Might Rory and Catriona MacCrimmon’s tale of a great spell-net woven across Alba by a long-ago king, Sophie wondered, be such another source? But as Cormac MacWattie had also asked that they each form an opinion without reference to one another or to anyone else, she refrained from raising the question with either of them.
“Well?” Cormac MacWattie inquired, when next they gathered in his study. “What have you to teach me today? Una MacSherry: Enlighten us, if you please.”
Una MacSherry came down firmly on the side of those scholars who considered the magick of the land no more than a charming folktale, invented by farmers and husbandmen of generations past to explain what they themselves could not—why a field cleared of stones in one season should sprout a new crop of them the next; why fields must sometimes be left fallow; why some sicknesses spread from beast to beast, or beast to man, whereas others do not.
Eithne MacLachlan, whose grandparents were farmers, was inclined to the view that some clan chieftain or chieftains unknown, undoubtedly with the connivance of the priests of the Cailleach (and perhaps of the Cailleach herself), had invented the idea out of whole cloth, for the purpose of cementing their own position of power over the smaller landholders.
“But the clan chieftains favour enclosure, while the priests oppose it,” Una objected. “Why should they act together against the smallholders?”
“We are speaking of a time long before enclosure was thought of,” said Eithne. “And, in any case, not all of the chieftains agree—when have they ever done?—so there is nothing in that, Una.”
Sophie, when it came to her turn, was a little hesitant to unfold her own conclusions, for she had not expected to differ so wildly from the others, and as an outsider she felt that perhaps she ought not to opine at all.
“I think,” she said, “of course it is not for me to say, but—I should not be surprised if there were such a form of magick, once. Perhaps not now, but long ago.”
Eithne and Una looked sceptical; Cormac MacWattie merely nodded and said, “Go on.”
“I have found—perhaps I have not understood everything correctly—but I have read half a dozen separate accounts, collected by several scholars over half a dozen parts of the kingdom, of workings which had some observable effect, and these accounts seemed to me to tally remarkably well . . .”
“But so they should do, of course,” said Eithne, “if all had heard the same tale from the priests of the Cailleach, and were merely repeating what they had heard, or were bending their observations to suit it.”
“That is so, of course,” said Sophie.
“Perhaps the scholars themselves invented it!” Una said.
“Perhaps, indeed,” said Cormac MacWattie. “When next we meet, I shall ask you each to defend a conclusion other than the one you have put forward today; and then we shall see where we stand.”
* * *
As this time Cormac MacWattie had said nothing against their discussing the magick of the land with whosoever they chose, Sophie took up the subject with Mór MacRury on her way home from the University that afternoon, with Lucia MacNeill after Dougal MacAngus’s lecture two days later, and with Catriona MacCrimmon when the latter called in Quarry Close on the morning after that. Mór was noncommittal—The gods have their ways, of which men know nothing—and Lucia MacNeill, Sophie thought, rather evasive; perhaps this was a matter on which it was politic for the royal family (as Sophie could not help considering them) not to opine.
Catriona MacCrimmon, however, proved an inexhaustible wellspring of knowledge—or, at any rate, of commentary—on the magick of the land.
“Of course it is difficult to understand, here in the city,” she said; and when Gray, returning from an outing with a colleague, was drawn into the conversation, she insisted on their all going out to the nearest unbuilt place—in the event, they found themselves halfway up towards the crest of Arthur’s Seat—in order to observe.
Catriona knelt amid the damp, straggling grasses—it had been raining for the better part of three days, and the air was chill—and, stripping off her gloves, pressed both palms flat against the soil. Sophie and Gray exchanged a look of mild alarm and followed suit.
“Do you see?” said Catriona. “It is faint and difficult to hear, surrounded as we are by the city and its noise—Din Edin was built from the land, of course, from its stones and timbers, but as it grows, the connexion weakens.” Her voice grew wistful as she added, “I wish I might live on Leòdhas again, where the land and the people are better acquainted with one another.”
It was a sentiment with which Sophie had some sympathy—for all that her childhood home had been more than half a prison, she was a creature of the countryside, far more than of the crowded, clattering town—and diverted her momentarily from the disconcerting question of what it was Catriona could see, or hear, or feel, that she (and, by his baffled frown, Gray also) could not.
“Can you not go home to Leòdhas, if Din Edin does not suit you?” she asked.
Catriona looked at Sophie as though, for a moment, she had forgot her companions’ presence. Then she blinked, and smiled, and said, “But Rory is here, and I have my own work to do. Besides, I should miss the Library; there is nothing anywhere else in Alba to compare.”
Sophie nodded, slow and thoughtful, and stared down at her bare hands splayed against the ground. Perhaps the seeing and hearing are metaphorical, she thought, and I have been going about this in the wrong way.
She closed her eyes, sank into her magick, and turned her perceptions inward; then—feeling her way awkwardly, for she sought an unknown destination and had neither map nor guide—she curved her fingertips into the soil and listened with her hands.
For what seemed a long time, there was nothing in her mind’s ear but the slow beat of her heart. Then, faint and far away, just on the edge of . . . ought she to call it hearing? . . . a soft sighing that tasted of sandstone and the sea.
