Lady of Magick

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “Besides,” Gray went on, more practically, “Miss MacCrimmon has engaged a daily woman for us, and I am sure we shall have no difficulty.”

  Perhaps more to the point, Sophie’s father had made them a very generous allowance, delivered via Edwin Cooper—to Gray, who was not too proud to accept His Majesty’s help, rather than to Sophie, who should certainly have protested—together with the promise that Lord de Courcy, His Majesty’s ambassador in Din Edin, might be applied to for the relief of any financial difficulties arising during their sojourn there. Gray had no notion of their falling into any such difficulties—their wants were not extravagant, and the stipend provided by the University to its visiting lecturers more generous than he had expected; in addition to which, he had still his Fellowship from Merlin—but he had welcomed the assurance all the same.

  Sophie was soon flitting about the tiny house, a little globe of magelight hovering at her shoulder, peering through windows and opening cupboards. There was, unsurprisingly, no pianoforte, but Gray studied the sitting-room and dining-room, calculating angles and clearances under his breath, and soon saw where, with a little judicious rearrangement of the existing furnishings, one might be installed (if it could first be got through the front door). He made a mental note to discover as soon as possible where an instrument might be hired or, if that were impossible, purchased.

  Sophie’s bright laughter rang out somewhere overhead.

  “Gray!” she called. A small magelight came bouncing down the staircase and hovered at Gray’s shoulder. “You must come up and see this ridiculous bed!”

  Gray smiled, barred and warded the front door, and took the stairs two at a time.

  * * *

  The bed was indeed a trifle absurd: set into a sort of loft, so that it must be reached by a small ladder, and hung with curtains so heavy, and so hideous, that they might have been designed to repel armed attack. A massive brass warming-pan hung beside the hearth, and a row of deep drawers was set into the wall beneath the bed; Sophie knelt and pulled two of them open, revealing at least three tightly folded eiderdowns. Stooping to pull open the third, Gray was not entirely surprised to discover a stack of woollen blankets.

  “All of this does make one suspect,” said Sophie, rising and dusting off her skirts, “that winters in Din Edin may be colder than we are accustomed to.”

  “If that is so, I am sure we shall find ways to keep warm,” said Gray, resolutely straight-faced. To his great satisfaction, Sophie burst into delighted laughter.

  “I was never in the slightest doubt,” she said, and, leaning her hands on his shoulders, bent to kiss him. “We both are capable of some cleverness, after all.”

  Gray felt that he could never tire of that particular juxtaposition of solemn face and slyly laughing eyes.

  * * *

  When they ventured downstairs the next morning, Catriona’s daily woman—by name Donella MacHutcheon, Catriona had told them—was sweeping the kitchen floor and singing in Gaelic, and the small table was set with a round brown teapot and a breakfast of what proved to be oatmeal porridge, butter, and cream.

  Conversation with Donella MacHutcheon was greatly hampered by their having no language in common but Gray’s few words of Gaelic. Sophie, however, broke the ice by at once taking up the melody of the song Donella MacHutcheon had been singing and asking, in Latin but with eloquent gestures, to be taught the words. When she sang back the first strophe and refrain in her clear, pure soprano, note-perfect, and was rewarded with a wide, astonished smile, Gray smiled too, in pride and no little relief; nothing could be less like the expression which Sophie and he had been accustomed to see on the face of Mrs. Haskell.

  After breakfast and some desultory attempts at unpacking, they sallied forth into the streets of Din Edin. The day was bright and crisp, and the neighbourhood of the University filled with people variously loitering, strolling, and hurrying in every direction, exactly like the streets of Oxford on a brisk September morning—but for the preponderance of spoken Gaelic.

  “We must find a bookshop, first of all,” said Gray decidedly; “tutorials or no, we shall need books to learn Gaelic from. And then, cariad, should you like to look about the University proper?”

  “I should quite like,” said Sophie, “to see the Library which Catriona MacCrimmon spoke so fondly of last night. And, Gray—”

  She paused, and they walked on in silence for some moments before she said, “Might we inquire whether somewhere in the University buildings there is an instrument that I might practise on? Somewhere where I should not be in anyone’s way?”

