But Joanna waved an impatient hand. “Never mind! You found him, I must suppose—where is he?”
“If I were capable of discovering his whereabouts from this distance,” said Sophie, “even very approximately, I should have said so long before this. But something has happened, Jo—something happened yesterday; it was yesterday?” Joanna nodded. “What it was, exactly, I cannot tell, but there is something else—someone else—woven in with Gray’s magick now, which was not there before. Like—”
“Like Lucia MacNeill’s spell for sharing her magick!” Joanna exclaimed.
“Yes,” said Sophie, “and . . . no—for Lucia’s magick was a welcome relief to me, and this . . .” She shivered, remembering the phantom weight on her chest, the dimming of her eyes—the sharp distress sizzling along the link between Gray’s magick and her own. “This was not.”
“Sophie—”
“I may be able to gain some better notion of where Gray is—in what direction, at any rate—once we are across the Manche,” Sophie continued. “And of course then it will be worth our while to begin trying a finding-spell—from here it would be useless, for the distance aside, open water is a dreadful dampener of finding-spells. And—”
“Sophie—”
“Whatever the Duc d’Orléans is about, it is gathering speed.” Sophie pushed back the bedclothes, swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and cautiously stood.
“But how can you know—”
Sophie could not explain, in rational terms, how she knew, and therefore did not try. “We have wasted too much time already in trying to persuade Lord Vaucourt and my father to act,” she said instead. “I do not intend to wait any longer. We know what is needed.”
* * *
A frankly enormous breakfast and a nearly scalding bath, undertaken at Joanna’s stern insistence, made Sophie feel much more herself, but produced no change in her opinion on the necessity for swift action.
“Then we shall act,” said Joanna simply. “But not by creeping away the moment the night is dark enough. You may be incapable of learning from past experience, but I am not; this expedition will be properly planned and provisioned, or we shall none of us have anything to do with it.”
Sophie sighed, but could scarcely argue with this eminently sensible pronouncement.
Their planning was made more difficult by Lady Maëlle’s solicitous care of Sophie, and by the fact that Lord Kergabet and Jenny plainly anticipated some attempt at escape; having largely left them to their own devices whilst they sorted and catalogued the voluminous results of their expedition to Oxford, and even during their furious interrogation of the diaries of Edward II, Jenny now seemed cheerfully determined to keep them under her eye, or busy about some other business, at all times.
They were forced at last to enlist the help of Katell, once more sworn to secrecy—all of which smote Sophie’s conscience to a degree which might have been insupportable, had there been less at stake—and to pool their coin for the hire of a carriage to take them to Oxford, which must be the first halt on their journey.
More delicate still was the problem of communicating their intentions to Lucia and Roland, as all written correspondence was liable to be opened and read—for their own safety, naturally. But the first thing necessary to their present mission was a sufficient complement of mages; and Roland and Lucia, surely, were among the least likely to reject their proposal out of hand.
Sophie had made a list of likely candidates at Merlin—headed, of course, by Gareth Evans-Hughes; she did not like to involve Master Alcuin, whose age and health militated against his participation in such an uncertain venture even as his skill and knowledge recommended it—but quailed inwardly at the thought of the time that would be spent, and perhaps wasted, in explanation and persuasion, all because the thing could not be done openly and officially, by the issuing of royal commands.
All the same, a small party of travellers could move more quickly than an army.
* * *
The next piece of news was that a fleet of ships flying the banner of the pretended Emperor had been seen departing Tours, sailing down the Loire towards the city of Naoned and, ultimately, the Breizhek coast—directly south and east of Karnag.
Sophie set aside her dignity, therefore, and wrote a pleading letter to her father, asking his permission to make a visit to the Palace, both to escape the four walls of Lord Kergabet’s house and to speak with him and with Lucia. His reply arrived sooner than she had dared hope—together with a carriage and a quartet of Royal Guardsmen for her safe conveyance thither.
