“You sound very confident. Is that for my sake? You waste your time.” She clutched his hand. “You might be killed.”
“No. Even if I am defeated, I will simply return to the time and the place from which I came.”
“Yes, Priory St. Windle in 1350!”
“What? How know you that?”
“I read it in a book.” She did not mention the circumstances under which she’d found the book. “If you go back there, we will never see each other again.”
Dominic covered her hand with his own. “Is it so important to you that we meet again?”
“Yes. No. Stop! I won’t be manhandled...”
“Am I being so brutal?” He gathered her close in his arms, pressing her head against his shoulder. His voice was low, thrilling her with its sincerity. “I pledge you, my lady, that I will find you across time, space, and eternity, though the ten thousand devils of hell bar the way.”
“A pie-crust promise—easily made and easily broken,” Clarice said, her voice obscured by tears that she had no intention of permitting to fall.
He pressed his lips to her temple and released her. “Chadwin has probably already found your nephew for you. I like Morgain, you know.”
“He’s a scrapegrace.”
“Yes, if it weren’t for that, he’d be intolerable.” He grinned at her and sketched a salute. “I shall go and see.”
At the doorway, he paused and glanced back. “I meant it, Clarice. Every word.”
A lesser woman would have flung herself into his arms again, giving him, between kisses, a pledge in return. Clarice felt a tremendous impetus to demonstrate how clinging and sweet she could be. She repressed it firmly, letting him go without a word, for if she’d spoken she would have given her heart away.
Too much had proved false of late. Her home was not her home, her trusted servants were strangers, her mother was not lost forever after all. With the foundations of her beliefs shaking, Clarice mistrusted the strength of the refuge Dominic offered. She longed to test it but she dared not try.
The sound of his footsteps had not entirely faded before Morgain appeared in the entrance to the nursery. His finger went to his lips before she had time to more than inhale for her cry of surprise.
“Hist!” he said, his green eyes alight with mischief. He glanced behind him into the hall, then tiptoed in. “I’ve always wanted to say that.”
“Morgain, where have you been?” she whispered.
“I hardly know myself. But I think I can find it again.”
“Find what?”
“The forest with the doors. I reached them the first time traveling in my bed. It didn’t work this time, but I found another method.”
Clarice could no longer think Morgain was out of his head when he talked this way. Ignorance had been more of a comfort than she’d realized. She only asked, “What doors are these?”
“You remember. I sketched them. I—I’m afraid I lied to you about that, Aunt Clarice. I told you I hadn’t seen any doors in the trees, that I just wanted to put them there. You see, I had a funny feeling that it wasn’t quite the done thing to mention them. Queer, that. But they are quite real and if we can reach them, then we can go home.”
“You’ll have to explain, Morgain. My head is spinning. How can doors help us leave Mag Mell?”
“I saw Hamdry through the doors. We find them, walk through them, and there we are, safe and sound. Once my father returns, he’ll know how to keep us out of their hands a second time.”
“You know why we’ve been placed in this replica?”
“I heard the Fay who are pretending to be Camber and the rest talking.”
“That was very careless of them. Didn’t they notice you?”
He shook his head with a joking look in his eyes. “Watch what I can do, Aunt.”
The hairs on the hack of her neck rose like hackles with awestruck disbelief. Morgain had disappeared, gone like a flame when a candle winks out. She looked around the dusty nursery, sure she heard his stifled laughter.
Then slowly, she began to see him. He looked like a drawing of himself in pale pastels, only the figure was not static. It moved with all the boy’s awkward grace. He rubbed his nose with the fore-knuckle of his finger and then wiggled all five at her in a funning gesture. The sketchy colors of his clothing began to deepen and Morgain increased in clarity. He passed from a watercolor to an oil in a matter of moments, until he stood before her solid and unchanged.
“How are you doing that?” Clarice demanded.
