Lost Child

By Wendy Palmer

A dire fairytale Imperative has fallen upon Queen Anura's baby. The princess has been stolen away, a changeling left in her place. Grieving and coldly furious, Anura puts all the blame on Jannin, the Lord Protector of the Domain, in control of the Imperatives—and yet refusing to interfere.

To rescue the baby princess, Rana must choose between her beloved cousin and her infuriating paramour. Her choice will plunge her back into the twisting Imperatives of the Domain.

Rated PG (mild content).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Winterbourne Publishing
• Release date: May 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9780987451156

Wendy Palmer

Wendy Palmer lives in Bridgetown, Western Australia with her partner, son, dogs, goats, alpacas, bees and chickens. She's patted tigers, ridden elephants, dog-sledded across glaciers, faced down lions in the Serengeti, swum with whale sharks, and camped in the Sahara, but she not-so-secretly prefers curling up with a good book.She writes fantasy fiction with entertaining characters, enjoyably perilous adventures, romantic entanglements, some dark undertones, but always happy, hopeful endings.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Rana opened the shutters of her room. The sun was rising, the fresh air was a blessing, and Jannin was beginning to stir from his deathly sleep at last.

She knew exactly how the Domain’s young Lord Protector would awaken. He would open his eyes; he would look about the room; he would realise he was in her simple bedchamber, exceedingly familiar to him by now. Then his black-eyed gaze would seek for her, as automatically as a moth following the light of the moon. When he discovered her sitting on the armchair she’d dragged to the bedside, his face would light up, notwithstanding her current state of tired dishevelment.

Then things would get difficult.

Indeed, it progressed exactly as predicted, except that when Jannin drew breath to greet her, his fond expression dissolved into a puzzled frown.

‘I know I am often breathless in your presence,’ he started, and the frown became pronounced. ‘Why am I having so much trouble breathing? And talking? And…and sitting up?’

‘You have been,’ Rana said quietly, ‘very ill.’

‘Is it so?’ He managed to push himself up to rest his back against the pillows, and looked around again, more alertly.

This time, he could not fail to note the sickroom accoutrements on the side table: the basin of cool water with its wrung-out cloth to bathe his burning forehead, bottles of willow-water and other tinctures cooked up between Amaryths and the castle’s herbalist, a full bowl of congealed broth. Over it, the staleness of sweat and fever, only just now beginning to be alleviated by the fresh morning air.

He rubbed at his eyes before murmuring, ‘Oh, yes. I was caring for a quarantined village.’

‘I know. Amaryths found you collapsed with fever in your tower.’

He managed a weak smile. ‘Nursed back to health by my beloved?’

‘I did not.’ Rana folded her arms. ‘Amaryths wouldn’t let me near you, in case you were infectious.’

She also thought Amaryths might have kept her away for another reason: she might been afraid that the thing, the alien and amoral manifestation of power, that lived inside Jannin, that lived inside both wizards, might try to extricate itself from its bindings when Jannin was at his weakest. Neither wizard would talk about it, even under less strained circumstances.

She finished with a crisp, ‘ She nursed you herself, since she’s immune.’

Licking his dry lips, Jannin assessed her; her tone as she enunciated those final syllables could not have failed to give him clear warning. ‘Are you wanting to shout at me about something, Rana?’

‘Why aren’t you immune, Jannin, if our castle wizard is?’

He glanced at her before lowering his lashes. ‘Is there water?’

Rana picked up the bowl of cold broth and slammed it back down on the table right beside him, effecting a transportation of approximately fifteen inches. The gruel slopped over her hand and onto the table surface.

Jannin gave the broth a dubious look while Rana, seething, wiped her hand on her skirt. Her other hand was freshly bandaged; Jannin looked at that dubiously too.

‘Amaryths was puzzled about that,’ Rana said. ‘She says the spells you two wizards use to extend your life so you can do your duty also make you immune to illness and disease. So tell me, Jannin, do the spells fail just when you’re within my lightstrike, or have you removed them completely?’

His fever had only broken the day before, a great relief that came just before the discovery that had shocked the castle. He must have still been weak, vulnerable enough that she could catch her tricky wizard in open consideration of which lie would best suit.

‘Truth,’ she snapped.

‘I’ve completely removed them.’ He tried on a wry look. ‘Except those that protect from unintended consequences, of course.’

‘Why?’

‘The spells are all wound together. I haven’t yet discovered how to subtract the longevity but leave the immunity, so I’ve removed all of them for now.’