“I hope you are not come with some idea of further badgering Lord Vaucourt with wild tales culled from the ravings of Edward the Dishonourable, my dear,” said His Majesty, when Sophie and he were settled on opposing sofas in his private study. “You know, I hope, that if there is any need for a rescue mission, you have only to tell me so?”
Things had gone so far beyond the need for Gray to be rescued that Sophie scarcely knew what to say to this. “I have no intention of importuning Lord Vaucourt, Father,” she said at last. Though only because I know very well it would do no one any good.
She had, it was true, had some hopes that her father might be a more receptive audience than Lord Vaucourt; but clearly they were not to be fulfilled.
“I have no reason to fear for my own health,” she said instead, “nor to believe that Gray is in more danger now than at any time since he left England.” He had, after all, been in grave danger all along, in one way or another. “My meeting with Lord Vaucourt was unrelated to either possibility, I assure you.”
His Majesty smiled. “I am glad of it.”
Sophie drew a deep breath. “I do have a favour to beg of you, however,” she said carefully. “If I may not—if I cannot be of any use to Maître de Vaucourt, or to Lord Kergabet, then I should wish to return to Oxford, and continue the work already begun there. If I may be permitted to go, I mean to ask Roland and Lucia to go with me, for I know that they are as weary of confinement as I am myself.”
The King considered her proposal at such length, and in such an imposing silence, that Sophie began to despair of success.
“The Lady Lucia has certainly made her displeasure plain,” he said at last, “and so, as a result, has your stepmother. I expect that Lucia should be glad of some practical employment, and Roland ought not to be moping about as he has been doing.” He regarded Sophie intently, as though searching her face for some sign of subterfuge; Sophie breathed very steadily, and prayed very hard to wise Minerva, and schooled her features into an expression of hopeful patience.
“Provided that you are adequately guarded,” said the King, “I suppose there can be no harm in it.” His lips twisted in a rueful not-quite-smile. “Indeed, on present evidence London would appear the greater danger, for the Lady Lucia at any rate. I must tell you, my dear—for I know you shall not repeat it—that I was astonished at her choosing to remain here, having been subjected to such a gross violation of the laws of hospitality. She certainly does not lack for pluck.”
Pluck, thought Sophie wonderingly, did not come even vaguely near to the truth of Lucia, but for present purposes, it would do well enough.
“I thank you, Father, very much indeed,” she said, rising from her sofa and bending to kiss his cheek. She straightened. “May I go now to deliver my invitation to Lucia and Roland?”
He waved her away with a kindly smile.
In the corridor outside her father’s private study, Sophie ran against Lord de Vaucourt—almost, but not quite, literally—striding purposefully in the opposite direction to herself, with a stack of dispatches in his arms.
It was the work of a moment to decide to listen at the door, and a journey of less than half a dozen steps to put her decision into practice, against both her conscience and her better judgement.
Alas, however, the door was very thick, and Ma�
�tre Vaucourt highly skilled in the working of warding-spells; and so all that came to her pricked ears, before the two circumstances combined to muffle all sound from within past distinguishing, was the single word Haudricourt.
It was enough.
CHAPTER XXXIII
In Which Sophie Breaks Her Word
Sophie ran Lucia to earth in the Fountain Court, reading an historical account of Edward Longshanks’s defeat at Berwick with great determination and very little success, and Roland in the music-room, irritably picking out a melancholy tune upon his mother’s pianoforte.
“I am come to dragoon you into another expedition to Oxford,” she said, with determined cheerfulness, for the benefit of anyone who might happen to overhear their conversation.
Then she herded them both into Lucia’s sitting-room, set the strongest ward she could upon it, and, over the ensuing hour, explained all that had been going forward in Grosvenor Square since their last meeting.
“And the answer—the method of renewing the spell-stones—it was in those old diaries?” said Lucia eagerly, when Sophie related the disappointing discovery that the defensive magick they had hoped to wield had almost certainly fallen prey to two centuries’ neglect.
