Lady of Magick

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  Gray stared.

  “I may be quite wrong, of course,” said Sophie hastily, perhaps supposing that his gobsmacked expression was the result of what she had said, and not of her having said it. “Only, when . . . when Mama was dying . . .”

  She turned as though to look out of the window, and her voice trailed away into a little hitching breath. Gray understood it; since her cousin’s dramatic injury in the course of their misadventures in London, not three years since, had restored the remembrance of her mother’s death so abruptly and brutally to her mind, Sophie had been unable to think of it without pain. But the sound reminded him, too, of Lady Maëlle’s starkly white face and wide, shocked eyes, her terrifying stillness and silence, when confronted with a portrait of the young Lady Laora, the companion of her youth. Her distress—swiftly mastered, yet no less keen for that—might have been only a woman’s grief for the distant cousin whom she had loved almost as a sister; but might it have been more—regret for sentiments never spoken, a mourning of what now could never be?

  Gray vividly remembered feeling, at the time, that he was witnessing the inadvertent expression of feelings which their owner had much rather have kept strictly private.

  “You mistake me, cariad,” he said. “I should not be at all surprised to discover that your reasoning is sound.”

  Sophie’s delicate eyebrows flew up. “Indeed?”

  “Do you remember—you might not notice at the time, for you were . . . confused, yourself—at that inn in Breizh, when we saw the portrait of your mother—”

  Sophie closed her eyes, as though the thought pained her. “I remember,” she said, low.

  Her hand reached blindly for Gray’s; he caught it and drew her into his arms. She leaned her ear against his heart.

  “I almost wish that Mama had known of it,” she said, “had known how she was loved; though perhaps it might only have made them both the more unhappy. It seems cruel of the gods, to fashion some men and women so that they must marry and be miserable, or not at all.”

  Gray could scarcely dispute this. “To be a god,” he said instead, “is to have great power over mortals; there is no law of nature which requires that such power be yoked to benevolence, as the laws of men may from time to time attempt to impose upon kings and princes. If history teaches us anything, it is that the gods are as likely to act for their own amusement, as for any benefit of ours.”

  “That is so,” said Sophie. She scrubbed one hand surreptitiously across her eyes and affected a tone of detached scholarly interest. “Consider the existence of nettles, and of thistles; and for that matter, of horseflies and stinging gnats.”

  “And marriages are miserable for many other reasons also,” said Gray; mimicking her tone, he continued, “Consider my parents. Consider George and Catharine.”

  Sophie’s little snort of uneasy laughter made her shoulders quiver briefly in his embrace.

  “In any case,” he said, “you do not suppose that companionship is only to be found in marriage? You know of course that Mór keeps house together with Sorcha MacAngus?”

  “Ye-es.” Sophie pulled away a little, within the circle of his arms, and looked up at him with narrowed eyes. “Of course I know it. Do you mean—you do not mean—”

  “I cannot say certainly one way or the other,” said Gray carefully; “I am not so much in Mór’s counsels.”

  “Nor I,” said Sophie, “but I do hope for their sake that it is so, and that it makes them happy.” She pressed closer, her breath hitching, and he knew she must be thinking of her mother.

  Gray bent his head and kissed her silk-soft hair. “Your mama was happy in you,” he said. Who could not be? “I am certain of it.”

  Sophie’s arms tightened about his ribs. Though she said nothing, her silence thundered in Gray’s ears.

  * * *

  Sophie sought out Rory on the following afternoon, in the interval between Professor Maghrebin’s lecture on astronomical notation in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and her meeting with Cormac MacWattie, and threw caution to the four winds by saying bluntly, “Why does Catriona not wish you to speak to me about the crop failures, or the sick sheep and cattle, or the clan storehouses?”

  Rory flushed an unbecoming scarlet and looked away.

  If Sophie had learnt one lesson from her sister-in-law Jenny, it was that silence could be more effective than any persuasion; accordingly, she clasped her hands about her elbows and stood patiently waiting for Rory to succumb.

