Cormac MacAlpine spun again on his heel and glared at her. “Be silent,” he hissed, reverting to Latin, and lifted his hand again as though to strike her.
Sophie managed not to flinch, but neither did she speak again.
The approaching footsteps quickened. After another moment, there was a rustling of branches to Sophie’s left, and Catriona MacCrimmon herself, wide-eyed and pale, stepped into the clearing.
“Cormac MacAlpine,” she said breathlessly. “I must tell you—”
Then her eye fell on Sophie, and she fell silent. Sophie stared at her in horror; Catriona’s answering gaze conveyed a sort of paralysed disbelief.
Cormac MacAlpine gritted his teeth. “Well?” he snapped.
“I—” Catriona looked from Sophie to her captor in evident bewilderment. “Why is—what have you—”
Sophie caught Catriona’s eye and turned her head deliberately to look at Gray, willing Catriona to follow her gaze. She must herself, she supposed, present a frightening enough appearance by this time, but the sight of Gray—gaunt and bloodied and insensible, with Cormac MacAlpine’s red-bearded henchman still holding a knife to his throat—surely was entirely horrifying.
Catriona looked; then, with a sort of choking gasp, she looked away again.
Sophie reached cautiously for her magick, caught the merest thread of it, and let it go in a low, quiet hum. Though she had no reason to expect any success in what she was attempting, it seemed impossible not to make the attempt. Look at us, Catriona. You may wish the success of Cormac MacAlpine’s enterprise, but will you accept the cost?
“Say what you have come to say, Catriona MacCrimmon,” said Cormac MacAlpine. “I can spare no time to indulge your fits of craven scruples.”
He appeared to have dismissed Sophie from his mind for the present: good. She did her best to show no reaction to his words or to Catriona’s, though the latter certainly knew her capable of following a conversation in Gaelic.
“Never mind that,” said Catriona. Her throat worked, and her slim hands clenched into corded fists. “What are you about?”
“I am about the business of Clan MacAlpine.” His voice suggested that he was very near to resorting to violence. “Which does not answer to you, Catriona MacCrimmon, and never shall. Say what you have come to say, or be gone from my sight.”
Look at me, Catriona. Look at Gray.
Whether because Sophie’s gambit was succeeding, or because she had indeed not understood what Cormac MacAlpine was about until this night, Catriona gazed silently at Gray, then again at Sophie, and at length said stolidly, “No.”
Sophie’s heart leapt.
Cormac MacAlpine stared at Catriona. “No?” he repeated incredulously. “And what of your vows of loyalty, then?”
“I cast my lot for Clan MacAlpine,” said Catriona, squaring her slim shoulders, “and for the healing and defence of Alba. Not for forcible confinement and slow murder.”
She flung an accusing hand in Gray’s direction. “You wrote me word that he had agreed to help,” she said. “That all of those I sent to you had so agreed, or had been sent on their way. I have been travelling up and down Leodhas and Na Hearadh on your behalf; and what do I find, on the very day after coming to you at last, but that your sacred grove is become a torture chamber!”
“They are only foreigners,” said Cormac MacAlpine. He had adopted a reasoning tone whose very ordinariness, in the present circumstances, made Sophie’s skin crawl. “And most are Sasunnach, at that. We pursue a great end, a god-given task; we must not be dissuaded by squeamishness over the means. If these stranger mages have the power we need to heal our ailing clan-lands, yet will not give it willingly, are we not bound by our service to the lands and gods of Alba to take it by whatever method offers?”
It struck Sophie then how odd it was that he should be attempting to persuade Catriona, when he might so easily have overpowered her. Certainly he had evinced no hesitation in offering violence towards herself. Just as this thought occurred to her, an echo of stealthy movement made her turn her head, and she saw that the red-bearded man had abandoned Gray and was circling the clearing to approach Catriona from the far side, quietly, out of her line of sight.
Sophie coughed. Both Catriona and Cormac MacAlpine started at the noise, harsh and rasping in the night-quiet of the wood. The red-bearded man froze.
Having begun to cough, alas, Sophie found she could not stop, and what was left of her song-spell slipped from her grasp.
