A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel)

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

Sophie resumed her pacing, to and fro before the broad window, and began attempting to trammel the said thoughts into some sort of order.

  First, then, the truth: Her insistence on following Gray to Ivry was half anxiety (for Gray and, yes, for herself) as to the consequences of a separation, and half resentment at being mewed up in London, at loose ends and quite useless, whilst Gray and Ned and Sieur Germain and even, in her own small way, Joanna were doing their part against the twin threats of the Duchies and the escaped conspirators, and for the rescue of Amelia. No very noble motive, that—and undoubtedly His Majesty knew it.

  A further truth: Her motives for seeking the rebirth of Lady Morgan College were no less complicated, and perhaps no more likely to withstand scrutiny. Of course she wished—quite unselfishly, if she did not mistake her own feelings—that young women of scholarly bent should have the same opportunity as their brothers for useful and challenging study, without having to beg for a place at the University in Din Edin, an expedient to which very few of their fathers were likely to agree in any case. But, too, she smelt a mystery clinging round the walls of Lady Morgan College, and burned to puzzle it out. Why had it, after centuries of modest but respected scholarship, having educated thousands of students—including several daughters of dukes and even kings—and easily holding its own with the newer men’s colleges, having attracted the personal patronage of the Princesses Regent in the reign of Edward VI, suddenly been closed? And not simply closed, but very nearly erased from history?

  Lady Morgan had not been the first Oxford college to close its doors; Bairstow, for instance, stood on the erstwhile site of another college, nearly as old as Merlin, and (according to the Museum of the History of Magick) set up explicitly as a rival to it. Beaufort College had opened with great fanfare under the patronage of the Duke of Somerset, and for nearly three hundred years had been a great success, even luring some notable Fellows away from Merlin; but before it reached its fourth century, it had begun to lose its Fellows, its students, and its reputation to its elder rival, and at last faded into obscurity, until its land had been purchased and its buildings improved and expanded, under the patronage of the Duke and Duchess of Grafton, into the present Bairstow College.

  The whole of this history, with many additional minutiae which Sophie had not troubled to commit to memory, was documented in dozens of histories of Oxford, of magick in Britain, and of Beaufort and Bairstow Colleges, readily available in the library of this last as well as in those of Merlin College and of the Museum of the History of Magick. To judge by the extant recorded history of Lady Morgan College, on the other hand—as Lucia MacNeill had astutely remarked—the whole of it might as well have been plucked up from the bank of the Cherwell by a curious god or goddess and never seen again.

  Except that the residents of Oxford, town and gown alike, saw it every day, half-buried in rust and rubble and ivy, but unmistakably present—a corpse at the feast, so to speak.

  Who owned the College buildings, and the land on which they stood, now that the College itself was no more? Why did no one seem to know, or even to wonder, and why had no one ever attempted (so far as Sophie had been able to discover) to make any other use of it? What, in the name of Clio, of Minerva, made all the histories stop short of the end of the tale?

  Confess, Magistra Marshall: You fancy yourself a solver of mysteries, and worse than that, you fancy yourself cleverer than all those historians, than all the tens of thousands of Oxonians who have failed to solve the mystery since the Princess Edith Augusta’s day.

  If that is not hubris, my name is not Sophie Marshall.

  Whatever her reasons—selfish or greathearted, noble or altogether the reverse—certain it was that restoring Lady Morgan College to its former state was an aim dear to Sophie’s heart. With the overt approval, if not the true patronage, of the King himself, that aim would become an attainable one; or, at the least, more attainable than formerly. A college, after all, is not only bricks and mortar, window-glass and furniture, pens and paper and books, but the people to use them—the Fellows, the tutors and lecturers, the students. Though sober reason told her that there had been clever, curious young women like herself in Lady Morgan’s time and thereafter, and would be again, who would leap at the chance to study as eagerly as she had, what of all the fathers, the brothers, the husbands like Appius Callender, like Edmond and George Marshall, whom they should have to persuade to allow them that chance? And where should Sophie find the tutors and lecturers to teach them, when so many of the Fellows of other colleges had gone out of their way to express their disapprobation of the very notion?

