“I trust Master Alcuin,” Sophie had said, very firmly, but Lucia had wondered whom, exactly, she had been hoping to persuade.
“Lucia?” said Roland, hushed and tentative, at her left shoulder.
Half turning from the taffrail, Lucia saw that Roland had brought her a shawl and was preparing to drape it round her shoulders.
“I thank you,” she said, low.
Roland ducked his head. “You were shivering.” He shifted into halting Gaelic to say, “Do you think that Sophie’s . . . plan has any chance to succeed, truly?”
Lucia did Roland the courtesy of considering this question seriously. “If I thought we had no chance at all,” she said, after a moment, “I should not have agreed to be a party to it. It seems . . . a bow drawn at a venture, I will concede, but I have seen Sophie do some very astonishing things.”
In the darkness, Roland nodded. “And so have I,” he said. “It is not that I lack faith in Sophie! It is only that . . . well.”
Lucia chuckled. “That her plan has all the hallmarks of madness, and is founded entirely upon instructions found in the diaries of a mad king whose funeral pyre was cold ashes centuries before any of us were born?”
“Well,” Roland repeated, scuffing at a knot in the decking with the toe of his boot. “Since you ask me, yes.”
“And that this Duke of Orléans has a very large army at his command, and we have not.”
“That, also.”
Roland shivered, and Lucia, greatly daring, unwound the shawl from the left half of her body and wrapped it, and her left arm, about his waist. He tensed briefly; then, perhaps deciding that the proprieties of his father’s court need not be scrupulously observed on the deck of a smuggler’s craft, drew the shawl up over his left shoulder and settled closer to Lucia at the rail.
“The last time I followed Sophie halfway across a kingdom,” she said pensively, “I had an army at my back—though only a very small one. I should have reached her much sooner without it, but I was glad of my little troop when we arrived.”
“Did you . . . did your father . . .” Roland’s voice trailed off uncertainly.
“I made off with a detachment of my father’s household troops without asking his leave, yes,” said Lucia, taking pity on him. “On the principle of its being easier to beg his pardon than to persuade him. He was very angry with me, I am told, but he had regained his temper by the time we next met face-to-face, and only subjected me to a detailed and scathing critique of my conduct—from a military perspective, you understand.”
Roland produced a disbelieving chuckle.
“Should you think less of me,” he said, looking resolutely away from her, “if I confessed to being a little afraid of your father?”
“If closer acquaintance does not alter your opinion,” said Lucia, “I shall be very much surprised.”
And if Duncan is not frightened of him, how on earth should you be?
“My father will say I ought to have stopped her,” Roland continued unhappily. “As though I could.”
“Roland, your father himself tried to stop Sophie from leaving England, and could not; three years ago, he attempted to stop her from remaining in Din Edin, and could not do that either. And he is not only her father but the King of Britain! You surely do not imagine that he expects more of you than he can accomplish himself?”
Roland shrugged, his shoulders hunching.
“Roland.” Lucia inched closer, so that they were pressed together from shoulder to hip, and spoke in Latin, near his ear: “You may not have seen your father’s face—or perhaps you may not remember it—after our adventure in the maze, when he was frightened for you, and declared himself in my debt; but I saw it, and I swear to you on the bones of my mother that you are as much beloved as your sister.”
He did not speak, nor turn to look at her, but his stiff posture gradually relaxed, and they stood shoulder to shoulder at the taffrail until the sun began to warm the eastern horizon.
* * *
Breakfast was followed by a council of war to discuss the latest intelligence—not so very recent now, but better than none at all.
“If it were only the troop-ships moving down the Loire,” said Lucia, “that would be one thing; he might only be aiming at Naoned, which would be perfectly rational—a bid to control the provincial seat, if I understand correctly, and the whole of the river from Orléans down to the sea.” She peered at the map, head tilted, and measured the distance with her spread fingers from the Loire to Naoned. “But he has a force at Klison already, which is far better placed to besiege Naoned.”
