Blissed Season 1 Episode 8
Cold Forged Iron
by
Nicolette Jinks
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2016 by NICOLETTE JINKS
NICOLETTE JINKS asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
You may contact the author via email:
[email protected] or check in at Twitter, Facebook, Google+, GoodReads. To follow the author, her blog is www.nicolettejinks.wordpress.com, where she writes about writing and life.
Independently Published by author
doing business as Standal Publications
393 River Road Bliss, Idaho 83314
Quick Blurb
Brandy Silver has been jailed for breaking parole from a past life. To earn her release, she must lead the White Wizard Council to Thaimon, who will be a dangerous catch.
Cold Forged Iron
There were no rats waiting to eat me during my sleep the first night I spent in a dungeon. I felt lied-to. There weren't even any bars to pinwheel my arms through, just a blank cell with hard floors and a mattress glued to the center of everything. I couldn't be sure if it was up to code, but this place had to be in some serious health and safety violations.
No lights.
No windows.
No ventilation.
Nothing besides that tiny pinprick of light and air which came through the keyhole, making me sweat with the humidity. Or perhaps I sweated with fever.
And there were the ghosts.
I couldn't be sure they were there. Perhaps it was just the cold virus attacking my body combined with a jittery imagination so soon after having had the beejezus scared out of me in the bone mine. Any time I sat down on that lone bed on the floor, I heard whispering. Faint, distant things which I could almost hear. If there had been an opening in the room or a thin spot in the wall, I would have attributed the voices to a distantly heard conversation. But there was nothing but solid wall, and I saw no traces of spells anywhere.
I'd grown used to seeing Wraithbane's green signature spells, Jay's tight yellow scrawl, Doc Mike's whispy blue glow. Here there was nothing.
The stale pondwater smell of the room grew stronger, beneath it the hint of grassy tobacco. I felt I should know that smell, the tobacco. That once I'd been able to cite a brand and origin and even if it had been fermented and how it had been done. Linked as it was in my mind with the scent of horse, I only had to feel the damp on my fingers to remember what it was like to hobble the horse and prepare the spell. How the horse had to be tied down just so, how the outer circle had to be made so the animal couldn't step on the lines or blur anything. With enough force of imagination, I could envision what those symbols had looked like as I double-checked them.
None of this could be real. It had to be a spell of some kind, meant to torment those who found themselves a prisoner of the White Wizard Council. Feeling strangely light-headed, I paced endless circles around the bed until I was warm again and I'd convinced myself that there were no ghosts. When my feet ached from pacing around the bed, I collapsed a long way to the bed and winced as my tailbone hit concrete through the padding. I put my arms behind my head and groaned.
I'd broken parole.
“Yeah, from last century!” I yelled at the wall which I then propped my heels upon. “This is all a load of bull.”
Staying up all night had done nothing for my temper, nor had it done anything but give me blisters on my big toes. Wraithbane had said that the White Wizard Council was fine so long as you didn't cross them. I'd done it.
“How was I supposed to know I was 'on parole for life' when no one in this life has ever told me? What am I supposed to do, remember it?”
Being in this place had me imagining things. It'd be better once I'd gotten some shut eye. Because I was imagining everything. There was nothing here.
Nothing except angry whispers.
It had gotten colder.
So much colder.
The damp sweat frozen, forming beads upon my skin. Shivering and lacking a blanket, I reached to brush the ice off my body. Hands seized my wrists and thrust them back to the bed, foul breath misted before my face. My heart pounded and my sleepy mind paralyzed in terror. While the thought ghost still lingered in my mind, I could do nothing but squeeze my eyes shut. Mentally I struggled against myself the way that the men would struggle right before they were turned into horses, to serve out their sentence in the service of those they had wronged. Then came another thought, that a guard might have entered the cell while I was dozing.
Gathering my strength, I lunged forward with a headbutt, expecting my forehead to connect with a man's nose. I passed through a cold mist and a shadow darker than the rest of the cell, then the pressure was gone, leaving me sitting stunned on the bed.
There was a clank which sent me bolting to my feet, then the door opened. I resisted the urge to rush towards it, watching instead as a man in a long gray cloak and matching wizard's beard entered.
“You my lawyer?” I asked. “I've already said I want one.”
Lawyer-like he was not. If Santa had decided to lose all of his weight and become a triathlete while maintaining his superlong beard, this is what he would look like. This man was even a bit cheery and had fleshy cheeks.
“Please state your name and alias,” he said in a kindly tone as the door shut behind him. For a minute I didn't know what to say, and he took that time to rock back and forth on his feet and whistle trilling bird songs. Upon completing his third song, he added, “They gave you Molly Rigby's cell. She had hands as big as a man's, and she used them to strangle her victims. Now tell me your name, or I'll leave you to her.”
He turned to go. Panic struck. I resisted the urge to grab his arm.
“Wait, it's Silver. Brandy Marie Silver, but I was born Dawn Smith.”
The man faced me again, giving me a slight bow. “And I am Simon Dane, your intermediary. I know who you are, yes, but before I tell you why you're here, why don't you tell me how you came by the name Smith?”
Surprised he didn't already know, I slowly sat down and told him my whole story in between itching-throat coughs and sneezes. How I'd been dumped at the fire department as an infant and found half-frozen, how I had a nametag that said Dawn and how they'd bestowed a random surname to me. Then my time in foster care, the eventual change of name once I was old enough to start my life new.
The bit about picking up my roommate at a Bliss Den came next, natural as if I was talking to my bestest bud in the whole wide world. Next I found myself relating my adventures with the Black Kettle Witness Protection program, my attempts to shake Thaimon the wraith who professed eternal love for me, the bone mine, all of it eventually ending with saving my partner Wraithbane from becoming revenant.
My story was crazy. I expected Simon to say so. What he said was, “That was not how your life was meant to evolve.”
I just stared at him, blankly repeating, “That was not how my life was meant to evolve? What?”
Simon Dane drew a book out of a pocket of his robes, a book which was far too large to have ever actually fit without some trace of magic—yet I didn't see it. That concerned me and made me wonder why I couldn't see the spell.
He said in an off-handed way, “You were to be raised in the home of Valery Goode, receive the best education you were capable of learning, and enter a life of charitably applied research. While you would be provided-for, your wages would be a small stipend and nothing more.”
That didn't sound altogether terrible, but nor did it sound fair. “So I was to be an indentured servant?”
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Simon paused at a page in his book, took a pencil out from behind his ear, and scribbled. “You were to fulfill the terms of your parole, as you agreed. And it wasn't in the eighteen hundreds that this bargain was made, as you seem to believe, but rather it was contracted in 1985, four years prior to your death.”
Panic and anger stirred within my chest. I started to pace restlessly at the corner of the bed opposite him. “This is messed up. I am not accountable for another person's mistakes.”
“You are not a civilian, you are a sorceress and a villain and a serial murderer. The laws you know are not the ones to which you are required to abide. A witch's life is longer than a civilian's, and her deeds are far from dead and forgotten.”
“But I wasn't alive in 1895!”
He glanced up from his book. “1985, I do believe that you mean, unless you refer to the date of your capture.”
I shook my head and muttered, “I flip numbers sometimes. It means nothing.”
Simon Dane smiled. “Dyscalcula is not a common trait, and you've always struggled to keep numbers in the right order.” He paused, regarding me closely as he said, “You preferred to color code everything.”
A chill went through my veins at that, but I resolved to say nothing else to incriminate myself. My argument was simple: I was not this person they said I was. I had to stand by that argument and not undermine it more than I already had.
“And,” Simon Dane continued, “you say that the Bliss made you see magic.