  It was on the tip of Gray’s tongue to say, I have a much better idea than that; but it occurred to him that it would be better still to surprise Sophie with a pianoforte of her own, and so instead he said, “Of course!”

  * * *

  They found three bookshops within a stone’s throw of one another. The first was dusty and smelt very strongly of cats; the second was so aggressively clean and well ordered that they scarcely dared take any book down from the shelves to look at. The third, however, possessed only one resident cat (“So important for the mice, you see”) and just that small degree of disorder which seemed to invite serendipitous discovery.

  “So you are the famous Sasunnach shape-shifter!” the proprietor exclaimed, when Gray had explained their errand; observing Gray’s astonished expression, he continued, “The one whose praises Rory MacCrimmon has been singing all summer.”

  “Then I suppose I am he,” Gray said; he blushed to the roots of his sandy curls, and Sophie concealed a grin.

  They left the shop with their arms full of codices neatly bundled with twine, and, by unspoken agreement, turned their steps towards Quarry Close rather than continue their explorations thus burdened. Donella MacHutcheon had gone home, they found, but she had left their dinner on the table, covered by a linen towel, together with a bowl of apples, green-gold streaked with red. Sophie was abruptly transported to the kitchen of her childhood, and bit into an apple with a pensive sigh.

  Gray for once did not seem to remark her distraction; he palmed two apples, dropped them into the pocket of his coat, and held out his hand to her, saying, “The University Library, cariad? What say you?”

  Or perhaps, Sophie reflected later, having spent the afternoon happily engrossed in a four-hundred-year-old grimoire, Gray had been perfectly conscious of her mood, and had known the best means of holding it in abeyance.

  * * *

  The introductory tutorials in Gaelic began on the first day of September. The rank beginners—Sophie and Gray amongst them—met at the second hour before noon and were instructed by a kindly woman with a good deal of silver in her dark auburn hair, who introduced herself to her pupils as Dolina MacKinnon and listened patiently as, one by one, they struggled to introduce themselves in return.

  Catriona MacCrimmon’s arch warnings notwithstanding, Sophie found the language no more difficult than the Cymric she had been studying with Master Alcuin since first arriving in England, though she was forced to concede that its variety of spelling put both English and Français in the shade. Dolina MacKinnon—clearly well accustomed to the wide linguistic variety of her charges—followed up the introductions by requiring each person present to list the languages in which he or she already had some proficiency; the great majority could speak (or, at any rate, read) some Cymric, and Dolina MacKinnon accordingly spent most of their remaining hour mapping upon a large blackboard the connexions and branching distinctions between the two languages. Master Alcuin and Gray had made use of the same approach in helping Sophie to learn Cymric—to which her native Brezhoneg was even more closely related—and to her great satisfaction, as the lessons progressed she began to recognise connexions almost before Dolina MacKinnon pointed them out.

  Though the Gaelic lessons were not productive of much local acquaintance, they proved an excellent means of becoming acquainted with
other newcomers to the University—from undergraduates to a visiting professor newly arrived from Rome, all more or less equally at sea amongst the mysteries of Gaelic lenition.

  * * *

  Rory and Catriona MacCrimmon declared that as sojourners in Din Edin, Sophie and Gray must see the view from the top of Arthur’s Seat, and before the weather turned; and accordingly the four of them set out one bright morning with a picnic luncheon to climb the city’s great hill.

  “I have heard,” Sophie began, hesitating a little, as the path began to grow steeper, “that you have had some troubles here of late—poor crops, and the like. We saw some signs of it on our journey—a long stretch of blighted fields, and a man burning a whole flock of dead sheep.”

  Joanna’s reluctantly extracted warning had nagged at her all along their journey from London, but particularly since seeing those blighted fields after the crossing into Alba. She had seen no obvious signs of hunger, disease, or unrest elsewhere, or here in Din Edin either, but being so little familiar with the city and the ordinary run of its inhabitants’ lives, she could not be certain of recognising such signs when she saw them.

  “That is true,” Catriona said, “but I was not aware that Alba’s troubles were of such interest to our neighbours. Mind that rabbit-hole, Sophie.”

