Lady of Magick (9 page)

The schedule of
lectures for the first fortnight of the new term was posted on the day before the Autumn Equinox. By this time Sophie's faithful adherence to Dolina MacKinnon's programme of study enabled her, upon spying Gray's name halfway down the list, to puzzle out that the entry read,
Magister G. Marshall (Merlin Coll., Oxon.)—On practical shape-shifting: Lecture the first (to be read in Latin).

She carefully noted down the time and place, and set about working out the titles of other listed lectures.

Magister N. Ferguson (School of Healing and Healing Magick)—On the philosophy of healing: Lecture the first

Professor D. MacAngus (School of Theoretical
Magick)—Fundamental magickal ethics: Lecture the first

Professor D. MacAngus (School of Theoretical Magick)—Fundamental magickal ethics: Lecture the first (to be read in Latin)

Magistra M. MacRury (School of Practical Magick)—Legal and ethical considerations in the use of scrying

Professor A. Maghrebin (University of Alexandria)—On the
Osirian Books of the Dead: Lecture the first (to be read in Latin)

Doctor M. Ní Sabháin (College of Magick and Alchymy, Duiblinn)—A survey of alchymical discovery, with special reference to the Erse School (to be read in Latin)

. . .

How provoking,
thought Sophie,
that so many particularly interesting lectures should be read only in Gaelic!
Then, recollecting that she was standing in the middle of Din Edin, she laughed at herself, and putting away her pen and commonplace-book, set off for her library carrel to work on her list of Gaelic verbs.

*   *   *

Some three days later, Sophie pushed open the door of a Library reading-room one afternoon to find a tall, imposing woman a few years older than herself, with a great plaited coronet of russet hair wound about her head, just looking up from the reading stand where she was consulting an enormous codex. Sophie halted on the threshold, daunted by the stranger's penetrating stare.

After a moment the woman said in Latin, “You must be Sophie Marshall,” and offered Sophie a flashing smile that, for a moment, lit her shuttered face like sunshine glinting through storm-clouds. “I am Mór MacRury.”

The name was familiar; it had been on the list of lectures, Sophie remembered.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss— Magistra—” She floundered; the stranger laughed, a clear alto chuckle.

“You Sasunnachs!” she said. “Always seeking to be strangers to one another. You must call me Mór.” Her Latin had the same soft, musical tilt that Sophie was becoming accustomed to hear from Rory and Catriona, and from Dolina MacKinnon.

Sophie, delighted, grinned in return and said, “Then you must call me Sophie. And I am not English.”

“No?”

“Well,” Sophie conceded, “I suppose I am
half
-English. But my other half is Breizhek, and I was brought up there.”

“Like the Lost Princess!” said Mór. Sophie stiffened a little, but perhaps this was no more than the idle remark it appeared, for her new acquaintance at once went on, “And now you are come to Alba. Do you find Din Edin very different from Oxford?”

*   *   *

“Sophie? Are you there?” Gray's voice, softly calling, floated in at the door.

Sophie sprang to her feet and ran to meet him. “Hush,” she admonished, taking his hand, “and come with me; I have made a most interesting new acquaintance!”

Mór MacRury looked up from the scroll she was copying. Her brief, startling smile flashed over her face again; then she blinked several times. Her eyes narrowed, and her face creased into a puzzled frown. “Brìghde's tears!” she said softly. “And what does that mean, I wonder?”

“What does what mean?” Sophie demanded. “What makes you look so baffled, Mór?”

Gray, meanwhile, had disentangled himself from Sophie's grip and was gazing shrewdly at Mór. “May I ask,” he said, “forgive me for addressing you when we have not been introduced—”

Mór glanced aside at Sophie with a wry twist of her lips. “You will not deny that
he
is English, I suppose?”

“No,” Sophie conceded, suppressing a smile. “Gray, this is Mór MacRury, who is a lecturer in practical magick; Mór, my husband, Graham Marshall.”

“The Sasunnach shape-shifter, yes.”

Gray ignored this—Sophie supposed he was grown quite used to it by now—and forged ahead: “Magistra MacRury, may I ask: Have you the talent of seeing others' magick?”

