Lady of Magick (44 page)

“Nearly,” she said, reaching for Gray's hand where it wrapped about her shoulder, and spreading her own over it, her fingers slotting into the interstices of his. “Another moment; I can see now how to go on.”

She tested her connexion to the spell-net and found it as firm as ever, but now that she had seen the magick from within, she could see too the way to break free of it—to free herself, and Gray, and all the others, without material damage to any. Reclining against Gray's chest, her head pillowed on his bony shoulder, she closed her eyes again to shut out the physical world, and reached after the thread that linked her magick to the great elm-tree. From there it was no difficult matter to trace the magick from tree to tree, and from tree to man, and to sever each thread that tethered one of the mages into the spell, and draw them all together with her own, through the heart of the great elm, and now . . .

The last trace of Lucia MacNeill's magick gleamed bright red-gold amidst the blue-white flower-petals that Sophie's mind used to represent her own magick—easily seen, and easily drawn out to stand alone. It was Clan MacNeill's magick that would feed the spell-net,
and could command it; if, when that last thread returned to its source, it carried with it the full strength of the half-dozen links which Cormac MacAlpine had created, would that not close the circuit once for all? Sophie wove together the strands, her own and Gray's and Professor Maghrebin's and the stranger-mages', with the red-and-golden thread of Clan MacNeill; at last, when the plaited rope seemed to pulse with life before her mind's eye, she reached for her own link to the spell and, with a deft twist of a metaphorical wrist, severed it cleanly.

She fell back into her own aching, bruised, and half-starved body with a resounding, if metaphysickal, thump.

“It is done,” she said, and, burrowing closer into Gray's arms, closed her eyes again and tumbled headlong into sleep.

*   *   *

“I cannot understand it,” said Joanna. “Where can they have come from? Who summoned them, and when, and why?”

There were guardsmen everywhere: in the wood and in the courtyard, in the kitchens and the stables, on the battlements and in the cells below the walls. It was not that she objected to their presence—indeed, they had made themselves extremely useful thus far, taking Cormac MacAlpine and his henchmen into custody, bringing food and blankets and even a journeyman healer to the erstwhile prisoners—but it was baffling and inexplicable, and Joanna was not overfond of things she could not explain.

“They were on their ship, out in the firth, were they not?” said Gwendolen reasonably. “Surely they are come here for the same reason as ourselves, thinking the wood was afire. It must have looked it, from a little way offshore.”

“No,” said Joanna decidedly. “That is, I can easily imagine it, but these are not Angus Ferguson's troops. They are Donald MacNeill's household guard.
Household
guard. From Din Edin. It is no part of their business to take ship to Mull to put down a”—she waved a hand vaguely—“whatever this was intended to be. They ought not to travel at all unless—”

“Unless?” Gwendolen prompted, after a moment.

Joanna said nothing, however, for she was staring in openmouthed alarm at the person, decidedly
not
a guardsman, who had just stepped into the clearing, pushing back the hood of her dark-green cloak to free a riot of red-gold curls. “Horns of Herne,” said Joanna. “Lucia MacNeill has followed us here!”

“Oh,”
said Gwendolen. “Well. Birds of a feather, I suppose . . .”

Joanna frowned at her, and she subsided.

The two guardswomen fell in behind Lucia MacNeill as she conducted a sort of makeshift tour of inspection of the late battlefield, pausing to speak to each of the freed prisoners. She spoke longest to Gray—Sophie being still so deeply asleep that it seemed nothing could wake her—and Joanna wished very much to know what they might be saying, but though she sidled close with that purpose in mind, the conversation was all in Gaelic, and her stealth availed her nothing.

At last Lucia MacNeill rose to her feet again, laid one hand briefly on Gray's shoulder, and began to make her way towards Joanna. Curiously, her route seemed to involve touching the flat of her right hand to the bark of each tree she passed.

“Joanna Callender,” she said, halting before Joanna and reaching for both her hands.

Joanna unthinkingly reached back and was startled and a little alarmed when the heiress of Alba pulled her into a fierce embrace.

“You were very foolish,” she said, when she pulled away. “All of you. Thanks be that Sophie sent me that note from Dùn Breatainn—”

“Which note?” said Joanna.

