Lady of Magick

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  The look in her eyes said, more clearly than any words, You could not have managed this without me. Though Joanna was not entirely prepared to concede this, it was certain that they should have had infinitely more difficulty over the business, and she saw the wary tension fade from Sophie as this understanding passed between them.

  “We shall all go,” she said, by way of concession.

  Joanna, for her part, did not relax until—having consulted with Gwendolen on the pretext of walking about the town, with Morgan for escort—they were safely ensconced in their modest bedchamber, behind a reasonably solid door and Sophie’s wards, and she could at last look her own sister in the face once more.

  * * *

  They were up before the sun to pursue their quarry, and the ebbing tide found them seated on oilcloth-wrapped bales of woven cloth, amidst a small party of women somewhat older than themselves, on the deck of a tubby fore-and-aft-rigged craft bound for Dùn Breatainn, where they should attempt to find passage to Mull.

  Their fellow passengers were apparently well acquainted both with one another and with the journey and its sights. Their voluble and unceasing conversation (or as much of it as Sophie could comprehend, for they all spoke very quickly and in an unfamiliar accent) revolved entirely around some set of persons evidently known to them all, and they seemed to take no notice either of the sun rising through a bank of brilliant cloud on the eastern horizon or of the faintly greening hills and tidy villages along the river’s banks. From time to time, looking up from their knitting, they darted an interested glance at the Sasunnach strangers; Sophie’s bland smile and concealing magick, however, prevented the glances’ developing into anything further.

  It was not safety, but it was at any rate something like.

  Abhainn Chluaidh—the River Clyde, as the folk of the Borders named it—stretched wide and blue, and their tubby little boat ran on the tide with a fresh breeze blowing almost dead astern to speed it along. Mother Goddess, bountiful and kind, Sophie prayed, great Abhainn Chluaidh and mighty Neptune, may it so continue.

  By the time the boat set them ashore at Dùn Breatainn, Sophie had learnt—largely by paying close attention to their conversation, but also by means of a few calculatedly diffident overtures of her own—that the Alban women hailed from Eilean Arainn, or the isle of Arran, and were bound for home. This was disappointing in that it removed them as a possible source of intelligence on the quickest and safest means of reaching Castle MacAlpine; on the other hand, it meant that they should soon be parted from Sophie and her friends and thus should not have time to become suspicious of them.

  Dùn Breatainn, though much less populous than Glaschu, possessed a minuscule dispatch office from which one might send an express to Din Edin. Sophie visited it early on the morning after their arrival, and there deposited an express letter directed to Mór MacRury, in which was enclosed a sealed note to Lucia MacNeill.

  We are on our way to Castle MacAlpine, it read, as I expect you have guessed, and I have not the least idea what we shall find there. I beg you will find a way to send some manner of assistance. If the rescue does not come off quietly, I expect there will be fireworks, and the time for subtlety will be at an end; please, if there is any possibility of your managing it, get word to Angus Ferguson’s company—though I hope he may not still be in command—that should they see or hear anything suspicious from the castle or its environs, they are to come at once in what force they may.

  Nothing might come of it, she thought with a sigh as she sealed the letter, but at least she should not have left the way untried.

  * * *

  The journey by water to Mull—requiring as it did a wide circuit about Arran and the long, narrow peninsula of Cinn Tìre, even before the voyage north through the sound—was the longest any of them had ever undertaken, not to mention the most costly. Sophie’s repeated prayers to Neptune notwithstanding, the sea was choppy and the voyage punctuated by what the sailors called little squalls, which the latter took in stride, assuring Sophie and Joanna that the storms of winter had been far worse and appearing not to remark how little comfort this brought them. Joanna’s typically stoical demeanour did not spare her from sea-sickness, nor did her outrage at the resulting indignities in any way alleviate them; Sophie, having found her sea-legs a little more quickly, was almost glad for the care of nursing her sister—though it meant spending much of her time belowdecks, where the air was close and none too fresh—for otherwise the slow passing of time must have pushed her close to madness.

