Chantress

by Amy Butler Greenfield

  “No! She’d have my head if she knew. Please don’t tell her.” I spoke quickly, quietly, willing him to understand. “It was an experiment, that’s all.”

  “An experiment?” He sounded incredulous.

  “Yes. Like your own.”

  “But you could have burned us alive, girl. You could have blown up Gadding House—”

  “The way you nearly did, with those firebox experiments?” That silenced him. “Admit it: Your work is as dangerous as mine. But that doesn’t stop you from doing it. Not when there’s something you need to find out. So why shouldn’t I do the same?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Why? Because it’s not science? Because I’m a girl?”

  “Because you’re doing magic.”

  I scowled at him. “Why am I even bothering to argue with you? Where magic is concerned, your mind’s completely closed. You hate everything about it, me included.”

  He looked at me, startled. “I never said I hated you.”

  “You said I was like the Shadowgrims.” It still rankled.

  He reddened. “That was before I really knew you.”

  His words caught me by surprise. Was he saying he’d changed his mind?

  “Your magic’s more complicated than I thought,” he said. “It’s not free, and it’s not easy. You work hard for it, as hard as I work at my own craft. Maybe even harder.”

  I drew a deep breath. It was the most praise I’d had in weeks—and it was coming from the person I’d least expected to offer it.

  “But that doesn’t change the fact that your magic is dangerous,” he went on, his eyes grave. “What if the smell of it pulls in the Shadowgrims?”

  “Whatever smell there is will be long gone by night.”

  “Maybe so. But your godmother said there were other perils too—that Wild Magic could deceive you and hurt you.” He shook his head. “What possessed you, Lucy? Isn’t her kind of magic good enough for you?”

  “I had to,” I said. “I had to know—”

  “Know what?”

  “Whether I could still do magic.” It felt like a confession.

  There was a long silence.

  “Whatever made you think you couldn’t?” he asked.

  “Never mind.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “What?” It was clear he would dog me till he got an answer.

  “It hasn’t been going well,” I admitted. “No matter what I try, I can’t seem to master Lady Helaine’s sort of magic.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “So you thought you’d turn to Wild Magic instead—despite the risks?”

  “It wasn’t that risky. Nothing like mind-reading. All I did was light one small candle.” Stepping back from him, I blew on the wick. “Look: It’s gone out.”

  I’d meant that to be the end of it, but the song of flame lingered in the air, and the urge to make music and magic was still strong in me.

  Nat stepped forward, his voice tense. “You’re not going to light it again, are you?”

  “It’s harmless enough. You’ll see.” I let the song rise from my lips, sure it would be the same, and wanting to prove to him how very safe it was. But the anger inside me, the tumult of the argument, the weight of Nat’s disapproving gaze—all of it fed into the music. I softened my voice and bent into the song, trying to tame it. Yes, that was better. The song was still powerful, yet more controlled . . .

  Someone rushed toward me, breaking my concentration.

  “What are you doing?” Lady Helaine shrieked. “Stop! Stop at once!”

  The song inside me exploded, and flames shot into the air.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  REVELATIONS

  As the flame flared and hissed down toward the candle, Lady Helaine roared, “What do you think you are doing?”

  Panicked, I slung the ruby necklace over my head. The music in the room vanished, and the flame subsided to a pinpoint of light on the wick. In the sudden silence, all I could hear was Lady Helaine’s ferocious growl as she stood before me, fury in her eyes.

  “Did you think me a fool, that I would not know the sound of Wild Magic when I heard it?”

  My mood of defiance was slipping into shades of doubt, but I held my head high. “I thought you were done with me.”

  “Not when you behave like this.” Lady Helaine turned on Nat. “You.” She spat the word out. “What did you do to encourage this?”

  “He did nothing,” I said before he could speak. “He is as angry with me as you are.”

  “Then you may go,” Lady Helaine told Nat. When he did not move, she raised her voice. “I said go!”

