The Kinlea Keeper Story Society (Msr. Timothy R. Jamison Presiding)

Copyright © 2010/2012 by E. Grace Diehl. All Rights Reserved (Note: E.G.D. reserves the right to change/edit any part of this unpublished work.  This excerpt is intended solely for the enjoyment of For Keeps series readers)

Prologue

            “What of the daughter of the rope maker’s daughter?”  It filled his head like the howling of the wind fills the air on a stormy night, and it cracked with more violence than any thunder.

Kinlea’s spirit cringed away like a shy, dark thing of shadows.  The sea was swallowing him from the inside; scraping, washing with acerbic brine the bits of him that were softest and most vulnerable.  Where it ground at him like diamond dust, what was ethereal and infinitely vital in him grew colder than flesh is capable of becoming, and in defiance of the very core of the keeper’s nature, his damaged spirit screamed that he should flee.  This was not something a man was tailored to face, even if he occupied a place of power deeper, stronger, and safer than any before him.

The ocean, the unkeepable, an entity entirely against and beyond control, was toweringly angry, and it was worse for the fact that Kinlea understood anger.  Anger, in purest form, sat in perfect opposition to control.  Anger, in purest form, was the force designed to rend away balance, and balance was what he was, within and apart from what was man.

“Great power, a life, and several pounds of flesh, and once it has been started, it cannot be stopped.”  The rumble of the voice lowered to a purr, and Kinlea gagged salt water.  “You must give me the rest of it.  It is the way.  It has always been, and it will always be thus.”

“Good Lord,” said Nicolas Waltham, rushing forward to catch his son’s arm as he fell.  “If you can’t take more than a finger of good whiskey, you can’t call yourself a proper Englishman.  Kinlea?  Good God.  Sarah, call a doctor.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Victoria Stewart, pressing herself against the wall of the foyer in horror.  She’d only just been introduced to the man, and already he was falling ill.  She could not say that didn’t follow the trend of her life in the past decade, but she hadn’t expected catastrophe to strike before she’d even formed an attachment.

Sarah Waltham waved down the nearest servant (a maid who was so mesmerized by the stricken young man she’d forgotten she was carrying the tea things) and ordered her to call the doctor.

Kinlea coughed and tasted the saltwater in his mouth.  There was blood in it as well, and thick, old magic.  He pulled back away from his father’s hand and from the voice in his ears and bones, and he crashed backward into the sharp corner of a heavy end table, sending an expensive oriental vase over the edge onto the rug.  He landed in the spilt water and flowers, bleeding and bruised.

“I’ve never known him to have seizures!” exclaimed Mrs. Waltham.  “Even when he was so very ill as a boy.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Vicky,” said Mr. Waltham, falling to his knees by his son and turning him over onto his back.  “Just a minute ago he was the very picture of health.”

“Is he breathing?” Vicky squeaked.

“He must be.  He’s coughing.”

Kinlea suddenly pulled away from his father again and tried to stand.  “I need,” he choked.  “I need to go outside.”  He found his feet and rushed past the horrified young visitor and down the steps of his parents’ townhouse, falling to his knees and violently expelling the fluid from his lungs onto the dirty, cobbled street.  The saltwater served to melt some of the gutter ice in splash-patches.

“Great power, a life, and several pounds of flesh,” the voice hissed.  “Come to me.”

“You’ve taken enough of what isn’t yours,” said Kinlea, forcing bonds open with Sutton Hill Keep and manipulating the network to dampen Haneth’s End’s unnatural connection with the sea.  “I’m sorry I can’t solve both of our problems, but I don’t expect the sea herself wants me to attempt anything short of total surrender, and I dare not risk a peaceful alternative.”

There wasn’t time.  The whole thing was already too dangerous.  The magic that had come for him was older and deeper than even the first idea of keeps, and it was undermining the balance in a way that was likely making every keeper in Europe’s head spin.  He could only hope that what he was about to do would not be taken as a declaration of war.

His father and the girl his parents hoped he would settle down with were standing over him, and there were hands on his shoulders, and his shoulder burned where the table had opened it, and he was outside in freezing weather without a coat, but he was only vaguely aware of anything outside of magic.  With less than a thought and more than a decision, Kinlea ripped open Dividing Wall and fell face-first into Sutton Hill’s magical realm, leaving his body behind and leaving his spirit soft and vulnerable like a crab without a shell.

“This is certainly different,” Death noted.  “I’ve never seen a keeper make himself into a fetch.”

“It’s the only way to directly access the wyrd, or at least so I’ve heard,” explained Kinlea.  “I need to tie a knot in it.”  His spirit-being shuddered at the wrath that was still grinding it and making it cold.  “If you’ll excuse me.”

“If this doesn’t work, I’m waiting.”

“I can see that,” said Kinlea, and he grinned to spite the depth of the terror shaking his soul.  He had to grin.  Otherwise, he couldn’t do a really proper job of winking at the Queen of Ends before turning away to find and alter the fabric of fate.

The arms of death were infinitely preferable to the arms of anything related to the sea.  Death was, unlike the sea, one of his dearest and oldest friends.

The wyrd world was through a second dividing wall, through which only fetch and other spirit figures could pass, and passing through it scraped at Kinlea in ways more agonizing than even the wrath of the sea.

“Your mægen is straining,” noted a wolf-form fetch who stood guard immediately through the barrier.  “You should not be here.  It could make you less than nothing to advance farther.”

“I left enough of me behind in my bonds that it should be well for the world if not well for my being,” said Kinlea.  “I need to correct a dangerous accident.”

“If you were not Haneth’s End, I would snuff you myself before you could risk deeper passage.”

“I know,” said Kinlea, bowing deeply.  “I am grateful, and I must go.  I trust you to expel me from the wyrd if there’s anything left of me after I do this.”

The stronger fetch nodded, and Kinlea passed farther into the wyrd.  With both the sea and pure fate working to grate him down to nothing, his time was even more stunted and precious, and though he was willing to sacrifice his self in order to ensure his keep would be safe, he was loath to take the risk and accomplish nothing.  This would need to be accomplished swiftly.

Following the strings of his pain, he found the threads in the fabric of the world’s sacred story that connected Haneth’s End to a power in the North Sea.  He followed them to where they were loose enough to pull, steeled himself against what might come, and reached out his mægen hands to disrupt the connection.  He need only tie a knot.  A tiny, simple knot.

The shock of first contact was purest disorientation.  Nothing in his mind could be directed, and sense was not something to be trusted.  His confusion scattered in every direction along the threads of the wyrd, reaching backward and forward through eternity in equal, miniscule particles of being.  The substance of his spirit dove forward and jerked back at once, and something in him twisted in agony and puerile, insane joy.  He might have been laughing.  He might have been dying.  He might have been tying a knot.

He had no awareness of the occurrence, but in an instant, he was forcibly expelled through the dividing wall of the wyrd world.  He had no grasp on what he had done or what he was doing, and what he would do from here could not even begin as a question on the foggy, scraped-smooth surface of his mind.  Several things of great power came forward to devour his essence, but quicker he felt the pull of someone calling.

“Kinlea Allen Waltham Haneth’s End, if you’re here, I order you to come and defy you to resist.”

He was suddenly in the hands of Sutton Hill, quivering and flickering, precariously on the edge of exploding like dandelion or milkweed fluff on the stiff afternoon wind.

“Into me, now, for the time being,” said Sutton Hill.  “I’ll assume your body is with your parents.  If it’s in a storage plane, you’re lost, but if it’s with your parents, there may be something we can do about this.  I wish you hadn’t torn a hole in Dividing Wall.  A pocket in the middle of town is never safe.”  The older keeper pulled Kinlea into his body for safekeeping and nudged the disembodied spirit into a dark corner of his mind.  “I’m glad you stopped whatever was happening.  It was making me ill.”  The stronger awareness nudged at Kinlea’s.  “Yes, I’m talking to you, Haneth’s End.  Yes, you.  Kinlea Allen Waltham, keeper of Haneth’s End, weaver of stories, friend and courting caller to Death, man of unfathomable recklessness and enormous capacity for both love and mischief.  We’ve met three times, though this is only the second time we’ve spoken.  I never in all my days would have imagined I could be of service to you, and I’ll admit it’s rather an honor.  Please stay focused and try to respond, or my spirit may swallow yours and that would do neither of us good.”

