“You heard the trees,” said Lucia, simply, “and I did not.”
Roland studied her, unspeaking, for a long moment.
“And it means so much to you,” he said at last, “to know the thoughts of the trees?”
Put in such a way, it did seem an eccentric taste. “It is as I told you,” said Lucia; “the trees seemed afire to speak to you, and why should that be, unless they had something to say?”
She had meant to stop there—to speak the rational portion of the truth, that is, and not the untidy, sentimental whole of it—but the rest tumbled out of her mouth before she could stop it. “And—you will think me very foolish, I suspect”—looking down at her hands tensely pleating the fabric of the unfamiliar dressing-gown—“but I am a stranger in your kingdom, and I suppose I hoped your trees might speak to me of home. I—I hoped, too,” she added, hurrying over the words lest she lose her nerve to speak them at all, “that you might feel more at home in Alba, if you knew something of the ways of trees.”
Roland was silent so long that Lucia grew apprehensive and chanced a sidelong look up at him—then, seeing his expression, raised her head to look him full in the face.
“I am sorry,” she began. “I did not mean—”
But Roland caught her hands and shook his head at her, as if too overcome to speak, and her words trailed away into abashed silence.
“A day or two ago, Lucia MacNeill of Alba,” said Roland after a moment, “I should have said you had not a poetickal breath in your body; you cannot wonder that I should be . . . a little surprised by your saying such things. I have written a deal of poetry myself, I fear, and you may believe me when I tell you that I should have retired from the field in triumph on the strength of such words as yours.”
Lucia, who had not at all intended poetry, and indeed rather regretted the degree of sentimental nostalgia to which she had given way, could not at all think how to reply to this.
“I,” she said, and stopped.
But Roland, for a wonder, seemed to comprehend what she had not said. “You need not be the heiress of Alba every moment of every day,” he said softly, tracing the tip of one forefinger in a slow circle on the back of her hand. “There is no shame in leaving a little space to be Lucia MacNeill, from time to time.”
From time to time, Roland of Britain, you are a very wise young man.
She smiled at him, and whatever he perceived in her expression seemed almost to light him from within, so luminous was his answering smile.
After some moments (or possibly hours) spent in the exchange of smiles, with Marcus Cattermole’s softly turning pages for accompaniment, Roland said—very low, and in halting Gaelic—“I do not know at all that I understand the trees; but I believe they tell me, told me, that they see an enemy—of mine? Of my father’s? Of their own? I cannot tell—and warn . . . warned me to beware.”
Lucia sat very still for a long moment, considering this.
“Has your father many enemies?” she inquired after a moment, still in Gaelic. “Have you?”
“I . . . my father . . .” Roland’s voice faltered, then fell still. After a moment, however, he lifted his chin and began again, this time in Latin: “I do not like to speak of it before you, but I trust you will excuse it, in the circumstances—”
With some effort, Lucia refrained from rolling her eyes. “You surely cannot suppose me ignorant of the factions in my own kingdom which continue to oppose this alliance?” she said levelly, in the same tongue. “The objectors are fewer now, and less belligerent—it is not popular to denounce Britain and all its works, as it was before your sister showed herself a hero on Alba’s behalf—but some remain. I do not think, however, that any of them could have followed me here without being discovered.
“Though,” she added, “I shall consult with Ceana MacGregor and Oscar MacConnachie in the morning, and see what may be done to investigate the possibility.”
Roland nodded. “I thank you,” he said, “for covering that angle of the matter, and I trust we shall find that there is nothing in it. Closer to home, however—you know, I expect, that some years ago Sophie was among those responsible for foiling a conspiracy upon my father’s life?”
Lucia, who had not, rocked back in astonishment; then considered of whom they were speaking, and with a rueful chuckle said, “I ought not to be surprised at it, upon reflection. This I suppose is part of the tale of the Lost Princess, which everyone in Alba is wild to hear, and which Sophie will never consent to tell any of us?”
