Lady of Magick

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  Rory sat up straighter. “Of course I should,” he said. “How can you doubt it?”

  “I am glad of it,” said Sophie, “and glad to see you here, for I believe Gray needs my help, and I need yours.”

  “Of course,” Rory repeated. “Has—is it—I hope his father is not—”

  “Gray is not gone to Kernow,” Sophie interrupted, before he could further entangle himself. “His father is not ill, so far as I know; my father’s envoy, from whom I supposed the summons to have come, knows nothing of it, nor did Gray’s sister when Joanna last saw her in London. And I have had another letter from him which clinches the matter.”

  As she was speaking, Rory’s green eyes had gone wide and dark, and he appeared to be holding his tongue with some difficulty. To her surprise, however, he did not inquire after the contents of the letter or demand tiresome explanations.

  “How,” he said instead, “how can I be of help?”

  Sophie swallowed and, determinedly pretending not to see Joanna’s disapproving frown and gestures of negation, offered a brief and bald précis of her meeting with Lord de Courcy.

  Miss Pryce returned with the tea-tray; the others absently accepted cups of tea, all of which but Joanna’s cooled untouched.

  Rory blanched at being informed that Gray was not the first foreign mage to go missing from Alba and muttered under his breath, “Professor Maghrebin.”

  Sophie halted midsyllable. “Oh,” she breathed. “I had not thought.”

  “Of course I may be quite wrong,” said Rory hastily. “But you cannot deny that the circumstances fit.”

  And indeed Sophie could not.

  “Being reliably informed that Lord de Courcy can do nothing in the matter without some sort of proof,” she concluded at last, “I am determined to provide it, insofar as I am able. When Mór and Sorcha are come back, I intend to take both letters to Mór and ask her—beg her, if need be—to scry them for me. I hoped that you might do the same.”

  “Of course,” Rory repeated. He gazed earnestly at Sophie. “And—and if there is any other way in which I may be of service—”

  “We shall not hesitate to call upon you,” said Joanna briskly. Again Sophie started; absorbed in her narrative and overwhelmed with relief at Rory’s accepting, she had half forgot that their conversation had an audience.

  “Indeed,” said Sophie. Joanna’s briskly cheerful tone rang utterly false to her ear, though Rory—who after all had known Joanna scarcely an hour—seemed oblivious. She pressed Rory’s hand and tried to smile at him, though his stricken expression suggested the effort had not been very successful. “I thank you.”

  Joanna ushered him out, and Miss Pryce began to gather up the tea-things, waving away Sophie’s attempt to assist her. Balked of these opportunities for useful endeavour, she drifted towards the pianoforte and trailed her fingers along the keys.

  The door closed, the bolt slid home; footsteps approached, halted. “That was very foolish, Sophie,” said Joanna.

  Sophie turned, frowning. “Foolish, how?” she demanded.

  “Think, Sophie,” said Joanna, her tone shifting from stern reproof into exasperation. “Have you forgot that there is another mage in this household more powerful than Gray? Someone in Din Edin is making away with powerful foreign mages—luring them here for the purpose, it may be—and what should you do but throw yourself upon the mercy of the very man at whose behest you came here to begin with!”

  Oh. Sophie pondered this, the ebony keys warming under her fingers: A, F, G. Her fourth finger strayed to B-flat, cool ivory.

  “I cannot believe such a thing of Rory,” she said; her conviction bolstered by their recent exchange, she added, “And if it were anything to do with him—which I do not for a moment concede—why should he so readily agree to my having Gray’s letters scried, when he must have known he should be implicated by whatever Mór MacRury can discover from them?”

  She folded her arms triumphantly, but she had reckoned without Joanna’s determined suspicion.

  “This Mór MacRury—have I reasoned rightly, that they are known to one another?”

  “They have been friends for many years,” Sophie conceded. “But Mór would not—”

  “How can you be sure?” Joanna’s voice was rising; Sophie retreated, trapped against the keyboard. “You have known none of these people more than half a year! How is it that you so cavalierly trust them with Gray’s life, and with yours?”