‘Jannin,’ Rana said, with what amounted, for her, to immense patience. ‘Why at all?’

‘So that I age,’ he said, with the obviously very apparent in his tone.

She’d sat at his side since the fever had broken and Amaryths had allowed her into the room. While he’d inhabited the deep, tranquil sleep of recovery, she had dwelt within a nightmare. She’d stewed and dozed and stewed. She was tired and sore and soiled. The tatters of her patience ripped anew.

This wasn’t even what she had waited by his bedside to discuss. This wasn’t even important, and that made her even angrier.

‘In the name of the Frog, yet again, why?’

Jannin looked away. He combed at his tangled hair, half black, half brightly coloured like the rest of his body—though the esoteric tattooed pattern decorating the left side of his body seemed almost pallid in the wake of his illness. He took a minute spoonful of broth and contemplatively placed the spoon back into the thin concoction before pushing the bowl away with his left hand.

Rana tapped her foot at the delaying tactics, hands on hips, head tilted in a clear signal of annoyance, mouth set.

Even the ever-cocky Jannin knew not to push his luck very much further—and yet did so. ‘Why do you think?’

‘I know what I think,’ she said coldly. ‘I want to hear it.’

With lashes lowered, he murmured, ‘So that we live a lifetime together.’

‘We can do that with you wearing your longevity spells.’

‘So that we live a single lifetime together, and age together, and, at some point in the very far distant future, die at approximately the same time.’

‘Of all the idiotic things,’ she shouted, glad finally for the reason to raise her voice and release her fury; it felt akin to the strange satisfaction that came with lancing a boil.

‘Why so angry?’ Jannin asked, beginning to smile. ‘I want one lifetime with you, not a lifetime watching you age and die and then tedious years without you. Should that not make you happy?’

‘That you’re throwing your life away for the sake of bedding me? No, it does not.’

His lips moved as he silently repeated bedding. His nascent smile was gone; she’d picked a sore point to poke at. They, together, were a little more than mere bedding to him; he asked her to marry him almost weekly. It was a little more than mere bedding to her, too; she still said no.

She had a plan of her own, in that regard, which needed another few months to come to fruition. Well. She’d had a plan. She glared at Jannin.

With magnificent disregard for the quagmire his toes were sinking into, he rallied. ‘That I love you so much I don’t want to live without you. Is that not a romantic gesture of epic proportions?’

It was too much. ‘It is ridiculous and foolish and irresponsible and self-aggrandising.’

Jannin had been flailing; he assumed his mask now, diving behind his self-defensive wall and leaving only the lightly glib version of himself to parry her, as frustrating and slippery as shadowboxing with water. ‘Am I not infamous for being all those things?’

Arms folded tight about herself, tone flat, Rana said, ‘You will not come to me again until you put those spells back on yourself.’

Jannin raised an eyebrow. Smiling, he asked, ‘Are you threatening me, imperious one?’

‘I’m telling you how it is going to be.’

‘I’m not putting the spells back on.’ He presented her with an overly casual shrug. ‘Will not live without you.’

‘Will have to,’ she said, ‘unless you put them on.’

‘Why are you so angry, Rana?’ he asked again, bewilderment slipping into his voice.

‘You are the Lord Protector of the Domain and you have a bigger duty than your feelings for me.’

Jannin stilled. He watched her like he was waiting for the jaws of the trap to close. He didn’t ask; he would not ask.

So Rana told him. ‘While Amaryths was occupied nursing you and watching over your quarantined village, someone stole Princess Esmeralda. How’s that for a gesture of epic proportions?’

His sharp exhalation sounded inordinately loud behind her as she stalked out, slamming the door behind her.

Jannin looked composed when he joined Rana, Amaryths, Anura and Tarqan in the nursery where the changeling was screaming. He’d effected, presumably with magic, dressing and washing and tidying his shoulder-length hair into a neat fishtail braid, but his patterned left side was dulled, the unmarked skin on his right side sallow, his cheekbones and wrists stark from the hungry burn of the fever, his movements not nearly as graceful as usual.

‘What is this?’ he asked as he walked in.

Queen Anura let out a muffled cry, half full of terror, half full of fury. She pressed her face into Tarqan’s shoulder. Tarqan had wanted to lead the search for his daughter, but Anura had been too distraught, tearlessly hysterical, for him to leave her side. He held his queen and stared coldly at Jannin as Amaryths gave her calm report.

