Powell was perhaps not quite so perceptive as Gray had been beginning to suppose him; for he appeared not to remark that anything was amiss, and, worse, said in a rallying tone, “I dare say you do feel so, now; but I wager in six months’ time you shall be very ready to be at home again!”
As Sophie was no more inclined than anyone else Gray had ever met to be told how she ought to feel—indeed, rather less—he was not surprised to see her straighten away from her new acquaintance, her defensive reserve at once fully restored, or to hear her say frostily, “Your opinion is noted, Mr. Powell.”
They took their leave of Powell very formally, under the curious eyes of the guardsmen at the gate, and Goff and Tredinnick loitering outside it. As they emerged again onto the pavement—out of Britain again, and in Alba—Gray offered Sophie his arm as usual; she took it, but hesitatingly, and when he covered her hand with his, she looked up at him with something very like apprehension in her dark eyes.
Gray cast a brief glance around them, to be sure they had no near witnesses. Then he halted on the pavement and turned to take both Sophie’s hands in his.
“Sophie,” he said, and waited for her to meet his eyes again. “You surely do not believe me angry with you for—for wishing to remain in a place where you have been happy?”
Sophie looked away again. “Merlin is your home,” she said at last, softly.
“Sophie.” Her gaze snapped back to his face, her eyes wide in startlement at his vehement tone. “Ubi tu Gaia, ego Gaius,” he said. “Have you so quickly forgot what we promised to one another?”
She flushed a little but did not look away this time. “I have not,” she said, low. “Of course I have not.”
“Well, then,” said Gray, and he allowed himself the indulgence of bending to kiss her upturned brow, though in so public a place. He let go her hands, with a last little press of her slender fingers, and tucked the left one up under his right elbow again, and they turned once more for home.
“I have not felt certain enough of the prospect to speak of it,” he said, after a long moment’s companionable silence, “but now I think I ought: The Dean of the School of Practical Magick is pleased with the progress of my students, and has hinted that I may be offered a more permanent post, should matters so continue.”
“Oh,” said Sophie, sounding a little breathless. “Oh. Then—then we might truly stay here!”
“Well, for a few years more, at any rate,” said Gray. “If you like to do so, that is. I have been thinking . . . well, to say true, I have been thinking that it might be a relief to you to be at home again, where you need not hide.”
But at this Sophie tugged away from him and, flinging up her hands, exclaimed, “But you have got it all wrong, just as Lord de Courcy did! I am not hiding; I am only concealing an accident of my birth, which ought not to matter to anyone. And at home, I . . . it . . . it conceals me. Do you see?”
To Courcy and Powell, she had called the Princess Royal a cloak she must don when visiting her father; he had once heard her tell her father himself, You are mistaken; my name is Sophie Marshall. And what had she said—wondering at it, her eyes alight with joy—as their carriage rolled into Din Edin? There are so many people, and not one of them knows or cares who I am, or who my father is!
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes, I do see. I am sorry, Sophie.”
Sophie ducked her head, stepped closer, and took his arm again, and they resumed their journey.
CHAPTER XIV
In Which His Majesty Issues a Proclamation
Prince Roland’s betrothal to the heiress of Alba was announced at last at the height of the Yule season, after a day like a gift from Apollo, a day which had burned bright with sunshine on new snow for a few brief hours before the midwinter twilight swallowed it whole. Roland bore up admirably under the onslaught of well-wishes from his father’s guests, who were many and seemed, to Joanna’s eye, to be divided between those who welcomed the match for reasons strategical or sentimental, and those who were eager to court His Majesty’s good opinion by pretending to do so.
The reaction of the rest of His Majesty’s Privy Council, upon the betrothal’s being announced to that august body in the course of the previous month, had been very much as Joanna might have predicted. Sir Aled ap Gwyn and young Karaez pronounced it shrewd strategy; Lord Craven, whose lands were nearest the Roman Wall, took sober thought on the matter and cautiously agreed. Essex and Angers wished to know why Roland’s bride should have been sought outside the kingdom; and Bayeux and the Vicomte de Cotentin were instantly persuaded that the King had been taken in by some manner of Alban plot, aimed at gaining a political foothold in Britain. It was at least, Joanna reflected, a change from their insistent beating upon the single drum of Breizhek sedition.
There was a sort of bitter comedy in it, too, in light of Lord de Courcy’s reports from Din Edin that a vocal faction in Donald MacNeill’s court considered the entire affair an attempt by King Henry to place his son on the throne of Alba. What should we want with their ridiculous kingdom, Joanna found herself thinking, in a moment of black self-mockery, with its sick sheep and its withered grain and its men who do not wear trousers? And what should they want with ours, when it seems we can think of nothing but each other’s capacity for treachery?
But Lord Craven’s approval had been a victory of sorts, and by Yuletide it was only the Comte de Bayeux and his particular cronies who continued to nurse dark theories of Alba’s designs on King Henry’s throne.
