Lady of Magick (34 page)

What could block a finding-spell so powerful and far-reaching as those she had worked just now? Wards, certainly; she and Gray had done exactly this, though their wards had been meant for another purpose, when her stepfather had come seeking them in the Kergabets' London house. A shielding-spell. An interdiction.

Other mages' wards—even Gray's—she had overcome before now; and a shielding-spell . . . what was it Master Alcuin said of shielding-spells?
What is only strong is also vulnerable, in the end.
Of course, he had been speaking of shielding against projectiles and elemental magicks . . .

A sudden vision—uninvited, unwanted—of flames and smoke and shouting, half-disintegrated books and shards of glass flying, made her catch her breath.

She shook her head irritably, and clenched her clasped hands together until pain drove the visions away.
I have only a little time to think, and this is a waste of it.
Wards. Shields. An interdiction?

Mother Goddess help me . . .

It was not by any conscious resolution that Sophie, her mind full of Gray and of her longing to find him, began to hum the familiar melody that first had drawn him to her, a lifetime ago in her stepsister's drawing-room, but even before finishing the first stanza, she
had thought through the consequences and made up her mind. This was magick which she had not allowed herself to use since leaving London, and to do so again must have felt strange, even without the disorienting addition of Lucia MacNeill's magick twined about her own; instead of attempting to ignore the strangeness of it, however, Sophie opened wide her metaphysickal arms and flung herself in head-foremost.

Lucia's face conveyed an open and profound bewilderment. She did not interrupt, however, and Sophie had at present no attention to spare for the thoughts or feelings of anyone else. It was not that she had any real hope of a drawing-spell's reaching where a finding-spell could not, and in any case, if Gray were indeed being held against his will, such a spell could not change the fact. Nor could its results—should any eventuate—be immediately apparent, for the target of a drawing-spell did not thereby develop the ability to travel at superhuman speeds; unless Gray had been all this time within a few streets of Quarry Close, success and failure should look exactly alike.

No; what had decided Sophie on this self-evidently futile course of action was that—as there seemed nothing practical to be done—she at least wished Gray to know, if such a thing were possible, that she was seeking him.

She sang, therefore, to the end of one song and, almost without pausing for breath, into the beginning of another; she was singing yet (though badly, in a voice clotted with tears, her forehead resting on Lucia's shoulder) when the front door was shoved violently open and Mór MacRury burst into the sitting-room.

Sophie (still singing, for by now it seemed impossible to stop) raised her head from Lucia's shoulder and looked up at Mór. She had evidently been running, and appeared to have been caught in a shower of rain; she was pink-faced and breathless, her russet hair dishevelled and her eyes wild. Tucked under one arm was a flat, oblong parcel tied up in brown paper and string. This Mór flung onto the sofa, where it landed with a damp, accusing
flump
, before advancing upon Sophie and Lucia, her slim hands rhythmically clenching and unclenching at her sides.

“What are you about?” she demanded.

Sophie straightened her back, hiccoughed, and sang, half under her breath,

Fhir a' bhàta, na hóro eile,

Mo shoraidh slàn leat 's gach àit' an téid thu.

Then she caught a breath and began the next strophe.

She had been a fool to choose this song, for it had moved her to tears even at the best of times. But Gray had—

But Gray loved it, and it was surely no more foolish to think that a song he loved might draw him more swiftly than to suppose for a moment that the spell might succeed at all. Her head ached and her limbs felt as though they had been hollowed out and filled with wet sand, but the magick pulsed bright and steady in her mind's ear.

Deciding perhaps that it was futile to attempt interrogation of Sophie, Mór turned on Lucia MacNeill and demanded, “What have you let her do?”

Lucia shook her head and, to Sophie's dimly felt astonishment, said, “She is only singing.”

For a long moment, Mór stared at her, wide-eyed and openmouthed.
“Only singing,”
she repeated incredulously. “Have I not taught you better than that, Lucia MacNeill? Look at her! There is a very storm of magick erupting from this house, which I could see from more than a mile away, and the gods know who else may have seen it also.”

Sophie inhaled sharply, and lost the thread of her song for a moment, but remembering that Gray might possibly be at the other end of it, she took it up again at once.

