Lady of Magick

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “Scry-mages and those who rely on their findings may see this as nothing more than unreasoning prejudice,” she went on. “There are, however, sound reasons for magistrates to demand independent corroboration of evidence obtained by scrying. Many of these are outside the scry-mage’s control—it is not possible, for example, to prevent tampering with the aetheric echoes which attach to an object, though methods can be learnt to detect some forms of such tampering. Unfortunately, however, the collective reputation of all scry-mages has also been damaged, perhaps irreparably, by the unscrupulous practices of a few, practices which are justly considered to compromise the integrity of evidence derived from scrying. The most insidious of these is that of scrying objects acquired without the knowledge or consent of their owners, for the purpose of obtaining evidence justifying an arrest—because in so doing the scry-mage taints what is otherwise incontrovertible evidence, and thus calls into question every link in the chain . . .”

  Sophie left Mór MacRury’s lecture silent and thoughtful, and replied to Catriona’s remarks somewhat at random, remembering with disconcerting clarity that once she had tried to persuade Jenny to secretly scry her guardian, Lady Maëlle, and had nearly succeeded.

  * * *

  Several days later, Sophie arrived in the Central Refectory, where she had arranged to dine with Gray, at the agreed-upon hour, and could find no sign of him. She had waited, gazing around in search of the familiar shock of sandy curls hovering slightly above the heads of every other person present, long enough to feel the beginnings of real annoyance, when she was hailed by none other than Mór MacRury, half rising from her seat at a table midway down the room.

  Gray may find me, if he chooses, she told herself rather crossly, and wove her way through the thronged tables.

  “Sophie,” said Mór MacRury, “I believe you know Eithne MacLachlan and Una MacSherry?”

  “Yes,” said Sophie, smiling shyly at them.

  Mór gestured at the other three occupants of the table, and named them in order: “Ringan, Lucia, Fergus: This is Sophie Marshall of Oxford; Sophie, Ringan MacAngus, Fergus MacCallum, and Lucia MacNeill.”

  Sophie controlled her instinct to bow, and instead put out her hand, in the local style, to each of the Alban students. The two men—scarcely more than boys; they seemed of an age with her brother Ned—gripped her hand cheerfully enough and, having made her acquaintance, returned to their mutton and their conversation. Lucia MacNeill, however, regarded her with bright interest and, as soon as Sophie had sat down, said, “I understand you are but lately come from Oxford, Sophie Marshall?”

  “I am,” said Sophie, inclining her head with a small smile. Which questions would follow next, she thought she might guess, but she was pleased that Lucia MacNeill did not speak of Britain as though England were the whole of it, as so many of the Alban students did.

  “Din Edin sees very few travellers from Britain,” said Lucia MacNeill, “though our kingdoms are such near neighbours.”

  It was not a question, exactly, but clearly she expected some reply.

  “Crossing the frontier is not always a simple matter,” said Sophie cautiously, wary of giving offence. “We were fortunate in receiving a formal invitation from the University, and in obtaining letters from the Alban ambassador in London, as well as from our own ambassador in Din Edin, and from the Privy Council, permitting us to leave Britain and to enter Alba, and I do not think any of the latter had been possible without the first. Even the post is not at all reliable; such a state as I have seen letters arrive in!—and sometimes they do not arrive at all.”

  Lucia MacNeill had listened patiently to all of this, her blue eyes intent and her delicately pointed chin resting upon her hand; now, sitting up straighter, she said in a thoughtful tone, “Well, we must hope that it may not always be so.”

  “Indeed,” said Sophie.

  Lucia MacNeill then inquired as to Sophie’s tutor; and having herself been, it transpired, Cormac MacWattie’s student the previous year, they passed a happy quarter-hour with Eithne and Una in comparing notes upon his methods. They were not the first to be caught off their guard by the challenge of an unseen summoning, and Sophie’s shyness receded with Lucia MacNeill’s admission that she had also been the only one of her tutorial to pass this test.