“Exactly,” said Joanna. “If the reports received thus far are accurate, there are more than enough men at Klison to hold it and march on Naoned besides. But if he can sail past Naoned—”
“My uncle’s troops will stop him if they can,” said Sophie loyally.
Roland glanced sidewise at her. “Of course they will,” he said, “but we must allow for the possibility that they cannot—as the garrisons at Klison and elsewhere could not.”
CHAPTER XXXIV
In Which Edward the Dishonourable Disappoints, and Gray Reflects upon the Recent Past
Sophie’s party were landed at dawn on a wide-curved beach on the Bay of Kiberon, almost due south of Karnag. They splashed through the surf barefoot, with trouser-legs rolled and skirts tucked up, and collapsed all up and down the empty shingle, with bag and baggage, to wait for the sun to rise.
Then, having set their clothing to rights as best they could, they reassembled themselves as a party of travellers visiting the sights and the holy places of Breizh, located the road to Karnag, and walked the two miles to the village of Le Ménec, on the far side thereof, and its one inn, the Ship at Rest.
The innkeeper beamed when Sophie and Joanna spoke to her in Brezhoneg. Yes, she had good, soft beds to offer them—they should find the rooms small, but bright and clean, never fear!—but such a large party, she hoped they should not object to share their rooms?—no, there had been no Orléanais soldiers hereabouts, no soldiers at all in fact, and glad enough she was of it, for there is nothing like a troop of soldiers for eating a person out of house and home! Well, if there was to be war, she only hoped that whichever side was fated to win it might do so quickly, and not drag the frontier to and fro a dozen times, to the harassment (and worse) of ordinary folk on both sides of it.
Joanna and Sophie looked at one another and refrained from translating this last for the others.
That evening, for the first time, Sophie’s finding-spell produced the faintest tug of awareness of Gray’s location—almost due south, at the very edge of her perceptive range—and she went to bed in good spirits, for all that the Duke of Orléans was advancing on their position, also, and from two directions at once.
After breakfast the next morning, they trooped out of the inn-yard and through the tiny hamlet of Le Ménec. All but Joanna and the two Alban guards were bleary-eyed and yawning; Sophie herself had scarcely slept.
The bleary eyes opened wide when at length they reached their goal, and stood at the westward end of a vast field planted with massive stones, gazing east along the long, almost mathematically straight rows at the rising sun.
“Apollo, Pan, and Hecate!” breathed Bevan.
Sophie felt very much the same herself; it was one thing to know of the existence of this ancient wonder, and another thing entirely to stand in its presence, feeling the vast aetheric echoes of its past.
“But there are hundreds of stones,” said Joanna, her voice oddly strangled. “Thousands. How are we to know which of them are important to the spell?”
“Hush, Jo,” said Sophie absently. She closed her eyes and pressed her palms flat over her ears, the better to hear the thing just beginning to tug at the edge of her perception.
Was this what had kept her awake last night? It seemed the most likely explana
tion. And if the sounds were not aural but aetheric, then that would explain both Joanna’s easy energy and her own ill temper, for Joanna might very well have slept like a top.
Sophie moved through the rows of stones with her eyes and ears still stopped, hearing their outlines in her mind as faint, shimmering shapes of dull crimson—not radiating magick, but . . . soaking it in; and there, there—
“That one,” she said, pointing at the stone to her immediate left, which shimmered sluggishly in a shade of scarlet so intense that it hurt her ears. “There are six, and that is the first.”
A line of . . . something . . . ran between that first stone and the next in the sequence, faint and stuttering but unmistakably there. It had a scent like wet limestone and old blood and the air after lightning, and Sophie was growing dizzy with the strangeness of it, which at the same time did not feel nearly so strange as it ought.
There had been rain in the night, and the turf beneath her feet was soft and yielding.
She followed the tugging trail to the next stone—laid both palms against its rough-smooth surface—felt something buzz distantly under her hands and beneath her feet.
