Lady of Magick

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  Sophie swallowed terror, swallowed rage. There was no help or guidance to be had here, no more knowledgeable and experienced person to tell her what she must do; Gray was in no state to help her. Whatever choices were to be made, they must be hers alone. Lady Minerva, in your wisdom, help me to choose rightly.

  “You need my magick,” she said, and was relieved to hear her voice emerge strong and steady. “For what purpose?”

  Cormac MacAlpine narrowed his eyes at her. “What matters it to you, Princess?”

  “If you know who I am,” Sophie said, “then you must understand that I have loyalties and obligations beyond the merely personal.” She closed her eyes briefly and swallowed again. Forgive me, Gray. “And I would hear from your own lips who you are, and what you intend, before I agree to lend myself to your . . . enterprise.”

  “Even at the cost of your husband’s life?” His tone was less threatening than intrigued.

  “You will not kill him,” said Sophie, with a great deal more confidence than she felt.

  “Will I not? Why say you so?”

  “Because you have the talent of seeing magick in others.” It was a desperate play for time, and the prize very uncertain; at present, however, Sophie could think no farther ahead than the next moment, and her only goal was to divert her captor’s attention from whatever it was he wished to do with his captive mages, until Joanna and Gwendolen should succeed in . . .

  In doing what?

  No matter. “And if you have seen mine,” she continued, “as you certainly did just now, you will easily imagine what your fate might be, were you to eliminate my motive for restraining it.”

  Cormac MacAlpine paced to and fro before her, thoughtfully; Sophie fixed her gaze on him, doubting her ability to look upon Gray’s face without bursting into tears, or worse. Considered objectively, their captor was not difficult to look at—tall and straight, with gleaming auburn hair tied back from his high forehead, clear blue eyes set wide above a fine straight nose, firm jaw, and expressive mouth.

  Sophie hated him as she had rarely hated another mortal being.

  Gray had once taught her a spell to unfasten knots; whilst her captor’s back was turned, she drew up the minutest thread of magick and muttered the words, two fingers pressing the one rope-end that dangled just far enough. But there was some other spell woven into the cord, which stung her fingertips viciously and set up a furious itching wherever it touched her skin.

  Magickal talent, said Gray’s voice in her mind, is sometimes less helpful than you might suppose.

  Cormac MacAlpine turned suddenly to face her, hands clasped behind his back. “Your mother was Breizhek,” he said.

  Sophie regarded him impassively. Did he know what she had tried?

  “And all know the tale of her petty rebellion. Does it never gall you, Princess, that you might have ruled a kingdom, had you been born a boy?”

  “Never,” said Sophie at once, with perfect truth. Many things galled her, in relation to her birth and upbringing, but having missed the opportunity to inherit her father’s throne was decidedly not one of them.

  Cormac MacAlpine’s eyebrows flew up and his eyes widened briefly, perhaps the first uncalculated expression she had seen on his face.

  “What has my mother, or my inheritance, to do with your purpose?” she demanded.

  “Your pardon, Princess.” The moment of uncontrolled reaction was past now. “I had supposed that your sympathies might lie another way than with your own oppressors.”

  Sophie’s bound limbs were trembling in little helpless shudders, her arms flinching away from the rough elm-bark, and she fought to keep her voice from trembling likewise. “This enterprise of yours: Do you tell me that I am to sacrifice myself for a purpose of which I know absolutely nothing?”

  The tall man studied her. Slowly, a smile curved his lips—a smile at once self-satisfied and hopeful. “Every great cause demands some sacrifice,” he said.

  Inwardly, Sophie groaned. It was as she had feared: They had fallen into the hands of a man possessed of a grand idea. Ought she to have answered his question differently, feigned resentment of her half brother Edward, who would inherit their father’s throne in her stead?

  She risked a glance at Gray. He had not stirred, but neither, it appeared, had the man with the knife.