Mór had turned at the sound, however, and was studying her now with narrowed eyes. “That is not your magick,” she said, “or not yours alone.”

Her gaze flitted from Sophie to Lucia and back again, and at last she said, appalled, “Lucia MacNeill,
what have you done
?”

The heiress of Alba seemed to take courage from this direct
challenge, for she rose gracefully to her feet and (allowing for some difference in their heights) looked Mór directly in the eye. “I have
helped
,” she said. Her voice was low and furious. “I had at my disposal the means to do some good for a friend—for a sister—and with her consent, I made use of it. My magick may help Sophie find her husband, or it may not, but in any event she will not die of the separation whilst I can prevent it. And I shall not apologise to you, Mór MacRury of Uist, or to anyone else, for offering help to one who had need of it!”

Sophie faltered to the end of the song Mór had taught her, her breath coming in sobs, and, casting about for another, hit upon a grisly ballad describing a young man's poisoning of himself and his lover for jealousy at her daring to dance with another man. What small part of her mind could be spared from her spell and the confrontation before her was distantly grateful that the song was in English, and thus largely incomprehensible to her companions.

“This is not the help she needs!” Mór returned, equally furious. Gone, entirely gone, was the collegial respect which she had earlier accorded Lucia MacNeill, and very long gone any hint of deference to her rank. “Sophie and Gray are my friends as much as yours,” she said, “and to suppose that you know better than I, or than her sister—”

But here the diatribe broke off abruptly, and Mór gazed in shocked silence at something which, evidently, only she could see.

Then, just as abruptly, she turned to Sophie, crouched down to clasp her hands, and said urgently, “You are working a drawing-spell, are you not?”

Sophie nodded, baffled; Lucia said, “Oh!” in a tone of enlightenment.

“Go on singing,” Mór commanded, and sprang up again. “As long as you are able.”

The light of bright curiosity—more, of
hope
—in Mór's eyes made it difficult to continue, for Sophie had a hundred questions burning to be asked, but impossible to consider stopping.

Mór paced towards the dining-room, her right hand outstretched, as though following . . . something. Arrived at the far wall, she stopped and raised her hand shade to her eyes. Shade them from what?

Sophie tried to clear her mind of every question, every thought except Gray, and went on singing. She stood from her chair, abruptly unable to bear sitting still for another moment, and stumbled towards the dining-room in Mór's wake. Lucia darted after her, curving an arm about her waist in support, and Sophie was too preoccupied to object.

She turned back at the sound of the front door crashing open once more, and Joanna's voice, sharp with anxiety, calling, “Sophie?
Sophie!
”

Joanna in person, with Gwendolen at her heels like an evening-stretched shadow of herself, erupted into the sitting-room, shoving back her dripping bonnet; then both of them stopped short, gaping at Sophie.

Sophie could offer no explanations at present, and looked pleadingly at Lucia; but just as the latter opened her mouth, Mór cried, “There!” and turned back to the dining-room table—to the spelled campaign-map, and the bedraggled owl-feather pen with its scarlet counterweight.

She studied the map with feverish haste, muttering under her breath.

“Bring me . . . bring me some twine or wool or thread, and some pins,” she demanded, holding out her right hand. “Quickly, at once.”

“Sophie, where is your work-basket?” cried Joanna, but Gwendolen was already rummaging in her own, extracting a bristling pin-cushion and a half-used skein of violet silk. In another moment Joanna was at Mór's side, thrusting the silk into her reaching fingers.

“Go on,” said Mór to Sophie, as she bent over the map, plucking pins from the pin-cushion with one hand and catching at the end of the embroidery-silk with the other. “We must not lose this chance.”

“And I have drunk the same, my jewel,”
Sophie sang, her breath coming fast and urgent, now, not from grief but from wild anticipation. She peered round Mór's shoulder, and—yes—the feather was moving! Anxiety clogged her throat, but she sang through it, though her voice was half a croak:
“I soon shall die as well as thee.”

She felt rather than saw Joanna's eyes on her, Gwendolen's and Lucia's.

