Chantress Alchemy (28 page)

He did? “You never said so.”

He shrugged. “What was the point, when I had no power to show for it? A terrible injustice, I always thought, that the male line was excluded from magic. But I shall redress that soon enough.”

Lying on the floor, my head by my knees, I remembered something else that Sybil had said. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I have to give the power willingly, that’s what the old lore says. And that I will never do.”

“But you already have.” His eyes glowed in triumph. “You helped make the elixir of your own free will. Your moments of struggle came too late; the transformation was already taking place. The proof lies before you: the elixir exists. It need only ripen for another minute, and then I will claim your magic for myself.”

Sir Isaac circled my prone body, the sharp tips of his boots coming within inches of my face. When he held the talisman before me, it multiplied before my eyes.

“It is an effective little ball, you must admit,” he mused. “Yet even with it, my success was far from assured. I thought I would never be able to lure you down here, or near any laboratory good enough to do the necessary work. Despite all the Council’s arguments, the King insisted you must be allowed to remain in Norfolk if you wished, that he had granted you safe haven there. And I feared that if I told him you were crucial to the Great Work, he might insist on seeing the papers for himself—and then Nat and Penebrygg and the others would begin to ask awkward questions.” He gave me another one of his manic smiles. “But finally I hit on the idea of stealing the crucible, and that worked like a charm. The King had to bring you here then—and it meant, too, that he would not let you leave, even when you wanted to.”

I stared up at him in dizzy disbelief. “You stole the crucible?”

“I did. And I spoiled the moonbriar seeds, too, although I did that much earlier, in case you came to Court before I was ready for you.” He spoke with evident pride in his own ingenuity. “Later I planted the crucible in Nat’s room. You all thought I was sleeping off the poison. But I’d done the poisoning myself—a much smaller dose than it looked. Once everyone left me, I took my chance to rid myself of Nat. Too clever, that boy.”

“And the King?”

Sir Isaac shrugged. “He got in my way. But never mind that now. The time has come.” Hugging the crucible close, he leaned over me, reaching for my hand. “The elixir is ready. All that remains is for us both to dip our fingers into it, and then your magic will flow to me.”

“That will never happen.” With a strength born of panic, I surged up from the floor.

“Oh, no you don’t!” He lashed out with the talisman. It glinted across my skin, and the world heaved under my feet again. I fell back, gasping, against the table. As the sickness washed over me, bottles smashed against the floor.

Bottles . . . tiny bottles . . .

He lunged for me just as my fingers found the right one: aqua fortis.

“Don’t you dare!” he shouted.

I hurled the bottle at him. It broke against the crucible, spurting acid onto Sir Isaac’s hand, the hand that held the talisman. Sir Isaac screamed—as much from rage as pain, it seemed, for when the acid hit the talisman, it vanished into smoke.

The moment it was gone, music flooded the world. With joy and relief and awe, I heard Wild Magic swirling around me, every note luminous and clear: the busy melodies of the potions in their bottles, the crackling cadence of the fire, the hypnotic canticle of the blue elixir itself. And wrapping around all these songs, running under them and over them and through them, I heard the toll of the River Thames outside the open windows—old London River, now at high tide.

Yet even as I opened myself up to the music, Sir Isaac’s hand locked around my wrist. He was bigger than I, and stronger than I, and half-mad with the desire for power. Even without the talisman, he could win, and he knew it.

But I knew my own strength now. I drew on the power that pulsed in the Wild Magic around me; I drew on the power I’d found in myself. And I sang.

Back in Norfolk, I hadn’t fully trusted myself. I’d usually gone for what was safe and easy. Now I trusted my deepest instincts, and the song I chose was the most powerful I could hear: a song that called upon the great river to defend me from my enemies.

It was a wild and fathomless music, as ancient as the river itself. As it surged through me, the river and I gained strength from each other.

But Sir Isaac, too, had found a new strength: the strength of desperation. Even as I sang, he forced my hand down toward the elixir. Our locked fingers neared the surface.

I gathered everything I had, calling the river to me . . .

. . . and it came, slamming through the walls and ceiling, gushing through the broken stone. Mighty and purposeful, it cleaved together like a living thing, a towering wave of water that barreled straight for Sir Isaac and me.