“What did I do?” asked Kinlea.  “Why am I here?”

“Excellent.  That’s the way.  Of course, I don’t actually know the answer to either of those, but the question is the thing.”

“I’m sorry, what am I, exactly?”

“You’re a man.  You’re a keeper.  You’re something of a legend.  These things will probably come back to you with a little time.  Right now, you’re oddly… Well, diminished might be the best word.  I do hope that someday you’ll be able to tell the story of whatever it was you did, as I’m sure it would be frightfully interesting.”

“Thank you for keeping me warm.”  Right now, warm seemed very important.

***

            “He’s burning up,” said the doctor, opening his satchel and rummaging through his assortment of powder envelopes and little jars.  “This was sudden, you say?”

“Very,” said Mr. Waltham.

“Well, I don’t think any of his organs has ruptured, which is one good thing.”  He turned to the maid.  “Mrs. Bates, could you fetch me a cup of water?”

The maid bobbed a curtsey and ran out of the room.

“Disorientation, fluid in the lungs, fever,” the doctor mumbled, “and all sudden.”

“Yes,” agreed Mr. Waltham, preparing himself for the worst.  He had more practice in such preparation than he cared to remember, and he was therefore very skilled.

“Could be any number of things.”  He prepared a plaster while he waited for the maid and the water.  “I’ll make no promises, but I’ll see what I can do.”

Mr. Waltham nodded stiffly.

Then, there was a very loud knock at the front door, and shortly thereafter the butler came to inform Mr. Waltham of the arrival of Sir Edgar Copley.  Concerned for his son or no, Mr. Waltham was a very socially conscious man, and Sir Copley was the most distinguished gentleman in the neighborhood.  He nodded stiffly to the doctor and followed the butler out to the drawing room, where his visitor was waiting.

“Sir Copley, this is a pleasant surprise, but I fear you’ve caught me at a bad time.  My son has taken ill, and my wife is suffering a fainting spell.”

“It’s Ed, Nick, if you please, and I’m sorry to hear it.  Kinlea’s actually in town?”  He stood and extended a shaking hand, which Mr. Waltham took firmly in his.

“He came on the train yesterday morning.”

“You were to introduce him to Victoria, then?”

“Did. Look, Ed, I really am sorry, but Kinlea’s in a bad way.  I do beg your pardon, but could you call back at a later date?”

“Might I have a look?  I do have a degree in medicine, and I may as well use it.”

“The family physician is already in the room with him.”

“Two heads are better than one, they say, and I do insist,” Sir Copley declared, indicating with his bearing that he expected Mr. Waltham to lead the way.

The man of the house was in no position to refuse a knighted lord anything. He nodded and complied.  A minute later, the family physician and Sir Copley were holding a very stiff and waspishly over-civil conversation, and Mr. Waltham left the room on the pretense of checking on his wife.

Once the two doctors were alone, the keeper of Sutton Hill exhaled deeply and said, “Sorry, Bradley, you know how things are.  Haneth’s End is Haneth’s End, and I found him half gone and disembodied on the magical side nearly half an hour ago.”  He quietly nudged the spirit back into its proper body, and the body shuddered as the parts re-merged.

“It doesn’t surprise me, somehow,” admitted Sutton Hill’s second-youngest guardian.  “First I’ve actually seen him, but Haneth’s End has an unsettling reputation.  I gave him something to reduce the fever, and I don’t fancy he’ll die.”

“Poor Nicholas and Sarah,” chuckled Sir Copley.  “It can’t possibly be easy to love someone so willful and reckless.”

“Happily, they’ll never know the half of it,” said Dr. Bradley.  He pulled his stethoscope from his satchel and checked his young patient’s breathing again.  “He’s showing signs of being better already.”

“Bodies generally do better when their mægen and mind aren’t wandering about elsewhere.”

“Not exactly the sort of thing they teach a man in medical college,” the doctor snorted.

The keeper/doctor/lord laughed and sat in a corner chair.  “No, I suppose not.”

***

            In the evening, once she’d properly calmed down and mustered the courage, Victoria returned to the Waltham residence and insisted that she be allowed to sit for a while with Kinlea.  The man was still unconscious, though the doctors said he was out of danger, and though the Walthams found her request a bit odd, they complied.

Mrs. Waltham sat with her in Kinlea’s room, and a maid brought them cream tea and little apple pastries.

“I’m glad the doctors say he’ll be well,” Victoria offered timidly, staring down into her teacup.  “I worried this morning.”

“It really did come as something of a shock,” Mrs. Waltham agreed.  “You know, he had a very poor constitution as a child.  He’s been ever so healthy, though, since he’s grown.  You’d think him a sportsman to see him on a usual day.”

“His coloring looks very well,” noted Victoria, venturing an attempt at polite conversation.  “The freckles suit.”

“I’ve been told he enjoys gardening and the like.”  The way she said it, gardening did not sound like something of which Mrs. Waltham much approved.  “Maybe he should be more careful to wear a hat.”

Victoria smiled.  Mrs. Waltham had almost exactly Kinlea’s coloring but not a single spot visible on her cream-colored face.  The younger woman wondered how very careful Sarah Waltham must have been to never neglect to wear a hat.

“Men needn’t worry about that sort of thing, really,” noted Victoria.

“He’s in danger of well bred people mistaking him for a farmer,” said Mrs. Waltham.

Victoria tried not to laugh because she could see perfectly well that Mrs. Waltham had not meant it for a joke.  Still, judging from the several seconds of her acquaintance with the man before he’d fallen ill, Kinlea was quite prettily mannered and carried himself more like a storybook prince than any farmer she had ever seen.  This was not to say that she could not imagine the man farming.  She had been given the immediate impression that there was very little such a person would be incapable of doing, given the opportunity or inclination.

“I daresay they’d find themselves quite shamed for the assumption once they’d spoken with him,” said Victoria, “if he’s half so much a wit as Father says.”

Suddenly, the man in question gasped and jerked upright into a sitting position very quickly.  His eyes were open and sharp, and Victoria couldn’t help but jump a bit in her chair when they met hers.  Tea sloshed onto her blouse, but she completely failed to notice.

“Oh, Kinlea!” exclaimed Mrs. Waltham, rushing to her son’s side and lifting a hand to the side of his face.  “Are you quite yourself again?”

“Where am I?” asked Kinlea, moving his eyes from the visitor to his mother and pushing her hand away gently.

“You’re home in your room,” Mrs. Waltham answered firmly.  “Where, quite frankly, I think you ought to spend more nights than you do.  Should I have the servants bring you something?  Soup?”

“No,” said Kinlea.  “I don’t understand.  I don’t know where I am.  I should know where I am.  I should always know where I am.”

“Dear heart, you were born in this house.  You were ten years in the nursery down the hall.  Are you alright?  Do you know me?”

“Yes, Mother.  I… I’m sorry, miss.  You look familiar, but I can’t recall if we’ve met.”  He looked past his mother and back to Victoria.

“Victoria Stewart,” said the woman in question, regaining the presence of mind to daub at her blouse with an embroidered handkerchief.  “You may call me Vicky, if you like.  Most everyone does.”

“She was to be our brunch guest,” explained Mrs. Waltham.  “You were introduced this morning.”

“You’ll pardon me that I don’t recall,” said Kinlea, nodding politely to Vicky.  “I don’t feel quite myself at the moment.  By your leave, I think I would like to properly dress.  Shall I meet you in the drawing room thereafter?”

“Kinlea, you’ve not been well,” said Mrs. Waltham.  “I don’t think you should leave bed.”

Almost as though cued, Kinlea shivered and coughed a painful, lung wracking cough.  He clutched at his chest and leaned back against the bed’s head board.  “No, I insist,” he managed once his breathing had settled.  “I’m fine.  Please let me be for a minute or two, and I’ll be with you presently.”

“Kinlea, dear, do be reasonable,” said Mrs. Waltham.  “I’ll have the maid fetch the doctor from the smoking lounge.”  She stood and pulled the bell.

