Lady of Magick

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  Ginger was binding him to the tree-trunk at ankles, hips, and chest; the rough-spun shirt and trousers in which they had clothed him were wholly inadequate to muffle the bite of the hempen rope or the scrape of the rough elm-bark against the half-healed weals across his back—relic of an earlier attempt at forcing his cooperation.

  The chieftain paced closer, holding Gray’s gaze. “Only say the word, Magister,” he said softly. “Only say the word and you shall be prisoner no more, but one among the honoured guests of the true chieftain of Alba.”

  Gray shook his head.

  His captor mimicked the gesture, adopting a sorrowful expression, and gestured again at Ginger and Steel-Eyes. The work of binding done, Ginger stepped away from the elm trunk; each seizing one of Gray’s wrists, they stretched his arms out towards the yew-trees to either side.

  Gray did not struggle, and not only because he recognised the futility of doing so; the truth was that he was desperately curious to know what might come next.

  The chieftain took a step towards him, then another and another, until he stood no more than an arm’s length away. Gray watched his face, half entranced, until by chance a brief, tiny gleam drew his eye to the copper blade in his captor’s hand.

  He was testing the edge against his thumb. A thin bright line of blood welled; he drew the pad of his thumb along the flat of the blade, painting first one side and then the other in a thin film of gore. In the cold glow of magelight, the blood shone against the pale wings of his hands.

  Moving with slow deliberation, and muttering in Gaelic the while—it was a spell, Gray thought by the cadence, though he could make no sense of it; a spell or a prayer, or both together—he pressed Gray’s head back against the tree-trunk with his left hand and, with his right, drew the point of the gleaming blade across Gray’s cheekbone. The knife was sharp, so sharp that the pain scarcely registered, though Gray felt the blood run down his cheek.

  What is happening here? This much was now clear: The “great magick” of which his captor had spoken, which was to right the great wrong done to his clan and to Alba, was borne in men’s blood and fed upon it—a working, and a form of worship, older than any now practised. Gray had felt out of his depth before; now he was drowning.

  The chieftain’s palm scraped across Gray’s cheek, collecting the blood he had spilled; then he drew back, his lips curving in a soft, unfocused smile more chilling than any previous word or gesture, and reached over Gray’s head to lay his hand flat against the bark of the great elm.

  The hairs on the back of Gray’s neck rose so suddenly that his skin seemed to prickle beneath them.

  Still smiling, the chieftain stepped aside and took Gray’s left hand in his. Gently he turned it palm downward, and the blade flashed across its back. The cut on Gray’s cheek was stinging fiercely now, but again he scarcely felt the fresh wound. The blood welled, dripped. Gray heard the soft spat as the first droplets struck, and looked down to see his blood soaking—improbably, vanishing—into a twisted root of elm protruding through the leaf-litter of autumns past.

  He felt light-headed—far more so than such a small loss of blood could possibly account for. Whatever this man was about, would it—could it—work against Gray’s conscious will?

  “There!” the chieftain exclaimed, narrowing his eyes at the blood dripping from Gray’s hand. “It begins, yes!”

  Gray came very near to asking—and, worse, to asking in Gaelic—what it was he was seeing. He hoped he was not squeamish, or more cowardly than necessary, but he could not deny that the sight of his own blood running so eagerly out of his veins and into . . . what? . . . unnerved him.

  His captor was cradling his right hand, now, turning it, poising his knife.

  The knife bit; after a little, the pain followed it. Gray watched, waiting for the first spat of blood on bark.

  The first drop fell—spread—vanished.

  Gray’s knees buckled as magick flowed into him—magick howling, shrieking—magick deep and fierce as the tide in flood.

  * * *

  For one brief, interminable moment, the four men in the yew-grove were all alike struck still in shock. Then three of them exploded into movement and noise, the details of which the fourth could never afterwards remember with any sort of clarity.

  There was a great deal of shouting, not all of which Gray understood. The bloodied copper knife, knocked free in the mêlée, somersaulted to the ground and stuck point-first in the soil, upright and quivering. Some other blade, wielded with more haste and less skill, opened a long shallow gash along Gray’s ribs as it cut away the last of the cords binding him to the elm-trunk.

