Wand: A Fantasy of Witches, Wizards, and Wands
Chapter Twenty-Three

On trekking into their new location, the sorcerer instantly knelt down and vomited.

It wasn’t just the metaphysical and supernatural method of travel; it was the abrupt shift in air pressure, temperature, and altitude. As soon as he was done being sick, the sorcerer, having carefully placed the mirror down, darted forward and wrapped his long arms around the leprechaun, who’d been chuckling at his unfortunate condition.

“Hey, let me go, you gobshite spellslinger!”

“I’ve captured you,” the sorcerer said calmly. “You’re mine. I Wish—”

“Oh, here it comes,” the mythic snorted.

“I hereby Wish that you will be my faithful servant, to follow my every command.” Then he dropped the leprechaun.

“Out of the pit and into the ravine,” the leprechaun complained. “Course you know I can’t take ya nowhere’s now, stupid jackeen.” It hobbled over to a rock and settled onto it, stubby arms crossed over its chest.

“What’s your name?”

“Lint.”

While tediously removing the heavy canvas from the mirror to check for damage, the sorcerer said, “Well, Lint, you don’t need to worry about that. We’ll be traveling through this mirror instead. It’s going to take me to the Institute.” He lovingly ran hands over the sigils burned into the frame.

“Whatcha want to go there for?” Lint wondered.

The sorcerer, pleased to find his mirror intact, waved this query aside. “Where are we?”

“Keeseville,” Lint replied. “Near the Ausable Chasm. If you wanted to go to the Institute, why didn’t you just say so? We could be outside its bloody fence right now.”

“I’m supposed to travel there using a mirror,” the sorcerer mumbled. He didn’t know why Endor’s vision wanted him to travel using this archaic method, but when a seer Saw, you obeyed. He stood at last to take in their new surroundings. “Keeseville, you say.” Last he’d seen (during one of his scans of the Preserve) a handful of Wiccan families had moved into the village in Essex County. “How far is it from Camp Sagamore, in Hamilton County?” he asked, familiar with the innate sense of distance and location inherent to all leprechauns.

“One-hundred nine of your miles,” Lint responded, still pouting on his rock. “But that’s a straight golden line, right through Mt. Marcy. Yer feckin thoin will have to hike it down there on yer old carriage roads. Take the Eighty-Seven south until you get to the Twenty-Eight, going west. That’ll take yer right over to the camp.” Lint whipped a pebble at a passing dragonfly, dropping the insect right out of the air. “But I thought you was going to the school?”

“Shut up while I meditate.” There was no point telling the leprechaun that he wanted to take the mirror home, so that on the return trip with the boy, he’d come out safe and sound back at Sagamore.”

Before delving into another round of spirit walking, the sorcerer took a few minutes to lay out a Circle of powdered salt and marjoram, and then consumed a few bethel nuts to increase his psychic potential. He was not taking any chances encountering that infiltrator again.

As he closed his eyes and crossed his legs, the sorcerer heard Lint mutter, “Diul mo bhad!”

It was a particularly vile curse, but he didn’t let it interrupt his commencement of the spirit walk. Lint was a wild leprechaun. His kind cussed like fish breathed water.

On returning to consciousness some while later, the sorcerer shivered against the evening cold while focusing on the memory he had just recovered. In his spirit walk he’d observed his younger self performing a ritual on the mirror following the instructions out of John Dee’s Enochian Shew-Stone and Scrying Heiroglyphic, a brilliant text on the crafting and use of seeing stones. It was the sorcerer’s own hubris that drove him to adapt Dee’s work into mirrors. He recalled regretting the warlock’s desecration of the true traveling mirrors, the method for their crafting being lost when the last Druid died nearly 300 years earlier.

“What are you doing?” he asked on finding the leprechaun munching on something. When it failed to answer, the sorcerer realized why. “That’s the reason you trekked us here.”

“The outskirts of Keeseville have the finest groves of wild magic mushrooms in the entire Preserve!” Lint exclaimed in a slight drawl. He was already high. “Don’t tell me to stop.”

“Fine,” the sorcerer sighed. “Just light a fire and make sure we have something to eat in the morning. We’re staying the night. Tomorrow we go home.”

“Through yer mirror?” Lint coughed.

The sorcerer shook his head. “We’re taking the Twenty-Eight, like you said.”

“Ah, but mirrors are forbidden items these days, I heard,” Lint belched. “Things could go arseways right quick on the roads. How about I trek us back there, like that?” he snapped his fingers and a flame ignited to life between them.

There was no reason to answer the leprechaun. Had it not been totally baked on magic shrooms, it would recall that once captured, he couldn’t trek his master anywhere. Probably it was an ancient enchantment, to keep captured leprechauns from being forced to trek their lazy captors all over the world.

But Lint was right, taking the roads while lugging a full length mirror was a risky business. He’d need his sleep to be sharp, and to regain the energy he’d expended during his spirit walks. Though he set up camp, using his undershirt as a pillow, the sorcerer knew sleep would not come easy. Something was watching him, and it was no mere mythic.

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