Lady of Magick

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “Gray is being held prisoner somewhere,” she said bluntly. Gwendolen winced. “And Mór MacRury could not tell us where, or by whom, because she could not see clearly, for all that she is so particularly gifted.”

  “I do not know very much about scrying,” said Gwendolen, “but I do know that it is no more invincible than any other branch of magick.”

  She briefly clasped Joanna’s shoulder; Joanna sighed, and allowed herself the small luxury of closing her eyes and curling up in Sophie’s chair. For a moment only, she told herself.

  “Jo,” said Gwendolen’s voice, some indeterminate time later. From the sound of it, this was not her first attempt at attracting Joanna’s attention.

  Joanna opened her eyes blearily; there was Gwendolen herself, holding something—which, when she put it into Joanna’s hand, proved to be a cup of tea, very hot and, if the colour were any guide, much stronger than necessary.

  “I know you don’t want it,” said Gwendolen, in what Joanna privately called her governessing voice, “but I can see perfectly well that you need it.”

  Joanna raised the cup to her lips. The first sip confirmed that the tea was not only too strong but also much too sweet; Gwendolen looked at her expectantly, however, until she had finished drinking it, and she was forced to admit—at least to herself—that she felt rather better as a result.

  “You mean to go back to see Lord de Courcy again, yes?” said Gwendolen, taking the cup and saucer away from her and bestowing them upon the mantel-shelf. “You had better go at once, I suppose, though I do think your sister ought to go with you—”

  “I had a thousand times rather speak to Lord de Courcy than to Sophie,” Joanna confessed, “but I cannot in conscience tell him anything before I have told her.” She sighed again, and was at once disgusted with her own cowardice. “I shall just go upstairs and see whether—”

  But she did not go at once, for at that moment there came a loud, determined knocking at the door.

  * * *

  There was a soft tap at the door of Sophie’s bedroom. She considered feigning sleep, but as she had been sitting at her dressing-table, leaning her head on her hand and attempting (without much success) to read a manuscript which Rory had lent her, this seemed altogether too much effort—and it could only be Joanna, after all. “Come in,” she called, not looking up from the page before her.

  The door creaked open, and Joanna’s voice said, “Sophie, I have brought Mór MacRury to see you.”

  Sophie sat up straight, so suddenly that her head swam. Had she not said very clearly that she did not wish to see anyone, anyone at all, for any reason?

  Before she had gathered herself to tell them to go away, she heard the door close again, and Joanna appeared at her elbow.

  “Jo—”

  “I know,” said Joanna, “and I shall apologise later if I must, but I do think you ought to see her, Sophie.” Head on one side, she surveyed her elder sister critically. “You look a little better than you did this morning, I believe. Come and sit by the fire; Gwendolen has made a pot of tea.”

  * * *

  Joanna poured out tea for Sophie and for her guest; then she retreated to hover with Gwendolen in the doorway, for there was not room for two more chairs within.

  “I saw almost nothing,” Mór explained gravely, “which is very suggestive, but does not help us. But we do know one thing now, which you only suspected before, and that is, that wherever he has gone, it was not of his own will. It was clever of him; the clues in the text were for you alone, but no one could possibly scry that letter, no matter how little they knew him, and fail to see that it was written under duress.”

  Sophie’s face had gone the colour of tallow; Joanna started forward, and Mór MacRury half rose from her seat, ready to support her if she should faint. She did not, however, and though her teacup rattled in its saucer, it stilled after a moment without shattering or even cracking.

  Joanna told herself firmly that this might as easily indicate improved self-control as depleted magick.

  “Sophie,” said Mór MacRury, giving her a quizzical look, “I do think you might have told me that your husband had vanished without trace. Or, if not me, someone. Surely you cannot have thought—”

  “I have told you,” said Sophie, “and my father’s ambassador, also, the moment I had reason to do so. You saw the first letter, as well as the other; I could not have known, then, that anything was amiss, and if I had run about Din Edin like a lost sheep, bleating, because my husband had packed a valise and gone home to see his dying father, I should only have been laughed at. Or, worse, packed off back to London myself.”

