Lady of Magick

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “The relay is holding,” she said, sounding pleased.

  A collective sigh of relief, and seven mages lunged for the tea-tray on the sideboard.

  * * *

  Joanna waited patiently until the first assault upon the plate of shortbread had abated; then she left her seat by Sorcha MacAngus, approached Rory MacCrimmon, who seemed the least likely to mock her ignorance, and said, “Will you explain to me what your spell does?”

  He had just opened his mouth to reply when a commotion from the far side of the sitting-room caused Joanna to bolt for the staircase. Halfway up, Sophie was clinging to the bannister-rail; Joanna sprang forward to intercept her, her mind at once beginning to spin out unhelpful images of Sophie tumbling down the staircase to her death.

  “Sophie, you ought not to be wandering about alone,” she said reproachfully.

  The effect of Sophie’s glare was undermined by her inability to stand upright without swaying and clutching the stair-rail. “Someone is working magick in my house,” she said. “I have been feeling it this past half-hour.”

  Joanna slipped her arm about Sophie’s waist (slimmer than before—too much so) and drew Sophie’s arm about her own shoulders, where it trembled perceptibly. “And I shall tell you all about it,” she said, “when we have got you back to your room.” How in Hades had Sophie managed the ladder?

  Her attempt to steer Sophie back to bed, however, met with unexpectedly effective resistance; Sophie clutched the stair-rail as if she meant never to let it go, and held herself rigid against Joanna’s gentle pressure to turn back the way she had come.

  Thwarted, Joanna changed her tactics. “You are in your nightdress, Sophie,” she pointed out, “and your dining-room is full of strange men.”

  “And of my friends, by your account,” said Sophie.

  “Yes,” said Joanna, “whom an hour ago you flat refused to see.”

  Sophie tossed her head, then grimaced as though regretting it—but still refused to be turned back.

  Further arguments proving equally futile, Joanna at last conceded defeat and turned her efforts to helping her sister negotiate the staircase without incurring serious injury. When finally they reached the foot of the stairs—both pink with exertion, and breathing hard—she steered Sophie to a chair near the fire, wrapped a shawl about her, and darted into the dining-room, where an entirely different dispute was now in progress, which—being conducted entirely in Gaelic—Joanna could not at all comprehend.

  Rory being now entirely absorbed in this debate, Joanna sought out Mór MacRury (who had retreated to her own former seat near Sorcha MacAngus) and bent to murmur in her ear, “I beg you will come with me to the sitting-room and explain things to Sophie.”

  Mór MacRury looked up at her, startled, but at once rose from her seat to follow.

  * * *

  Sophie was sitting up determinedly in her chair, her spine as straight as she could manage, when Joanna returned with Mór in tow.

  “Sophie,” said the latter uncertainly, “ought you not to be—”

  “What magick are you working?” Sophie demanded, before that supremely irritating sentence could be finished. She was pleased to find that her voice shook only a little.

  “A finding,” said Mór at once. “Or rather, a circular series of findings—a relay. Spells of protection and concealment are often worked in this way, though I have never seen it done with a finding-spell. It was Rory’s notion, to increase the range, and to maintain the spell so that if . . . if there is any change, we shall know at once.”

  Sophie studied her carefully. She looked tired and harassed, but there was nothing in her expression to suggest any intent to deceive. “How? How shall we know?” Sophie said.

  Mór sighed. “That is what they are attempting to decide at present,” she said. “The spell is Alasdair Cameron’s mapped finding—do you know it?”

  Sophie made to shake her head, preemptively regretted it, and instead said, “No.”

  Mór looked briefly disapproving, and Sophie wondered guiltily whether Cameron’s mapped finding had been described in some lecture which she had failed to attend.

  “The finding is in two parts,” said Mór. “First, the map, which is spelled to link its symbols to the landmarks they represent—only very approximately, you understand; and, second, the focal object, which stands in for the person or thing sought. When the magick spirals back—just as it does in an ordinary finding—it points the way by situating the object on the map, rather than the person, or thing, in the world.”