  Nat looked at me, and to my surprise, it wasn’t anger I saw in his face but concern. “Do you want me to stay?” he asked quietly.

  I shook my head. This was my battle, not his. “Please go.”

  After he left, Lady Helaine said in a low, stony voice, “You drive me to despair, goddaughter. You scoff at everything I teach you, and then you practice Wild Magic behind my back—”

  “Only this once! And only because you said I had no power left—”

  “I do not wish to hear your excuses,” my godmother said, still in that harsh voice. “I know the truth now: Something in you is resisting me. Something in you is determined to follow the wrong path.”

  “But I—”

  “You are just like your mother.” Lady Helaine’s voice cracked across mine like a whip.

  My breath caught in my throat. What did this have to do with my mother?

  “She had power enough for both of us, more power even than I. But she would not listen.” Lady Helaine’s burning eyes looked straight through me, as if she were seeing a ghost. “You must be exact, I told her. You must be careful. You must practice and practice and practice. She was my ward and my apprentice; she was duty-bound to listen to me. But she dismissed me at every turn—exactly as you do. Every gift I offered, she scorned.”

  Was this true? It didn’t sound like the gentle mother I remembered. But Norrie had said that my mother and Lady Helaine had not gotten along, and perhaps this was why . . . .

  “Wild Magic was the only magic that interested her,” Lady Helaine said. “I warned her to steer clear of it. I told her I would not tolerate such doings under my roof.” Her mouth crumpled. “I never thought she would run away.”

  I did not know what to say. Lady Helaine seemed to be speaking to someone else in the room, not to me.

  A moment later, her eyes focused on me, as if she were suddenly remembering I was there. “I saw her only twice after that,” she added more calmly. “The first time, she brought you, a babe in arms. She knew that by Chantress law, I was your godmother, the eldest of your close-born kin, and she came to me to make your stone. Even with her love of Wild Magic, she knew you must have one. Young Chantresses are too vulnerable without it; they can be carried off by any devious music that crosses their path.

  “I thought we might be reconciled then, but when I learned she was still playing with Wild Magic, I was furious. I tried to make her see that she was risking not only her life but yours. We quarreled, and she went away. For eight years, she hid from me, and she used Wild Magic to cover her tracks. There was no way to find you without using Wild Magic myself, and I knew better than to take that path. So I did not see her again until the night she came to me with news of Scargrave and the grimoire.” Lady Helaine’s voice wobbled. “She would not tell me what she had done with you, not even when I begged. I find that hard to forgive, even now.”

  I was still grappling with what she’d said earlier. “She used Wild Magic for eight years?”

  It was the first inkling I’d had that Wild Magic did not necessarily lead to swift catastrophe and death.

  “She was incorrigible.” Lady Helaine’s jaw became more pronounced. “Absolutely unrepentant.”

  “But you said Chantresses who use Wild Magic don’t last long.”

  “She had a flair for it,” Lady Helaine said grudgingly. “A
few in every generation do, though most have the sense to refrain from making use of it.”

  “But she didn’t. Why?”

  Lady Helaine’s lips tightened. “Because she was tempted. That is what Wild Magic does. It tempts. It seduces. It gives you power beyond reckoning. No doubt that’s what drew her to it. She said she liked the freedom of it and the joy—though what she meant by that, I can’t understand.”

  Perhaps she couldn’t, but I could. It made me think of the wholeness I felt when I heard the wild music again, and the hot light inside me when I sang the kindling song. Had my mother felt the same way?

  Lady Helaine’s mouth soured. “Little good it did her in the end. When the Shadowgrims attacked us, her Wild Magic failed her. That is the way of Wild Magic: For all its power, it is chancy and deceitful. It will betray you when you least expect it. And she had nothing to fall back on, no discipline, no memorized songs, no long years of practice at Proven Magic. Indeed, she’d practiced Wild Magic with such abandon that she couldn’t work any Proven Magic even if she had remembered it. Her stone had cracked right through.”

