The Mage and the Magpie

This book is dedicated to my wife, who consistently believes in me when I do not. She is the best person that I have ever known.

“Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.”‌—‌Barbara Kingsolver

Copyright © 2015 by Austin J. Bailey.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below. Please contact by email: [email protected]

Note: This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Author Website:
www.austinjbailey.com

Cover design by
James T. Egan

Edited by
Crystal Watanabe

Map of Aberdeen by
Karl Vesterberg

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Chapter One

In which there is a pool of drool

B
rinley fell out of a dream onto the floor of her bedroom and the jolt of the cold tiles against her sleep-warmed feet instantly sent her up on tiptoes. Last summer her dad had gotten four truckloads of tile for free. It was free because nobody could sell it, and nobody could sell it because it was so ugly, but that didn’t stop him from ripping out all of the carpet and tiling every last inch of the house. Sure, it was easier to keep clean, but tile was cold. She shivered in her nightgown, which was really just one of her dad’s old work shirts. She was too old to wear her dad’s shirts to bed, she thought vaguely. It was time to get some real pajamas,
warm
ones. Then again, the shirt had almost no holes in it, and it was so soft. Best of all, it smelled like Dad. And Dad smelled warm.

She got back into bed and then leapt out again when she remembered what had awakened her. The noise! It had been so loud! She dashed down the hall to her father’s room and shook him awake in the middle of a snore.

“Dad, did you hear that?”

He put his palms to his face and rubbed slowly. “Uh…what? What time is it?” he said blearily.

“Did‌—‌you‌—‌hear‌—‌that?” she repeated, more earnestly now that he was actually awake.

“Hear what, Brinley?”

“That noise. It practically shook the house!”

“What noise?” he asked patiently, pushing himself up on one arm and looking around as if to find the source of it. “Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?”

“Yes,” she said fervently. Then, “Well, maybe not…I mean, I guess when you’re dreaming and a giant gong wakes you, you can’t be sure if the gong was in the dream or not…”

“Exactly,” he said, nodding and lying back down. He was asleep again as quickly as he had awakened. He always did that. Now she was going to be awake all by herself for who knew how long, trying to figure it all out. She hopped onto the end of his bed, crossed her legs, and tried to remember what the sound had been like.
Gong
was how she had described it, but maybe it was more like a
boom
…like a cannon, maybe? Or was it more like a loud
clang
? No…

***

When she woke up the next morning, she was still on her father’s bed. She was half lying down, half sitting up, with an impressive amount of drool pooled beside her face. Evidently she had fallen asleep with her head on her hand, elbow propped against her knee, and then face-planted some time later. Her father was poking her.

“Wake up, drool-face.”

She lifted her head but stayed sprawled, wiping her face with one hand and batting him away with the other.

“Bad Daddy,” she said weakly. He stopped, then burst out laughing. She smiled with her face half-buried in the bed.

Later, as they stuffed their faces with pancakes, he asked what all the fuss had been about last night, and she repeated the story.

“Hmm…” was all he said when she finished.

“Hmm…” she mimicked.

“Well, it’s probably nothing,” he continued. “All the same, you should tell me if it happens again.”

“Really?” This was not at all how she had expected him to react. She’d thought he would simply reassure her that it was just a dream, and by doing so, end the silly idea that she was clinging to: that it may not have been a dream at all.

“Sure,” he said easily, helping himself to another pancake. “Giant nighttime bells are nothing to trifle with.”

“You’re making fun of me!”

“No,” he said, growing serious. “No, I’m really not.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Well, maybe I am a little.” He gave her a significant look. “Actually, it happened to me once.”

“Really?” she replied. “What do you mean?”

“Hearing bells in the night.
A
bell,” he corrected himself.

“You never told me that,” she said, excited.

“No,” he said simply. “It was a long time ago…” He trailed off, and they ate in silence for a while.

“Dad,” Brinley said at length, thinking of the question she had meant to ask him, “how did you find me?”

“Hmm? Oh. In a basket, on the steps of the old church at Morley, like I told you,” he said, stirring the leftover syrup on his plate idly.

“No, I mean
how.
How were you there, at Morley, in the middle of the night?”

“Ah.” He looked up at her with renewed interest, eyes flashing a little in the morning light. “That brings us back to the bell.”