“I do not know what tales may be told in Alba,” said Roland, a little stiffly, “but should you wish to hear a true account of the matter from one who was there, I am quite ready to oblige you.”
There was a rustling from the corner; glancing up, Lucia saw that Marcus Cattermole had abandoned his book, at least for the moment, and was observing them with some interest. When his gaze crossed Lucia’s flat stare, however, he blinked self-consciously and said, “If you have no objection, m’lord, my lady, I should be the better for stretching my legs.”
“No objection whatever,” said Lucia.
He rose from his chair, laying aside his codex, and made for the door; Roland watched him out of the room with narrowed eyes.
Lucia settled back in her chair—her own legs were rather in need of stretching—and said, “Well?”
“Er,” said Roland. “What has Sophie told you?”
“Very little,” said Lucia. “I know that her mother ran away with her when she was only a baby, because she objected to the terms of the marriage your father had contracted for her; and that she reappeared very suddenly some years ago, but was rarely seen at Court. All of which I knew before ever I met Sophie, and certainly before I discovered who she is.”
“Hmm. Yes.” Roland cleared his throat—ducked his head—smoothed his fingers fussily along the coverlet. “It was Samhain-night six—five?—years ago, at the Royal Ball. There is always an enormous masqued ball for Samhain, you see. Sophie was there with Lord Kergabet’s party—he was not a member of the Privy Council then, indeed I am sure my father had never laid eyes on him since he was first presented at Court—because she and Gray and Joanna had discovered a plot to poison my father.”
Lucia nodded, wide-eyed; news of such a plot had reached her own father’s court in Din Edin, though shorn of details—including, it appeared, Sophie’s involvement in the affair—within a month of its failure.
“I can be certain only of what I saw and heard myself, you understand,” said Roland; “the rest is hearsay, more or less. In any case, the poison was in the libation to the gods, from which the King must drink before pouring the rest out onto the altar. It was Joanna’s father who poisoned the wine, and my uncle Edric—Mama’s twin brother—helped him do it, though it was not either of them who first had the idea.” Roland’s face screwed up in disgust. “That honour went to Viscount Carteret, who was then my father’s chief advisor; it seems he fancied himself a kingmaker, and meant to promote himself from advisor to King Henry to regent to King Edward before the opportunity passed him by. And he might well have succeeded, too,” he added, “if he had kept his conspiracy at Court—there was one of the Royal Healers in the plot, as well as Uncle Edric—and not brought Appius Callender and his students into it, in order to get at a better class of poison. And at Sophie, of course.”
“Whatever did he want with Sophie?” said Lucia. “That is—I should have suspected him of wishing to put her on the throne, but . . .”
“An alliance with Iberia,” said Roland. “Again. He did not think Sophie was truly the Lost Princess, but he meant to marry her off to some Iberian princeling all the same, for if he could not tell one half-Breizhek girl from another, nor could they.”
“Ah,” said Lucia. It had not occurred to her, for some reason, that this danger might have resurfaced; it was no wonder that the subject of royal marriages mad
e Sophie twitch.
“If they had believed Callender to be telling the truth,” Roland went on, thoughtfully, “perhaps Carteret and his co-conspirators might have taken better precautions. Or perhaps not—who can tell? In any event, they did not, and Sophie and her friends used her mother’s magick to move about the Palace unnoticed, and my grandmother’s magick—you have heard Sophie sing, I suppose?—to stop my father from drinking the poisoned wine.”
“Brìghde’s tears!” Lucia breathed.
“Only, none of it was quite enough to stop him from doing what he thought was his duty to the kingdom, by completing the Samhain-night offerings; so she made herself look like her mama, and that so shocked him that he dropped the wine-cup, and no one was poisoned after all. There was a deal of fighting after that, and my father ordered all of them arrested, for he was in no state to understand which of them were traitors and which heroes, and there was a trial the next day. Ned and Harry and I saw nearly the whole of it, because Mama would go bursting in to plead for Uncle Edric’s life, and spit at Sophie, and we could not stop her.