Then Catriona did an unexpected thing—at any rate, Sophie had not expected it, and by the look on his face Cormac MacAlpine expected it still less. “Take mine,” she said, holding out both her hands.
Cormac MacAlpine stared. Sophie managed at last to catch her breath.
“I have magick,” Catriona said; “not so much as she has, but certainly more than is likely to be left to him,” with a jerk of her head at Gray. “If you have not killed him altogether, it is only by luck or his gods’ own hands. But I have my magick still, and I will give it to the spell, if you will first let the unwilling go free.”
Clever, thought Sophie approvingly, to make him lay down his arms first, before the true import of Catriona’s offer dawned upon her and she gasped, “Catriona!”
Cormac MacAlpine gave her a look with daggers in it, and someone—it must be the red-bearded man—cuffed her bloodied ear. Sophie closed her eyes briefly, swallowing a yelp.
Catriona turned on one heel and regarded her levelly, and shifting into Latin she said, “I have offered my magick in exchange for your lives. You had rather surrender your own?”
There was no particular affection in her gaze; indeed, Sophie saw, she had not been wrong to suppose that Catriona did not much like her. And yet she was playing along with Sophie’s ruse; and yet she was offering—
Did Catriona understand, in fact, what she was offering to do?
“Catriona,” Sophie repeated, “you must not—it is not safe—”
“That is very generous of you, Catriona MacCrimmon,” Cormac MacAlpine interrupted, with a curl of his lip, shifting back into Gaelic. “But the spell needs more than you or I can offer it, my dear. The power of Clan MacAlpine, as you know, is sadly diminished since the days when the spell was wrought.”
He gave Sophie a look of such thorough contempt as no one had directed at her since she left her stepfather’s house, and added, “You surely cannot think that I would feed it on the magicks of strangers, had we sufficient power of our own?”
Catriona appeared to consider this.
At last she said, in the flat grey voice of one bowing to the inevitable, “Then at the least, let him go. Look at him; he can be of no use to you now.”
There were footsteps approaching. Rescue? Or more of Cormac MacAlpine’s bully-boys?
“I think not,” said Cormac MacAlpine, who seemed not to hear them. “He is a hostage to his wife’s cooperation.”
Catriona scoffed, and he looked astonished and displeased.
“I see,” said Catriona, her voice regaining some of its customary bite. “And are you finding it an effective strategy? Because, if so, I must say that your standards for success appear to be—”
As she spoke, Cormac MacAlpine’s lips were drawing back in a snarl, his hand clenching into a fist. The unseen footsteps were growing louder; the red-bearded man turned his head, listening.
“Catriona,” Sophie cried, desperate to divert attention from what she devoutly hoped was some sort of rescue party. “Go carefully! Whatever you have been saying to him, I fear that it is making him angry!”
As she had hoped, both Catriona and Cormac MacAlpine turned to glare at her; the red-bearded man stepped towards her, menacingly, then recoiled again at Cormac MacAlpine’s furious “Look to your work, man!”
On the far side of the clearing, an unexpected flash of movement caught Sophie�
�s eye. Her heart leapt: Gray! She nearly turned her head to look but, catching herself just in time, looked sidelong instead, keeping her face to Cormac MacAlpine and Catriona.
The oblique angle made her eyes ache, but she scarcely remarked it. Gray had raised his head—Oh, thank all the gods!—and was gazing at their captors with narrowed eyes, his bleeding mouth set in a grim line.
Once again Sophie’s magick reached for his, leaping up with desperate energy—no longer bent on destruction, but simply yearning towards its other self—and this time she made no effort to restrain it. Was it only her wishful fancy that made her believe she felt Gray’s magick reaching back?
He straightened slightly, and turned his head to meet her gaze.
CHAPTER XXXII
In Which Gwendolen Proves to Have Unexpected Talents, and Joanna Is Disinclined to Follow Orders
Catriona! Help us!
Gray struggled up towards consciousness at the sound of Sophie’s cry, though the words made no sense to him. He opened his eyes cautiously, and his bafflement grew; before him stood Cormac MacAlpine and the man he had dubbed Ginger, and with them—By all the gods, how comes this?—Catriona MacCrimmon.
