The Night of the Solstice (3 page)

“Now sit!”

Janie sat.

“I have no more time for foolishness,” said the vixen. “Listen carefully. You and your world are in terrible danger—”

“Huh? Our
world
?” said Charles.

“—because in just two weeks, on the night of the winter solstice, the mirrors will be open to all, and Cadal Forge can come through. And he
will
come
through, too, unless Morgana can get here first and close him out.”

“Morgana?” said Alys blankly.

“Morgana Shee is my mistress, and the lady of this house, and the greatest sorceress of her time. And she's been betrayed, captured, imprisoned, entrapped, and who knows what else! And it's up to us to save her because she's the only person who can close the mirrors! Well?” She swept them with a gaze from eyes like golden lamps. “Will you help me? Will you lift a hand to save yourselves from slavery and destruction? Or will you sit here quietly and await your doom?”

There was a pause. Finally Alys stirred. “I'm sorry,” she said, “and I don't think you're evil anymore. But frankly I don't have the first idea what you're talking about.”

The vixen sighed. “Of course you don't. I fully intend to explain.” She hesitated a moment as if uncertain where to begin. Then she said, “I suppose you children have been taught to disbelieve in magic?”

“Well …” said Alys.

“Of course you have. And rightly so. Because there is no magic—or precious little of it—in this world,
anymore
. But that doesn't mean there never was.

“The world where magic originated is called Findahl, the Wildworld. And it is, or was, connected to this world by countless Passages. The Quislais found the Passages first—well, they would! The Quislais are—oh, I suppose you people would call them fairies. Anyway, they wandered into the human world, and soon other Wildfolk followed—sorcerei and elementals and beasts you know only through legend.

“In those days the Wildfolk got along well enough with the people of Earth, which they called the Stillworld. But most were never really comfortable with your civilization. And presently the humans turned against magic and began burning witches.

“The greatest sorcerei were too powerful to be caught, but many of the minor ones were killed, and witch-hunting proved to be the last straw for the Wildfolk. They decided to pull out of this world entirely.

“The Weerul Council, the supreme ruling body of
Findahl, decreed that all the Wildfolk be evacuated at once to their own world, after which the Passages would be closed forever. Humans were to be sealed in the Stillworld and Wildfolk in the Wildworld, and there would never more be any congress between them. Plans were made immediately for enforcing this law, and of all those affected only one dared raise a voice in protest—Morgana.” The vixen raised her head and eyed them grimly. “My mistress had always been something of a rebel, but this was more than that. You see, just before the Great Separation she fell in love with a young native American of the Yuma tribe, a dreamsinger. He was only a boy, but she loved him. And she wasn't about to give him up for anyone.

“The Weerul Council is powerful,” continued the vixen, “but, oh, my mistress was clever! She went before them with a unique argument. You see, although Morgana's mother was a Quislai, her father was human, and she argued that by the Council's own decree she was obliged to spend half her time in the human world and half her time in the Wildworld.

“There was a tremendous debate about it, and
Thia Pendriel, a magistrate of the Council, led the opposition. But in the end the Council ruled that a single Passage, the Great Coastal Passage by the Pacific, be left open and that Morgana be given control over it—on one condition. She had to keep it exclusively for her own use, and never, never let any humans through. The penalty for disobedience was death for both her and the human involved.”

“Great Coastal Passage, huh?” said Charles curiously. “Where is it?”

“It's here, dolt!” said the vixen. “You're sitting on it! No, don't get up, you can't fall through accidentally. Morgana made sure of that. You see, she built this house directly over the Passage, and in the Wildworld, at the other end, she built another house, a counterpart. Then she tied up all the power of that great Passage and bent it to her will, and made it into a number of smaller passages connecting the two houses. And those passages are the mirrors.”

“The mirrors,” breathed Claudia.

“Yes. This is Fell Andred, the Mirror House, and you can walk through a mirror in this living room
and emerge in the great hall of Morgana's castle in the Wildworld in one and a half seconds flat—if you have moonlight and the amulet.