He shrugged with supple shoulders. “I don’t know. I just ask myself to do it, and it’s done. Oh, I’m afraid there’s a rather big stain on the carpet in my room, Aunt. The manticore I conjured up wasn’t entirely housetrained.”
Clarice felt glad that Morgain was not slightly older, or he might have conjured up a mermaid or a nymph. “I thought you were trying to control this power.”
“I have tried, Aunt, but I’m afraid that.. . I’m afraid. ...” Suddenly Morgain looked at her with the eyes of a small boy whose longed-for toy broke on Christmas morning. “I haven’t been trained for this. I don’t really know what I am doing or how to control it. It... it frightens me.”
Clarice put her arms about him and found him reassuringly solid. “What do you think it means, Morgain?”
“I think I’m becoming one of them, Aunt.” He seemed to be looking inward. “I’m losing my human half. I can feel it going even now. The more magic I do, the faster it leaves me.”
“Then don’t do any more of it, please. Unless... Morgain, do you want to change?”
“I thought I might, but I don’t. Not really. It sounds wonderful, but Mother wouldn’t like it.” He bit his lip, looking and sounding his age for once. “I wouldn’t like it either. Their hearts are colder than ours, you can tell by the way they talk. Oh, Aunt Clarice, I so want to go home.”
Clarice cuddled him for a moment, feeling that he needed her to make a wise, mature decision. Her growing attraction for Dominic belonged to a silly chit fresh out of the schoolroom, not a woman with responsibilities and duties. Heartbreak could have nothing to do with such a woman. “Very well, Morgain. How do we set about finding these doors?”
“I’ve made a map. Look.” He brought out from his breast pocket one of his much-folded pieces of paper. Carrying it over to a sheet-shrouded table, he lay it out for her inspection. It looked like any of his old maps of imaginary places but with a difference, for she recognized several names. The great meadow where the feather-roofed tents stood was in the center with MAG MELL lettered over the top. A round insignia with a crown in the center hovered over these words.
Around the map were arrows pointing off to the four points of the compass. A river here, a shining lake there, a few mountains rising above the sea, and a distant, jagged peak with the words LA’AL FORTRESS surmounted by a floating banner empty of all insignia.
“I don’t think that this is everything.” Morgain said regretfully. “I had to leave out a lot, but it shows the main points.
“Did you invent this? How can you know what is contained in the Living Lands?”
“All those books I’ve been reading, Aunt Clarice. There’s an awful lot of writers who have either been to the Deathless Realm or who have written about it. Maybe it’s all make-believe; I don’t know.”
“That can’t be right, Morgain. Why would the Fay leave those books here for us to find. That doesn’t make sense. You don’t help an enemy escape.”
The boy lowered his voice to a whisper. “I think someone else is helping us.”
“I hope you are right. I hope they go on doing it. Come. We’d better dress warmly and I’ll try to filch some food from the table at dinner. We’ll leave as soon as night falls.”
Chapter Fourteen
They crept out of the house as soon as darkness came. Clarice lead the way at first, for she had been as far as the end of the brick walk. “At least I need not fear the Rider this time,” she said softly
.
Morgain stole his hand, already cold, into hers. “I thank God Dominic was with you. I should have hated to lose you.”
Clarice pressed his fingers. “You will never lose me.”
When gravel crunched under their feet, Clarice relinquished the lead. She knew it was the merest folly to trust to a child’s imagined map created from a mingling of the wild dreamings of others but it was the only hope she had. She owed it to her sister to return Morgain safe, sound, and as human as he’d been when he’d been given into her care.
“What direction shall we go in?” she asked.
“Wherever the fog is thickest, I assume.”
“Ugh. Very well.”
Mindful of how cold she’d grown on her previous venture into the fog, Clarice had chosen to wear her riding dress, dragging the trailing skirt around her body and tucking the end into her waistband. The leather breeches she wore beneath her skirt were exposed on the right, a small price to pay for having warm wool cocooned around her. Beside, it left her stride swinging free.
