Ailin said, “I can blast you, just like I did that stupid rose.”
Rudelle kept moving.
“I can change you into a toad. I bet Trevelyn wouldn’t like you so much then.”
Rudelle ignored the threats and kept coming. She was furious and let the anger show on her face.
Uncertainty showed in his eyes. “I’ll do it! I’ll change you!”
His hands raised, and the first word of an invocation trickled from his mouth. Rudelle hit him hard, closed fist, against the jaw. He slid to the ground, boneless as a sack of wheat.
Ilis crept closer, a look of wonder on her face. “Is he dead?”
“No, just unconscious.”
Ilis knelt beside the fallen sorcerer and looked up at Rudelle, her eyes shining.
“But didn’t you know he could have killed you?”
Rudelle shook her head. “I am the middle child of seven, all boys except for me. I am not about to start letting little boys bully me, magic powers or not. Once you let them think they have the upper hand, they do. And he doesn’t have it with me.”
Elva reappeared. Ilis introduced them. Elva said, “He’ll kill you when he wakes up. No one insults Ailin like that.”
“You speak of him as if he were a grown man; he is not. He is a little boy, and little boys respect and need discipline.”
“Ailin is a sorcerer.”
“And a little boy.”
Elva shrugged. “Have it your way, farmer’s daughter.”
Trevelyn walked through the destruction, calling for Rudelle. He hugged her when he found her. “I was worried when I saw the signs of battle.”
Ilis said, “Did you see what Rudelle did?”
“No.”
Ilis told him, the deed growing a bit with the telling.
Elva spoke to Trevelyn as if Rudelle were not there. “She won’t live out the week.”
Elva vanished.
He hugged Rudelle tighter and said, “I’ll carry Ailin inside and put something on his face to keep the swelling down.”
“I’m sorry that I hit him.”
“I’m not,” Trevelyn said.
She asked, “Ilis, can your rose be saved?”
The girl walked close to the wounded vine, tears glistening in her eyes. “Yes, but she hurts.” The girl sat on the ground, and the surviving blossoms shivered and cringed above her head.
Trevelyn motioned for Rudelle to come with him and leave Ilis to her magic.
Rudelle asked, “How are your parents?”
“Down in the caverns under the house. They have research to do and spells to prepare. They’ve neglected the magic shop. It’ll take me weeks to catch up.”
“They don’t like me very much.”
“No, but I love you, and that will be enough for them, eventually.”
Rudelle nodded, but was unconvinced.
Dinner preparations went forth in the only truly clean room in the house, the kitchen. The maid had kept up in there. Trevelyn watched through the open doorway. Ilis worked beside Rudelle. The girl wore a clean brown dress and clean undergarments. Rudelle had even shown her how to mend rips without magic.
Ailin was nursing a wondrous bruise, but the boy was peeling potatoes, something his mother could never have gotten him to do. Of course, his mother wouldn’t have been basting a turkey either.
Ilis watched everything Rudelle did with a kind of wonder. Ailin watched her with a wary and unusual emotion, respect.
Elva came to stand beside Trevelyn. “What have you brought into this house, brother?”
He smiled. “Peace, cooked meals, love, discipline.” He shrugged, “Rudelle.”
“How did you know?”
“I went to a prophet and paid gold.”
Elva laughed. “It looks like you’re going to get your money’s worth.”
He nodded. “Rudelle will see to it.”
An explosion shuddered through the house. “What was that?” Rudelle asked.
Ilis answered, “Mother or Father, they are working spells.”
“Well, my cake is going to fall if they keep doing that. Go downstairs and tell them to please not rock the house until after dinner.”
Ilis looked like she’d lost her mind.
Elva saved her. “I’ll do it. Should I tell them you said so?”
“Please do, and tell them that if they can refrain from blowing up the house, we will have layer cake, turkey with walnut stuffing, candied orange breads, potato cakes, and fresh greens, courtesy of Ilis’s magic.”
Elva grinned. “You fixed all their favorites.”
Rudelle grinned back. “Did I?”
Ailin said, “Candied orange breads? Really? But it isn’t a holy day.”
Elva gave a small bow in Rudelle’s direction. “I will tell my parents to stop rocking the house. If you can scold them like children, I can be brave enough to bear the message. Though I will have a sorcerous shield ready when I tell them.”
Rudelle said, “Thank you, Elva.”
Elva laughed and hugged her brother. “That new wife of yours may live out the week.” Then Elva vanished.
“People certainly leave rooms quickly here,” Rudelle said.
Ailin asked, “May I have a candied orange bread?”
“Just one, or you’ll ruin your dinner.”
The boy nodded.
Rudelle handed him the treat and said, “You’ve done a wonderful job on those potatoes. You’ve been a big help, and you didn’t waste a spell on it.”
He grinned, mouth full of orange bread, and mumbled, “I don’t need magic to peel any old potatoes.”
“Of course you don’t.”
Ilis asked, “Rudelle, the water’s boiling, now what?”
“We cut up the potatoes and put them in.”
“Oh.”
Trevelyn listened to the rise and fall of voices, smelled the rich fragrance of cooking food, and smiled.
HERE BE DRAGONS
This is the only science fiction story I’ve ever completed. Hardware-oriented science doesn’t interest the writer in me. It’s the softer sciences that fascinate me on paper. Of course, just because it’s soft science doesn’t make it a soft story. One editor rejected this story by writing that it made her feel unclean. Cool.
SOME people are just born evil. No twisted childhood trauma, no abusive father, or alcoholic mother, just plain God-awful mean. Dr. Jasmine Cooper, dream therapist and empath, believed that, knew that. She had spent too many years looking inside the minds of murderers not to believe it.
Bernard C. had been born evil. He was sixty, tall and thin, a little stoop-shouldered with age. Thick white hair fell in soft waves around a strong face. At sixty, he still showed the charm that had allowed him to seduce and slaughter sixteen women.
He wasn’t your typical mass murderer. First, he was about fifteen years too old; second, until he started murdering people he had seemed quite sane. No abuse of animals, no child beating, no rages, nothing. Perhaps it was that very nothing that was the clue. Bernard had been the perfect husband until his wife died when he was fifty. He had raised two children, the perfect father. Everything he did was perfect, so squeaky normal that it screamed when you read it. Too perfect, too ordinary, like an actor that had his role down—to perfection.
Jasmine had studied the pictures; the basement slaughter room with its old-fashioned autopsy table. Bernard had been a mortician before he retired. Jasmine had found morticians to be some of the most stable and sane people she had ever met. You had to be pretty well grounded to work with the dead, day after day. As a mortician, Bernard had been the best, until he retired.
He brought sixteen women down his basement steps, ranging in age from forty-five to sixty-nine. He tapped them on the head, not too hard, strapped them to his table, and started the embalming process while they were still alive. Technically, most of them just bled to death. Bernard drained out their blood and pumped in embalming fluid, simple. They bled to death.
But Jasmine knew it was not simple, that they hadn’t just bled to death, that they had strained against the tape over their mouths, struggled against the straps at wrist and ankle until they rubbed the skin away and bled faster. As you grow older the skin tears more easily, thin and fine as parchment.
And Jasmine was in charge of Bernard’s rehabilitation. Dreaming. Images swimming, colored clouds floating across the mind. Brief glimpses of places, people, sharp glittering bits of emotion. The dreamer moved in his sleep, almost awake, dreams surfacing, spilling over his conscious mind. Bright memories of make-believe following his thoughts like hounds on a scent. He would remember. Jasmine would see that he never forgot.