Mór had driven a pin into the map somewhere amidst the representation of Din Edin; now she stood stock-still, watching the feather as it tilted drunkenly northeastward and began to drag its weighted foot across the surface of the map.

“Horns of Herne!” muttered Joanna, somewhere behind Sophie. “I have seen garden-snails go faster.” The reproving
Jo, hush!
that followed was surely Gwendolen.

When at last the feather stopped and stood quivering in place for the length of a verse, she lifted it carefully, straight upwards, and affixed another pin beneath it. Then she tied the two pins together with the violet silk, and stood straight, pressing both hands to her temples.

“I have it,” she said, quietly exultant, and Sophie's song-spell stuttered to a halt.

Gray was no
more than half conscious when his captor's two lieutenants, whom he had dubbed Steel-Eyes and Ginger, opened the door of his cell and hauled him up off the noisome mattress in the corner. Passing the boundary of the interdiction on his cell revived him sufficiently to get his feet under him; he struggled against the hands gripping his arms, more from habit than from any real hope of escape, and was not surprised when the only result was a sharp upward jerk of his left elbow (it was always the left, when he annoyed them; Ginger had yanked him upright by that arm, very early in their acquaintance, and the pain had waxed and waned in the intervening days but never entirely vanished) and a ringing clip round his right ear.

In retaliation—such as it was—Gray abandoned all attempts at locomotion, and even at bearing his own weight, so that Ginger and Steel-Eyes must drag him bodily along the dim corridor. This tactic was less effective now than when he had first used it, before they had begun to punish his recalcitrance with long periods in that interdicted cell and the resulting nausea and vertigo had sapped his appetite; but even now his long limbs made him an awkward burden, and
there was a bitter satisfaction to be gained from forcing his captors to bear it.

He had, he was fairly certain, been a fortnight in this place—whatever place it was. The length of the journey hither from Din Edin, however, remained a vague and timeless jumble: here the rumbling of a farm-waggon, there the pitch and roll (and the smell, great Neptune, the smell!) of a fishing-boat, here a low ceiling and the scents of small beer and burning peats—and always the blindfold and the rough hands herding him, rarely cruel but never kind.

They dragged him round a blind corner, along a dim corridor, up a spiralling flight of narrow stone steps, along a passageway and out through a postern-gate into blue-velvet twilight, and down another staircase, walled and even more narrow. At its foot, Gray fell sprawling on uneven flagstones from whose haphazard cracks arose tiny forests of green shoots.

So long was it since Gray had last opened his eyes in daylight that even this dim approximation of it was startling. Pushing himself up on his elbows, he drew a deep lungful of crisp evening air; it caught in his throat, convulsed his lungs, and reemerged in a heavy, rasping cough.

Ginger made a noise of disgust and kicked him.

This was all to the good, however; any little delay meant prolonging his time outside the castle walls and the wards upon them—and, more importantly, away from the interdiction. He drew breath, past the sharp pain in his ribs, and waited.

Presently heavy-booted footfalls announced the arrival of some fourth person. “Where are you taking him?” someone demanded—a voice Gray did not recognise.

“The grove,” said Steel-Eyes shortly. “The chieftain wants him.”

The newcomer grunted what must have been agreement, for rough hands caught at Gray's arms again and dragged him to his feet.

“Walk, now,” Ginger growled, speaking now in Latin for Gray's ears. “We know you can walk.”

Gray stood still, swaying a little.

“Walk.”
The command was accompanied by a firm shove to the middle of his back, and he stumbled forward involuntarily; one pace, two.

No one was holding him now, and for a brief, mad moment he contemplated running. Two more steps persuaded him that any such attempt must be worse than useless.

Ginger and Steel-Eyes propelled him through a grove of elm and yew trees that grew nearly up to the foot of the curtain wall. The elms were newly in bud; his timekeeping was not badly amiss, then, for it was still early spring. The cool glow of magelight spread its fingers between the tree-trunks, and beneath it, at the centre of an almost perfectly circular clearing, stood the man whom all the others called simply “the chieftain,” a copper knife gleaming in his right hand.