“They ought all to have been executed for treason, but only Carteret was, in the end; the rest are shut up in the Tower of London still.”
Roland’s voice was growing hoarse, and his eyelids beginning to droop; Lucia was therefore not altogether sorry to hear the door open wider, and see Marcus Cattermole slinking back in.
“Well,” she said briskly, “you ought to sleep again now, if you can. Shall I just—”
She reached for the topmost pillow—meaning to rearrange them so that Roland might recline in more comfort—but halted midgesture, startled, at his abrupt, involuntary “No!”
“Your Highness—” Marcus Cattermole started forward.
Roland ignored him utterly; Lucia flung up a hand—a gesture unconsciously copied from Ceana MacGregor—and their minder subsided, though Lucia could feel the wary tension radiating from him like some overambitious warming-spell.
“I shall stay here beside you,” she said—quietly, as though she had been speaking to a frightened child. “As long as you like.”
To her own ears the words, the tone, sounded unbearably condescending; at any other time, she should have expected Roland to scoff at them, and blamed him not at all. But it seemed the lingering effects of magick shock, or of the nightmares of which he refused to speak—or, perhaps, of some other hidden hurt which Lucia could not imagine—still held sway, for instead his stricken expression smoothed out into relief, and he loosed his renewed grip on the sleeve of her borrowed dressing-gown and settled back into his nest of pillows.
“Do you,” he said, so low that Lucia was forced to lean close in order to hear him. “Do you—Sophie knows a spell, for sleep without dreams; I do not suppose you . . .”
Lucia shook her head in genuine regret. “I am sorry,” she said, folding Roland’s left hand into her own. “I do know one or two other sleeping-spells, however, and perhaps that may answer?”
“Perhaps,” Roland agreed.
“Close your eyes, then,” said Lucia, and when he had done so, she laid her right hand across his brow, gathered her magick, and began to weave her spell.
“Lady Lucia,” said Marcus Cattermole in a warning tone, as he recognised what she was about.
Lucia looked up just long enough to stare him down, not pausing in her working; then returned her full attention to Roland, whose pulse and breathing were slowing at last into true sleep.
The spell concluded, she gently disentangled their hands and, greatly daring, bent to kiss his brow, then settled herself in her chair by the bedside and composed herself to snatch what rest she might.
CHAPTER IX
In Which Sophie Seeks Reinforcements
“I have a thing to tell you,” said Sophie, erupting into Lucia’s sitting-room with her arms full of codices and a quite unaccountable grin spread across her face, “which I hope may cheer you a little, now that Roland is going on so well. May I?”
Lucia had spent nearly every waking moment with Roland since their adventure in the maze, and was now too exhausted even to speak; she waved a hand at her friend—Proceed, then—without much enthusiasm. How could Sophie, who had made the journey from Grosvenor Square to sit with her brother for some hours nearly every day, and had to all appearances worried for him as zealously as his own mother, be so full of sparkling energy now?
Sophie closed the door behind her, surveyed the available seats, and settled herself at one end of the canary-striped sofa. She deposited her stack of codices upon an occasional table, and laid across her knees a leather portfolio tied up with red tapes, which she at once occupied herself in opening.
At last she extracted something from within—a sheet of parchment, it appeared, not large, which had until recently been rolled, for upon being released from the flattening portfolio it at once began to curl inwards from both sides.
Lucia sat up a very little, cautiously interested despite herself.
Sophie leant forward and spread the . . . parchment, yes, it was certainly parchment, across the low table that separated the sofa from Lucia’s armchair, and weighted its corners with objects extracted from her reticule: a lump of blue sealing-wax, two copper coins, a heavy silver ring set with some sort of black stone.
