Lady of Magick (40 page)

“No one hit us,” Joanna said; after a moment's thought, she amended, “that is, I did not
see
anyone do so. There was an explosion—that was Sophie's doing, of course; I wonder that they did not see it coming, for I certainly did. Then I suppose someone must have . . . must have collected us from that tunnel, and brought us . . . here.”
Wherever
here
may be.

“And,” she added, “we must have lost Mama's charms in the explosion, or they should not have seen us at all.”

“Explosion?”
Gwendolen repeated incredulously, ignoring all the rest of Joanna's explanation.

Joanna turned towards her, frowning. Did she not remember the blazing light, the overwhelming noise, the great
whoosh
of displaced air? She must have hit her head much harder than Joanna had supposed.

“Yes,” she said.

“You!” a rough baritone voice called, in an equally rough approximation of Latin, from several yards away. “Be quiet.”

Joanna followed the direction of the voice, and her heart sank as she discerned its source: a man's head silhouetted against a high, barred window.

The red-bearded man
herded Sophie into line behind four other prisoners, bent-headed and grey-robed like herself, and roped them together at ankles and wrists.

This stumbling procession made its way along a half-lit corridor, climbed a steep and winding staircase—not entirely without incident—and after passing through a torchlit passage, through a postern-gate, and down another equally steep, but mercifully straight, staircase, plunged into the edge of the wood. At last they halted in a clearing roofed over with the spreading branches of elm and yew trees.

Here their path intersected with another, and they met a second, smaller procession of men in grey robes, also escorted by a guard, but not bound as Sophie and her companions were. Sophie raised her eyes to look into their clean-shaven, well-fed faces and saw none of her own terror and pain, but a solemn trepidation—and here and there, she thought, a glimpse of something like guilt.

Each of them was shortly bound to his own tree, arms stretched backward around the trunk and bound at the wrists; from her vantage point Sophie could see only two of the others, both men of
middle years, starveling-thin and bearded, dull-eyed and resigned—but clean, and newly dressed in woollen robes, just as she was herself. She shuddered at the thought of Aileen MacAlpine's hands upon her, washing her like an infant—dressing her like a doll.

And directly across the clearing—no, the shrine; the ring of trees was too symmetrical to be anything but a deliberate planting—Gray sagged against the trunk of an elm twice as wide as he was, his eyes closed and his head lolling. So still was he that for a moment Sophie's heart seemed to stop; then his chest rose and fell, just perceptibly, and she breathed deeply, trying to summon calm.

Focus. Concentrate.
The thin cord cut into the skin of her wrists; her shoulders burned with the pull of it, and through the stuff of the robe the rough elm-bark prodded at her spine.

“You cannot possibly believe that this will do you any good,” she said—speaking in Latin, in case there might still be some advantage to be gained. “You have won some of these men to your cause, I collect, and I wish you joy of one another. But the rest you have beaten and starved, you have held under interdiction; if they have any magick left at all, it is not by any care of yours. What do you imagine that they can give you now?”

The tall man—Cormac MacAlpine, certainly—turned slowly on his booted heel to look at her, and a smile, thin and narrow-eyed, crossed his face.

“You mistake, Princess,” he said; “the question now is what
you
can give us, and what price you are prepared to pay for the petty satisfaction of refusing.”

He gestured carelessly, and the red-bearded man stepped to Gray's side, wrenched his head up by the hair, and held a knife to his throat.

For a moment the world went very still. Then Sophie's magick roared up like a live thing, cold blue-white and shrieking—nearly all her own, now, the borrowed threads of Lucia MacNeill's faded almost to nothing—and tried to obliterate everyone here present who might do harm to Gray. Sophie's rational self fought it grimly; she would not,
must not
repeat the disastrous outburst that had led to her mother's death.

I am no murderess,
she told Cormac MacAlpine, quietly under the clamour in her mind,
and I shall not let you make me into one.

And if Gray, or any innocent person, should come to harm through any action of hers . . .

It did not bear thinking of. She fought the magick down, down, into a still small pool of fury.

Cormac MacAlpine smiled again. “Indeed, Princess. That is precisely what we expect you to provide.”

Yes, he truly can see magick,
Sophie thought,
and it appears he has set his sights on mine.

“And why should I oblige you?” she demanded, as though she could not see the reason perfectly well, bound to a tree in front of her eyes with a naked blade at his throat.