“The amulet was Morgana's way of locking the Passage, of making it human-proof. She never told the secret of it to any of the other sorcerei. She settled down to live in this house with her new husband, and he willingly promised never to ask her where she went when she disappeared.

“But the young dreamsinger was human, and insatiably curious, and … well, you can guess the end of the story. He couldn't bear not knowing. He wheedled and cajoled and threatened and begged her until finally she made the amulet for him, and brought him into the Wildworld. And the long and the short of it is that he was caught there and Thia Pendriel had him put to death.”

“Oh,
dear
,” said Alys. She felt it was a foolish thing to say, but she couldn't help it.

The vixen ignored this. “Morgana herself was brought before the Council in chains. Of course, she didn't go quietly, and by the time she got there
she had the deaths of quite a few minor sorcerei on her head. Thia Pendriel wanted Morgana cast into a Chaotic Zone, a place where the magic is so wild, so uncontrollable, that only a full Quislai could survive there and stay sane. There was a fight. The guardians of the High Council, the Feathered Serpents, soon ended that, but in the confusion Morgana managed to escape back to this world, where none of the sorcerei could follow her.

“The Council decided that the most merciful—and most practical—thing to do was commute Morgana's sentence to exile, with death as the penalty if she ever returned to the Wildworld. Morgana didn't care. She was half-mad with grief anyway, over the loss of her love. In anger and bitterness she flung down her Gold Staff and her grimoire, her great book of spells, and she locked her workshop and swore never to touch the mirrors or practice magic again. She kept that promise, too, until just a few days ago.

“Pay attention, now. I'm getting to the point.” Before anyone could protest that they
were
paying attention, the vixen continued.

“All these many years since my mistress was exiled from the Wildworld she has been isolated from the Wildfolk, all of them. Except Elwyn. Elwyn Silverhair, her half sister. Elwyn, daughter of a queen of fairies. Elwyn, the scatterbrained, light-minded, fickle-hearted, irresponsible nincompoop! If you can find one good thing to say about her I'll turn vegetarian! Amulets mean nothing to full Quislais. They are immortal and can cross any open passage at will. The only thing that will hold a Quislai is a thornbranch tangled in the hair. And if amulets mean nothing, common decency means less. The mischief Elwyn has done! Luring young men into the Wildworld and dumping them back twenty years later, and setting loose dragons, and . . . Well. The less said about it, the better. In any case, Morgana had no choice but to let her come and go as she pleased, and she often brought us news of the Wildworld, until about a century ago when she and Morgana had a terrible falling-out.

“We hadn't seen Elwyn since then, until last week, when she came tripping through a mirror as if she
owned it, laughing like a loon, her long hair floating behind her. I don't know what she said to Morgana, but within ten minutes it developed into a magnificent fight. Elwyn threw a sky-bolt, and you can see what it did over there.” Everyone turned to see that one wall of the living room was scarred and blackened in a circular area the size of a hula hoop.

“Morgana knows a trick or two of her own,” added the vixen dryly, and for the first time her listeners took in the destruction around them: tables and chairs overturned and broken, rugs shredded, bric-a-brac scattered across the floor. “And Elwyn may be immune to pain or death or fear, but my mistress managed to chase her back to the Wildworld, all right. Much good it did! Next evening she returned and apologized in words so fair that I ought to have been suspicious right away. She and Morgana talked for hours behind a closed door, and the next thing I knew Morgana had gotten out her grimoire and was making up the amulet for herself and for me.” The vixen stretched her neck, and they saw that she was wearing a golden collar with a little bag of green material tucked underneath.

“Then she told me that we would be going to the Wildworld that very night. Well, I was surprised, but I was ready at the time she appointed—an hour after sunset—only to find that she was already gone, and that wretched Elwyn with her.

“When she didn't return I realized something was wrong. The next day, at moonrise, I went through a mirror myself, and, to my horror, I found the house full of the smell of strange sorcerei—and one scent that was all too familiar. Cadal Forge was there.