Victoria, in startled fascination, noticed nearly frantic frustration in the man’s eyes the moment his mother’s back was turned.  He moved his hand from his chest to his face, and then he rubbed at his eyes and pushed his hair back in a movement that somehow gave Victoria the impression the man would have rather used his pent-up nervous energy to jump out the window and run.  She stood and nodded her head to the Walthams in turn.  “I’ll retire to the drawing room, then.  I’m glad to see you’re out of danger, Mr. Waltham.”

Kinlea’s attention appeared to return from the distance of his thoughts, and he cast a glance about the room as though he expected to see someone there he hadn’t previously perceived.  Then his confusion seemed to clear, and he met his guest’s eyes again with apology in his own.  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry.  You meant me.  Thank you for your kindness.  Please call me Kinlea.”

Victoria felt the heat of a blush come into her face, and all she could manage to do was nod and flee the room.  She burned with curiosity, and she wondered at the young man’s peculiar behavior.  He’d looked ever so much like an unusually intelligent (but nonetheless cornered) rabbit, and he didn’t seem to at all associate himself with his own family name.  She wondered what her father and the Walthams hadn’t bothered to tell her.

It was as though she was to be betrothed to a wild thing, or a dangerously powerful thing, and certainly something of the unknown.  She felt almost as though she’d just had an encounter with a member of the Sidhe.  If so, the Walthams must be hosting a changeling like in the old faerie stories.

“Oh, but he’s a charming one, at that,” she thought, and she blushed all the more furiously as the maid passed her by.

***

            Kinlea wanted to claw his way back out of his skin, and he couldn’t have explained the way he felt with all the words in any language at his disposal.  He knew and didn’t.  He felt and didn’t.  He was and wasn’t what he thought he ought to be, and he felt as though he should know things he didn’t and did know things he shouldn’t but couldn’t place which was which.  He needed time alone to sort himself out, but how was a man to explain to his mother that he felt like most of him was elsewhere and calling for him to join, but from a direction he couldn’t determine?  How should he be expected to explain this to a doctor who would likely insist on bed-rest?

The maid came and went, and Mrs. Waltham sat down to the side of him on the bed.  “Kinlea, you’ll stay with us, won’t you?  Until you’re better, at least.”

Kinlea couldn’t have imagined a less reasonable request.  He knew in his bones that he should be somewhere else.

“I’ll give it due consideration.”  He had to force the words.  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so muddled and confused, but then, at the moment, he couldn’t remember what it was like to not feel muddled and confused.

“I do hope you will.”  Mrs. Waltham smiled with more tenderness than Kinlea could ever remember seeing in his mother, and then she sighed.  “I think you’ll like Vicky once you properly make her acquaintance.  She has something of your peculiar strength of spirit, we think, and your father and I hope you’ll give her a chance.”

A chance?  He tried to wrap his mind around the idea.  A chance at what?  He felt scattered, scraped empty, and stupid, and he wondered if he would go mad.

“The union would be well for the family, too, though I know you don’t concern yourself with those things,” she continued.

That sort of chance.  His mother was clearly taking the opportunity to make her case while he was too weak to run away and too muddled to argue.  It didn’t seem at all fair, and it was worse for the fact that she was so perfectly sincere.  Kinlea imagined he was usually more prepared to cope with this sort of situation, but he was ill prepared to think so with assurance.

“She’s an endowment of £2500 a year, and you know your father hopes you can follow him into his place on the board.  You could be very comfortable and secure.  I know you don’t fancy Cambridge, but the local university is almost as good for law and business, they say, and you could still visit Between House in the country whenever you felt over-restless, or the two of you could lease a summer cottage, and your children could play with those that dear Alexi and his bride to be are bound to have in years to come.  I’ll admit, I fancy grandchildren.  I rather regret that I was so afraid of you when you were small, and you were our only chance.”

Kinlea gaped a bit as his mother pulled out her handkerchief and dabbed genuine tears from her eyes.  He wasn’t confident he could cope with this just at the moment, and he silently prayed that the doctor would arrive before he would be made to reply.

Then, to Kinlea’s horror, something inside him he was sure did not belong there seized his throat, and he heard his voice say, “I do know my duty to you, Mother, and I would like to make you happy.  I don’t know how well I can succeed, but I promise that at the least I will try.”

His mother gasped with joy and embraced him, and at that very moment, the doctor entered the room.

Over the ecstatic woman’s shoulder, Kinlea’s eyes met those of the guardian of Sutton Hill, and Dr. Bradley recognized the urgency in Kinlea’s face.  Something had clearly gone terribly, dangerously wrong.

***

The pad-like branches of the kelp forest waved in the cold, gray water of the North Sea.  A few common moon jellyfish drifted aimlessly by, and a pink and gold octopus watched the mermaid with disapproval as her imperfectly aerodynamic upper body stirred up turbulence in the water.  Once she’d passed, the octopus retreated into its cozy hole-hide of a rock.

It was a beautiful day, as winter days in the North Sea went, but Fren was in too much of a hurry to notice.  Something had gone terribly wrong.  She could feel that as plainly as she could feel the fingers on her hands or the gills on her face, and it made so little sense to her mind after fifty years’ experience as a healer that it shook her clear down to her soul.  The Greenwitch was dying.

She dove downward toward the darker depths as the kelp forest receded beneath her.  This was outside of her range of expertise, so she knew it would be well out of her father’s, but he had connections she did not, and he would be more affected by the Greenwitch’s passing than anyone else in the sea.

“Father,” she called, sweeping into the ship a kraken had wrecked and her family had subsequently claimed for a castle.  “Father, you must come quickly.”

“What is it, Fren?”  The old man’s voice was surly.  “I’m quite occupied at the moment, and this is rather a delicate operation.”

“Whatever you’re doing can wait, Father,” insisted Fren.  “Your sister is dying.”

“What?” he demanded shortly, looking up from his letter.  He was attempting to avert a war with the kraken of the north, and he was not in the mood to confront a foolish impossibility this morning.  “A Greenwitch cannot simply die.  You know that perfectly well from you training.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have reality to reckon with.”

“That’s just the thing,” said Fren.  “It’s impossible, but it’s happening just the same, and because it’s impossible, I know of no way to stop it.”

“She’ll die on her thousandth anniversary to the hour, or I’m a shark,” he muttered, allowing more of his attention for re-reading his letter than for listening to his daughter spout nonsense.  “Just like her mother.”

“Her mother was not a shark, Father,” Fren snapped.

“Fren, go away.  I meant she’ll die at the moment of her thousandth birth anniversary like her mother, and you knew that, and I would be much obliged if you would fin-off.”

“Father, come and you will know I’m right,” she snatched away the sheet of laver on which her father was writing and threatened to rip it.  “War is simpler to deal with because it is normal.  It has happened before, and it will happen again with or without your silly letter.  What is happening to my aunt is not so simple.  It has never happened before, and I will be horrified and nastily helpless if it ever happens at all, let alone happens again.  She is dying.  This is wrong.  You must summon the Wise for answers.”

The king of the mermen attempted to snatch his letter from his eldest daughter’s clutches.  “Fren, you silly, silly girl!  The Wise are not to be summoned for fantasy.  They can only be summoned once in an entire generation, and what are we to do if we need them hereafter?”

“It is not well with the sea, Father.”  Fren was practically spitting with rage, now, and she was sick to heart of this usual game.  The stupid old man had every reason to trust her sense, and he knew it quite well.  There was no time.  “If you do not summon them, I will, and then you will no longer be king.”

“Fren!”  The king sounded quite thoroughly scandalized and deeply hurt, and it annoyed Fren all the more.  “Know the duty you owe me, girl, and keep your place.”

“Know the duty you owe me and heed my warning.  The sea is sickened by the Greenwitch’s illness.  I do not know what will happen to the world if we allow her to actually die.  I do know that it will mean worse for us than war.  Sickness such as this has no place in saltwater.”

“Well, if you’re going to be so very serious about it, I suppose I’ll have to come,” conceded the king, screwing his face up into something of a pout.  “Take me to where she is before I change my mind.”

Fren set her jaw against what she wanted to say.  It would not do for her to be a hypocrite, and she knew that time was short and would not wait for her to pour the scalding words that boiled in her mind.  She nodded, dropped her father’s letter on his writing desk, and left the wreck-castle with all the speed she could manage.  Her father followed.