  The worst of it was that she could feel Lucia MacNeill’s magick ebbing. At the same time, as the good ship Muireall inched closer to her port of call on the southern coast of Mull, she could feel her own magick stirring, but it came in fits and starts, and was not enough, not yet, even to begin to make up the lack. No, that is not the worst of it: the worst is that we have had no reliable news since leaving Glaschu.

  They had inquired, of course; finding a ship bound for Mull, willing to take on three Sasunnach passengers of dubious provenance, and able to satisfy the requirements of respectable accommodation as well as the limitations of Sophie’s increasingly thin purse, had taken more time than Sophie had felt they had to spare, the one side benefit of which was that the delay afforded them plenty of time for both eavesdropping upon and openly questioning every traveller they could find who had lately set foot on that isle. The accounts thus gleaned, however, were so various and contradictory as to be entirely useless as intelligence. There were shades and spirits haunting the old castle (as it was invariably called); there had been a pitched battle—riots—a rout of Angus Ferguson’s company by men of Clan MacAlpine, or the other way about—pillaging and rapine—peaceful demonstrations—the accepted chieftain of Clan MacAlpine had been ousted by a rival claimant, or had shut that rival up in the old castle to keep him out of the way—the castle had been fired, and its forests burnt, or its walls had been levelled, or the force sent against it had been laughably inept—the people of the Ross of Mull were cowering in fright, or they were taking up arms against Donald MacNeill, or they were fleeing in fishing-boats, or they had welcomed Donald MacNeill’s troops with open arms because all through the winter their clan chieftain had let them starve.

  “None of them look particularly hungry to me,” Gwendolen had said, when Sophie related this last.

  “Perhaps,” Sophie had replied thoughtfully, “those we have met are the lucky few who have succeeded in making their escape.”

  Joanna scoffed at this, however. “Donald MacNeill is not a fool,” she said, “and he does not rely on rumour and happenstance for news of what befalls his subjects. If the folk of Mull had been starving to death by their clan chieftain’s fault, you may be sure that he should have intervened long before now.”

  At Sophie’s look of mild surprise, she added, “You do not suppose that your father—”

  Sophie and Gwendolen had both hushed her then, for they were standing in the inn-yard in full daylight; but in the dark of a night aboard ship Sophie was a little ashamed to recall that she had required reminding that her father was not, in fact, a tyrant content to see his people starve.

  Joanna whimpered almost inaudibly, curling herself more tightly towards Sophie in the narrow bunk they shared.

  “Ssh,” Sophie murmured, smoothing a hand over her sweat-damp hair. “Hush, now, I shan’t leave you.” Joanna had seemed a little better this evening—at any rate, the vomiting seemed to be over and done, to the great relief of all concerned—but now the physical symptoms appeared to have been succeeded by a terror of Sophie’s abandoning her to . . . to, Sophie supposed, whatever horrors were plaguing her dreams.

  I wish I had been born a healer, she thought, not for the first time, but perhaps at least she might do something about the dreams.

  She reached gingerly for her magick, and found it sufficient for her purpose; leaning close to Joanna’s ear, she began to croon t
he spell for dreamless sleep which Gray had taught her in the midst of a very dark night of her own, some years ago.

  Gradually Joanna’s limbs relaxed and her breathing slowed as she slipped deeper into sleep. And at last, though not for some time, Sophie succeeded in joining her.

  * * *

  The Muireall was hailed early one morning, as she emerged from a narrow channel between two islands, by a trio of young men in what looked very much like a fishing-boat, and shortly thereafter boarded by two of the same. They spoke Gaelic with the same half-impenetrable accent as the islanders whom Sophie had met in Dùn Breatainn; they swaggered and glared, demanded payment from the ship’s captain for her passage into “the domain of Ailpín Drostan”—from the gobsmacked expressions of the crew, this was by no means usual—and commanded that all the passengers identify themselves and explain what business brought them to Mull.

