Black Coven (Daniel Black Book 2) (18 page)

              We started with an ugly silver scar on her left arm, where the damage from any unexpected side effects would be minimized. I cut it out with one careful sweep of a force blade I’d made just the right size and shape for the job, letting the severed flesh fall into a stone bowl I’d conjured up for that purpose. Then I healed the wound, while Elin watched what I was doing with her own magic. Her power flowed through mine like warm water through a steel mesh, an oddly intimate sensation.

              When we were done I checked the bowl, and found that the drop of mercury I’d removed had torn its way free of the lump of dead muscle and was now trying to crawl out of the bowl.

              Figuring out a way to dispose of the golem fragments proved a bit tricky, since my force constructs couldn’t hurt them and using fire magic on enchanted mercury sounded like a spectacularly bad idea. I was pretty sure superheated mercury vapor would be fantastically toxic, and I didn’t have any particularly good way to decontaminate a room. I ended up just trapping it in a hollow ball of iron for now.

              Elin looked a little pale when I returned my attention to her.

              “I have those… things… inside me, sir? How am I even alive?”

              “That was my first thought, too,” I told her. “But your body is actually too tough for little bits like that to damage, at least not quickly. I guess that’s a grendelkin attribute?”

              She nodded slowly. “I think so. Mercury isn’t cold iron, so I suppose mother’s nature may also be giving me some protection. Undines can live in the depths of the sea, so they’re surprisingly durable.”

We did a few more extractions that first day to confirm that there weren’t going to be any other complications, then stopped until we could figure out how to dispose of the fragments. Elin asked permission to consult with an alchemist in town for that, and I introduced her to Oskar and told him to give her a transport and a detachment of guards whenever she needed to go out. It didn’t escape my notice that the mishap where she was injured might well have been an assassination attempt, and if that was the case there was no sense making it easy to try again.

Then it was on to the next project.

Avilla had been cooking with campfires and magic hot plates for as long as I’d known her, and it was about time she had a real kitchen. I spent several hours that day finishing out the work I’d done before, giving her granite counters and a split island shaped to her exact specifications in a room that had expanded considerably from the original version. I also built her a magic stove, with controls modeled after the dials you’d see on a modern appliance.

That kind of thing was surprisingly tricky, but I was finally getting the hang of it. I followed up with a double oven, with some consultation from Avilla on how big the flames needed to be to reach the temperatures she’d need. She was so happy about that I decided to go the extra mile, and put in a refrigerator. Removing heat from an enclosed space was right at the edge of what my limited mastery of fire magic could handle, but it was worth the effort to see the look on her face when I showed it to her.

She insisted on “thanking” me right there on the kitchen island. Then she got a naughty smile, and asked if I could help her dedicate the room that evening.

“I thought that was some kind of secret hearth witch ritual?” I asked.

“It’s not secret from you, silly. Normally it would take weeks to get it done, but with your power we don’t need to wait. I just need you to keep me full of magic, and give me a little help with the ritual elements. Sex can be a very powerful claiming ritual, you know.”

“Is it, now?”

She nodded seriously. “Oh, yes. I think five or six times in one night will get the job done, at least for the kitchen. The other rooms will have to come later.”

I grinned, and palmed her lush breast. She purred, leaning into the contact.

“I think you just want to get me all to yourself for a night,” I teased.

“Do I need an excuse?” She smiled up at me. “But no, I’m serious about this. Cerise and I have already shared magic so deeply we don’t have to worry about disturbing each other’s sanctums. But you’re a powerhouse, and we’re not at that level yet. Doing it this way will mingle your magic with mine in the ritual, and that way you won’t have to worry about accidentally disrupting my spells if you come in here while I’m working.”

She leaned into me, and started kissing my throat. “Or if you cum in me while I’m working.”

Needless to say, I agreed.

I’d resisted the girls’ idea of forming a coven when they’d first suggested it, but I was slowly coming around. A coven bond allowed a group of practitioners to combine their abilities using ritual magic, in a way that otherwise took years of practice and a massive investment in magical implements and facilities. My witches had a wealth of magic handed down from their teachers that required a coven to use, and some of it sounded quite valuable. Avilla knew rituals to raise wards and lay blessings on guardians, to prevent sickness and reduce discord and bolster morale. Cerise’s grimoire had darker rituals for protecting secrets, binding servants, detecting enemies and cursing them from a distance. It was a more strategic sort of magic than the individual spellcasting I’d seen them do, and vastly more powerful.

A coven bond was also a powerful protection against practically any sort of enchantment or binding. The ritual to create a coven required such an intimate blending of magic that the participants were magically one person for a few minutes, which would break any binding that wasn’t shared by all of them. After that establishing a new binding would require the consent of the whole group instead of just one person, and most mind-affecting magic would similarly tend to fail unless it actually caught all the coven members at once.

From a purely pragmatic perspective, both benefits would be invaluable. But there was a more personal side to the equation, which had set my alarm bells ringing at first. Blending magic generates a very visceral sort of feedback, as I’d already noted on a number of occasions, and the rituals of a close-knit coven were almost as intimate as sex. Trust and emotional closeness made the process vastly easier, and the resulting magic quite a bit more powerful.

So in effect, a good coven was only a few steps short of a group marriage. Coven members don’t have to be lovers, but the level of emotional intimacy involved was almost on that level.

After my wife’s betrayal I wasn’t exactly eager to leap into another long-term relationship, especially something that unconventional. Yes, Avilla and Cerise were both sexy as hell, but that only increased my hesitation. I’d dated enough to know that beautiful girlfriends make for short relationships. Young, hot and a little crazy was just asking for trouble, especially with the culture gap.