Brinley’s pulse quickened.

“I heard it that night. It brought me right out of bed. It was ringing again and again, so loudly that I couldn’t hear myself think. I got halfway to the church before I realized that no one else seemed to be bothered by it. No lights on, no one looking out their windows. The bell stopped as soon as I got there, and there you were, waiting for me.”

Brinley was quiet for a moment, reflecting on this new piece of the puzzle. “I don’t understand,” she said finally.

“Which part?”

“The bell.”

“What about it?”

“Well,” she said slowly, “Morley Church doesn’t have a bell.”

He blinked. “It doesn’t?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head. She went there all the time, and she could have sworn it didn’t, but now she was doubting herself. “I’ll have to check, I guess.”

He shrugged. “Well, there was on the night that I found you. I know I heard one.”

“Do you think that’s what I heard last night?”

“I don’t know, Brin. Maybe.” He glanced at the clock. He took her plate and moved to the sink, where he began to wash the dishes.

“Dad,” she said, “what did it sound like?”

“What?”

“The bell.”

His hand made a slow, silent circle around the plate in the dishwater.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “It was…I don’t know.”

“What?” she prompted.

He turned to her, cocked an eyebrow. “Well, I was going to say that it felt like it was from somewhere else.”

Brinley felt a twinge of excitement. This was exactly what she’d thought last night, but this morning she figured he would think she was crazy. “Like another world?” she asked.

His eyebrows went up. “I don’t know what that even means,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “I’m probably being silly.”

“Yeah,” she said hastily. “Right, me too.”

They looked at each other awkwardly, then he shrugged and said, “Maybe we can go down there and take a look around together this Saturday.”

She brightened. “Really?”

He smiled. “I’ll be home late tonight. Don’t wait up.”

She watched him go. She thought about her father being drawn out of the house in the middle of the night by a bell that no one else could hear. It had led him to her when she was a baby. Could it have something to do with where she came from? Saturday, he had said. They would go to Morley on Saturday and check it out.

She glanced around the empty house and tried to imagine waiting until Saturday. She sighed. There was no way she could wait that long. She had to know now. There was something strange about that sound. It was as if it were calling to her
.
Something deep inside her had recognized that bell. It was ringing for
her
.

Chapter Two

In which someone is very nearly eaten

B
rinley was not wrong. The sound had indeed come from a place far from her world. In that place, several days before Brinley was awakened by the sound of the bell, the oldest of all the mages fingered his long beard and curled his age-worn body into a wisp of night mist, vanishing in the wind. He was the Wind Mage, after all, and the wind was his business.

The devil-child whom he had been following screamed and raised a fist in protest, but there was nothing to be done. Animus was too smart to be taken in by its tricks, too clever, too old, perhaps, to wander into a trap so obvious. He had followed the child across the night as it beckoned to him, followed it silently past the guards over the ancient bridge, followed it disbelieving over the section of the bridge that should not have been passable, moving through walls and wards of magic that should have barred their way; nobody should have been able to cross this bridge. The mages had taken precautions long ago to keep this from happening.

He had followed the creature through the mist at the top of the high, arched bridge and down the other side into a dark and tangled forest which bears a name so old and evil that it cannot be written. He had followed it long enough. He would go alone to investigate the creature’s claim. He would do it carefully, quietly; he would be nothing more than breath-mist on the wind, hiding his name and power from the darkness that lived within.

It didn’t take long before he found her.

She was unconscious‌—‌dead, he thought at first‌—‌but no, that was not possible. She lay there with her straw-colored hair fanned out across the mud like tarnished gold. Gold that should never tarnish. It was too much for him, seeing her like that, the best person in the world discarded like a dirty rag in a dark corner. Without thinking, he changed back into himself and moved to help her.

He regretted it immediately.

A mass of fur and feathers and claws tore from the shadows behind him and pinned him to the floor of the little clearing. It would have killed him too, mage though he was, if it had not recognized him in the split second that it took its teeth to reach his throat.

“Peridot!” Animus exclaimed. It was clear now, who had caught him. Pinned beneath her side, he was staring up at the place where wings connected to the rest of her body. There was only one such creature in the world: Peridot the Magemother’s herald. She was the last of her race‌—‌a winged lion, a “Laurel,” as they were called in the old days, and she was sworn to protect the Magemother.