Joanna chose to pretend that she had not heard this last remark.
The staircase had no rail or any other handhold, though fortunately it was so narrow that Joanna could easily keep one hand on each wall as she descended. There was almost no light, but someone had affixed a magelight lantern, shuttered almost to invisibility, here and there upon the wall; these gave just enough illumination to allow her, once her eyes had adapted to the near-total darkness, to make out the vague shape of Gwendolen descending the steps just ahead of her. The steps, and the darkness, seemed to go on forever, and the tight spiral made it impossible to maintain either her sense of direction or any notion of how far down they might have gone.
At last, however, they came to the end of their descent and peered cautiously out into a long, dimly lit corridor.
They crept along in silence, side by side. Just as Joanna was beginning to fear that it led to a dead end, the corridor turned sharply. She drew in a startled breath at the sight of two long rows of heavy, bolted doors, and nearly choked on the smell of rank misery.
* * *
There was a square window in each of the doors, well above Joanna’s head and closely barred. As they passed from one to the next, Gwendolen stood a-tiptoe and stretched her neck up to peer through the bars, while Joanna, who could not reach so high even by following suit, shot back the bolts.
“What if some of these men are such as belong behind bars?” Gwendolen objected, when Joanna darted ahead of her and began wrestling feverishly with the next bolt.
“I don’t care,” said Joanna fiercely. The bolt yielded with a rasping scrape, and she crossed the corridor and set her half-skinned hands to the next. “I don’t care, I don’t care.”
Gwendolen halted just behind her and clasped her shoulders, one in each slender hand. “I know,” she said softly, warm breath at Joanna’s ear. “You thought your heart hardened, I suppose, and now you find it as soft as your sister’s. But you cannot help them by losing your wits, Jo.”
Joanna drew in a deep, shuddering breath—she recognised dimly that she was growing used to the smell, which was both a relief and a new source of horror—and leant her forehead briefly on the age-darkened wood of the door before her. “Yes,” she said, after a moment. “I understand.”
“Good.” Gwendolen squeezed her shoulders briefly, then released them, and went back to peering through the barred windows, one at a time—though now Joanna heard her shooting back the bolts as she went.
Joanna had nearly reached the last door on her side of the corridor, and was beginning to despair of finding Gray, when Gwendolen whispered, “Jo! Come here!”
She fairly flew across the corridor, and scrabbled frantically at the bolt until Gwendolen batted her hands away and shot it back herself. The door creaked horribly as, together, they eased it a little way open, and Joanna half expected a tumble of angry Albans to descend upon them, but no shout or footstep came.
Joanna slipped through the narrow gap between door and wall; Gwendolen followed her. Then they stood for a long moment with their backs pressed against the wall, while Joanna struggled not to vomit, weep, or howl.
We shall be leading no triumphal procession from this castle, that’s certain.
* * *
“Mother Goddess!” Gwendolen muttered, as she struggled to heft Gray’s broad shoulders. “He is heavier than he looks.”
“He is not heavy enough,” said Joanna. She shifted her grip around her brother-in-law’s bony knees and lifted. “I believe they have been starving him.” Or he has been starving himself, like my fool of a sister. The part of her mind that knew better than to speak its thoughts aloud whispered that it might be as well, for Joanna and Gwendolen could scarcely have lifted him otherwise, even working together.
Gwendolen huffed a breathless laugh that was half a sob, and said it for her.
They were not even halfway to their goal when Gray half woke from his stupor, drawing in a shuddering breath and struggling wildly—if ineffectually—against their hands. Joanna fought to keep her hold on his shins; Gwendolen muttered curses in Cymric, hanging on grimly.
Gray’s eyes fluttered open briefly, then fell shut again. “No,” he said, very clearly, though his voice was ragged, as though he had been shouting. His wrists and ankles, Joanna had been unable to avoid seeing, were ringed with abrasions, red and raw or scabbed over or sluggishly bleeding. “No. No.”
“Gray,” she hissed. “Be quiet. They will hear you.”