‘Princess Esmeralda was agitated and sickly yesterday morning. She bit the nursemaid and screamed when Anura tried to hold her. Then when Rana saw her, she of course saw straight through the illusion.’ Rana was lightstruck, cursed so that certain types of magic did not work in her presence; she officially had no truck with illusion. ‘I broke the illusion, eventually. Captain Rokan and Lord Boris are leading search parties in every direction. We’ve been waiting for you to wake up so you can advise on this Imperative. I can’t see it.’

Jannin had frowned when Amaryths mentioned breaking the illusion, and now glanced over at Rana, the only sign he gave that he’d realised that she had not being standing vigil in the sickroom on his behalf, but on Esmeralda’s. Enragingly, he otherwise appeared entirely uninterested in Amaryths’s stark recitation of the great disaster that had struck the Bufonida castle.

He waved at the cot. ‘No, I meant, why have none of you picked her up? She’s upset.’

‘She’s upset?’ Tarqan echoed. Rana knew he counted Jannin as a friend; he was staring at the wizard now with his hands bunched to fists.

‘It’s a changeling,’ Anura spat.

Beautiful face grey, eyes red with sleeplessness, hair in disarray, Anura drew herself up into her most regal bearing. All her terror and grief had transformed into narrowly-directed wrath when Jannin—Lord Protector of the Domain and, crucially, controller of the story Imperatives—had strolled into the nursery and turned his sympathies away from her devastating loss.

Jannin looked at her, head cocked. ‘She’s a baby.’

‘I wasn’t sure if it was safe to touch it,’ said Amaryths.

‘She’s a baby.’

‘I tried and she bit me,’ said Rana.

‘She’s a changeling baby,’ Jannin conceded and walked over the cot. Rana joined him.

Baby Zelda was a gloriously chubby and cheerful pink-cheeked cherub of eight months, with the hazy grey-blue eyes and freckled snub nose of her father and the white-gold hair and delicate smile of her mother. The cot now held a long and skinny scrap of a thing, her hair a spiky mass of bright magenta, a colour it hurt Rana’s eyes to perceive, and her skin tinged with a lighter purplish-pink hue, like lilac.

Between that and her tiny near-translucent claws in lieu of fingernails, the nursemaids had muttered about various unsavoury superstitions and refused to come into the nursery even before she’d opened her mouth to reveal pointed white teeth. Rana knew intimately that the teeth were as sharp as a puppy’s.

She blinked up at them with violet eyes before opening her mouth and shrieking again, loud enough to ring Rana’s ears.

Jannin tsked upon spotting those pointy teeth. ‘Drew blood?’ Rana silently showed him her bandaged hand again. ‘Hope you washed that thoroughly.’

While Rana was still looking at her hand, wondering if she’d washed it thoroughly enough, Jannin leaned over the cot to address the changeling. ‘Do you want to be picked up?’

He clapped once and showed her his palms, the same invitation he made to Princess Esmeralda before he picked her up for a cuddle. Rana couldn’t help sucking in a shocked breath, and heard it echoed by the others. Jannin looked around at them impassively. He was at least not resorting to his usual flippancy, but this unwonted gravity came along with a disconcerting dose of callousness.

The changeling stopped screaming and stared up at him with eerily detached curiosity. She raised her arms to him.

Jannin picked her up, holding her upright and at arms’ length so he could firmly address her. ‘Esmeralda—’

Anura flinched. ‘Don’t you dare call that creature by my daughter’s name.’

After a pause eloquent in its silence, Jannin said, ‘Zelda—’

‘Not her nickname either. Nothing to do with my daughter. Nothing.’

Jannin set his jaw. ‘Ezra, if you bite me, you go straight back in the cot.’

The changeling hiccupped and Jannin gathered her in close to pat her back. He started to rest her against his left, patterned, shoulder but she hissed and arched her spine, rigid. Unperturbed, he transferred her to his other shoulder, and she quietened and laid her head down. He gently guided a clawed thumb to her mouth so she could suck on it.

‘Hungry?’ he murmured. ‘Don’t think we can inflict those teeth on a wetnurse. We’ll get you some goat milk, will that work? Maybe something to chew on while you’re teething.’

He began to sway and hum, cupping her narrow skull with his unmarked hand through an awkward bend of the same arm that held her close, keeping his left hand well away. The changeling’s eerie eyes blinked sleepily a few times, and then drifted shut. Her scrawny body gradually relaxed and went floppy against his shoulder.

He’d done this before, for Princess Esmeralda. It was still astonishing to see him so capably do it to someone who had been screeching like a banshee a moment ago. Rana was embarrassed to admit how appealing she found him in these moments. He shot her look from under his lashes to remind her that he knew it already.