  Joanna was up and about once more, if a little thinner and paler than was her wont, and for some days now Sophie had felt the welcome flicker of her own magick reasserting itself, bit by infinitesimal bit, over the ebbing traces of Lucia MacNeill’s gifting. She was better equipped than she had feared, therefore, to encounter a pair of large, impatient Albans desiring to know her business—though nevertheless thoroughly terrified by the experience—and by means of a wistful smile, the interminably rehearsed and therefore reasonably glib tale of Elinor Graham’s mama, whose last wish it had been that her daughter should visit the birthplace of her grandmother, and the judicious use of her own mother’s magick, she succeeded in persuading them to move on to the next party of passengers with no more comment than a gruff injunction to take care and to go nowhere unescorted. If, afterward, she leant rather heavily upon Gwendolen’s arm, she hoped that this might be attributed to her own recent bout of sea-sickness.

  * * *

  Joanna had been expecting some sort of port—not one so large or so busy as London or Portsmouth, naturally, but something like the port of Douarnenez, where fishing-boats, traders’ vessels, and private craft put in with some regularity, and a modest selection of inns stood ready to feed and house those newly arrived to the town or awaiting passage elsewhere. She had been ill for days and days, or so it seemed, and for much of the voyage she had longed for a proper meal, a proper bed, and a proper floor that did not rock and sway beneath her feet, to the exclusion of all else.

  Instead, however, the Muireall stood off from a shallow bay on the south shore of the Ross of Mull, and those passengers whose destination this was were sent ashore in the ship’s boats.

  “Look,” Sophie whispered, as she and Joanna leant their elbows on the taffrail, awaiting their turn to climb into the swaying boat. “There it is.”

  She pointed with her chin to the southwest, where a stone fortification—it looked tiny from this distance—perched high above the sea. Castle MacAlpine, then.

  Joanna nodded.

  Gwendolen, as Morgan Prichard, took a turn at the oars—acquitting herself rather well, and preening only a little at Joanna’s pleased surprise—and as they approached the shore, she hopped nimbly over the gunwales to help one of the sailors run her up onto the stony beach, so that the ladies might disembark onto relatively dry land. Joanna remarked, with a pang of guilt at not having done so before this, that not since that first unauthorised gallop in London had Gwendolen looked so uncomplicatedly happy.

  The three of them hung back to watch the rest of the disembarking travellers—a shopkeeper and his wife from Glaschu, come to visit the latter’s elderly and ailing parents, and two sandy-haired brothers, island-born, who had gone to Din Edin to seek employ and found it did not suit them—make their way up the beach. To their left above the flat waters of the bay, a hill rose precipitately, rocky and rough, with turf and heather beginning to green over it and thin cloud drifting lazily across its seaward prow. As Joanna watched, a tiny figure appeared over the brow of the hill, followed at once by a greyish mass that ebbed and flowed around it, which after a bemused moment she recognised as a flock of sheep.

  “Come along, Harriet,” said Sophie, tugging at her elbow. “Look.”

  Joanna looked round and followed the direction of Sophie’s gaze to where the shopkeeper was solicitously helping his wife along a steep, narrow footpath leading upward and inland from the rocky beach. Each of them carried a large valise in one hand, which made their progress slow and ungainly. The sandy-haired brothers were well ahead of them, and widening the gap.

  She looked behind her; the little boat and its crew, rowing steadily, were already more than halfway back to their ship.

  With Sophie and Gwendolen, at their own insistence, carrying all of their scant possessions, they turned their faces to the northeast and made for the path.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  In Which There Is a Change of Plans

  There was no inn at Carsaig.

  A public-house there was, at least, denominated the Drovers’ Drum, and here Joanna and Gwendolen inhaled vast helpings of roast mutton and vegetables while Sophie, who was too tightly strung even to think of eating, sought the assistance of the publican’s taciturn wife and rather exuberant daughter, nursing the mug of porter which the latter had pressed upon her.

  “There’s Rose Neill MacTerry,” said the daughter to her mother, whose sole contribution to the discussion thus far had consisted in attempts to persuade Sophie to eat something. “Her youngest married an Arrain-man last summer and she’s all alone now. Or Malveen MacUsbaig—but she’s a Hearach, you know.”