  She was not altogether wrong, Joanna conceded—though it was also true that had she gone at once to Lord de Courcy, and thus discovered the message to be a false one, there might perhaps have been some opportunity of intercepting the culprits before they left the city.

  Mór MacRury, it appeared, did not see things in the same light. “I should have advised you to sound the alarm at once,” she said; “the letter was plausible enough, I grant you—scrying it could tell no one anything but that he believed every word he wrote at the time of writing it—but the whole tale, taken together: that, no.”

  “That is exactly what I said,” said Joanna.

  Her sister’s consequent glare, though halfhearted, lifted Joanna’s spirits a little, as showing some return of Sophie’s.

  “But that was guesswork; this is evidence enough to take to Lord de Courcy,” said Sophie. Turning to Mór MacRury, she added, “That is . . .”

  “Enough to convict a man in the law-courts, certainly not,” said Mór MacRury. “But more than sufficient to justify an investigation. On the one hand, of course, I should have wished to see more clearly; but on the other hand, the fact that I was prevented from doing so is as good as a signpost reading Here be foul play.”

  “Foul play of what sort, exactly?” said Gwendolen. Joanna glanced up at her in pleased surprise. “A powerful ward might be responsible, might it not? Or a sufficiently potent spell of concealment? And either might be used for a benign purpose, as easily as for a malevolent one.”

  “That is so,” said Mór MacRury. “But a man whose circumstances demand wards and concealment-spells, and who also writes a letter which has one meaning to its intended recipient and another to those who do not know him well, is a man in difficulties, whether the wards and concealments are his enemies’ or his own.”

  “Yes, I see,” said Gwendolen.

  “I tried a finding-spell this morning,” Sophie said glumly. “You can guess its outcome, I am sure. Either he is outside my range, or the same mechanism—whatever it may be—is interfering.”

  Mór MacRury leant across the space between their chairs to squeeze Sophie’s hand.

  “In any event,” said Joanna, “we must go back to Lord de Courcy as soon as may be, with this news.”

  “Yes,” said Sophie, raising her chin. For a moment she looked almost herself again; but then she said, “Yes, Jo, you must go at once.”

  * * *

  Joanna had feared that they might have difficulty in explaining to Lord de Courcy—who was not a mage any more than she was herself—the process by which they had come by their evidence. Fortunately, however, Mr. Powell appeared to understand all of it easily, and nodded briskly at things which Joanna herself found baffling.

  “I know nothing to speak of about this Rory MacCrimmon,” he said, “though if he is a friend of Marshall’s, my lord, you may be sure he is at least no fool. But Mór MacRury I do know, at any rate by reputation; she is one of the University’s foremost experts on the craft of scrying. Whatever she has told you, Miss Callender, Miss Pryce, I believe we may rely on absolutely.”

  Unless Mór MacRury considers herself an enemy of Britain, Joanna thought. But she recalled Mór’s tone of voice, her unconcealed anxiety for Sophie, for the missi
ng Gray, and could not believe that even such a cause could have persuaded her to deception in a matter touching their safety.

  “What we know, then,” said Lord de Courcy, folding his hands on the desk before him, “is this. First, that Monsieur Marshall was alive and well at breakfast on the morning of his disappearance, and said nothing to his wife at that time of any intention to leave Din Edin. Second, that at some point after his wife’s leaving the house with a friend and before her return thither late in the afternoon, he received a message purporting to come from this house, and as a consequence allowed himself to be driven . . . somewhere.

  “Third, that he certainly wrote the letters received from him by his wife and by his colleague Rory MacCrimmon—which may indicate that the latter had no involvement in the business, but may only mean that Marshall was not aware of his doing so—but, fourth, that one of them was written under duress, and its surface import dictated by some other person or persons unknown to us.”

