Small Magic

  Small Magic is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Terry Brooks

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Circle colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The following stories have been previously published:

  “Imaginary Friends” in Once Upon a Time: A Treasury of Modern Fairy Tales edited by Lester Del Rey and Rita Kessler (New York: Del Rey, 1991)

  “Indomitable” in Legends II: New Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy edited by Roger Silverberg (New York: Del Rey, 2003)

  “Allanon’s Quest,” “The Black Irix,” and “The Weapons Master’s Choice” in the ebook edition of Paladins of Shannara (New York: Del Rey, 2013)

  “The Fey of Cloudmoor” in Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson’s Worlds edited by Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2014)

  “An Unfortunate Influx of Filipians” in Unbound: Tales by Masters of Fantasy (Auburn, WA: Grim Oak Press, 2015)

  Warrior (Auburn, WA: Grim Oak Press, 2018)

  Hardback ISBN 9780525619963

  Ebook ISBN 9780525619970

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Fritz Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: David G. Stevenson

  Cover illustration: © Larry Rostant

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Fey of Cloudmoor

  Aftermath

  Imaginary Friends

  The Weapons Master’s Choice

  An Unfortunate Influx of Fillipians

  Allanon’s Quest

  Indomitable

  Don’t Tell Dad

  The Black Irix

  Last Ride

  Warrior

  Dedication

  By Terry Brooks

  About the Author

  Introduction to “The Fey of Cloudmoor”

  I began reading science fiction and fantasy in middle school—right about 1956—although there was little enough of the latter being written at that time and most of the kids I knew were reading the former. It was the beginning of the age of space travel and Sputnik and travels to the moon, and that was what every kid I knew was reading about. I shouldn’t say kids but rather boys, because very few girls I knew had found their way to that sort of fiction yet.

  Anyway, among those writers whose works I read and admired—while still in my burgeoning wannabe professional writer mode—was Poul Anderson. In those days, I wasn’t reading or particularly interested in fantasy. I was strictly a science-fiction kid, with peripheral leanings toward adventure stories (Boys’ Life and the like), so my favorite stories by Poul tended to fall along those lines.

  But I remember one that didn’t. I read “The Queen of Air and Darkness” right after it came out in one of the science-fiction magazines, and I was captivated by it. When I was asked to contribute to the Poul Anderson anthology Multiverse in 2014, it was the first story I thought of. It always felt to me as if there was more to the story, as if the telling of it wasn’t finished. What happened afterward to the Queen and the Old Folk of Cloudmoor and Carheddin? Was that really the end of them when Sherrinford took back Jimmy Cullen? Could they really have been so easily dispatched?

  I felt a certain trepidation in trying to make those determinations for Poul. “The Queen of Air and Darkness” had won both the Hugo and Nebula, and has enthralled Poul Anderson readers for decades. Who was I to mess with an icon and his art? But my marching orders were clear: I was to take something from Poul’s astounding body of work and build on it. So that was what I tried to do.

  I met Poul Anderson once, years ago now, at a family gathering at his daughter’s home. I can no longer remember the occasion. He was quiet and unassuming and had about him the grandfatherly look I see in myself these days when I look in the mirror. I said hello and told him how much I admired his work. I have no idea if he knew who I was or what I did. He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. It didn’t matter. What mattered was how it made me feel. Writers form links in an endless chain, one influencing another in a crucial, necessary rite of interaction and succession, ultimately so we may be inspired and our craft may evolve.

  Poul Anderson was one who did that for me.

  THE FEY OF CLOUDMOOR

  He came out of the world of Men and their cities of steel and concrete in tatters, all scratched up and dirtied on the surface and broken and ripped apart inside. He carried what was left of his life in a blanket clutched to his breast, carefully shielding its contents from the sights and sounds and smells of the civilization that had ruined him and destroyed her. He thought of her all the time, but he couldn’t make himself remember what she looked like anymore. He knew only how hard they had tried to find a way through the morass of their lives, choosing to share their misery but always searching to break free of their bonds.

  Hard to do when nothing in your life is real and every day is a slog through dark and painful places that strip the skin from your soul.

  When she died, they had been huddled in an alleyway in the darkest part of Christmas Landing, sheltered poorly in cardboard from a steady downpour that formed a small river only four feet away. They had scored early and resold what they had to get money for food and milk for Barraboo. They had made a good choice for once, but had come to regret it with night’s hard descent and no means to soften the blow. She had been coughing badly for days and her breathing had worsened, and all he knew how to do was to stay with her. There were medical centers they could go to, but once they entered one of those places they might as well say goodbye to their baby. She might have gone alone, of course, but she was afraid to do that, as if making that choice would cost her the baby anyway.

  As if, in his desperation, he might choose to sell it.

  As if, in hers, she might approve.