  “So, then,” said Joanna, “if the feather and the pebble . . . go somewhere, we shall know that Gray is there? If that is so, why has it not told us that already?”

  “That is not a question which I or anyone here is capable of answering,” said Mór carefully. “He may at present be beyond even our collective range, or the finding may be impeded by strong wards, or shields, or other protective spells, or perhaps—though it is not very likely, unless he should be imprisoned in a literal prison—by an interdiction.”

  Sophie shuddered. “I hope it may not be that,” she said; and, gathering her wits again, continued, “Our hope, then, is that at some point whichever of these conditions presently obtains shall cease to do so? And the feather and the pebble, as Joanna says, shall show us where that lapse in vigilance has occurred?”

  “Exactly,” said Mór, with a pleased nod.

  “But,” Joanna objected, “that would mean that we must watch it day and night.”

  Mór gestured expansively in the direction of the dining-room. “Hence the dispute,” she said.

  “I will watch it,” said Sophie. “I shall watch as long as I must.”

  CHAPTER XXIV

  In Which Sophie Receives an Illustrious Caller

  A peremptory knock startled Sophie from her restless doze, curled in Gray’s armchair by the sitting-room fire; she opened her eyes just in time to see the swirl of Mór MacRury’s skirts disappearing into the hall. Guilt stabbed her; she had been watching the map, watching the spell for some sign, and what had she done but doze off, so that Mór must keep vigil in her stead!

  She was struggling to sit up when she heard the door open.

  An astonished “Oh!” was all the warning afforded to her before Mór reappeared in the sitting-room, accompanied by, of all people, Lucia MacNeill.

  The heiress of Alba was dressed simply and soberly, as though she had just come from attending a lecture, and her bright hair was tucked up under a soft grey capote. With grave, measuring eyes she watched Sophie’s valiant attempt to rise and greet her, and when its futility became apparent, she crossed the small room to seat herself in the other armchair. She leant forward and propped her elbows on her knees. “Sophie,” she said, and seemed not to know how to go on.

  Sophie could at least command herself sufficiently to look her friend in the eye. “Lucia,” she said. It was oddly disorienting to see her here: for all their camaraderie, Lucia MacNeill had never before crossed the threshold of Sophie’s house.

  Fortune smiled upon her in the form of Mór MacRury, who had vanished into the kitchen and now returned bearing the Marshalls’ unprepossessing welcome-cup. She offered it wordlessly to Sophie, who prayed to Brighid and Aesculapius to steady her hands and spoke the ritual words she had learnt at her mother’s knee: “My welcome to this house, Lucia MacNeill.”

  Lucia took the cup from her and replied gravely, “My thanks for this welcome, Sophie Marshall, and the peace of your gods and mine be on you and on all who belong to you.”

  Like Joanna, she had altered the traditional words of the ritual to include the absent Gray, and Sophie summoned a smile to show her gratitude.

  The welcome having been drunk, Lucia seized the opportunity of Mór’s taking the cup away again to clasp Sophie’s hands in hers and, leaning close, to whisper, “I cannot stay so long as I shoul
d like; my father and I . . . do not see eye to eye in this matter, and I hope to return before my absence is marked. Sophie, will you trust me?”

  “I—” Sophie began.

  Mór came quietly in again, however, and Lucia retreated into platitudes; whatever she had intended to say, was plainly not for Mór’s ears.

  “Mór,” Sophie said, seizing the chance of a momentary pause in the conversation, as soon as she had invented what seemed a plausible excuse, “may I ask a great favour of you? I should so much like to see the latest edition of the Transactions; one of our Oxford friends has got a paper in it, and he promised to send a copy to me himself, but it appears he has forgot it . . .”

  It was an absurd errand to demand of Mór, in the circumstances, but Sophie was counting on Mór’s relief at the slightest sign of any ordinary interest in food, conversation, or intellectual engagement to overcome her natural suspicion.

  She was not disappointed. Almost before Sophie had reached the end of her artfully unfinished request, Mór was on her feet. “I shall go to Eochaid Balfour’s at once,” she said.