He was a tall man—quite as tall as Gray—and wore always the kilted plaid, a pattern unfamiliar to Gray, over a finely made linen shirt; his hair was a deep russet-brown, worn long and tied back from his aristocratic face in the fashion affected by the most traditionalist members of Din Edin society. His eyes, the cold clear blue of Windermere under a cloudless sky, regarded Gray as they always did, with a disconcerting blend of acquisitiveness and contempt.

“May I hope to hear that you have reconsidered, Magister?” he inquired. His Latin was fluent and flawless, but, as always, he spoke the words as though they burnt his mouth and grated on his ears.

“No,” said Gray.

What the
great enterprise
might be to which his captors wished him to lend his magick, or how this might be accomplished, he had yet to discover, but, as it apparently required kidnap and even more unsavoury practices, there seemed little likelihood of its being in fact, as they claimed, for the good of Alba.

The chieftain sighed. “A pity,” he said. “A free exchange of gifts is of greater worth than a payment exacted; but time runs on, and we must make do with what we can obtain. Bring him,” he snapped, shifting abruptly into his native tongue.

His followers hastened to obey, and Gray found himself pinioned in the centre of the clearing, no more than a foot from the chieftain himself.

“You are standing,” said the chieftain, reverting to Latin, “in the place where all the paths begin.” His hands sketched lines in every direction.
I have heard that phrase before, or something like it . . . where, and when?
He gestured at the largest of the circle of trees—a mighty elm, live but still scarcely in bud, pruned close to a height of ten feet or more and branching gracefully above—and Steel-Eyes caught both Gray's wrists in a grip like a vice and propelled him towards it.

“So,” said Gray, putting all the bravado he could muster into his voice, which rasped and creaked from disuse—how long had it been since he last spoke any words but
No
? “You mean to take by force what you could not obtain by persuasion, bribery, or abuse? What do you expect I have left to give you?”

It was half the truth, but half a bluff; his hours in the interdicted cell were always long enough to make him weak and ill, but never so long as to incapacitate him, and already he could feel his magick stuttering back to life.

Ginger was binding him to the tree-trunk at ankles, hips, and chest; the rough-spun shirt and trousers in which they had clothed him were wholly inadequate to muffle the bite of the hempen rope or the scrape of the rough elm-bark against the half-healed weals across his back—relic of an earlier attempt at forcing his cooperation.

The chieftain paced closer, holding Gray's gaze. “Only say the word, Magister,” he said softly. “Only say the word and you shall be prisoner no more, but one among the honoured guests of the true chieftain of Alba.”

Gray shook his head.

His captor mimicked the gesture, adopting a sorrowful expression, and gestured again at Ginger and Steel-Eyes. The work of binding done, Ginger stepped away from the elm trunk; each seizing one of Gray's wrists, they stretched his arms out towards the yew-trees to either side.

Gray did not struggle, and not only because he recognised the
futility of doing so; the truth was that he was desperately curious to know what might come next.

The chieftain took a step towards him, then another and another, until he stood no more than an arm's length away. Gray watched his face, half entranced, until by chance a brief, tiny gleam drew his eye to the copper blade in his captor's hand.

He was testing the edge against his thumb. A thin bright line of blood welled; he drew the pad of his thumb along the flat of the blade, painting first one side and then the other in a thin film of gore. In the cold glow of magelight, the blood shone against the pale wings of his hands.

Moving with slow deliberation, and muttering in Gaelic the while—it was a spell, Gray thought by the cadence, though he could make no sense of it; a spell or a prayer, or both together—he pressed Gray's head back against the tree-trunk with his left hand and, with his right, drew the point of the gleaming blade across Gray's cheekbone. The knife was sharp, so sharp that the pain scarcely registered, though Gray felt the blood run down his cheek.

What is happening here?
This much was now clear: The “great magick” of which his captor had spoken, which was to right the great wrong done to his clan and to Alba, was borne in men's blood and fed upon it—a working, and a form of worship, older than any now practised. Gray had felt out of his depth before; now he was drowning.

The chieftain's palm scraped across Gray's cheek, collecting the blood he had spilled; then he drew back, his lips curving in a soft, unfocused smile more chilling than any previous word or gesture, and reached over Gray's head to lay his hand flat against the bark of the great elm.

