Lady of Magick (41 page)

If his gods do indeed crave the blood of captives, it seems they shall have mine as well as Gray's.

Cormac MacAlpine's hand darted towards her once more; with desperate effort Sophie controlled her reflexive flinch. He did not strike her again, however, but caught her jaw in a bruising grip and wrenched her face towards his own. “It seems my judgement is awry,” he said; “I thought you a woman of more sense.”

For the space of a few heartbeats, Sophie let her magick well up, felt it stretching desperately towards Gray's, and with satisfaction saw her captor's eyes widen minutely. Then she thrust it down again, almost savagely, and keeping her eyes fixed on his said, “For a man who has no quarrel with Henry of Britain and wishes him no ill, you have chosen a curious method of demonstrating your intentions.”

“You imagine that he will rush to avenge his beloved child—the same child he once sold away to the Iberian Emperor?” Cormac MacAlpine scoffed. “How little you know of the world, Princess.”

Three years ago, this line of argument might well have succeeded; three years ago, indeed, Sophie might have made it herself. Now, however, she could not help thinking of the way her father smiled at her, affectionate and regretful; of the anguish she had seen in his face when she had come so near to throwing him off entirely; of the pains to which he had gone to ease her journey to Din Edin, though so reluctant for her to go at all, solely because she wished it.

Of Lord de Courcy saying of her father, disconcertingly matter-of-fact, that
whosoever threatens harm to his daughter may expect swift retribution
.

“I may know very little of the world,” she said, “but it seems to me that you know very little of my father.”
Or of me,
she added silently. “You thought it very clever, I daresay, to target foreign mages—their
acquaintance in Din Edin could be convinced that they had left for home, and their friends at home that they remained in Alba.” The slow drip of blood down the side of her neck was an irritating distraction; if only she could reach up and wipe it away!

“It was clever enough,” Cormac MacAlpine said, “to bring us seven mages with no one the wiser.”

Seven?
Sophie blinked, trying not to show her surprise; Lord de Courcy had known of only four, apart from Gray. “Yet you did not foresee that if you kidnapped the daughter of a foreign king, the consequences might not be to your liking?”

The tall man smiled mockingly at her. “Ah, but I did not kidnap you, Princess,” he said; “you came to me of your own accord, or as nearly as makes no difference.”

“Teàrlag MacAlpine and Rose Neill MacTerry were acting on their own impulse, I suppose,” said Sophie. “And your henchmen to whom they handed me over, helpless as I was. None of them were carrying out your orders.”

“They were acting in the interests of Alba,” said Cormac MacAlpine, sharply. “As do I. You have seen, of course, that the Cailleach herself has no love for Donald MacNeill or his daughter.”

What can he mean by that? But of course: the effigies, the priests' instructive drama.

“I have seen that her priests do not,” she said, “which is not necessarily the same thing.”

Cormac MacAlpine leaned closer to Sophie and drew one finger gently down the side of her face, in dreadful mimicry of a lover's caress. “You will find that we have many allies,” he said, “even in Din Edin.”

Despite herself, Sophie shuddered.

A tactical error on her part, to let him see that he had distressed her. But so long as he was enjoying himself at her expense, he was neither forcing her compliance with his
enterprise
nor actively doing harm to anyone else. And perhaps . . .

Sophie controlled a little shiver of anticipatory triumph.
Perhaps
he will be willing to part with more information, if he believes it will give me pain.

“I cannot believe such a thing of any of my friends,” she said—defiantly, but with a tremble in her voice which suggested (or so she hoped) that it was her own defiance that she could not entirely believe.

“Can you not, Princess?” Cormac MacAlpine purred. “And yet you claim to have
duties and loyalties beyond the merely personal
. You cannot pretend to be surprised to learn that others have such loyalties also.”

Sophie could see nothing about this man to inspire loyalty; but then, she still knew almost nothing about him. And certainly there were many in Din Edin—and presumably throughout the kingdom—who were ill pleased with the idea of an alliance of marriage between Alba and Britain. “Such loyalties might be easier to comprehend,” she said, “if I knew who you are, and what it is you are about.”

