Spells in Silence

Chapter 9: The City

For all that she left Upper Milton at the crack of dawn the second time, the sun was already sinking below the horizon by the time Hazel hopped off the road proper onto the pavement alongside it. The streets of Bristol lay before her, or at least the neighborhoods that surrounded it. She was sure she would not get to Bristol proper for another hour or two, but she was glad to be back in civilization if only because it meant far less chance for that red cap to try ambushing her again.

Her hand relaxed as her worry subsided, and eventually she let it drop and stretched out her fingers. No longer held in a death grip, the nail she had taken from a hardware store back in Upper Milton fell to dangle around her neck as the shoelace she had tied around it kept it from dropping any farther. It looked like it was iron, or she certainly hoped it was. From the reading she had done about the fae, iron was essentially their one weakness and one she did not want to be without in the future. Just in case.

She had been wondering about that the entire walk here, even as her eyes flickered back and forth around the road to make sure nothing was going to jump at her in the daylight. The sealed portal-gate-thing she found in Glastonbury talked about sealing the fae in their own realm, or that was how she first read it, but she had encountered a murderous fae just a few days later. That had not made any sense, and she thought she had two possible answers that made sense with what she knew.

The first was that maybe it only sealed away the most powerful of the fae, entities like Gwyn ap Nudd who was said to rule one of the Otherworlds that could be reached through Glastonbury Tor. If that was the case, maybe the red cap she ran into was too weak to be driven back when the gate was closed.

The second, and in some ways the scarier one, was that it might only close the road to one of the fairy lands. She had jumped back to Glastonbury when that thought crossed her mind, and sure enough upon a second reading of the plaque it did not say that it kept out all the fae. What it said was that the 'great fae' were banished from Earth, but more specifically the strange room she found closed 'the road to the Greenwild'. If there were multiple fairy realms, just as the Celts described with their talk of multiple Otherworlds, then the Greenwild might only be one such realm. Perhaps the red cap was from a different Otherworld and so was not caught up in whatever happened with the road was closed.

That possibility was the scarier of the two because if it were true, she had no way to guess how many Otherworlds there were and how many still had open roads. For all she knew there were thousands and the sorcerer who built the massive chamber she found had only closed one or two of them.

Morgan let out a birdy yawn and snuggled up into her neck, and she reached up to give him a little scratch. She would love to be able to send him ahead to scout, to see through his eyes somehow, but she did not think that was possible. At the very least she had been unable to feel anything like a mental connection the few times she tried it over the course of the day, and she could not think of any tool that would let her do something like it.

Reaching her arms to the side, she stretched as well as she could with a drowsy pet on her shoulder. Having a scout would be nice, but it was nothing that would make or break her plans for the next couple of days. Her main focus right now needed to be how in the world she was going to restore her ability to see.

Hazel was tempted to reach up and pull off her glasses again, but she had done enough of that already in the last twenty-four hours. When she woke up, she had decided to give fixing her glasses another chance. It did not work any better than the last time. Now the left lens of her glasses was not just covered in ridges, but the frame itself had twisted and dripped and mixed into the lens itself as if they were taffy melding together in the summer heat. She could basically not see anything on that side of her head anymore.