Wood splintered, stones rumbled, pots smashed on the floor. Then there was only the roar of the river itself—the roar and the splash and the muck and the brine—as the wave closed over us.

I thought at first it would drown us both, but it sluiced between our joined hands, knocking me aside. It wanted only one of us. As I held on to an iron ring in the wall, the wave washed over Sir Isaac, crucible and all, and dragged him back to the riverbed.

Choking and spluttering, my garments drenched, I rushed to the broken walls and saw the Thames sink back between its banks in the pale light of dawn. The whole river shuddered, as if thrashing in its sleep. And then the Thames was itself again, flowing strong to the sea, with only the broken walls and the wet trails on the floor to show it had ever done anything else.

†    †    †

It felt like an age, but might merely have been a minute, before I heard my name.

“Lucy!”

“Nat?” Still in shock, I turned and saw a crack in the door, and Nat’s aghast face above it. Behind him crowded the King, Penebrygg, Sir Samuel, Gabriel, and the guard named Potts, all gazing at me and the shattered wall in stunned silence.

I straightened my spine. “You saw?” I said.

“We saw.” Reaching through the broken wood, Nat threw the deadbolt, lifted the bar, and shoved the battered door open. There was a small cut on his cheek, and a yellowing bruise on his jaw, but otherwise, he had no injuries. “Are you all right? I thought—”

He stopped short, a pained look in his eyes. The others filed out behind him, still watching me in silence. They were all keeping their distance. And why not? They had just seen me call up a wall of water and destroy one of their own.

“I had to do it,” I said. “He wasn’t making the Philosopher’s Stone—”

“We know,” the King said. “Nat showed us the book. We were already growing anxious by then. We could not hear what you were saying, but you sounded distressed.”

I turned to Nat with a questioning look. “The book?”

“It’s all in here.” Nat held up a palm-size volume. “In Gabriel’s writing.”

“Gabriel?” I was instantly on my guard. Was he part of the plot too?

“I didn’t know.” Gabriel’s brown eyes pleaded with me to believe him. “I merely copied what I saw. I didn’t mean to hurt you, I promise.”

I heard the ring of truth in his voice, and what’s more, a note of fear.
He’s afraid of me
, I realized. They were all at least a little afraid.

Except, perhaps, for Nat. He gave Gabriel a hard look. “Yes. We’ve had it out with him, and it seems he was only copying
from Sir Isaac’s papers. And from what I’ve seen of his attempts at translation, he didn’t understand a word of it.”

Gabriel looked as if he wanted to knock Nat down. But he checked himself.

“A spy?” I repeated, startled. “For the Queen of Sweden?”

“For himself,” Nat said.

Gabriel flushed, but he did not deny it. “And why not?” he said with a pale imitation of his old swagger. “If you stood to lose your entire fortune, your lands, your home, you would act too.”

Nat ignored this. “He wanted to make his own Philosopher’s Stone. That’s what his own notes say. And when he found where Sir Isaac hid his metal box at night, and worked out the combination, he thought he’d found the way to do it. But it turned out he couldn’t read the papers inside, or at least not well enough to glean what he needed.”

“They were in the most devilish code ever devised,” Gabriel said bitterly. “All I could do was copy them.” He pointed an accusing finger at Nat. “And then you stole my book.”

“I saw him hide it,” Nat said to me. “After we, well . . . on that last night, just before I was found with the crucible.”

My cheeks went hot, remembering what we had said to each other then: how I’d refused to go with him, and he had left me because he thought I didn’t care for him.

“I thought I’d better find out what was so interesting to him,” Nat said, “so I took the book out to look—but the next thing I knew, the whole palace was chasing after me. You know how that ended.”

“I know some of it,” I said. “You managed to escape?”

“I did. I got the book and myself to a hideaway in the Greenwich cellars.”

“You’ve been here all the time?” I was amazed. “How did you keep hidden?”

“I have a friend or two in the kitchens. And a few in the guards.” He and Potts exchanged the ghost of a smile. “That helped a lot.”

I nodded. It made sense that Nat would have allies in unusual places. Rank didn’t matter to him. He’d as soon strike up a friendship with a servant as a king—a trait I loved in him.