  There was, in other words, an uphill battle before her, in which even royal backing was no guarantee of victory.

  Nevertheless, it was also true that were her father not making her this offer as a distraction, as a bribe to keep her feet safely (as he believed) on English soil and away from the armies of the Duchies—had there, in other words, not been far more urgent and important work for her to do, if only she were permitted to do it—she should not have hesitated even a moment before accepting it.

  Am I truly considering cutting off my nose to spite my face?

  She was wearing a path in the carpet of her father’s study, Sophie found; she forced herself to stillness—swallowed hard—looked down at her clasped hands.

  No.

  “If I am to accept your terms,” she said at last, “I must have your sworn word—your oath on . . . on the bones of my mother—that should Gray find himself in need of rescue—which the gods forbid!—there will be no delays, no arguments—”

  “I am prepared to give my sworn word in the matter of a rescue mission,” her father said, holding up a hand to stem the mounting tirade, “provided that it is understood that any such mission shall be undertaken by persons of suitable training and experience.”

  Not, in other words, Sophie translated, by yourself and your sister. In fact, however—had he only been willing to acknowledge it—no person living could be better suited to this task than herself.

  “Yes,” she said. “That is understood, of course.”

  In any case, we must pray that it does not come to that. Gray should not be wandering about Normandie alone, after all, but in the company of a regiment of soldiers; he was perfectly well able to look after himself, and, after the near-catastrophe in Alba, would be on his guard against . . . what? There is the rub, indeed; he cannot know what awaits him there, and nor can any of us.

  “Then . . .” She hesitated, swallowing back what she feared might become bitter regrets; on no account would her father agree to her following Gray to Ivry, and it was futile to wish it, but remaining in England nevertheless felt like an abandonment. “Then, yes, Father, I agree.”

  * * *

  Lucia was playing at chess with Roland—they were more or less evenly matched, being both apt to open with great caution and to grow increasingly reckless as the game progressed—when a discreet knock upon the half-open door of her sitting-room, where Ceana MacGregor and Conall Barra MacNeill stood guard, heralded the arrival of Sophie Marshall.

  She looked altogether wretched, and Lucia was half out of her seat, crying, “Sophie! Whatever is the matter?” before Sophie’s eye fell on Roland, turning towards her in alarm. Before Lucia’s astonished eyes, Sophie’s ashen cheeks warmed to a healthier colour, the reddening of recent tears faded from her eyes, and something almost like a smile curved her lips.

  “You will never guess,” she said, in a voice, again, almost entirely like her own. “My father has given me leave to mount an expedition to Oxford, and I am come to ask you—both of you, though I did not know that I should find Roland here—to be of the party.”

  Roland, not surprisingly, was looking from Lucia to Sophie and back again, wearing a frankly baffled expression. During his convalescence—or at any rate until her stepfather’s escape from imprisonment had prompted her brother-in-law to confine
her to the house—Sophie had been a regular visitor, and Lucia had believed the pair of them to be developing something approaching mutual confidence. It seemed, however, that Sophie was not prepared to allow her brother to witness her present distress, or to know its cause.

  “Of course we should be delighted!” said Lucia.

  “Yes, of course,” Roland agreed, ready enough despite his evident puzzlement; getting into the spirit of the thing, he said, “When does this expedition of yours set forth?”

  “I . . . I hardly know,” said Sophie. She reached for the high back of Roland’s chair, which was nearest, misjudged the distance, and swayed on her feet.

  Lucia’s heart plummeted into her boots; Roland leapt up, knocking the chessboard askew and half the chessmen onto the floor, and each of them caught one of Sophie’s elbows to guide her into the seat he had vacated.

  “Roland,” said Lucia sharply, “fetch your sister a cup of tea—put a great deal of honey in it, if you please—and whatever cakes may be left from the tea-tray—”

  She desisted—he was already up and moving, pouring honey into her own empty teacup with one hand and sweeping a dozen uneaten cakes and petits fours onto a clean plate with the other—and dropped to her knees beside Sophie.