  He stole some medicine off the shelves of a pharmacy, but it didn’t seem to help her. Nothing did. She just kept coughing and wheezing, getting worse by the day. He found her an old blanket in a garbage bin and wrapped her in that, then held her close against him to share his body heat. She was so cold, and she didn’t look right. But she still held Barraboo and wouldn’t let her go, and so he ended up holding them both.

  But finally he fell asleep, even though he had told himself he wouldn’t do so, and when he woke she was dead.

  He never knew her real name. She never gave it to him. He called her Pearl because she was precious to him, and she seemed content enough with that. He told her his own name, though. “I’m Jimmy,” he said. “Once upon a time, I was kidnapped by the Old Folk.”

  He had told that to only a very few before her and then quit doing so because no one believed him. She probably didn’t believe him, either, but she came closer to looking as if she did than anyone else. She was like that. Even at her worst, when she was so strung out she could barely put a sentence together and started seeing things that weren’t there, she could find a way to listen to him. She was tough, but she was vulnerable, too. She trusted people when she shouldn’t have. She had faith in people who didn’t deserve it. He was one of those people, he supposed. Mostly, he was good to her and took care of her an
d the baby and did little things to make her life more bearable when really it was Hell-on-Earth.

  He thought all this and more as he rode the hovercraft out of Christmas Landing to Portolondon and his future. His and Barraboo’s. For he was determined his daughter would have a future, even if Pearl didn’t. He had fought against himself and his habit and his wasteful, reckless existence for too long. He had denied what he had known was true for too many years, persuaded by his mother and the rescuer she had hired to find him, made to believe when in his heart he knew he shouldn’t.

  Memories surfaced like half-remembered dreams of his time among the Old Folk, the Outlings. He had been only a boy, little more than a baby, and so young he barely realized what was happening to him. Taken from his mother’s camp by a pooka, carried to the realm of the Old Folk beyond Troll Scarp, seduced and made happy beyond anything he could have imagined possible, his mother all but forgotten, his world made over—there he had remained until his mother had come for him, finding him with a mother’s persistence in the face of formidable odds, taking him back to his old life, telling him he would forget all this one day, it would seem a dream to him, he would become the man he was meant to be and not a pawn in the hands of creatures who could not know and would never care what it was he needed.

  “The choices you make in this world should be your own and never another’s,” she had told him. “You should never be another’s pawn.”

  He disembarked with his precious cargo still asleep and stood looking from the loading platform at the dingy buildings of the town. There was nothing here for him and never would be—not in this hardscrabble collection of housings and shelters, not in this scooped-up mélange of humanity and waste. He wrinkled his nose at it—a measure of its ugliness, given his own sad state. All of Roland was a backwater, light-years away from the civilized universe—the back of beyond. It allowed for habitation—breathable air, drinkable water, sustainable crops—but not for much in the way of sunlight. He shivered in the cold, empty light of the season’s perpetual night. Winterbirth, the pooka had called it. It gave him pause that he should remember this, but memory chose to keep what it wanted and discarded the rest. What mattered was how much attention you paid to memory and what you did with it as a consequence. For example, if you knew it was dangerous to go somewhere, you tried hard to remember not to go there again.

  Conversely, if you remembered a place where you were happy—even if you were told you weren’t and tried very hard to forget it and pretend that what you believed then to be happiness was in fact nothing of the sort—maybe you needed to make sure.

  Especially when all other options had been exhausted and nothing in your life was good. Especially when you had more than yourself to worry about, and even in your drug-addicted rootless life you knew babies were pure and innocent and deserved better than what you could give them.

  Especially when hope was all you had left to give.

  He looked out across the buildings to the far north of Arctica, to the shimmer of the aurora and the green of mountains and valleys and mysteries that everyone knew were waiting there and no one wanted to discover.

  No one except him.

  “Hoah,” a voice greeted. He looked down. A dwarf was standing right beside him, looking up from waist-high, bearded and twinkly-eyed, browned by weather and sun, wrinkled by age. “Need transport?”

  He shook his head. “Got no money.”

  “You don’t say? But there’s other means to get to where you want to go, youngling. Have you a destination?”

  He shrugged. “Out there, somewhere. A place I lived once a long time ago, when I was a boy. Beyond Troll Scarp.”

  “Scallywags! Flywinds! Danceabouts!” The old one shook his head. “Don’t no one wants to go there. They who is not to be named in places like this one live in places like that one, and they keep to themselves. Everyone knows. No one says.”

  “Old Folk. Outlings. The Fey. The Faerie Kind. There, I’ve said it for all those who won’t. I don’t fear them. I lived with them.”

  The old man cocked his head. “Yet came back to live among the humans who birthed you? That right? But from the look of you, it didn’t work out so well.”

  “Not so well.”

  “A baby and no mother?”

  He looked at the old man sharply. The baby hadn’t moved or cried out. He might have been carrying old clothes for all anyone could tell. But this old man knew better.