Grudgingly, Lucia sat up straight, the better to see the thing on the table-top. It was . . . was it a map? No: a bird’s-eye view of—of a castle?
“Not a castle,” said Sophie. She grinned, and Lucia could not help smiling back at her. “A college.”
Lucia blinked.
“Lady Morgan College,” Sophie elaborated, touching delicately with one finger the title scroll spread out across the top of the page. “Established in the reign of King Henry the Fifth, and abandoned at the time of the Princesses Regent, two centuries ago or thereabouts. I disinterred this from a mislabelled pigeonhole in the Palace Archives; I know almost nothing about its provenance, however, as it does not seem to have been included in the archivist’s catalogue.”
She looked up at Lucia, bafflingly expectant.
“Abandoned, why?” said Lucia, seizing upon one of the several puzzles presented to her, more or less at random.
“No one knows,” said Sophie. She had begun to exude an air of suppressed excitement, which Lucia could not at all understand, but to which she could not help responding. “So far as I have been able to discover. Of course, there are a great many books I have not yet read—I have not been long about this business as yet—which may perhaps contain some clue.”
Lucia glanced instinctively at the small tower of books on the table. “And you have brought me some of them?” she hazarded.
“Oh! No, not at all,” said Sophie. “That is, yes; I have already read all of those, but you must read them, also, if you are to help me with my project.” She reached for the topmost codex, and handed them one by one to Lucia, who had just time to read their titles as they went by: An Historie of Lady Morgane College, Oxford. Lady Morganne: A Life, Written by Her Nephew. The Oxford Colleges and Their Patrons. The Lives of the Princesses Regent. A Woman of Substance: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Morgan of Clwyd. A Man of Oxford: Being the Memoirs and Recollections of Arthur Claudius Antony de Coucy, Mag.D.—
“Your project?” Lucia just succeeded in catching the books now attempting to slide off her lap in both directions, and attempted to herd them into a stack once more. “What project is that? I do wish you might learn to begin at the beginning, Sophie.”
Sophie paused, still with a book in either hand. “Oh,” she said, and her mouth twisted, a small self-deprecating smile. “The beginning. Well—”
There followed a long, thoughtful silence, during which Lucia (familiar by now with Sophie’s tendency to drift, and content for the moment to let her do so) examined the codex on the top of the pile, which proved to have been published in the reign of Sophie’s grandfathe
r. Arthur Claudius Antony de Coucy, Mag.D., she had concluded by the second folio, had been a dull and self-important fellow almost on the order of Xanthus Marinus, and she rather wondered that Sophie should have persevered through four hundred and forty-eight pages of his recollections.
At last Sophie said, “The beginning is not at all to the purpose. The end is, that I think it is time someone brought Lady Morgan College back to life.”
This extraordinary statement was delivered with the same sunny smile and matter-of-fact confidence with which the Sophie of Quarry Close, tucking a stray curl behind her ear with inky fingers, might have said, I have decided to walk up to Arthur’s Seat tomorrow; should you like to join me?
This was, Lucia reminded herself, the woman who had set off across a foreign kingdom, alone but for two other young women who did not even speak the local language, to rescue her kidnapped husband from a would-be mage-king—and, against all expectation, succeeded in rescuing not only said husband but half a dozen other prisoners and, indeed, the kingdom itself. A woman, in fact, who made a habit of rescuing entire kingdoms. Resurrecting an abandoned college might well seem a mere rainy-day amusement by comparison.
“And that someone is you, I suppose?” she said, nevertheless. “You mean to wave your hand, and say, ‘Let it be so,’ and there is an end to the matter?”
“Of course not,” said Sophie scornfully. “I am not such a ninny. Nearly every don in every Oxford college will detest the very notion. My stepmother will tell my father that I am only jealous of Roland, or perhaps of Ned, and attempting to draw attention to myself, and will insist on his ordering me to desist. Joanna will fault my atrocious timing—you were quite right, Lucia, by the by, about Joanna—”
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