  “What is it?” she demanded, low. She spoke in Gaelic; it would not prevent Roland from understanding, but it would at any rate slow him down. “Something is very much amiss; if I did not know better, I should say—”

  “Kergabet has sent Gray to Normandie,” said Sophie miserably, in the same tongue. “To spy for him—he believes there may be traitors in the ranks of my father’s army—and to look for my sister Amelia, who has run away with one of my stepfather’s henchmen, or so we have concluded. And,” she added in quite a different tone, sitting up straighter and scrubbing one forearm roughly across her eyes, “I ought not to have told you any of that, so you will forget all of it straight away, if you please.”

  Roland appeared at Lucia’s shoulder with the cup of heavily sweetened tea and the plate of cakes; Lucia took them from him with a smile of thanks, set the plate upon the abandoned chessboard, and thrust the teacup into Sophie’s hands.

  “Drink this,” she said firmly, reverting to Latin, “and when you are feeling more yourself, you shall tell us all about it.”

  PART THREE

  Oxford and Ivry

  CHAPTER XVIII

  In Which Gray Occasions Some Surprise

  It was a little past noon on a blazing-blue Marday when a Normand farmer’s cart—driven by the farmer’s stocky, towheaded fifteen-year-old son, whose conversation through the whole of their slow, bone-rattling journey had, despite Gray’s efforts, consisted entirely in variations on the two themes of When I am old enough to go as a soldier . . . and If my father knew what my sister Ginette has been at with that Breizhek corporal . . .—deposited Gray before a beflagged and imposing tent in the military encampment east of the city of Ivry. Having assisted in disentangling his passenger’s belongings from the cured hams and rounds of cheese which constituted the remainder of his cargo, and tucking away with a broad grin the coins Gray dropped into his hand, the boy vaulted back up onto the driving-seat, took up the reins, and clucked his father’s patient draught horses into motion.

  “Au revoir, monsieur!” he called cheerfully over his shoulder as the cart trundled away.

  The large young men standing sentry outside the tent eyed Gray with disfavour. Gray, however, had stared down, if not many a greater man, at any rate more than one; and, though not so broad in the beam as these fellows, he was half a head taller than either. “I am to report to Colonel Dubois,” he said, drawing himself up very straight. “My name is Marshall; I have letters for him from London.”

  The sentries’ expressions of distrust were altered not at all by this explanation, but the left-hand one did unbend so far as to say, “Wait here, sir, and I’ll inquire.”

  He turned on one heel and vanished into the tent. His fellow contrived somehow to stare straight ahead whilst nevertheless visibly keeping Gray under his eye. The effect was rather unnerving; were they trained up to it, Gray wondered, or were men chosen for this duty because they possessed a natural gift for silent, stolid intimidation?

  Surprisingly quickly, the vanished sentry reappeared, holding open the tent-flap and gesturing Gray within.

  * * *

  Colonel Dubois, at first blush, answered Gray’s every expectation of the archetypal regimental commander; standing tall and straight behind his desk to receive his visitor, he possessed a cragged and weathered face bisected on the vertical by a nose as crooked as Gray’s own—perhaps for the same reason—and on the horizontal by pale sharp eyes which swept over Gray’s person in a single assessing glance. Only in one particular did he deviate from the Platonic ideal: He had evidently been working in his shirt-sleeves, for his regimental coat hung by its shoulders from the back of his chair.

  “You have letters for me?” he said, holding out one hand.

  “Yes, sir,” said Gray. Outside the Colonel’s tent, he had stood to attention in a conscious attempt to intimidate the suspicious sentry; here, before the man himself, he found himself doing so quite involuntarily. He handed over Kergabet’s letter of introduction, and with it the file of documents, tied up in red tapes, which until this morning had lain concealed beneath the lining of his trunk.

  Colonel Dubois set aside the dossier and, following a minute examination of Kergabet’s seal, broke open the letter. Gray watched him reading it, noting that he wore his chestnut-coloured hair longer than was the fashion in England, drawn back tightly and clubbed at the nape of his neck, and that it was liberally, but unevenly, streaked with grey; that three fingers of his left hand bore unmistakable evidence of having been broken and then poorly set, without benefit of a healer (talented or otherwise); and that there depended from his waistcoat pocket, on a sturdy leather thong, a soldier’s talisman in silver, stamped with the emblem of Mars on one face and of Mithras on the other.