  “The mother died. Pearl. She was like me, an addict. But not strong enough to survive it. The baby is all I have left.”

  “Ayah. Would you take her with you, then?” Jimmy didn’t miss that he hadn’t told the old man it was a girl. “Would you give her over to them for a drug that only they could give you?” the old man persisted. “Would you make a trade if it were offered?”

  He shook his head. “Not for anything. Not though I were the most desperate of men, and I am very much that. I am the lowest and saddest of all humans, and I would sell anything I could get my hands on to satisfy my need for even five minutes. But not Barraboo. Not my Pearl’s child. I have not yet come to that.”

  The old man studied him as if to ascertain the truth of such a statement. Then he shrugged. “What then?”

  Jimmy Cullen, he that was taken by a pooka once upon a time, smiled crookedly. “I have come to take her home.”

  The old man regarded him quizzically, all knitted brow and scrunched-up mouth, before saying, “Well, then, perhaps I can help you.”

  * * *

  —

  The old man led him through the city, down its teeming streets and byways, along its alleys and footpaths, past shops and offices, homes and apartments, flowers and filth, way out to the ends of the northside and there to a stable. Inside the stable was a wagon and what appeared to be a reindeer—and soon enough, on closer inspection, proved to be. The old man hauled the wagon out of the stable by himself, grunting with the effort but refusing Jimmy’s help, harnessed the reindeer, and got them aboard and settled.

  “Bit of a ride ahead. If you need to sleep, put the small one in the necessaries box behind you—there, you see it, don’t you? There’s blankets to make her snug. What’s your name again?”

  “Jimmy Cullen,” he said.

  “I don’t think so. But it will do until we reach Cloudmoor.”

  “What’s yours?” Jimmy asked.

  The old man shrugged. “Oh, I have all sorts of names. Widdershanks and Skitterfoot and Trundlestump, among others. But you can call me Ben.”

  They set out, the reindeer pulling the wagon and its load, leaving Portolondon and humankind, making for the Outway and Troll Scarp, solitary and far distant against the always-darkening horizon. No sun this time of year; no daylight, no day. It was night all the time or maybe twilight for a little while each day, and the people who lived in Arctica soon got used to the idea. Behind them, the Gulf of Polaris glimmered green-gray under skies brightened marginally by two small moons brought close together in their present orbits, both dwarfed by the dazzle of Charlemagne. Lights from the city lent their smudged and diffuse glow, but it did not penetrate the darkness far beyond the city. The Outway was its own space and kept its own presence, and did not suffer intrusions from men or the consequences of their inventions.

  “Better wrap up in this, Jimmy Cullen,” the little man said after a time. He held a long switch in one hand for urging on their wagon’s furry engine. He held the reins in the other, but he lay down the switch long enough to hand Jimmy a blanket. “It gets cold out here for those not born of the Outway, especially those come to us as you have, desperate and soul-bereft. Go on, now. Take it.”

  He did so, pulling it about him, altering it to give further warmth to Barraboo. She was beginning to stir and soon would cry, but he had nothing with which to feed her, neither food nor milk. He had love, but he knew you could not live on that
alone or even survive on it. Ask Pearl. Tears flooded his eyes as he thought the name and the memories surfaced.

  “How do you know the way?” he asked Ben, anxious to deflect the consequences of his awakened feelings.

  “I just do,” the other answered, and said nothing more.

  “Are you one of them?” Jimmy asked, glancing over for a close look.

  Ben shook his head. “Not I. But I know of them, and I do what I can for them. I am a link in what has become a very long chain.”

  “Were you looking for me back at the station? You seemed quick enough to find me. I don’t look the sort that many would want to help. Only avoid. Yet you asked me right out. Do you know me? Have we met before and I’ve forgotten?”

  The old man laughed softly, not in a mean-spirited way, but gentle and kind. “I know you well. Not by name, but by look.”

  “An addict, you mean?”

  “A type, I mean.”

  “At the end of a rope. Lost to everything, including themselves. Wanderers in a world that wants nothing to do with them—only for them to go away and not come back. Rejects. Embarrassments.”

  Ben seemed to consider. “I would not use those words, Jimmy Cullen, although they are true enough in the world of humans. In your world, so many have no place. They are discarded and ignored and have no value, as you say. But how did they come to be that way? Have you asked yourself?”

  He could not answer right away because he wasn’t sure, couldn’t remember, so he said nothing. Under him, the wagon rocked about and rolled along, and the night was sweet smelling and deep. He was already in a different place, away from the things that had ground him under their collective boot and left him shattered. The urge to take something to ease the hurt of it had diminished, and he wondered suddenly why that was. By now, he should have been screaming for his drug. By now, he should have been sweating and shaking and clawing at his skin. Barraboo would be howling, and he would be unable to stop her from doing so because his all-encompassing need blinded him to hers.