She left the daring hat with the turned-up brim and feather in her room, choosing instead to wear her shawl again, wrapped and pinned about her head. Her only fear was that these clothes were not what they seemed. Would she arrive at the real Hamdry wearing nothing but cobwebs?
Morgain was snug in his caped coat and best boots, a low, brimmed hat like an officer’s forage cap pulled down tightly over his hair. He said, “I believe that there are spells laid on this place to keep us here. If we seek out the most difficult way, then we shall be heading toward whatever they most want us not to find.”
“We should ignore the warnings, in other words, because the door with the biggest lock contains the greatest treasure?”
“Exactly. For instance, that patch of fog looks much heavier than the rest. I think we should head into it.”
Clarice nodded. It was already hard to see her feet. She grasped Morgain’s hand firmly, and adjusted her grip on the bandbox she carried in her other hand. It contained four rolls, sliced and stuffed with wild mushrooms, half a dozen small cakes, and three peaches. She’d smuggled them off the table and into the detached pocket she’d held on her lap throughout the meal. The Fay-Camber had noticed nothing, she thought.
Dominic had been harder to fool. He’d sat at the end of the table, smiling at her in such a way that she’d been in one long blush. A man’s eyes should not be so intent. Thank heavens Morgain had been at his most distracting. Twice he’d upset his water goblet and once had demonstrated how to skip a new potato across the highly polished table like a stone on a millpond. Clarice had hated to scold him, but thought it would look too suspicious if she did not try to control his antics.
The fog grew thicker with every step they took. Clarice began to feel chilled and, more than that, frightened.
The last time she’d attempted to penetrate the fog, the Rider had nearly carried her off.
“Do you hear anything?” she asked, in Morgain’s general direction. He was little more than a shadow.
“There’s nothing to hear,” he said confidently. “I’d know if there was.”
“It doesn’t seem to be thinning at all.”
“Not yet.”
Dominic had said that if the Rider had succeeded, she would have been with her mother by now. The idea had not filled her with delight. Though she knew herself un-dutiful and unfeeling for admitting it, there was no denying the last ten years without the elder Lady Stavely had been peaceful ones.
When her father had been alive, there’d been a never-ending series of estrangements, shouting, and bitterness. If Clarice dared to speak one word in her father’s defense, the same punishments would be laid on her, despite the fact that her mother lavished all the love of which she was capable upon her only child.
Her father had protected her but he had possessed a gift of evading unpleasant scenes by simply not being around when they were occurring. Always, Clarice had been aware that his milder nature would be expected to submit under her mother’s implacable will, even on the subjects of education and acquaintance- The merest expression of a counter-desire set Lady Stavely’s lips in an unalterable line. Only once had the viscount prevailed over his termagant.
How cold Matilda had been to Felicia, her husband’s illegitimate daughter, blaming the child for her own existence. Clarice had loved having an older sister and had taken Felicia to heart from the first day she’d arrived, her common speech and ill-habits notwithstanding. Felicia had grown into a delightful, proper lady but Matilda had continued to hate her. Anything that diminished her own child rankled, even though Clarice herself had not felt so reduced.
And there was the dreadful sense that Matilda had been pleased rather than appalled by the bane laid on Clarice by Forgall the Fay-King. Had her mother preferred keeping her a child rather than seeing her mature so that she could at last achieve perfect control over her? The years between thirteen and sixteen were as blank as the fog to Clarice yet she felt, somehow, that Matilda had not been horrified to find her daughter a beautiful, docile fool.
Clarice couldn’t imagine that immortality had cured her mother of these flaws, any more than it had, apparently, sated her insatiable greed for jewels, gold and power. She remembered her mother’s hands, covered with rings, so that whenever she grasped her daughter’s hand, it would hurt. They’d sparkled vibrantly, each one kept scrupulously clean, but Clarice had too often been scratched by a pronged setting to admire them.
“Morgain, how long do you think we’ve been walking?” Clarice asked after a long time,
“There’s no way to tell. I thought about counting our paces, figuring half a second per pace, but I lost track at about a thousand four hundred and seventy-seven. If only I’d brought my abacus. ...”