He narrowed his eyes at her again, as though attempting to decide whether answering her implicit questions was more to his own advantage or to hers. Had she succeeded in persuading him that she was capable of sympathy with his cause?

He was wavering, yes—Sophie made her face open and inviting and, to her relief, saw him yield.

“I am the true chieftain of Clan MacAlpine,” he said. “You know, I presume, some of the history of MacAlpine, and of how my forefather Ailpín Drostan built this kingdom from a rabble of quarrelling clan-lands. Among the other debts which Alba and her people owe to my ancestors are the beneficence of the Cailleach and the lesser gods of the land, and the present system by which successors to the chieftainship are chosen and confirmed. To hear the lackeys of Donald MacNeill tell it, it has been done this way since the gods first made men to live in Alba; but the truth of the matter is that it was Drost Maon who first decreed that his heir should be chosen without bloodshed, under the guidance of the Cailleach, Brìghde, and the lesser gods, and were it not for the example of Clan MacAlpine, the rest of
them should be all still murdering one another in their beds, or over their wine-cups.”

Sophie refrained from comment. Where, she wondered, did the spell-net come into this tale?

“Alba prospered under the rule of Clan MacAlpine,” Cormac MacAlpine went on, “for the gods of the land blessed their reign. But those among the chieftains of other clan-lands who could not see things as they truly were, and sought only their own private gain, twisted the Moot of Succession—”

To choose an heir from some other clan, I suppose,
Sophie thought, and was grimly amused when Cormac MacAlpine's next words were, “to place an interloper from Clan MacLeod upon the chieftain's seat in Din Edin.”

He paused, expectant, but Sophie said nothing, letting the silence stretch out past the point of comfort.

Cormac MacAlpine smiled a thin smile with no mirth or friendliness in it—
I know what you are about, Princess
—and at last went on: “Since the chieftain's seat was lost to Clan MacAlpine, there has been nothing but misfortune and mischance in Alba.”

This assertion in no way aligned with what Sophie had learnt of Alba's recent history, which—until the present crisis—had been characterised by growing stability and the gradual cessation of hostilities with most of her neighbours. Certainly, however, there was more than enough misfortune to go round at present.

“And you mean by this
enterprise
of yours to win back the chieftain's seat from Donald MacNeill,” she hazarded, “and thus restore Alba to her former glory?”

He could not decide, she saw, whether she had meant this last in mockery or in earnest.

Before he could reply, there came a rustling of footsteps approaching from, presumably, the direction of the castle; Cormac MacAlpine's head snapped up, and he stepped towards Sophie and clapped a hand over her mouth, gripping her jaw hard enough to bruise.

Sophie considered biting him, torn between the savage satisfaction of paying him back in some small way for his cruelty to Gray and
the near certainty that to do so would be to ruin any possibility of stopping him.

“Cormac MacAlpine!” a woman's voice called softly.

In the midst of her calculations, Sophie froze. She knew that voice, had heard it not long ago, in fact, when its owner had left her in Quarry Close with a stack of parcels in her arms, to find her house empty and her husband gone.

But why is she here? She was going to Leodhas.

Unless, of course, that too was a deception.

The hand dropped away from her face, and Cormac MacAlpine turned towards the voice and said curtly, in Gaelic, “What is it?”

As he was turning, Sophie drew as deep a breath as her bonds permitted, and threw all of it into a single frantic cry: “Catriona! Help us!”

Cormac MacAlpine spun again on his heel and glared at her. “Be silent,” he hissed, reverting to Latin, and lifted his hand again as though to strike her.

Sophie managed not to flinch, but neither did she speak again.

The approaching footsteps quickened. After another moment, there was a rustling of branches to Sophie's left, and Catriona MacCrimmon herself, wide-eyed and pale, stepped into the clearing.

“Cormac MacAlpine,” she said breathlessly. “I must tell you—”

Then her eye fell on Sophie, and she fell silent. Sophie stared at her in horror; Catriona's answering gaze conveyed a sort of paralysed disbelief.

Cormac MacAlpine gritted his teeth. “Well?” he snapped.