  Miss Pryce had come quietly up beside Joanna during this outburst and laid a calming hand upon her arm; Joanna shook it off.

  “You are too trusting altogether, Sophie,” she continued. “For all you know, they—”

  Sophie found her voice at last, though it was rough and scraped her throat. “If all of Alba is so little to be trusted,” she said, “how is it that you have been conspiring with Sieur Germain and my father these past six months and more, to offer my brother to them as a hostage?”

  Joanna’s breath left her in a sharp huff. They glared at each other, flushed and furious, until at length Miss Pryce caught at Joanna’s arm again and bent to murmur in her ear. Sophie could not hear what she said, but whatever it was made Joanna close her eyes and turn her face away, and suffer herself to be shepherded into the kitchen.

  Sophie kept hold of her quivering rage for a moment more; then reaction overcame her, and she sank to the floor, leaning one shoulder against the leg of the pianoforte. She clasped her arms about her shins and pressed her face against her bent-up knees. What ails me, that I should speak so to Joanna, of all people?

  * * *

  Gwendolen grasped Joanna by the elbow, her long fingers pressing; her warm breath brushed Joanna’s ear. “Jo,” she murmured, “she cannot strike at her enemies, and you are seeking to take away her only means of discovering who they are. Can you wonder that she is angry with you?”

  Joanna closed her eyes, but Sophie’s face—consumed with a furious anger which Joanna had seen before, but never directed towards herself—hovered before her nonetheless. When Gwendolen put an arm about her and urged her towards the door, she went unresistingly.

  Sophie did not follow; indeed, the next sound Joanna heard from the sitting-room was that of stumbling footsteps making for the stairs. Above their heads, a door closed—not with a bang, but with great finality—and Joanna fancied that she heard a key turn in a lock.

  “When I said we should be going off on an adventure,” said Gwendolen at last, with a wry little smile, “I confess this is not quite what I imagined.”

  Joanna, looking at her across the scrubbed pinewood table, could not help feeling that she had badly miscalculated. “I ought never to have brought you here,” she said. “Sophie is quite right about that, at any rate; you had much better be in London, where you should be safe. I am sure that Lord de Courcy—”

  “No,” said Gwendolen, quietly but very firmly.

  “Gwen—”

  “You may save all the rest of your arguments, Jo. I have no doubt they are excellent ones, but if they had no effect upon your sister or yourself, surely you do not imagine that I am likely to be persuaded by them.”

  Joanna could think of nothing to say.

  They sat in silence for a long moment; then Gwendolen jumped up, dusted her hands on her skirts, and said briskly, “Now, come and help me with the washing-up.”

  Joanna laid aside her shawl and stood, glad of something to do with her hands.

  * * *

  “Do you think the ginger fellow has made away with your brother-in-law, truly?” Gwendolen asked, passing Joanna a teacup to be wiped.

  Joanna sighed. “Rory MacCrimmon? Yes,” she said. “No. I have not the least idea, Gwen. But do the circumstances not suggest it?”

  “Perhaps they may,” said Gwendolen thoughtfully. “Though he did not strike me as a particularly able liar.”

&nbs
p; Joanna considered Rory MacCrimmon. Tall, much freckled of face; some few years older than Gray, and perhaps about Kergabet’s height. Hair that curled and shone like a new copper coin. He had arrived in Quarry Close wearing a voluminous great-coat which entirely obscured the shape of him, and a woollen muffler in a shade which some lady of his acquaintance must have chosen to bring out the startling new-grass green of his eyes; when last seen, he had also worn an expression of confused dismay with which, at present, Joanna could very readily sympathise.

  “Perhaps not,” she said, stretching up to return the teacup to its proper place. “But I should never forgive myself if I let him—or any of them—do harm to Sophie.”

  Gwendolen rinsed four saucers in thoughtful silence. Then she said, very low, “Take care you do not do the same yourself.”

  * * *

  Sophie did not reemerge from her bedroom until late the following morning, and it was immediately clear that she had not spent a restful night: her eyes were red-rimmed, her face pale, and she moved about the house with an air of slow, resigned misery which Joanna found very difficult to bear. She would not eat any breakfast, though she consented at last to drink a cup of tea.