It was not like riding the blue-fire magick of Ailpín Drostan’s ancient spell-net—to begin with, it was still perfectly clear to her where her own body ended and the rest of the world began—but perhaps, perhaps, the long-dead mage-queen who devised this spell had drawn inspiration from Alba.
As the map had suggested, there were six scarlet stones among the dull crimson ones, straggling vaguely southeastward—in, that is, the approximate direction of Klison, the first link in the chain. Upon opening her eyes, Sophie discovered that each now had a human attendant.
“Yes,” she called, cupping her hands to either side of her face to amplify her voice. “One mage to every stone.”
There was a brief scuffle just out of sight amongst the stones.
“Do you mean to begin at once?” d’Allaire called back, from halfway along the chain.
“Have you some better notion?” This from Gareth, farther off still. “We have not come all this way for a picnic luncheon.”
Sophie rolled her eyes (for none of them could see her, after all), then stood very straight and drew a deep breath, for optimal volume. “Who has the first stone?”
“I have,” called Lucia MacNeill.
“Then you must begin,” said Sophie. “Jo, where are you?”
Joanna emerged from beyond the northernmost row of stones, trotted towards Sophie, and said, “Here.”
“Will you go back to Lucia now,” said Sophie, lowering her voice, “and give the signal to Gareth when she has finished, and so on? I did not think the keystones would be so far apart.”
Joanna nodded eagerly, and trotted away.
And now there was nothing to do but wait in silence for Lucia—then Gareth, then d’Allaire, then Roland, then Bevan—to take their turns, so that she might cap the spell. And then we shall have nothing left to do but hope we have succeeded.
She could hear nothing, and could see very little, of how the others went on, but that did not stop her from imagining each of them in turn pricking one finger with a pen-knife or paper-knife, smearing a drop of blood on the stone, and speaking the invocation, so that by the time her own turn came, every muscle ached with tension.
The little knife was so sharp that she did not feel the sting of the wound until her thumb was pressed against the stone’s rough face, and then she nearly jerked it away in surprise at the sudden sensation of pulling.
“O gods great and small,” she recited, “O gods above and gods below, gods who made the bones and flesh of my kingdom and made men of bone and flesh and blood to walk upon its beloved soil, protect us. O gods who bring the seasons in their proper time, protect us. O gods who gave magick to mankind, defend us. O gods who wear many guises, defend us. With my blood, with my magick, for the sake of my kingdom and all who dwell there, be renewed. Do ut des.”
She brought her hand away from the stone, staring at the smear of blood where her thumb had been.
She closed her eyes, stopped her ears, reached for her magick—and found everything precisely as it had been before.
Exhaustion and disappointment rolled heavily over her, and she turned her back to the stone and sagged against it.
* * *
“We must have done something wrongly,” Sophie sighed, as they made their dispirited way back to the inn. “Perhaps the spell truly cannot be worked except ‘at the turning of the year,’ and we ought to have waited for the Equinox—”
“And the arrival of enemy troops?” said Joanna. “If that is so, then there is nothing to be done about it, Sophie.”
“Or perhaps the words of the invocation—perhaps I was not careful enough in transcribing it—did I misunderstand Edward’s instructions? Not that they were instructions, as such—”
“Perhaps at a different time of day,” said Henry Crowther, clapping her encouragingly upon the shoulder. “Noon, perhaps. Or midnight? Some spells are more efficacious at midnight, you know, or can be worked only then . . .”
It was kindly meant, but surely if the time of day had been a vital component of the spell, the diary must have said so? Sophie sighed and managed a smile at Crowther.
“I move we make another attempt after dinner,” said d’Allaire.
“Seconded!” said Bevan. “All in favour of dinner?”
There was a good-naturedly derisive chorus of Ayes.
