Magic Under Stone

Somewhere in the middle of his dream list of animals, he fell asleep.

He woke to a whisper in his ear. “Ifra?”

“Hmm?”

Violet was sitting behind him. “I thought those stupid girls would never go to sleep. They snore too, at least one of them does. Were you sleeping? I thought you didn’t need sleep.”

“I want sleep.” He turned over to look at her. Her hair was down, and all rippled from being in braids. She had a nightgown on that should have buttoned to the neck, but the buttons looked like they’d mostly been torn off by the previous owner, perhaps in some sibling scuffle, baring her neck and the sharp edge of a collarbone.

The longer he looked at her, the less peevish she looked, and the more anxious… and lovely.

“I’m cold,” she whispered.

He rearranged the blanket so he could throw a corner around her shoulder, and she settled down with him, her small body rigid.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“It’s so ordinary here. I mean… these people are nice. Maybe a little too nice. And then when everyone went to bed and I had time to think…” She took a deep breath. “I can’t believe… Uncle Erris might be dead. And I’m going to the fairy kingdom, and… it doesn’t seem quite real. I’m not prepared for it to be real.” She turned to him, stricken. “I don’t want to be a queen! I want to go home.”

“I’m scared, too, but-”

“I never knew jinn could be scared. You must have granted zillions of wishes already.”

“Twelve,” he said. “I guess Luka’s wish for me to serve him was the thirteenth.”

“Three wishes times four? You’ve only granted wishes to four people?”

“Well, I’m only seventeen. I haven’t been doing this for long.”

“What were the wishes?” she asked.

“I’m starting to forget. When I have a new master, I forget the last ones, mostly.”

“How do you become a jinn who grants wishes? It obviously wasn’t something you wanted.”

“It happens to all of us. On our seventeenth birthday. I wasn’t sure what day I was born, exactly, so it was a surprise, but maybe it’s best that way. One day I guess I just blacked out, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up to this person holding a golden oil lamp. My first master was young, I remember that. A boy. Wait-a thief. He’d lost a thumb as punishment for pickpocketing, and he asked for it back.” Ifra smiled a little. “That wasn’t such a bad wish.”

“And before that… you lived somewhere without chocolate?”

“We didn’t have a lot of food. There was grass, so we raised animals, and we had milk and yogurt, but we only had about ten fruits and vegetables. The best time of year was when we’d go to the big market and get spices and tea.” His eyes glazed in the dark room, thinking of the colors of the bazaar that were such a striking contrast from the tan rocks and dull green brush he had stared at every day.

“What about your family? Do you have sisters and brothers?”

“No. I don’t have a family, not really. My mother is a slave and my father is her master, so a free jinn raised me. I spent the better part of the year on a farm, with a couple that didn’t have any children to help with the crops and the animals. I was good with the animals. Plus, if there wasn’t enough food, they didn’t have to eat as much when I was around, so they never had to starve.” That was a good memory too. Sometimes his magic truly felt like a gift. “Why so many questions, anyway?”

“I don’t know you. I’m not afraid of you like Celestina and Nimira wanted me to be, but when you came out of the forest, I thought you were immortal and mystical, and you would protect me and say wise things, like in books.”

Ifra laughed. “I was never like that.”

“All I had to go on were those books. I had a book of stories about jinn.”

“Well, what about you?” he said. “I don’t know you either. I know people forget you, and your father wants to protect you, and the people in Cernan don’t even know you exist, so I presume you don’t leave the house much.”

“Sometimes in summer, Papa takes me to New Sweeling to buy me new toys and books and clothes. That’s it. I was always sick, anyway, especially in the cold months, so I mostly stayed in bed and read books and made up stories with my paper dolls. Nobody knew what was wrong with me. They thought it might be tuberculosis, and that I would die.”

“But you didn’t, clearly.”

“No. Uncle Erris knew what was wrong. He knew things I suppose my mother would have known. I don’t know how much alike they were, but when he told stories about her… I almost wished he’d stop. I didn’t realize, until I heard them, how much I wanted a mother.” She paused. “No, that’s not true. I always knew it. I just tried to hide it away because Papa would be so sad. He was already sad.” She sniffed. “I guess I associate my mother with sadness, but Erris told me she was always cheerful and silly, and she was always getting in trouble, and for the first time I could really imagine her.”

She wiped her face, rather dramatically, with her sleeve. “But anyway. I mean, it’s no use thinking about that. Except that Erris… he made me curious about being a fairy. I wanted to see where my mother came from. And now he’s gone too. I just don’t understand why the fairy king would want to kill him without even meeting him.”

“He did meet Erris, when they were young,” Ifra said. “Of course, that still doesn’t explain why he wanted to…” The word “kill” jarred him. Those were not the words of the wish. “No, that’s not right. He didn’t want him killed. He wanted his clockwork body destroyed.”

“Same thing.”

“But… it’s a funny choice of words. It would have been easier to tell me just to kill him, but Luka was very aware that jinn can twist the words of wishes, and those were the words he chose.” The way Ifra kept feeling a wisp of Erris back in Telmirra nagged at him.

Violet’s eyes shot wide open. “Death sleep,” she said.

“Death sleep? I don’t understand.”

“We don’t know what happened to Uncle Erris’s real body. Is it dead? But if it was, wouldn’t the fairy king just have asked you to kill him? Wouldn’t it be the same thing?”

Violet told him a story about poking around her father’s study, finding clockwork mice and a clockwork cat and a clockwork woman, and journals that explained how her father had enchanted automata by putting living creatures in a death sleep and then coaxing their souls elsewhere. “I guess he was looking for a way to raise the dead, but it never worked,” she said. “Or else… he could have brought back my mother.”

Ifra sat up and took from his pocket the cravat pin Luka had given him to aid in tracking Erris. “Maybe that explains why I kept feeling Erris back at the fairy kingdom even while I was supposed to track him down at Cernan. I could never pinpoint exactly where his spirit was, so I assumed it was just because he used to live there, and the strange nature of his enchantment. Like a bit of a ghost.”

“No. He’s alive. He must be.” Violet met his eyes. There was a new brightness to her, an electric sense of purpose. “We just have to find him. And wake him up.”

THE FAIRY KINGDOM

Ifra’s sense of the weather was not as sharp as his ability to sense living beings, but he had a little warning of the winter storm approaching. They were not long past the fairy gate. He didn’t tell Violet-didn’t want to alarm her-but aimed for a nearby village. If the storm snowed them in for some days, he didn’t want to impose on an isolated family. Maybe they could find an inn of some sort.

“Is there a festival going on?” Violet asked, looking delighted by the main street coming into view.

A bonfire blazed in the town square, with a dozen or so fairies singing and dancing while musicians played merry music. A few brightly painted carts decorated with now-familiar fairy designs of animals, intricate knots, and symbols, sold hot food and drinks, their smells roasty and alluring.

“Ohhh,” Violet moaned. “I haven’t had real food since the pancakes.” After the hospitality of the farm family,