  Sophie paused, looking down, and stepped around the hole. There was a hint of coldness in Catriona’s tone that surprised her; by Rory’s slight frown, he was in the same case as herself.

  “Well, naturally one is more apt to hear these things when one is known to be travelling to Alba,” Gray said reasonably. He had paused when Sophie did, and was now looking up at the blue sky and white puffs of cloud with a satisfied expression; he had not been very eager to leave his books this morning, but after all he seemed to be enjoying himself.

  “It is a strange thing, indeed,” said Rory. “Poor crops of every sort, and sick beasts of every description—there seems no pattern in it. Of course it is inevitable that some should call it a punishment from this god or that, and others should call it the effects of malicious magick.”

  “Of course,” Gray agreed. His eyes met Sophie’s; she was sure he was thinking, as she was, of the plot they had helped to foil, which had been meant to convince an entire kingdom that the sudden death of their king was the will of their gods. “And has anyone any evidence in either direction? Or in any other?”

  “If anyone had,” said Rory, with a wry twist of his lips, “I should not expect to be the first to be told.” He shifted Donella MacHutcheon’s picnic hamper from one hand to the other. “In any case, we shall not starve; the priests of the Cailleach—she is our goddess of autumn and winter, you know, as Brìghde is of the summer and spring—have storehouses, and the clans also, which will be opened at need; we are not at the mercy of a single season’s crops.”

  “My dear Sophie,” Catriona said, in a rallying tone, “this is not a very cheerful subject you have started! Tell us instead what you think of our Library, now that you have been to see it.”

  Sophie did not much like to be dictated to so blatantly, during an outing which she had organised herself, but even less did she wish to offend Catriona, who had been everything helpful and welcoming since their arrival—and even before it, as the picnic hamper in Rory’s hand attested. She acquiesced in the change of subject, therefore, as gracefully as she knew how, and was able (with Gray’s assistance) to praise the University Library even to Catriona and Rory’s satisfaction, with no need to misrepresent her true opinion; it was, in fact, the largest and finest library she could ever have hoped to see.

  The views from the top of Arthur’s Seat, too, were everything the MacCrimmons had promised. The whole of Din Edin spread out below them: to the east, the golden walls of the Castle, and to the west the deep blue of the firth. They amused themselves for some time in rambling over the hilltop to admire the various views, and in attempting (without much success) to pick out their own lodgings from the warren of rooftops below; and then, happily fatigued and ravenously hungry, they spread their picnic-cloth and attacked the contents of the hamper.

  “Local legend says,” Rory remarked, as he reached for another slice of Donella MacHutcheon’s pigeon pie, “that this place was a crossroads of Ailpín Drostan’s great spell-net.”

  “History, I think you mean,” said Catriona. She was smiling, but it was, Sophie rather thought, the sort of smile that is intended to masque something decidedly more dangerous. “This was a crossroads of the spell-net, indeed, though by no means the greatest of them.”

  “Oh,” said Rory, carelessly, “the spell itself I grant you; but I do not see how anyone can pretend to do better than guess at the details.”

  “No; you I suppose do not,” said Catriona. Sophie could not be certain whether she had imagined the slight emphasis on you.

  “What do you mean by spell-net?” said Gray. His eyes were alight with the spark of scholarly curiosity; if there was any chill or awkwardness in the conversation, he seemed not to have remarked it. “And who is Ailpín Drostan?”

  “Ailpín Drostan was the first chieftain to unite all the clans of Alba under a single banner,” said Rory, “so that he is regarded—accurately enough—as the father of the kingdom. He was a great warrior, and a great mage; to which of these attributes his success is principally owing, historians of the period have long disagreed,” he added, with a wry half smile, “and will, I expect, continue to disagree until the end of time.”

  “That is a quality of historians, I am told,” said Sophie, and the half smile broadened out into a grin.

  “It is certainly a salient quality of all those I have ever met.”

  Catriona said, “It was through the spell-net that the kingdom was created, and was sustained for generations after Ailpín Drostan’s death, under the rule of Clan MacAlpine, to whom he gave his name.”

