Half Sick of Shadows by Erika Tracy

First book in the Travel's Tales series

Heat Rating: Just A Spark

Content Warning: None.

Fleeing the Blitz, a young witch finds a path of dreams leading into coal-smudged reality.

The station seemed a world of legs. Elena felt small and frightened as her parents bustled her onto the train. They patted her on the head, told her she was a big brave girl and that they would come to get her just as soon as they possibly could, and vanished before she could protest. If they could come to get her later, couldn't they come with her now? If they needed her to be safe, well, didn't she need them to be safe too?

But she was nine just yesterday, and too big to cry in the middle of strangers. Nine was old enough to travel alone to her aunts, the ones she was supposed to remember so she'd said she did. Nine was old enough to know about war, and to know Glynarien was much safer from attack than London. Nothing would fall from the sky onto Glynarien.

She took herself to the toilets after an hour. After three, she bought herself lunch from the dining car and counted her change.

"Are you traveling all by yourself, dearie?" asked a wrinkle-faced lady who took the seat beside her an hour after that.

"Yes. But I'm all right."

"You seem awfully young."

"I'm big now. I even bought my own lunch." This seemed like good evidence of grown-up-ness to Elena, but the old lady smiled as though she had said something adorable. Elena always hated that smile. "How far are you going?"

"I'm off at the next stop, going to see my newest granddaughter. And you?"

Suddenly Elena didn't want to say where she was going or why. "I'm going all the way to the end of the line. It's a test for spy school. They wanted someone who looked just like a little girl."

The old lady nodded, but the lines on her face had bunched in a way that looked suspiciously like a laugh wanted to come out. "I see. Did I mention that my daughter needs me to help with the unicorns until she's rested up?"

Elena ended up sorry to say good-bye to the old woman; swapping outrageous lies had been far more fun than getting to know each other properly. She waved at the window as the train pulled away from yet another station, then cast about for something new to amuse herself. After kicking her feet fretfully, she remembered a book in the little satchel she carried, as well as several favorites in her trunk in the luggage wagon. She pulled out Frogs, Toads, and Toadstools of England for rereading and tried to remember where Glynarien would be on the habitat maps. She might see something new in the mountains, given half a chance.

Her next seatmate was a young man with a puzzled slant to his eyebrows and a blunt nose that barely seemed to rise from the plane of his face. Elena sneaked glances at him from behind the curtain of her hair as she read, distracted by his flatness. "And where are you off to, little girl?" he asked her, sounding as though he wasn't sure what to do now that he'd caught her peeking.

"Glynarien," she answered, not liking him even enough to invent something.

"That's the next stop," he told her, looking faintly relieved. "What are you reading?"

Elena flipped the book up to show him the title, then laid it flat on her lap again.

"You're a very unusual little girl, then." A thought seemed to strike him. "Are you a witch?"

Elena hated that question; she was never sure how to answer it. "Not yet."

That seemed to puzzle him, as it puzzled most normals. They never seemed to understand that a witch was trained and had a staff; they thought it was something you were or weren't, instead of something you became. A person was born magic, but she had to become a witch.

Dismissing him from her thoughts altogether, Elena returned to her book. After a long moment or two where she could feel him staring at her, he fidgeted and reached into his own tote for a pamphlet, never quite turning his head away. The conductor's call of "Glynarien! Next stop!" was horribly welcome. Elena hurried to the steps with her tote.

Her aunts met her on the platform, two tall skinny women with billowing clothes and the orange hair of redheads going gray. Aunt Lottie held a pale oak staff loosely at her side; Aunt Hildy clutched at a maple staff with a faint greenish tint to its finish. Elena remembered them both in a rush. Hildy fussed and fretted, while Lottie had an easy, almost forgetful way about her. Hildy was related to her, and Lottie just lived with Hildy, but they were both Aunt. Elena nodded to herself as she put her foot on the last step down and allowed Hildy to swing her the rest of the way to the ground. Here, unlike the London station, there was no wooden box below the metal step to help out a little girl with short legs. Here...

Elena looked around in dismay. Here seemed to have been sprayed evenly with fine black soot. The mountains surrounding them were green and beautiful, some tree-covered and some baldly grassy, but the town itself squatted in wait for her. This didn't seem like the right place at all, but the big step and Aunt Hildy's hands kept Elena from marching back onto the train and demanding to be taken back home, war or no war.

"Welcome to Glynarien!" chirped Aunt Hildy.

The name had suggested something else, an airy place of silver spires and glamour. This was not a Glynarien. This was solid and soiled.