“‘Inept’ is too kind. I prefer ‘lying and hypocritical.’ Anyway, Parliament guards saw the banner and shot a spell-jammer at one of Dad’s machines so it crashed on the street.”
“Oh,” Sal said in a falling tone of sympathy.
“So I picked up the banner and … ” He arched his hand skyward. “Flew with it myself.”
“Ha. I expect they didn’t like that.”
“Nope. I knew they weren’t going to shoot me down, not with all those witnesses. At least things haven’t gotten that bad. But when I landed, about eight police officers closed in and arrested me. Charged me with ‘unauthorized deployment of rare witch abilities.’ That’s a seven-hundred-lira fine, by the way.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. Though we can assume if I’d been flying with a ‘Riquelme is awesome’ banner, they’d have laughed and waved it off.”
“Ha. Likely.”
“So that’s my first strike for unauthorized magic. If I get to three—jail time. Which is … stressful to hear.”
“Back in university, I recall, you occasionally got dragged in to talk to professors for objectionable behavior, but it never went as far as arrests.” She smiled.
“But now we live in interesting times.”
“Rare witch abilities.” Sal sighed. “Yours isn’t dangerous, though. What harm are you going to do by flying for twenty minutes now and then?”
“I don’t know. We always had to be registered, but nothing much used to happen otherwise. Now they’re checking up on people like me. And arresting us as needed.”
Making temporary changes to his skin, giving himself a boost of super-speed, channeling ambient light to make his hand glow in lieu of a flashlight—those were all things any endo-witch could do, and were legally free to. Abilities like flying, however, were unusual, and authorities kept a tighter rein on such actions. Still, he hadn’t truly felt the legal oppression until lately.
“How is your father lately, anyway?” Sal asked.
Merrick touched the plastic orange strands of the wig lying across his lap. “Not getting any better. The healers have nothing. Seems the only hope is if our mother would show up, finally come out of the fae realm and tell us if there’s anything she could do. But she never has.”
“Is he happy, though?”
“Of course. Always.”
“Then maybe it isn’t something that needs to be fixed. Just accepted.”
Merrick threw the wig onto a table, where it draped a stack of books. “But I want to fix things. The way—well, the way Prince Larkin did.”
“By complete self-sacrifice?” Sal set her mug on the table. “I hope you meet a better end than him.”
“He put the truce in place. He fixed a lot for the country. Along with Rosamund, I guess, since she made the deal and did the magic, but it’s a little hard to view her as a hero. She was almost as awful as Riquelme, with some of the land-grabs she pulled on the fae. Some people say she’s why Ula Kana started attacking. Kind of an ignoble ancestor to have.” He sent another glance around the house, with a rueful twist of his mouth.
“Nonetheless, a fascinating personage to us historians.”
“That reminds me … ” Merrick turned his head, listening. Cassidy’s voice answered Elemi’s, down on a lower floor. He met Sal’s eyes. “Let me show you something.”
He went to the room that opened off the library, where Cassidy had been rummaging for old clothes. An eighteenth-century canopy bed took up half the space; in its honor, they called it the Canopy Bedroom.
Sal shuffled in after him and peered at the painting on the wooden underside of the bed canopy. It depicted a shipwreck in progress, with drowning sailors, snarling mer-people, and tempest-blowing air fae. Given the creepy décor, generally no one ever wanted to sleep there. Merrick certainly never had.
“Still haven’t figured out how to move this old thing, eh?” Sal wrapped a hand around one of the carved bedposts.
“Nope.” Merrick opened the top drawer of a chest. “Rosamund locked the whole bed in place. Who knows why. We have a thousand theories; can’t prove any of them.”
“Must hide something. No secret passages?”
“None would fit in the walls or floors. We’ve measured. But the bed’s old news. This is what I wanted to show you.” From the drawer he took out a faded cardboard box with its corners coming apart.
Sal peered over his arm. She poked a finger at the tarnished jewelry in the box. “Oh yes. Some spells in there somewhere.”
Merrick’s magic only extended to altering his own body, and he couldn’t sense spells on other people or things unless they were active enough to affect him. As a faery, however, Sal could pick up such information easily.
“Do you think any of it could be Rosamund’s?” he asked. “These things were always in here, stashed with other junk. Our grandma told us she thought it all belonged to her grandmother. But the other day I noticed … ” Merrick picked out an earring, a drop-shaped scarlet gem with gold leaves wrapped around it. “These look an awful lot like … these.” He pulled over a history textbook he’d left nearby and opened it to the page he had bookmarked.
The portrait in the book displayed Rosamund Highvalley, wide-bosomed and beaming with triple-witch pride in her three colors of sashes—and wearing gold-and-red earrings that exactly resembled the pair he had found.
“Well, well,” Sal said.
“I’d gotten this book down to look up something for Elemi’s homework. And that same day I got out this box to make room for other stuff. When I saw the earrings, the connection clicked.”
Sal held the earring in her palm, then set it back on top of the chest. “Might be the same ones, but these aren’t enchanted. The spells are attached to something else in here.” She kept poking, shoving aside bird-shaped pins, gaudy cufflinks, and tangled strings of fake pearls.
Merrick’s heart beat fast. “Please, please let it be her Lava Flow charm.”
Sal laughed. “The palace already has that. It’s in their museum.”
“Maybe she made another one. A charm to cure people of fae spells is exactly what my dad needs.”
“Good luck using it, even if you somehow got hold of it. Rosamund’s talents were unparalleled and her charms were often too complex for others to grasp … ah.” She pulled out a silver chain, thread-thin and at least three feet long.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Resistance charm. Just in case anyone’s trying persuasion magic on you. Still potent, if you need one.”
“Oh.” Merrick took it, wrapping its length around his hand. “We can buy these, though.”
“This one feels stronger than the over-the-counter ones. But there’s still something else in here … a-ha.” After another few seconds of rummaging, she drew out a gray stick, five inches long and as thick as Merrick’s thumb. It was carved with spiraling designs and had copper wire wrapped around one end, gone green with age. “Summoning stick. Definitely not legal to own these days.”
Magic to force anyone to do anything against their will—even just come to you—had been against the law in Eidolonia since the early nineteenth century. Shield charms, like the chain, existed to protect people in case someone illegally tried.