Alison could see that Keir had been considering this for ages. That his guilt had been weighing on him all this time. She thought back to the moments when he’d pulled away from her, moments she thought were connected to his trauma and to the isolation he had imposed on himself. And perhaps they were, but there was something else there all along.
“What does it mean for her?” Keir asked the spriggan. Alison had been so concerned for him she had not thought about what the revelation meant for herself.
She had the old magic in her.
The old magic, which had power great enough to imperil the entire town. The old magic, the maker of dream worlds and the same power that granted the spriggan his stewardship over the forest. The power wielded by the korrigans and the fairies and all the wild things left in the world.
It was her power too.
“It’s for her to decide. Alison, the power that grows within you is your own. You can let it grow and learn to wield it, or you can squash it down and pretend it doesn’t exist. But be careful—the things we try to ignore often become the things that haunt us the most. As long as you pose no threat to the forest, you will be safe in my company.”
“If I wanted to learn to wield it, where would I turn?”
The old magic book Alison had bought a couple of years earlier had not worked. Alison had managed to make a glass bottle explode rather than create water within it as the book suggested.
But then, maybe the explosion was a sign of its own.
“There were once academies dedicated to its study. They took a great number of my trees to make their books, but they always planted more in return. I have not seen their kind in some time, though.”
“Most of the magic academies have been gone for a while,” said Keir. “There are still some scholars who consider magic alongside science, though.”
“If not among your own kind, there are other folk that still practice the old ways,” said the spriggan.
“Like the fairies?” Alison asked.
“Yes,” said the spriggan. “Although they can be temperamental. And they make a mess of my forest. Rings of mushrooms and doors in my trees and harnessing starlight for their evening revelries. They’re a wild folk, and I would expect lessons from them to come with a price.”
Alison knew she should be afraid. She had seen what the old magic was capable of, and she knew there were things in the world that did not share her notions of morality, that people like the wild fairies could not be trusted and should be feared.
But she trusted in herself. That even if she was faced with danger and hard choices, she would do her best to do what was right. And she trusted in Keir, that he would do his best to protect her. And she trusted in her friends, including the softly snoozing Willow, who admittedly wasn’t the most help at the moment as she had found a warm spot on the spriggan’s shoulder to nap after all, that they would help her whatever she asked of them.
“Do you know how to find them?”
Alison and Keir kept a lookout for the new signs of fairy activity the spriggan had shared with them: sounds of laughter or thetinkling of tiny bells on the breeze, flickers of light or floating orbs visible only in the corner of the eye, and the brush of something against the skin as if something had grown into the path that was absent upon closer inspection. But they made their way back to the cottage mostly without event, the one exception being a brushing against Alison’s legs that turned out to be Willow.
Their plans to meet with the korrigans and continue their search for the fairies could not proceed immediately the following day. Keir was needed to evaluate the healing of an injury sustained by the innkeeper, and Alison’s friend Rinka was due to arrive the very next evening.
Alison spent the day tidying up the cottage to prepare for Rinka’s arrival. Brytak carried a new bed frame and feather mattress up the stairs into Alison’s room, asking a dozen questions about Rinka. Alison gently let the young orc down—although Rinka was a bit younger than Alison, she was several years too old to be impressed by a teenager.
As she made her way through the cottage, Alison tried to use the magic the spriggan had told her of to make the work easier. She swept the floors and imagined the dust vanishing but was disappointed to find a neat little pile collected in the center of the room that certainly would have fallen through the cracks before Keir “fixed” them. She willed the pot to boil on the stove, but she was rewarded with only a bubble or two that seemed to come up a little early. She strained at the door handle, begging it to turn while her hands were full of linens up to hang on the line outside, but it did not so much as rattle.
“Maybe your powers aren’t domestic,” said Willow. The cat had slept through most of the chores, but she happily joined Alison outside in the afternoon sunshine. “Try setting something on fire.”
Willow’s face was so adorable and sweet that it was hard to remember that underneath her impossibly soft fur beat the heart of a killer. A most darling killer, but a killer nonetheless.
Alison pinned the linens to the line as she considered the cat’s words. “Keir noticed the magic while I did domestic tasks, but I didn’t. Maybe I’m focusing too hard.” She attached two pins to a sheet that needed at least three and left it to dangle, turning her back on it.
Then she snapped back around, hoping to catch something happening.
It hadn’t. The sheet slipped down from the second pin, forcing Alison to catch it just before it reached the grass below.
“Nope,” said Alison.
Willow gave her a withering look, or as close to one as she could manage with her little cat brows. “Keir’s magic came from a terrible pain he suffered. Do you really hate sweeping and gardening? Maybe it’s that you need to be angry or upset.”
There was a degree of annoyance or impatience in the tasks Keir had observed Alison doing. She liked the results of cleaning and gardening but found the activities themselves tedious. Perhaps her magic was the manifestation of a shortcut, her mind sparing her from boredom.
There were other tasks today that would enable her to test that theory. Washing the dishes, ironing the clothes, pulling the weeds from the garden. The tasks were never-ending.