  “And I do not ask of any man a sacrifice greater than those I have already made myself. I have succeeded in the task set us by Alba and her gods—our gods. My father devoted the last decades of his life to mapping the great journey of Ailpín Drostan, by which he wove together the clans and clan-lands to make the kingdom of Alba, and my loyal clansmen and I, against equally great odds, have retraced every step of that journey, and renewed its paths with the blood of Ailpín Drostan’s descendants.”

  Sophie’s mind helpfully supplied an image of MacAlpine and his followers retracing their distant ancestor’s steps across and about Alba with arms outstretched, scattering in their wake their own blood dripping from their fingertips. She repressed a shudder.

  How much blood would such a deed require? Though Alba’s territory was nothing like so large as Britain’s, still it was a kingdom entire, and not a small one. All those hills and crags. All those islands, and the passages amongst them.

  “I had not so many willing assistants as Ailpín Drostan,” said Cormac MacAlpine; with a bitter little smile, he untied one of his shirt-cuffs, shoved the sleeve upward, and extended his arm abruptly, revealing to Sophie’s appalled eyes a long series of parallel scars. “He is said to have made his journey in a space of months; ours was the work of many years. But success in this great undertaking is worth every step and every drop of blood, for thus shall we cure the disease that afflicts both Alba and ourselves.”

  Sophie was silent, this time, not from a wish to goad her captor into speaking, but because she could think of nothing to say.

  “You worship the conqueror-gods, I conclude,” Cormac MacAlpine said. He stepped closer and loomed over her as he folded down his shirt-sleeve and retied the cuff.

  Sophie answered cautiously, as she had once answered Conall MacLachlan the butterfly collector, “I hope I give all the gods their due.” Cormac MacAlpine’s remark seemed an entire non sequitur.

  “Say you so, Princess? And why should you owe anything to the gods of those who broke your ancestors to the yoke? The gods of Rome have no rights in your land, and still less in mine. And if your father supposes that either the people or the lands of Alba will stand idle while he thrusts his son into the chieftain’s seat of Alba and his conqueror-gods into our shrines and wellsprings—”

  “I am sure His Majesty has no designs on Donald MacNeill’s throne,” Sophie said, lifting her chin as she thought Joanna might have done in the same circumstances, “and why you, or the priests of the Cailleach, or anyone should imagine that he has the least interest in Alba’s choice of gods, is beyond my understanding. My father may worship what you call conqueror-gods, amongst the many who are revered in his kingdom, but he has no yearning for conquest himself, that I have ever heard of.”

  “Oh, indeed not,” said Cormac MacAlpine. He had begun to pace again but paused in his trajectory to fix her with a venomous smile. “He had rather conquer Alba in Lucia MacNeill’s bed, as his forefathers conquered Breizh, than try and fail to win her on the field of battle.”

  It was a barb which many a Breizhek gentleman or lady—Sophie’s own family perhaps especially—might have found impossible to swallow; as a goad to Sophie’s temper, however, it was singularly ineffective.

  “And your enterprise will prevent him?” she inquired. “How so?”

  The smile grew gentle and earnest; Sophie repressed a shiver that had nothing to do with the chill night air.

  “You need not fear that any harm will come to your family, Princess,” Cormac MacAlpine said, “or to your kingdom. None here wishes any
ill to your father, so he and his gods leave us to ourselves. Our quarrel is not with him, but with the false clan that would sell Alba in bondage to Britain.” He nodded to himself, and Sophie had to stop her own head from mirroring the motion. “Donald MacNeill ought never to have sat the chieftain’s seat; any effort to right what is wrong in Alba must begin by removing him from it, and all of his clan and get.”

  “And replace his clan and get with your own, I collect?” Sophie let her eyes drift briefly to Gray’s face and found it yet slack and still. Layers of old bruises marked the skin of his bared throat, and from his temple blood dripped sluggishly, one drop to every three of Sophie’s heartbeats. “Is this the service you give your gods?” she said softly. “Trickery, treachery, and the blood of captives too badly broken to choose otherwise?”