“No,” he repeated, but for just a moment his eyes opened again and looked into hers in sudden recognition. He blinked. “S-s-s—”
Somewhere deep down, Joanna was implacably furious; deeper still, she was sobbing with grief and rage. “Yes, Sophie is here,” she said, her voice pitched low, calming. “But you must be quiet, Gray.”
Another blink; a short nod.
“Can you . . . can you walk?” Joanna suggested, doubtfully.
Gray nodded again.
Joanna counted three, and she and Gwendolen lowered him to the floor; then she held out a hand to pull him up.
He staggered as he came to his feet but kept himself upright by leaning heavily on Joanna’s shoulder. She slid her right arm about his waist—the difference in their heights was perfectly ridiculous, and most inconvenient—and Gwendolen, at her pointed frown, hastened to do the same from the other side. She at least was a little nearer Gray’s height.
They made their slow and awkward way along the dim stone corridor in considerably less silence than Joanna had intended. If Gray had not been lying, exactly, in claiming to be able to walk, he had certainly overstated the case; his absurd feet dragged at the ends of his long legs, and the weight of him lurched from Joanna’s shoulder to Gwendolen’s at every shuffling step. How in Hades were they to manage that narrow, tightly spiralling stair?
Still, this slow and shambling progress was progress nonetheless, and Joanna was just beginning to believe that they might make good their escape, in spite of everything, when heavy footsteps sounded ahead and there loomed up before them a large red-bearded man with a lantern in one hand and a dirk in the other, and an only slightly smaller man holding a wooden cudgel.
The large man shouted something in Gaelic, of which Joanna understood nothing but which made Gray’s bent head jerk upright. “No,” he said.
“Gray,” Joanna whispered urgently, “if there is any helpful magick you might do—”
“Shut up, Jo,” Gwendolen hissed. “He is dead on his feet.”
Then more footsteps—stumbling, unsteady—sounded in the darkened corridor; a lamp glowed behind Red-Beard and Cudgel, who turned, temporarily distracted, and Gray’s weight lifted from Joanna’s aching shoulder as he straightened to stand upright for the first time.
Joanna squinted ahead and bit back a curse; the unsteady footsteps, she saw, had belonged to Sophie, who stumbled ahead of a man with a face like a rat—all nose and teeth and bulging eyes—with her arms bound behind her, her head bowed, her ankles shackled with rope.
Gwendolen groaned, a low, despairing sound.
As Joanna watched in a sort of horrified trance, Sophie slowly raised her head. Her stumbling gait, the droop of her shoulders, spoke resigned submission, but her face was pale, her hair a fury, and her dark eyes burned.
Joanna knew that look of old, and it boded no good for Sophie’s enemies—nor, when she came to think of it, for anyone in Sophie’s general vicinity.
Gray said, “Sophie,” in a whisper that seemed to shake Joanna’s very bones; then, more loudly, “Let her go.”
Joanna had only that moment’s warning—just enough to dodge behind Gray, seize Gwendolen by the wrist, and yank her backward, out of range—before Sophie opened her mouth in a cry of rage, and the corridor exploded.
* * *
Sophie’s head ached so fiercely that she could scarcely see, and the rest of her
felt as though it had been run through a mangle, then loaded down with bags of wet earth. Swallowing back a groan, she flexed her hands—freed again; that was something, at any rate—and wriggled her toes, to confirm that she could; then reached for her magick, to see how much that furious outburst had depleted it.
“Oh,” she whispered, horror-struck. There was nothing there.
She tried to think, to remember, but her thoughts were sluggish and woolly, and everything ached, and last night’s supper was threatening to reemerge.
Lethargy . . . nausea . . . weakness . . . a prison for mages . . .
“Oh!” she said again. She felt no better, objectively speaking, but there was a certain comfort in knowing what ailed her. And this explained, too, why Gray had been so difficult to find by magick; almost certainly there were wards on the castle, too, against finding-spells and scrying, but wards alone, she suspected, could not have withstood the drawing-spell she had worked with Lucia MacNeill’s magick. A strong interdiction, however, would deaden the effects both of magick within its boundaries and of any spell seeking to pass those boundaries. And the interdictions on Castle MacAlpine’s prison-cells, if they had been designed to contain powerful mages, must be very strong indeed.
