“That is so,” said Lucia, interested by this view of Edward-as-strategist. She glanced up; Edward and Delphine would hear them in a moment, always supposing they had any attention to spare from one another.
“So instead,” Roland continued, oblivious, “he made us go over and over the path until we knew it cold, and leave signs which no one else would recognise—just in case; and then we rolled up the twine and gave it back to the kitchen-maids. Some of the signs are there still.”
That was encouragement, surely?
“Will you show me?” said Lucia. “That is, if you are not sworn to secrecy.”
Roland blinked—glanced again over his shoulder at his brother and sister-in-law, still some yards away—looked at Lucia.
Then he turned on his heel, cupped his hands around his mouth, and called, “Ned! Delphine!”
They raised their heads; Edward shaded his eyes with his free hand and quickened his pace.
“We are going into the maze,” said Roland, when they drew near enough for speech: not a question but a firm statement of fact.
Prince Edward’s eyes lit—a tiny spark, but a spark nonetheless—and he said, “I have not been into the maze for . . . it must be years! Delphine, we must go with them; you shall like it of all things, I am sure.”
Delphine did not look as though she expected to like it; she pressed closer to Edward’s side and in a small voice said, “Is it not . . . are there not unquiet shades within? Ought we to disturb them?”
“That is only a tale, Delphine,” Roland scoffed. So dismissive was his tone that Lucia, though she agreed with him entirely and found Delphine rather trying at the best of times, winced a little; Edward’s glare could have melted steel.
“You need not go in if you do not like it,” said Edward, kindly (no one, thought Lucia, would guess that he was only a year Delphine’s elder), “but there is no truth in those tales that the maze is haunted, I promise you. And Roland and I know the way very well; we shall not lose ourselves.”
“I . . . I had really rather not,” said Delphine. Was she actually shivering? “Ned, I am a little cold; may we not go indoors now?”
Roland and Lucia, for the moment utterly in sympathy with one another, exchanged a look of disbelief: Was Delphine sickening for something, that she should feel a chill in the sun-warmed, almost breezeless Palace gardens?
Edward looked anxiously down at his wife, and up at his brother. “Of course,” he said, but doubt edged his tone. “But, Roland, it does not seem to me proper that you and Lady Lucia should be wandering the maze unaccompanied. Perhaps you may put off your excursion for another day.”
Lucia, who had been studying Delphine, did not at once appreciate Edward’s objection; when its implication dawned, she rolled her eyes (which made him wince) and said, “Edward, I give you my word of honour that we shall behave with the utmost propriety.”
“Indeed, Ned,” Roland added, though Lucia remarked that he took care not to look at her, “you ought not to judge others by your own habits. Good morning, Delphine; I hope you may soon be quite recovered.”
And with courtly ceremony he turned aside, neatly snubbing his elder brother, and bowed Lucia ahead of him into the maze.
* * *
The yew hedges that made up the walls of the maze were carefully pruned and shaped to prevent them growing together overhead, but so high were the walls that the moment of entering the maze felt to Lucia like passing from broad day into twilight. She paused to look about her, trying whether she could guess which was the correct turning to take or spot the first of the signs left by Roland and his brothers.
“I yield,” she said at last, finding that she could do neither. “I am in your hands, my lord; lead on!”
She spoke half in jest—an appeal both to Roland’s self-consequence and to the sly, mischievous sense of humour which she could nearly always see lurking beneath his armour of princely dignity—and was delighted to see him take up her small challenge.
“There,” he said, and stepped across the path to thrust one hand into the hedge straight ahead of him—a blank wall facing the entrance, which curved away on either side.
Lucia stepped up beside him.
Feeling about inside the hedge, Roland frowned, then rose a-tiptoe to explore farther up; and at last said, “Ha! Yes, here we are. The hedge has grown up more than I expected, since I last sought out the marks—I do not need them for myself, you know. We cut them near to the ground, so that Harry should be able to find them.”