  “She thinks of it as hanging up our dirty linen before the neighbours’ eyes,” he said at last, his gaze still fixed firmly on the corner of his desk. “Alba’s trials are Alba’s to face, she says, without interference from strangers.”

  It made a sort of sense, Sophie supposed, if one thought of the kingdom as a young woman who did not wish to be rescued from a humiliating scrape by her elder brother.

  “But Gray and I are not strangers,” she pointed out. “Not any longer. And it seems . . .” She paused, seeking an adjective that might convey her meaning without giving offence. “It seems short-sighted to be always twitching the curtains over the windows when behind them, there may be thousands of children starving to death.”

  Rory’s head snapped up. “The clans and the Cailleach will not let people starve,” he said, in a scandalised tone. “That is the whole purpose of the Law of the Storehouses: to make sure that every clan and grove maintains—”

  “And next winter?” Sophie interrupted him, and brushed away the guilt she felt at having done so. “Where shall we all be, if the storehouses are emptied this winter, and we cannot turn to our neighbours for help?”

  “We?” He lifted an eyebrow.

  Sophie looked away, caught out in the daydream she had not yet revealed even to Gray, of finishing her degree in Din Edin and, just possibly, making a home here.

  “I am curious to know,” said Rory, “what provision is made in Britain for like circumstances. You do not have clans as we do, I know, but you have . . . lords, have you not? Men of property, who must take responsibility for the tenants who work their lands? And the servants of your gods?”

  “Yes,” said Sophie slowly. “That is so. But we have no formal law that I know of, to force any man to make adequate provision for his tenants; only customary law, I suppose, and knowledge of the consequences of failure—which some men, I regret to say, appear to regard not at all.”

  “That seems a very poorly conceived system indeed,” said Rory, wrinkling his freckled nose.

  “I dare say it is,” said Sophie, “but if what I have heard of the doings of His Majesty the King and his Privy Council is in any degree true, there are great lords who had sooner take up arms against the throne than submit to be told how they must husband their estates and care for their tenants.”

  She was sufficiently astonished at this speech—or, rather, at the evidence it represented, that she recalled far more from Joanna’s sometimes excessively political correspondence than she had previously imagined—as to be caught off guard by Rory’s asking her, in tones of equal surprise, “Have you acquaintance at King Henry’s Court, then?”

  “Well, yes,” Sophie conceded. “I have.”

  His eyebrows rose again, but—to Sophie’s relief, for she did not wish to distract him from the matter of the clan storehouses—he did not pursue the question. Instead he said, thoughtfully, “So it was in Alba, before the time of Ailpín Drostan.”

  Ailpín Drostan had been King of Alba long ago, Sophie recalled, and his was the imposing statue of a wild-haired man in a kilted plaid, thrusting a sword aloft from his seat atop a rearing horse, which dominated Teviot Square, near the main gates of the University. “Before his time, but not since?” she said.

  “As well as being more or less the founder of the kingdom,” said Rory, “Ailpín Drostan was also the originator of the Storehouse Laws, for which he is justly
celebrated. The one point on which all the historians, living and dead, agree, is that had it not been for Ailpín Drostan’s great dream-vision—a gift of Brìghde and the Cailleach, so he claimed, and given its sequel, it is a difficult claim to refute!—which forewarned him of a year of terrible plague and famine in his clan-lands, and spurred him to preparations which both his allies and his enemies thought absurd—”

  Rory paused, his burnished-copper eyebrows drawing together, and Sophie carefully did not smile; he had become so entangled in his own Latin syntax, it appeared, that he could find no way out. “Ailpín Drostan had a vision, you say,” she prompted, switching into Gaelic in the hope of easing his way.