“Will they make trouble, do you think, my lord?” Jenny asked her husband over dinner, on the day following the public announcement. Bayeux and Angers had been seen at Court the previous evening, pointedly omitting to wish Roland joy of his marriage and casting dark looks at Kergabet and any of his allies whom they chanced to encounter.
Sieur Germain sighed, and thoughtfully sipped his wine. “I hope very much,” he said, “that they may have the sense the gods gave a goose, and refrain from stretching out their necks to do mischief.”
They had both, it appeared, quite lost the caution they had once exercised before Gwendolen, who now said, “I wonder whether there are crabbed old men in Alba who dislike their heiress’s betrothal as much.”
“The Comte d’Angers is not a crabbed old man,” said Jenny.
Gwendolen tossed her head. “Perhaps not on the outside,” she said, and Joanna, in spite of everything, snickered. It was odd, she thought, how often she laughed at Gwendolen’s absurd remarks instead of disparaging them as they almost certainly deserved.
Jenny and Sieur Germain looked as though they should have liked to snicker, also, but they contrived matching looks of mild reproof instead, one from each end of the table.
“As for the news from Alba,” said the latter, “I cannot pretend that there is not some cause for concern; I do not say alarm,” he added, a shade too quickly for Joanna’s liking, “but approbation of the match is by no means unanimous. The timing has proved unfortunate. I do not think, however, that any advantage was to be gained by putting off the announcement here, and a public announcement by Donald MacNeill will at any rate put paid to the wilder rumours presently circulating in Din Edin.”
“How, unfortunate?” Gwendolen asked. “And what sort of rumours?”
Sieur Germain sighed again and ran one long finger slowly along the foot of his wineglass; Joanna rather fancied that he was now regretting his lack of circumspection. She wondered whether Mr. Fowler, had he been present, might have thought to avert it in some way, and whether she ought to have made the same attempt. Yet she could not pretend to regret this interesting turn of the conversation.
“Unfortunate because there is danger of famine in Alba,” he said at last, “which has lent credence to the preposterous idea that Donald MacNeill has sold his daughter and her throne to Britain in exchange for the waggon-loads of grain and other provisions which are travelling n
orth to Alba at this moment, as part of His Majesty’s bride-gift.”
“Oh!” said Joanna, sitting up. So this plan was going forward already! “Sophie will be pleased to hear of such a gift.”
Indeed, Sophie’s letters of late never failed to mention the hardship in this or that district in which some acquaintance of hers had left friends or relations to come to the University in Din Edin, and by Lord de Courcy’s report, her belated visit to him had been much the same.
He had also reported that Mrs. Marshall seemed unduly anxious at the possibility of her identity’s being discovered.
What, Joanna asked herself, had Sophie been leaving out of her letters? The reports of ill tidings from her acquaintances’ families aside, the most recent had consisted largely in exactly the sort of news to which Sophie’s letters had always been liable—accounts of lectures she had attended, of which Joanna understood perhaps half; amusing anecdotes (or anecdotes intended to be amusing) in which various friends and acquaintances played the principal roles; when weather permitted, descriptions (and occasional sketches) of sight-seeing excursions—and in inquiries after the health of everyone in London with whom Sophie had any acquaintance whatever. There had been nothing in any of them to cause alarm; they had in fact been, on the whole, more cheerful than those which Joanna had been accustomed to receive from Oxford towards the end of her sister’s sojourn there, and Sophie had more than once gone so far as to say outright that she was finding the University at Din Edin more congenial than Merlin College.
She could not have done so, surely, if she were genuinely afraid?
“But if their folk are starving,” said Gwendolen, “they will be glad of any help, surely, though they disdain the giver?”
Sieur Germain sighed. “That is the rational and the humane course, certainly,” he said, “and Donald MacNeill is, I believe, a rational and a humane man. I am less certain of his counsellors, and of public opinion in Alba. The people of Alba have a long memory, and it is not so very long ago, as these matters are accounted, that a British king sought to conquer them entirely. It is not so strange that some should hesitate to offer us wholehearted trust.”
“Ye-es,” said Gwendolen doubtfully, “but—”
“And there is also the Law of the Storehouses,” said Joanna. “I have been studying the history of it,” she explained, when this remark was greeted with looks of mild surprise and of incomprehension, “because when Roland is married to Lucia MacNeill, it will be part of his charge. The storehouses are meant to preserve the people from famine, of course, as we know; but it seems that the law was also intended to preserve the kingdom itself from relying too heavily on goods imported from elsewhere. To prevent the Crown’s sinking into ruinous debt, originally; but might a gift of food in time of famine be similarly perceived?”
Sieur Germain looked at her thoughtfully. “In the proper hands,” he said, “any act, no matter how noble its intentions or how beneficial its effects, can be so explained as to look like malice.”
* * *
It was on a bright afternoon in January, no more than a fortnight after Solstice-time, that Sophie and Mór MacRury emerged from the University Library into an astonishing cacophony of sound.
“Whatever can all that shouting be?” Sophie said, resisting a childish urge to press her palms over her ears as they descended the broad steps. “It sounds like a drunken brawl in Tartarus.”