“After I went into hiding, I worked on cracking the cipher,” Nat said. “And when I finally figured it out, I discovered that Sir Isaac wasn’t making the Philosopher’s Stone, but an elixir to steal away Chantress powers.”

“I didn’t know,” Gabriel said again. He opened his hands to me, as if to plead that he’d meant no harm.

“I came up from the cellars then,” Nat said to me. “It was almost dawn, and I was afraid I was going to be too late. My only chance was to come straight here. Because everything was in an uproar, I had no real trouble till I approached the stairs. There was a bit of a scuffle then, but fortunately, Sergeant Potts here was on duty, so I got through to the King. And thanks be, he listened.”

The King took up the tale. “When he showed us the book, we could hardly believe it. But we thought it odd, the way Sir Isaac had barred the door, and then we heard the sound of shouting. And then Nat appeared with an explanation that made sense of it all.”

“So we started to smash the door down,” Sir Samuel said. I looked up and saw the hatch marks in the wood.

Behind his spectacles, Penebrygg’s eyes were distressed. “We wanted to save you, my dear.”

“But you saved yourself,” Nat said.

I did
, I thought.
I did. I found my power.

Nat’s eyes were steady on me, and I thought I saw both pride and regret in them—but we were too far apart for me to read more. Before I could step closer, the King said, “Where are Flamel’s papers?”

“I doubt they’re Flamel’s,” Nat said. “They’re more ancient than that.”

“Sir Isaac brought them down here,” I said. “I think the river took them.”

For a long moment, we all looked at the wreck of what had been the best alchemy laboratory in Europe. There was no sign of the box that had held the papers. Even the great fire-breathing furnace had been humbled into a heap of broken bricks and twisted metal. The bottles and crucibles and beakers had been dashed to pieces.

“Even so,” the King said, “I think we had better search Sir Isaac’s rooms. Who knows what else may turn up?”

†    †    †

The King led the way upstairs, with the rest of us following behind. I had thought Nat might speak to me then, but instead,
he lagged at the back. Perhaps he was still keeping watch over Gabriel. Or perhaps he was waiting until we had more privacy.

“You are cold, Chantress?” the King asked.

I was shivering. “I’m afraid the wave soaked me through.”

The King took in my sopping clothes for the first time. “So it has. You must change.”

He insisted on escorting me to my rooms. As we traversed the palace, people moved out of our way. I heard whispers echoing around us: “Chantress . . . wave . . . rose right out of the Thames . . . taller than the East Tower . . . magic.”

When we reached my door, the King ordered the guards to stand down. They did so immediately. From the look on their faces, they too had heard about the great wave.

“Come and find us when you are ready,” the King said to me.

The room was empty, but I didn’t need a maid’s help to dress. Instead, I shrugged myself into the only clothes I could find—my mulberry silk—and wrapped my plain traveling cloak around me to keep warm.

By the time I reached Sir Isaac’s room, the place had been well and truly gone over. It was Nat and Gabriel who had made the chief discoveries: two secret boxes shaped like books. One contained various poisons and their antidotes. The other held keys swaddled in wool, including all the keys needed to open the moonbriar casket.

“He must have had copies made,” Nat said to me. “And we’re guessing that he might have used the poisons on Sir Barnaby, to keep him out of the way. Of all of us, Sir Barnaby knew Sir
Isaac the best, and he might have noticed something was wrong.”

“Can anything be done to help Sir Barnaby now?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Nat closed the doors to the cabinet at the foot of Sir Isaac’s bed. “I hope so.”

“How could he stoop to such things?” Penebrygg shook his head, his eyes dimming behind his spectacles. “And how could I have been so blind? My dear,” he said, turning to me, “I am so very sorry.”

“He made fools of all of us,” Sir Samuel said indignantly.

“Only because we let him,” the King said in a low voice.

Blustering, Sir Samuel started to deny this, but Penebrygg cut across him. “The King is right. Sir Isaac told us what we wanted to hear, and we believed him. We ought to have guessed he was promising us something too good to be true.”

“One of us guessed it,” the King said, looking at Nat. “I will not forget that.”