  “Her stone cracked?”

  “Wild Magic can damage our stones as badly as the Shadowgrims can, though the pattern of the cracking is different. Given the kind of powerful magic your mother worked, it’s surprising her stone lasted as long as it did.”

  My hand moved to my ruby of its own accord. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “Because I thought there was no need. You had given your word you would obey me.”

  I held the ruby up to the light, and she and I searched it for damage.

  “It’s still intact,” my godmother said, unbending just a little.

  “And the mind-reading earlier, with Scargrave—that didn’t damage it either?”

  “No. I examined it very closely the night we met, and I would have seen the fault if it had been there. Your stone is a strong one, like your mother’s, and it escaped unscathed. But it will not stay that way, not if you keep practicing Wild Magic. Another attempt to kindle flame, another session of mind-reading—anything could be the last straw that starts a crack, or even shatters the stone completely. Then you will be like your mother, up against the Shadowgrims without anything to protect you. And you know what happened to her.”

  I heard blame in Lady Helaine’s voice, and it made me angry. “But you were there. You knew the right songs. Why didn’t you save her?”

  “You think it is as simple as that? A few songs, and all is well?” Lady Helaine’s face twisted. “Understand this: The songs I sang were among the most complicated I knew. They required craft and cunning and years of practice. Even I, with all my skill, could only barely manage to save myself. Your mother succumbed so quickly there was no way to rescue her.” She turned away from me, as if the memory were too much to bear. “And if you think that this does not pain me every day of my life, goddaughter, then you may think again.”

  Chastened, I stood silent. Thorny-tempered my godmother might be, but her anguish was real.

  Lady Helaine squared her sharp shoulders and faced me. “Enough of this. What’s past is past.” The anger had burned out of her voice, leaving only pain and resolute determination. “I was wrong to walk away from you. You are slow—very slow—to master Proven Magic, but the power is there, that is plain. I believe you have as much raw talent as your mother did, and what’s more, you have a self-discipline I never saw in her. If you do exactly as I say, you could become a truly great Chantress.”

  I frowned. Lady Helaine remembered only a handful of song-spells, didn’t she? There didn’t seem to be much prospect of greatness in that.

  But when I raised the point, Lady Helaine shook her head. “Do not trouble your head over that. If it is meant to be, it will be—provided you give your whole heart and body and mind to what I am teaching you. And provided you never do Wild Magic again.”

  “I never meant to do more of it, anyway,” I said, though I knew this was only half-true. Once the ruby was off, the music had beguiled me, and it had been hard to resist it.

  “No one ever means to do more, not at the start. That is the way of Wild Magic.”

  “I tell you, I won’t take the stone off again.” I had no wish to end up like my mother—betrayed by Wild Magic, surrounded by Shadowgrims. Perhaps Proven Magic was not as powerful, but it was safe. And ever since I had walked into Scargrave’s mind, safety was what I craved most.

  My eye fell on the candle in front of me. “Let me try again.”

  “Try what?”

  I blew out the flame. “To light it your way.”

  “I think you’ve done enough for one afternoon,” Lady Helaine began.

  But I had already started to sing, drawing breath in the way that she had taught me.

  I can do this.

  The song-spell still felt wrong to me, burning and scorching and making my head ache, but this time I didn’t let the feeling rattle me. I had learned something from the Wild Magic that carried over here: the sense of how a kindling song was put together, and how it needed to work as a whole. Beat after beat, my voice rang out stark and strong.

  And yet still the candle stayed dark.

  I trained my whole mind on it and kept singing, concentrating fiercely on each pitch and beat and phrase.

  But now the last notes were escaping from my mouth—and still the wick was cold and black. Heart sinking, I sang the final tone, long and low.

  The song was over. It was done. And yet again I had failed. I turned away, hands shaking.

  Next to me, Lady Helaine gasped.

  I spun around. At the top of the wick, a flame quivered, faint but indisputably there.