  The front door had scarcely shut behind her than Lucia MacNeill was crouching before Sophie’s chair, clasping her hands and gazing earnestly up into her face. “Will you trust me?” she said again. “Please, say you will trust me in this.”

  In her father’s audience chambers, Lucia MacNeill had been cool and regal, where now she most resembled an anxious, exhilarated child, but her eyes were the same as ever, summer sky encircling pools of midnight—the eyes of the young woman she had met in the Central Refectory and argued with over summoning-spells and the nature of younger brothers—at once daring and begging Sophie’s trust.

  Sophie turned her palms up and returned the hand-clasp. “Yes,” she said.

  * * *

  Lucia MacNeill had drawn the window-curtains against the incipient rain and vanished into the kitchen, whence she presently emerged carrying a basin on which was balanced a tray holding a lit candle-stub and a small stack of folded linen towels. She deposited basin and tray on the floor by Sophie’s chair, knelt at Sophie’s feet, and spread one of the towels over her knees.

  “There is a spell,” she said, “a spell of my clan, for sharing one’s magick with another. Every mage of Clan MacNeill learns it upon coming of age. I believe I may be the first to use it since my great-grandfather’s time.” She paused. “That is, if you should consent to it.”

  She extracted from her elegant little reticule (embroidered all over with tiny scarlet lions rampant) a small object which, on closer examination, Sophie discovered to be a tiny knife in a similarly elegant sheath of gilded leather, stitched with more lions rampant. Its haft was of smoothly polished bone, stained a deep red-brown—the colour, Sophie remarked absently, of Catriona MacCrimmon’s hair—and its blade, when Lucia MacNeill drew it out of the sheath, gleamed silver.

  Intricate, swirling patterns—no, letters—were incised along the flat surfaces of the blade. Sophie reached a tentative finger towards it. “What does it say?”

  “Nuair a thig air duine thig air uile,” said Lucia MacNeill, and repeated the phrase in Latin: “What befalls one, befalls all. It is a reminder of my responsibilities as heir to the chieftain’s seat.”

  She passed the blade through the candle-flame, once, again.

  “Nuair a thig air duine thig air uile,” Sophie repeated. The words felt heavy in her mouth. “Lucia, why?”

  Lucia MacNeill paused, knife in hand, and raised her blue eyes to Sophie’s. “Because you have stood my friend,” she said. “Because you are Roland’s sister, and will be mine. Because if I loved any man or woman as you love your husband, I should stop at nothing to keep them from harm.”

  She took Sophie’s left hand in hers, turned it palm up, and examined each of her fingers in turn. At last she seemed to decide on one of them—the third finger, on which Sophie wore the slender gold band, chased with laurel-leaves, that had been her betrothal-gift from Gray—and again looked earnestly into Sophie’s eyes. “May I?”

  “Yes,” said Sophie, before she thought; and then, “what . . . ?”

  By way of reply, Lucia let go Sophie’s hand, picked up the knife, and opened a minuscule slice in the pad of her own left thumb.

  Sophie swallowed hard and nodded; Lucia MacNeill took her hand again—more firmly now, though her grip was not so tight as to be painful—and raised the blade. The thin film of bright blood that coated the pad of her thumb smeared across Sophie’s palm. The bite of the blade was swift and painless; blood welled, scarlet as the lions rampant, and she watched in fascination.

  Lucia dropped the knife into her lap, where their mingled blood stained the white linen, and released Sophie’s hand—only to press her bleeding thumb to Sophie’s bleeding fingertip.

  She began to sing her spell—it was certainly sung and not spoken, though more drone than melody—and Sophie tried to follow it but could catch no more than one word in ten. As it was such an old spell, perhaps the language was archaic? Perhaps Lucia—

  Sophie dropped the thread of her thought with a sharp gasp as magick flooded through her, sharp as hunger, hot and sudden as desire. Her breath came fast and desperate; her lungs burned; her sitting-room, dimmed by the drawing of the window-curtains, brightened so rapidly that she instinctively squeezed her eyes shut. The light, inexplicably, persisted.