  She spoke rather as though reciting a lesson, and Rory turned to her with eyebrows raised in astonishment; but whatever he had meant to say was forestalled by Gray’s asking eagerly, “How so? What sort of spell was it—a protection, perhaps? But one man could not cast a protective spell over a whole kingdom; no mage has ever had such a range, or so much power. A group of mages, then—but how—”

  “How is of course the great mystery,” said Rory; “no one knows. Or perhaps I ought to have said that it is one such, for no one truly knows what or why, any more than how. I must say that had I been present at the time, I hope I should have kept better records than Clan MacAlpine appears to have done—”

  “Rory!” said his sister reprovingly. Sophie could not see what cause there was for reproof; it was not disloyal, surely, to utter so mild a stricture upon such a long-ago king.

  “But Clan MacAlpine do not rule Alba now,” she said, testing this hypothesis.

  “No,” said Rory. “Not for many generations.”

  “And the spell-net itself—whatever it may have been, or been for—I suppose decayed along with the fortunes of Clan MacAlpine,” said Gray, thoughtfully. “I should have liked to understand how it was made, and why. It is a great pity, indeed, that they did not keep better records.”

  Sophie looked at him, smiling at his scholarly censure—he and Rory MacCrimmon were birds of a feather, truly!—and in so doing discovered that Catriona MacCrimmon was also smiling at Gray, in a manner that put Sophie distressingly in mind of her elder sister, Amelia: smug and acquisitive and very slightly predatory.

  The hot wash of fury that swept over Sophie was, she told herself, both unwarranted and absurd: Gray was not looking at either of them, was not even returning Catriona’s smile, much less inviting any inappropriate attentions on her part. Her anger was swift, and as swiftly mastered; but though deploring the impulse, and the impression it might give that she did not entirely trust her husband, she could not help leaning closer to him and laying a proprietary hand upon his arm.

  CHAPTER V
I

  In Which Joanna Enters Unfamiliar Territory

  Joanna prodded irritably at the spun-sugar cage of glazed profiteroles on her plate. What was the use of a dish which one could not eat without first attacking it with a pick-axe? A covert glance up and down the long, elaborately decorated table suggested that her fellow dinner-guests were similarly reluctant to engage in this gastronomic battle, and that those who had dared were faring poorly. Across the table and to Joanna’s left, an irate dowager duchess was surreptitiously removing fragments of spun sugar from her décolletage; several places to her right, an unfortunate young man was staring down in bewilderment at the wide, flat circle of puff-pastry, spun sugar, and cream that now surrounded his plate. Joanna suspected an attempt to extract the profiteroles from their cage by magick.

  She repressed an exasperated sigh. Her next neighbours, with whom she had been conversing, turn-about, throughout this endlessly elaborate dinner, were Lord Havery, younger son of the new Earl of Wessex, whose painful shyness, gradually subdued by nearly a dozen glasses of wine, had unfortunately given way to an unstoppable flow of poorly informed opinions on the politics of the Duchies, which Joanna longed to correct but dared not; and the octogenarian, nearly deaf, and highly inebriated Viscount Somersby, who was labouring under the delusion that Joanna was his granddaughter, and recounted in excruciating detail all of the clever things she had apparently said at the age of three. It had been a trying meal, and the evening promised to be more trying still, for it was to be devoted to a ball in honour of the Queen’s birthday.

  Joanna had once longed to go to a ball—had, in point of fact, schemed and connived her way into one, when her elders had (perhaps rightly) decreed her attendance too dangerous—but now, in the midst of her first real season of ball-going in London, could scarcely remember why the idea had held such appeal. True, there was generally plenty to eat, and of a high standard; there was of course plenty of dancing, provided that one did not mind whom one danced with, and were willing to persevere for half an hour together in the most insipid sort of conversation; and from time to time there was an opportunity to speak to someone genuinely interesting. No assembly since that first one had been so dramatically disrupted by attempted poisonings, calls for rebellion, duels, or magickal catastrophes; this must of course be accounted a blessing, but Joanna could not help feeling that a ball featuring none of these elements lacked excitement.