Knitting and Necromancy: A Fairy Godmother's Tale

“What are you doing up there?” Creature asks.

Bobbin looks down at the massive ice beast from his perch in the tree. “There’s a cat up here,” Bobbin replies, pointing above his head.

“A what?”

“A cat. You know, with paws and a tail. Says ‘meow.’”

Creature considers that. “You mean a horse?”

Bobbin giggles as he uses a branch to pull himself higher. Honestly, how does a former human, a princely one no less, not know basic fauna?

“What do you plan to do with it?” Creature rumbles. He has settled on his haunches, flurries from his breath dancing in front of his muzzle, yellow eyes curious.

“Gonna eat it,” Bobbin says, close enough now to see the green eyes and twitching tail. “We haven’t eaten in weeks.”

“You mean yesterday?”

“Says the beast what doesn’t know the difference between a cat and a horse.”

“You’d best leave it alone, Bobbin.”

Ignoring his friend, Bobbin slowly extends his arm. The cat hisses and bats at his fingers. “Come here, yummy squishy thing,” he coos.

The cat yowls as he lunges and grabs its leg. It swipes a black paw at his face and rakes its claws deep across his flesh. Bobbin yelps, his grip loosening—

“Shit!” Bobbin cries, watching the cat tumble through the branches and hit the ground far below.

Since Queen Jane's husband died last year, the neighboring kingdoms have tried all manner of ways to take her crown: marriage proposals, threats to and violations of trade agreements, and lately, a knife in the night.

The first assassination attempt was pitiful to say the least, the pair having miscalculated the location of the queen’s rooms so poorly that they ended up right in front of the guards at the opposite tower.

A week later, three assassins had walked in through the gate, posing as diplomats from a country they couldn’t pronounce. They were dispatched immediately before making it to the inner courtyard.

Over the next month, there were three more attempts, each as bungled as the last.

“You seem to be attracting a high volume of idiots lately, Jane,” Landra comments as Jane finishes writing her letter.

“Comes with the job, I’m afraid,” Jane says lightly, leaning back in her seat. Despite all the spies in the queen’s network scouring for information and Landra’s scrying, they’ve uncovered nothing. She rubs her eyes. “They have been rather rampant lately.”

“You should let me go—” Landra begins to offer.

“No,” Jane interrupts. “Please stay.”

Landra huffs. “Fine. But you know I can’t scry worth shit.”

Jane chuckles. “I won’t tell anyone.”

A knock comes at the door and as soon as Landra opens it, a terrified lady-in-waiting bursts in. “Your Majesty, a visitor—a-a-a beast! And a little man with a red hat, only I don’t think he’s a man. They say they’re from the enchanted forest—”

“Take a deep breath, Amelia,” Jane says, rising to her feet. “Did they state their business with me?”

Amelia shakes her head. “No. I mean, yes! I mean, their business is not with you, your majesty. It’s with...the fairy godmother.” Dropping her gaze, she gestures nervously at Landra.

“Well,” Jane says with raised eyebrows. “Certainly more interesting than another assassin.”

“Unless they are assassins,” Landra points out.

“Oh, please. From the enchanted forest? The creatures there would rather wear pants than come to the castle.” Jane grabs her knitting bag and breezes through the door. “Let’s go. I’ve never seen a redcap before.”

“Well, surprise, he won’t be wearing pants,” Landra grumbles after her.

Landra stares down at the filthy redcap who twists his hands anxiously in front of his bulbous belly. He’s on his knees, crouched guiltily over the heap of black fur that he dropped at her feet. She hasn’t seen a redcap in centuries and my, how time has softened this one. The cap on his head isn’t even dripping in blood. Instead, it is made of proper red cloth. And gods help her, he had purple mittens on.

Behind her, the queen sits on her favorite bench in the garden, knitting needles clacking merrily.

“What is that?” Landra demands, gesturing at the prone animal.