Then skewer-sharp, a rent in the sound, like a gull’s shriek breaking an incantation, quivered through her, stealing her breath.
Then silence, and the too-rapid beating of her heart.
The sound had been there and gone in a moment, and try as she might Sophie could not catch hold of it again.
She opened her eyes, blinked dizzily for several breaths, and looked down at her hands. There was dark soil under her fingernails.
When she looked up again, Catriona was speaking—Sophie struck the heel of one hand against the side of her head, sharply, to clear away whatever metaphysickal cobwebs might be clogging her physical ears—and Gray was shaking his head.
Catriona turned to Sophie. “And you?” she asked eagerly. “Did you hear it?”
“I . . .” Sophie hesitated. “I think . . . perhaps. Just for a moment. But I may be quite mistaken.”
“It is difficult here, as I told you,” Catriona said, with a kindly, condescending smile that made Sophie squirm. “Or perhaps it is because you are not children of Alba.”
They dusted off their fingers with their handkerchiefs, and put on their gloves, and made their way down the slope to the footpath (where her father’s guardsmen fell in behind them, as though they were two strangers who happened to be taking the same way home), and back to Quarry Close. Their muddied clothing drew a few stares, but no one spoke to them, nor did they speak to one another, until Catriona paused at the turning for her own lodgings and turned to Sophie.
“I hope you understand a little, now, how the land lies,” she said; and, bidding them farewell, she turned away.
Sophie watched her out of sight.
“I think,” she said at last, “that I understand less now than I did before.”
“Did you hear something, truly?” Gray said. “I did not, but I should have sworn that you did. Your face had that look.”
“I believe I did hear it,” said Sophie, slow and thoughtful. “Not
with my ears, you know.” Gray nodded; with so many more years’ experience of magework, he must, she thought, have understood this before she did. “I have not the least idea what. It was not . . .”
Her voice trailed away; Gray hummed inquiringly.
“It was not a happy . . . sound, let us say, for lack of a better term. There was a great deal of pain in it.”
Gray stopped suddenly, and Sophie, holding his arm, perforce stopped with him. “Joanna,” he said.
Torn between amusement and alarm—This is taking the unworldly scholar rather too far—Sophie elbowed him gently and said, “I am Sophie.”
“No.” Gray dropped her arm, not ungently, in order to run both gloved hands through his hair. As this was reliably a sign of frantic thought, Sophie waited patiently for the process to unfold; at length he said, “Joanna told you, did she not, that some here believe the blight and the sheep and cattle disease to be of magickal origin?”
“She did,” said Sophie. “But, Gray, she did not mean that it is so in fact; she meant only to warn us to mind where we put our feet.”
“But what if it is so in fact?” Gray persisted.
“Then we should need more than my few heartbeats’ worth of confused impressions to discover it,” said Sophie. “I cannot imagine flimsier evidence.”
* * *
She broached the subject in her next tutorial meeting, nevertheless, and was not much surprised when Eithne scoffed at her, and Una said, “What can have given you such an absurd idea?” and Cormac MacWattie listened gravely to her hesitantly marshalled arguments and at last said, with the utmost courtesy and not the least shred of belief, “That is a very interesting theory.”
Even if it were true, Sophie thought ruefully, which I do not suppose it is, why should they take my word upon it? As Catriona MacCrimmon says, I am no child of Alba.
Their excursion into Alban history or legend—whichever the case might be—continued, reaching no conclusion, for the evidence seemed to point all ways at once.
“The scholars whose views are enshrined in our libraries,” said Cormac MacWattie, by way of conclusion, “are as human, and as humanly fallible, as any of us; and the converse likewise. When in the course of your lives you are tempted to believe that the world is divided tidily into the known and the unknowable, the good and the wicked, the magickal and the mundane, I hope you shall call to mind our discussions here, and remember that matters are rarely so simple.”
* * *
By the time Gray had become accustomed to his students, his colleagues, and the rather different expectations of the audiences at his lectures, Sophie’s tutor had chivvied his students headfirst into the theory and practice of illusion-spells, and Sophie became so engrossed in her experiments with these that on several occasions, Gray was forced to remind her of the existence of mealtimes. Here was one amongst a considerable number of subjects in whose theory she had acquired a thorough grounding, but whose practice the course of study at Merlin College had not greatly encouraged. As a consequence, Sophie found herself well abreast of her year-mates’ reading but hopelessly behind in respect of execution.
“Gray,” she said, one evening during this period, pausing with a forkful of boiled mutton in one hand and a bread-roll in the other. “Tell me what you see.”
She returned the fork to her dinner-plate, balanced the bread-roll carefully on the palm of her left hand, and began describing circles about it with her right forefinger, muttering the while. “Noctis umbra tegit te,” Gray heard; “te verbo lux revelat . . .”
A spell of concealment, then—a particular species of illusion-spell, which he had never thought to teach Sophie, past mistress of rendering herself forgettable.
The bread-roll wavered momentarily, then reestablished itself as a sort of ill-made rendering of Sophie’s left palm. She prodded at it with the fingers of her right hand, frowning. “The dissonance makes my head ache,” she said.
