Lady of Magick (10 page)

They were both regarding her eagerly, expectantly, and she wanted nothing more than to erase herself from their notice; but that was one of the things she had promised herself never to do here, in light of the questions it must raise.

“It is as I told Cormac MacWattie,” she said at last, haltingly; “there was a thing I needed very much, but I could not see it. It seemed to me that it could not be worse to try and fail, than not to try at all. That I succeeded was . . . a surprise to me.”

She did not add that it had surprised Gray, also, and greatly (and unpleasantly) surprised their enemies. She did not add that when she recalled that moment of desperate wanting, she could feel again the smoke burning her eyes and her throat, the rough weight of the pikestaff slamming against the palm of her hand, and that it was all of a piece with the panic that seized her when she attempted any spell involving flame. There were few people in the world to whom she could imagine saying any of these things, and all of them but one were very far away.

Eithne MacLachlan looked rather disappointed that Sophie could not (or would not) be more specific; Una MacSherry, however, was
directing at her a narrow-eyed gaze that reminded Sophie uncomfortably of her sister Jenny in a suspicious humour.

“Sophie Marshall,” she said thoughtfully. “Marshall is the name of that very handsome new lecturer—the tall one they say is a shape-shifter. And he is Sasunnach, too. You are . . . I suppose you must be his sister?”

Sophie, ruthlessly suppressing another hot and perfectly absurd stab of jealousy, laughed. Gray would laugh, she knew, at being called
very handsome
, whatever might be her own thoughts on the subject. “No, indeed,” she said. “He does have two sisters, but I am his wife.”

“His
wife
,” Una repeated. She frowned. “Then why do both of you use the same family name? Or are you cousins?”

“Oh!” said Eithne MacLachlan, looking a trifle smug, Sophie thought, at knowing something which Una MacSherry did not. “Because that is the Sasunnachs' custom, Una, for a bride to take the name of her husband's family.”

“That is our custom, indeed,” said Sophie, a little puzzled, “but what is yours?”

“You must be very lately married,” Una said, ignoring the question and raising her eyebrows; “you cannot be more than seventeen.”

Sophie's face flushed hot. “I am
twenty
,” she said—which was essentially true—ignoring, in her turn, the first of Una's implied questions. “Not that my age is any affair of yours.”

“And you are not cousins?” said Eithne MacLachlan.

“Certainly not,” said Sophie.

“My mother and my father are second cousins,” said Eithne MacLachlan, in an explanatory tone, “but my father has forbidden me to marry any of my cousins—
if the MacLachlan blood ran any thicker,
he says,
it would stand still
—and I think it a great pity, for my cousin Niall MacLachlan—”

“Eithne, enough!” cried Una MacSherry, clapping both hands over her own ears. “We are all sick to death of your cousin Niall MacLachlan!” Eithne subsided; Una dropped her hands and, turning to Sophie,
said in an only slightly less belligerent tone, “Your husband—is he a shape-shifter, truly?”

“Certainly he is,” said Sophie, “an excellent one. Why should you think he is not?”

Una flushed, now, and her blue eyes darted away from Sophie's. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “I ought not to have mentioned it.” Her voice was tense and defensive, however, rather than contrite; Sophie had unknowingly given some manner of offence.

“I . . .” Acutely uncomfortable, Sophie cast about her for a peace-offering. “Should you like to be introduced?”

Eithne and Una exchanged an unreadable look. It was Eithne who finally spoke: “If we are to spend all this year together with Cormac MacWattie,” she said, with a return of her earlier diffidence, “I wish we might be friends.”

Sophie swallowed hard and essayed a smile. “I should wish the same,” she said. “I have not many friends in Din Edin yet.”

Eithne grinned at her briefly and rather startlingly, white teeth and green-grey eyes glinting in her freckled face, and Sophie could not help grinning back. Perhaps Eithne was not naturally shy, but only intimidated by Cormac MacWattie?

“Una,” Eithne said, and nudged her companion gently with one elbow.

Una was not to be so easily won over, it appeared; she did raise her eyes to Sophie's again, however, and repeated her earlier apology in a discernibly less hostile tone.

“I don't presume to speak for Una MacSherry,” Eithne said, perfectly cheerful now, “but
I
should very much like to meet your famous husband.”

Sophie considered the angle of the sun. “He will be in his study now, I expect,” she said; “I believe he has students at the same hour as Cormac MacWattie.”

“Well, then!” Eithne linked one arm through Sophie's elbow and the other through Una's. “Lead on, Sophie Marshall.”