He smiled fondly, shaking his head, and Lucia’s mouth curved in a fond smile of her own: Harry topped both his elder brothers by half a head now, and she liked Roland the better for not resenting it.
“Had we better cut the marks anew, lower down?” she said. “For . . . for Ned’s children to discover, one day?”
Roland turned from the hedge (his hand still buried in the foliage, his arm still stretched above his head) and in the dimness his eyes glinted at her. “Ned’s children must find their own way into the maze,” he said. “It will do them good. But we shall cut the marks again for their own sake,” he added, his teasing tone gone abruptly sober, “in memory of the boys we were, and to make our own memories for—” He looked away from her.
“For our own children,” said Lucia quietly, touching his free hand, soft and quick, with her fingers.
Roland’s boot-heels came down again with a quiet thump, and he dropped his arm and turned fully to face her. “Lucia,” he said, low. He reached for her hands, and she let him take them, hoping against hope that he should not be intending to descend once more into poetry.
And he did not; but what he did say was very nearly as bad: “Lucia, tell me—can you—shall you ever be able to love me?”
Lucia shut her eyes briefly to keep from rolling them. “I like you very much, by times,” she said honestly. When you do not insist on speaking to me of love, and reading romantical poetry at me. “Many a happy marriage has been built on less solid foundations. Can we not let that suffice for the moment?”
Roland sighed, plainly disappointed. He did not drop her hands, however, or turn and stalk away in high dudgeon; Lucia therefore considered her plea to have met with some success.
“Will you show me your marks?” she said, after a moment, tilting her head up towards the hedge-wall.
Roland nodded, and let go one of her hands in order to guide the other. She, too, had to stretch up onto her toes, but her searching fingers soon found what they sought beneath the foliage: a scar in the curved surface of the yew-bark, smooth where the shingled outer layer had been stripped away, in the shape of the letter W.
“Because we first turn west?” she asked, coming back down to her heels.
“Yes, exactly,” said Roland. “Now . . .”
He rummaged in his coat pockets and brought out an elaborately adorned pocket-knife.
“Oh!” said Lucia.
Roland—in the act of crouching down to look for a suitable space of bark near to the ground—looked up at her with his brows drawn together in bafflement. “What is it?” he said.
“I expected magick,” she explained, half-apologetic and fearing lest he should take offence. “I had forgot, I suppose, how young you and your brothers were, at the time of this adventure.”
“We were very young,” said Roland, slowly and thoughtfully, “but I own I had not considered the possibility, even now. I blame my tutors,” he added, his wry grin flashing momentarily, “for they have been telling me since first I learnt to call light that relying too far upon one’s magick carries as much danger as failing to learn to control it. But now that I do think upon it—if the marks were made by magick, one could find them by magick, is that not so?”
Lucia, crouching down beside him, nodded. “Whether that confers a benefit or a disadvantage depends, I suppose, upon your purposes,” she said. “One cou
ld make a mark which can only be found by magick, but if one were minded to use magick to defeat a maze, there are easier ways of doing so.”
Roland chuckled. “I was for having Ned use a finding-spell to bring us to the centre,” he admitted. “I should have used one myself, had I been capable of it at the time. Ned would have no part of it, however—it would be cheating, he said, and would prove nothing but that he could work a finding, which everyone knew already—and of course he was quite right. We learnt afterwards,” he added, just as Lucia was about to repeat Sophie’s remarks upon the nature of the maze, “that the whole of the thing is spelled against finding- and summoning-spells. I am glad we did not know it at the time, however, for it was a comfort to Harry to think that should we lose ourselves after all, there was only Ned’s favourite finding-spell between us and rescue.”
A comfort to Harry, indeed, thought Lucia, with an inward smile.
