Lady of Magick (11 page)

Sophie cleared her throat. “May I—may I ask what—”

She stammered to a halt; Cormac MacWattie studied her, his eyes widening in astonishment. “Sophie Marshall, you surely cannot suppose that I am threatening you?”

“I . . .”

Her tutor cast up his eyes. “Brìghde's tears!” he muttered. “What ideas these children do invent!” And turning again to Sophie, he said, “You are my student; your progress, or lack thereof, is in part a reflection upon my tutelage. I should be doing neither of us a service by allowing you to face an examination jury without having learnt to perform such an elementary magick. Have I made myself clear?”

“Yes, sir,” said Sophie.

“Now: You have been attending Dolina MacKinnon's morning lessons, have you not?”

Sophie nodded.

“Very well. You will come here every morning, then, before going to Dolina MacKinnon; there are no lectures so early, and I have no other students at that hour. If you are willing to put your knowledge into practice, I daresay we shall not be about the task longer than a fortnight.”

“I . . . I thank you, sir,” said Sophie.

Cormac MacWattie waved this away, and, when she did not at once turn for the door, he flapped one large hand at her and said, “Go, go! You shall be late for your lecture on ethics.”

“Oh!” said Sophie, and hastened away.

*   *   *

The next morning Sophie knocked at the door of Cormac MacWattie's study, and when the door opened, she was confronted with a very forest of tallow-candles, lanterns, and lamps. Behind them sat her tutor, drinking tea.

“Oh,” she said, nonplussed.

At his gesture she threaded her way through the assemblage of combustibles, perched gingerly upon her accustomed chair, and accepted a cup of tea, poured from a pot around which a warming-spell hummed gently, almost below the threshold of her hearing.

“A few precautions, I think, before we begin,” said Cormac MacWattie. He rose from his seat and paced a small circle about an occasional table, in whose centre, set upon a mat which appeared to have been woven from fine wire, reposed a large, fat tallow-candle. “Set me a ward about this table, if you please.”

Warding-spells—for reasons which she should not have dreamed of disclosing to her tutor—were a speciality of Sophie's. By the time she had completed her own circuit of the table's perimeter, with herself and Cormac MacWattie inside it as well as table, mat, and candle, she felt both entirely confident in the integrity of her wards and rather more inclined to optimism with respect to the purpose of this lesson.

Cormac MacWattie prodded with one finger at the invisible barrier and gave a surprised huff. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “Now: We have at our disposal two sand-buckets”—he pointed them out—“and whatever water-spells we may see fit to deploy; the air is quite damp this morning, which is all to the good. Shall we begin? Light me this candle, if you would.”

Sophie drew a deep breath; let it out; closed her eyes and sank into the consciousness of her magick, the many-petalled flower of cold
blue-white flame by which it represented itself to her reasoning mind. Seek, find, catch the end of a petal between metaphorical fingers: The process was so familiar by now as to be the work of a breath. And then came the tension-taut moment when, having gathered up her magick and focused it on the candle-wick, on the tiny shimmer of heat always present in the air, she said, “
Flammo te!
” to strike the spark.

In the next breath, she was shouldered aside, and Cormac MacWattie was dousing the half-melted candle in a bucket of sand.

“Well,” he said. “I see the difficulty now, I think.”

“Oh?” said Sophie. Despite her best efforts, her voice shook, and her breath came too quickly.

“Your metaphor—the scalded cat—was apt,” said Cormac MacWattie, scraping the sand back into the bucket. That done, he set the candle upright again—now a little less than half its original height, and deeply cratered. “What does the cat do, when the object of her fear threatens? She arches her back, she extends her claws, she hisses and spits—in short, she makes herself a threat in return, so far as she is able.”

He looked at Sophie expectantly.

“Sir, I do not see . . .”

“Do you not, indeed? That spell of yours, Sophie Marshall, used as much magick as you could put into it, and was flung at its target with sufficient force—so to speak—to light a candle on the other side of the Firth: not the force of sober thought, calculated from the facts at hand, but the force of unreasoning fear.”