  “Yes,” Rory said, and—accepting the cue—went on: “The Cailleach spoke to him in a dream, and gave him this warning, after which the other clan chieftains—and many of his own clansmen, it appears—thought him mad, to be stockpiling grain and preserved foodstuffs in such quantities that surely they could only end as rotted waste. Mad, or very devious, in service of some end which none of them could see. But Ailpín Drostan insisted that his stores should be needed, and so indeed it proved; and thus he gained a reputation for prescience which served him well when later he set his sights on building himself a kingdom.”

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, Sophie was translating all of this into tidy Latin periods for conveyance to Joanna, whom it must certainly interest. Who could have predicted, in the days when Joanna was making mischief as a schoolgirl in Kemper, that she might one day be more enthralled by histories than by fantastickal minstrel-tales, or that hanging about the edges of Court politics might be the catalyst of such a change? Certainly not Sophie, who had loved her younger sister to distraction while at the same time sympathising wholeheartedly with the exasperations of the headmistress whose reports on Joanna’s conduct (directed to the Professor, and read stealthily over Amelia’s shoulder) had tended towards the despairing.

  “Do you suppose,” she said, “that the gods spoke to him in truth? Or was he only very fortunate and very clever?”

  Rory grinned down at her and said, “I have not the least idea. It is a fascinating tale, however, and”—he glanced out of the window of his study, gauging the angle of the sun, and then began poking about in one of the bookcases—“one which we have not time for at present, if you are not to be late for Cormac MacWattie.”

  Sophie started, and heard the great University bells begin to chime the hour. She made to depart, stammering apologies, but Rory halted her on the threshold of his study to hand her a small stack of codices, the topmost of which was titled in Latin, in faded gold leaf stamped upon russet leather, The Rise and Fall of Clan MacAilpín.

  “There you are,” he said, smiling the smile of the tutor well pleased with the efforts of his student.

  “Thank you,” said Sophie, and hastened away to her own tutor. Not until much later did she recognise the manner in which her questions about Catriona had been deflected, or think to ask herself whether Rory had done it with intent.

  CHAPTER XIII

  In Which Sophie Learns Lessons of More Than One Variety

  The history of Alba is to a considerable degree the history of Clan MacAlpine, and more particularly that of the great mage-king Ailpín Drostan, for whom it came to be named. The origin of this great kingdom—for a great kingdom it is, whatever claims to superiority may be adduced by my countrymen—

  Sophie turned back to the frontispiece of The Rise and Fall of Clan MacAlpine, and noted that the author was one Edward L’Arbalestier. An Englishman of Normand descent, then, very likely. It was dated at London, in the first decade of her own father’s reign.

  —is bound up in the exploits of this remarkable man, to whose inspired dream of uniting the warring clans to the benefit of their people and establishing an unbreakable line of defence against their acquisitive neighbours to the south, the shape and structure of the modern Kingdom of Alba are principally owing.

  Ailpín Drostan was born on the island Ioua, which the Albans name Eilean Idhe, a pebble on the shores of An t-Eilean Muileach, which we call the Isle of Mull, and though not the eldest son or even the eldest child, was chosen as his father’s heir (in a tradition which Alba’s rulers continue to this day) by reason, first, of his great magickal talent, and, second, of the skill and prowess he is said to have early shown, not in pitched battle against the rivals of his clan, but in devising strategies to prevail against such rivals with cunning rather than brute force.

  Though the precise details of Ailpín Drostan’s early life are lost to us, we may safely assume that he received the best formation in both practical magick and practical warrior-craft which his father—that great Drost Maon of Ioua who, as legend has it, set forth as a boy from Ioua insula to seek his fortune, and became a great leader of men—was able to provide for him. Certain it is, in any event, that the young Ailpín was mage first, and warrior second; some accounts, indeed, paint a compelling picture of a man both reluctant to join battle and relentless in pursuing victory by any means necessary. Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that the tactics of Britain’s own mage-officers owe as much to the tactics and strategy of Ailpín Drostan as to those of the Roman Legion’s vaunted sorcerer-centuries. Yet for all the lore that has come down to our day, there remain aspects of Ailpín Drostan’s reign which resist explanation.