Sophie blinked in surprise—but they were neither of them fools, and they must of course already have concluded that her request for those specific volumes had not been an arbitrary one.
“Yes,” she said. “And that is why I need your help—both of you. Not to go to Oxford—that is, Oxford first, but after that, by ship to Karnag.”
She described her conversations with Lord Kergabet, with Maître de Vaucourt, with her father; described the bizarre experience of feeling some other person’s magick invade her link with Gray, and her conviction that Orléans’s plan was coming to a head (Roland made to object to this reliance on gut instinct; Lucia said firmly, “If Sophie says it is so, then that is enough for me,” and he subsided); and concluded with her attempt at eavesdropping on the King and his chief mage, which, they all agreed, might plausibly be taken to support their theory as to Orléans’s intentions.
“And King Edward’s method requires half a dozen mages,” she said at last. “Gwendolen Pryce and I are two, but her talent is modest and she is largely untrained. You two, on the other hand—”
Sophie fell silent, gazing determinedly at her toes and chewing her lip in nervous anticipation. From the corner of her eye, she could perceive Roland and Lucia muttering together.
* * *
Lucia, who owed no allegiance to anyone on either side of this conflict, save Roland and her own friends, was very ready to be persuaded to quit the increasingly stifling confines of the Royal Palace for a highly unauthorized jaunt across the Manche to Breizh.
“And it is not as though we shall even be going near the fighting,” she pointed out, tracing possible routes on the map—an ordinary map of Britain, this time—which Sophie had prudently brought with her from Grosvenor Square. “Or . . . not very near, at any rate.”
“Not yet,” said Sophie. “But I think it is only a matter of time, if we go to Karnag, before the fighting comes to us.”
Roland, as Sophie had expected, was a more difficult undertaking; for him as for herself, what she proposed to do was a matter not only of genuine risk to life and limb but of defying both father and King—if the bones so tossed fell wrongly, in fact, a matter of treason.
But Roland had already been stinging from being made to stay safe at home when fell the dual blows of Derrien Robic’s attempt on Lucia’s life and successful taking of his own; he was, it seemed, feeling sufficiently useless, reckless, and unjustly stymied that his thoughts made more fertile soil for Sophie’s ideas than she had at all allowed herself to hope.
This is only the barest beginning, she reminded herself sternly, when euphoria threatened. And we may already be too late.
But Roland and Lucia were looking at her expectantly, and beginning to talk of logistics and supply, and she could not help a very small smile.
* * *
The chief difficulty to be overcome, Lucia recognised early on, was not that of slipping away from the escort of Royal Guardsmen told off to accompany them to Oxford—no very difficult matter, when one travelled in company with Sophie Marshall—but, rather, that of ensuring that the said guardsmen, once evaded, should neither come to harm as a result of Sophie’s deception nor immediately raise the alarm and thus put the expedition at risk.
The offer of a solution came, to Lucia’s surprise, from little Master Alcuin—Sophie’s former tutor, it transpired, and before that, Gray’s—who, though he did not look it, proved to have been a mage-officer in His Majesty’s army in his youth, and to be adept at spells of illusion and misdirection.
“If we could have a se’nnight’s start on whatever pursuit my father may choose to send after us,” said Sophie eagerly, “it would be enough, I think; we ought to be able to reach the coast in three days—I shall not tell you where, Magister; you understand?—and once we are aboard ship we shall not be quite so easily found.”
“A se’nnight,” the little don mused. There was a faraway look in his pale-blue eyes, and he tugged absent-mindedly at the end of his beard. “Yes, it might be done, I think, with a little ingenuity.”
There followed a moment’s thoughtful silence before he rose abruptly from his chair, muttering unintelligibly into his beard, and began searching his bookshelves. After some unsuccessful attempts to recapture his attention, Sophie rose also, and tugged Lucia up by the hand. “Come along,” she said. “We have other fish to fry.”