In very little time, they arrived at an entryway to the Greenwitch’s den, which was carved into a deep, very dark ridge.  All within was silence and stillness, but that at least was normal.  Fren dove into the darkness before her father could comment, and then the moans were audible in their bones, if not in their ears.  The very water resonated with her shrinking, shuddering pain.

The moment his poor sister came into sight, the king stopped where he floated and gaped in open-mouthed horror as his daughter demanded with her eyes and her shoulders to hear him admit that she had been even more than her usual echelon of absolutely right.  The Greenwitch, the sister his empress mother had fathered with her power, her life, and several vital pounds of flesh, was collapsing into herself in an impossible way, and the power in and around her was explosive and disconnected like a hole in reality.

“I shall call the Wise,” he conceded.  “Let us go at once.”

“Yes,” said Fren, and they left and went to the deep-magic place only known to those meant to rule.  Fren had not been there before, though she knew in her magical soul where it was.  She knew, but she followed after her father in their passage out of respect for his position and age.  He had more right to know the way than she until she assumed his position, and for all that he was a silly old man, he was a very powerful and dominating presence when he was acting as king.

The place was not very different to look at than the sea around it, but it was very different to feel.  There was weight there, and time seemed less concerned with moving forward than it was in places with shallower magic.  Fren found that she felt peculiarly more settled and comfortable than she’d expected.  She felt more like she belonged in this place than in the home of her birth.

The king floated at the center of the place and wove his fingers through the magic in the water, invoking his birthright and summoning life into the stones of the ocean floor.  As the spell shifted the stones into place, it became suddenly apparent that the ocean was toweringly angry; angry from the outside in, radiating from its shores back to its core.  The anger was a volatile flare on the fringes, but here it was cold and dense.  The king continued to spell-weave.

There was no way to nor desire to mark time in this place, so it could have been seconds or days when the stones rose and locked at intervals around the power that had summoned them.  When the Wise were ready and alive, they glowed with a color that could not exist to eyes, and they waited for the questions that they already knew.

The king bowed all the way to the ocean floor, touching his crowned head to the smooth silt.  Then, forsaking words, he rose and asked with his entire being.

The stones acknowledged the king and then moved to acknowledge Fren outside of their circle, for she had both the same power and the same question as the king.  Then they answered, and the answer was even more sickening than the question.  Fren was suddenly no longer comfortable in this place.  It was no longer a place of certainty.

The Wise, though the Greenwitch was not yet dead and would not be for some time, expressed that the battle for her life was already over.  The result could not be reversed, and certainly not in time to change her fate.  With the deepest knowledge in all the deep world, the Wise knew uncertainty, and uncertainty was the only answer past the Greenwitch’s certain death.  Something was coming that was entirely other and entirely indefinable, even on the level beyond language.  The sea had lost the ability to decide what the indefinable something would be, and it had lost it in a way that offended its eternal dignity.  Change was coming, and the sea did not like change it did not bring itself.

The Wise would never deign to admit the possibility of a mistake, but this was a mistake.  It was a dangerous mistake.  It was a mistake that made the ocean’s towering anger impotent because no force it could raise could bring it amends, though revenge was not beyond its concept of justice, and somewhere the water was rising to batter the shores of the land.

Abruptly, the Wise retreated into their resting state as cold, dead stones and sank back to the sea floor, and Fren and her father were left facing one another with open shock written in their eyes.

“What do we do?” Fren asked in a hoarse whisper, wrapping her arms around her chest to ward off the cold of her fear.  “I didn’t understand.”

“Well, we’re a fine pair,” said the king.  “If you cannot understand, how can you expect answers of me?  We both know you’re cleverer by half.”

“What do we do?” she repeated.

“What we can.  I’m not sure exactly what that is, but if nothing can bring her comfort, all that is left to do is wait and hope.”

“She had no sisters, and I know not if her mother had sisters to have other young.  Will this end the line of the Greenwitch?  Will it be snuffed?”

The old man blinked back his surprise.  “You failed to understand even that, child?  The cause, the very thing we can never more alter, is that she will die giving her young the necessary life and several pounds of flesh.  There will be a new Greenwitch, but I do not know what this Greenwitch will be.”

Fren nearly choked on her gasp, and she flared out her gills.  “What of the father?”

“He or she,” the king explained, “was a mistake.”

***

            April Norins burst into Mr. Waltham’s library study with the long-suffering maid (who had been trying to direct her to the drawing room) in tow.

“Kinlea, what in the good Lord’s name do you think you are doing, and on top of that, why did no one telephone?”

Forsaking the room’s fashionable and tolerably comfortable furniture, the object of April’s frustration was curled up on the floor in front of the fire in a wad of blankets, facing the ceiling with his head on the floor.  He had one elbow propped on a stack of books with a Latin text in hand a foot and a half above and to the side of his face.  He pulled the textbook down to his chest and kinked his neck so that he could look at April upside-down from where he rested.

“To be perfectly frank,” he said with a sigh, “I don’t know, and I do dearly hope that you can tell me.”

“You don’t know the first word of Latin.”

“I’ve come to that conclusion myself.”

“Please, Miss Norins,” insisted the maid, “if you would come with me to the drawing room, I’ll take your coat and bring you tea, and young Mr. Waltham will be with you very shortly.”  The maid and what she had to say were entirely ignored.

“You were supposed to come home two days ago, and we’ve all been worried sick, but something told me that it may not be prudent to call your parents and ask them when you planned to be back, what with their still inexplicably thinking we’re the ones you’re visiting after nearly fourteen years, and I hoped I could assume that if something went really wrong you would tell me about it.  I could barely hear you at all, and none of what I could hear made any sense, and then we finally get a proper call from somebody right when I’ve determined to come fetch you, and it’s a guardian of Sutton Hill to ask if we’d heard from you about your condition.  ‘Condition?’ I ask. ‘What did he do to himself this time?’ and he says ‘As near as I could tell, he’s lost the will to deny his parents anything they wish of him,’ and next I know I’m on the train and so furious I can’t even remember buying the ticket.  What did you do?”

Kinlea opened his mouth as though he was about to say something, but then he closed it.  Then he opened it again.  “Mary, could you bring that tea here instead of the drawing room, please?”

The maid looked very like she wanted to object, but she thought better of it, bobbed a curtsey, and left the room to do as she’d been asked.

Kinlea waited for the door to close behind her, and then he said, “Well, I daresay, I don’t know what I did, but I’ve been enormously uncomfortable ever since, and you can’t fault me for not calling, because I can’t think clearly enough for that sort of thing to occur to me.”

“That was extraordinarily verbose for a man who can’t think,” snapped April.

“I know,” agreed Kinlea, and he looked so very amazed and confused at the observation that April couldn’t bring herself to stay angry with him.

“Oh, Kinlea,” she sighed.  “I think whatever you did has damaged my ability to see it, and Oldcross is still borrowing Mirror from Peter, so we’re at a bit of a handicap.  We should get you home so that Mother can try her hand at fixing you.”

“My mother insists I stay, at least until I’m well,” said Kinlea.  “And I promised her I’d try to make her happy.”

“You’re ill?”

“Yes.  I have coughing fits.”  He paused.  “And a very strong and disturbing feeling that I should be somewhere else, and an even stronger feeling that it is wrong that I can not feel where I am.  It makes me lightheaded and sick to my stomach.”

April crouched down over Kinlea and pursed her lips.  “Whatever you did must have been spectacularly reckless.  Those bonds are the most powerful in all the history I can see, and it’s like someone’s shoved cotton into them right where they connect to you.  We really do need to get you home.  What else have you promised your parents?”

Kinlea shifted his backward and upside-down gaze so that he was looking at the fire.  “I promised my father that I would sit for university exams and interviews, I promised the both of them that I would try to learn to love Victoria Stewart, and I don’t think I promised, but I think they assume that I have consented to a betrothal they hope will eventually result in grandchildren.”

“This is clearly going to make our lives extraordinarily difficult,” said April.

“I know, and I can’t even properly think of how or why,” said Kinlea.  “But every time one of these things comes out of my mouth, it frightens me beyond description.”

The maid came into the room with tea and set it on a coffee table that sat in front of the sofa.  Out of the corner of her eye, she peered suspiciously at the two of them, awkwardly positioned with one on the floor and the other crouching over, and asked, “Will you require anything else?”

“No, that should be all, but please fetch us when my mother or father returns.”