Sophie wished very much to deny this, but she could not.

“We shall have to go back to the beginning,” said Cormac MacWattie. He frowned thoughtfully. “Suppose,” he said, “that instead of lobbing your blazing Yule-log into a drought-stricken forest and fleeing the conflagration, you held a candle-flame on the end of a lamplighter's pole, and touched it lightly to the wick of a lamp.”

Another metaphor,
thought Sophie. Master Alcuin had been fond of telling her that to use magick was to deal in metaphors, made concrete in the world.

“Yes, sir,” she said aloud, and set about constructing the image in her mind's eye.

The next attempt could not be called a success, precisely, but certainly it was less destructive than the first. By the end of their allotted hour, Sophie was drooping with fatigue—not from drawing too much upon her magick, but only from the effort of restraint—and Cormac MacWattie's stock of candles had been reduced by four; but her progress was visible, if slow, and he seemed pleased with her efforts.

“Fire is like magick,” she murmured, as she smoothed her hair and gathered up her books. “Controlled, an invaluable tool; uncontrolled, a catastrophe.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Cormac MacWattie.

Sophie, who had not meant to be heard, repeated herself. “It is a saying of my husband's,” she explained.

“Indeed?” said her tutor. “I have heard it said before, or words to the same effect, but always in the opposite direction. But then,” he added, in a thoughtful tone, “one does not often meet a mage who is capable of teaching herself unseen summoning, yet has reached the final year of her undergraduate education without discovering how to call fire to light a candle.”

*   *   *

In the second month of the term, Cormac MacWattie turned his students' attention to what he called
the magick of the land
. For the first time, the reading required was entirely in Gaelic, which made Sophie's preparation something of an ordeal, and each successful navigation of a page of text a small triumph to be celebrated. Before long, however, she had become sufficiently engrossed as to feel the work no hardship.

The magick of the land, Cormac MacWattie had told them, was a key to Alba's history, or a legend propagated by the early clan chieftains, or a gift of Alba's gods, or a tale to mislead the credulous, or some combination of all these, depending upon the particular scholar consulted. He had charged Sophie, Una, and Eithne to read through
the list of sources he had assembled for them, as well as any others they might lay their hands on, and draw their own conclusions, which they should then debate at their next meeting.

Might Rory and Catriona MacCrimmon's tale of a great spell-net woven across Alba by a long-ago king, Sophie wondered, be such another source? But as Cormac MacWattie had also asked that they each form an opinion without reference to one another or to anyone else, she refrained from raising the question with either of them.

“Well?” Cormac MacWattie inquired, when next they gathered in his study. “What have you to teach me today? Una MacSherry: Enlighten us, if you please.”

Una MacSherry came down firmly on the side of those scholars who considered the magick of the land no more than a charming folktale, invented by farmers and husbandmen of generations past to explain what they themselves could not—why a field cleared of stones in one season should sprout a new crop of them the next; why fields must sometimes be left fallow; why some sicknesses spread from beast to beast, or beast to man, whereas others do not.

Eithne MacLachlan, whose grandparents were farmers, was inclined to the view that some clan chieftain or chieftains unknown, undoubtedly with the connivance of the priests of the Cailleach (and perhaps of the Cailleach herself), had invented the idea out of whole cloth, for the purpose of cementing their own position of power over the smaller landholders.

“But the clan chieftains favour enclosure, while the priests oppose it,” Una objected. “Why should they act together against the smallholders?”

“We are speaking of a time long before enclosure was thought of,” said Eithne. “And, in any case, not all of the chieftains agree—when have they ever done?—so there is nothing in that, Una.”

Sophie, when it came to her turn, was a little hesitant to unfold her own conclusions, for she had not expected to differ so wildly from the others, and as an outsider she felt that perhaps she ought not to opine at all.

“I think,” she said, “of course it is not for me to say, but—I should not be surprised if there were such a form of magick, once. Perhaps not now, but long ago.”

Eithne and Una looked sceptical; Cormac MacWattie merely nodded and said, “Go on.”