“One of my tutors was a scout in my father’s guard,” she said, “and had been a forester in his youth, before he became a guardsman.” She reached into the hedge at elbow height and felt about for a trunk or a large branch to suit her purpose. “It was his doing that Morag MacNeill and I were able to carry out our harebrained scheme, though I never told anyone so, for fear he might be punished for encouraging me in reckless behaviour, which he had never done. He taught me—”
The pads of her fingers brushed over a smooth, broad curve where the outer bark had sloughed off itself, and she curved her palm over it and let it rest there.
“These trees are not like the trees I knew as a child,” she said. “They are tame trees”—Roland raised his eyebrows; Lucia ignored him—“and belong to the world of men as much as to their own. But perhaps they may still remember their ancestors . . .”
She reached inwards for her magick—the power she had been born with, twined together with that of Clan MacNeill and of Alba itself, invested in her as her father’s heir—and with the scarlet-and-gold thread of it in her hand, reached outwards to find the spirit of the tree under her palm. For a long moment, nothing stirred; but at last she felt (saw, heard: to describe in the language of the physical senses the sensations of using magick was an enterprise that continually defeated her) the thread of sweet green light that was the yew-tree’s pulsing lifeblood, faint and distant and tasting of iron as well as of leaf-mould and wood, and gently tangled her magick into it.
But the tree was not her tree—the ground from which it grew was not her ground, and her own was far away.
Lucia let the magick go and drew her hand away, surprised to find that she was breathing hard and perspiration beading on her forehead.
“It is not my tree,” she said, answering Roland’s worried expression. “It will not mark itself for me, as the trees of Alba would do.”
Roland studied her—studied the yew-hedge—laid his hand alongside hers against the smooth under-bark.
Acting on instinct above all (though later she would see the parallels with events in an ancient yew-grove on the Ross of Mull), Lucia caught his other hand in hers and sent another tendril of her magick questing cautiously towards his.
“Mother Goddess!” said Roland, low and reverent. “I did not know—is it always—Oh.”
And now, under their two hands, drawn out by the calling of Roland’s magick to the tree’s, the mark took shape, rising out of the bark—embossed upon it, rather than incised into it, but otherwise echoing the original in every particular.
Roland blinked hard, shaking his head like a dog coming in out of the rain. When he turned to Lucia, his eyes were alight with something like awe.
“It called to me,” he said wonderingly. “The tree—or all of the trees—it called to me. Not—it—it knew me. How can such a thing be?”
He had turned away from her again, and was running his fingertips over the raised W, peering through the branches. He raised his other hand and almost absently muttered, “Adeste luces”; a globe of magelight, no larger than a gooseberry, bobbed into existence in the air above his palm, then floated into the yew-hedge.
“It is exactly like,” he said. “And yet the tree made it—or I thought it did.”
Now he sat back on his heels, frowning at Lucia. “This is an astonishing thing,” he said, “yet you do not seem even mildly surprised. Does none of this”—he waved a hand, and the magelight described a drunken tumble inside the hedge—“seem at all out of the ordinary to you?”
Lucia shrugged. “If I am astonished at anything,” she said, “it is—well—your astonishment. Though of course there are Albans aplenty who know nothing of such magicks, and understand still less. Not every father would have his child taught by a man who speaks to the trees.”
She smiled—a peace-offering of sorts—and climbed to her feet. Roland returned the smile, but when Lucia extended a hand to him to pull him to his feet, his eyebrows rose in astonishment and instead of taking it, he scrambled upright and offered her his arm.
I have put my foot wrong again, thought Lucia, a little despairingly, as she allowed Roland to tuck her hand up under his elbow. I suppose I ought not to have implied that I am as strong as he is.
But all the same, Roland had looked at her with wonder in his eyes—had smiled at her—was guiding her through the maze now, with his hand warm over hers, and pointing out each turning where a mark might be renewed—was talking of magick, and of gardens and labyrinths, and not of poetry or of love—and all of this, despite her repeated missteps, felt like the beginnings of victory.
* * *
“The way is not so difficult, you see,” said Roland, pausing at what must be the final turning.