  His gaze flicked first to Mr. Powell, industriously taking notes, then to Joanna, who swallowed, licked dry lips, and said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Fifth,” he continued, “that Monsieur Marshall has two points in common with four other men who have disappeared within the last twelvemonth, without satisfactory explanation: He is a stranger to Din Edin, and a powerful mage. Sixth”—and here his decided recital of facts took on a more hesitating quality—“that some . . . spell, or . . . other barrier, is preventing his being located by means of scrying.”

  Mr. Powell raised his head. “Surely someone has tried a finding-spell?” he demanded.

  Joanna regarded him levelly. “So I am told,” she said. “My sister has made several such attempts, she tells me, and I understand that both Rory MacCrimmon and Mór MacRury have also done so, without success.”

  Again doubt flickered in her mind—how was she to know the difference between a mage who had attempted a finding-spell and a mage who only claimed to have done so?—and again she firmly quashed it.

  “Duly noted, Miss Callender,” said Mr. Powell. He looked chastened and bent his head to his notes once more. “Which tells us only that Mr. Marshall is no longer here in Din Edin, or within the operative range of the said mages—which may be very considerable,” he added, with a nod to Joanna, “but cannot possibly extend beyond, say, a radius of fifty miles.”

  “Now,” Lord de Courcy said, “having established these facts of the matter, we may draw some logical inferences.” His tone—precise, even, almost didactic—so closely recalled what Sophie called Gray’s lecturing voice that Joanna was abruptly, painfully glad of Sophie’s absence. “First, that given the clear parallels in these cases—two such might be coincidence, but five?—we must consider the disappearances as linked. Second, that whatever Monsieur Marshall’s present whereabouts, he did not come there of his own volition.”

  “And, third,” said Joanna, “that he is not in Kernow. Because,” she added, as Mr. Powell seemed about to object, “if he were in Kernow, they—whoever they are—should have made him tell Sophie that he is somewhere else.”

  “If I were to attempt to hide a man,” said Mr. Powell, “I should go to London; surely there can be no better bolt-hole for persons who wish not to be found.”

  “Have you ever lived in London, Mr. Powell?” Joanna inquired.

  “Not . . . lived, as such,” he admitted. “But I have been staying there quite often—”

  “If I wished not to be found,” said Joanna, “I should not attempt to hide in London, for a kingdom. You are thinking, I am sure, that concealment must be very easy in so large a city, so full of people who cannot possibly all know one another. But what I have discovered is that London is not so much a great city as a vast collection of villages, which are as quick to note the arrival of a stranger as any village anywhere; and that, where so many people live in such close proximity, nothing can long go unremarked—and almost any tongue can be loosened by the judicious application of coin. Surely Din Edin is not so very different? I have heard Lord de Courcy say as much, unless I am much mistaken.”

  Mr. Powell—who had bristled a little, to begin with—was now nodding thoughtfully. It was fortunate, thought Joanna, that he had been long enough in Din Edin to lose the habit of treating women’s opinions as surplus to requirements; though he was of Cymric birth, by his surname and his speech, which was perhaps not unimportant. What was it about Normandins and Englishmen (and here she thought irritably of her own father, as well as of Sieur Carel de Bayeux and his faction of the Privy Council) that made them so obtuse and so intransigent upon this point?

  “And let us not forget,” said Lord de Courcy, “that if our second supposition is correct, they have had not one captive to conceal, but five.”

  “Indeed,” she said.

  “If not London or Din Edin, then,” said Mr. Powell, “where should you conceal yourself, should you require concealment?”

  “In the country,” said Joanna at once, and Gwendolen nodded agreement. Joanna herself had never attempted to run away from home, until the night when Sophie had announced herself to be doing so; unlike Sophie, however, she had spent many a resentful hour in plotting how she might successfully abscond, either from her father’s house or from her school in Kemper. “In my own country, where every croft and hayrick and fox-hole is known to me—where I am no stranger, and may therefore go unremarked, and perhaps command the loyalty of others—where there are places so isolated as to permit of true secrecy. Where”—she paused to swallow back a wave of revulsion—“where a man might scream as loud as he liked, with no one to hear him.”