“I—” Catriona looked from Sophie to her captor in evident bewilderment. “Why is—what have you—”

Sophie caught Catriona's eye and turned her head deliberately to look at Gray, willing Catriona to follow her gaze. She must herself, she supposed, present a frightening enough appearance by this time, but the sight of Gray—gaunt and bloodied and insensible, with Cormac MacAlpine's red-bearded henchman still holding a knife to his throat—surely was entirely horrifying.

Catriona looked; then, with a sort of choking gasp, she looked away again.

Sophie reached cautiously for her magick, caught the merest thread of it, and let it go in a low, quiet hum. Though she had no reason to expect any success in what she was attempting, it seemed impossible not to make the attempt.
Look at us, Catriona. You may wish the success of Cormac MacAlpine's enterprise, but will you accept the cost?

“Say what you have come to say, Catriona MacCrimmon,” said Cormac MacAlpine. “I can spare no time to indulge your fits of craven scruples.”

He appeared to have dismissed Sophie from his mind for the present: good. She did her best to show no reaction to his words or to Catriona's, though the latter certainly knew her capable of following a conversation in Gaelic.

“Never mind that,” said Catriona. Her throat worked, and her slim hands clenched into corded fists. “What are you about?”

“I am about the business of Clan MacAlpine.” His voice suggested that he was very near to resorting to violence. “Which does not answer to you, Catriona MacCrimmon, and never shall. Say what you have come to say, or be gone from my sight.”

Look at me, Catriona. Look at Gray.

Whether because Sophie's gambit was succeeding, or because she had indeed not understood what Cormac MacAlpine was about until this night, Catriona gazed silently at Gray, then again at Sophie, and at length said stolidly, “No.”

Sophie's heart leapt.

Cormac MacAlpine stared at Catriona.
“No?”
he repeated incredulously. “And what of your vows of loyalty, then?”

“I cast my lot for Clan MacAlpine,” said Catriona, squaring her slim shoulders, “and for the healing and defence of Alba. Not for forcible confinement and slow murder.”

She flung an accusing hand in Gray's direction. “You wrote me word that he had agreed to help,” she said. “That all of those I sent to you had so agreed, or had been sent on their way. I have been travelling up and down Leodhas and Na Hearadh on your behalf; and what do I find, on the very day after coming to you at last, but that your sacred grove is become a torture chamber!”

“They are only foreigners,” said Cormac MacAlpine. He had adopted a reasoning tone whose very ordinariness, in the present circumstances, made Sophie's skin crawl. “And most are Sasunnach, at that. We pursue a great end, a god-given task; we must not be dissuaded by squeamishness over the means. If these stranger mages have the power we need to heal our ailing clan-lands, yet will not give it willingly, are we not bound by our service to the lands and gods of Alba to take it by whatever method offers?”

It struck Sophie then how odd it was that he should be attempting to persuade Catriona, when he might so easily have overpowered her. Certainly he had evinced no hesitation in offering violence towards herself. Just as this thought occurred to her, an echo of stealthy movement made her turn her head, and she saw that the red-bearded man had abandoned Gray and was circling the clearing to approach Catriona from the far side, quietly, out of her line of sight.

Sophie coughed. Both Catriona and Cormac MacAlpine started at the noise, harsh and rasping in the night-quiet of the wood. The red-bearded man froze.

Having begun to cough, alas, Sophie found she could not stop, and what was left of her song-spell slipped from her grasp.

Then Catriona did an unexpected thing—at any rate, Sophie had not expected it, and by the look on his face Cormac MacAlpine expected it still less. “Take mine,” she said, holding out both her hands.

Cormac MacAlpine stared. Sophie managed at last to catch her breath.

“I have magick,” Catriona said; “not so much as she has, but certainly more than is likely to be left to him,” with a jerk of her head at Gray. “If you have not killed him altogether, it is only by luck or his gods' own hands. But I have my magick still, and I will give it to the spell, if you will first let the unwilling go free.”

Clever,
thought Sophie approvingly,
to make him lay down his arms first
, before the true import of Catriona's offer dawned upon her and she gasped, “Catriona!”