Part One: On What Wings

“On what wings dare he aspire?”

William Blake, “The Tiger”

Chapter One: Lila’s Story

Modern Reflections

It was the violin that started it all, you see.

You don’t see, of course. You don’t know me. In all the stories over all the years, my name has been mentioned once or twice, but it was always in whispers. I am barely remembered, barely even a legend.

I consider myself a keeper of legends, though.

I’m not really a storyteller. I am not Jessica Ashley Allodola, spinning others’ tales into entertainment, with some editorial revisions to make the narrative fit together in a way that is less messy than truth. I am not Renegade, she who was once Gabri Arun before she challenged the world and became something new, before she gathered her powerful friends and started sharing the hidden stories.

I prefer the forgotten stories. The legends.

And in the last few decades, I have become one. As those around me have gained fame or notoriety, I have been at the periphery of so many stories, indirectly involved or at least distantly aware—and sometimes there, with my hands in the meat of time and my fingertips on the pulse of destiny.

But it didn’t start that way.

It started with a violin, crafted by Antonio Stradivari in Italy, twice played at the palace at Versailles… and occasionally played in a small fishing village where cod and God vied for importance.

Rhode Island Colony, 1682

As the Puritans settled much of New England, it was cod that served as a shelter for those of my kind. As neighbors whispered to each other of witchcraft—anxiety that would eventually become frenzy—it was a large, cold-water fish native to the Atlantic ocean, whose claim to fame is its ability to be salted and dried efficiently, that served as an effective disguise for myself and my kin.

It also helped that many of my kind were capable of weaving powerful spells capable of quelling suspicion. It turns out that the best defense against accusations of witchcraft is, in fact, the practice of witchcraft. To my knowledge, not one of my kind was ever arrested by a human witch-hunter, though shapeshifters, natural psychics, and humans themselves were devastated by the fear that swept first through Europe and later the American colonies.

I’m ahead of myself. The famous trials in Salem—more famous somehow than the fires of Inquisition that killed millions over the course of centuries—would not occur until I was dead and gone.

Now I’m well ahead of myself.

This story begins a decade before the first finger was pointed in Salem, and a hundred miles away.

At that time, witchkind owned at least a dozen households, mostly in Boston, Marblehead, and Rhode Island. We were fisherfolk and ship-builders mostly, though some were known for brewing and a few dabbled in farming.

Working the land was an honorable, respectable profession, so we stayed as far away from it as we could. On both sides of the ocean, fisherfolk and woodsfolk were despaired of as immoral and vagrant, likely to work the Sabbath and violate the strict adherence to the commandments that the Puritans held as the basis of their society. We sheltered in that assumption, on the edge of society where any strangeness was dismissed as the ways of city-folk, of fisher-folk, of “those” folk.

Oh, I grew up knowing my Bible and attending meetings, of course. Those things were necessary, to fit in and avoid undue attention. For similar reasons, I dulled the extraordinary beaten-gold color of my hair with a rinse made from oak bark and walnut shells, and when faced with a strange man on the street, I dropped my gaze.

Except that once.

And as I’ve said before, it was the violin’s fault.

It was a spring day in 1682. I was on an errand in town and passed the docks where fishing ships were being unloaded. I had uncles and a brother among those fishermen, and like any immoral young woman raised by fisher-folk—and like any witch with power in my hands—I had no fear of the rough folk in that place. I moved about with more independence than an unmarried woman my age could have in more “civilized” areas of the colonies.

There is a modern misconception that Puritans banned all music, that there were no instruments and no singing on the colony shores for the time they were in charge. That is not correct; they banned instrumental music from their religious services, believing the elaborate scores favored in Catholic masses were a distraction from true piety, but there was music aplenty in their world. There were even musicians who performed on the streets and at the docks and taverns, though they were more common in areas like Salem and Boston than in our smaller port.

That said, those buskers produced music, yes, but I had never heard anything like this.

I must begin with the instrument itself, which was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. Its wood glowed; its sound glowed, arching and seeming to resonate through my body in a way that stopped me in my tracks, wiping all other thought from my mind.

I was not the only one who paused, caught in the unusual busker’s spell—not that I cared a whit about any of them in that moment.

Unlike most performers I had seen before, who held their fiddles down on their arms as they played, this musician cradled his close to his cheek like something dear to him. He sat at ease on a shipping crate, and his eyes were closed as he played. Fair lashes rested on cheeks that seemed evenly sunkissed, as if his skin had not been tanned by weather but rather by a single touch of the divine.

Such was my first impression of Kaleo Sonyar, the man who would create and destroy my world.

Some combination of moon and tide and blood and breath and of course music took me that day. I stopped like a heathen statue, first watching and then simply listening. I might as well have been a human caught in a witch’s spell, for so I felt at that moment.

Did I know what he was?

Of course. Almost immediately.

Unlike the Inquisitors, who occasionally hired traitor shapeshifters or human diviners to identify witches, the Puritans had no ability to read auras or sense magic, so I had no reason to hold mine hidden during daily life. My aura spread around me and took in information about my world as continually as my eyes, ears, and nose did.

I heard the music first. Then I noticed the man. And then I sensed the power inside him, banked like hot coals, simmering and hungry.

Until that day, I had never met a vampire, though I had been taught about them. I knew how to fight and kill them if necessary.

