had found themselves adopted by the coalition.

And just as they did the children of their flesh, they taught her. Neira’sha and Ashara and sometimes the elder male, Venaimar, took her in hand and drilled the basics into her mind. It was tiresome and boring sometimes, the tutoring, and often showed no results that made up for a day spent listening to Venaimar’s high pitched voice droning on at her. But she learned. It was not a raw display of power that told of skill, she was informed. It was the ability to shape the power, to rein it in even though it burned to be released and direct it on some chosen path, be it as wide as a river bed or as narrow as a strand of spider’s web. She did not think she could ever have the skill for the later.

When she opened herself and summoned the earth magic it consumed her. It beat at her insides with relentless fists demanding to be released in the quickest mode possible. More than once, her tutors had called a shaky end to the lessons after one of her bursts. It had rained for two days after her first session. A rain that Ashara herself had not been able to drive away for two nights. And Ashara was the most powerful weather wizard among her folk.

Victoria knew they walked with cat feet around her. She knew they were wary of her human magic and she knew how hard they tried to make her feel comfortable and trusted. She ached for their generosity. She felt guilty over their thoughtfulness. They sought to help her understand herself and she fantasized about fleeing their kindness and finding her lost love. Dreamed about taking the raw power they tried so hard to teach her how to control and releasing it all in one raging flood against the creature that had caused her to be here, the creature that held Alex.

Ashara would not talk of him, this Azeral. Her lips thinned at his mention and her shields thickened to fortress-like stature. Neira’sha would say little more, only that this Azeral was high sidhe like themselves. But Dockalfar to their Liosalfar. Dark to their light. Evil to their good. Sadism to their kindness. That he and his lived far away in the shadow of the Desney mountains, where he ruled his part of the world with an iron fist. That he was a power to be reckoned with and an intellect darker than the Liosalfar liked to dwell on.