‘I’ll just put our baby Briar Rose back in her cot,’ he said, beginning to lower her down.

‘We hardly want it!’ Tarqan said. ‘It’s not our daughter, Jannin, what are you not understanding?’

‘Take that filthy creature away,’ Anura ordered, spine very straight, eyes burning.

Jannin paused again, face blank. Rana knew him well enough to know that he was angry but he merely said, very mildly, ‘Shall I take her home with me, then?’

The queen’s response was instant and final. ‘Do as you like, just get it away from me.’

He looked at Rana and she opened her mouth to defend her frantic, grieving cousin. Logically, it was not the changeling’s fault that Anura’s daughter had been stolen, but, however Jannin felt about Anura, he surely could not expect a distraught mother fighting to stay afloat to dive to the depths of compassion. Rana herself was only barely capable of that, so soon after the fatal discovery.

Jannin cut her off. ‘May I visit you?’

He was acting as if he were about to leave with the changeling and not otherwise assist them. Rana held her line, as the quickest, and perhaps only, way to find out what his line was. ‘As soon as you put the spells back on.’

‘No.’ He stroked the dozing Ezra’s back, still absently swaying. ‘I guarantee I can hold out longer than you can; you’ll work out why soon enough.’ He smiled, and a glimmer of his glibly amused poise returned. ‘It’s not to do with how wildly attractive you find me, I assure you.’

‘Are you two fighting?’ said Tarqan. ‘Cat’s boots, make it up before we get hail and blizzards again, and let’s get on with this rescue.’

Jannin nodded out the window. It was one of the clear bright days the Domain was often blessed with in autumn. ‘Not a cloud in the sky, Your Highness, not a cloud in the sky.’

He swayed and hummed and looked back at Rana without the slightest flicker of concern.

‘I’d like you to visit me,’ Amaryths said and Jannin turned the sort of darkly flirtatious look on her that he normally reserved for Rana. ‘Stop that! I meant, for help with this Imperative. It is… It is an Imperative, isn’t it?’

Jannin glanced slowly about the room, up at the ceiling, and down at the sleeping child in his arms before giving his colleague a minimal nod. They all relaxed, even the red-eyed, ashen Anura. The baby was caught in a fairy tale, which was, on balance, safer than a mundane kidnapping. Jannin could turn an Imperative if its implications were too unpleasant to contemplate.

He smiled at them knowingly. ‘You are the Bufonida,’ he said, still with that disturbing tranquillity. ‘Imperatives will come. I wouldn’t be doing my duty as Lord Protector of the Domain if I shielded you from all of them. It must fall out how it will.’

Rana’s eyes narrowed. She had conceived a sudden and yet certain suspicion as to the game Jannin was playing.

‘What?’ Anura said. ‘But— Zelda! Go and get her, wizard.’

She had been unfriendly to Jannin, and contemptuous of the changeling he was blithely cuddling, but she had assumed, as Rana had assumed, as all of them had assumed, that Jannin would help them rescue the princess, in such a way that this Imperative was satisfied and Esmeralda was made safe from further notice until the appropriate time came for her prince to rescue her.

It was a simple exchange: Jannin had been sick when they had needed him to turn an unwanted Imperative, so he would fix it for them. They had all assumed that, to greater or lesser degrees. Anura apparently just about expected him to simply fetch her daughter regardless of the constraints of the story Imperative ensnaring her.

‘You’ll get the princess back, Your Majesty. There’s not an Imperative in the world that harms a baby.’ He considered. ‘A royal baby, anyway.’ He considered again. ‘Usually.’

Anura looked reassured, but only for a moment. Tarqan’s tanned face had drained of its usual warm good humour. He put his hand to Anura’s shoulder.

‘Now it’s dawning upon them,’ Jannin said conversationally, addressing the empty air with his self-satisfied smile still lingering.

Fairy tales could, occasionally, be horrible. And not one of them had been able to think of a fairy tale, Domain or otherwise, that featured a baby princess stolen away but returned safe and unchanged. While Rana had hovered by Jannin’s bedside, Amaryths had torn the Archives apart looking for anything other than Rapunzel variants.

‘No. I want my baby back now, as she is,’ the queen said. ‘Not when she comes of age and returns to the kingdom under a curse or with her prince by her side or whatever nonsense. You have to be sure of which Imperative has her. You have to bring her back.’

‘Is it so?’

‘Yes!’ She turned to her cousin. ‘Rana, tell him!’