Some of my kind trained rigorously to the hunt, though their skills in that era were most often used whaling, or in the forest hunting wolves or puma who threatened livestock. Unlike those of the Vida line, however, even the hunters in my line are not charged to keep separate from the blood-drinkers and regard them immediately as enemies. Instead, we are taught the possible facets of our magic—hunting, healing, crafting, seeing—and given rein to choose our own path. I personally had chosen the way of a seer and an artist, so I felt no call to violence upon seeing the vampire peacefully performing at the wharf.

I do not know how long I stood there, until the song ended and his eyes opened.

I was not surprised to see that his eyes were black, as if the pupils had drowned out what color had once been there. As I’ve said, I knew what he was, so I knew what to expect. Some in the group around me were unnerved, however; I heard them shift, and many moved on, either unsettled or simply released from the spell by the end of the song and now needing to return to their tasks.

I was startled that, when his eyes opened, they were looking directly into mine. In one of the glimpses of history my power sometimes afforded me, I saw that they had once been hazel-blue, before the vampiric blood darkened them. He had been a musician even then, though the strings his long fingers danced over belonged to a lyre instead of a violin.

I blinked away the past, aware despite everything that losing track of the current moment when faced with a vampire was not the wisest course of action. I was not a fool.

Oh, yes I was. Such a fool. But I thought I was so wise, as young people from the dawn of time have often thought themselves wise.

“Good morning, daughter of Hecate,” he greeted me.

The words probably should have sounded threatening. Certainly I instinctively cast out my ever-ready Net of Eclipse, a spell that would trick mortal senses so they failed to notice any oddness in my vicinity. But I did not back away.

“That isn’t a name we’ve ever called ourselves,” I said, “though it is kinder than some of the names we have been called. What are you doing here?”

Hecate was one of the many goddesses in history claimed as a patron of witches. My line in particular is near in age to her worship, though the lineage of my kind is older by a few thousand years. Older than the vampire who stood before me, who may have intended the comment to tell me about himself as much as to acknowledge that he knew what I was.

“Heaven forbid I be called kind,” he teased. “As for what I’m doing here, I should think it obvious.” He briefly lifted his violin, which he had set in his lap during the long seconds when our eyes had locked, then said with a quirked smile, “Though I think your spellwork is likely to drive away my audience. And what of you? What brings one of your kind to a place so inhospitable to magic, and indeed to all women of power?”

Before I detail more of our conversation, I should like to point out a few things that I noticed only in hindsight:

He dismissed my question, then diverted me so I answered his instead.

He deliberately used a term he knew we did not call ourselves, but which he considered preferable and clever, and found a way in asking about me to drop information about himself.

He warned me outright that he was not kind.

He casually referenced the danger I was in, simply by being what I was in that place.

I noticed none of these things. Instead, I noticed the way his hands rested on his instrument. I noticed his smile, and the way his attention focused on me with warmth and humor. I noticed how open he was in acknowledging that a woman could have power, without seeming intimidated by it, a simple truth that meant much in an age when even among ourselves a woman’s strength seemed eroded by the few avenues society offered her to show it. I noticed his interest in me.

At the time, I thought I was so clever, intrigued by him but completely safe. I explained, “Most of my kind has settled on these shores. Not just my line, but Vida and Arun as well.”

I meant the words as a warning to him that there were hunters nearby who would take it amiss if he chose to hunt among the people of this village.

He only nodded thoughtfully. “And the Smoke line too, I imagine,” he said, as if I had left that pacifist line out of my warning list as an oversight. “Are they able to use their healing skills here, or is it too dangerous?”

“They use their skills at the waterfront, discreetly,” I answered, off-balance. I had expected some response to my mention of the two hunting lines. “Going to sea is dangerous, whether it is a long voyage or a daytime fishing trip.”

“Indeed. But you haven’t answered my question at all,” he reminded me. “Why here, of all places?”

“Where better?” I replied. “The world is afire with religious hysteria. When we crossed the ocean, we were promised open land ripe for settlement, but the wild woods we thought we could disappear into belonged to others. There may be other places in the world that do not fear magic, but not ones where those who look like us and speak the language we know would be welcome. We have found a place here.” At last I realized it wasn’t I who had evaded a question, but him. “What of you? You truly can go anywhere. Why here?”

He eased down from the crate he had been sitting on to play and put his violin away in a velvet-lined case. The instrument and case were both far too rich and worldly for that time and place, but such was always the way of Kaleo Sonyar. “I was tired of palaces,” he answered. With a self-deprecating chuckle, he added, “I also may have offended some ladies in the French court, and had an almost-gentleman demand satisfaction of me. And, though I am capable of traveling where I will in a blink, like you, I do not like to go where I am not welcome.”

That was an outright lie.

If only there had been shm’Ahnmik blood in my veins, perhaps I would have known that. If only my powers had warned me of the future, instead of being good only for peering at the past.

If only I had been sworn to revile him and kill him on sight.

“Would you like to walk with me, Mistress…” He trailed off, offering his arm and asking for my name.

If only, like one of his French ladies, I had been schooled in how to turn on my heel and deliver the cut direct, a social snub that would have rebuffed him before we went further.

“Lila Light,” I said instead, giving my true name rather than the Puritan-approved use-name the humans knew me by.

“Mistress Light,” he said. “I am Kaleo Sonyar. May I walk with you a while?”

It was the violin, you see. If only I had never heard those strings vibrating that day, all the rest could have been avoided.