She curtseyed again and left, propping the door open behind her with the hallway table to ensure the maintenance of propriety.

“Do you need help getting up?” asked April, offering her hand.

“Probably,” said Kinlea.  He put the Latin book on the pile he’d been leaning on, and he took his guardian’s hand.

Far from helping her keeper up, April wrenched her hand out of Kinlea’s almost the same moment they touched and fell backward to her rear with a startled cry.  She’d seen more than she could accept, and she’d seen and felt it all at once: the sea’s anger, the intensity of the confrontation, the wyrd in all its unfathomable immensity…

That, together with all that followed, was far too large for one human mind to hold.

And so, April’s mind momentarily snapped, and she could not only not-see, but she couldn’t have thought to save her life.  She forgot to breathe.  Her heart forgot to beat.  Then, when her consciousness returned with her pulse, it was all she could do to not scream and go mad.  Both were tempting, but dangerous in this house at this time with her keeper more in the power of his parents’ hopes than he had ever been.  She could not afford the luxury of madness.  Her madness would put too many people and powers in danger.

“April!”  Kinlea scrambled out of his blanket-nest and lunged forward to where she had fallen.  “April, what happened?  Did I hurt you?”

April, unable to control herself, spontaneously burst into tears.  She covered her face with her hands to muffle the sobs in her throat.

Kinlea, for his part, clawed with his power at the congestion in his bonds, though more from instinct than from any improvement in his ability to think.  It shortly occurred to him that an indisposed guest in his home might want tea, and as he turned toward the coffee table, he found the thought disturbed him in a way that felt like a blow to his stomach.  He had to sit down.  He did.  Heavily.  On top of his stack of books.  The books slipped under him, and then he was sitting on a pile instead of a stack.

For many very long minutes they sat, lost in their privately horrible thoughts; Kinlea’s scrambled beyond recognition and April’s as clear as the blinding noontime sunlight.  They were lucky. The household had been given strict orders not to disturb Kinlea in his studies unless he rang the bell, and Mary had been called to some time-consuming task by the household’s head of staff, or she would have come to collect the tea things long before either of them were ready to move or speak.  As it was, the hour and more that Kinlea and April spent unable to function passed undisturbed.

April collected herself first.  She looked and felt a wreck, but she stood, brushed off her skirts, wiped her face with her handkerchief, and walked to where her keeper sat staring at the long-since-cold tea.

“Let’s try this again, shall we?”  She reached down, grasped Kinlea’s hand, and helped him find his feet.

Kinlea looked for a moment at April’s red, swollen eyes.  Then he looked down at his feet.  Then he started collecting the scattered books.  “What just happened?”

“Very little just happened,” noted April, though she knew perfectly well what Kinlea had meant.

Once Kinlea had an armful of algebra, Latin, and literature, he walked the texts to the appropriate shelf.  He looked up at the room’s tall, stately grandfather clock as he passed it.  “I see.”

April thought about helping with the books but decided against it.  She didn’t know where any of them were supposed to go, and it seemed as though Kinlea did.  She sat down and poured herself cold tea.  Cold though it was, it was comforting.  She sipped it and watched Kinlea tidy the room.

It was odd to watch him move here.  He looked strangely comfortable with his closed and bookish surroundings, but his movement was reserved and showed none at all of his usual wild energy.  When he was himself, Kinlea tended to fill any given space from wall to wall and floor to ceiling with a sense of presence.  Kinlea the keeper of Haneth’s End commanded the space he occupied in the same way that a captain of a ship often does: an outside observer could tell even from a distance and even when he wasn’t doing anything specific that he was in perfect possession and control of everything around him.

Kinlea tucked the last book on its proper shelf, picked up one of the hearth-warm blankets, wrapped it around his shoulders, and sat down next to April.  “Do you know what’s happening, now?”

“Yes,” said April.  “And it is extremely disturbing.”

“It’s disturbing for me, too, though I don’t know what it is.”

“You did something stupid and impossible.  You reached into powers man is not meant to touch.  It has resulted in any number of awful things with which we will have great difficulty coping.  What’s worse, you did the truly best possible thing you could have done in that situation and to the best possible end.  You did something that was supposed to be fatally and foolishly wrong, and it was somehow the right thing to do.  Kinlea, you are a seer guardian’s nightmare.”

“I’m… sorry?” he asked, raising an eyebrow and fighting down a wave of confusion.

“Well, the whole of the magical world is better off for it, but because of your time, place, and situation when you entered the wyrd, it would appear as though your personal wyrd has gotten snagged… um… caught up in, or maybe colored by your parents’ hopes.  Or maybe it’s that when your fetch awareness scattered in time, part of you found a wyrd that might have happened if you hadn’t been cursed by Tennah’s End?  Maybe both?  It’s all a little bit too layered and complicated for me to sort through, truth be told, but that’s the best I can figure it.”  It was a strange thing, the human mind.  She’d seen it all, but she had a nasty feeling she’d never be able to determine exactly what it all meant.  If she could, she thought she probably wouldn’t be able to express it in words.  “Anyhow, I think you’re sort of surface possessed by an other-you who might have been and whom your parents hope you can yet become.”

Kinlea felt suddenly cold and numb.  He pulled the blanket closer around his shoulders.  “Will I have to stay like this?”

April gathered her courage and looked directly into Kinlea’s steel gray cloudy-sky eyes.  “I’m afraid to try to look.  I’m afraid of what I might see.  It’s already been an enormously overwhelming day, Kinlea, and you’ll have to forgive me, but I don’t think I can give you an answer to that right now.”

“Oh.”  Kinlea examined his knees where they poked out from the blanket.

“Your family physician is a guardian.  He seems the sort to understand the situation.  I’m going to have him tell your parents that you shan’t get well without clean country air, and we’ll have you on the train home before the day is out.”  She stood and left the room at a very fast walk, leaving Kinlea behind her to sort through what she’d just told him.  She closed herself to his thoughts, which were audible again since she’d touched him.  She didn’t think she could cope with more mental and emotional turmoil than that which was her own.

***

It was no easy task, finding the doctor and finding a place where it was safe to explain the situation.  April, though she was a seer and could see where the doctor would be on his house-calls all day, did not know the city very well and did not know where it would be safe and proper for a lone country lady to venture.  What was worse, she noted that some nasty little magical things had decided to explore the new pocket that Kinlea had opened in Dividing Wall, and they were stirring up trouble in parts of town that were not normally rough.

April, after prolonged deliberation over a mug of hot spiced wine from a street vender’s stall, ultimately paid a visit to the local keeper instead, and he championed her cause with such great zeal that April half came to believe he fancied her, though she couldn’t hear the first murmur of his thoughts.  In any case, April told Sir Copley where Dr. Bradley was, and after a few urgent telephone calls, the doctor-guardian came to them.

After tea and planning, the three of them decided it would be best if April did not join them when the physician and the lord went to visit the Walthams.  That might make everything seem as contrived as it actually was.  It was decided that Sir Copley would instead loan her a coach and send her off to find a nice, new hat, and April would open herself to Kinlea (though having a confused and unhappy Kinlea in the back of her head was likely to ruin any enjoyment hat shopping might have otherwise brought her) so that she could time her return to the train station.  The two men went to the Walthams’ house by their own methods and routs and made a show of calling at the same time through pure chance.  Through actual chance, Mrs. Waltham was home and Mr. Waltham arrived at his front door before the servants finished removing the visitors’ hats and coats.

At the very least, Dr. Bradley admitted when all was said and done, nobody had been forced to really lie about the situation.  It was only too true that Kinlea couldn’t possibly manage a full recovery in his parents’ townhouse, and it was also true that the country air would do him worlds of good.  The look on Sarah Waltham’s face when she learned that she would have to forfeit her son’s company just when he was behaving so agreeably, though, would stick in the doctor’s mind for many days to come.  He was a father himself, and he realized that he was an uncommonly lucky man to have neither a keeper nor a guardian among his brood.  He imagined that his children would also have difficulty meeting with their mother’s approval if they had been, and he didn’t think he would like to see his wife unhappy.