‘Yes, Rana, tell me, do,’ Jannin said, swaying and watching her over the head of the sleeping Ezra with nonchalant expectation.

Rana shut her eyes, gritted her teeth and then met his eye and said, ‘We want an Imperative that allows us to safely rescue Zelda straight away, while she’s still a baby.’

‘And who are you talking to, Lady Rana?’

Amaryths shook her head in some private disgust. Rana said a rude word under her breath. Her tone was rather less polite than her words when she said, ‘Lord Protector, may we please have a story Imperative to bring the Princess Esmeralda home safely and soon?’

‘As has recently and with some emphasis been pointed out to me, I am indeed the Lord Protector,’ Jannin said. ‘My duty will not allow me to interfere with a fairly bestowed story Imperative.’

‘Are you blackmailing me using a baby?’ Rana seethed at him.

‘Shush,’ he said. ‘Ezra’s sleeping.’ He patted the changeling’s back as she shifted and murmured restlessly.

‘What is this?’ Amaryths said. She sounded both stern and fretful, which was not uncommon during her interactions with Jannin.

‘Rana wants me to wear the longevity spells or she won’t be with me,’ Jannin explained. ‘But she may not have it both ways. Either I’m merely a caretaker until you’re ready to take the role as Lady Protector, in which case I can do as I like in several different regards, or I’m truly the Lord Protector and I wear the spells and I do my duty and I can’t interfere. Which is it, Rana?’

‘You are blackmailing her using a baby!’

Anura started, ‘How dare you—’

‘She blackmailed me first,’ Jannin snapped, his façade of unconcern suddenly cracking open.

Ezra startled awake and cried out in alarm. Jannin breathed out, a long, slow exhale that made his chest hitch with a suppressed cough. Looking only at the floor, he patted the little changeling’s back again, humming in her ear, the same soft tune Rana had heard him use to calm and centre himself.

When she’d settled into coos and gurgles just like a real baby, trying to seize Jannin’s ear in one clawed fist while he gently fended her off, he deigned to glance at Tarqan. ‘Maybe a cloud or two, spare prince.’

‘Go away, then,’ Rana told him, pitiless in the face of the distress he was causing the bereaved parents. ‘We’ll save Zelda ourselves.’

‘Do that.’ He turned his back on all of them, murmuring to Ezra as he walked out. ‘I know my magic won’t work on you, so I can’t bring you with me when I jump away home. Can you follow me, do you think?’

If the changeling made an answer of any sort, it was not audible, and when Rana followed the wizard out a moment later, he and Ezra were already gone.

Chapter 2

When Ezra popped into existence beside Rana in the solar two days later, Rana dropped the white rowan staff she was holding and Amaryths, Anura and Tarqan made various noises of shock or surprise.

The appearance from empty air was nothing the inhabitants of the castle hadn’t become somewhat inured to, with the comings and goings of two wizards, but even the magic-blind Rana could recognise something different in the way Ezra did it. Jannin and Amaryths called their means of transportation jumping, and they stepped into or out of thin air in a shimmer of power that, consciously or not, warned spectators. Ezra truly did pop abruptly into being, and much closer to Rana than her lightstrike allowed the wizards.

However, Rana’s true surprise came not from Ezra’s appearance, but her appearance. Her magenta hair was as bright and spiky as before, and her skin was still a soft lilac, but the skinny scrap of a baby had sprouted in mere days into a sturdy tot of perhaps two who scurried across the floor of the solar and down the spiral stairs, making a wild sort of noise that Rana, after a moment of horror-touched confusion, realised was giggling.

Jannin arrived just as Rana was stooping to retrieve the staff and the others were still staring in consternation at the empty doorway to the stairs. His familiar materialisation provided a clear contrast to the little changeling’s method. He reflexively picked up the staff at his feet and handed it to Rana, without looking at her. Amaryths kept a repelling spell on the staff to stop anyone but Rana from touching it; she’d obviously removed it for Jannin as the trust between the two wizards had grown.

That they were at odds distressed her; it must have distressed Jannin, too, almost as much as being at odds with Rana did, but he was not one to show it. Neither wizard was, really, but where Jannin wore his glibly smiling mask, Amaryths wore her cloak of cool detachment.

He leaned against one of the antique tapestries that covered the stone wall of the solar and helped make it a cosy refuge, Anura’s erstwhile sanctuary. The casual lean was the sort of insouciance he normally flaunted, but he also slumped heavily enough to raise a small puff of dust, and his breathing sounded uneven. The aftereffects of his long fever-struck illness