Learning more about the traditional methods witches used to make covens work hadn’t done much to set my mind at ease. Back home it would be just about impossible to find five people who could maintain that kind of relationship for long. Inevitably attention wouldn’t be shared equally, someone would get their feelings hurt, and things would go rapidly downhill from there. Especially considering how poisonous modern relationship advice is. Teaching men to subserviently kowtow to a woman’s every whim, while the women are taught to harshly scrutinize their partners for any possible fault, is not a recipe for happy relationships.

Here in Vinland human nature was the same, at least as far as I could tell. But the people thought nothing of measures that would have been condemned as horrific evils back home. I’d known that was true of their society in general, but I hadn’t realized how it applied to covens until Cerise had pulled out her little black grimoire one evening and started going through her ideas about the perfect coven bond with me.

Practically every coven bond involved effects that were arguably mind control.

Sexual compatibility was considered highly desirable in a coven, because sexual attraction and emotional intimacy are so closely related in the human psyche. So mixed-gender covens generally used magic to ensure their members were all bisexual. All-female covens similarly inducted any formerly heterosexual members into lesbianism, and neither of my witches thought there was anything odd about this. Even Beri just shrugged and said it sounded like a small price to pay for the security of belonging to a strong group.

The way she blushed at the question made me wonder a bit what her initiation into Hecate’s cult had involved. But it was a mystery cult, so she wasn’t likely to tell me about it.

When I asked Avilla how reliable that kind of magic was, and what would happen if it wore off, she had a giggling fit.

“Alterations only wear off if the subject opposes them, Daniel,” she explained when she recovered. “Think about what a coven is supposed to be like. If you’re having an amazing sex life with people you love, why would you want to suddenly stop enjoying it?”

I had to admit she had a point, but it still made me uncomfortable.

Covens weren’t necessarily one big romantic relationship, of course. Especially the larger ones, with seven or nine or even thirteen members. Some mix of permanent couples and trios was the norm, but given the emotional fallout of working group magic regularly it was impossible to expect strict fidelity. Within a coven trysts, flings and mate swapping were considered entirely normal, and the occasional orgy wasn’t unheard of. Perhaps in reaction to this a coven bond normally placed limitations on sex outside the coven, but there was usually an escape clause. Cerise’s version had all members swearing off outside men, but left them free to fool around with other women.

“Sounds a little unbalanced,” I pointed out. “You don’t care if I go around seducing half the women in town?”

“I wasn’t kidding when I told you I sacrificed my jealousy,” she replied with a grin. “Besides, Avilla and I are both libertines. Why shouldn’t you be able to get in on the fun? The fidelity thing is just to make sure there aren’t any hard feelings about taking care of our children.”

I blinked, and surreptitiously scanned her. No, she wasn’t pregnant. Yet. Note to self, medieval girls don’t expect to put off having babies until they’re thirty. But that wasn’t the only issue here.

“You do realize that if I got some strange woman pregnant I’d want to take care of the kid?” I pointed out reasonably.

“You would? Huh. Yeah, I guess you would, wouldn’t you? Alright, what if we say affairs are limited to servants and vassals of the coven unless we all vote to give ourselves a free pass for a day? That’s got the right symmetry to be stable, and it won’t get in the way of you and me working our way through those sexy wolf girls while Avilla is busy getting her little maids ‘properly trained’. But that way if you do knock one of them up someday she’ll already be one of our people, and we can just put her on special harem duty or something.”

Yeah, Cerise was getting pretty upfront about her intention to become a serious skirt-chaser now that she was in an environment where it was possible. Her interest in men was a lot more limited, although she teased me now and then about maybe giving one of the younger wizards a try if I took too long about making things official.

But that just led back to the other issue that gave me pause.

Most modern fiction has a convention that ‘true love’ is some kind of ineffable mystery that can’t be faked with magic or technology or whatever other powers a setting might have. But anyone who actually thinks about the issue for more than five minutes knows that’s clueless drivel. Romantic love is a complicated blend of several distinct emotions, but that’s the only thing that makes it different from anger or fear or simple lust. Binding yourself to feel specific emotions takes a bit of power, but it’s perfectly doable.

Thankfully coven bonds usually shied away from the direct approach there, but only because it was a case where a little finesse was more effective. The wording Cerise had worked out in her years of study and preparation was:

“I open my heart to my coven-mates, unreservedly and forever. I trust my coven-mates, and I know that they trust me. I cherish their strengths, and forgive them their faults, and will strive always to make our bond a thing of joy to us all. I savor the bonds of attraction between us, taking comfort in the certain knowledge that my coven-mates find me desirable, and revel in all the myriad permutations of our sexplay. I shall indulge the desires of my coven-mates, and they shall indulge mine, seeking love and happiness together forever.”

I had to think long and hard to untangle what effects that would have as a magical binding, and I still wasn’t sure I saw the whole picture. It was a far cry from love potions and obedience charms, but at the same time it would be damned hard not to fall in love with a woman you’d taken that vow with.

A lot of people back home would still consider it mind rape. For that matter, a lot of women would consider the implications of “revel in all the myriad permutations of our sexplay” to amount to rape. Anything that makes it so you never really want to say no automatically qualifies, to some people.

When I mentioned that to Cerise, she looked at me like I’d suggested fire was wet and by the way maybe joining the Aesir wouldn’t be so bad.

“You have to go into this voluntarily,” she pointed out. “For that matter, our last two members are going to have to earn their spots. Covens are rare, and this is going to be the most kickass coven in centuries. Avilla and I have been working on this since I was fourteen, so we obviously know what we’re getting into. If some other woman fights her way in, earns our approval, reads the vows and agrees with them and then helps cast the binding - well, how the fuck can you argue that she didn’t consent to everything that comes afterwards?”