The hairs on the back of Gray's neck rose so suddenly that his skin seemed to prickle beneath them.

Still smiling, the chieftain stepped aside and took Gray's left hand in his. Gently he turned it palm downward, and the blade flashed across its back. The cut on Gray's cheek was stinging fiercely now, but again he scarcely felt the fresh wound. The blood welled, dripped. Gray heard the soft
spat
as the first droplets struck, and looked down
to see his blood soaking—improbably, vanishing—into a twisted root of elm protruding through the leaf-litter of autumns past.

He felt light-headed—far more so than such a small loss of blood could possibly account for. Whatever this man was about, would it—could it—work against Gray's conscious will?

“There!” the chieftain exclaimed, narrowing his eyes at the blood dripping from Gray's hand. “It begins, yes!”

Gray came very near to asking—and, worse, to asking in Gaelic—what it was he was seeing. He hoped he was not squeamish, or more cowardly than necessary, but he could not deny that the sight of his own blood running so eagerly out of his veins and into . . . what? . . . unnerved him.

His captor was cradling his right hand, now, turning it, poising his knife.

The knife bit; after a little, the pain followed it. Gray watched, waiting for the first
spat
of blood on bark.

The first drop fell—spread—vanished.

Gray's knees buckled as magick flowed into him—magick howling, shrieking—magick deep and fierce as the tide in flood.

*   *   *

For one brief, interminable moment, the four men in the yew-grove were all alike struck still in shock. Then three of them exploded into movement and noise, the details of which the fourth could never afterwards remember with any sort of clarity.

There was a great deal of shouting, not all of which Gray understood. The bloodied copper knife, knocked free in the mêlée, somersaulted to the ground and stuck point-first in the soil, upright and quivering. Some other blade, wielded with more haste and less skill, opened a long shallow gash along Gray's ribs as it cut away the last of the cords binding him to the elm-trunk.

Once again he fell forward, sprawling.

To his surprise, however, the terrifying, exhilarating buzz of magick—his own and not his own, familiar-strange—did not
immediately lessen. He reached for it, aligning the words of his shape-shifting spell behind his eyes—caught hold—shaped the syllables quickly and silently, and poured the magick in.

There was no time for care or for finesse; already the chieftain had ceased berating his minions and one of them was reaching down to grasp at Gray's right arm. He was just too late, however—outflung arm already bending and shifting into close-folded wing—and the eye-blink moment of astonishment was just sufficient for Gray to effect his scrambling, ungainly escape.

Hope swelled in Gray's breast, buoyed up his newly lightened bones. But so long as he remained earthbound, he was slower by far than his pursuers, with their long-striding legs and reaching arms. Could he go aloft like this, from a running start (and to call it
running
was to be very charitable indeed), with no branch or rail to drop from and no hands to toss him upward?

I shall have to try.

He imagined himself leaving behind the leaf-mould and the tangled tree-roots, leaving Ginger and Steel-Eyes and their gods-accursèd chieftain, their spell that fed on the blood of mages to accomplish the gods alone knew what—saw spreading below him the woods and streams and crags of Alba—saw the lamplit window of a tiny house in Quarry Close, and the silhouette of a slim young woman bending over the keys of a pianoforte.

He spread his wings and ran.

The first powerful wing-beat proved the futility of any attempt at flight; the movement set loose a hot overpowering tide of pain from his injured left shoulder, half forgotten in the heady surge of new magick and old terror, that swamped his wing, his back, his leg, and tore an almost human shriek from his strigine throat.

Ginger and Steel-Eyes were upon him in moments, cursing at his feeble attempts to claw and bite them, wrapping him up in his discarded shirt and trousers like a recalcitrant infant in its swaddling-bands. Despair took the place of his earlier wild hope, sitting heavy like iron-stone on his heart.

Then something tugged at him: some faint aetheric thing, unrelated to his physical captivity. A familiar thing, though so distant as to be almost imperceptible; a pull he had felt before, without at first recognising or comprehending it. A sound heard in his mind's ear, like the echo of a half-remembered song.

Sophie.