  Once again he fell forward, sprawling.

  To his surprise, however, the terrifying, exhilarating buzz of magick—his own and not his own, familiar-strange—did not immediately lessen. He reached for it, aligning the words of his shape-shifting spell behind his eyes—caught hold—shaped the syllables quickly and silently, and poured the magick in.

  There was no time for care or for finesse; already the chieftain had ceased berating his minions and one of them was reaching down to grasp at Gray’s right arm. He was just too late, however—outflung arm already bending and shifting into close-folded wing—and the eye-blink moment of astonishment was just sufficient for Gray to effect his scrambling, ungainly escape.

  Hope swelled in Gray’s breast, buoyed up his newly lightened bones. But so long as he remained earthbound, he was slower by far than his pursuers, with their long-striding legs and reaching arms. Could he go aloft like this, from a running start (and to call it running was to be very charitable indeed), with no branch or rail to drop from and no hands to toss him upward?

  I shall have to try.

  He imagined himself leaving behind the leaf-mould and the tangled tree-roots, leaving Ginger and Steel-Eyes and their gods-accursèd chieftain, their spell that fed on the blood of mages to accomplish the gods alone knew what—saw spreading below him the woods and streams and crags of Alba—saw the lamplit window of a tiny house in Quarry Close, and the silhouette of a slim young woman bending over the keys of a pianoforte.

  He spread his wings and ran.

  The first powerful wing-beat proved the futility of any attempt at flight; the movement set loose a hot overpowering tide of pain from his injured left shoulder, half forgotten in the heady surge of new magick and old terror, that swamped his wing, his back, his leg, and tore an almost human shriek from his strigine throat.

  Ginger and Steel-Eyes were upon him in moments, cursing at his feeble attempts to claw and bite them, wrapping him up in his discarded shirt and trousers like a recalcitrant infant in its swaddling-bands. Despair took the place of his earlier wild hope, sitting heavy like iron-stone on his heart.

  Then something tugged at him: some faint aetheric thing, unrelated to his physical captivity. A familiar thing, though so distant as to be almost imperceptible; a pull he had felt before, without at first recognising or comprehending it. A sound heard in his mind’s ear, like the echo of a half-remembered song.

  Sophie.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  In Which Sophie Seizes the Moment

  They blinked at one another in the sudden silence: Sophie and Mór at either end of the dining-room table, Lucia and Joanna and Gwendolen crowded along one side.

  Lucia rested her forearms on the table and brought her face so close to the map that her nose nearly brushed the pins. “Brìghde’s tears,” she breathed. When she straightened up again, her expression was grim; she turned to Mór and said flatly, “Explain.”

  Joanna meanwhile had put her arm about Sophie’s shoulders and drawn out another chair from the table. “Come and sit down,” she said gently, guiding Sophie into it.

  Sophie went without protest, for after the effort of sustaining the spell so long, following upon a period of enforced inactivity, her limbs were trembling despite the
infusion of Lucia MacNeill’s magick. She folded her arms upon the table and rested her chin upon them, staring uncomprehendingly at the map.

  Joanna stood behind her sister’s chair; she said nothing, but her hands on Sophie’s shoulders, gripping just short of actual discomfort, conveyed her opinion more clearly than any words. Lucia MacNeill took a seat facing Mór across the table, both looking rather shaken. Sophie could not see where Gwendolen had gone, but suspected her of lurking out of sight behind Joanna.

  “Mór,” Sophie said. “Mór, that was—was that—”

  “Gray was hidden from us when last we sought him,” said Mór, perhaps taking pity on her inarticulate anxiety, “and I confess I doubted whether Rory’s scheme were worth the effort all of us put into it, but it seems he was quite right.”