  The quick flash of fury on Cormac MacAlpine’s face, though as quickly controlled, warned Sophie what was coming, and she tried, too late, to turn her head aside. The attempt was a mistake; he saw the motion and shifted so that instead of striking her cheek, his open hand caught her hard across one ear, crushing the other against the tree-trunk at her back. For a moment she hung limp against the ropes that bound her, dazed by the force of the blow. When she regained her balance and shook her head, trying to clear her vision, both ears throbbed, and something warm and wet ran down the treeward side of her neck.

  If his gods do indeed crave the blood of captives, it seems they shall have mine as well as Gray’s.

  Cormac MacAlpine’s hand darted towards her once more; with desperate effort Sophie controlled her reflexive flinch. He did not strike her again, however, but caught her jaw in a bruising grip and wrenched her face towards his own. “It seems my judgement is awry,” he said; “I thought you a woman of more sense.”

  For the space of a few heartbeats, Sophie let her magick well up, felt it stretching desperately towards Gray’s, and with satisfaction saw her captor’s eyes widen minutely. Then she thrust it down again, almost savagely, and keeping her eyes fixed on his said, “For a man who has no quarrel with Henry of Britain and wishes him no ill, you have chosen a curious method of demonstrating your intentions.”

  “You imagine that he will rush to avenge his beloved child—the same child he once sold away to the Iberian Emperor?” Cormac MacAlpine scoffed. “How little you know of the world, Princess.”

  Three years ago, this line of argument might well have succeeded; three years ago, indeed, Sophie might have made it herself. Now, however, she could not help thinking of the way her father smiled at her, affectionate and regretful; of the anguish she had seen in his face when she had come so near to throwing him off entirely; of the pains to which he had gone to ease her journey to Din Edin, though so reluctant for her to go at all, solely because she wished it.

  Of Lord de Courcy saying of her father, disconcertingly matter-of-fact, that whosoever threatens harm to his daughter may expect swift retribution.

  “I may know very little of the world,” she said, “but it seems to me that you know very little of my father.” Or of me, she added silently. “You thought it very clever, I daresay, to target foreign mages—their acquaintance in Din Edin could be convinced that they had left for home, and their friends at home that they remained in Alba.” The slow drip of blood down the side of her neck was an irritating distraction; if only she could reach up and wipe it away!

  “It was clever enough,” Cormac MacAlpine said, “to bring us seven mages with no one the wiser.”

  Seven? Sophie blinked, trying not to show her surprise; Lord de Courcy had known of only four, apart from Gray. “Yet you did not foresee that if you kidnapped the daughter of a foreign king, the consequences might not be to your liking?”

  The tall man smiled mockingly at her. “Ah, but I did not kidnap you, Princess,” he said; “you came to me of your own accord, or as nearly as makes no difference.”

  “Teàrlag MacAlpine and Rose Neill MacTerry were acting on their own impulse, I suppose,” said Sophie. “And your henchmen to whom they handed me over, helpless as I was. None of them were carrying out your orders.”

  “They were acting in the interests of Alba,” said Cormac MacAlpine, sharply. “As do I. You have seen, of course, that the Cailleach herself has no love for Donald MacNeill or his daughter.”

  What can he mean by that? But of course: the effigies, the priests’ instructive drama.

  “I have seen that her priests do not,” she said, “which is not necessarily the same thing.”

  Cormac MacAlpine leaned closer to Sophie and drew one finger gently down the side of her face, in dreadful mimicry of a lover’s caress. “You will find that we have many allies,” he said, “even in Din Edin.”

  Despite herself, Sophie shuddered.

  A tactical error on her part, to let him see that he had distressed her. But so long as he was enjoying himself at her expense, he was neither forcing her compliance with his enterprise nor actively doing harm to anyone else. And perhaps . . .

  Sophie controlled a little shiver of anticipatory triumph. Perhaps he will be willing to part with more information, if he believes it will give me pain.

  “I cannot believe such a thing of any of my friends,” she said—defiantly, but with a tremble in her voice which suggested (or so she hoped) that it was her own defiance that she could not entirely believe.

