Free Charles Bewitched by Marissa Doyle

new
dresses, and driven them off. He’d slipped into the room in their wake, and
been most gratified by Persy’s shriek of surprise—imagine, Persy shrieking!—and
her launching herself at him, hugging him till he’d protested. But when he’d
calmed her down enough to explain that Lochinvar was not with him and that he
wasn’t here to take her directly home—at least not yet —her joy had
evaporated.
    She slumped back into the
window seat and shook her head, staring morosely out the glassless window—no
glass was needed here in this land of eternal June. “I appreciate your trying
to rescue me, Charles, but…but now you’re stuck here too, aren’t you?”
    “No, not at all,” he replied
with more confidence than he felt. After all, the fairy lord hadn’t actually said so.
    But Persy wasn’t listening.
“And how could you agree to work for him? Do you know what he’s done to
me? I’m bound here. Bound to him . I have been ever since my wedding
day.” A tear slipped down her cheek, and Charles guessed from her reddened eyes
that she’d been crying a lot since she arrived here.
    “And now we’re going to
figure out a way to get you out of here,” Charles said fiercely. Seeing his
powerful elder sister in such despair was unnerving.
    “Charles, you don’t seem to
understand. I—I can feel the magic he’s used to bind us. I’ve been examining it
almost since the moment I woke up here after he took me from the woods. It’s
old magic—very old fairy magic. Breaking it would be like trying to break a
mountain—you just can’t.” She swallowed. “Only death can break the bond between
us.”
    “Oh.” It was a ridiculously
inadequate response to such a statement, but he couldn’t think of anything else
to say. Then he brightened. “Then we could destroy him. That would release
you.”
    Persy gave a mirthless
chuckle. “What a splendid idea. Would you like to try it?”
    Charles remembered the armed
folk standing guard around this great house, and remembered too his new
master’s slender but powerful build and the magic he’d already seen he was
capable of. “Er, well, maybe not. But there has to be something we can do to
get you out of here.”
    “Charles.” Persy held her
hand out to him. He came closer and took it, and saw another tear follow the
first one, and then another. “There isn’t. It’s all I’ve thought about, when I
have time to think.”
    “Look here, I’m not going to
give up—and you can’t either. We’ll think of something, but you have to try.
Don’t let him win. Keep fighting.”
    She regarded him sadly. “But
he already has won. He won before we even knew there was a fight.”
    “No,” Charles said fiercely
and a little desperately. She couldn’t just let the fairy lord win so
easily. “I’m not accepting that, and neither can you. What would Lochinvar say?
He’s not giving up.”
    Persy quickly looked away,
and he saw her swallow convulsively once or twice. “Does…does he know where I
am?” she asked in a low voice.
    “Well, we didn’t know for
sure, but we suspected—or at least, Lorrie did. She knows a lot about
fairies—she said she’d read lots about them. I’m sure that she and Lochinvar
are thinking about what can be done.” If only there were some way for him to get
word to them about all this.
    “I wish I’d known that
before…no, it wouldn’t have done any good, because I didn’t know what was
happening. It was like living in a bad dream—he kept calling me, and I had to
follow the call….” She shuddered, then lifted her head and looked at him.
“Promise me you’ll leave when you get the chance. You have to let them know
what happened to me. And as glad as I am to see you, I don’t want you to be
stuck here too. It’s—it’s not a fit place for human beings.”
    A commotion of feminine
voices outside the door made them both look up. Persy sighed. “I think my
ladies are back. You’d better go. I don’t see why