Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

They were girded for war, all relative youngsters, led by an older and more experienced-looking leader with warpaint that accentuated her scars and the tips of her ears, one of which was ragged and partially shorn away by a sharp implement like a saber. They were armed with clubs and spears, but no bows and no rifles or repeaters.

“They sent their greenest kids to me, thinking I’d be a pushover,” Jinny said. “Don’t you worry, little Witchazel,” she said. “Mommy’s no pushover.”

Seeing empty scryers laid out in front of her–the wild folk were only coming from a single direction–Jinny decided to have a word with them. She fumbled for a potion from the root cellar, one that would project her voice and allow her to hear replies a bit better, and downed it.

“Hello there!” she said. “My name is Jinny Witchazel, and this is Witchazel Farm. I can’t help but notice that you’re trespassing on my land, armed for war! If you’re here to buy some potions, salves, or spells, I’m happy to oblige you! But if you’re here for anything else, I’ll thank you to get gone from my lands before I have to take action to defend myself.”

The leader held up an arm and the wild folk stopped their advance. “You can call me One-Ear,” she said, “for my actual name is not for you to know. We have heard that you, in violation of whatever trust the wild folk had placed in you, directed outsiders to one of our most revered edor leaders, and not long after one of our brightest rising stars was killed at one of our most sacred sites.”

“I know all about what happened at the Meeting Rock,” Jinny said, “and I’m really sorry about it, love. It’s awful! But the easterners I sent up to Father Zelten meant no harm, and you’ve no quarrel with me!”

“It is we who decide when there is a quarrel,” One-Ear replied. “Not you. Just as it is we who decide when squatters will be permitted on the lands that we have long shared with our green brethren. You have gained a reputation as a betrayer of secrets and a caster of unlucky spells, Jinny Witchazel! We have come to see justice done upon you.”

“Is it really justice, to cut a young woman down in her prime when she is with child?” Jinny said.

One-Ear seemed surprised by this revelation, and whispered to the other young elves in her cohort. “We were not aware of this,” she said. “You may depart, then, if you wish, leaving your word never to return.”

“I have often felt that the wild folk and the edor were treated badly, with a heavy hand where a light touch would do. Are you to throw in your lot with them, love, and see yourself counted among those who fling the innocent off lands they have worked?” Jinny said. “I have my reasons for wanting to stay.”

This, in turn, seemed to make One-Ear angry. “You’d dare put us and they in the same group?” she hissed. “With child or not, human, you will leave or you will die.”

“I’m not leaving,” said Jinny. “This is the patch of ground I’ll die on, my child by my side, if need be. You said that I have a reputation for unlucky spells; are you ready to see what I’m capable of?”

“We are through talking,” One-Ear said. She made a curt movement. “Attack!”

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Her little fellow kicked like a mule, and Jinny winced, pausing a moment to hold herself. “I know, I know,” she said. “This isn’t any sort of circumstance for a little guy to be born into.”

Another kick, and Jinny reached for one of her altered bullets. “Yes,” she said, “you make a good argument, love. Killing people that attack is the only proven way to keep them from coming back. And I’m not opposed to that, at least not at my greatest need. But if I kill them, that means that there’s revenge in the mix, and for all that folks say about the elves out east being too soft and too rich, the ones out here hold grudges measured in generations.”

“But these,” she said, tapping the newly cast bullets. “Holy water, garlic cloves, and white oak shavings, crystallized and hardened with elemental sap. It’ll give a nasty but most likely not fatal surprise to anybody that gets hit with one, so long as they’ve got violence in their heart.”

One last, much gentler and almost half-hearted kick from Jinny’s little fella. “Okay, little Witchazel,” she laughed. “I promise not to shoot myself with it, love. I promise.”

When dawn was just a few degrees below the valley’ landscape, Jinny emerged from her hiding place. She’d stocked it with extra bullets and food, so it could serve as a last refuge, but if Sally had been right and the wild folk knew that she had been hiding there, it could wind up a shooting gallery.

Jinny brewed some tea over enchanted blue flame, anointing it with a wakefulness spell based on coffee beans that had been soaked in agave and pimento. Then, repeater slung over her back with a rude rope made of twine, she shut and barred all the downstairs windows and doors. A sleeping poultice knocked out her one remaining chicken and goat, and she buried them both gently under some straw in the hopes that they might survive.

All that done, Jinny took up a position on her second floor. She set a scrying sphere made of magicked water and brambles at each window in the four cardinal directions, and twinned them with four others that she set in front of her at the north-facing window, directly above the door. With that, and a meal of milk, eggs, and pemmican set out beside her, Jinny waited for the arrival of the wild folk, all the while hoping that she had made her preparations for nothing.

