Modern Magick

The Wonders of Vale: 17

What was it?

'It'll come to me,' I said aloud.

'I'll take that as no,' said Jay, though he carefully loosened the grip of one hand, and I regained a glimmer of sight in my right eye.

And hastily closed it again, tight, for the gloaming somehow blazed with light, more brightly than high noon, though it was a pallid rather than a vivid glow, and everything ethereally a-shimmer.

Emellana stood in the centre of it like a goddess, taller than seemed possible, and her eyes were afire with the same light.

The lyre, to my mixed disappointment and relief, was no longer in her hands, and the music was gone.

'So it's been an interesting half-hour,' I commented, as I waited for my seared eye to stop watering.

'Could say that,' Jay agreed.

I thought I heard someone sobbing. 'They're enslaved,' Miranda was saying. 'Slaves.'

Who? I wanted to ask, but realisation dawned as my sluggish brain caught up, and I didn't need to. She meant the griffins, of course, and the unicorns.

Including my Adeline.

Emellana's shoulders sagged. She swayed like a young tree in the wind, and would have fallen had not Jay and I hastened to catch her. We helped her to sit down, and she did so without appearing to notice the seeping wet earth beneath her, or the wind driving rain into her eyes. 'I am very well,' she insisted, smiling up at us, and I wondered how much the deep magick of that place, and whatever she had done to it, had addled her brain. If at all.

'It is an old spot, you know,' she said after a little while, looking around at the gloomy hilltop. 'Ancient. Much older than Torvaston and his court. I found layers of magick running deep, so deep...' She stopped speaking, and stared mistily over the landscape. 'The griffins have always been here,' she continued at length. 'The griffins, and their like. The enchantments which bind them, however, are much newer.'

'How much newer?' I said.

'Measurements of time are arbitrary constructions,' she said, smiling vaguely at me. 'It is impossible to determine anything of that kind from the traces I have lately read. I could not say this number of hundred years ago, or since that event. I can only say, that they have permeated the earth and the air of this place, but not to any great depth.'

I thought about that. 'If I understand you rightly, you mean to say that they probably were not laid down by Torvaston, or anybody else, as much as four centuries ago.'

'Perhaps not, indeed,' Emellana agreed.

'But I saw him,' I said. 'At least, I am fairly sure it was him.'

Emellana's gaze turned upon me, and, at last, sharpened. 'Saw him?' she echoed.

'I had visions,' I elaborated, looking first at Em and then at Jay. 'Surely it wasn't just me?'

Jay just looked at me.

'Oh. Well, I saw... everything was very confused. I don't quite know what much of it was. Enraged griffins, chaotic unicorns, and a troll king...' I could dredge nothing more concrete out of my churning thoughts.

'A king?' said Jay. 'How do you know he was a king?'

'Because he was wearing a crown.'

'That would narrow it down,' Jay agreed.

'And we saw that crown in the museum at Farringale,' I continued.

'Are you certain?'

'Perfectly. Though, I cannot say that it means anything. I may have added that detail myself, or interpreted the crown in question as one that was familiar to me. It was a... confusing experience.'

Jay said, thoughtfully, 'That might be so. Otherwise, it's going to be hard to explain how you saw Torvaston here wearing a crown he left behind in the old Britain.'

'It could be a mental construction of Ves's own,' Emellana said, some of her old calm returning. 'Time will tell, I suspect.' She levered herself to her feet, leaning heavily upon me and upon Jay, and stood in silence for a moment.

I began to wonder what had become of Miranda, and my pup. The latter I saw trotting gaily through the rain, apparently untouched by it, though her fur was slicked with wet. It took rather more effort to locate Miranda. I saw her at last, far on the other side of the hill, a bedraggled, sopping-wet figure with her face turned up to the rain, searching the sky. She'd got as close as she could to the griffins, whose regular flight patterns brought them nearest to that side of the hill.

'Is she right?' I said, nodding in Miranda's direction. 'Are they truly enslaved?'

'Oh, yes,' said Emellana. 'It is not mere pacification, or coercion. They are absolutely bound, stripped of all independent thought, or capacity for independent action. It is the type of magick long banned in our Britain.'

'And here they're using it to farm ancient mythical creatures like cattle,' I said, feeling unusually grim. And it wasn't just because I was wet to the skin and I had snakes coiling in my hair.