A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel)

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

* * *

  The small fleet of ships bearing the second sorcerer-century—such as it was—down the river Loire and across the Bay of Kiberon had sailed all day and all night, whenever possible, to cover the distance more quickly. When they came in sight of the long, shallow curve of the beach where they were to go ashore—standing afar off, to be on the safe side, for though the passengers might trust to the Emperor’s spells of concealment, the crew did not—the sun was hanging low in the western sky, and Gray watched as the crew prepared to lower the boats over the side of the Coulèvre with a strange tight thrumming in his chest.

  All through the journey, the signs had been there which told him that he was growing nearer to Sophie (or she to him). He had done his best not to dwell on what this must mean, for knowing Sophie to be safe and well and, above all, out of danger from Orléans’s armies had been a comfort to him, but so unmistakable were the sensations of proximity now that there was no denying it: She had, in fact, somehow put herself directly in their path. Why should she do so? And, by all the gods, how had she managed it?

  This is British soil we are landing on, he reminded himself; it is she who has every right to be here, and Orléans’s troops who have not.

  In the ordinary way, there was no reason why Sophie should not come to Breizh whenever she liked. But nothing about the present circumstances was ordinary, and so . . .

  So, then: Sophie was very near. Sophie had given her father her word not to attempt to follow Gray to Normandie, and her presence in Breizh certainly violated the spirit, if not the letter, of that promise. Sophie could be impetuous, true, but she would not lightly break her word to her father.

  Certainly there were few enough things he could trust at present, and few enough people. The other mages treated Gray with a more or less friendly condescension, except when actually engaged in some manner of drill or rehearsal of joint manoeuvres. Only twice—in silent shared horror on the occasion of Orléans’s original announcement of his campaign plan, and poorly concealed relief at its subsequent revision from hingeing on wholesale slaughter to making use of spells for deep sleep, immobility, and concealment—had any real fellow-feeling subsisted between the others and himself. How odd that after half a day’s acquaintance he had been prepared to trust Ollivier and Lécuyer with his life, yet here . . .

  “Marais!” Bertrand jostled Gray’s shoulder. “T’es encore dans la lune, hein? Allons, on descend.”

  Gray mumbled an apology for his inattention, and followed Bertrand and Girard over the starboard rail and into the next boat.

  * * *

  Two young crewmen rowed in near silence by the faint light of magelight lanterns. Crammed in beside Gray in the stern of the boat, Girard tilted up his head and murmured, “What do you suppose the Emperor wants with this gods-forsaken place?”

  Gray liked Girard well enough, most of the time—he was not much given to cruelty, and had once helped Gray rescue one of the kitchen-maids from the unwanted attentions of a drunken comrade—but confiding in him was quite impossible. And, in any case, what did Gray know? Take and hold the keystones at Karnag, Orléans had said; though it was more than any of the others—save, presumably, their commander—had been told, it did not answer the questions why, or how, or to what purpose.

  “I suppose that we shall be told what his purpose is when he deems it necessary,” said Gray, therefore—but not reprovingly. Girard was very young, and it was perfectly natural to be curious, and even apprehensive, in the circumstances.

  Girard sighed. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose so.”

  He subsided, leaning gently against Gray’s arm and shoulder, and Gray sank back into thought.

  When word had come that the sorcerer-century was to sail from Orléans in three days’ time, Gray had come near to pleading with Amelia to allow Ollivier and Lécuyer to engineer her escape, but to no avail, for she refused categorically to abandon her beloved papa. Gray could appreciate the integrity of her position—but the problem of the reserve mages’ mysterious compulsion, which ebbed and flowed with the strength of their connexion to the field-mages, was a more complex task even than he had anticipated, and a solution unlikely to materialise in the time remaining to him. He bore Amelia’s recriminations on this point without protest but equally without concession, until at last she said, “Even if I were to leave Papa, what would become of me then? I followed him here because, for all his faults, he loved me and needed me; but now he is fallen under the Emperor’s spell, and I have nowhere else to go—no one else to go to.”

