And Roland was certain to ask her for a dance, which prospect she presently dreaded above all things.
She had in fact done her best to cry off from this long-standing invitation, but Jenny had first employed reason and logic—“It will cause all manner of talk, Jo, if you are not there”—and finally resorted to bribes, promising to let Joanna drive her phaeton around the park whenever she should wish for the next month.
* * *
After the ordeal of dinner, upon the gentlemen’s rejoining the ladies, the company moved into the Green Ballroom, where every available surface had become a riot of summer blooms and a company of musicians were assembling themselves with much scraping of chairs and adjusting of instruments.
Joanna did her best to hide behind Jenny, but her efforts availed her nothing; the couples had scarcely begun to form up for the first two dances before Roland, resplendent in a coat of blue velvet precisely matched to the shade of his eyes, had found them out and was kissing Jenny’s hand and paying her absurd compliments. Jenny—who, Joanna grudgingly supposed, could not strictly speaking be accused of betrayal, having no idea how very much Joanna wished to avoid dancing with Roland—laughingly stepped aside so that he might speak to Joanna; despite the few moments’ warning, Joanna could think of no excuse likely to pass muster, and, when he requested the first two dances, was forced to acquiesce.
Joanna had danced with Roland so often before, when he had been her friend instead of her chief tormentor, that it was perfectly absurd to feel that the eyes of all the room were upon them as they went down the dance. To be fair—and Joanna hoped she was capable of being fair, even to persons with whom she was deeply annoyed—Roland was in his best looks tonight, all bright blue eyes and shining golden curls and aristocratic nose and cheeks flushed with excitement and dancing, which, she supposed, might naturally draw attention. She had taken care herself to dress in a becoming but retiring manner (wishing all the while that Lady Maëlle had not taken Queen Laora’s charms of concealment back with her to Breizh), so that when the inevitable occurred, she should at least not be accused of enticing Roland to dance with her.
“You are very quiet this evening,” said Roland, as they met, clasped hands, and turned about. “Is something amiss?”
As this was hardly the place for Joanna to tell him once again that he was himself very much amiss, she merely lifted her chin and looked down her nose at him.
She had found a new sonnet in her reticule two days since, full of absurd allusions to wood-nymphs and the goddess Proserpina. This had so annoyed her that even the reliably oblivious Mr. Fowler had been moved to ask whether Miss Callender was quite well, and every shred of self-control Joanna possessed had been necessary to save him from a vicious telling-off. She was beginning to wonder whether she was entirely sane; Roland’s behaviour was exasperating, certainly, but he must tire of it eventually, and she ought not to be so foolish as to mind it.
I wish Lucia MacNeill of Alba may give him what he deserves.
“I think you had better not dance any more at present,” said Roland, eyeing her suspiciously across the set. “You are very pale. I shall get a glass of wine for you and find you a seat on the terrace.”
Joanna, to her infinite chagrin, flushed to the roots of her hair. How dare he! “I am not pale,” she hissed, furiously and now with perfect truth, “and I shall not let you fetch me wine and conduct me to the terrace.” In a more publicly audible tone she said, “Your Highness is very good! I am quite well, however, I assure you.”
Roland, stymied, stared at her with furrowed brows; Joanna returned her very best carefree smile and ignored him.
The first two dances ended at last—surely there had never been such long ones!—and Roland tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and led her away towards, so far as Joanna could determine, that corner of the room which was farthest from where she had left Jenny. She allowed herself to be led; she had nothing to gain by making a scene in front of all of these people, and if she had not, then Roland had not either.
“People are looking at us,” she murmured, behind a blandly acquiescing smile. “You ought not to pay me so much attention.”
“They may say what they please,” he retorted. “I must speak to you, Jo.”
“You—”
A potted pear-tree—How perfectly absurd!—loomed up before them, and Roland released her hand, caught her elbow, and turned her swiftly to propel her behind it.
“Roland!” Joanna hissed, jerking her arm away. Before she could escape, however, he was gripping both of her elbows and dipping his face towards hers, so close that he might have kissed the tip of her nose, or even . . .
It was not, decidedly not, the fear of being kissed by Roland, but the prospect of being discovered in this absurd and deeply incriminating circumstance, that made Joanna’s pulse accelerate and brought the flush back to her face. “Let me go, Roland. What can you mean by—”
“My father is plotting something,” Roland whispered, harsh and urgent. “Something to do with me. Ned will not tell me anything, and I do not know what they are about, but you know, I am sure of it. You must tell me, Jo. As you are my friend, you must tell me.”
This was so very much not what Joanna had expected, that for a panicked moment she nearly told him all. But it was only for a moment. This, this was what all of Sieur Germain’s enemies in the Privy Council expected: that, faced with the choice between keeping His Majesty’s confidences and ingratiating herself with a handsome young man, she should betray her patron and her King as easily as breathing. Well, that I certainly shall not. Yet she was, as Roland had said, his friend, and to keep this truth from him was another sort of betrayal.
But no one should ever say of Joanna Callender that she did not know where her duty lay.
“I should like to know,” she said, with a laugh that came very near to sounding natural, “why you imagine that I am privy to all your father’s secret plots.”
Roland waved this away impatiently. “You live in the same house with Lord Kergabet, who is well known to tell his wife everything.” This was unfair, but Joanna did not say so. “And you always do know whatever there is to know. If something is afoot that concerns me, you must tell me!”
Joanna looked up into his bright blue eyes and lied as convincingly as she was able. “There is nothing to tell.”
CHAPTER VII
In Which Gray Gives a Demonstration, and Sophie Is at a Loss to Explain Herself
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 L
odge 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.
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