  Sophie raised her head in desperate hope; before she could speak, however, Mór turned to her and said, “Your spell . . . I am somewhat at a loss to describe what I saw, for it is quite out of my experience. But I saw your magick, Sophie, wound all about with Lucia MacNeill’s; and just now, at the end, I saw . . . I believe I saw Gray’s magick echoing back, as I have seen your magicks do before—but faint and weak and distant. It did not look quite as it usually does—just as yours, at present, does not—but I do not believe I could mistake it for any other’s. And the echo came—”

  She drew her forefinger along the line of violet silk, west-northwest from Din Edin to a point along the coastline of one of the great islands.

  As she did so, the quivering owl-feather—until now nudging up against the second pin, as though unable to bear being parted from that spot—abruptly stilled, then quietly heeled over.

  Sophie clapped one hand across her mouth to stifle a cry of alarm. Her face was hot, her heart battering wildly against her ribs. “What does that mean?” she demanded. “What has happened?”

  Her voice emerged as a sort of breathless shriek. From either side they gazed at her, measuring, assessing, till she longed to disappear, to divert their attention elsewhere; she held herself in check, and did not.

  “It means that we were right to seize our moment,” said Mór, grave and thoughtful. “Whatever has been blocking the finding-spell was temporarily in abeyance—perhaps he was behind a ward, and was briefly outside it?—but that reprieve is now concluded” (she waved a hand at the upended owl-feather) “and we do not know when there may be another.”

  If at all, she did not say, but Sophie heard it nevertheless.

  “But we do not need another,” she said, as calmly as she could manage. “I have it, you said; you know where to look for Gray—on”—she leant forward to peer at the map—“on Mull.”

  The map, she saw, recorded not only the names of places—towns and fortifications, rivers and lochs and firths—but also the names of people: Lindsay. Bruce. MacDuff.

  No; not the names of people, but the names of clans. And what clan name is written along the coast of Mull, that makes Lucia MacNeill look so grim?

  She levered herself upright and peered down the table, trying to see what Lucia MacNeill had seen. MacLean . . . MacQuarie . . .

  MacAlpine.

  The name was familiar, why? She had seen it printed, not in the Gaelic manner (as on the map) but in plain Latin—she had heard it spoken, too, and where?

  The others were staring at her; she adjured herself not to care. Lucia knew something—perhaps Mór, also—was it the same something which Sophie (perhaps, possibly) knew?

  “Clan MacAlpine,” she muttered experimentally, and squeezed her eyes shut and tugged at a loose curl of hair. The words tickled at the edges of her memory; she spoke them again; then, “But Clan MacAlpine do not rule Alba now.”

  Sophie stood bolt upright, her eyes open wide, but seeing nothing of her own surroundings. Arthur’s Seat. Gray and Rory and Catriona MacCrimmon, sitting over the remains of a picnic hamper. The memories tumbled through her mind, almost too quickly to be caught hold of. Rory’s voice: A crossroads of Ailpín Drostan’s spell-net. Catriona’s, reproving. It had been legend to him—idle talk for an idle moment—but not to her. And Gray, afire with curiosity: No one mage has ever had such power, or such a range. A group of mages, then . . . I should like to know how it was done . . .

  And then . . . and then Catriona had smiled at Gray in that odd, acquisitive way.

  Later, a supper-party here in Quarry Close: Sophie had been curious about the opening of the storehouses, and though the other Albans present had been ready—even eager—to exchange the latest news from their own clan-lands, Catriona had again turned the conversation—and not for the first time. Even Rory had sent Sophie away with a book about Alba’s past when she attempted to discuss its present circumstances. Though it had been an enlightening volume, and she was grateful to him for the loan of it, hindsight clearly showed it to have been an evasion.

  A parade of memories of Catriona MacCrimmon presented themselves to Sophie’s mind, each in some way entirely out of character with the last. Here she cast arch, flirtatious glances at Gray; there sat at Sophie’s elbow in a lecture theatre, patiently translating from Gaelic into Latin. In January she had asked Sophie, in a tone of distant reproach, what manner of friendship she imagined might subsist between two such unequal parties as their two kingdoms; in March, insisted upon trundling her all round Din Edin, from warehouse to dressmaker to milliner’s shop—

  “Oh,” Sophie said, and sat down hard. She had come home that very afternoon, very late, to find her house chill and empty, and Gray not in it. “Oh, surely not.”

