Chantress Alchemy

by Amy Butler Greenfield

  Cool against my fingers, the ball glowed in the flickering light.

  “Now look past its surface and into its depths,” Sybil said. “Look into the heart of it. And when you have gone as deep as you can, then ask, ‘Where is the crucible?’ ”

  I fixed my eyes on the crystal. Deep inside it, I could see tiny flecks of light. As I stared at them, bright constellations jumped out at me. A single bright spot like the North Star, a glowing cluster like the Pleiades. The lights multiplied, until it was like looking out into the heavens, with stars upon stars upon stars, as far as one could see.

  “Now ask,” Sybil prompted.

  Her voice jarred me. What was it I was supposed to ask? Oh yes . . .

  “Where is the crucible?” My voice echoed in the dark night sky of the ball.

  “Now relax and clear your mind of everything,” Sybil whispered. “Gaze into the ball, and breathe, and visions may come to you.”

  Clear your mind. Breathe. Wait for what may come. A familiar litany, for this was how one listened for song-spells. It felt odd to approach scrying the same way, yet it was comforting, too—as if I were merely translating what I already knew into some other language.

  I let myself fall deeper into the glass, just as I would let myself fall into a song, and something shimmered inside the ball. For a bare instant it blossomed: a red-gold circle against a night-black sky.

  My fingers tightened, and the ball shook in my hand. The vision vanished.

  “Oh,” I said in disappointment.

  “What is it?” Sybil’s excitement was plain to see. “What did you see?”

  I described the red circle.

  “The rim of the crucible,” Sybil said. “Surely that’s what it was.”

  “Perhaps,” I said doubtfully.

  “Do it again,” Sybil urged. “You might see more this time.”

  Try as I might, however, the magic wouldn’t work for me again. My eyes kept tracing the surface of the glass and the curving flame reflected in it. I couldn’t see the stars at all.

  “Still, something happened,” Sybil said, taking the ball from me. “That’s a good sign. You have some kind of ability here; it’s just a matter of drawing it out.”

  “Draw it out how?” I glanced at the lumpy case. “Do you have another ball?”

  “No, but I have something that might serve you just as well. Perhaps even better.” Rising from her chair, she put the ball back in the case and drew out a shallow copper bowl. “Not everyone scries with a ball. Some find that mirrors work better—and some use water.”

  Water. Hope flared inside me. The element I best understood. The magic that came most easily to me.

  But that was Chantress magic, I reminded myself. Scrying magic—that was something else altogether. Water might not make any difference there.

  Sybil handed me the bowl and plunged her hand back into the case again.

  “Now, where . . . ah yes, there it is.” Looking quite pleased with herself, she pulled out a glass vessel.

  I looked askance at it. “A perfume bottle?”

  “Not anymore,” Sybil said, “I finished the last of it the other day, and I dunked the bottle into my handbasin when Joan wasn’t looking.”

  When Sybil poured the water into the bowl, the faint scent of lilies splashed out too. “Oh dear. I thought it would be more.”

  The water only just covered the bottom of the bowl. “Does it matter?” I asked.

  “Perhaps not,” Sybil said after a moment. “There’s still something to catch the light, and something for you to gaze at. Give it a try, won’t you?”

  She slid the bowl across the glossy table toward me. “It’s just like the ball, you see,” she said. “You look, and then you ask, and then you wait for the answer.”

  Perched on the edge of my chair, I stared at the water. It was no more than half an inch deep, and through it I could see a pattern incised into the center of the bowl: a figure almost like a flower.

  Sybil sat back down beside me again. “Hmm . . . the light’s not quite right, is it?”

  She pulled back the candle, and suddenly it was the water I saw, and not the bowl. The surface held me first, rippling with both the light of the candle and the dark of the room, and then something deeper called to me. The water barely covered the bottom of the bowl—I knew that—and yet somehow it seemed to go down and down and down, slippery and cold as the sea.

  “Ask,” Sybil whispered.