They had been a long time in the maze, through stopping so often to renew the little Princes’ way-finding marks; the sun, sinking towards the western horizon, had dipped below the barrier of the high yew-hedges, making the path through the maze dimmer than ever. It might have been gloomy, but Lucia did not find it so; the trees knew Roland, welcomed him, as the woods of Alba had always known and welcomed her, if more sedately, and if they did not yet know her, she could imagine the possibility of their coming to do so.
She had chosen her guide well, though for what undoubtedly were, from the trees’ point of view, entirely the wrong reasons.
They rounded the last turning, and the high, close hedge-walls fell away.
“Cailleach mór!” breathed Lucia, staring around her
“It is something to see, indeed,” said Roland; and if he sounded very slightly smug, who could blame him?
They stood in a great three-sided clearing, carpeted with chamomile, clover, and creeping thyme, so that every step smelt of sunshine. In its centre stood a weathered sundial, whose brass gnomon was green with age, and whose foot seemed to grow up from amongst the thyme-stems like a great stone toadstool. In each corner was ensconced a small, well-tended shrine, and along each wall a low stone bench grown over with thyme, and over the whole fell a profound and listening silence. The air was so still that Lucia almost hesitated to breathe, for fear of disturbing it—yet bright and alive with expectation.
“Hegemone,” Roland murmured, gesturing to the buxom figure atop the nearest shrine, whose feet, like the sundial’s, were hidden by vines twining about her legs and up her uplifted arms. “She who watches over growing things. Apollo and Diana, sun and moon.” Two figures: a man who held a harp, a woman with a bow. Your goddesses may be handy with a sword or a bow; but your women, almost never. Why is that, I wonder?
“And Minerva,” said Roland, nodding at the last shrine.
Lucia peered at it across the clearing—or was it a grove?—and slipping her arm out of Roland’s, took a few hesitant steps towards it, skirting the sundial.
“That is an owl,” she said at last. “An owl who sits upon a helmet, and holds a sword in his claws.”
“Yes,” said Roland. “Minerva’s sacred bird—her sword—her helm.” He
paused, looking from Lucia to the owl-shrine and back again, and at last said doubtfully, “You will not like to make an offering, I suppose. I shall do so, however, if you have no objection?”
“Objection?” said Lucia, bewildered. “What objection could I possibly have to your making offerings to your own gods in your own garden?”
“Well,” said Roland. He looked at his boots. “They are not your gods, I know; and I have heard that in Alba, the gods of Britain are . . . not well regarded.”
Lucia sighed. “Alba resisted the great legions of Rome,” she said, “when Britain did not; there are still far too many Albans who cannot, or will not, regard their gods with anything but suspicion.” This was something of an understatement, as Roland must be aware. “It is not all the gods of Britain whom such persons so resent, you understand, but only those who are also gods of Rome. But in any case, Roland, I should never ask you to disavow your gods! No matter how much an altar to Minerva or Apollo in the Castle may irritate the priests of the Cailleach.”
She paused, turning this notion over in her mind, and added, “In fact, now I think on it, I believe that may be rather an advantage than otherwise.”
Roland looked up at last, brows furrowed, to gauge whether this were a serious suggestion; and before Lucia knew what had happened, they were laughing together.
* * *
Roland began searching his pockets. The much smaller pockets of Lucia’s worked muslin gown producing nothing of interest, she hunted through her reticule and at length extracted a long blue-black feather which she had picked up in the course of their walk; a copper ring in the shape of two snakes, a gift from Sìleas which, however, fit none of Lucia’s fingers; and a linen handkerchief embroidered with the lion of Alba.
“Will any of these do?” she inquired diffidently, holding out her hands to Roland. “Or I suppose chamomile-flowers, or clover—”
“One of the secrets of the maze,” said Roland, “is that any offering you make here, you must bring in with you from the outside. I had not the least notion of going into the maze today, however, and so—”
A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel) Page 8