“You are not a fool,” Cormac MacAlpine said; “kindly do not insult either of us by pretending to be so. We have in our hands both your husband and yourself, as well as these others; you hold in yours, for want of a better metaphor, the fuel which our enterprise requires. To provide it costs you nothing; to refuse . . . well, I have no doubt that you are capable of interpreting the evidence of your senses.”

Sophie swallowed terror, swallowed rage. There was no help or guidance to be had here, no more knowledgeable and experienced person to tell her what she must do; Gray was in no state to help her. Whatever choices were to be made, they must be hers alone.
Lady Minerva, in your wisdom, help me to choose rightly.

“You need my magick,” she said, and was relieved to hear her voice emerge strong and steady. “For what purpose?”

Cormac MacAlpine narrowed his eyes at her. “What matters it to you, Princess?”

“If you know who I am,” Sophie said, “then you must understand that I have loyalties and obligations beyond the merely personal.” She closed her eyes briefly and swallowed again.
Forgive me, Gray.
“And I would hear from your own lips who you are, and what you intend, before I agree to lend myself to your . . . enterprise.”

“Even at the cost of your husband's life?” His tone was less threatening than intrigued.

“You will not kill him,” said Sophie, with a great deal more confidence than she felt.

“Will I not? Why say you so?”

“Because you have the talent of seeing magick in others.” It was a desperate play for time, and the prize very uncertain; at present, however, Sophie could think no farther ahead than the next moment, and her only goal was to divert her captor's attention from whatever it was he wished to do with his captive mages, until Joanna and Gwendolen should succeed in . . .

In doing what?

No matter.
“And if you have seen mine,” she continued, “as you certainly did just now, you will easily imagine what your fate might be, were you to eliminate my motive for restraining it.”

Cormac MacAlpine paced to and fro before her, thoughtfully; Sophie fixed her gaze on him, doubting her ability to look upon Gray's face without bursting into tears, or worse. Considered objectively, their captor was not difficult to look at—tall and straight, with gleaming auburn hair tied back from his high forehead, clear blue eyes set wide above a fine straight nose, firm jaw, and expressive mouth.

Sophie hated him as she had rarely hated another mortal being.

Gray had once taught her a spell to unfasten knots; whilst her captor's back was turned, she drew up the minutest thread of magick and muttered the words, two fingers pressing the one rope-end that dangled just far enough. But there was some other spell woven into the cord, which stung her fingertips viciously and set up a furious itching wherever it touched her skin.

Magickal talent,
said Gray's voice in her mind,
is sometimes less helpful than you might suppose.

Cormac MacAlpine turned suddenly to face her, hands clasped behind his back. “Your mother was Breizhek,” he said.

Sophie regarded him impassively. Did he know what she had tried?

“And all know the tale of her petty rebellion. Does it never gall you, Princess, that you might have ruled a kingdom, had you been born a boy?”

“Never,” said Sophie at once, with perfect truth. Many things galled her, in relation to her birth and upbringing, but having missed the opportunity to inherit her father's throne was decidedly not one of them.

Cormac MacAlpine's eyebrows flew up and his eyes widened briefly, perhaps the first uncalculated expression she had seen on his face.

“What has my mother, or my inheritance, to do with your purpose?” she demanded.

“Your pardon, Princess.” The moment of uncontrolled reaction was past now. “I had supposed that your sympathies might lie another way than with your own oppressors.”

Sophie's bound limbs were trembling in little helpless shudders, her arms flinching away from the rough elm-bark, and she fought to keep her voice from trembling likewise. “This enterprise of yours: Do you tell me that I am to sacrifice myself for a purpose of which I know absolutely nothing?”

The tall man studied her. Slowly, a smile curved his lips—a smile at once self-satisfied and hopeful. “Every great cause demands some sacrifice,” he said.

Inwardly, Sophie groaned. It was as she had feared: They had fallen into the hands of a man possessed of a grand idea. Ought she to have answered his question differently, feigned resentment of her half brother Edward, who would inherit their father's throne in her stead?

She risked a glance at Gray. He had not stirred, but neither, it appeared, had the man with the knife.