  “Where is the crucible?” My voice sounded slurred, almost the voice of a stranger.

  Something almost like music rang in my head. I breathed in with delight, and the water stirred. Truly, it stirred, though nothing else moved—stirred and whorled and took monstrous shape before my eyes. In its depths I saw a king and queen locked in a terrible embrace. Their hands clawed each other’s necks. They were choking the life out of each other. Beneath their golden crowns, their throats bled from crimson gashes.

  As their faces turned blue, something closed around my neck too, a sharp, strangling cord biting into my skin, bringing up the blood. I could not get air; I was drowning—

  The bowl rippled. Suddenly the water was only water, with no pictures in it. Air rushed into my lungs.

  “Lucy? Are you all right?” Sybil bent over me, her eyes wide with alarm. “You were making the most dreadful sounds.”

  I put my hand to my throat. No cord, no blood. And yet it had felt so real. . . .

  “What happened?” Sybil still looked agitated. “Did you see something?”

  It was impossible to forget the vision. When I shut my eyes against it, the picture only became brighter.

  “What was it?” Sybil asked again.

  Perhaps putting the picture into words would exorcise it. “A king and queen, attacking each other, choking each other—”

  “Our king?”

  “I didn’t recognize the faces.” They’d looked like stained glass, or the kings and queens on playing cards.

  “What do you think it means?” Sybil asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, it must mean something.” She nudged the bowl of water toward me. “Try it again. See if the water will show you anything else.”

  I tried again and again, but either I’d lost the trick of it or the water didn’t have anything else to communicate. My head started to pound. My body craved sleep.

  At last, after nearly half an hour of fruitless effort, I said, “I think we should stop.”

  “Shhhh!” Sybil put her finger to her lips.

  I thought at first that she wanted me to keep working. But then I heard what she’d heard: dim shouts echoing out in the corridor, beyond the closed door.

  “They’re looking for us,” Sybil said.

  I bolted from my chair. “We’d better hide.”

  “No.” Sybil grabbed the linen case and dumped the water from the copper bowl into a great vase by the window. “We’ll clear everything away, and then we’ll go.”

  “Go?”

  “To meet the searchers. Best to brazen it out, I think, rather than be caught here.” She shoved the bowl into the pillowcase and bundled the whole thing into the ornate cabinet. “You can tell them you heard a sound outside your door and you found me sleepwalking. You followed me to keep me safe.”

  A very neat story. I was surprised that she had come up with it so quickly.

  “Come on, Lucy.” Her hand was on the doorknob. “If they find us here, they might find the case, too. And that will be hard to explain.”

  Out in the corridor, the shouts were louder. But it turned out they were nothing to do with us at all.

  “The King! The King!”

  As Sybil and I looked at each other, Gabriel came round the corner and rushed toward us. “Chantress, Miss Dashwood, have you heard? The King’s been attacked!”

  “Attacked?” I repeated. A terrible dread crept over me.

  “Yes,” Gabriel said. “Someone tried to strangle him.”

  CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE

  AN ATTACK AND A LIE

  “Someone strangled the King?” Sybil sounded horrified, but at least she could speak. My own voice had left me, and visions of the murderous king and queen flickered in my head.

  “He was attacked with a garrote, from the look of it,” Gabriel said. “He’s lucky to be alive.”

  So the King had survived. Sybil looked as relieved as I felt. Indeed, she looked almost ready to cry.

  “You’re quite certain?” she asked urgently. “Have you seen him?”

  “Yes.” Gabriel spoke with more than his usual self-importance. “I woke to the sound of someone wailing, and when I went out to see what was wrong, I saw them carrying the King past on a bier. For a moment, I thought the worst, but then I heard the rasp of his breath. He’s sitting up now, with the Royal Physician and Wrexham in attendance. And now the order’s gone out that everyone is to be woken and questioned.”

  “So the King doesn’t know who did it?” I said.

  Gabriel shook his head.

  “Does he remember anything?” Sybil asked.