* * *
They returned to the stones towards dusk, some of their confidence restored by the inn’s simple but excellent dinner, and Evans-Hughes, d’Allaire, Crowther, Proulx, Bevan, and Sophie took up positions at the six stones. At first, either the alteration in the choice and sequence of mages or the time of day appeared to be making the difference, for Sophie, at the end of the chain, could feel the stones farther upstream gathering in magick and beginning to radiate it outwards, as they had not done before. But the momentum died with Bevan, and when Sophie herself nicked her thumb and spoke the invocation, it was with the sinking feeling that nothing she now did, or did not do, would have the slightest effect upon the outcome.
Weary and dispirited, they collected themselves, called a flock of magelights, and began to make their way back to the inn.
“Sophie,” said Evans-Hughes quietly, falling into step beside her as they turned into the inn-yard, “may I see the diary?”
“Of course,” said Sophie. “I shall fetch it down for you.”
The next two hours were spent by Gareth in close study of Edward II’s diary, and by Sophie and Gwendolen in attempting to repair the damage inflicted upon everyone’s clothing by most of a day spent tramping about what was essentially a muddy field.
Sophie was mending a rent in Lucia’s petticoat, and Gwendolen progressing steadily through a heap of stockings in want of darning, when there came a knock at the door of Sophie and Lucia’s bedchamber.
“The answer is in the names,” said Gareth, quite without preamble, the moment Gwendolen opened the door. “The names of the mages. Edward did not think to be more explicit, I suppose, because he thought it clear enough. Look—” He thrust the diary almost under Sophie’s nose, and Sophie, perforce, did look. His broad forefinger touched each name as he spoke it, moving along the line of cramped, faded script; did he hear in his mind’s ear the voice of a king five centuries dead? “Arzhur of Dinan. Guillaume Forestier of Bayeux. Guy d’Ernée. Melyor Penrose of Lamorna. Richard of Lincoln, called Blythe. And Edward himself, of course. Do you see?”
Sophie did not see, at first. She read the names over again, however, and a pattern began to emerge. A Breizhek name, then two which were more Français than English; Bayeux was in Normandie, of course, and Ernée . . . yes, in Maine. A Kernowek name, and a very English one, from an English town. But—
She shook her head. “I thought I s
aw the pattern,” she said, “but I was mistaken; there is a second English mage, here”—she tapped Edward’s name—“where I expected a Cymric one.”
“Oh, but Sophie, you forget your history,” said Gareth reproachfully, and Gwendolen exclaimed, “Of course! Edward of Caernarfon!”
“Of . . . ? Oh!” Yes, Edward Longshanks’s fourth son had been born in Caernarfon Castle. But did that make him, this long-dead Plantagenet king, a man of Cymru? Surely not—or did it?
It was an absurd method; it was dreadfully impractical; it was . . .
It was, thought Sophie with an inward sigh, just exactly the sort of fail-safe which a mage might conceive of, in an attempt to control some very powerful working otherwise apt to grow dangerously out of hand.
She revolved the matter in her head, surveying the resources at her command. Two English mages—Roland and Crowther—and three Cymric ones—Gareth, Bevan, and Gwendolen. Lucia, whose magick she had been relying upon as the most powerful after her own, was suddenly removed from the equation altogether. Guillaume d’Allaire was Normand and Séverin Proulx Mainois, entirely by luck, and she herself was Breizhek enough for this purpose, surely?
But the pattern had a gap in the shape of Melyor Penrose of Lamorna, Edward’s Kernowek mage, and how was Sophie to fill it?
Had she dragged all these men and women across the Manche—and into something very like treason—to no good purpose, after all? Minerva, Lady of Wisdom, how am I to untangle this knot?
Before settling down to sleep, she worked the usual finding-spell, ignoring—or attempting to ignore—Lucia’s silent sympathetic gaze. To her surprise, the result this time was strong and immediate: Gray had grown closer since yesterday, much closer, and the direction of the pull had altered.
If Gray is coming here . . .
Was Gray, whose parents were English but who had been born at Glascoombe, near Dowr Carrek, sufficiently a man of Kernow to stand in the place of Melyor Penrose of Lamorna?
A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel) Page 44