  Like his father, Ailpín Drostan cherished aims far outside the sphere in which his birth had placed him. Unlike his father, however, he inherited on the distaff side a prodigious magickal talent which—

  Sophie started violently as a large, warm hand clasped her shoulder, and the book fell to her desk with a leathery slap.

  “I am sorry, kerra!” Gray said. He looked down at her with consternation writ all over his guileless face. “I thought you must have heard me calling for you.”

  “I was reading,” said Sophie, blinking. “Are you just now arrived?”

  Gray grinned. “Very nearly,” he said. “I have been upstairs, putting myself back to rights.”

  Sophie examined him more closely, and saw that his hair was damp and en bataille, his hazel eyes gone faintly tawny, and the remainder of him wrapped in an elderly dressing-gown—all sure signs that he had returned from the University Library not on foot but on the wing.

  “Oh,” she said, still blinking stupidly. How had she become so deeply engrossed, so quickly, as not to have heard him descending from the first floor? Ordinarily, the sound of his tread on the steep, uncarpeted staircase—even without boots—was enough to wake the dead.

  Gray perched on the corner of her desk and smiled at her again—quite a different smile, this time, of the sort which was never bestowed upon any person else. “Can I persuade you,” he said, reaching out a hand, “to—”

  Sophie did not wait to discover what arch or absurd circumlocution her husband had been meaning to employ to invite her upstairs to their bedroom; instead she clasped his hand, returned his warm and secret smile, and said, “Yes, I should imagine you can.”

  * * *

  There was a letter from Joanna in the following morning’s post, and though Joanna’s letters had lately tended to the uncommunicative, Sophie nevertheless pounced eagerly upon it and tore it open without pausing to dust the crumbs from her fingers.

  Alas, it proved to be more of the same. Joanna’s mare Kelvez had thrown a shoe, in consequence of which Joanna had missed her day’s ride in the park. Jenny had taken Joanna and Gwendolen to several more balls since Joanna’s last letter, and Sophie was subjected to a detailed description of each of these entertainments, which she rather wondered at Joanna’s having had the patience to set down.

  She was near to losing patience with it herself when she came to the penultimate paragraph, in which Joanna’s tone shifted abruptly from cheerful gossip to earnest lecturing.

  Sophie, His Majesty’s ambassador in Din Edin has written to Kergabet to ask why
you have not yet been to call upon him; I must say that it is beyond me why you should not have done so long before now.

  The word long had been underscored twice, which Sophie felt was unfair; it was not as though Joanna—Joanna who gossiped with kitchen-maids and grooms, who spent her days taking notes at meetings of the Privy Council and her nights (to all appearances) deciphering coded messages—were in any position to criticise Sophie’s manners.

  On the other hand, of course, this was not the first time that Sophie had received similar instructions, nor was Joanna the first to issue them to her.

  Do go and pay your respects, Sophie, please; Lord de Courcy is not a man to take insult over nothing, but should you be in any difficulty and require his help, a prior acquaintance would be of material service. You must see that it looks very odd for a gentleman and his wife from Oxford to have been in Din Edin three months, without calling upon the representative of the Crown in Alba?

  “‘Should you be in any difficulty, and require his help’?” Sophie said aloud.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Gray, looking up from his own stack of letters.

  “Joanna,” said Sophie. She frowned. “She is seeking to rescue us in advance from the consequences of our own incompetence.” She read out the offending paragraph, and added, “You see? One would think we were children, not fit to be let out alone.”

  “I confess, love, I cannot see anything so very dreadful in the idea of calling upon Lord de Courcy.” Gray looked honestly perplexed. “It is natural enough, surely? Anyone inclined to see such a visit as suspicious, it seems to me, must be so generally inclined to suspicion that it could not possibly matter what we do.”

  Try as she might, Sophie could not deny that this was a perfectly reasonable argument.

  “Very well,” she said, after a long, obstinate silence. “Let us go this morning, then, as we have nothing else pressing in train, and have it over.”