He caught her gaze and held it. You are not that child now, Sophie. Your magick does not master you.
The wind did not die down, but it seemed to Gray that its frantic howling eased a little.
He followed Cormac MacAlpine’s progress around the circle of trees as well as he could. How many other victims were there? He could see two; but to judge by their placement, precisely two trees to Sophie’s left and two trees to her right, there would likely be two more outside his line of sight. The man tied to Sophie’s right—a small fellow whose tangled hair and ragged beard were black—raised his head as Cormac MacAlpine and Steel-Eyes approached him; with a renewed shock of dismay Gray recognised his erstwhile University colleague Professor Maghrebin, of whom Sophie had been so fond, and who had been called away so suddenly—
No. Not called away. Decoyed away and kidnapped, as I was.
He saw, or heard, the rite repeated over and over, and felt the earth-blood-ocean smell of Ailpín Drostan’s magick thrum a little stronger as each was linked into the spell-net.
Why now? Why all together? These men have been here even longer than I—or at any rate some of them have been—
His attention was wrenched back to his own predicament, when a businesslike grip on his left wrist—his arm having been freed apparently whilst his concentration was elsewhere, and tingling fiercely with the returning flow of blood—jarred the accumulated bruises and abrasions, and he choked back a pained yelp.
He knew of course what must be coming, and could think of no way out of it but through. The others must know what it was to which they had agreed, or had been forced, to lend their magick; did Sophie know it? Or . . .
Forcing himself to a discipline which he had not found necessary for years, Gray closed his eyes, slowed his breathing, and ruthlessly excised from his consciousness the raw pain in his wrists, the sting of the knife across the back of his left hand, the bite of rough elm-bark against the half-healed skin of his back—the scuffles and blows, the oaths and gasps—the keening of the wind, the tiny sounds of the woodland night—the voices, the tense heavy breaths of his captors—until the thrum of magick about him was so loud in his mind’s ear as to drown out all other sounds, all sights, all sensations. He wished, not for the first time, for some of Master Alcuin’s talent for the visual perception of magick, so much clearer and less ambiguous than what he could himself perceive.
The sound of it, the feel of it, was only half familiar. What could that mean? To begin with, that there was magick here which was neither his nor Sophie’s. The magick of Ailpín Drostan’s spell-net, certainly, for it had a smell of blood and chill air and the sea which he had felt before, but not that alone. This was . . . this was . . .
But his speculative probing was swept away in an upsurge of magick, or magicks—Sophie’s and his own, and Ailpín Drostan’s, and others which he could perceive but not identify—which seemed like to take off the top of Gray’s head from below, and he came back to the physical world with a ringing thump and a deafening blur of shouting, panicked voices.
* * *
Joanna pressed her right shoulder against Gwendolen’s, then at once drew away again, ashamed of herself. “Heard you that sound?” she whispered.
“Of course I did,” said Gwendolen. “I should not be at all surprised if it had been heard in London. What was it?”
Joanna had not the least idea. But whatever it was, their guards had heard it also, and plainly it had alarmed them. They argued in rapid, low-voiced Gaelic, their voices gradually rising and their gestures growing more emphatic, and at last the elder of them barked a sharp order to the younger—the tone of command perfectly clear to Joanna, if the words themselves were beyond her—who rocked back, wide-eyed, and departed at a run.
Their remaining captor fixed them with a hard stare which said more clearly than words, Do not test me.
Joanna, however, had never been very good at taking orders from men whom she did not respect, and Gwendolen, the gods knew, followed instructions only when it suited her to do so.