  “He can’t say much; his voice is too raw,” Gabriel said. “But he can write, and it seems he was attacked on the way back from a late meeting with Wrexham and Roxburgh. Wrexham confirmed that the meeting took place; he says he’d received dispatches saying that Boudicca now has over two thousand followers, some of them marching in formation like an army. He wanted the King to give the order to attack, but the King wouldn’t. He can’t seem to believe the woman really means him harm.

  “After some debate, Wrexham says, the King left. And the rest of the story comes from the King’s own written account. He says that as he made his way back to his room, he heard a thump behind a door on the east side of the palace. And so he went in to investigate.”

  “By himself?” Sybil was surprised. “He didn’t call out an alarm?”

  “No,” Gabriel said. “He had his dagger, he said. That was enough.”

  Unwise, but who could blame him? His life was a weary round of meetings and diplomacy and compromise; it was probably a welcome change to be wielding a dagger on his own—especially after an argument with Wrexham.

  “All appeared to be well at first,” Gabriel went on, “and then he saw by the light of his candle that a piece of the paneling was out of joint. When he pushed on it, a little cupboard in the wall opened up—and there was the crucible.”

  “The crucible!” I was astonished.

  “Yes. He started to call out then, but he’d barely made a sound before the cord closed his throat. That’s the last he remembers, until a guardsman found him some time later, crumpled on the floor.”

  “And the crucible?”

  “The guards have searched the room and found the cupboard. But the crucible is gone.”

  “But it was here,” I said. “Here in the palace.”

  “And most likely still is,” Gabriel said. “They’re searching every room now.”

  While he was speaking, Nat appeared around the corner, his eyes lighting up with relief as he saw me. When he took in my companions, however, he backed away.

  Left to myself, I would have gone after him, but with the others there I couldn’t. Sybil and Gabriel were facing me; they had missed both his sudden arrival and his disappearance. I didn’t want to be the one to give him away.

  I wasn’t quite the blank slate I wanted to be, though.

  “Chantress?” Gabriel glanced at me oddly. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, nothing.” I shook my head and pulled my cloak tighter around me. “I’m just uneasy, that’s all.”

  “So am I.” Sybil shivered. “First Sir Isaac, and now the King. That’s two attempts at murder in one night.”

  “Are there any clues?” I asked Gabriel. “Anything that could point to who did this?”

  “Nothing very much,” Gabriel said. “It’s given a few people alibis. Wrexham and Roxburgh, for instance. They both swear they were together from the end of the meeting until they heard the guards raise the alarm. For what it’s worth.”

  He clearly wasn’t convinced, and neither was I. But even if the alibi turned out to be true, Wrexham wasn’t in the clear, since he could have asked one of his spies to do the dirty work for him . . .

  “Where were you?” Sybil asked Gabriel.

  “I was asleep. Though I’m afraid there aren’t any witnesses. What about you?” he asked Sybil. “I passed by your room, and your maid was shouting that you were missing.”

  Sybil blushed in a charmingly sheepish way. “I was sleepwalking,” she told Gabriel. “And Lucy was following me. I don’t remember anything about it myself. But I’m afraid I’ve done it before; it’s a bad habit of mine.” Her blush deepened. “So very embarrassing.”

  Gabriel looked as if he wasn’t quite sure what to make of this. “You’re a sleepwalker?”

  Time for me to back Sybil up. “I woke up and there she was, right by my bed,” I told him. “But she couldn’t seem to see me. After a bit I realized she was asleep. When she started to walk off, I thought I’d better follow.”

  “I’ve led her a merry dance for the last hour, she tells me.” Sybil looked utterly mortified.

  An hour? Well, that would cover us nicely, I supposed, especially if her maid had missed her some time ago. Yet even as I nodded, part of me was taken aback by the calculation that had gone into Sybil’s lies. I hadn’t realized she had such a talent for deception.

  “She was afraid to wake me,” Sybil went on. “Don’t they say you can frighten the life out of sleepwalkers that way? But in the end I came out of it myself.”