  Dimly she heard the ending of the spell trail off to silence—a living, breathing silence filled with the noise of beating heart and rushing blood and, beneath all the rest, the restless thrum of a magick that was not her own.

  She opened her eyes, slowly and cautiously, just as Lucia drew her bleeding hand away.

  Sophie blinked and tried to focus her gaze on Lucia’s face—on the candle-holder—on the fire-screen. Everything she looked at glowed and danced, and when she closed her eyes again, though the objects themselves vanished, the shimmer and glow of them did not. She felt that she could not sit still another moment, but Lucia MacNeill was holding her wrist, and something warm and wet was sliding over her bloodied left hand.

  When next she dared open her eyes, her fingertip and Lucia’s thumb had been neatly bandaged, and the neat stack of clean towels on the tea-tray had become a damp and bloodstained heap in the bottom of the basin.

  The earlier glow had faded, and the dance and shimmer calmed; Sophie’s vision was not exactly as usual, but she no longer felt in danger of bursting into flame. For the first time in many days, she reached consciously and deliberately for her magick, slow and careful, as though she were again learning the process as Gray had first taught it her.

  The blue-white flower, singing in treble chorus, which was her mind’s representation of her magick, burned yet at the still centre of herself—whole, unmarred, though small and weak compared to its former self. But around it, winding like ivy or clematis about that coldly flaming core, a stranger-magick burned, red-golden, fierce; and when she caught hold of one blue-burning petal, it was twined around with the red-gold vine, and neither could be grasped without the other.

  “It is well?” Lucia asked anxiously.

  Sophie formed in her mind an image of the green-glazed teapot which, when not in use, habitually reposed in the centre of the kitchen dresser, dwelling carefully on the precise curve of its handle and the tiny chip on the lip of its spout, and shaped the magick to bring it to her. “Accedete,” she said, holding out her hands.

  The teapot emerged from the kitchen—fortunately for this experiment, it appeared that Lucia had left the door open—and floated gracefully into her cupped hands.

  It was not altogether like using her own, familiar magick—which, even when reinforced by Gray’s, had never felt other than hers. The spell left an odd unfamiliar sort of echo in whatever part of her mind perceived such things. But here in her hands was the teapot, real and solid, and she had summoned it from the kitchen entirely unaided—
an accomplishment which, not half an hour earlier, had been altogether beyond her. However disconcerting the corollary effects of sharing Lucia MacNeill’s magick, she should bear them willingly, for the sake of feeling almost like herself again, and capable of doing something—anything—to help Gray.

  “It is well,” she whispered.

  Lucia lifted the teapot carefully from Sophie’s grasp, rose to her feet, and carried it back into the kitchen. When she returned, grave-faced and intent, she seated herself opposite Sophie and folded her hands in her lap.

  “It will not last forever,” she said. “Perhaps a se’nnight, but certainly no more, and very likely less.”

  Though clearly meant as a warning, this came as something of a relief to Sophie, who had been too clouded in her wits before to think through the consequences. “Good,” she said, rather vaguely. Already most of her conscious mind was focused on the image of Gray’s face, familiar and infinitely beloved, on which she meant to build a finding-spell.

  She turned to Lucia. “If I were to turn your magick to a finding-spell,” she said, “what might be its range?”

  “I am my father’s heir,” said Lucia MacNeill, matter-of-factly; “my talent is not so powerful as yours, but my range is the whole of Alba.”

  The whole of Alba! Sophie grinned fiercely.

  There was a finding-spell which Gray had taught her, and which he had named especially powerful. This was not her first attempt upon it—she had run through every finding-spell she knew, since receiving that second letter, and this one most often—but her own range was no more than twenty miles, and surely less when she had scarcely strength to walk. Now, now it would be different; now she should succeed where the rest had failed.

  “O amisse reperiaris!” She spun the words out into the aether. “Verba oris mei ad te eant. Remitte ea ut me ad te adducant.”