“A cat,” the redcap says miserably. “I wanted to eat it at first but then it fell and made a crunchy sound. It’s not quite dead yet and it’s so soft and small.” He sniffles. “A fairy godmother helped me once when I was bleeding something fierce, so I thought, why not bring the cat to this fairy godmother—”

Landra raises her hand to stop him. She studies the animal for several seconds. The green eyes, glazed with pain, track her warily. Otherwise, it doesn’t move. She wagers its back is broken. And there’s a white mark on its chest...

Landra straightens, takes a measured step back. “That’s not a cat.”

“Hmph,” says the hulking thing hiding in the shadow of the manicured trees. “Told you it was a horse.”

“It certainly looks like a cat,” Jane says casually.

“It’s not a cat,” Landra insists. The thing on the ground glares at her, and Landra feels the runes tattooed under eyes shiver and multiply. “That is a cait sith.”

“A what?” Jane asks and the needles go quiet.

The redcap’s face goes pale. His huge wet eyes bounce from Landra to the animal and back again. “N-no...it’s too weak. It’s just a cat, a sweet thing and I broke her—”

“It’s weak because it’s starving.” Landra plants her fists on her hips. “I’ll bet it’s from beyond the kingdom. Only an idiot of a soul-eater would try to make a home in the enchanted forest.”

The soil there consumes dead bodies and their souls. No wonder the thing was as small as a house cat.

The redcap frets and the creature peels itself out of the darkness to step forward and pat his friend on the head. Landra has heard of the ice beast in the forest, another human fallen prey to a curse. Odd that he’s so tame and coherent, but nothing much surprises Landra these days.

Except for those damned mittens.

And the cait sith.

It stares at her, unblinking. Landra’s fingers twitch.

“Landra,” Jane says, getting up and standing beside her. “What will you do?”

Landra sighs. She can feel the sympathy in Jane’s stupid heart, and it is enough to force the runes on her skin to tuck back under her eyes.

Landra whirls, black skirts rippling. Over her shoulder, she calls out to the redcap and the creature with his frost-tipped muzzle. “Come on then.”

I have met her kind before, this dark wielder. I see the depth of her power in the scars on her face and neck. The inked markings she wears are ancient, and they remind me of home.

The redcap lays me down on a stone slab in a dark room. It smells wild here, rich with dead things and waiting magic. The redcap has left tears on my fur and strokes me with his strange gloves. I feel it distantly, as if in a dream.

“When it’s healed, don’t look it in the eye,” the dark wielder says. She holds a knife against her forearm.

“My people—” the human starts to say.

“I’ll restrain her.” Then, with an encouraging smile which looks stiff on the dark wielder’s scarred face, she adds, “It’ll be fine, Jane. Just wait back in the castle.”

“No, thank you.”

The dark wielder grunts. “Worth a try.”

“You think maybe she needs a bit of life? Creature here gave some to me a few decades back after I had a run in with a sword. Or a sword ran into me, as it were.”

The beast, too large to fit through the door, leans its massive head in and grumbles, “I don’t give my life to horses.”

“Hush,” the dark wielder snaps, and I feel the shadows around my body and under my ears tremble and shift in her direction. “One more word and I’ll use my blood magic to slaughter you all.”

The human scoffs.

“I will do it,” the dark wielder insists.

The human pats her on the shoulder. “Sure.”

With a sigh, the dark wielder turns her attention to me. The weight of her eyes makes something settle in my gut. I have been running for a very long time. I am tired. Here, with her in this place and among these strangers, my mind finally stills.

The dark wielder’s blood wells from the cut, bright and eager. She begins to chant something low under her breath and my fur stands on end in response. The last thing I see before the shadows steal over my body is the runes flaring under her eyes like raven wings.

Landra pinches the bridge of her nose with her fingers. She only needs to tolerate the incessant chatter of the redcap trailing behind her for a little longer.

“So they’re like paws, but hard like rocks, so when they walk their feets is safe. Cats only got them little beans and tricky claws.”