When the guard turned away, they edged minutely towards one another, so that their fingers met behind their backs. Their captors had, presumably during their period of insensibility, confiscated Gaël’s borrowed clasp-knife from Gwendolen’s pocket and the hoof-knife secreted in her boot; their search of Joanna’s person, however, had evidently been more cursory, and (as she had hoped) it had not occurred to them that she might have concealed a small paper-knife, honed to a murderous edge, inside the left sleeve of her pelisse, between the tight-woven wool and the heavy satin lining. Gwendolen, however, knew exactly where it was, and was just enough taller than Joanna—as well as being much cleverer with her fingers, which could set tiny invisible stitches to mend a rent in a muslin sleeve, and dance rapidly across the keys of a pianoforte, as Joanna’s could not—as to have it out of its hiding-place and busy about the cutting of their bonds in what seemed very short order.
“There we are,” she breathed, gathering up the cut ropes—or most of them—as they fell away, and pressing the handle of the paper-knife into Joanna’s stiff, numbed hands. “Now, we must not let him see.”
As though I needed telling.
She tucked the knife carefully back into the lining of her sleeve, and flexed her fingers cautiously, keeping her gaze downcast lest any sign of her present relief, trepidation, or furious calculation show on her face.
The guard paced to and fro before the door, pausing now and then to peer out through the grille into the corridor, or to glare down at Joanna and Gwendolen—torn, seemingly, between concern for his comrades and distrust of his prisoners. Joanna watched him from the corner of her eye and developed an idea.
“He is wild to know what is happening without,” she murmured, when next she heard the minute creaking of the door as he leaned upon it. “If he thinks we are too ill to escape, or too exhausted, perhaps he may risk going to investigate.”
Gwendolen did not reply in words but (to Joanna’s immense and secret satisfaction) by coughing pathetically and slowly subsiding rightward until she lay curled in a limp heap upon the flagstones—her no-longer-bound wrists still concealed between her slim betrousered hips and the dressed stone wall.
When next their captor turned to look at them, another damp cough and a little whimper emerged from the heap.
Joanna debated briefly the relative merits of bolstering Gwendolen’s charade by means of some appropriate theatre of her own, and of joining her in it. Which approach might their captor find most persuasive, or least suspect?
The natural, the obvious response in such circumstances would be that which had come so naturally to her when Sophie had been so ill during their visit to Donald MacNeill: panic, quickly suppressed; demands for assistance; an insistence that everything possible be done for her cousin, and that she herself take charge of the doing of it.
Natural, too, to demand that their captor free her hands for the purpose; and then he should realise—
Joanna groaned—her despair was only partly feigned—and let her head loll back against the wall, attempting to look as helpless and dispirited as possible, whilst still keeping one eye obliquely on Cormac MacAlpine’s henchman. Could she, for the sake of facilitating their eventual escape, muster some tears?
She found that she could—that it was, in fact, disconcertingly easy. Her eyes stung, her nose prickled; her throat clogged, and she coughed wetly, her shoulders held rigid against the wall to preserve the illusion that she remained bound and helpless. She let slip the tight rein she had been keeping on the part of her mind which insisted upon imagining, in minute detail, what dreadful things might have happened to Gray during his captivity, and might now be happening to Sophie also; the nightmare images bloomed behind her half-closed eyelids, and a gasping sob tore from her throat.
Booted footsteps approached, heavy and slow. Joanna forced her eyes open, and through th
e distorting lens of brimming tears she saw her captor regarding her and Gwendolen with mouth downturned in an expression of bemused disgust. “Shut up,” he growled, in heavily accented Latin, and prodded at Gwendolen with the toe of his boot. “Useless children.”
It was exactly the reaction which Joanna had hoped to produce, and she was in equal parts elated that they had managed it and profoundly ashamed of the extent to which her play-acting was nothing of the kind.
A renewed commotion in the corridor—rapid footsteps, incomprehensible shouting—drew the Alban’s attention away once more; he crossed to the door, peered out through the grille, and gave vent to what was unmistakably a string of curses. He glanced back at Joanna and Gwendolen—both shamming despair, resignation, and bodily weakness for all they were worth—and out through the grille again, and at last he opened the door and slipped out into the corridor.
Joanna’s elation crowded out her shame, even whilst she heard the distinctive metallic chunk of a key turning in the lock on the far side of the door.