“I have found—perhaps I have not understood everything correctly—but I have read half a dozen separate accounts, collected by several scholars over half a dozen parts of the kingdom, of workings which had some observable effect, and these accounts seemed to me to tally remarkably well . . .”

“But so they should do, of course,” said Eithne, “if all had heard the same tale from the priests of the Cailleach, and were merely repeating what they had heard, or were bending their observations to suit it.”

“That is so, of course,” said Sophie.

“Perhaps the scholars themselves invented it!” Una said.

“Perhaps, indeed,” said Cormac MacWattie. “When next we meet, I shall ask you each to defend a conclusion other than the one you have put forward today; and then we shall see where we stand.”

*   *   *

As this time Cormac MacWattie had said nothing against their discussing the magick of the land with whosoever they chose, Sophie took up the subject with Mór MacRury on her way home from the University that afternoon, with Lucia MacNeill after Dougal MacAngus's lecture two days later, and with Catriona MacCrimmon when the latter called in Quarry Close on the morning after that. Mór was noncommittal—
The gods have their ways, of which men know nothing
—and Lucia MacNeill, Sophie thought, rather evasive; perhaps this was a matter on which it was politic for the royal family (as Sophie could not help considering them) not to opine.

Catriona MacCrimmon, however, proved an inexhaustible wellspring of knowledge—or, at any rate, of commentary—on the magick of the land.

“Of course it is difficult to understand, here in the city,” she said; and when Gray, returning from an outing with a colleague, was drawn into the conversation, she insisted on their all going out to the nearest unbuilt place—in the event, they found themselves halfway up towards the crest of Arthur's Seat—in order to observe.

Catriona knelt amid the damp, straggling grasses—it had been raining for the better part of three days, and the air was chill—and, stripping off her gloves, pressed both palms flat against the soil. Sophie and Gray exchanged a look of mild alarm and followed suit.

“Do you see?” said Catriona. “It is faint and difficult to hear, surrounded as we are by the city and its noise—Din Edin was built from the land, of course, from its stones and timbers, but as it grows, the connexion weakens.” Her voice grew wistful as she added, “I wish I might live on Leòdhas again, where the land and the people are better acquainted with one another.”

It was a sentiment with which Sophie had some sympathy—for all that her childhood home had been more than half a prison, she was a creature of the countryside, far more than of the crowded, clattering town—and diverted her momentarily from the disconcerting question of what it was Catriona could see, or hear, or feel, that she (and, by his baffled frown, Gray also) could not.

“Can you not go home to Leòdhas, if Din Edin does not suit you?” she asked.

Catriona looked at Sophie as though, for a moment, she had forgot her companions' presence. Then she blinked, and smiled, and said, “But Rory is here, and I have my own work to do. Besides, I should miss the Library; there is nothing anywhere else in Alba to compare.”

Sophie nodded, slow and thoughtful, and stared down at her bare hands splayed against the ground.
Perhaps the seeing and hearing are metaphorical,
she thought,
and I have been going about this in the wrong way.

She closed her eyes, sank into her magick, and turned her perceptions inward; then—feeling her way awkwardly, for she sought an unknown destination and had neither map nor guide—she curved her fingertips into the soil and listened with her hands.

For what seemed a long time, there was nothing in her mind's ear but the slow beat of her heart. Then, faint and far away, just on the edge of . . . ought she to call it
hearing
? . . . a soft sighing that tasted of sandstone and the sea.

Then skewer-sharp, a rent in the sound, like a gull's shriek breaking an incantation, quivered through her, stealing her breath.

Then silence, and the too-rapid beating of her heart.

The sound had been there and gone in a moment, and try as she might Sophie could not catch hold of it again.

She opened her eyes, blinked dizzily for several breaths, and looked down at her hands. There was dark soil under her fingernails.

When she looked up again, Catriona was speaking—Sophie struck the heel of one hand against the side of her head, sharply, to clear away whatever metaphysickal cobwebs might be clogging her physical ears—and Gray was shaking his head.