  “I have been thinking,” she said, à propos of nothing, halfway through a very long afternoon. Joanna raised her head from her knitting—it was Sophie’s knitting, in point of fact, but she had plainly lost all interest in it, and it provided employment for Joanna’s restless fingers—and offered an encouraging Hmm? but Sophie was staring once more into the middle distance, and said no more. Her eyes were damp and her face grown ashen; as Joanna watched, a tear leaked from the corner of one eye and tracked down her cheek, apparently unremarked.

  Joanna and Gwendolen, tucked up into one corner of the sofa with her broderie anglaise, exchanged a worried look.

  It struck Joanna then what it was that so alarmed her: What was Sophie about—Sophie who concealed everything remarkable about herself as easily as breathing—to allow not only Joanna but Gwendolen to see her misery so plainly?

  CHAPTER XXI

  In Which Mór MacRury Makes Herself Useful, and Joanna and Gwendolen Pay a Call

  The following day was to bring the return of Mór MacRury from her seaside excursion, which event Joanna had confidently expected to spur Sophie into action. In this, however, she was disappointed: though two days since Sophie had appeared to have every intention of calling upon her friend as soon as she might, when Rory MacCrimmon returned to Quarry Close with a request that Sophie should come with him to Mór MacRury’s lodgings, she was so ill—or so deeply sunk in melancholy—that Joanna could not persuade her to leave her room.

  Short of carrying her sister bodily down the narrow staircase and out into the street, there was nothing for Joanna to do but take the letters from Sophie’s dressing-table and go away. She paused in her way, however, to speak to Gwendolen, and to dispatch her to sit with Sophie—a precaution not likely to be much to the taste of either but necessary to Joanna’s peace of mind.

  Rory MacCrimmon frowned at her explanations but duly escorted her to Mór MacRury’s lodgings in MacDuff-street. The plump, fair-haired woman who opened the door in answer to his knock—she was no taller than Joanna, and was wrapped in a grey cloak and an elegant little grey hat—greeted Rory MacCrimmon familiarly and gave Joanna a pleasant smile.

  This was not Mór MacRury herself, as Joanna had first supposed, but her fellow lodger, one Sorcha MacAngus, on her way to call upon her own brother and sister. Joanna followed Rory MacCrimmon into a bright, untidy sitting-room, where she found him speaking quietly with another woman, of entirely different appearance—tall, angular, and altogether rather severe—but about the same age: perhaps six- or seven-and-twenty.

  “Miss Callender,” said he, “allow me to present my colleague, Ban-mhaighistir Mór MacRury; Mór, this is Joanna Callender, of London—she is Sophie Marshall’s sister.”

  “I am very pleased to make your acquaintance, Joanna Callender.” Like her colleague before her, Mór MacRury put out her right hand in a businesslike manner, and Joanna, less ill-prepared this time, took it.

  She swallowed back a yelp of surprise; the scry-mage had a grip like a farrier’s. “I am grateful for your help”—she groped for a title she was able to pronounce—“Magistra MacRury.”

  To her secret relief, the imposing lady lecturer seemed not to take offence at this. “Do call me Mór,” she said. “And there is no question of gratitude. Your sister and brother-in-law are friends of mine, as well as very promising scholars, and I feel—were it not for—” She stopped abruptly, pressing her lips together, and after a moment went on, “Any small assistance I may render them in this . . . difficult circumstance, I am very glad to offer. But Sophie is not come with you?”

  “She . . . is not feeling quite herself today,” Joanna said, acutely uncomfortable, “and has asked me to act for her in showing you these letters.”

  She passed them to Mór MacRury, who laid them flat upon one of the two desks—the one piled with stacks of books and papers, as against what appeared to be astronomical equipment—arranging them so as to catch the best light from the bow window.

  “Now, Rory,” said Mór, “where is yours?”

  Rory MacCrimmon extracted another letter from an inner pocket and laid it beside the others; Mór MacRury hummed thoughtfully, and settled herself at the desk.