  “How can you say so?” Gray exclaimed. “Your sisters and your cousin Maëlle were half-sick with worry for you, when last I saw them in London, and dreading what might have befallen you in Taylor’s company. Why else should I so readily promise to help you?”

  Amelia blinked at him, tears beading on her long lashes, and caught back an emerging sob. “Truly?” she said, in a very small voice.

  “Of course,” said Gray, nonplussed.

  Amelia sat down heavily—and with an uncharacteristic lack of grace—on the lip of the fountain. “But why?” she demanded. “Why should they take me in, any of them? I have been rude to Joanna, and cruel to Sophie—I am a burden to Lady Maëlle, and likely to remain so—”

  “I do not pretend to understand even Sophie, let alone Joanna or Lady Maëlle,” said Gray, by now rather desperate to stem this tide of self-recrimination, “but love need not be rational. Your sisters, I dare say, remember a time when you were better friends; and as for Lady Maëlle . . . well, she has no children of her own . . .”

  “And—and she would take me back, after . . . all of this?” An expressive wave of her hands indicated their surroundings.

  “I have not the slightest doubt of it,” said Gray truthfully.

  Gray had seen many things, but he would not soon forget the sight of Miss Amelia Callender, erstwhile chatelaine of Callender Hall, weeping into her hands in a moonlit courtyard in Orléans. He reflected, not for the first time, that nearly all of Amelia’s behaviour in Grosvenor Square, and most of Sophie’s and Joanna’s, could be explained very tidily as a means of self-defence—each attempting to wound the other before she could be fatally wounded herself.

  The storm of weeping was intense, but mercifully brief; and when its aftermath had been assuaged by means of first Amelia’s own handkerchief, then Gray’s, she had sat up straight on the fountain’s edge, folded her hands in her lap, and said quietly, “Very well, Mr. Marshall—Gray. I am at your disposal.”

  Ollivier had smuggled her out of the castle courtyard the following evening, dressed in yet another purloined infantryman’s uniform, and by now she might already be safely over the Mainois border, or so Gray hoped.

  * * *

  The boats deposited their passengers on the fine shingle, then at once put out again towards the Coulèvre, now nearly invisible in the gathering dusk. The sorcerer-century formed up into small, relatively inconspicuous groups for the brief march inland—the stone-fields of Karnag were only a few miles distant—and Gray, one of very few speakers of Brezhoneg present, found himself in the first group to depart, together with Bertrand, Guillemeau, Dolet, and Decurion Rousseau’s particular crony, Antoine Martel.

  The high, sweet thrum of Sophie’s magick sang louder and louder in his blood as they climbed up from the beach and strode along the road. The strength and the nearness of it both comforted and alarmed him: Sophie is here! sang one part of his mind, triumphant, joyful, whilst another gibbered, Sophie is in terrible danger!

  As the link between his magick and Sophie’s tugged him in one direction, his links with the mages of the reserves in Orléans tugged resolutely the other way—each in itself a small and fragile thing, but collectively a weight upon his spirits.

  For his own sanity, he had still to avoid recalling too closely the process of forging those links. What Rousseau and Girard had described as mildly unpleasant, on the orde
r of a mild headache or a case of indigestion, Gray—whether because of his existing link to Sophie or because of his violent, if unexpressed, objection to Orléans’s modus operandi—had experienced as excruciating pain. He had lost consciousness only briefly (or so he was afterwards assured), but the feeling of disorientation, the skin-crawling sensation of something wrong, had taken days to fade, and even then had not vanished but merely subsided.

  Worse than all of this was knowing what the links were for. Talk amongst the sorcerer-century confirmed Amelia’s claim that nothing in the linking-spell prevented a reserve-mage’s magick from being entirely drained, should the field-mage’s need be sufficiently great. Some drew confidence from this notion; a few had confessed, though quietly and obliquely, that the implications troubled them; but the majority expressed no opinion in either direction. Did they simply take the reserves for granted as insurance against difficulty or disaster, or did they harbour objections which they were too afraid to voice even to one another?