*   *   *

Gray, absorbed in recording his impressions of his new students, started at Sophie's firm knock at his study door—the same quick syncopated rhythm with which she had always announced herself in Oxford—and sprang up to open the door. Why was she here now, when they had arranged to meet in the library and walk home together to eat their dinner? Had she already fallen into some sort of trouble? Surely not—

He was more startled yet to find, in the corridor outside, that Sophie had brought with her two Alban girls perhaps a little younger than herself. Sophie gave him a small, half-apologetic smile; her companions stared up at him in frank curiosity.

Despite her evident embarrassment she introduced her new acquaintance very gracefully. Eithne MacLachlan shook Gray's hand with a diffident smile, and Una MacSherry with a grave, measuring look.

“I am delighted to make your acquaintance,” he said, and beamed at them as though they had really been Sophie's friends—a supposition of which he was not at all persuaded. He tried to read in her eyes and the angle of her chin whether she wished him to invite all of them in and serve them tea, or to concoct some excuse to send them on their way.

“Sophie says you are a shape-shifter,” the grave, auburn-haired one—Una MacSherry—said. “You would not care to give us a demonstration, I suppose?”

Gray swallowed back the incredulous laugh that rose to his lips; Sophie had flushed scarlet in agonised embarrassment, and he did not wish to add to her discomfiture.

“Una!” Eithne MacLachlan exclaimed, laughter and outrage warring in her soft contralto voice. “How can you say such a thing? Anyone would think—”

She cut herself off abruptly, and there ensued a brief, whispered argument in rapid Gaelic. Sophie made a tiny stifled sound; Gray, glancing at her over the bent heads of her fellow students, could see that she was trying hard not to simply flee what was becoming a hideously awkward conversation. He tried to imagine what
sequence of events might have led to this unexpected visit: Had Sophie been boasting of him? It seemed unlikely, though admittedly more likely than that she should have been showing away on her own behalf.

Sophie blinked rapidly, and her lips silently formed the words
I am sorry
. Now, at last, Gray understood her: She feared that she was embarrassing him, as well as making a spectacle of herself.

He grinned briefly at her and said, “I do not make a habit of displays for strangers; but as you are friends of Sophie's—”

And as all three of them stared at him in openmouthed astonishment, he shrugged off his coat, handed it to Sophie, and summoned up his magick.

The sensations of the shift—the compacting of muscle and the lightening of bone, the unfurling of long flight-feathers from his outspread arms as they became his wings—were as familiar by now as the weight of Sophie's head upon his shoulder or the rough-smooth slide of paper under his fingers. It was tidier to remove all of his clothes first and fold them up ready to put on again afterward, but of course one could not do such a thing in a public corridor, before the eyes of two young women one had only just met.

It could not be denied, however, that clothing—and the presence of a neatly tied neck-cloth, in particular—made things rather more difficult. Fortunately Sophie was not unfamiliar with the problem, and in a matter of moments the confounding folds of linen were swept away and Gray was blinking up at her, on her knees amidst the abandoned garments.

Sophie wrapped his shirt about her forearm and held it out, low; Gray hopped and fluttered onto the proffered perch, feeling awkward and ungainly as he always did in the interval before going aloft. Sophie climbed to her feet and turned to face Una and Eithne. Though Gray could not see her face, he imagined an expression of quiet triumph.

Una MacSherry and Eithne MacLachlan, whose faces he could certainly see, looked satisfyingly gobsmacked.

“May I,” the latter said, looking at Sophie, “may I—”

“Gray?” Sophie turned her head, and Gray turned his, so that their
eyes met; he bobbed his head once, an established signal, and Sophie turned back to Eithne and said, “You may.”

Eithne MacLachlan put out a cautious hand and drew one finger gently along the slope of Gray's folded left wing.

Una MacSherry—the more sceptical of the pair—hung back, staring.

“Have you never met a shape-shifter?” Sophie asked, in a tone of honest curiosity. “Is this talent very unusual in Alba?”

It was very unusual everywhere in the known world, as Sophie well knew, though primarily—in Gray's opinion—because learning to shape-shift required more patience, determination, and research than most mages could be bothered to devote to mastering a skill which was not, for the most part, of much practical use. He sidled towards her elbow and nudged his head reprovingly against her shoulder.

“I have never met one, that I know,” Eithne MacLachlan admitted. “Though of course one cannot know without asking, and asking would be dreadfully rude.”

Gray and Sophie exchanged a look.

“I have heard Magister Rory MacCrimmon lecture about shape-shifting,” Una MacSherry said, “but I do not believe he can do it himself.”