  “Can you not, Princess?” Cormac MacAlpine purred. “And yet you claim to have duties and loyalties beyond the merely personal. You cannot pretend to be surprised to learn that others have such loyalties also.”

  Sophie could see nothing about this man to inspire loyalty; but then, she still knew almost nothing about him. And certainly there were many in Din Edin—and presumably throughout the kingdom—who were ill pleased with the idea of an alliance of marriage between Alba and Britain. “Such loyalties might be easier to comprehend,” she said, “if I knew who you are, and what it is you are about.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her again, as though attempting to decide whether answering her implicit questions was more to his own advantage or to hers. Had she succeeded in persuading him that she was capable of sympathy with his cause?

  He was wavering, yes—Sophie made her face open and inviting and, to her relief, saw him yield.

  “I am the true chieftain of Clan MacAlpine,” he said. “You know, I presume, some of the history of MacAlpine, and of how my forefather Ailpín Drostan built this kingdom from a rabble of quarrelling clan-lands. Among the other debts which Alba and her people owe to my ancestors are the beneficence of the Cailleach and the lesser gods of the land, and the present system by which successors to the chieftainship are chosen and confirmed. To hear the lackeys of Donald MacNeill tell it, it has been done this way since the gods first made men to live in Alba; but the truth of the matter is that it was Drost Maon who first decreed that his heir should be chosen without bloodshed, under the guidance of the Cailleach, Brìghde, and the lesser gods, and were it not for the example of Clan MacAlpine, the rest of them should be all still murdering one another in their beds, or over their wine-cups.”

  Sophie refrained from comment. Where, she wondered, did the spell-net come into this tale?

  “Alba prospered under the rule of Clan MacAlpine,” Cormac MacAlpine went on, “for the gods of the land blessed their reign. But those among the chieftains of other clan-lands who could not see things as they truly were, and sought only their own private gain, twisted the Moot of Succession—”

  To choose an heir from some other clan, I suppose, Sophie thought, and was grimly amused when Cormac MacAlpine’s next words were, “to place an interloper from Clan MacLeod upon the chieftain’s seat in Din Edin.”

  He paused, expectant, but Sophie said nothing, letting the silence stretch out past the point of comfort.

  Cormac MacAlpine smiled a thin smile with no mirth or friendliness in it—I know what you are about, Princess—and at l
ast went on: “Since the chieftain’s seat was lost to Clan MacAlpine, there has been nothing but misfortune and mischance in Alba.”

  This assertion in no way aligned with what Sophie had learnt of Alba’s recent history, which—until the present crisis—had been characterised by growing stability and the gradual cessation of hostilities with most of her neighbours. Certainly, however, there was more than enough misfortune to go round at present.

  “And you mean by this enterprise of yours to win back the chieftain’s seat from Donald MacNeill,” she hazarded, “and thus restore Alba to her former glory?”

  He could not decide, she saw, whether she had meant this last in mockery or in earnest.

  Before he could reply, there came a rustling of footsteps approaching from, presumably, the direction of the castle; Cormac MacAlpine’s head snapped up, and he stepped towards Sophie and clapped a hand over her mouth, gripping her jaw hard enough to bruise.

  Sophie considered biting him, torn between the savage satisfaction of paying him back in some small way for his cruelty to Gray and the near certainty that to do so would be to ruin any possibility of stopping him.

  “Cormac MacAlpine!” a woman’s voice called softly.

  In the midst of her calculations, Sophie froze. She knew that voice, had heard it not long ago, in fact, when its owner had left her in Quarry Close with a stack of parcels in her arms, to find her house empty and her husband gone.

  But why is she here? She was going to Leodhas.

  Unless, of course, that too was a deception.

  The hand dropped away from her face, and Cormac MacAlpine turned towards the voice and said curtly, in Gaelic, “What is it?”

  As he was turning, Sophie drew as deep a breath as her bonds permitted, and threw all of it into a single frantic cry: “Catriona! Help us!”