Mór raised her emphatic eyebrows in surprise. “Have you not heard?” she said. “The Senior Common Room could talk of nothing else today. You were at Professor Maghrebin’s lecture this afternoon, were you not? Did you not find the attendance shockingly thin?”
“It was that,” Sophie admitted. “I thought perhaps this sunny weather might account for it. Where was everyone, then?”
The noise was growing louder.
“There,” said Mór, pointing, as they came into sight of Teviot Square, through which Sophie and Gray habitually passed on their way home.
Sophie halted abruptly, her mouth falling open. She shut it again, hard.
The square was filled from edge to edge with people—men and women and even a few children; students and labourers; and here and there men in grey robes, with long hair and longer beards, whom Sophie recognised as priests of the Cailleach—and all of them were shouting and chanting, together or severally, to the limits of their lungs.
At the northeast corner of the square, on what appeared to be an overturned waggon, stood two tall, broad-shouldered men whose kilted plaids, from this distance discernible only as two kindred shades of green, set off their vividly red hair and beards. One held a broadsword nearly as tall as himself. Their gestures suggested they were speaking, or singing, or possibly shouting, but nothing could be heard above the noise of the crowd.
Sophie stretched her neck to bellow into Mór’s ear: “What are they doing? What are they saying?”
Mór was listening intently, a small frown creasing her ivory forehead. “A moment, Sophie,” she said absently.
Sophie stood beside her, quivering.
After some moments, Mór caught Sophie’s elbow and inclined her head. “Come away,” she said, her breath warm against Sophie’s ear.
“Why?” said Sophie.
Mór’s grip on her elbow tightened. “Come away,” she repeated. “Now, this moment.”
Sophie had heard that tone before, though not from Mór MacRury; it meant certain danger, and she obeyed it almost without meaning to do so.
They retreated to the University’s back gate and paused there, in the lee of the fieldstone wall, watching the flow of passersby in both directions: many towards the square, some eager and some hesitating, and some few hastening away from it with looks of trepidation.
“Mór,” said Sophie, “tell me.”
Mór looked at her in troubled silence.
“I have heard worse things, I expect,” said Sophie, before she thought.
“Have you so?” Mór quirked a russet eyebrow.
Under her breath, Sophie called herself every sort of fool. “I only meant—”
“You have heard, I suppose, the rumour that Donald MacNeill has made a marriage for Lucia?”
Sophie nodded, puzzled though relieved at the change of subject. It was not a question that interested her particularly, except insofar as she liked Lucia MacNeill and wished her happy; but many of the Alban students in her year had strong views on which of the various clan chieftains’ sons—there seemed to Sophie to be dozens of chieftains with hundreds of sons—was most likely to be chosen.
“The news today—or the rumour, rather, for there is no more reason than usual to suppose it true,” said Mór, “is that the consort Lucia MacNeill has chosen, when she might have had nearly any chieftain’s son in Alba, is a Sasunnach prince.”
Sophie gaped at her. Roland? Or Ned?—no, Ned is spoken for, now. Surely not Harry, for that must mean a very long delay. Only by clapping one hand across her mouth did she prevent the words from spilling out aloud. And, in any case, it is only a rumour. Joanna should certainly have told me, if such a thing were afoot.
Unless, of course, this were the explanation for the sudden and mysterious absence of news in Joanna’s letters.
Silent gaping, it appeared, was nearly as bad as ill-judged words, for Mór’s gaze upon her sharpened in the way that meant nothing should stand in the way of her discovering the answers to her questions.
“That is very unlikely, surely?” Sophie said hastily. “All the talk I have heard was of chieftains’ sons, as you say—Mór, the crowds, that man with the sword, they—”
“Are expressing their opposition to Lucia MacNeill’s choice, yes,” said Mór. “I cannot say that I should altogether understand such a decision myself; though if I were Donald MacNeill I certainly should not object to have a firm ally in the British King, which we must suppose to be the object of an
y such marriage.”
Even Sophie could follow this line of reasoning. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I expect we must.”
Mór’s eyebrows drew together, a graceful accolade above her narrowed eyes. “And how should you expect this news to be received at home?” she inquired. Her tone was light, but her bright eyes sharp and implacable. “Assuming for the moment, that is, that it were true.”
“I . . . I hardly know,” said Sophie, with perfect truth.
Mór gave her a long look but said nothing.
* * *
They made their way to the Marshalls’ lodgings by a route that swung wide around the square. When they reached what Sophie recognised as the turning to Mór’s lodgings in MacDuff-street, she made to pause and take leave, but Mór only took a firmer hold of her arm.
“You are not going home?” said Sophie, puzzled.
Mór looked at her disbelievingly. “Sophie, you surely cannot imagine it wise for a young Sasunnach woman to wander the streets of Din Edin alone, when no more than a mile away a mob is calling for—”
Then she shut her mouth abruptly and quickened her pace.
“I trust,” said Sophie—a little breathless, and therefore less scathing than she had intended—“I trust that you are not attempting to protect me by keeping me in ignorance? I am not a child, Mór, Sasunnach though I may be.”
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