When she saw the first wild folk filtering through the trees at the far end of her homestead, she knew she’d hoped in vain.

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Jinny took one of the turnips and idly spun it in her hand, balancing it on a fingertip with a little help from a magical cantrip. “If only I could flash the water out of you into steam, like I do when I’m jellying you for the winter,” she said.

A thought occurred, and she held the turnip up as if it were speaking back. “But you can!” she squeaked. “Just cast a rune of delay! Then the instant I’m disturbed, I’ll flash-steam! But with no pot to contain me, the result will be mayhem!”

Jinny snickered. “Make me a promise, little man,” she said, laying a hand on her belly. “Never get so old that you’re embarrassed by your mom talking to vegetables.”

There were other cantrips, spells, and knacks that has already been cast. The little garden outside the house had been magicked to produce thicker, juicier veggies on the quickfast; Jinny sprinkled a packet of seeds on it from a little drawer she’d labeled “War Sprouts.”

Outside in the fields, small as they were, the magic had almost entirely gone out of the scythe and bucket that had harvested the meager Sagescrub crops. They were capable of only a few feeble movements, and certainly not enough to fight even though their blades were quite keen. The wagon to move cut crops up to the house had only a tiny amount of knack left, enough for one good trip. Jinny, weakened by the strain of manufacturing an heir and mindful that the Art was not end endless wellspring, couldn’t spare a cantrip to re-enchant it.

Jinny whispered to the cart. “Up there,” she said. “At the top of the path. Wait for my signal.” It obligingly shuddered up the footpath that led into the hills, and, eventually, the Butterhollow homestead. To the pitiful farm tools, she whispered a different missive: “Into the house with you, loves, and speedily.”

The barn had been depleted from the long winter, with just a few goats, chickens, and a nag that Jinny kept more as a pet than a farm animal, as her days of carrying anything other than a small child were long over. She kept her best layer and best milker out of the chickens and goats, and then led the others outside. With a tub of water in one hand and a little bit of ground-up feyroot dust in the other, she wrote a message onto the fur and feathers of her animals, invisible to the naked eye of anyone but its intended recipient.

“Mrs. Butterhollow,” she whispered to one chicken. “Mr. Cuttergrille,” she cooed at a goat. Another chicken was quietly told “Goris Sluffer,” while the final goat was given the name “Feris Skulljelly.” At last, Jinny drew her old nag, Murgatroyd, to her. “Old Mr. Supply Belcher, at the Old Mission.”

Once the ensorcellment was complete, Jinny opened the barn doors and let her animals loose. They departed in five different directions with five different degrees of alaracity. “As long as there’s no rain to wash off the magicks, they should arrive with the messages intact, kiddo,” she said to the babe beneath her armor. “No idea if they’ll actually do anything, but that’s out of my power. If nothing else, my critters don’t have to die if I do.”

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“Jinny! Jinny, I know you’re in there!” Sally cried, pounding at the door to Jinny’s homestead, a combined house-barn with a shared second story. “It’s Sally, and I have something important for you!”

She heard a creaking from inside, a few heavy steps, and Jinny appeared at the door. She wore a potbellied stove cover, hung from her neck, as makeshift armor for a baby bulge that stood out starkly on her wiry frame, carried a repeater engraved with glowing runes of accuracy, and wore a sour look on her face.

“I’ll have you know, it’s not easy to answer the door for company when you’re hiding in the root cellar, love,” Jinny said to Sally. “Come in, I’ll make you some tea.”

“This isn’t a social visit, Jinny,” said Sally. “Word has gotten out.”

“Word of what?” Jinny said. She patted her child-swollen belly. “This? I think if people were gonna get upset about that, love, they might have done it sooner.”

“People set up homesteads out here just to get away from that, I know,” Sally said. A member of the wild folk herself, she nevertheless had frequent contact with Jinny and the traders working out of the Old Mission. “But someone in our band has been fast and loose with their tongue. Word that you sent those easterners to us is out among the wild folk. I heard it from some of the forest elves, and even the humans on the River Ozay are talking about it, according to them. They even know you’ve been hiding in your cellar.”

“And so what?” Jinny said. “If I cared what other people thought, would I be out here in the part of the wild where they don’t ask questions, working hedge-magic and swelled up with a bastard child? The answer’s no, love, in case it wasn’t obvious.”

“Jinny,” Sally said, taking her friend by the shoulders. “An edor is dead, desecrated. Our peoples are furious. Easterners have died. And you pointed a pair of them at our oldest and most respected edor like a pair of steel darts!”

At this, Jinny fell silent a moment. “How soon?” She asked softly. “And how many?”

Sally shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I would expect their visit soon.”