“I spied on him and listened to his counsels, and then I understood.
He
had persuaded Elwyn to lure Morgana into the Wildworld, and it is
he
who is holding Morgana prisoner. Why? Because his plans involve the mirrors, and in either world only Morgana can possibly close them against him.

“When I heard what his plans were I could scarcely credit my ears—but I should have realized, long ago, how twisted he had become. Morgana knew Cadal
when he was a youth, the youngest wielder of a Red
Staff in the Guild. Like her, he was dwelling in the human world. They shared a love of learning, and
Cadal was actually apprenticed to a human alchemist—as close as you could get to a scientist in those days. But the Inquisition came and the alchemist betrayed Cadal to save his own life. The only thing your superstitious, blood-crazed ancestors hated more than science was sorcery, and they tortured Cadal before trying to burn him. Morgana rescued him from the stake itself and took him to the Wildworld to be healed, but the greatest wounds were not to his body.

“He turned against all humans. He took a terrible revenge on the poor alchemist, and when the Council announced the Plan for Separation he argued passionately that instead of withdrawing from the Stillworld the sorcerei should simply conquer it. The councillors wouldn't listen, of course, and eventually, after he intrigued against them once too often, they convicted him of treason. They cast him into a Chaotic Zone, but somehow he escaped, and I see now that he never gave up. He found other sorcerei of like mind and created a Society devoted to re-entering and mastering the human world.”

“But how could he get here?” said Charles. “I
thought you said you needed the amulet to go through the mirrors.”

“Very good. You do—
with one exception
. Do you know what the winter solstice is? The longest night of the year, which falls on December twenty-first—in just two weeks! Well, even Morgana could not tame the passage completely, and on the night of the winter solstice, by light of a full moon that rises at midnight, it is open to all. From the moment the moon enters its quarter until the moment of dawn, anyone can cross over. Elwyn alone knew this, and she must have told Cadal Forge. Which means that in two weeks' time
he
will be coming through, with the rest of his Society. And he's got Morgana trapped in the Wildworld where she can't do a thing to stop him.”

“But how can he keep her from coming back here?”

“He can kill her… . But since he hasn't done that yet I dare to hope that he will not. Still, I can think of a dozen ways. Unless you are a Quislai you need three things to cross through a mirror. The first is moonlight. Moonlight must fall on the mirror before you can go through. He could imprison her in a room
with the windows boarded up, say, or bricked over. The second is the amulet. He could take that away from her, although hers wouldn't work for him. The third is the mirror itself. Obviously, if Morgana cannot reach a mirror she cannot pass through. He could weave a magic circle around her, or cast a binding spell, or simply tie her to a chair.”

“Tie her to a
chair
!” said Janie. “If she's such a hot sorceress, why can't she free herself?”

“Why can't you hammer nails into a board with your elbow?” countered the vixen. “She went to the Wildworld in trust, without even her Gold Staff. A sorceress without her magic instruments is no more powerful than an ordinary woman. And that's why she needs our aid. I've gone through the mirrors every day since Morgana disappeared. I know she's in the castle somewhere, for I can smell it, but the rooms are so thick with enchantment its hard to locate her precisely. The other sorcerei seem to have left for the time being. If you will help me, if you will go through the mirrors, too—”

“Us!” cried Claudia excitedly.

“Yes, you! Why do you think I've wasted all this time recounting the history of the Wildfolk? For my own amusement? I need help, and you four have able bodies and fair-to-middling minds. Or so I thought.” The white teeth clicked together impatiently. “Well? Will you do it? Will you help bring Morgana back to close the mirrors once and for all?”

“I'll help,” said Claudia instantly.

“Me too,” said Charles.

Alys still felt stunned and disoriented—and frightened. She wished with all her heart that she had never come with Claudia to the old house. She had a strange, almost dreamlike desire to turn her back on the vixen, shut the door behind her, and leave.

But whether she turned her back or not, the vixen would still be there. And so would the house.