“Don’t trouble yourself about it. I’m only wondering if we’re going around it circles, but I suppose there’s no way to tell.”
“No. No way at all. Except that we have been walking on grass for a quite a way. Haven’t you noticed?”
“No, I hadn’t. What a relief. Are you tired? Shall we rest a moment?”
“All right. Grass is easier to sit on than gravel and we might as well rest while we can.” They sat down together, knee to knee. “It would be fatal to lose each other,” he said. “I’m glad you’re holding my hand, Aunt.”
“I’m glad too, Morgain. It’s too lonely without another person. Would you care to eat something?”
“No. But I am thirsty.”
“So am I, despite being as wet as a mermaid. We’ll share a peach. The juice will help.”
But the string that held the bandbox closed had become involved in a tight knot, aggravated by the fact that the string was also quite wet. She picked at it, breaking a nail. She’d been unable to find her small knife after the struggle with the Rider, so there was nothing to do but to keep trying. It was while she was engaged in this that she first heard the noise.
“What noise?” Morgain asked, looking around.
“Didn’t you hear it? A slow scraping sound.” She strained her ears. “It’s gone now, I think.”
“What kind of slow, scraping noise?”
“I don’t know.” She glanced at her nephew, whose freckles were just visible behind the shifting mists. He wore a most peculiar look, as though he were trying to close his ears to sound without using his hands. “Morgain, what is it?”
“I mustn’t think,” he said, his voice high with strain. “I mustn’t think about what a sound could be, Aunt, because I’ll make it happen. Oh, why did I have to study mythical monsters! If only I’d studied something safe like . . . like butterflies. The Lepidoptera are so soothing, don’t you think?”
The knot slipped free at last. “We shall eat something and then go on,” Clarice declared.
But she snatched back her hand just inches away from the lid as it began to rock back and forth. “Morgain ...” she whispered, drawing his attention to the box. “What is it?”
She clutc
hed him when he would have reached out. “Wait. Don’t. Heaven only knows what’s in there.”
Morgain reached into his coat pocket and brought out the map and a pencil. “I thought I could add interesting topography as we went.”
Extending the pencil like a fencer, he deftly flipped off the lid. Instantly, a column of colors arose, in exactly the same size circle as the box. Like a fountain, it shot upward to plume out in a glorious spray. Only this column was made not of water but of brilliant, iridescent insects with wings that flickered and shone even in the dim light of the fog-ridden Wilder World.
Clarice stood, mouth open, looking up, as the fountain ceased. She saw that the breaking spray did not fall at once to earth. Each particular speck floated in the air, higher or lower according to what seemed the merest whim. Then one “speck” drifted near enough for her to see the truth.
“They’re butterflies, Morgain! Look.”
One had landed on her sleeve, flirting blue and purple wings. He stayed on her sleeve only an instant before flying away, leaving Clarice wondering what he had thought of her.
“Amazing,” Morgain said, studying a magnificent orange and black specimen that had landed on his knee. It flew away and he followed its flight with his eyes. “Truly amazing.”
“You did say you could conjure things. You must have invoked butterflies just now.”
“I did not refer to the butterflies, Aunt. Rather, that.”
Looking up, she saw that the fog had lifted as though blown away by the beating of all those tiny wings. They stood in the grass at the edge of a rutted track that led off into an indistinct distance lined with blue. Clarice thought she glimpsed snow-covered peaks but it was difficult to make out details at this distance with no clearer light than the moon.
Of one thing alone could she be certain. This was not Devon. Nothing about it looked or felt familiar. The vast rise of the moor did not overshadow this land. Without it to steer by, she felt lost.
“It’s a beautiful night all of a sudden,” Clarice said warily. The full moon looked like a great water lily in the vast pool of sky. She shamed the stars so that none but the boldest showed themselves.
Magic by Daylight Page 20