  By the time Gray appeared at last, Sophie was pleasantly full of roast mutton, root vegetables, and goat’s cheese and was laughing madly at Lucia MacNeill’s impression of a preternaturally solemn Dougal MacAngus. Though still rather cross with him, she made introductions with perfect cheerfulness—no one should say of her that she was guilty of hanging out her dirty washing in public—but thereafter she turned back to Lucia MacNeill and Fergus MacCallum, with whom she had been debating whether Gaius Aegidius or Conor Òranach MacAlasdair were the more useful source of elementary spells, and left Gray to fend for himself.

  If she had meant this for a snub, however, it was a singularly ineffective one, for Gray seemed perfectly content to discuss lecture schedules with Mór MacRury. Sophie, increasingly cross with herself and growing not a little jealous, found herself stealing glances at him, and blushed with embarrassment when their gazes crossed.

  * * *

  “I like Lucia MacNeill,” Sophie said, merely to break the awkward silence, as they made their way back to their lodgings after dinner. Gray had not offered her his arm as he usually did, and she had made no attempt to take it. “She seems very clever, and she does not mind laughing at herself. But there is something odd—I wonder whether you remarked it?—the others at the table all seemed inclined to defer to her, even Mór MacRury rather.”

  Gray laughed.

  “What are you laughing at?” Sophie demanded.

  “Lucia MacNeill is heir to the throne—no, not the throne—the chieftain’s seat of Alba,” said Gray. “That is, when Donald MacNeill dies, or chooses to yield the throne—Donald MacNeill is—”

  “I know who Donald MacNeill is, I thank you, and what it means to be heir to his throne,” said Sophie, now very cross indeed. She drew a deep breath and let it out, and was able to say more calmly, “It had not occurred to me that I might cross paths with the heiress of Alba over dinner in the Refectory. She certainly appears to have made a better success of her studies than the Princess Royal did at Merlin.”

  “Sophie—”

  “I suppose,” she continued, overriding Gray’s attempt to speak and ignoring his simultaneous attempt to take her hand, “I suppose you will say that this shows what a goose I am, to dread being found out.”

  Gray sighed quietly and said nothing. Sophie found she had been half waiting for him to answer back—to say something calm and eminently sensible—and was perversely disappointed at being given no opportunity to rail against his perfectly reasonable arguments. Risking a glance up at him, she found him looking carefully straight ahead, his hands now vanished into the vast pockets of his great-coat.

  They walked on in silence for some time. It was a chilly evening, and between the pools of lamplight the street was very dark.

  “Gray,” said Sophie at last, sotto voce, inching closer in wordless apology, so that her pelisse brushed against the skirts of Gray’s great-coat.

  “I am sorry for laughing at you,” said he, “and for having been so late to dinner. The great Doctor Balfour was in a tremendous strop, you see, because someone had rearranged his mammalian skulls; I ought not to have let it detain me.”

  “And I ought not to have sulked like a child,” Sophie conceded. “I apologise.”

  He drew his right hand out of his pocket and curled his arm about her shoulders, drawing her in against his side: Apology accepted.

  * * *

  You will never guess who I met yesterday, Sophie wrote to Joanna the next morning.

  The heiress of Alba, sitting at a table in the Central Refectory like any ordinary undergraduate, discussing Gaius Aegidius and th
e uses of Atropa belladonna! You may imagine how envious I was when I learnt whom I had been speaking with. I hope we shall meet again, for I should like to ask her about the blight we saw on our journey. She seemed remarkably well informed about Britain, which in general the students here are not; but if she is to rule Alba after her father, I suppose that must account for it . . .

  * * *

  At the close of their fifth session, as Sophie made to leave her tutor’s rooms with Una MacSherry and Eithne MacLachlan, Cormac MacWattie said quietly, “Sophie Marshall, a moment, if you please.”

  “Sir?” Sophie turned back, her arms full of codices. The others went out; the door closed behind them.