  Despite her acute concern for the results of the scrying, Joanna could not help being interested in the process itself, which—to her untalented and untutored, though experienced, eye—appeared very different from Jenny’s. Instead of shutting her eyes and repeating a scrying-spell under her breath, Mór MacRury sat very still and silent for a long moment, with one hand spread flat on the first of Sophie’s letters; then, so softly at first that Joanna was not certain she had not imagined it, she began to hum.

  Whether the humming was a melody or only a drone, Joanna had no means of knowing; it was evident, however, that this was a quite different song-magick from those Sophie habitually used, for it had no effect whatever on Joanna.

  The bright blue eyes gradually closed, and the humming grew louder and developed something almost like words, though Joanna could not catch hold of any that she recognised. At length the sound died away, finally ceasing altogether, and Mór opened her eyes, shook out her fingers, and laid her other hand upon the next letter.

  Having repeated this process twice more, she looked up at the others, frowning deeply.

  “There is nothing out of the ordinary about either of these first two letters,” she said, nodding at those which Gray had written before leaving Din Edin, “apart from its being entirely out of character for Marshall to abandon Sophie in such a way, and except as subsequent events suggest. When he wrote them, whatever may have befallen later on, he believed himself to be going to Kernow, and was hopeful of a reconciliation with his father. But this one—”

  Joanna leant forward, peering over Mór MacRury’s shoulder, as though she might somehow see for herself.

  “There is something in the way of my seeing,” said Mór MacRury, “some other spell or working, whose source I cannot fathom. It clouds everything I attempt to see. I ought to be able to glean a great deal from something so personal as a letter, and so recently made, but I cannot. I can only tell you that though Marshall did write this letter himself, just as he wrote the others . . .” She paused, casting a troubled look at Joanna.

  “What is it?” the latter demanded, as calmly as she could manage. With some effort she refrained from howling, Do not speak to me as though I were a temperamental child!

  “There was compulsion,” said Mór MacRury. Her voice was low and grim; Joanna clearly heard Rory MacCrimmon’s startled intake of breath. “The words are in some measure his own—else, as you say, he could not have planted so many clues—but he was under some form of compulsion when he wrote them, whether magick or trickery
or main force. The whole of this letter is full of his outrage against it.”

  “That is . . . that is very much what I feared,” said Joanna. Her heart thumped in her throat, and her brain seemed to grow too large for her skull. “I wanted so much to be mistaken . . .”

  She had been hoping desperately, all this time, that her conclusions were quite wrong, that Gray was safe and well at Glascoombe and she and Sophie were making a mountain of a molehill. The appalling reality, which had been gradually seeping into her mind and heart, now finally drenched her in an icy flood. “Mother Goddess,” she whispered. “How am I to tell Sophie?”

  Abruptly and unexpectedly, scarcely hearing the others’ exclamations of solicitous alarm, she dropped into a chair, put her face in her hands, and burst into tears.

  * * *

  Joanna pushed open the front door of Sophie’s house with a dull, dragging feeling of inevitability. The Joanna of a few years ago might have felt some degree of triumph—or at any rate some satisfaction—at the double confirmation of her suspicions. She almost wished that she could do so; she felt hollowed out by the afternoon’s revelations, sick with vaguely reasoned guilt at the thought of Gray’s coming to harm and with dread at the prospect of the news which she must shortly give to Sophie. It could not be put off—all else aside, she had faithfully promised Sophie’s friends that Sophie should be immediately and fully informed of their discoveries—but oh, how she wished that someone else might do it for her!

  Gwendolen, having evidently heard the door opening, came swiftly but quietly down the stairs. “She is sleeping,” she said. “What had the scry-mage to tell us?”

  Joanna tossed her bonnet and cloak over the stair-rail and dropped into Sophie’s armchair with a sigh, putting her head in her hands. She was sorely tempted to pour the whole tale out at once, to plead with Gwendolen to take on the unenviable task of relaying it to Sophie. But she owed it to her sister not to seek such a coward’s path—though she could not be sorry for this brief reprieve.