He could not have told how he had come to be in the yew-grove; his last clear memory was of staggering back into the interdicted cell, propelled by a rough hand to his shoulder-blade, and collapsing against the wall, after which were only confused flashes which might well have been hallucinations, for surely Joanna had not really been wandering the corridors of Castle MacAlpine with a smooth-faced boy from Cymru? But he knew at once that Sophie was near; nothing else could account for this abrupt change of heart, from despair to hope, from grim resignation to a heady, almost drunken relief. It was not mere freedom from the interdiction—though that, too, was as always a blessed relief—but a more positive sense of something healed that had been sundered, something restored to him that he had lost.
He pressed his lips together tightly, lest he yield to his instinct to call out to her, and slowly, painfully, raised his head.
Cormac MacAlpine and Catriona MacCrimmon were arguing in low voices—so low, indeed, that Gray could not hear what they said, though that might be only the effect of the persistent ringing in his ears. He watched them through slitted eyes, wary, but they appeared for the moment to be paying him no heed.
His magick was welling up now—sluggish and uncertain yet, but gathering strength apace—and the deep thrumming of it seemed to vibrate through his bones. And almost, almost, Gray could hear the high clear singing of Sophie’s magick, so closely attuned to his own. If the sound in his mind’s ear was yet indistinct, however, the direction from which it came was not.
Slowly, cautiously, he turned his head to face the far side of the yew-grove.
Sophie! He did not shout her name across the clearing, but it was a close-run thing. She was closer even than he had suspected—directly opposite him, and bound to a tree-trunk just as he was: the great elm tree, the anchor-point of Ailpín Drostan’s spell. Apollo, Pan, and Hecate! Gray knew too well what that meant; did Sophie? Her face was ashen; blood stained her throat and the bodice of her gown; but her eyes burned bright as they met Gray’s, and now he truly heard the singing of her magick.
It seemed an age that he gazed into Sophie’s eyes, feasting upon the sight of her after long deprivation; but in fact only moments passed before an ominous silence announced that Cormac MacAlpine had registered the altered state of affairs amongst his prisoners.
“Well,” he said, reverting to Latin. “How very interesting.”
Gray turned his head towards the slow, speculative voice, and from the corner of his eye he saw Sophie do likewise. Cormac MacAlpine gestured sharply to someone outside Gray’s field of vision, then paced towards them, graceful as a hunting cat.
A little smile was playing at the corners of his lips.
Gray’s heart sank, and his belly roiled, and his attempts to channel his magick into some useful offensive spell were floundering and slow.
“Gray!” cried Catriona, slipping past Cormac MacAlpine to approach Gray’s tree. She stopped just short of arm’s reach and stared up at him. “Brìghde’s tears! I thought they had killed you.”
Gray gaped at her, still too baffled by her presence here—though his notion of their precise whereabouts was distressingly hazy—to parse the import of her words.
“Catriona,” said Sophie again, and this time her voice held a warning. A warning of what? How in Hades did Catriona MacCrimmon come to be here? For it was apparent even in Gray’s advanced state of befuddlement that she was not a prisoner like themselves, and surely no one would single her out as a rescue party.
Now more baffled than ever, Gray closed his eyes briefly and leant his head back against his tree.
When next he raised his head and opened his eyes, he saw Cormac MacAlpine standing tense and still, looking from Gray to Sophie and back again with narrow-eyed intensity.
“How very, very interesting,” he repeated, at last; and then, speaking in Gaelic now, and quietly as though to himself, he said, “What manner of spell is that, I wonder? One without words, at any rate; we were not speaking so loudly that I should not have heard one of them saying a spell. And it must be her spell, for the boy has not used it before.”
“Cormac MacAlpine,” said Catriona. “I beg of you—”
“Pàrlan Dearg!” he barked, ignoring Catriona entirely. Ginger—in whose hand was a worryingly large and keen-edged knife—fairly leapt to attend him. “Keep this one out of the way.”