What they must have suffered, Gray and the others! Some of them had been here many months.
It was not long thereafter that the door of her cell creaked open and the young man with the russet beard hauled her upright by one elbow, bound her wrists behind her back once more, knotted a handkerchief across her mouth, and brought her out into the corridor. As they crossed the threshold, Sophie’s magick surged up again; the nausea ebbed, and the pain in her head began to subside.
She had no leisure to enjoy her freedom from the interdiction, however, for her captor half marched, half dragged her down the corridor, pushed her into another cell, and locked her in again. As she staggered across the damp stone floor, the golden-haired woman she had last seen in that elegant sitting-room—somewhere far above her head, now, she supposed—rose from her seat on a wooden bench and said in Latin, “The Princess of Britain, I presume.”
Oh, gods and priestesses!
Sophie straightened her back as well as she could, raised her head, and gave the other woman a level look, refusing to humiliate herself by attempting to speak around the gag.
The golden-haired woman smiled. “I am sorry,” she said. “We have not been introduced. I am Aileen MacAlpine; Cormac MacAlpine is my brother.”
Sophie shifted her gaze to the wall directly opposite.
For some time there was no more conversation, for which Sophie was grateful. To her surprise, it appeared that she had been brought here not to be interrogated, but to be bathed. The water was pleasantly warm, the soap pleasantly scented with lavender. Sophie’s skin crawled; she tried not to let Aileen MacAlpine see it.
This was some ritual, plainly, but in preparation for what?
Finally she was reclothed in a linen shift and a robe of rough undyed wool, her hair combed out straight and left to fall down her back and over her shoulders, after which Aileen MacAlpine drew a length of slender cord from a pocket in her skirts, bound Sophie’s wrists tightly behind her, and knocked loudly upon the door to summon the guards.
* * *
Joanna came to with a ringing in her ears, a fierce ache in her head, and a warm weight pressing her legs into the stone floor; she could not move her arms. She blinked frantically for a few moments, trying to dispel the blurred darkness that seemed to be afflicting her eyes; then, swimming up into full consciousness, she recognised that the half darkness was real, her hands were tied behind her back, and the weight across her knees was a human body.
Panic surged; then the warm weight shifted a little, and Gwendolen’s voice, rough but recognisable, said, “Mother Goddess! What did those sons of the pits of Tartarus hit me with?”
“Gwen!” said Joanna, half laughing in breathless relief. “Are you hurt?”
There was a shifting in the gloom; Gwendolen’s weight lifted away, then settled again along Joanna’s left side as Gwendolen shuffled backwards to sit up against the wall. “A spooked horse trampled me once, when I was younger,” she said; Joanna winced. “This feels rather like that. And you, are you—”
“I am not much injured,” said Joanna. “Apart from a knot on the head.”
The room was growing lighter, by tiny increments, or perhaps her eyes were accustoming themselves to the gloom.
“What did they hit us with?” said Gwendolen. “Did you see?”
“No one hit us,” Joanna said; after a moment’s thought, she amended, “that is, I did not see anyone do so. There was an explosion—that was Sophie’s doing, of course; I wonder that they did not see it coming, for I certainly did. Then I suppose someone must have . . . must have collected us from that tunnel, and brought us . . . here.” Wherever here may be.
“And,” she added, “we must have lost Mama’s charms in the explosion, or they should not have seen us at all.”
“Explosion?” Gwendolen repeated incredulously, ignoring all the rest of Joanna’s explanation.
Joanna turned towards her, frowning. Did she not remember the blazing light, the overwhelming noise, the great whoosh of displaced air? She must have hit her head much harder than Joanna had supposed.
“Yes,” she said.
“You!” a rough baritone voice called, in an equally rough approximation of Latin, from several yards away. “Be quiet.”