“Like Master Alcuin!” Sophie whispered, and studied Mór with new interest.

Mór's arched russet eyebrows flew up. “I have,” she said. “And
since you have so quickly guessed it, perhaps you may be able to explain to me what it is I am seeing? For I confess I am, as Sophie puts it, baffled.”

“I regret that I cannot explain it,” said Gray. “But—”

Despite having asked the question, however, Mór MacRury did not appear to be attending to his answer. “Sophie has a deep well of magick,” she said, tilting her magnificent head and studying the pair of them with narrowed eyes. “Almost the deepest I have ever seen. It lay quietly all the time we were speaking together, waiting to be called upon, which she did not have occasion to do. Then you came in”—she looked sharply at Gray, and narrowed her blue eyes still farther—“and Sophie's magick leapt up like a great flame feeding on dry wood, though she seemed to be calling upon it as little as ever. And yours, which is nearly as deep, boiled up as though to meet it. I have never seen such a thing, though I have lived so many years among mages.”

Sophie looked up at Gray, and found him regarding her with a troubled expression. Master Alcuin, who had observed what was presumably the same phenomenon, had never satisfactorily explained it; perhaps, like herself, Gray was torn between avid curiosity and a desire to avoid notoriety.

“It is true,” he said slowly, as though testing each word before he spoke it, “that we are much in the habit of working spells in concert.”

“Perhaps that may account for it,” Mór conceded. Her thoughtful frown remained, however, and Sophie—feeling rather pinned under glass—was not altogether sorry when the approach of the dinner hour obliged them to part from their new acquaintance.

*   *   *

The University term proper began on the following day. A senior member of the School of Practical Magick having died suddenly in the first week of September, Gray—though invited only as a lecturer—found himself applied to by the head of the School to take on several of the students thus left without a tutor; and Sophie, for her part, threw herself into undergraduate life with the same enthusiasm that had characterised her first term at Merlin.

Together with two other young women, she met her tutor on the fourth morning of the term, in a cluttered, cosy study comfortingly reminiscent of Master Alcuin's rooms in Oxford. Throughout this first meeting she was perpetually on her guard, equally fearful of giving offence and of attracting attention; gradually, however, it became apparent that though her recent arrival, her still halting Gaelic, and her unfamiliarly accented Latin made her a curiosity to her fellow students, they saw nothing else in her to occasion extraordinary interest. Still, she kept a tight rein on her concealing magick—just enough, and not too much—glad now of the long hours she had spent in learning to make it answer to her will and not merely to her instincts and emotions.

Her tutor, the redoubtable Magister Cormac MacWattie, she observed with a more wary eye. Their first meeting, he explained, would be devoted largely to gauging where Sophie and her companions stood in their course of study, Sophie being a newcomer and the others having had other tutors the year before. Though Sophie felt she acquitted herself reasonably well in respect of matters theoretical—allowing for the rather dismaying number of important works in Gaelic with which she was yet unfamiliar—she began to wonder whether there was any possibility at all of her catching up her year-mates.

In deference to Sophie, Cormac MacWattie spoke slowly, or spoke in Latin, except when beginning to be absorbed in a subject, when he forgot her handicaps altogether and her head began to ache with the effort of parsing his rapid Gaelic—by turns lulling her ear with its similarities to Brezhoneg or Cymric and baffling her by its differences.

When they passed on to matters practical, Sophie—knowing now how much more emphasis was placed on practical magick here than by most tutors at Merlin College—was rather apprehensive. In fact, however (thanks to having been Master Alcuin's student, as well as to Gray's less formal tutelage), it was in the practical tasks that she more easily held her own, demonstrating without much difficulty her ability to direct the size, height, and direction of a globe of magelight;
to summon objects up to the size and weight of Cormac MacWattie's Gaelic translation of the
Greater Mabinogion
without upsetting the intervening furniture or causing injury to herself or anyone else; and to use a finding-spell to locate one of her own hair-pins, which Cormac MacWattie had concealed on the top of a bookcase whilst she and her fellow students waited in the corridor outside. The calling and control of fire—though on the very small scale of a candle flame—presented a greater challenge: not because it required more magick, more self-control, or significantly more finesse than the other tasks (it did not) but because Sophie had never yet succeeded in separating this relatively small and ordinary magick from the horrors of the night in the Master's Lodge at Merlin when she had first seen fire-magick used in battle. Eithne MacLachlan's flame was tiny, but steady and obedient; Una MacSherry's larger and less tidy, but still firmly under her direction. Sophie's, however, lurched from spark to conflagration and back again so rapidly and erratically that Cormac MacWattie was moved to step in and put it out altogether. He waved off Sophie's halting apologies, but above his kindly smile his eyes were shrewd and thoughtful.