  “You are thoroughly conversant with the theoretical aspect of fire-magick,” said Cormac MacWattie, without other preamble. “Your essay upon the subject was . . . I should not say a model of its kind, for you might have greatly improved it by a third draft, but certainly it demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the topic at hand. And yet you struggle with its practical application, as I have not seen you do in any other area of practical magick thus far. Even the little magick of a candle-flame, which any talented child ought to have mastered by the age of six.”

  He regarded Sophie in expectant silence, whilst she battered her thoughts into some sort of order—for all the world as though he were prepared to wait all afternoon for her reply.

  “I . . . do not much like working with fire,” she said at last; at Cormac MacWattie’s sceptical expression, she added, “Very well: I am frightened of it. In Français we say, chat bouilli craint l’eau froide, the scalded cat fears cold water, and I am the scalded cat.”

  “An interesting metaphor,” said Cormac MacWattie. “And how did you come to be scalded?”

  Sophie thought for a long moment before she spoke. “I have seen at first hand the harm which can be done by mage-fire,” she said at last. “I do not wish—”

  “That is a fool’s argument, Sophie Marshall,” said her tutor, “and you know as much, I think. You are a powerful mage—ah, I see you do not pretend not to know it—and any magick of yours which you do not learn to master, will one day master you. To your own destruction, it may be, and certainly to the detriment of others. To believe otherwise is a dangerous indulgence.”

  Sophie swallowed. It was true that Gray and Master Alcuin had indulged her in this, had allowed her to direct her studies towards other aspects of magick—there were so many, after all!—and that the almost purely theoretical course of study for a Merlin Mag.B., together with the habits learnt over sixteen years’ ignorance of her talent, had abetted her in concealing her aversion to even the simple act of calling fire.

  “I am not in the habit of indulging my students,” Cormac MacWattie continued, “and particularly not such a promising one as yourself. I have refrained from calling attention to your . . . difficulties before your fellows, but they have not gone unremarked.”

  Sophie cleared her throat. “May I—may I ask what—”

  She stammered to a halt; Cormac MacWattie studied her, his eyes widening in astonishment. “Sophie Marshall, you surely cannot suppose that I am threatening you?”

  “I . . .”

  Her tutor cast up his eyes. “Brìghde’s tears!” he muttered. “What ideas these children do invent!” And turning again to Sophie, he said, “You are my student; your progress, or lack thereof, is in part a reflection upon my tutelage. I should be doing neither of us a service by allowing you to face an examination jury without having learnt to perform such an elementary magick. Have I made myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Sophie.

  “Now: You have been attending Dolina MacKinnon’s morning lessons, have you not?”

  Sophie nodded.

  “Very well. You will come here every morning, then, before going to Dolina MacKinnon; there are no lectures so early, and I have no other students at that hour. If you are willing to put your knowledge into practice, I daresay we shall not be about the task longer than a fortnight.”

  “I . . . I thank you, sir,” said Sophie.

  Cormac MacWattie waved this away, and, when she did not at once turn for the door, he flapped one large hand at her and said, “Go, go! You shall be late for your lecture on ethics.”

  “Oh!” said Sophie, and hastened away.

  * * *

  The next morning Sophie knocked at the door of Cormac MacWattie’s study, and when the door opened, she was confronted with a very forest of tallow-candles, lanterns, and lamps. Behind them sat her tutor, drinking tea.

  “Oh,” she said, nonplussed.

  At his gesture she threaded her way through the assemblage of combustibles, perched gingerly upon her accustomed chair, and accepted a cup of tea, poured from a pot around which a warming-spell hummed gently, almost below the threshold of her hearing.

  “A few precautions, I think, before we begin,” said Cormac MacWattie. He rose from his seat and paced a small circle about an occasional table, in whose centre, set upon a mat which appeared to have been woven from fine wire, reposed a large, fat tallow-candle. “Set me a ward about this table, if you please.”

  Warding-spells—for reasons which she should not have dreamed of disclosing to her tutor—were a speciality of Sophie’s. By the time she had completed her own circuit of the table’s perimeter, with herself and Cormac MacWattie inside it as well as table, mat, and candle, she felt both entirely confident in the integrity of her wards and rather more inclined to optimism with respect to the purpose of this lesson.