  * * *

  Sophie collapsed backwards into her chair as abruptly as though her strings had all been cut.

  “Sophie!” cried Joanna in sudden alarm. She quickly folded herself into the next chair to Sophie’s, pulling it as close as the shape of the table permitted.

  “Lucia,” said Sophie urgently, ignoring her sister altogether, “Mór, that place on Mull, where you put in the second pin—where Gray is, if Rory’s spell does not mistake—what is at that spot?”

  Lucia MacNeill and Mór MacRury exchanged a guarded look.

  “Castle MacAlpine,” Lucia MacNeill said grimly, after a long moment. “Birthplace of the last MacAlpine to hold the chieftain’s seat of Alba, and of none since, for his descendants abandoned it after his death—there are MacAlpines everywhere in Alba, for they ruled for hundreds of years, and they have many a more convenient seat. It has lately been rumoured to be haunted; now I suppose we know why.”

  Sophie’s fingers traced the long curve of the Ross of Mull, wrought in faded green ink upon the parchment of the sea.

  “You shall tell your father?” she said, looking up at Lucia MacNeill.

  The heiress of Alba grimaced. “As soon as ever I can,” she said.

  “You did not say that you were here on your father’s behalf!” cried Mór MacRury, turning to her eagerly.

  “I did not, because I am not,” said Lucia MacNeill. “He will deplore my act of deception in coming here, but my father is not a man to neglect a promising avenue only because its origin annoys him. And of course the discovery is Sophie’s and not mine, and will be the more welcome therefore, in the circumstances.”

  Joanna eyed her sidelong, attempting—unsuccessfully—to determine whether this remark indicated resentment.

  “There is no need to peer at me in that manner, Sophie,” Lucia MacNeill said tartly—frowning at Sophie, who must evidently have succumbed to the same impulse.

  Sophie turned to look her in the eye. “I do beg your pardon,” she said. “This . . . this business of fathers and daughters is quite outside my experience. I hope I am not to blame for—”

  Lucia MacNeill threw up an imperious hand, suddenly every inch the heiress of Alba. “There is a wealth of blame to be shared out in connexion with this mess,” she said. “None of it is yours. Let us have no more apologising.”

 
“Yes, ma’am,” said Sophie. “There is another point—I had almost rather not—but what if Gray should not be their last victim? I am very much afraid, Lucia, that Rory MacCrimmon’s sister Catriona—”

  A sharp indrawn breath from Mór MacRury; glancing in her direction, Joanna saw shock and surmise and sorrow chase one another across her face. “Oh, my poor Rory,” she said, rubbing her brow as though her head ached.

  “I am sorry for it,” said Lucia MacNeill, “and I honour your scruples, Sophie, but if I am to tell my father anything of this—and I must—then I must tell him all.”

  Sophie nodded glumly.

  Joanna heard, as though from very far away, the arrhythmic clop-clop of carriage-horses in the street, and was vaguely surprised when, instead of fading into the general hum of sound as the carriage passed along Quarry Close, it halted abruptly and was succeeded by a jingle of harness, and then by a sharp rap at her own front door.

  “Whoever can that be?” she said, jumping up to peer around the window-curtain.

  Lucia MacNeill ran to the window and peered likewise, then turned away again and groaned.

  “Who is it?” said Sophie, as Gwendolen ran to open the front door.

  “The compliments of Donald MacNeill, Chieftain of the Clans,” came a measured, resonant voice from the entry, speaking in a formal and strongly accented Latin, “and will Lucia MacNeill be pleased to take her seat in her father’s carriage at once.” The voice rose a little in volume: “At once.”

  “M-my duty to Donald MacNeill,” stammered Gwendolen, “and . . . er . . .”

  Lucia MacNeill grimaced, muttered something uncomplimentary beneath her breath, and turned to Sophie and Joanna. “I am discovered, evidently,” she said. “I shall send to you with news, as soon as I may.”

  She hesitated, biting her lip; then, darting forward, she clasped Sophie’s hands and whispered fiercely, “Do not despair.”