Fireflies at Lughnasadh

II

On the holy days of the year he did feel more connected to magic; there were eight main feast days, the four celestial holidays and the four agricultural holidays. Hence the strength of his ability had suddenly increased. His fingers tingled with the sort of power that he’d been trying to recall for years. The last time he’d conjured fireflies was during the war at the Yule bonfire before the recapture of Kubice. Fuel had been scarce, but the authorities had broken up the last of the old fishing boats abandoned by their imperialist owners before evacuation. The candle was, however, rather small compared to what he’d previously been used to.

His lack of practice also made it hard to control. The candle flame exploded in a riot of colours and puffed out harmlessly. However, the baubles of light hung in the air, rather than immediately vanishing. They spun in a flurry through the room, bombarding the guards, who shielded their eyes. 

They probably expect the lights to be hot, Naujokas thought. I wonder if they are.

Doirrean in particular jumped back and swore in the Galtarai language, and looked angrily at him as the lights faded. “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”

“No,” Naujokas protested. “I haven’t done that in years, I promise you. I was practising earlier, but I could only get the flame to spark.”

The warder gave him a look as if she didn’t believe him, but shook her head and said nothing more for a moment.

His earlier experiment had prepared him for his energy to be expended after one attempt, but his fingers still pulsed. “Light me the candle again.” He looked around. “They’re light rather than heat,” he added to the general frowns coming from the warders.

“I’d always wondered about that,” another warder, a Breston called Graeme, said. “I’ve seen them at Midsummer and always kept well back.”

“I’d still be careful of them,” Naujokas replied, allowing a sly smile to creep across his face. “Heat and light are not always perfectly separated.” He looked at Graeme, trying to keep him and the others from getting too relaxed. It never hurt to play up some of the fears as well as the wonder people had of magic.

Doirrean herself hesitated, but reached out for the candle. “Do it again, druid,” Doirrean insisted, addressing her with a term normally reserved for Galtarai shamans, a sign that she was affording him a little more respect. She struck a match and lit the flame again.

Naujokas pretended to focus, although he didn’t need to concentrate much more than he had last time. Instead, he thought about how to control the lights with what tiny energy the candle could generate. He needed a campfire to create enough flame to manipulate the “fireflies” into a proper phantasmagoria, commanding the “fairies” of the flame into action to dance to his will rather than their own. Worshippers of Lapiukas – or whatever name he was known by across the globe, be it Lisak, Frey, Lugh, Coyote, Anubis or Kanmare, the rainbow serpent of the Antipodes – used this gift to celebrate his holy day, and Naujokas had been blessed with the talent. He’d read a lot of lore about it, and managed to bring an old textbook with him from Kubichas, hunting for it in the rubble after his home had been shelled. By some feat of will, he had managed to keep it with him as they were variously put to work clearing the debris and then shunted off into the wilderness, prisoners without even a proper conviction to their names.

After an appropriate length of time to convince them he had more power than he really had, he drew in a breath that swelled his chest with air. The candle flame swelled to twice and then three times the size. He could feel another female guard behind him, Eimear, tighten her body and focus her gaze on the back of his neck, but Doirrean was there almost immediately to pacify her, and probably stop her reaching for her gun. A magician in the process of casting a charm was sensitive to the atmosphere around him, and although he couldn’t see Eimear’s anxiety, he could feel it.

Let her fear, he thought. I’m not going to do anything to harm her. The candle grew to four times its original size. He wondered how big it could get before he would have to release it, but it was worth it to see the look on their faces. If he wanted to, he could blind them all with this candle – but he might catch himself with it too.

He let go of the spell as it reached what he believed was its natural climax. The flame burst into a thousand tiny pinpricks of coloured light, across the whole spectrum, and he told the fairies through his mind’s voice to spin the room out of control, like you did just now. The regular kaleidoscopic pattern that had made the guards smile and relax burst in the air, knocking their chairs over onto each other as they scrambled for safety from the chaos. After that wave of fear broke, they appeared to be fascinated. Even Doirrean, who had appeared to be magically gifted earlier on, looked as if she had been bewitched.

The candle itself burst, splattering the table with molten wax but not causing anything to ignite. The flame disappeared in a puff of smoke, as had happened earlier, but the wisp from the wick got lost in the cloud of fireflies.

Naujokas kept his own eyes off the mesmerising patterns to prevent him being hypnotised. Now we’ll see whose side Lapiukas is on.

He left the spell spinning in the air and bolted for the door, still full of magical energy but without a flame to produce more lights should the spell dissolve. The impulse carried him to the door, but the corridors were complicated and despite memorising them coming in and out of the cell block every morning and every evening for nine years, there was no invisible guide directing him. Every time he thought he’d remembered the way out, he ran into another blank wall.

He wore only slippers, pyjamas and a dressing gown; he couldn’t go far. Nevertheless, he was determined to try.

He heard Eimear’s voice closing in behind him, calling for assistance. Doirrean answered. The spell must have worn off without him there to sustain it. The shaman finally turned another corner and found the door to the outside, where he had expected it all along – but after too many twists and turns of the corridor. He put his hand on the doorknob and pushed.

The night air seeped into the vestibule beyond the door, and he took deep draughts of it, warm and gritty with the dust from the fort’s courtyard.

Stumbling and catching himself, he couldn’t, however, wait long to catch his breath. There were no guards in the quadrangle, just a pile of wood which had been left there for the following night’s bonfire. At this time of year, the long midsummer nights had already shortened, although not to any great degree like at home, where it didn’t get dark for weeks at a time around the solstice. He had waited until it was fully dark to begin his experiments anyway, so the shadows that cloaked the compound allowed him some degree of cover as Eimear and Doirrean, along with Graeme and two others, came out of the cell block and began to spread out through the cloisters. Naujokas made it across the courtyard, and begged concealment from the shadows as he continued to slide towards the exit. There must be something he could do to slip inside them; he began searching inside himself for the long-forgotten ability to dissolve his own body into the darkness. He had done it once before, as a child playing in the cellars of the tenement in which he had grown up, and been missing so long that a constable had been called, but not since.

Before he could even try, a hand came down onto his shoulder like a manacle, sliding down towards his elbow and then his wrist. “A magician should be aware of their own trail,” a voice said, a lilting Galtarai accent mixing with the Allemundisch common language. “You’re lit up like a bonfire to me. I allowed you to practise your talent, for various reasons, but I don't care for you to go beyond what we allow you to do. It won’t end well.”

It was Fionn Mac Dhomnhuill, the commander of Dun Dubh.