  Sophie did not see in what way Malveen MacUsbaig’s coming from Na Hearadh—what the British called the isle of Harris—could have any bearing on her own present difficulty, but it seemed impolite to say so. And perhaps she had misheard; the Gaelic of these islanders was not that of a Din Edin drawing-room.

  The publican’s wife looked directly at her, frowning. “You are Sasunnach,” she said.

  “My father was,” Sophie said easily, thinking I am Elinor Graham as hard as she could. “Or half a Sasunnach at any rate, on his mother’s side. I was born in the Borders. My mother was born in Glaschu, and her mother at Pennyghael.”

  “Oh!” said the daughter. “MacGille, was she?”

  Sophie knew not how to reply to this; would it be the more suspicious to answer yes, or no? Pennyghael, on the far side of the narrow neck of land that was the Ross of Mull, had seemed the safest decoy destination—near enough to account for their wishing to go ashore where they had done, but not so near as to make a long stay in Carsaig convenient for their alleged purposes.

  Fortunately the publican’s wife ignored her daughter’s question entirely. “But your cousins”—she gestured at Joanna and Gwendolen—“have not even so much claim as yourself to Alban blood. This is a bad time for Sasunnach strangers to be coming here. Have you not heard that Cormac MacAlpine is trying to raise the clan-lands against the chieftain Donald MacNeill, because Donald MacNeill is bent on selling his own daughter to the Sasunnach King, and Alba with her?”

  Sophie blinked. Cormac MacAlpine is trying to raise the clan-lands. Was this useful intelligence, or yet more unsubstantiated rumour?

  Behind her, the quiet sounds of Joanna and Gwendolen working their way through their luncheon continued unabated. They did not hear that, she reminded herself, and could not have understood it if they had.

  “I had heard that there is to be a marriage between the heiress of Alba and one of King Henry’s sons,” she said, feeling her way slowly through what was abruptly become a sort of conversational fenland, liable to sink her to the neck in stinking mud at the least false step. “I have not heard any of the rest, and I confess I do not know what it means to raise the clan-lands.”

  “It is Alban magick,” said the publican’s wife, “old magick and deep. Not for strangers’ ears, or strangers’ eyes. You had better have stayed at home, child of the Borders.”

  At this point her daught
er intervened, feeling perhaps—as Sophie did—a little taken aback by her vehemence.

  “I’ll just take you up to see Rose Neill MacTerry, shall I?” she said, smiling brightly at Sophie. “Will your cousins come, also? Or will we come back for them later? It seems a pity to interrupt their dinner.”

  Sophie smiled absently in return. Cormac MacAlpine is trying to raise the clan-lands. Old magick and deep—might that be Ailpín Drostan’s spell-net, or Cormac MacWattie’s magick of the land? And five powerful mages vanished without trace . . .

  “I thank you, yes,” she said.

  * * *

  Rose Neill MacTerry, it appeared, lived halfway up the side of a mountain; at any rate, Sophie was feeling achy, dishevelled, and sluggish by the time she and her companion reached the gate of her small stone-built house.

  The woman who opened the door to their knocking was a very little taller than Sophie, straight and slim despite the four grown children about whom Sophie had heard endless anecdotes in the course of the journey from the Drovers’ Drum. “Teàrlag MacAlpine!” she exclaimed, prompting a very belated recognition on Sophie’s part that she had come all this way with a girl whose name she did not know—and, it now transpired, a daughter of Clan MacAlpine. Tread carefully. “What brings you?”

  Sophie caught Teàrlag MacAlpine’s brief frown at Rose Neill MacTerry and wondered what it meant. A faint itching sensation tickled the bridge of her nose; she knew very well what that meant but could not deduce its source.

  “Elinor Graham of the Borders,” said Teàrlag MacAlpine, gesturing at Sophie.

  “Are you so indeed?” Rose Neill MacTerry smiled pleasantly, but she studied Sophie in a way that Sophie did not altogether like.

  “She has two Sasunnach cousins with her,” Teàrlag MacAlpine continued; “my mother is giving them their dinner at the Drum. Elinor Graham asked our help to find a bed for the night.”