And there, Gray suspected, was the spark that ultimately had led to his perching on his wife's arm in an upstairs corridor in the middle of the afternoon for the entertainment of undergraduates. He blinked his eyes at Una MacSherry and hooted in annoyance; then, because it seemed foolish to waste all the effort of a shift for no more reward than this, he gripped Sophie's wrist through its makeshift wrappings to signal that he meant to fly.

*   *   *

Sophie blinked in surprise, but it was short-lived: Gray had not gone flying for nearly a se'nnight, and it was not to be supposed that he should waste this opportunity to do so. She looked about her for a convenient window, and finding none along the corridor that could be
opened, she instead made for the top of the staircase that descended into the broad, high-ceilinged hall below, and tossed Gray over the rail.

Una gasped, and Eithne choked back a protesting cry; they crowded against the railing, peering anxiously down into the hall.

Sophie did not trouble to join them; instead she tripped lightly down the steps, and at the foot of the staircase paused, one hand on the newel-post, to watch the fun.

Gray's colleagues had presumably known themselves to be sharing their premises with a shape-shifter, but this seemed in no way to mitigate the astonishment with which those presently passing through the hall greeted the arrival in their midst of an owl whose wingspan measured more than four feet. A lecturer with an impressive white beard dropped his armful of scrolls and sat down abruptly on the floor; a pair of women walking arm in arm cried out in astonished delight as Gray glided past them; a fair-haired young man wearing a wrapped plaid and a severe expression blanched, turned on his heel, and fled at a rapid walk.

Gray did not follow him out into the crisp autumn air, but flew two leisurely circuits about the hall and then, having apparently made his point, alighted on Sophie's shoulder and waited to be carried in state back up the stairs.

“Lazybones,” she scolded him; but as the weight on her shoulder was in fact rather less than a newborn baby's, it was difficult to summon up any genuine affront.

In the course
of the succeeding fortnight, Sophie attended Gray's lecture and nearly a dozen more. Those read in Gaelic she found rather a frustrating exercise, until Catriona MacCrimmon, calling in Quarry Close to return a borrowed codex, found her struggling to decipher her notes and said, “Shall I come with you from time to time, and help you with the difficult words?”

Sophie tried to demur—it was such an imposition, surely much more than hospitality demanded—but Catriona was so cheerfully persistent that continued refusal seemed churlish. “I thank you,” she said therefore, “very much indeed.”

“Oh! I beg you will not think of it,” said Catriona. “It will prevent me from stagnating, you know.”

As Rory MacCrimmon had predicted, Gray's first lecture was so greatly oversubscribed that Sophie had no choice but to cram herself in amongst those standing at the back of the hall, for both the seats and the aisles between them were entirely occupied—the front two rows, at least, not by students but by other lecturers, readers, and professors. She could see from Gray's face, when he emerged to take his place at the lectern, that the size of his audience surprised him; he
took it in stride, however, and delivered his remarks as confidently as if he had been speaking to half a hundred sleepy undergraduates at Merlin College.

Having noted that the course of lectures on the fundamentals of magickal ethics—which all undergraduates in both theoretical and practical magick were required to attend, and upon which they should all be examined—was offered both in Gaelic and in Latin, Sophie attended both, and, with Catriona's help, made a linguistic exercise of comparing her notes from each iteration and attempting to fill in the gaps. The substance of the first of these lectures presented no particular novelty—Sophie hoped that she did not need to be told that magickal ethics forbade her to work a sleeping-spell without the subject's consent or to make use of a summoning to pick a man's pocket—but gave her many an uncomfortable moment, by bringing to her mind instances in which she had, either unknowingly or from desperate need, violated a wide variety of the tenets elaborated in Dougal MacAngus's lecture.

She was particularly grateful for Catriona's murmured translations when Mór MacRury's lecture on scrying devolved into legal details which, rooted as they were in the unfamiliar laws, customs, and legal vocabulary of Alba, must otherwise have been entirely lost to her.

“Courts of law have long tended to dismiss or discount the evidence of scry-mages,” said Mór MacRury, nodding at the blackboard on which, before beginning, she had inscribed the headings of her lecture:
Scrying on trial / The scry-mage as expert witness / Compromising evidence / Reliable, fallible, or both?

“Scry-mages and those who rely on their findings may see this as nothing more than unreasoning prejudice,” she went on. “There are, however, sound reasons for magistrates to demand independent corroboration of evidence obtained by scrying. Many of these are outside the scry-mage's control—it is not possible, for example, to prevent tampering with the aetheric echoes which attach to an object, though methods can be learnt to detect some forms of such tampering.
Unfortunately, however, the collective reputation of all scry-mages has also been damaged, perhaps irreparably, by the unscrupulous practices of a few, practices which are justly considered to compromise the integrity of evidence derived from scrying. The most insidious of these is that of scrying objects acquired without the knowledge or consent of their owners, for the purpose of obtaining evidence justifying an arrest—because in so doing the scry-mage taints what is otherwise incontrovertible evidence, and thus calls into question every link in the chain . . .”