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Sagescrub Valley, in the foothills of the great western mountains, was not particularly popular with the settlers that had been flowing into the wilds. Its hilly ground had poor, rocky soil that could only support a homestead at certain places, and even then the tilling of fields was rocky and fraught with backbreaking labor. Even with the assistance of someone with the Art, whose magic could move boulders if not mountains, it was a hardscrabble life. And although that same rockiness meant that they had never held the land in high esteem, the wild folk who had once foraged there freely were highly ambivalent at best about outsiders.

The only people that made the journey either prized their solitude or had their reasons for not wanting to be found.

Seven people had chosen to brave the difficulties and settle there anyway. The Cuttergrilles, a dwarf couple, had built a waterwheel on the creek and mostly got by fishing and foresting. They also ground anything for anyone, no questions asked, and word had it that Mr. Cuttergrille was on the run from the government back east for illegal grinding of glitterdust.

A couple of halfling mushroom farmers, the Butterhollows, lived near the valley’s subsidiary peaks. Mr. Butterhollow came from a family of seventeen, and Mrs. Butterhollow had a total of twenty-one siblings that had made it out of childhood. They were there for the solitude and the very occasional use of the Cuttergrille mill for making ‘shroom flour.

Goris Sluffer and Minerva DeLouise ran a valley farm of their own, quite successfully. But they were also each married to someone who was not their current farming partner back east, and Goris had an orcish father besides. Sagescrub Valley was far from judgmental and prying eyes, as well as their respective spouses and children.

And then there was Jinny Witchazel, who had a small plot from which she was barely able to glean enough food to get by, and even that required a heavy use of the Art, in which she was quite exceptionally gifted. She was about a month, give or take, from increasing the valley’s population to eight with the birth of her first child. None of the other Sagescrub residents had asked who the father was, and she had not offered the information.

The others were friendly, and Jinny offered her services as a hedge-wizard in exchange for the necessaries that she couldn’t get elsewhere. But the stream of people coming to see her from both the wilds and the towns, from the mountains and the Old Mission, made her neighbors keep her at arm’s length.

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Tizeech returned not long after, and behind her sauntered the sheriff–Sheriff Dallas, to be exact, with a flask in his hip holster instead of a shooting iron. His deputy, Missy Ferguson, was by his side, sullen but silent.

“Well, well,” said Dallas with a light slur in his voice. “What have we here?”

“I told you to get the sheriff,” Miss Scarlet hissed angrily at Tizeech.

“I…I did!” Tizeech stammered.

“The real sheriff, Deputy Ferguson! Not this drunk idiot!” Miss Scarlet was whispering loudly enough for Sheriff Dallas to hear, but he either ignored her or took it as a compliment.

Dallas walked around the room, hands clasped behind his back in what he probably fancied was a thoughtful pose, looking at Pearl on the bed, bound, and Miss Scarlet with a repeater pressed to the chest of a Valley Union man. “Your girl says this man was threatening you with his irons,” said Dallas, “but from where I’m standing, it looks the other way around.”

“Yes, Sheriff, that’s exactly it,” said Miss Scarlet. “You’ve uncovered my nefarious plot to tie up Pearl and then shoot the gun out of the hand of my own john.”

Deputy Ferguson had untied Pearl, who stood up. “I can vouchsafe that this scoundrel is the malefactor here,” she said. “Miss Scarlett saved me, no thanks to your and your lead-footed pace in getting up here.”

“And yet, from where I’m standing, it looks like the law is on the side of this man here,” said Dallas, jabbing a finger at Edenburner. “I think you’d better let him go, missy.”

“What law, in what fever dream, in the head of which diseased syphilitic codger, says that?” Miss Scarlet cried.

“This law,” said Sheriff Dallas. “Right here.” He opened his duster, reached into his waistcoat, and produced a folded piece of paper. Unfolding it, and pinching a pair of pince-nez spectacles on his nose to read it, he intoned gravely. “Let it be known that, under the authority of the acting civil servants during the duration of this emergency rail severance, that this warrant permits the search of suspicious environs by the agent designate hereafter named, and protects the same from any recourse, legal or moral, that might arise from the ensuing investigation.” He looked up. “Signed this day by Sheriff Brandon Dallas on behalf of Mr. Jedidiah Edenburner.”

Exasperated, Miss Scarlet lowered her repeater. “You have a search warrant for my place, signed today? That is corruption, sir, pure and simple.”

“Is it, now, missy?” Dallas said. “The head of the Valley Union office came down to have a talk with me this afternoon, said that he had a suspicion that you might be engaged in some sort of…questionable behavior. I signed the warrant over to his agent on the spot.”

“In other words, as soon as his gold coins hit your pocket!” cried Pearl. “This man’s boss bribed you to get him out of trouble!”

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