The rest of these fish were also Fellows of Merlin College—young men all, though none so young as Sophie herself—with the exception of one graduate student. The field was necessarily limited by its being still, for some weeks more, the Long Vacation; but the Marshalls’ particular friends, it appeared, were as fond of their books and their comfortable quarters as the Marshalls themselves.
Their first call was to Gareth Evans-Hughes, who had been of such material assistance on their previous visit to Oxford, and by whose gifts as a scry-mage Sophie set such store. They had not asked permission to wander about Merlin College; instead, disconcertingly, Sophie had simply caused the Porter on the gate to find them unremarkable, and they had walked in on the heels of a fair-headed young man in a blue coat (who took no more notice of them than the Porter had done) and made directly for Master Alcuin’s staircase. Lucia had never before seen this power of Sophie’s so clearly on display, and in a way it was more terrifying than any of her more dramatic magickal undertakings: the effortlessness of it, as though to make herself and Lucia essentially invisible were a matter of no more account than calling light!
“Gareth is not the most powerful of mages, in the ordinary way,” Sophie explained, low-voiced and in Gaelic, as they crossed a grassy quadrangle. “But he is sensible and clever, and has been one of our most loyal friends, and I hope that he may be persuaded to forgo common sense for the sake of that friendship, if for no other.”
“And,” said Lucia, with a sidelong look, “we may perhaps have need of a scry-mage?”
“Yes,” said Sophie. “That, also.”
* * *
If Gareth Evans-Hughes proved astonishingly persuadable, Guillaume d’Allaire, Reader in Magickal Theory, was not.
“This is your plan,” he said flatly, when Sophie had finished explaining herself. His pale eyebrows had vanished entirely under his untidy, straw-coloured curls. “This . . . this hodgepodge of legends and speculation. I must tell you, Magistra, I expected better of you.”
Lucia was struck speechless by the man’s effrontery, but Sophie—who had named him a friend!—merely pressed her lips together briefly before returning to the fray.
“It seems absurd to you, I know,” she said patiently, “and I cannot altogether disagree. But it is by no means the strangest defensive magick I have seen at firs
t hand; if it works as it ought to do, we shall be doing a great service to the kingdom, and perhaps saving a great many lives which must otherwise have been laid down in defence of it.”
Guillaume d’Allaire sighed. “And how, precisely, do I figure into your scheme?”
He looked reluctant and sounded put-upon, but for all that, there was a certain look in his slate-blue eyes which Lucia—her father’s apprentice in matters political since her childhood—had seen before. Unlike Sophie, therefore, she was entirely unsurprised when, at last, d’Allaire agreed to join their clandestine expedition to Karnag.
* * *
By the time their party set sail—by night, aboard a smuggler’s craft, from the unlovely fishing village of Bognor, upon the Sussex coast—it numbered fully a dozen persons: not only d’Allaire and Evans-Hughes but two more Fellows of Merlin, Henry Crowther and Séverin Proulx, and Gray’s former student Rhein Bevan—and (at their own insistence) Ceana MacGregor and Conall Barra MacNeill. It was thus far larger than Lucia considered either necessary or advisable, but she could not deny that the effect on everyone’s spirits of travelling with eight mages of some power (and it would not do to discount Gwendolen Pryce, either, she reminded herself) was a cheering one. Of course this was largely an illusion; in fact, it was Sophie’s magick which protected all of them at present, and the more persons Sophie must conceal, the greater the drain upon her magick and, thus, the greater the danger to them all.
The company of Royal Guardsmen dispatched to Oxford along with Sophie, they had left to the care of Master Alcuin. His promise to procure Sophie’s party a se’nnight’s start, to ensure that no harm came to any of the guardsmen, and to pay their tariff at the Dragon and Lion from the purse of coin Sophie had left with him for the purpose, was less reassuring than it ought to have been, from the circumstance of his having refused to tell any of them precisely how he meant to carry out the first of these undertakings.
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