“One last task,” he said, “before we part. Look closely at this cup.” He held up the little silver goblet with which he had welcomed them at the beginning of the session. The three students passed the cup from hand to hand.

“Now that you know what it looks like,” he rumbled, remembering again to speak slowly, “give it back to me.”

He held out his hand, and Sophie returned the cup. Then with a barked “Eyes front!” Cormac MacWattie strode around the half circle of chairs until he stood behind his students. Sophie heard the rustle and scrape of books moving along a shelf, and a faint metallic clink, and then heavy footfalls as her tutor returned to seat himself in his armchair.

“Eithne MacLachlan!” he said. “Summon me that cup, if you please.”

The afore-named, a plump and pretty young woman, abundantly freckled and exceedingly shy, started in her seat. When she made to
turn towards the bookcase at her back, Cormac MacWattie brought her up short with a pointed cough. Biting her lip doubtfully, Eithne MacLachlan closed her eyes and, after a moment, began to mutter a spell. Sophie clasped her hands in her lap and held her breath.

Eithne MacLachlan, it appeared, could not perform an unseen summoning, and Una MacSherry, though she seemed to have a large store of elaborate summoning-spells by heart, did no better. They both appeared so much chagrined by this failure that when it came to Sophie's turn, she felt almost ashamed of the ease with which her muttered
Accedete!
made the welcome-cup sail over her shoulder and onto her outstretched palm—though, after the debacle of the candle-flame, she could not help feeling some pride in it, too.

Eithne and Una gaped.

Cormac MacWattie raised rather shaggy grey-gold eyebrows and nodded at Sophie. “Well done,” he said, reaching to take back the cup. “Who taught you how to do that?”

Sophie flushed and dropped her eyes. “I . . . taught myself it,” she said, uncertain and awkward in Gaelic.

“You may speak in Latin, Sophie Marshall,” her tutor reminded her, himself shifting into that tongue. “You taught
yourself
the skill of unseen summoning? May I ask how?”

Sophie shrugged uncomfortably and fought a strong urge to disappear. Why had she not dissembled, pretended to be less adept? She could not tell the truth; suppose she said,
My husband was in danger of his life, and I could help him only by summoning a weapon I could no longer see for smoke and dust
—these people could not possibly believe her, and indeed it would be almost worse if they did.

“The circumstances . . . urgently required it,” she said at last. “I am not altogether certain how I succeeded the first time, but once I had got the trick of it, the next time was very easy.”

Cormac MacWattie's expression—lips pursed, eyes narrowed, head tilted on one side—suggested that he found this explanation insufficiently specific, but to Sophie's vast relief he chose not to pursue it for the present. “The magicks we learn because we must,” he said mildly, still in Latin, “we seldom afterwards forget;
but it does not follow that learning ought always to occur under duress.”

“No, indeed, sir,” said Sophie feelingly.

*   *   *

The session ended with stern instructions for their subsequent meeting: for Sophie, an essay upon the theory of elemental magick, with particular reference to the magick of fire, and for the others, upon the theoretical differences between seen and unseen summonings. Sophie tried to flee to her carrel in the Library, but Eithne and Una crowded round her outside the door of Cormac MacWattie's study, so that she could not escape unless by actually pushing past them.

“How
did
you learn to do that?” Una MacSherry demanded. Her Latin was heavily accented, but so much more fluent than Sophie's Gaelic that Sophie could scarcely fault it.