It was late afternoon and intensely cold by the time Sir Copley’s motorcar arrived at the train station with all three of the Walthams in it, and according to plan, Sir Copley’s coach arrived with April very nearly simultaneously.  This surprised Kinlea’s parents.  April acted almost as surprised as they, and Sir Copley exclaimed something good natured about it being a happy coincidence that April was heading home on the same train as the man who had lived most of his life in her house.  Sarah Waltham was suspicious, but she didn’t express it in words.  She was inclined to leave well enough alone because she had Kinlea’s word he would return to see her and finally have that proper brunch with Victoria when he was quite well.  For all his faults and peculiarities, Kinlea had never been anything but entirely a man of his word.

***

 “That went better than it might have,” said Kinlea, settling in the train compartment and steeling himself against the usual discomfort he experienced when riding in trains.  Kinlea had never enjoyed trains, even when they were pointed in the direction of home, and this had not apparently been changed by his peculiar situation.

“I supposed it did,” agreed April, “though I’m not looking forward to what we’re going to have to do now.  Even if Mother can fix you, you will have to spend more time away from Haneth’s End than any of us will enjoy in order to keep the promises you made while damaged.”

Kinlea wasn’t sure what he thought about that, and he was pretty sure he wasn’t understanding the ramifications of his recent actions nearly so well as April.  He wasn’t sure whether he even understood the actual actions at the moment, and he couldn’t remember them very clearly, at that.  Still, something felt both right and necessary about going home with April, and the idea felt familiar enough that he could almost put his finger on what it was he didn’t recognize about himself.  He bit the inside of his cheek and tried to put his thoughts in order, but the more he tried to grasp any one of them, the more they slipped away and left him feeling a lost stranger in his own head.

“Sorry.  I shouldn’t talk of these things wile you’re unwell,” said April, patting his hand with hers.  “Really, I ought to be plenty cheerful that you’re alive against greater than usual odds.  It’s not something to be taken for granted that you defied an angry sea and prevented a monster from draining the rooted power of all keeps through you, but I do wish you’d find some way to avoid solving your problems with solutions that cause problems.”  As soon as she said it, April found herself wondering if Kinlea would actually be capable of solving any of the problems he solved if he exercised thought or caution first.  It didn’t seem likely.  “Anyhow, I expect we’ll find some way to cope.”

They lapsed into silence as Kinlea fought his motion sickness and April watched towns and fields pass on the other side of the window.  When he felt the train cross the border between Sutton Hill and Oldcross, Kinlea actually jumped in his seat, which left both him and his guardian laughing for no reason they could explain.

Neither of them found it funny shortly after when they crossed from Oldcross into Haneth’s End.  Rather than jump, Kinlea gasped sharply, grew suddenly disoriented, and pitched forward into April’s lap.

“Oh, Kinlea, are you going to be ill?” asked April, attempting to push Kinlea upright.  It didn’t work.  Kinlea was heavy, and he wasn’t doing anything to help.  “If you feel you must, I’ve an empty hatbox…”  She let her voice trail off as she noticed her keeper’s temperature.  “Kinlea, you’re on fire.”

Kinlea, for his part, was less concerned with his fever and more concerned with the fact that he felt like small explosions were going off inside him.  He couldn’t see straight.  He couldn’t control the direction of his thoughts, and strikingly vivid memories and emotions flashed through his mind in no logically followable sequence.  His heart beat in his ears.

April pulled her sight as far back and away from Kinlea as possible and left him be where he was, compromising position or no.  Small blessing, they were the only two in the train compartment and the porter had already been by to check tickets, so nobody would raise eyebrows or ask questions.  Still, it was a queer situation.  It wouldn’t do to call for help.  Kinlea’s condition was unique and unlikely to be remedied by normal means, and anyhow they were less than twenty minutes from Nevensworth station where real help would be waiting.  Twenty minutes, uncomfortable minutes though they may be, was not so long that doing nothing seemed a very dangerous option.

Not unnaturally, this course of inaction did nothing to sooth April’s sorely abused nerves.  She was feeling a helpless and panicked fool by the time the train pulled into the station, and she couldn’t imagine how the day could possibly find a new way to be worse.

Kinlea was unconscious and shaking like a leaf in strong wind, and she pushed his head off her lap and onto the seat the second the train started to slow.  She ran through the train toward the door, yelling for the porter as she went, and she pushed past the short line of startled people exiting the train to the platform.  She was enormously relieved to run headlong into the arms of her older brother, who embraced her more to stop her forward momentum than to greet her or to calm her down.

“Kinlea’s inside, then?” he asked.  She nodded into his coat, which was damp from the snow flurries that had melted there, and Alexi passed her to their mother as he and his father shortly greeted the train personnel and elbowed their way onto the train.

“We’re not very happy with you for going alone,” said Analie Norins, directing her daughter to a bench under a little overhang.  “We’re even less happy you didn’t tell anyone where you were going before you went.”

“Yes,” agreed April.  “It was wretched of me.  I didn’t think.  I’m sorry.”

“Sutton Hill keeps us better informed than you do, it would seem.”

“Yes.  He’s very kind, and I’m very stupid, and Kinlea is going to send me into an early grave if he doesn’t stop being so very much himself every time something dangerous and unprecedented happens.”

“You’ll need to tell us all the news once we’re home.  I can see you won’t want to, but it’s your own fault for excluding us.”

“I think you’d best fix him first.”  Alexi and John Norins were carrying Kinlea off the train between them, and he looked like he’d progressed from simple shaking to more violent convulsions.  “He’s been getting worse since the train crossed into the End.”

“Heavens,” said Analie.  “April, come help me take your brother’s side of Kinlea so that he can take care of the people watching while we get him to the cart.”

The two women had a fairly awkward time of helping John move their unconscious and violently jerking keeper, but Alexi’s guardian power of memory theft was the only thing that could save the family from their neighbors’ need to feel helpful and then subsequently tell the tale to everyone else in town.  Alexi wasn’t nearly talented enough to steal memories from a small crowd of people and move toward the cart at the same time.

“Can you feel where he’s wrong, Ana?” John asked once they’d maneuvered Kinlea into the cart and covered him in blankets.  April arranged herself in the back with him so that he’d have a lap between his head and the cart bed, which was apt to jar and bump on the rough country roads, and Analie sat next to them so that she could get a start on attempting to return Kinlea to his natural state of being.

“He’s all wrong,” Analie replied, moving her hands from Kinlea’s chest to the sides of his face.  “Except for that he’s alive, which is right enough.”

“Done!” said Alexi, jogging up to the cart and swinging into the front seat next to his Father.  “Did you fix him?”

“This could be dangerous,” noted Analie.  “Something in him is trying to keep Haneth’s End out, which would be queer enough except for that he’s reaching out and grabbing for it so very desperately with all of the rest of him…”

“He set hand to the wyrd and started becoming what his parents wish he would be,” explained April.  “As little sense as that makes.  I’m not sure I actually understand it, but I can try to explain what happened, if you think it could help.”

“Human beings can’t get into the wyrd,” said Alexi.  “That’s ridiculous.”

“Tell Kinlea,” snapped April.  “In any case, he was a fetch at the time.”

“A fetch?”  Alexi’s voice went flat.

“An imperfect one, but yes,” said April, rather primly.

“Hush,” said Analie.  “John, take us through that pocket at the fork in the road.”

“Right,” said John, and he set the horses to trot.

“Let’s see if this can follow him into his seat of power,” said Analie.  “It’s likely to cause him damage and pain if it does, but the damage and pain are a definite thing if I try to pull Haneth’s End through him here and as he is.”

“Oh, I have a bad feeling about this,” moaned April.

“Oh, no, should we stop?” asked Analie, half ready to spring up and take the reins from her husband’s hands.

“No,” said April.  Her seer’s intuition was saying that whatever this was needed to happen, but it still felt like it was going to be enormously unpleasant.

“Alright, then,” said Analie, and John steered the horses through what in the non-magical side was a solid wall at the side of the road’s right fork.  Once they passed through the pocket in Dividing Wall there was no such obstruction, and they were not far from Lesser Lake or Wytchwood Hill (both places most non-magical residents of Haneth’s End had never heard of nor seen).