Joanna followed the direction of the voice, and her heart sank as she discerned its source: a man’s head silhouetted against a high, barred window.
CHAPTER XXXI
In Which Friend Is Not Easily Distinguished from Foe
The red-bearded man herded Sophie into line behind four other prisoners, bent-headed and grey-robed like herself, and roped them together at ankles and wrists.
This stumbling procession made its way along a half-lit corridor, climbed a steep and winding staircase—not entirely without incident—and after passing through a torchlit passage, through a postern-gate, and down another equally steep, but mercifully straight, staircase, plunged into the edge of the wood. At last they halted in a clearing roofed over with the spreading branches of elm and yew trees.
Here their path intersected with another, and they met a second, smaller procession of men in grey robes, also escorted by a guard, but not bound as Sophie and her companions were. Sophie raised her eyes to look into their clean-shaven, well-fed faces and saw none of her own terror and pain, but a solemn trepidation—and here and there, she thought, a glimpse of something like guilt.
Each of them was shortly bound to his own tree, arms stretched backward around the trunk and bound at the wrists; from her vantage point Sophie could see only two of the others, both men of middle years, starveling-thin and bearded, dull-eyed and resigned—but clean, and newly dressed in woollen robes, just as she was herself. She shuddered at the thought of Aileen MacAlpine’s hands upon her, washing her like an infant—dressing her like a doll.
And directly across the clearing—no, the shrine; the ring of trees was too symmetrical to be anything but a deliberate planting—Gray sagged against the trunk of an elm twice as wide as he was, his eyes closed and his head lolling. So still was he that for a moment Sophie’s heart seemed to stop; then his chest rose and fell, just perceptibly, and she breathed deeply, trying to summon calm.
Focus. Concentrate. The thin cord cut into the skin of her wrists; her shoulders burned with the pull of it, and through the stuff of the robe the rough elm-bark prodded at her spine.
“You cannot possibly believe that this will do you any good,” she said—speaking in Latin, in case there might still be some advantage to be gained. “You have won some of these men to your cause, I collect, and I wish you joy of one another. But the rest you have beaten and starved, you have held under interdiction; if they ha
ve any magick left at all, it is not by any care of yours. What do you imagine that they can give you now?”
The tall man—Cormac MacAlpine, certainly—turned slowly on his booted heel to look at her, and a smile, thin and narrow-eyed, crossed his face.
“You mistake, Princess,” he said; “the question now is what you can give us, and what price you are prepared to pay for the petty satisfaction of refusing.”
He gestured carelessly, and the red-bearded man stepped to Gray’s side, wrenched his head up by the hair, and held a knife to his throat.
For a moment the world went very still. Then Sophie’s magick roared up like a live thing, cold blue-white and shrieking—nearly all her own, now, the borrowed threads of Lucia MacNeill’s faded almost to nothing—and tried to obliterate everyone here present who might do harm to Gray. Sophie’s rational self fought it grimly; she would not, must not repeat the disastrous outburst that had led to her mother’s death.
I am no murderess, she told Cormac MacAlpine, quietly under the clamour in her mind, and I shall not let you make me into one.
And if Gray, or any innocent person, should come to harm through any action of hers . . .
It did not bear thinking of. She fought the magick down, down, into a still small pool of fury.
Cormac MacAlpine smiled again. “Indeed, Princess. That is precisely what we expect you to provide.”
Yes, he truly can see magick, Sophie thought, and it appears he has set his sights on mine.
“And why should I oblige you?” she demanded, as though she could not see the reason perfectly well, bound to a tree in front of her eyes with a naked blade at his throat.
“You are not a fool,” Cormac MacAlpine said; “kindly do not insult either of us by pretending to be so. We have in our hands both your husband and yourself, as well as these others; you hold in yours, for want of a better metaphor, the fuel which our enterprise requires. To provide it costs you nothing; to refuse . . . well, I have no doubt that you are capable of interpreting the evidence of your senses.”
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