“It shows promise,” said Gray, tilting his head to examine the illusion from several angles. “Though if your hand were that colour in truth, I should be summoning a healer at once.”
Sophie said firmly, “Lux,” and the bread-roll resumed its former aspect. She tore off a chunk of it and chewed thoughtfully, turning the remainder about in her hands.
“This is so much more difficult than I feel it ought to be,” she said, after a moment. “Like . . . like learning to play the pianoforte with my toes, whilst my hands, which are perfectly capable already, are tied behind my back.”
Gray contemplated for a moment whether he ought to take offence at this; at last he said, “I hope you have not tried that analogy on anybody else.”
“Certainly not!” Sophie sat up straighter. “I know perfectly well how odious it sounds, and I should not dream of saying such a thing except to you.” She sighed. “But it is quite true, for all that.”
“Show me what else you have been practising,” said Gray, both as a means of changing the subject and because he was genuinely curious; the cross-pollination of the two Schools to which they were attached—of Theoretical and Practical Magick—had excited his lively interest from the first, and led him to consider how different his own life might have been, had a similar atmosphere prevailed at Merlin. Though, of course, had he never been forced to study with Professor Callender, he should never have met Sophie, and such a fate did not bear thinking of.
“There is this,” said Sophie, a little doubtfully, and pushing her half-empty dinner-plate aside, she curled her hands loosely on the tablecloth, palms angled very slightly upward, perhaps a foot apart. She frowned fiercely at Gray’s plate and again began muttering under her breath, so low and indistinctly this time that he could not make out the words of her spell.
There appeared in the space between her palms another dinner-plate, hazy and imperfect, but recognisably a copy of his own: here the last half-inch of a slice of mutton, there a sad little mound of boiled cabbage, the fork and knife laid down at odd angles.
The illusion wavered, then stilled; Sophie looked up expectantly.
Gray leaned down to examine the faux dinner-plate more closely. “Is it a visual illusion only?” he asked, then answered his own question by attempting to grasp the handle of the knife; his thumb and fingers passed through it and met in the middle. “Where is the catch?”
In a civilised society, the use of illusion-spells, as Master Alcuin (one of the few Merlin dons willing to teach such spells at all) had drummed into him years ago, must be governed by strict rules, one of which was that an illusion must always be distinguishable from reality by a sufficiently alert observer. A properly worked illusion, therefore, might be deliberately implausible of appearance—as a scarlet peacock, or a chair upholstered in oak-leaves—or, if modelled more closely on reality, contain a catch, some small but unmistakable clue as to its illusory nature. Though no very clever worker of illusion-spells himself, Gray had at least absorbed that detail.
“Come now, Magister,” said Sophie, grinning broadly; “surely you are capable of detecting it.”
Gray moved aside the remains of his real dinner-plate, pushed back his chair, and dropped to his knees, bending to bring his eyes level with the illusory one. He examined it from every possible angle, then climbed to his feet again and circled round to peer at it from Sophie’s vantage point, then from each of the other two sides of the oblong table.
“There!” he said at last, triumphantly, pointing with Sophie’s fork at the tiny thread of viridian running through a single cabbage-leaf. “That is very cleverly done, kerra.”
Sophie drew a deep breath and blew it out, dispelling the illusion. “Do you think so?” she said. “I fear that my detail work is not all it ought to be.” Still, however, she looked enormously pleased with herself.
“Perhaps so,” said Gray, “but that will come with practice.”
Sophie retrieved her fork and address
ed herself once more to her dinner. “I do miss Master Alcuin, and Joanna, and all our friends,” she said, after a moment. “But I am glad we are come here.”
CHAPTER IX
In Which Joanna Faces the Consequences
Since their near quarrel at Her Majesty’s ball, Joanna had met Roland nearly as often as formerly, but with none of their former ease; though there had been no direct renewal of his unwelcome attentions, every word that passed between them seemed edged with the knowledge of what he was not saying.
Perhaps I am only imagining it, thought Joanna, more than once. Certain it was, however, that the day must be approaching when Roland should discover the depth of her betrayal—that she had known what his father planned for him, and disclaimed that knowledge—and the anticipation sat like a lump of something indigestible in her belly.
Irrespective of Joanna’s feelings, however, when His Majesty’s Chief Privy Councillor was summoned to his master’s presence, go he must; where Lord Kergabet went, Mr. Fowler must follow; and Joanna had no notion of allowing Prince Roland or anyone else to prevent her doing likewise.
Thus it was that she found herself, on this unseasonably warm October morning, following Sieur Germain and Mr. Fowler out of the former’s carriage and up the steps of the Palace. They were met as usual by the major-domo and—which was by no means usual—ushered at once into His Majesty’s private audience chamber. Joanna pondered, as they paced through the corridors, what this might betoken, and was drearily persuaded that it could be nothing good.
She had not long to fret over the possibilities, however, for they entered the audience chamber to find King Henry deep in conversation with the Alban envoy, Oscar MacConnachie.
“Ah! Kergabet!” he exclaimed, looking up at the sound of their footsteps. “The very man.”
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