Ginger—Pàrlan Dearg, then, which came to much the same thing—had neatly stowed away his knife and taken Catriona MacCrimmon by the wrists almost before the first outraged protests had left her lips, and he quickly silenced them by clamping his free hand over her mouth. “No spell-words,” he said, jerking his head at Gray, then at Sophie. It was not difficult to imagine how quickly his grip on Catriona’s jaw could become a fatal twisting of her delicate neck. She kicked furiously at his booted ankles, to no avail.
Cormac MacAlpine meanwhile had unsheathed his own unpleasantly familiar knife and was approaching Sophie. Her dark eyes tracked his every step, equally terrified and determined not to give him the satisfaction of showing it.
“No!” Gray shouted—or, rather, croaked. Sophie’s head jerked towards him. He coughed wetly and tried again, this time achieving a sort of hoarse bellow: “No! If you must have blood to feed your horror-spell, let it be mine, not hers.”
And it was the truth—yet not all the truth, for if he could do again whatever he had done on that other occasion, and so confound them . . .
Cormac MacAlpine smiled broadly, and Gray’s heart sank still further. “The time for striking bargains is past, Graham Marshall,” he said, his voice a silken murmur, and gestured at someone out of Gray’s line of sight. “I shall have your blood indeed, however; yours and your Princess’s both, and then we shall see.”
Steel-Eyes emerged silently from the shadows beyond the clearing, and at a nod from his master, he approached Gray’s tree, smiling grimly.
“Shut him up,” said Cormac MacAlpine, reverting once more to Gaelic, “and make certain that he does nothing which he may regret.”
Steel-Eyes nodded sharply, and Cormac MacAlpine turned away. Digging in the leather purse that hung from his belt, Steel-Eyes produced a large handkerchief, then another. The first he wadded up and, after a brief scuffle—which Gray inevitably lost—stuffed into Gray’s mouth; the second he then tied tightly about Gray’s jaw, forcing his lips and teeth apart, so that he was effectively muzzled.
“Now then, Princess.” Cormac MacAlpine was unsheathing his gleaming copper knife. As before, he sliced his thumb and slicked the knife-blade with his own blood, but rather than cutting her cheek as he had cut Gray’s, he bent close and stroked the knife’s edge along the sluggishly bleeding wound behind her left ear. Then he
cupped her jaw in his right hand, a hideous parody of a caress, and pressed the palm thus bloodied against the tree-trunk above her head. Sophie was rigid with revulsion, her face white and her eyes blazing, and Gray was not at all surprised when he felt the air about him stir, then bite, and finally howl.
Cormac MacAlpine frowned at Sophie, whilst Steel-Eyes and Pàrlan Dearg squinted suspiciously at Gray.
“Now,” Cormac MacAlpine repeated, impatient, and Steel-Eyes left Gray’s side, crossed the clearing, and disappeared behind Sophie’s tree.
Temporarily unobserved, Gray tugged at his bonds as hard as he dared. The knots were solid, and the movement jarred his raw-scraped back and bruised ribs painfully, but perhaps if he could put enough strain on the ropes, they might stretch sufficiently to allow some hope of escape . . .
Sophie’s arms fell free, hanging limp at her sides. Steel-Eyes reappeared from behind the tree and grasped her right wrist, holding her arm out straight; Cormac MacAlpine took her hand, sliced across the back of it, and squeezed it—to Gray’s furious eye, not at all gently—and as her blood fell against the roots of the great tree, the hum of magick in Gray’s mind’s ear grew suddenly louder and higher.
Cormac MacAlpine moved to Sophie’s other side and repeated his rite—less graceful now that he must do all the work himself, Gray noted, with a small and bitter satisfaction. The wind was so strong now that it whipped the branches of the elm-trees and scattered their few small leaves; and its howling mounted higher, a mad keening that Gray felt as well as heard, at the second infusion of Sophie’s blood.
The tearing wind, the flying leaves, the whipping branches: Gray could not help recalling the story she had told him—half a lifetime past, even then, but made all too vivid by her halting, horrified recital—of her mother’s sudden and untimely death. He saw the moment when Sophie recalled it also, in the minute shift of her face from terror and revulsion to the grim expressionless masque which meant that she was fighting hard for control.
Lady of Magick Page 42