Kinlea screamed a hollow, wailing banshee scream and exploded into power conflict that physically tore not only at the inside and outside of him, but at the hair, skin, and clothing of the two guardians nearest him.  The cart was immediately stained with the blood of all three, and Alexi leapt over the back of the seat to pull his sister off the cart and out of the way while John struggled to control the spooked horses.  Analie, ignoring the fact that she’d just nearly lost an eye to a nastily sharp errant shard of Haneth’s End, shoved an arm under Kinlea, propped him up against the side of the cart, placed a hand on his chest, and sent her guardian power in a pulse through whatever was obstructing Kinlea’s bonds.  The peculiar stuffiness pushed her power straight back into her hand, and she pushed harder in response.

Then Kinlea opened his eyes and saw his guardian mother’s grave and bleeding face, and in startled panic he reached out to control the chaos he seemed to be causing.  This only made matters worse.  Analie’s arm suddenly wrenched backward and dislocated at the shoulder, and then she flew violently end-over-end off the cart in a flurry of torn skirts and blood.

“Analie!” Kinlea yelled in horror, reaching out a hand as though he expected to be able to do any good by catching her as she went.  Hot tears ran down his face with his blood, and he realized in disgust that he couldn’t feel her through even a bond so essential as a guardian bond.  He couldn’t tell whether he’d just killed her.  The end of his guardian mother’s name caught in his throat and became the roar of the fiercest possible battle cry, and the force blocking his bonds shredded like so much tissue.

The relief he felt the moment he could feel she was alive did not comfort him long.  With the gargantuan rush and pressure of a tidal wave forcing itself through the narrow tunnels of a cave, Kinlea’s power came back into him and left him aware only of the fact that no single human being could be the vessel of anything half so vast.  His flesh could not hold it.  He was going to burst into pure light and life and love, and there would be no piece of blood or man left to show for his more than 23 years in the world.

The physical of him started to unravel under the strain and impossibility of everything he was that wasn’t physical, and he found his eyes were searching for the familiar face and form of Death.  He would not and could not rob Haneth’s End of such a wealth of being, determined though it may seem to obliterate less permanent parts of him.  It would be wrong to smother it or staunch the flow, so he fought his instinct to survive and waited for Haneth’s End to consume him utterly.

Then his face was knocked smartly into the blanket-strewn and blood soaked cart bed, abruptly derailing his will to be defeated, and Kinlea coughed as he inhaled the blood that had been leaking down the inside of his nose.  While his lungs struggled to clear the fluid and take in air, Kinlea tried to turn his head and look up at the heavy thing that had knocked him over and was still planted between his shoulder blades.

“Hullo, Keeper,” said Mayweather, shifting and making himself more comfortable on his perch.  “You seem to have misplaced some blood.  I do believe that’s supposed to stay held on the inside of you, unless you’ve made some other unusual arrangements for it, in which case I’d love to hear what you’re about.”

“Oh, bother all!”  Kinlea, who had only just stopped himself coughing, now could not stop himself laughing.  His power and his self were as balanced as they’d ever been, and all it had taken was a familiar distraction.  “You’ve gone and saved my life, and now you’re never going to let me live a day without reminding me of it.”

Mayweather inspected his delicately pointed claws as though to indicate he had intended nothing of the sort, but now that Kinlea brought it up, he didn’t think it too unreasonable an idea.  “Oh, were you planning a rendezvous with your darling queen?  Did I interrupt?”

Then Kinlea’s laughter stopped quite abruptly and he burst upward to his feet, knocking the fae up into the air (where Mayweather in turn spread his wings and hovered in a bit of a sulk).

“Analie, oh Lord, Analie, how badly did I hurt you?”  He was over the end of the cart and running toward her crumpled and bloody form in a split instant.  John was already with her, and he was as pale as snow as he worked to staunch the bleeding.

Kinlea made it halfway there before the dizziness of the blood-loss hit him and he toppled to the ground in a peculiar mix of a swoon and effervescent, sharp awareness of everything connected to his bonds.  He both wondered if, and at the same time knew that, this is what it felt like to be himself.

The cart rattled away at speed as Alexi let go of the horses and ran to where Kinlea had fallen.  It was near-miraculous April managed to roll out of the way of the wheels as they passed her where she lay.

Alexi cursed vilely, and April yelled that she matched the sentiment.  Then Alexi crouched over Kinlea and put a hand on the keeper’s shoulder.  “Kin, you shouldn’t move until we’ve slowed the bleeding, at least.”

Kinlea obligingly passed out and lay very still while Alexi worked to do just that.

Kinlea regained consciousness slowly and by degrees.  First he noticed that there was a great warm weight pressing down over him.  Then he noticed that his face was cold.  Then he noticed that light was shining through his eyelids, and then there was nothing for it but to open his eyes and face whatever he might see.

He was in his own bed in his room in Between House, and the weight was the weight of at least five thick quilts topped with a sleeping cat.  The quilts seemed a bit excessive, but then, Kinlea’s room did not have the advantage of a fireplace, and there were several old and drafty windows for which the shutters did not quite serve to keep the winter out.  Long ago, Analie had tried to convince him to spend the winter months sharing Alexi’s room, but Kinlea would hear nothing of it.  In many ways, he had always thought of this room as his own private miracle.  The ceiling he was looking at had been his first glimpse of the first place he’d ever thought of as home.  He’d mistaken it for Heaven at the time.

“Kinlea’s awake!” April’s voice yelled from some other part of the house, and in very little time, the cat on the quilts leapt to its boot-clad hind feet and hissed “That was supposed to be my job!”

Kinlea extracted one of his arms, and it brushed against two hot water bottles as he pulled it up through the quilts.  “Hi, Peter.  Kind of you to abandon your place by the fire for me, anyway.”

“Or it would have been if I’d accomplished anything by it,” said Peter.

“Is everyone alright?”

“If you are, then that makes everybody,” said Peter, jumping down to Kinlea’s pillow and then tucking himself into the quilt-ripple through which Kinlea had just removed an arm.  “Your room is too cold by half.  I don’t know why you like it so much.”

Then the Norins family filed into the room, and Analie was the first to rush forward and throw her arms around Kinlea.  Kinlea felt a throb of guilt rise in his chest.

“Oh, Kinlea, it’s a miracle the magical world is intact and you’re alive.”

“Well, he’s not allowed to die until he’s done standing as my best man in spring, so it’s really only right and proper,” said Alexi.

“It’s been too long since I told you all how much I love you,” said Kinlea, tears rising in his throat.  “And I’m sorry.”

“Maudlin sap,” observed Peter.

“Yes, terribly,” agreed April.  “Kinlea, stop feeling sorry this instant.  You’re not allowed to feel sorry for our having gotten a little hurt while guarding you.  It’s what we were born to do.”

“She’s got a point,” agreed John.

“You’re absolutely allowed to be sorry when next you nearly kill me, though,” Peter offered magnanimously.  “In fact, I’ll be annoyed if you don’t.”

“Hush, you,” said Analie.  “And Kinlea, you needn’t fret.  We were outnumbered by magical healers in a matter of minutes, and you’re the only one who didn’t wake up and help search for the horses.”  That part had been dark and cold and plagued by malicious pixies, but Analie prudently didn’t mention.

“How long have I been out?” asked Kinlea.

“You slept through the night and missed breakfast,” said April.  “Would you like me to bring you some soup?”

“No, I think it’ll be just as well if I get out of bed and eat at the table, and we can discuss the unnatural impulses I seem to have acquired of late to make and keep commitments with my parents.  If we can’t contrive some way to forge a mid-ground between what my parents want of me and what I want of me, I’m likely to discover what it is to be an unhappy man.”

In the end, things worked out peculiarly, but not as badly as they might have.  On doctor’s orders, Kinlea continued to live in Between House, though his father in turn gave him a motorcar and insisted he use it in meeting all his new visiting obligations.  Kinlea attended parties and dinners with Victoria Stewart on his arm, and he made a concerted effort to befriend her father and two elder brothers.  He continued in his studies, and he spent long hours with private tutors until the spring exams and interviews, which he passed through the unlikely mistake of letting slip to the interviewers that he had only had two years of formal schooling.  He was assumed a natural genius; a rough gem that could only stand to benefit from a collegiate polish, and the interviewers were so charmed by Kinlea’s apparent frankness and academic modesty that they all declared that he would certainly grow to be a feather in the university’s cap (it was still a very young university, and it was only then in the process of forging its reputation, so its peculiar choice was not as odd as it might have seemed elsewise).

