Enchanted No More. Robin D. Owens

Aric through renewed tears.

      “Here.” He handed her a frame crusty with grime, and she glanced down to see a photograph of the whole family—all her sisters and brothers and her parents. It had been taken a year before she’d lost them.

      In the picture, Jenni sat cross-legged on the floor between her sisters, her arms around them, grinning cheekily. Her parents sat on a plump love seat behind them, her mother’s head tilted against her father’s shoulder, obviously both loving and beloved. Rothly lounged against the right arm of the love seat, lanky as he’d reached his final inches. Her second brother, Stewart, leaned against the left arm in a mimicking pose. Her oldest brother stood behind her parents. Lohr had looked the most like their father, the half elf. His smile was shy and proud.

      Jenni clutched the picture to her chest, wailing breaths pounded her body. Again Aric was there, arm curving around her, gently moving her down the hall. They passed doors on the right and left that belonged to her siblings—rooms that Jenni was glad were closed. She yearned to open them, but knew the pain would be beyond bearing.

      They stopped at the landing, and Aric pressed her to descend, but she balked.

      “Come, Jenni, enough of memories. We have work to do. We must find Rothly’s notes.” Aric had tucked his photograph into a large pocket that had appeared in his coat, then vanished.

      “No.” She pivoted in the circle of his arm and paced away to the door at the far end of the hall and the little room—the smallest in the house, as she’d been the youngest—and stood there. She steadied her breath and her emotions, once again groped for the mass of tissues that Hartha had put in her coat pocket. Foresightful brownie.

      After cleaning herself up again, she stared at the door. “I need to do this,” she said in a cloggy voice. “H-he— Rothly—threw silver and salt at me.”

      “At us, and he was wrong.” Aric laid his arm once again across her shoulders. “We did nothing to be made dead to him.”

      Jenni shrugged off his arm. “I didn’t get to the ritual dancing circle to open the portal on time.”

      “You didn’t get there early,” Aric corrected. “As your family did, and they didn’t call you when plans changed. We would have been on time. But the Lightfolk moved the opening of the portal up.”

      There was the faintest note of cool satisfaction in his voice that reminded her that he’d been her family’s guest for the great event. He wasn’t anywhere close to being high enough status to have been invited on his own. No, he wouldn’t have been late for the dancing circle to open the portal.

      Unwanted shades of memories flitted near. She didn’t intend to take a closer look at them. “They opened the portal while we were having sex.”

      “While we were enjoying each other. None of that is a reason for guilt.”

      Jenni blinked away sticky tears that clung to her lashes, peered at him. He sounded completely reasonable. He didn’t feel any guilt—hadn’t ever—about being in bed rolling around with her having sex when her family was being cut down by Darkfolk.

      She didn’t want to think of memories, so only stared at the barrier to her old room. She couldn’t bring herself to touch the knob and open the door. Aric reached around her, twisted the knob and flung the door open. Her room was empty and painted a white as stark as clean bones.

      Air whisked from the place into the hall, carrying a faint searing scent. Jenni knew in that moment that Rothly had called on his djinn fire nature to flash-incinerate everything in her room, including the bed that her grandfather had made for their mother when she was a girl. Jenni’s breath was stolen again and she rocked back. Aric’s arm curled around her waist and he drew her against his body, pulled the door shut with a slam. He inhaled a lungful of air. “Rothly burnt your things!”

      “I know,” she said thinly.

      “He’s your brother.”

      A terrible smile formed her lips. “No. He threw silver and salt at me, disinheriting me, making me dead to him. Since he’s older than me and so the head of the family, he made me no longer a Mistweaver.”

      “You will always be a Mistweaver.” Aric’s hands curved around her shoulders and he gave her a small shake. “The Air King was angry with you yesterday when you baited him, but I double-checked the official lists. You and Rothly are still both listed as Mistweavers.”

      Jenni just closed her eyes, and went dizzy as Aric swung her up in his arms. He took her back to the landing and clomped down the stairs. “And you can still move into the gray mist, the interdimension, and weave elemental energies to make the land and Folk more powerful. That makes you a Mistweaver.” He set her on her feet with a little jolt, handed her pack to her. She was glad to be back in the light they’d left on the ground floor. “Let’s do what we must do and leave this sad place,” Aric ended.

      Her chest hurt and breath came short from all the emotions pressing inside her—grief and anger and guilt. She slid the photo into her backpack. With even steps she walked to the center of the entryway and raised her arms above her head, called on her djinn nature and fire. She could do something else here for Rothly—more, for the memory of her parents. She could send a cleansing wind through the place and remove every particle of dust. She tapped her foot in the right rhythm, conjured the sound of finger cymbals, a thumping drumbeat began and she saw Aric tapping both hands against the sturdy wooden stair banister. “I helped your mother occasionally,” he said.

      He had. As Rothly’s friend, he had come to stay now and again.

      Jenni nodded at him, started the nasal chant, then began to spin. Soon the room was only a blur, as she gathered air and fire around her, then let it go with a spell and the snapping of her fingers. The fire-wind whistled from her and shot up the stairs, doors opened and closed, the whole atmosphere of the house vibrated and by the time Jenni crossed to the stairs and sat down to rest a little, it was done. The house was clean.

      Aric sat beside her and it was almost companionable.

      He took out the other photograph he’d chosen from the top of her parents’ dresser, leaned his arms on his knees and they both looked down at it. Another jolt through her chest into her heart.

      He’d chosen the picture they’d all had taken before the mission in the elegant clothes they’d purchased for the event. Aric himself was in the picture, arm in arm with her, smiling with easy charm. He really was photogenic.

      Another frisson slipped through her. She looked as if she’d been in love.

      For a moment she sat frozen. Why had Aric chosen this photograph? Because he was in it? Because she was?

      “I didn’t get to say goodbye to them.” His voice had the native lilt of a Treeman. He used his sleeve to clean off lingering dust. “And there was that party the night before the portal opening.” He smiled and it was beautiful and almost like an old one that she remembered. Surely he’d lost that original smile as she had most of hers. “We all got a little drunk on mead.”

      She remembered. She’d stayed to the end of the music, but retired before he, knowing that he would come. They shared a room in those days. When he’d arrived later he’d been singing some Treefolk song that she couldn’t understand. They’d loved then, slept in later than they should have, and had loved again…until they’d heard screams.

      Jenni rose. “Let’s see if Rothly left any sign of his exact path.” She grimaced. “Though I still think that the Eight could find him if they tried. They are, after all, the most powerful beings on Earth.”

      Aric didn’t defend them. He stood, looked down at her with an inscrutable face, then moved from the stairs down the main hall and turned toward her father’s study.

      She glanced upstairs, wondering if she could face the second floor again.

      “I examined Rothly’s bedroom.” Aric’s words carried to her through the echoing house. “Nothing there.”