  At that moment, Aunt Goring came upon us, pop-eyed in her nightdress and a bizarre assortment of furs. “Sybil! What are you doing up here—and in such company?” She pursed her lips and glared at Gabriel.

  It was not as if Gabriel could see anything through our heavy woolen nightgowns, I thought. Still, her outraged stare made me aware of quite how improper the scene must look.

  Gabriel, however, was unruffled. “I was only making sure they were safe, Lady Goring. And now I must be on my way.”

  He dashed off as Aunt Goring clamped a no-nonsense arm around Sybil and propelled her toward the nearest staircase. “Come with me, young lady.”

  Lady Goring seemed to want nothing to do with me, so I hung back, wondering if Nat was still nearby. Almost the instant they were out of sight, he flew back around the corner and caught my hand.

  “Over here,” he whispered. He tugged me back toward the room where I had done the scrying.

  Once we were inside, he shut the door and turned to me. “Tell me what you were doing with Sybil Dashwood.” His hazel eyes were fierce and unblinking in the light of my candle. “And this time tell the truth.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A NEW PLAN

  We stood barely a foot apart; the candle, burning bright between us, revealed everything. I couldn’t keep lying now, even if I had wanted to. “What gave me away?”

  “Your voice was too flat. It didn’t sound like you.”

  “Do you think Gabriel noticed?”

  “Gabriel?” The shadows sharpened the angle of Nat’s jaw. “Why are you so concerned about him?”

  I was surprised I had to spell it out. “Because I don’t trust him.”

  “Oh.” Nat looked mollified. “No, I don’t think he noticed. But you haven’t answered my question: What were you doing with Sybil?”

  I told him everything, even describing the terrible vision I had seen.

  When I finished, he did not speak.

  “Nat?”

  “I can’t believe it,” he said slowly.

  “I know it sounds impossible, but I really did see it.” The faint scent of lilies still perfumed the air. “I was sitting here, in that chair—”

  “I don’t mean the vision. If you say you saw it, you saw it.” He looked at me across the candle flame. “What I can’t believe is that you trusted Sybil like that. You put yourself completel
y in her hands.”

  “I needed help, Nat.”

  “Help? From her?”

  Was it worry driving him, or anger? In the dim light, I couldn’t tell, but I could feel my temper fraying, in part because I was trying to squelch my own doubts about Sybil. “You don’t understand what it’s like. I feel like I’ve lost myself—”

  “You haven’t.” He spoke more gently now. “Whatever’s going on, you’re still you, Lucy.”

  “But it’s frightening not being able to defend myself. That’s why I went to Sybil. Any kind of magic is better than none.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Nat said. “Look here: Are you sure you were the one doing the magic tonight?”

  I looked at him, bewildered. “What do you mean?”

  “Could it have been Sybil who put the pictures in your head?”

  “I—no. No, it couldn’t have been.” I rejected the idea out of hand.

  “She wasn’t working some dark magic through you?”

  “She doesn’t have magic—”

  Nat shook his head. “You saw a king choking to death. And at the very same hour, King Henry is strangled. I don’t like the coincidence.”

  “I saw things, yes. But I didn’t do anything.”

  “You say that, but how do you know?”

  I shook my head, but his questions tore me up inside. Had I made a terrible mistake in trusting Sybil?

  He must have seen the pain in my face, because his voice softened again. “I’m not blaming you, Lucy. If harm was done, you were innocent. But Sybil could be using you for her own ends. She might even be the reason why you can’t sing magic anymore. Maybe she’s cast some enchantment of her own against you—”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “No. But these are dangerous waters, don’t you see?”

  I did. Even if I hated to admit it.

  “But it’s going to be all right, Lucy.” His voice deepened and grew eager. “I have good news. That’s why I came looking for you. I’ve found a way out of here.”

  All thought of Sybil fled from my mind. “A way out?”

  “Yes. I’ve been looking for one since you came here.”

  “You never told me.” He’d talked about wanting me far away from here, but I hadn’t expected this.