  I had made the song-spell work.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  MASTERY

  The next weeks passed in a blur of singing and magic. Every day there was something new for me to learn, and sometimes I could feel myself making progress almost by the hour.

  Not that the road was entirely smooth.

  “Again!” Lady Helaine continued to bark, day after day, hour after hour. More demanding than ever, she jumped on me for being too loud, too soft, too piercing, too husky, too passionate, too glib, and too reckless. Some days almost nothing I did passed muster.

  “Again—and sing it properly this time!” I heard the curt command even in my dreams.

  Yet I found that Lady Helaine’s criticism did not sting as much as it once had. Slowly, painstakingly, with many stops and stumbles, I was learning the song-spells I needed, and that was what mattered.

  And if I took more time over this than either I or Lady Helaine would have liked, I was making faster strides with another magical task: that of reading the Chantress manuscript with the song for destroying the grimoire.

  Covered with scratching and hatch marks, the pages appeared indecipherable at first, but as I held the scraps in my hands and listened to Lady Helaine’s explanations, I started to grasp the relation between each page of symbols and the sound of the song-spell it denoted.

  Lady Helaine tapped her fingers together with excitement. “You have a gift for this.”

  I scrutinized the pages, my mind absorbed by their mysteries.

  “A remarkable gift,” Lady Helaine mused, now with an air of quiet calculation. “And a very useful one. It will serve you well.”

  I looked up from the vellum in my hand. “I thought hardly any Chantress manuscripts were written down—and that Scargrave had burned most of them.”

  “He burned my library.” Lady Helaine’s voice was smoky with anger and regret. “Still, I expect he has not burned everything. Surely some scraps remain to be found.” She pointed to a line on my page. “Enough talking. Sing that to me. And be sure to hold your chin up exactly as I have directed.”

  As I continued to work with the manuscript, I sometimes caught Lady Helaine looking at me with pride, and occasionally with a certain wary respect as well. And that respect only increased when, after hours of agonizing practice, I final
ly made the song-spell for concealment work.

  “Excellent, excellent,” Lady Helaine murmured. “I can hardly see you even full in front of the candles. And you are virtually invisible in the shadows.”

  To see my own body slip away was shocking, and I nearly lost the momentum of the song then and there. But Lady Helaine’s rigorous training stood me in good stead. Though my head throbbed horribly, I kept breathing properly for a full quarter hour, and the magic of the song stayed with me until I lost it in a fit of coughing.

  “It is a start,” Lady Helaine said when I became visible again. “But we must build your stamina.”

  Our practice sessions became longer and more intense than ever, and as I became more and more proficient, Lady Helaine unbent a little and began telling me stories. At first, these were mostly gripping yarns about her adventures as a Chantress, but later, quieter tales emerged as well: how the women of our lineage had kept their magical nature largely hidden from their husbands (“Men cannot be trusted, neither husbands, nor fathers, nor sons”); how her own husband, a young nobleman, had considered her taste for books and libraries unseemly (“It was fortunate that I had skill with locks”); how she had never borne children but had longed for them (“Daughters all, if I’d had my way”).

  She told me stories, too, of the dilemmas my ancestresses had faced and the victories they had won. Instead of dreaming about the island, I now dreamed about Niniane and Melusine and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Knowing their histories—their glories and triumphs, their struggles and defeats—made me determined to prove myself worthy of the long line of Chantresses who had come before me.

  Yet even when telling stories, a part of my godmother stayed aloof. If I asked a question she didn’t want to answer, she simply ignored it. If I dared repeat the question, she turned sour and taciturn.

  But then I kept secrets too.

  † † †

  One of the secrets I kept concerned Nat.

  I had seen him only three times since the day he had found me practicing Wild Magic. Two of those visits had taken place in full view of Lady Helaine, and I had thought that she must be the cause of the awkwardness between us. But on his third visit, in early March, Lady Helaine allowed us to make a brief expedition by ourselves into the upper realms of Gadding House—and the awkwardness remained.