“And I do not ask of any man a sacrifice greater than those I have already made myself. I have succeeded in the task set us by Alba and her gods—our gods. My father devoted the last decades of his life to mapping the great journey of Ailpín Drostan, by which he wove together the clans and clan-lands to make the kingdom of Alba, and my loyal clansmen and I, against equally great odds, have retraced every step of that journey, and renewed its paths with the blood of Ailpín Drostan's descendants.”

Sophie's mind helpfully supplied an image of MacAlpine and his followers retracing their distant ancestor's steps across and about Alba with arms outstretched, scattering in their wake their own blood dripping from their fingertips. She repressed a shudder.

How much blood would such a deed require?
Though Alba's territory was nothing like so large as Britain's, still it was a kingdom entire, and not a small one.
All those hills and crags. All those islands, and the passages amongst them.

“I had not so many willing assistants as Ailpín Drostan,” said Cormac MacAlpine; with a bitter little smile, he untied one of his shirt-cuffs, shoved the sleeve upward, and extended his arm abruptly, revealing to Sophie's appalled eyes a long series of parallel scars. “He is said to have made his journey in a space of months; ours was the work of many years. But success in this great undertaking is worth every step and every drop of blood, for thus shall we cure the disease that afflicts both Alba and ourselves.”

Sophie was silent, this time, not from a wish to goad her captor into speaking, but because she could think of nothing to say.

“You worship the conqueror-gods, I conclude,” Cormac MacAlpine said. He stepped closer and loomed over her as he folded down his shirt-sleeve and retied the cuff.

Sophie answered cautiously, as she had once answered Conall MacLachlan the butterfly collector, “I hope I give all the gods their due.” Cormac MacAlpine's remark seemed an entire
non sequitur
.

“Say you so, Princess? And why should you owe anything to the gods of those who broke your ancestors to the yoke? The gods of Rome have no rights in your land, and still less in mine. And if your father supposes that either the people or the lands of Alba will stand idle while he thrusts his son into the chieftain's seat of Alba and his conqueror-gods into our shrines and wellsprings—”

“I am sure His Majesty has no designs on Donald MacNeill's throne,” Sophie said, lifting her chin as she thought Joanna might have done in the same circumstances, “and why you, or the priests of the Cailleach, or
anyone
should imagine that he has the
least
interest in Alba's choice of gods, is beyond my understanding. My father may
worship what you call conqueror-gods, amongst the many who are revered in his kingdom, but he has no yearning for conquest himself, that I have ever heard of.”

“Oh, indeed not,” said Cormac MacAlpine. He had begun to pace again but paused in his trajectory to fix her with a venomous smile. “He had rather conquer Alba in Lucia MacNeill's bed, as his forefathers conquered Breizh, than try and fail to win her on the field of battle.”

It was a barb which many a Breizhek gentleman or lady—Sophie's own family perhaps especially—might have found impossible to swallow; as a goad to Sophie's temper, however, it was singularly ineffective.

“And your enterprise will prevent him?” she inquired. “How so?”

The smile grew gentle and earnest; Sophie repressed a shiver that had nothing to do with the chill night air.

“You need not fear that any harm will come to your family, Princess,” Cormac MacAlpine said, “or to your kingdom. None here wishes any ill to your father, so he and his gods leave us to ourselves. Our quarrel is not with him, but with the false clan that would sell Alba in bondage to Britain.” He nodded to himself, and Sophie had to stop her own head from mirroring the motion. “Donald MacNeill ought never to have sat the chieftain's seat; any effort to right what is wrong in Alba must begin by removing him from it, and all of his clan and get.”

“And replace his clan and get with your own, I collect?” Sophie let her eyes drift briefly to Gray's face and found it yet slack and still. Layers of old bruises marked the skin of his bared throat, and from his temple blood dripped sluggishly, one drop to every three of Sophie's heartbeats. “Is this the service you give your gods?” she said softly. “Trickery, treachery, and the blood of captives too badly broken to choose otherwise?”

The quick flash of fury on Cormac MacAlpine's face, though as quickly controlled, warned Sophie what was coming, and she tried, too late, to turn her head aside. The attempt was a mistake; he saw the motion and shifted so that instead of striking her cheek, his open
hand caught her hard across one ear, crushing the other against the tree-trunk at her back. For a moment she hung limp against the ropes that bound her, dazed by the force of the blow. When she regained her balance and shook her head, trying to clear her vision, both ears throbbed, and something warm and wet ran down the treeward side of her neck.