  Cormac MacWattie prodded with one finger at the invisible barrier and gave a surprised huff. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “Now: We have at our disposal two sand-buckets”—he pointed them out—“and whatever water-spells we may see fit to deploy; the air is quite damp this morning, which is all to the good. Shall we begin? Light me this candle, if you would.”

  Sophie drew a deep breath; let it out; closed her eyes and sank into the consciousness of her magick, the many-petalled flower of cold blue-white flame by which it represented itself to her reasoning mind. Seek, find, catch the end of a petal between metaphorical fingers: The process was so familiar by now as to be the work of a breath. And then came the tension-taut moment when, having gathered up her magick and focused it on the candle-wick, on the tiny shimmer of heat always present in the air, she said, “Flammo te!” to strike the spark.

  In the next breath, she was shouldered aside, and Cormac MacWattie was dousing the half-melted candle in a bucket of sand.

  “Well,” he said. “I see the difficulty now, I think.”

  “Oh?” said Sophie. Despite her best efforts, her voice shook, and her breath came too quickly.

  “Your metaphor—the scalded cat—was apt,” said Cormac MacWattie, scraping the sand back into the bucket. That done, he set the candle upright again—now a little less than half its original height, and deeply cratered. “What does the cat do, when the object of her fear threatens? She arches her back, she extends her claws, she hisses and spits—in short, she makes herself a threat in return, so far as she is able.”

  He looked at Sophie expectantly.

  “Sir, I do not see . . .”

  “Do you not, indeed? That spell of yours, Sophie Marshall, used as much magick as you could put into it, and was flung at its target with sufficient force—so to speak—to light a candle on the other side of the Firth: not the force of sober thought, calculated from the facts at hand, but the force of unreasoning fear.”

  Sophie wished very much to deny this, but she could not.

  “We shall have to go back to the beginning,” said Cormac MacWattie. He frowned thoughtfully. “Suppose,” he said, “that instead of lobbing your blazing Yule-log into a drought-stricken forest and fleeing the conflagration, you held a candle-flame on the end of a lamplighter’s pole, and touched it lightly to the wick of a lamp.”

  Another metaphor,
thought Sophie. Master Alcuin had been fond of telling her that to use magick was to deal in metaphors, made concrete in the world.

  “Yes, sir,” she said aloud, and set about constructing the image in her mind’s eye.

  The next attempt could not be called a success, precisely, but certainly it was less destructive than the first. By the end of their allotted hour, Sophie was drooping with fatigue—not from drawing too much upon her magick, but only from the effort of restraint—and Cormac MacWattie’s stock of candles had been reduced by four; but her progress was visible, if slow, and he seemed pleased with her efforts.

  “Fire is like magick,” she murmured, as she smoothed her hair and gathered up her books. “Controlled, an invaluable tool; uncontrolled, a catastrophe.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Cormac MacWattie.

  Sophie, who had not meant to be heard, repeated herself. “It is a saying of my husband’s,” she explained.

  “Indeed?” said her tutor. “I have heard it said before, or words to the same effect, but always in the opposite direction. But then,” he added, in a thoughtful tone, “one does not often meet a mage who is capable of teaching herself unseen summoning, yet has reached the final year of her undergraduate education without discovering how to call fire to light a candle.”

  * * *

  In the second month of the term, Cormac MacWattie turned his students’ attention to what he called the magick of the land. For the first time, the reading required was entirely in Gaelic, which made Sophie’s preparation something of an ordeal, and each successful navigation of a page of text a small triumph to be celebrated. Before long, however, she had become sufficiently engrossed as to feel the work no hardship.

  The magick of the land, Cormac MacWattie had told them, was a key to Alba’s history, or a legend propagated by the early clan chieftains, or a gift of Alba’s gods, or a tale to mislead the credulous, or some combination of all these, depending upon the particular scholar consulted. He had charged Sophie, Una, and Eithne to read through the list of sources he had assembled for them, as well as any others they might lay their hands on, and draw their own conclusions, which they should then debate at their next meeting.