“To say that she was not sitting quietly at home, as we supposed—as though one small illusion-spell should hoodwink the whole of her acquaintance!—nor convalescing at the seaside, as she seems to have suggested to Rory MacCrimmon, but staging a landing on the Ross of Mull,” said Lucia MacNeill, “and requesting me to get word to Angus Ferguson's company, that they might intervene if they saw ‘fireworks.'”

“I see,” said Joanna, who did not.

“But of course I could not trust anything of the kind to Angus Ferguson, and I am not myself empowered to relieve him of his command,” Lucia MacNeill continued, which answered that question; “and so I had to come myself, with our own troops, whose commander can be trusted not to overreact. Though I confess,” she added, with a little shudder, “I was greatly tempted myself to overreact, when we saw the whole of the wood behind the castle apparently afire.”

“It did look rather like that,” said Joanna. “But it was not fire at all, in the end; it was magick. And Sophie has sorted it out, I believe, for there is certainly nothing afire now.”

“That is what you think,” said Lucia MacNeill darkly.

*   *   *

“It was your magick that the spell wanted,” Sophie explained, between spoonfuls of mutton stew. “Not Cormac MacAlpine's, and not even ours, truly”—she gestured expansively at the rest of the mages sleeping in cots slung from the ceiling of the spacious cabin aboard the
Malmhìn NicNèill
—“though it drank our power greedily enough, given the opportunity. But it was only because you had lent me your magick that it . . . came awake.” She paused for another bite. “At least, that is my present theory.”

“So, then,” said Lucia MacNeill bemusedly, “whilst I have been blaming myself for giving you the means of putting your life in danger, you have been using it to set my kingdom to rights?”

“And to save half a dozen lives,” Gray added, “for I think Cormac MacAlpine must have killed all of us sooner or later, and himself with us—though I do not believe he meant to do either.”

Sophie flushed and looked down into her soup-plate.

“And now this . . . spell-net . . . is linked to me.” Lucia MacNeill very evidently did not know what to make of this development, and Gray could scarcely blame her.

“I believe so,” said Sophie. Now that they were speaking about magick and not about her bravery under fire, she was perfectly able to meet Lucia MacNeill's eye. “I hope it was not all my imagination,”
she said, a little wistful, “for it was a great satisfaction to me to help in such a way.”

Gray slid closer to her on the narrow bench and surreptitiously rested his hand on her knee.

“If what you say is true,” said Lucia MacNeill thoughtfully, “then you held the fate of the whole of Alba in your hands.”

“I suppose I did,” said Sophie, and took another mouthful of stew.

“And you might have done anything at all with that power,” Lucia MacNeill persisted, “but you chose to use it to heal our wounds.”

“Of course I did!” Sophie sat up straighter and put down her spoon. “Do you tell me that you should have done differently?”

“No, no!” said Lucia MacNeill. “I should have done just as you did, and counted myself lucky to have such a chance. But I am the heiress of Alba, Sophie; and you are—”

“Your sister, or nearly,” Sophie said gently. “A welcomed guest in your home, as well as in your kingdom, and a student at your University. I was not born in Alba, Lucia, but that does not make me indifferent to her fate.”

“No,” said Lucia MacNeill, a little subdued. “No, I see that. But—” She hesitated, then plunged onward: “You gave it up. You held the power of life and death over an entire kingdom, and at the first possible opportunity, you chose to give it up.”

Sophie looked genuinely astonished at this. “Of course I did,” she repeated.

For some time thereafter, the three of them ate their mutton stew in meditative silence.

*   *   *

As well as magistrates' men to take charge of the prisoners, the
Malmhìn NicNèill
was met on the quay at Dùn Breatainn by the private secretaries of both Donald MacNeill and Lord de Courcy, each of whom had brought with him a carriage and driver for the purpose of conveying his charges to their destination. The difficulty was, however, that the distribution of charges and of destinations seemed not to be altogether clear.