On the tenth of April, Kinlea stood with Alexi as his best man when he married the stunningly beautiful Marilyn Brown.  At the wedding feast, Marilyn (who was an accomplished witchcraft hobbyist) presented him with an invaluable gift: a pendant that would transport him to Haneth’s End should he be distant in an emergency.  Of course, it would only work once and Marilyn had run out of three vital ingredients while crafting it, so he would need to be very careful about when he decided to use it.

A little more than two months after the wedding and about a month after Kinlea’s 24^th birthday, hundreds of miles away in a land Kinlea would never visit, the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife were assassinated.  Though Kinlea was ineligible due to his well-known history of ill health, most of what would have been Kinlea’s graduating class, along with the entirety of what had long ago been the Kinlea Keeper Story Fellowship, eventually went off to fight in a war that would leave most of them dead and buried in foreign soil.

Of course, that is a story that has been detailed in thousands of more insightful and academic books, and on a different token, the corresponding years in Kinlea’s life were not his most magically interesting.  Infinitely more remarkable things were happening in the North Sea.

Chapter I

Étaples was cold and gray.  It was often cold and gray in winter, and Oceane had rarely ever taken issue with the tiny town for the fact, even though she was from Calais, where there was more to see and do than dunes and fish and rope-works, and where (while it could also be cold in winter) at least it was less gray.  There were lovely cliffs in Calais, from which she could see the sea, and there was less of the sand and the dunes and the bitter British soldiers.  Well, she could not say with certainty that there were not the bitter British soldiers in Calais these days, but that did not matter.  What mattered was that here in cold, gray, sandy Étaples, there were so few places she could throw herself into the river and expect it to take her out to sea.  She did not want to be washed back onto some damned shore, and so she walked a great number of miles to where the river flowed into the sea, which was as gray and gloomy as the sky.  The sea may have taken her father, long ago in another, more innocent life, but the shore was attached to the war that had taken her sons, and she had done with it.  She would wash more than her hands of the whole wretched continent.

She would, anyhow, once she found a good place to quietly and privately commit herself to the sea.

Two sons dead in trenches, and the little one torn from the world by a shell and shrapnel whilst returning home from his uncle’s bread shop, and all her happiness had died in those three blows.  The British army complex and the constant flow of soldiers attracted the enemy.  It was not always the soldiers who were harmed.

Her feet were sore when she reached the rocky beach upward of the delta, but she was not planning to be feeling the feet for long, so she didn’t care.  She pulled off her shoes and threw them back toward the road, where a cart full of wood and a delivery boy on a bicycle were passing slowly.  That was annoying and unusual.  There was almost never anyone on that road anymore who was not a soldier.  It was far too dangerous and stupid to travel these shores.  Especially, now that she thought about it, for a woman alone.  Soldiers were often lonely.  Lonely and thoughtless and cruel.  She wondered if her boys had become lonely and thoughtless and cruel before horrific death had freed them from the war.

She splashed forward to her knees, and the icy water numbed her flesh almost instantly following the first shock of it.  She gasped as the water wicked upward into her skirts, though, and she shivered sharply in the chill sea wind.  Then she sobbed a laugh at the rocks and the sky and steeled her nerve to dive forward into the unknown; to swim out until her clothes were too heavy and she was too numb to move or care, even about her poor husband who would be left with nobody but his addled mother, and who did not deserve more grief in his life.  She leaned forward, took a breath, and prepared to spring, but then she caught a strange sight in the corner of her eye and staggered back in surprise.

Surely she was mad to think she saw what she saw.  She pulled her heavy, wet skirts up out of the water and splashed her way toward the larger, sharper rocks farther up the shore, where they forbiddingly broke the sea into spray and foam at its every feeble heave.  Among those rocks, she could swear she saw the crouching form of a very small child; naked, staring and pale, shivering in the wind but doing nothing to protect itself from its winter bite.  The apparition was not even crying in the righteously self-absorbed way of small children in cruel circumstances, and it made so little sense that Oceane more suspected it was a ghost than a creature of her imagination.  She would never imagine a thing so absurd.  Would she?

And yet, the closer she drew, the more solid and real and clear became the image.  Rather than resolving into a ball of sailcloth or driftwood capped in seaweed, the child remained a child, and Oceane stopped several meters away, panting and feeling the winter burn in her lungs, as a round face framed in damp clumps of dark auburn hair turned to examine her with gray eyes exactly the color of today’s winter sky and sea.

“Little one, where is your mother?” her voice was weak and shaky, and she noticed the violence of her own shivering.  “Where are your clothes?”

The steel-sea eyes blinked slowly, and the child tilted its head to one side and pursed its little lips.  Even after several long moments, it did not reply.

“Can you not speak?”  Oceane stumbled another step forward, but stopped when the child jerked back and looked over its shoulder, back at the sea, as though that was where safety could be found.  When the child shifted and turned, she could see with certainty that it was a girl.  A little girl alone and naked on sharp rocks on the shore of the ocean in January?  Either she or this little stranger really must be mad.  “Please, little girl, don’t be frightened.”  She pushed forward another couple steps and extended her hand.  “You will freeze to death out here.  It is not safe.”

The girl turned to meet Oceane’s eyes and said, in perfect adult earnest and perfect adult English, “I cannot understand you.  You are speaking to me, I take it?”

Oceane gaped open-mouthed for a moment and then managed to stammer a few words in her second language.  “You are English?”

“I am?”  The child stood awkwardly, as though standing was something she had only learned to do very recently, and though she flinched and glared at the wind when it gusted cold spray into her face, she did not make any move to shield herself with her arms.  “Is air always this cold when it moves?”

Oceane had never before felt so cold in a dream, but the question in that little, piping voice was too surreal to be anything else, and she was sure enough of her English to be sure of what she had heard.  The child looked no older than perhaps two or three years, and she should be too cold and miserable to speak, and if she could speak, she should be asking the usual questions like ‘where is Mummy?’  “Little girl, please, let me take you to shelter!  You could die in this cold, and I would never forgive myself.”

“Shelter.  Is the temperature different in shelter?”

“Yes!  Please, we should go now.  May I carry you?”

“Oh, please do!” the child half-sobbed.  “I cannot swim in the air, and the sea keeps pushing me back out here, and I don’t know what I did to anger everyone so, and some strange force keeps pulling me down!”

Oceane splashed the last few steps toward the child, cutting one of her bare feet on a sharp rock she could barely feel through the numbing cold.  She resigned herself to the fact that her feet would have to endure the pain, and worse pain soon enough, for longer than she had originally anticipated.  Abandoning any hope of making sense of the situation, she gathered the small form into her arms, and started back toward her shoes and the road.  Once she was holding the child, she noticed that the little thing was shaking after all, though not nearly so much as she should be in such cold, and she was heavy for a child so small.  Had her boys been so heavy at this age?  She could no longer remember.

The carter and the messenger boy were long gone, but her shoes had stayed put where they’d been thrown.  Thank heaven for small favors, she thought, as she pulled the shoes over her sorely abused feet and tied the laces clumsily with her arms still circling the clinging form of the child.

“Here, we’ll wrap you in my coat, little one,” said Oceane.  Her teeth were chattering horribly, and she was unsure the child had been able to understand, but regardless, the child did not seem frightened or offended when Oceane pulled her away from her chest and set her down on a rock while she struggled with numbed hands to unfasten the buttons of her coat.  It took longer than it should have.  Not only was she freezing cold, but now Oceane was starting to panic.  It was a very real possibility that she and the child would die before aid could be found, and she was now more desperate to keep them alive than she had ever been to kill herself to escape the war.  “Were there any adults with you, little one?  Parents?  Is there help on the way?”  She gave up on the last two buttons and wrenched the coat over her head.  When the coat cleared her eyes and she once again had a clear view of the child, she saw that it was looking at her like she was mad or possibly stupid.

“Why would there be help on the way?” asked the child.  “Who would want to leave the sea to help me?”

“Oh, this is madness.  This must be a fever dream,” muttered Oceane through chattering teeth, pulling the coat over the child’s head all the same.  “And this is not a fault with my English.”

The girl snuggled into the coat, pulling it closer to her and heaving a deep sigh that could not possibly belong to someone so young.  “I don’t know.  Maybe it is madness.  I do that to people sometimes.”