  At length Colonel Dubois looked up. “Have you never thought, yourself, Mr. Marshall,” he said, “of accepting a commission?”

  Gray blinked. “There was some thought at one time, indeed, of my going into His Majesty’s service,” he said, carefully eliding the ownership of these thoughts, “but in the end I proved better fitted for a scholar than an officer.”

  “A pity, that,” said Colonel Dubois. “There is a great demand for men of your particular talents.”

  “My talents, sir?” Gray inquired, puzzled. What in Hades was in that letter of Kergabet’s? “Er—you mean a facility with languages, I suppose?”

  “Languages?” The Colonel’s eyebrows inched up his forehead like chestnut-furred caterpillars. “No, of course not. Mr. Marshall, Lord Kergabet gives me to understand that you are a shape-shifter—is it not so?”

  Oh. “Yes, sir; it is certainly true. I did not—that is, I was not aware of Lord Kergabet’s having mentioned the matter to you.”

  “And, if I may inquire, your other form is . . . ?”

  Gray blinked again. “An owl, sir,” he said. “A Great Grey. It is native to—”

  “A night-scout, by Mithras!” Colonel Dubois exclaimed. “Yes, a great pity that you should be wasted in a library carrel.”

  Rather than pursue this line of conversation, however, he reached for the file Gray had brought him, untied the tapes, and began reading through the topmost of the papers within, whilst Gray stood silently pondering what the next move in the game might be, and studying with interest the interior of the first military command-post he had ever seen. It was, in its way, not unlike the rooms of many a Fellow, lecturer, or student of his acquaintance—spartan in appearance, filled with the tools and detritus of an all-consuming profession—but meticulously well ordered. The interior was lit by a magelight lantern suspended from the tent’s central peak; that it was magelight was apparent
from its steady, silent glow and the lack of heat or smoke, but its colour was strange, a warm yellow rather than the usual cool blue-white.

  “The quartermaster uses coloured glass in the lanterns,” said Colonel Dubois. Gray started slightly—had his host been reading his thoughts?—but, of course, he must still have been gazing at the ceiling, puzzling over the lantern, when the Colonel looked up from his reading. “To guard against night-blindness. Now: to business.”

  He took up a brass bell from one corner of his folding desk and rang a brisk peal upon it; this summoned a slight young man, wearing a lieutenant’s coat and a patch over his left eye, who gave his commanding officer a smart salute and Gray a respectful bow.

  “Mr. Morvand,” he said, “Mr. Marshall is seconded to Captain Tremblay’s company for the present, and may wish to go out with the scouting-party at dusk. He is to be billeted with the night-scouts. Kindly escort him there, and then to the Captain, wherever he may be at present. And see that he has a bed, and so on.”

  “Sir,” said Mr. Morvand. He turned to Gray and inquired, “Have you much kit with you, Mr. Marshall? Er, much baggage, that is?”

  “That may depend on your definition, I suppose,” said Gray doubtfully. “My things are outside, I believe—we unloaded them before the fellow with the cart went on to see the quartermaster—”

  Colonel Dubois cleared his throat in very audible impatience, and Gray exerted himself to overcome his dithering: “There is not more than I can carry, at any rate,” he said, and, to the Colonel, “I thank you, sir.”

  The Colonel grunted a vague dismissal, already absorbed once more in Lord Kergabet’s dispatches and entirely oblivious to Lieutenant Morvand’s parting salute.

  They collected Gray’s possessions—a small brass-bound trunk and a pair of valises—from the hard-packed ground before the Colonel’s tent. The trunk, containing books and other magickal impedimenta, Gray had carefully packed himself; the valises containing clothing, brushes, shaving kit, and other necessities of travel had been packed for him in great haste by Sophie with help from Daisy, as Gray had been almost on the point of climbing into his brother-in-law’s carriage for the journey to Brighton without them. Morvand, having attempted to lift the trunk, was glad to cede it to Gray and carry the valises; the attempt left him red-faced not, Gray judged, from physical exertion but from a sense of his own inadequacy.