  And if, as it was said, only Orléans himself could forge those links between a mage of the sorcerer-century and his reserves, was the reverse also true? Must Gray now pass the rest of his days with half a dozen strangers’ magicks uncomfortably twisted up with his own—and, worse, with Sophie’s?

  Gray wrenched his thoughts away from this distressing tangent, focusing as narrowly as he was able upon the here and now: the sounds and scents of the night air, already hinting at autumn’s chill as the Equinox approached; his companions’ footfalls, their quiet voices, all about him; the silver glint of moonlight on Martel’s dark hair, on the buttons of Bertrand’s coat; the precise spot where his own boot was rubbing a blister on his left heel.

  When he was calm again, within as well as without, he allowed himself to consider once more how to go on from here. The easiest and least risky choice was to slip away once the first few groups of men had reached the rendezvous point between Karnag and Le Ménec and settled in for the night; if he volunteered to take the first watch, then he should have only one sentry to subdue or outwit, rather than two. By awaiting the next morning’s promised briefing, on the other hand, he should have more precise intelligence to carry to Sophie, or to the nearest British garrison, if he should stumble across the latter before finding the former. But what if that small delay should make the difference in his ability to escape, or if it should mean that the intelligence came too late to do any good?

  And what in Hades does it mean, that Sophie is here?

  CHAPTER XXXV

  In Which Gray Seizes His Opportunity

  The following morning, the whole of the party followed up their breakfast with a largely undirected ramble about Le Ménec, so that they might speak more freely without setting wards. They paused for a quarter-hour’s rest in a coppice-wood on the far side of the stone-fields, and at Sophie’s insistence she, Gareth, and Lucia worked yet another set of finding-spells. This time, they were pulled so strongly towards Gray that Sophie had to be physically restrained from following her finding at once.

  “He may not be alone, or free,” Lucia pointed out reasonably. “He went into the Duchies to investigate this Imperator Gallia, as well as to search for your sister; we cannot know what schemes he may have in train, and we should do no one any good by interrupting them.”

  Sophie, now resting with her back against the trunk of a tree, bounced one knee in suppressed frustration. “I can go to him without being seen,” she said. “I have done such things before, as you may remember”—here a pointed look at Lucia, as though Lucia might perhaps have failed to remark how entirely their journey from London to Karnag had depended on Sophie’s particular talents—“and if Gray is in need of rescuing—”

  “If he were in need of rescuing,” said Joanna, “should you not have known it already, now he is so nearby?”

  “Well,” said Sophie, looking at her feet. “Yes, very probably I should. But—”

  “And if you can find him,” Joanna continued, “then he ought also to be able to find you? He must know already that you are here, just as you have known for some time that he was travelling towards us?”

  “Yes,” said Sophie. “But—”

  For a long moment the sisters faced one another in silence, conversing, it appeared, in some language made up entirely of pointed looks.

  At last the contest, whatever its precise nature, was resolved in Joanna’s favour; Sophie turned away, clasping her elbows and curling in her shoulders, and said, “Very well.”

  Joanna sighed, looking not at all satisfied with her victory.

  “I know how eager you must be to see Gray, Sophie,” said Lucia, clasping her shoulder. “I should be frantic, in your place. But if he is not in any danger . . .”

  “It is not only that,” said Sophie.

  Lucia mentally chalked up a point to herself, for provoking her friend into speech. It is a fact of human nature, her father was fond of saying, that we are loath to let a wrong statement go unchallenged.

  “This is what Gareth and I wished to explain,” said Sophie, “here, away from the inn and whoever else may be in it. We need a Kernowek mage, in order to renew the magick of the stones; and Gray is . . . the nearest available approximation.”

  “Why?” said d’Allaire blankly.

  “Because he was born in Kernow,” said Sophie. She frowned at him.

  “Not—” d’Allaire scrubbed a hand across the back of his neck. “I meant—why do we need a mage from Kernow?”

  “The diary,” said Gareth. His sidewise glance at Sophie held some exasperation; he himself, Lucia suspected, would have begun at the beginning. “Edward the Second was born in Cymru, and when he came to Karnag to replenish the magick his father had neglected, he brought with him mages from each of Britain’s other provinces. If Sophie and I are correct, we shall not succeed unless we do the same.”