The foreign mages were to remain in Glaschu for the period of their convalescence; Donald MacNeill had dispatched instructions for their proper accommodation, together with a purse of coin and the formal request that the local magistrates should hear their evidence as soon as they should be well enough to provide it. Mr. Powell had strict instructions from Lord de Courcy, who had in turn received them from His Majesty by way of Sieur Germain de Kergabet, that Joanna and Gwendolen (now respectably clothed in a sober travelling-gown from Lucia MacNeill's trunk) were to be returned to London with all safe speed—a course of action which Sophie regarded as eminently sensible, and Joanna as the height of injustice—together with an invitation for Sophie and Gray to return to London likewise, if they so chose. On the other hand, Ciaran Barra MacNeill carried both strict instructions to return Lucia MacNeill to Din Edin by any means necessary (though Sophie suspected him of exaggerating the vehemence with which the request had been delivered) and an invitation for Sophie and Gray to return to Din Edin as guests of Donald MacNeill, or to their house in Quarry Close, whichever they might prefer.

Mr. Powell had also brought Joanna's and Gwendolen's effects and a considerable stack of letters collected from Quarry Close—most of them directed to Gray, half a dozen to Sophie, and two to Joanna. The first of these made her roll her eyes, and she tossed it aside unopened; the second (in the direction of which Sophie recognised Jenny's hand) she slit open with an expression of trepidation and read through very quickly, before folding it up again and stuffing it into the very bottom of her reticule. Her face was pink and her shoulders hunched when she turned away to look out at the harbour.

A surreptitious glance at the neglected letter showed it to be from Roland. Sophie frowned thoughtfully, and refrained from rocking the tenuously balanced boat.

*   *   *

“What had Lady Kergabet to say to you, Jo, that made you squirm so?” Gwendolen inquired, sotto voce, as Lord de Courcy's coach rattled out of Glaschu.

Joanna hunched her shoulders and jerked her head at Mr. Powell, who sat gazing out of the window with a careful appearance of insouciance.

“She chastised me for taking criminally foolish risks with my own life, and with Sophie's and yours,” she said at last, too low (she hoped) for Mr. Powell's ears, “and for frightening her half to death—as though Sophie's mad schemes were all
my
fault.”

Gwendolen hummed sympathetically and tilted her curly head on one side. “To be fair, Jo—”

“And then she thanked me,” Joanna continued, “and blessed me in the names of a dozen gods, for saving her brother's life, and told me—” She swallowed hard. “And told me that she should have been proud to be my mother.”

“Oh,” Gwendolen murmured. She inched closer to Joanna on the leather-cushioned seat, and clasped her hand, and said no more.

*   *   *

That night, however—Mr. Powell having grudgingly consented to a full night's halt, rather than another change of horses, because Lord de Courcy's coachman insisted upon it—she turned from the dressing-table and said quietly, “I have a confession to make to you, Jo.”

Her tone—hesitating, almost fearful—froze Joanna in the act of unfolding her nightdress.

“H-have you?” she said.

Gwendolen ducked her head, as though studying her hands. Joanna, drifting closer, found herself studying them likewise: still long and slim and graceful, and now perfectly clean, they bore the unmistakable signs of their recent ordeals in new blisters, scratches, and ragged, broken nails.

The silence stretched out unbearably. “Gwen, we are good friends, are we not?” said Joanna at last. “Whatever it is—”

Whilst she was speaking, her right hand, smaller than Gwendolen's but similarly marked, had crept forward of its own volition and her fingers woven themselves into Gwendolen's soft curls. Now
Gwendolen's face tipped up towards hers, and her dark eyes were wary, troubled.

“Jo,” she said, “have you ever been in love?”

“No,” said Joanna at once, “and—”

“Nor have I,” Gwendolen said. “That is—I had not—until we were caught and thrown in that horrible place; and then I could not mistake it.”

Joanna frowned. Why should those words make her stomach churn?
I ought to be happy for her, surely.
But then, Gwendolen herself seemed more tense and anxious than happy.

“May I . . . may I ask who . . .”

“Oh.” Gwendolen's lips twisted in wry self-mockery. “I hoped,” she said, bending her head again, “I hoped that she might feel the same. But I see I was mistaken.”

She spoke so quietly that Joanna was not altogether certain of what she was hearing. She dropped to her knees, feeling as much at sea in this conversation as though she had been attempting to comprehend some complex magickal working, to bring their faces closer to level.