  There was a long, fraught silence.

  Joanna waited to be told that this was no fit subject of conversation for a young lady, or that she was overwrought and would be the better for a glass of watered wine and a good night’s rest. Instead, however, Lord de Courcy said, “Your theory, then, is that once we have discovered who is responsible for these disappearances, we shall also have discovered—broadly speaking—where to look for them.”

  “Yes,” said Joanna; “and also, I must suppose, what led them to do . . . whatever it is they have done, or are presently doing. But,” she added dejectedly, “as the who of the matter remains as much a mystery as ever, I do not see that it gets us any forwarder.”

  The Ambassador’s study fell silent again as all present contemplated this dispiriting conclusion.

  “Might this,” said Mr. Powell, hesitating a little, “might it have any connexion to the Prince’s betrothal to Lucia MacNeill?”

  Joanna considered it. “I do not see how,” she said, “if it is true that mages were vanishing long before anyone outside Donald MacNeill’s inner circle was let into the secret. And then, too, the mages who have vanished are all foreigners to Alba, but not all are British subjects . . .”

  “It seems to me, moreover,” said Lord de Courcy dryly, “that if I were minded to kidnap subjects of a foreign kingdom for the purpose of revenge, or in order to hold them hostage against the carrying out of some scheme to which I objected, I should be foolish to do so in secret.”

  “That is so,” Mr. Powell conceded. “Nevertheless, sir, you cannot deny that there are objections to this scheme, and very strong ones, in certain quarters, and it is only reasonable to suppose that—”

  “Einion,” said Courcy sharply, startling Joanna with the vehemence of his tone and Mr. Powell, evidently, by the use of his given name. “I should advise you to take careful thought before making such an accusation against the priests of the Cailleach, from your position as a guest of the Alban Court. You should not, I hope and trust, be so foolish as to stand on the mustering-ground of a battalion of His Majesty’s army, and offer insult to the priests of Mithras?”

  “If the boot fits—”

  “But if the priests of the Cailleach were indeed responsible,” said Joanna, keeping her voice even with some effort, “then surely
, as the Ambassador says, they should have made their actions, and the reasons for those actions, public knowledge. You suspect them of holding British subjects captive in an effort to stop Lucia MacNeill’s marriage; but any such scheme must depend entirely on our knowledge—on the Ambassador’s knowledge, and through him, the attention of His Majesty—of what they intend, of what they want.”

  Mr. Powell pressed his thin lips together tightly, stared over Joanna’s shoulder, and said nothing.

  His employer, on the other hand, now looked at her with all his attention. “I take it, Miss Callender,” he said evenly, “that Sieur Germain de Kergabet still supposes you to be making an innocent visit to your sister, saving your mandate to scrape an acquaintance with Lucia MacNeill?”

  To anyone else, it might have seemed a non sequitur, but Joanna—with Courcy’s steady, speculative gaze now focused entirely upon her—parsed the chain of unstated connexions without difficulty, and was forced to concede that even a Normandin may be capable of learning from experience.

  “You are correct, my lord,” she said. “In this matter, I am at present an envoy for no one but myself.”

  Mr. Powell raised his eyebrows.

  “You are here alone, are you not?” Lord de Courcy inquired.

  “She is not alone, my lord,” said Gwendolen, sitting up—if it were possible—even taller.

  “Your pardon, Mademoiselle Pryce.” He inclined his head politely; then, turning again to Joanna, he said, “You are not, however, in any sense part of an official delegation?”

  “No,” said Joanna. “I came here by prior arrangement, in the company of Lady MacConnachie—that is, of Sìleas Barra MacNeill—on an entirely innocent visit to my sister, without the least inkling of what I should find when I arrived. Though I dare say,” she added, somewhat against her better judgement, “that if Kergabet had had any idea, Gwendolen and I should never have been permitted to leave London.”