  “What an odd requirement!” said Crowther. “You are certain of this, are you? It seems . . .”

  “We can be certain that both of our previous attempts failed,” said Evans-Hughes.

  “And the first, I think, failed almost straight away,” said Sophie, “but the second . . . the magick was settling in the stones, as it ought to do, until we reached Bevan’s stone, and then the . . . the flow reversed itself. Which suits Gareth’s theory perfectly, because Gareth had the first stone in the chain, and so you, Rhein, represented a doubling-back to Cymru.”

  Bevan nodded thoughtfully.

  “I agree with Lucia and Joanna, that we ought to wait for Marshall to seek us out,” said Roland. “In case he may be occupied with something which ought not to be interrupted. But if you had rather not wait, Sophie, could you not use a drawing-spell to bring him here? He is very near now, you said?”

  “Very near,” Sophie agreed, “and to the south. Roland, have you ever felt a drawing-spell? Or seen one?”

  “No,” said Roland, a little defensive. “It is not a very common magick.”

  “At this distance,” said Sophie, “it would be very difficult to resist, and quite impossible to explain.”

  “A last resort, then,” said d’Allaire, with a wry smile.

  The light drizzle which had begun whilst they were debating Evans-Hughes’s theory was now thickening into rain of the sort which demanded to be taken notice of.

  “If our plan at present is to wait quietly for Marshall to grace us with his presence,” said Crowther plaintively, “let us at least wait within doors, and out of the damp.”

  * * *

  The slow and stealthy reassembly of the Emperor’s troops in a fallow field a few hundred yards from the stones at Le Ménec was accomplished a little before midnight; and when the tents had all been pitched, the latrines and fire-pits dug, and the ring of concealment-spells, wards, and shielding-spells set in place, the sorcerer-century retired to its bedrolls. From the tent he shared with Bertrand and Girard, Gray could hea
r the occasional low murmur of voices from the men standing the first watch, the chirping of crickets, the wind singing through the lines of stones. Soon Girard and Bertrand were snoring to either side of him; Gray lay long awake, however, contemplating the bizarre turn his life had lately taken.

  By the time the watch changed, he had dozed and awoken several times, and was forced to concede that Morpheus had chosen not to favour him with restful sleep tonight. Very well, then; he was not likely to find anything more like privacy than this. He closed his eyes, settled his thoughts as best he could, then reached deep for his magick and, holding in his mind’s eye an image of Sophie’s face, sent it out on the quiet words of a finding-spell: O amisse reperiaris! Verba oris mei ad te eant. Remitte ea ut me ad te adducant.

  The returning flow of magick was immediate and almost overwhelming—Sophie was very near now, and he had failed to compensate for the proximity of her magick. He had not been aware of any ebbing of his own power, but now it strained towards hers, clamouring in tandem with the finding-spell to pull him up out of his bedroll and southward towards the village proper. He could follow it—could nudge aside the tent-flaps and crawl out from under the canvas, tug on his boots and creep between the tents and out of the camp—but tomorrow, tomorrow he should discover what Orléans was about with this manoeuvre, and then he should not have spent all this time and effort to no purpose.

  Tomorrow.

  * * *

  He rose at dawn having slept scarcely at all, performed his morning ablutions, fell in with the others, and waited for their commanding officer to speak. Beyond their wards and shields, and beyond the woods ringing the field in which they had pitched their camp, some heavy cart or waggon rumbled past along the road from Le Ménec. The Centurion, so called, was ordinarily a man of terse orders and brief but rousing extempore speeches; when instead he drew from his uniform coat several folded pages of writing-paper, a murmur passed through the ranks of mages. It subsided as he began to speak, but rose again, baffled, when he said, “Once we have taken possession of the stone-fields of Karnag, our empire will hold the reins of a great and ancient magick, older by far than the Kingdom of Britain from whose grasp we must reclaim the remaining lands of Gallia Romana.