Sophie left Mór MacRury's lecture silent and thoughtful, and replied to Catriona's remarks somewhat at random, remembering with disconcerting clarity that once she had tried to persuade Jenny to secretly scry her guardian, Lady Maëlle, and had nearly succeeded.

*   *   *

Several days later, Sophie arrived in the Central Refectory, where she had arranged to dine with Gray, at the agreed-upon hour, and could find no sign of him. She had waited, gazing around in search of the familiar shock of sandy curls hovering slightly above the heads of every other person present, long enough to feel the beginnings of real annoyance, when she was hailed by none other than Mór MacRury, half rising from her seat at a table midway down the room.

Gray may find me, if he chooses,
she told herself rather crossly, and wove her way through the thronged tables.

“Sophie,” said Mór MacRury, “I believe you know Eithne MacLachlan and Una MacSherry?”

“Yes,” said Sophie, smiling shyly at them.

Mór gestured at the other three occupants of the table, and named them in order: “Ringan, Lucia, Fergus: This is Sophie Marshall of Oxford; Sophie, Ringan MacAngus, Fergus MacCallum, and Lucia MacNeill.”

Sophie controlled her instinct to bow, and instead put out her hand, in the local style, to each of the Alban students. The two men—scarcely more than boys; they seemed of an age with her brother
Ned—gripped her hand cheerfully enough and, having made her acquaintance, returned to their mutton and their conversation. Lucia MacNeill, however, regarded her with bright interest and, as soon as Sophie had sat down, said, “I understand you are but lately come from Oxford, Sophie Marshall?”

“I am,” said Sophie, inclining her head with a small smile. Which questions would follow next, she thought she might guess, but she was pleased that Lucia MacNeill did not speak of Britain as though England were the whole of it, as so many of the Alban students did.

“Din Edin sees very few travellers from Britain,” said Lucia MacNeill, “though our kingdoms are such near neighbours.”

It was not a question, exactly, but clearly she expected some reply.

“Crossing the frontier is not always a simple matter,” said Sophie cautiously, wary of giving offence. “We were fortunate in receiving a formal invitation from the University, and in obtaining letters from the Alban ambassador in London, as well as from our own ambassador in Din Edin, and from the Privy Council, permitting us to leave Britain and to enter Alba, and I do not think any of the latter had been possible without the first. Even the post is not at all reliable; such a state as I have seen letters arrive in!—and sometimes they do not arrive at all.”

Lucia MacNeill had listened patiently to all of this, her blue eyes intent and her delicately pointed chin resting upon her hand; now, sitting up straighter, she said in a thoughtful tone, “Well, we must hope that it may not always be so.”

“Indeed,” said Sophie.

Lucia MacNeill then inquired as to Sophie's tutor; and having herself been, it transpired, Cormac MacWattie's student the previous year, they passed a happy quarter-hour with Eithne and Una in comparing notes upon his methods. They were not the first to be caught off their guard by the challenge of an unseen summoning, and Sophie's shyness receded with Lucia MacNeill's admission that she had also been the only one of her tutorial to pass this test.

By the time Gray appeared at last, Sophie was pleasantly full of roast mutton, root vegetables, and goat's cheese and was laughing
madly at Lucia MacNeill's impression of a preternaturally solemn Dougal MacAngus. Though still rather cross with him, she made introductions with perfect cheerfulness—no one should say of her that she was guilty of hanging out her dirty washing in public—but thereafter she turned back to Lucia MacNeill and Fergus MacCallum, with whom she had been debating whether Gaius Aegidius or Conor Òranach MacAlasdair were the more useful source of elementary spells, and left Gray to fend for himself.

If she had meant this for a snub, however, it was a singularly ineffective one, for Gray seemed perfectly content to discuss lecture schedules with Mór MacRury. Sophie, increasingly cross with herself and growing not a little jealous, found herself stealing glances at him, and blushed with embarrassment when their gazes crossed.

*   *   *

“I like Lucia MacNeill,” Sophie said, merely to break the awkward silence, as they made their way back to their lodgings after dinner. Gray had not offered her his arm as he usually did, and she had made no attempt to take it. “She seems very clever, and she does not mind laughing at herself. But there is something odd—I wonder whether you remarked it?—the others at the table all seemed inclined to defer to her, even Mór MacRury rather.”