The ice beast rumbles a reply, causing the redcap—Boppit? Tobbin?—to snicker.

His name is Bobbin, the cait sith tells her, loping at her side.

The sound of the cait sith’s voice in her head still feels uncomfortable, like a whisper right against her eardrum, soft and clear and unavoidable.

I don’t care what his name is. I only want him to shut up, she snaps back.

The cait sith’s ear twitches. I don’t believe he’s capable of that.

They are approaching the enchanted forest now, a good four miles away from the castle. Walking out had been a tense endeavor with the cait sith’s body healed. Although still small and not fully restored in its power, the flames in its eyes and flash of its teeth were enough for Landra to leash shadows tightly around its neck.

Now, however, the soul-eater has stopped glaring and snapping its jaw at everything that moves. In fact, it practically trots next to her like the horse Creature insists it is.

At the edge of the enchanted forest, Landra stops. She waves the beast and his companion around her. “Next time, find someone else to fix your broken things,” she says to Bobbin.

The pair look at each other and shrug before continuing into the trees.

The cait sith makes no move to follow.

“Well?” Landra asks, forgetting in her impatience to mindspeak. “Go on, then.”

The soul-eater cocks its head. Go where?

“I don’t know. I don’t care.”

I go where you go. As if to drive its point home, the cait sith sits down and curls its tail around its feet.

“What? No. You go that way.” Landra points to the forest, ignoring Bobbin who has stopped to watch them curiously. “I go this way.” She points back to the castle.

The cait sith gives her a slow blink, and Landra swears there’s amusement in the banked flames of its gaze. I go where you go, dark wielder.

“That is not a condition of the spell. You are not bound to me.”

I am.

“You are not.”

“Arguing with your familiar already, eh?” Bobbin guesses sympathetically. “I hear cait siths can be a bit fiesty.”

“She’s not my familiar,” Landra hisses. “I’m not a witch.”

Bobbin’s eyes widen. “That’s rather prejudiced, you know. Not all familiars bond to witches.”

“She. Is. Not. My. Familiar.”

I am, the soul-eater repeats, licking her paw.

“Fairy godmothers don’t have familiars,” Landra insists with a scowl.

Creature huffs from the trees. “Fairy godmothers don’t deal in blood magic, either.”

Landra’s irritation simmers out of her pores as she glares at the cait sith. “Why did we bother walking all this way then if you were just going to stay with me?”

“Honestly, I was wondering the same thing,” the redcap admits. He yelps and hurries back to Creature’s side when Landra bares her teeth at him. “’Bye, Fairy Godmother! Bye, Lilias!”

Landra closes her eyes. She counts to ten. Then twenty. Then fifty.

When she finally looks down at the cait sith, it stares back up at her, long tail swishing. Landra sighs. “So it’s Lilias, then?”

Yes.

“Fine. I’m Landra. Let’s head back so Jane can laugh at me.”

“You...have a...familiar,” Jane wheezes, wiping tears from her eyes. “Now everyone will truly believe you to be a witch.”

“That’s prejudiced,” Landra grumbles.

“My goodness,” the queen says with a happy exhale. “Well, I’m glad for it. You need more friends.”

Landra whirls on Jane who doesn’t even flinch at the fairy’s scowl. “I have plenty of—” she blinks “—friend.”

This time, when Jane laughs, the corner of Landra’s mouth twitches.

Right before dawn, another covered cart of dead bodies is pulled to the postern gate. The servant waits, yawning, until the guard there opens it.

The servant hopes these assassination attempts stop soon. Not only are they running out of space for unmarked graves, but the entire thing has to be embarrassing for whichever villain hired them all.

As he starts to pass through, the mule pulling the cart jerks sharply to the side and starts to skitter back.

“Whoa, whoa,” he says soothingly. “What is it? A wolf?”

In the graveyard, among the freshly turned earth, he can barely make out something crawling on the ground.

The guard at the gate comes forward. “Who’s there?” she calls.

They are still trying to see through the clinging dark when the first corpse pulls itself out of the cart.

Landra sits up in bed, her skin prickling. The shadows of her room shudder in the corners. She sees the green flame of Lilias’ eyes as the soul-eater leaps onto the mattress.

“What is it?” Landra asks.

They have come for your queen.

“Who?”

Its tail snaps in agitation. The dead.

Magus saunters through the main gate held open by a pair of the fresher assassin corpses.

Through his hold on the dead, he can see the terror of each face as servants and guards register the things coming at them, rotting and stinking with grave dirt packed between teeth and inside nostrils. He strolls into the inner courtyard to the fanfare of metal clashing on metal and panicked shrieks when whatever was stabbed doesn’t stop coming.

He expected the queen to be hiding behind rows of guards up in her tower, but to his delight, she waits for him with a single lady-in-waiting, unarmed, chin high.

“Greetings, your majesty,” he says loudly enough to be heard over the clamor, which already grows quiet as the dead falter against the living.

“What do you want, sorcerer?”

He scoffs. “I’d have thought that was obvious. I want everything.” He opens his arms. “All this.”

“You should have brought more soldiers with you,” she says. “Most of your men are already down.”

Magus smiles. “I prefer to recruit talent from within.” And with a snap of his fingers, all the victims of his fatally inept assassins rise to their feet. They lumber forward, swaying and seeping blood that moves from gravity rather than heartbeats.

“I’m sure a woman as smart as you knows how this will go,” he continues. “Yield and I’ll allow your corpse to rot properly in the ground.”

Before the queen can speak, her lady-in-waiting steps forward. The weak dawn light lands on her face. He sees the runes dancing and spreading down her cheeks and neck.

“Cute trick,” the dark fairy says, nodding at the dead who shuffle toward her. She raises her hands.

It is like the rise of a tide as the dark fairy gathers all the shadows from the walls, the bodies, the darkened hallways. The world around them leeches to sickly shades of gray as a black deeper than loss coils at her feet. It slithers up her gown and explodes out of her fingers, wrapping around the corpses.

The bodies stagger and jerk, held in place. She flexes her hands, runes twitching across her face. The bodies remain whole. She leans harder into her hold, hands spasming. Several heartbeats of silence go by before the dark fairy frowns.

Magus laughs. “I’m almost insulted. Did you think I wouldn’t prepare to meet the queen’s fairy godmother? You deal in blood magic, Landra the Blight. In life. These vessels are less than dead and so cannot be undone. All their spark—their souls— it all belongs to me.”

He strides forward. Through his minions, he can feel her growing strain. “You can’t hold them forever, Landra, and when you finally let go, my army will tear you apart.”

Landra has begun sweat, droplets glistening at her temples.

“Souls, you say?” the Queen says from behind Landra. “My, that’s quite convenient, isn’t it?”

Landra’s smile sends ice down his spine. “Quite.”

Then he sees a pair of flaming green eyes in the distance and the white gleam of hungry teeth.

It takes a moment for the human to put the sweater on me. After glutting myself on Magus and the souls he captured, I am restored to my true size, standing with my head at shoulder height to the queen.

“She doesn’t need a sweater, Jane,” Landra protests.

Jane ignores her. To me, she says, “I made it to match Bobbin when you see him again. He’ll be so excited.”

I chuff a laugh and bump her arm with my head in gratitude.

“It’s not dignified,” my mistress continues. “Lilias finally looks like a proper companion for a dark fairy—”

“You mispronounced ‘familiar.’”

“—and you made her look like a carnival prize.”

Jane laughs. “You’re just jealous. But guess what?” She taps Landra on the nose. “I made you one too.”

“I will slaughter you all in your sleep.”

Jane smirks. “Sure.”

My mistress turns away, but I still see it—the tilt of a smile on her scarred face.