Gray laughed.

“What are you laughing at?” Sophie demanded.

“Lucia MacNeill is heir to the throne—no, not the throne—the chieftain's seat of Alba,” said Gray. “That is, when Donald MacNeill dies, or chooses to yield the throne—Donald MacNeill is—”

“I know who Donald MacNeill is, I thank you, and what it means to be heir to his throne,” said Sophie, now very cross indeed. She drew a deep breath and let it out, and was able to say more calmly, “It had not occurred to me that I might cross paths with the heiress of Alba over dinner in the Refectory. She certainly appears to have made a better success of her studies than the Princess Royal did at Merlin.”

“Sophie—”

“I suppose,” she continued, overriding Gray's attempt to speak and ignoring his simultaneous attempt to take her hand, “I suppose you will say that this shows what a goose I am, to dread being found out.”

Gray sighed quietly and said nothing. Sophie found she had been half waiting for him to answer back—to say something calm and eminently sensible—and was perversely disappointed at being given no opportunity to rail against his perfectly reasonable arguments. Risking a glance up at him, she found him looking carefully straight ahead, his hands now vanished into the vast pockets of his great-coat.

They walked on in silence for some time. It was a chilly evening, and between the pools of lamplight the street was very dark.

“Gray,” said Sophie at last, sotto voce, inching closer in wordless apology, so that her pelisse brushed against the skirts of Gray's great-coat.

“I am sorry for laughing at you,” said he, “and for having been so late to dinner. The great Doctor Balfour was in a tremendous strop, you see, because someone had rearranged his mammalian skulls; I ought not to have let it detain me.”

“And I ought not to have sulked like a child,” Sophie conceded. “I apologise.”

He drew his right hand out of his pocket and curled his arm about her shoulders, drawing her in against his side:
Apology accepted.

*   *   *

You will never guess who I met yesterday,
Sophie wrote to Joanna the next morning.

The heiress of Alba, sitting at a table in the Central Refectory like any ordinary undergraduate, discussing Gaius Aegidius and the uses of
Atropa belladonna
!
You may imagine how envious I was when I learnt whom I had been speaking with. I hope we shall meet again, for I should like to ask her about the blight we saw on our journey. She
seemed remarkably well informed about Britain, which in general the students here are not; but if she is to rule Alba after her father, I suppose that must account for it . . .

*   *   *

At the close of their fifth session, as Sophie made to leave her tutor's rooms with Una MacSherry and Eithne MacLachlan, Cormac MacWattie said quietly, “Sophie Marshall, a moment, if you please.”

“Sir?” Sophie turned back, her arms full of codices. The others went out; the door closed behind them.

“You are thoroughly conversant with the theoretical aspect of fire-magick,” said Cormac MacWattie, without other preamble. “Your essay upon the subject was . . . I should not say a model of its kind, for you might have greatly improved it by a third draft, but certainly it demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the topic at hand. And yet you struggle with its practical application, as I have not seen you do in any other area of practical magick thus far. Even the little magick of a candle-flame, which any talented child ought to have mastered by the age of six.”

He regarded Sophie in expectant silence, whilst she battered her thoughts into some sort of order—for all the world as though he were prepared to wait all afternoon for her reply.

“I . . . do not much like working with fire,” she said at last; at Cormac MacWattie's sceptical expression, she added, “Very well: I am frightened of it. In Français we say,
chat bouilli craint l'eau froide
, the scalded cat fears cold water, and I am the scalded cat.”

“An interesting metaphor,” said Cormac MacWattie. “And how did you come to be scalded?”

Sophie thought for a long moment before she spoke. “I have seen at first hand the harm which can be done by mage-fire,” she said at last. “I do not wish—”

“That is a fool's argument, Sophie Marshall,” said her tutor, “and you know as much, I think. You are a powerful mage—ah, I see you do not pretend not to know it—and any magick of yours which
you do not learn to master, will one day master you. To your own destruction, it may be, and certainly to the detriment of others. To believe otherwise is a dangerous indulgence.”

Sophie swallowed. It was true that Gray and Master Alcuin had indulged her in this, had allowed her to direct her studies towards other aspects of magick—there were so many, after all!—and that the almost purely theoretical course of study for a Merlin Mag.B., together with the habits learnt over sixteen years' ignorance of her talent, had abetted her in concealing her aversion to even the simple act of calling fire.

“I am not in the habit of indulging my students,” Cormac MacWattie continued, “and particularly not such a promising one as yourself. I have refrained from calling attention to your . . . difficulties before your fellows, but they have not gone unremarked.”