A long moment passed in tense, expectant silence. When at length no sound or movement signalled the return of their captor, Gwendolen sat up, shaking out her wrists.
“That was well done,” she said. Her voice was prudently low, but she wore a broad grin, plastered precariously over a wild-eyed exhilarated terror. “The maidenly tears, especially.”
Joanna scrubbed the sleeve of her pelisse (no longer very clean) across her eyes, dug her handkerchief out of her bodice, and blew her nose. “One does one’s best with what the gods send one,” she said primly.
Gwendolen climbed to her feet, a little unsteadily, and reached down a hand to pull Joanna up. Joanna reeled, light-headed, and was forced to lean one shoulder against the wall for a few breaths, so as to regain her equilibrium.
“He has locked the door,” said Gwendolen, striding across the room to investigate. Her stride was half a stagger, but Joanna, equally unsteady on her feet, forbore to comment.
“Yes,” said Joanna, rubbing her aching shoulders. “I heard him. What—”
“Give me that knife.” Gwendolen cut across her, holding out an impatient hand. She braced one hand against the wall and crouched down to peer into the keyhole.
Joanna limped towards the door, taking care to stay out of line of sight from the grille and decanting the paper-knife from her sleeve as she went. She crouched beside Gwendolen, heaving a tiny sigh for the comprehensive wreckage of what had once been a simple but particularly becoming gown, and laid the knife in her outstretched hand.
* * *
“Gwendolen Pryce,” Joanna breathed, as the lock snicked softly open, “I believe you have been concealing a very unsavoury past.”
Gwendolen ducked her head. “That’s as may be,” she said, all the bravado gone out of her voice, and pressed herself upright, her back against the wall.
Joanna rose from her awkward crouch to the tips of her toes to peer out through the grille. The corridor appeared quite deserted.
“Well?” she said.
But Gwendolen was no longer beside her; glancing back over her shoulder, Joanna saw her hefting a small spade in one hand and a large long-handled broom in the other, as though weighing them against each other. After a moment she dropped the broom and swung the spade over her shoulder, for all the world like the Breizhek groom whose clothing she wore.
A sound like a thunderclap raised the hairs on Joanna’s arms; she succeeded in keeping her composure, but only just. They opened the door just enough to slip through one at a time, and Joanna kept watch, her heart pounding unpleasantly, whilst Gwendolen again prodded at the keyhole with her paper-knife and a long sliver of wood, split off from the broken leg of an abandoned wheelback chair, which she then secreted inside her right boot.
“Done!” she said at last, and stood up abruptly, tucking the paper-knife into Joanna’s hand. “Come along.”
Moving as quickly and quietly as they knew how, they set off in the direction of the noise.
* * *
The corridor was deserted. Once out in the cobbled courtyard, they moved more cautiously, hugging the walls. But here, too, the sentries seemed all to have abandoned their posts, and Joanna and Gwendolen dared to break for the open and run towards what had now become a roar of unintelligible sound.
The postern-gate had been latched from without, but yielded without much difficulty to their determined application of Gwendolen’s salvaged spade, in the character of a hatchet; the noise of this undertaking was such that had anyone at all been within earshot, they must have been discovered at once—yet no one came to investigate.
They stumbled through the gate and looked wildly about them for the source of the deafening roar that seemed to come from everywhere at once. It was nearing dawn; Joanna had had no sleep to speak of in what by now seemed like days, and had become thoroughly disoriented in their wanderings through the bowels of Castle MacAlpine—all of which might be supposed to explain, if not excuse, her mistaking the glow along the northern horizon for the sunrise.
Then the breeze shifted, and Joanna smelled smoke. She turned her head into the wind and saw the marks of milling footsteps taper off into a faint trail.
“There!” she cried, catching at Gwendolen’s elbow, and took off running, following the footmarks towards the coppiced wood that lay to the northwest of the postern-gate.
* * *
The forest was not burning.
Or, at any rate, it was not burning in the usual sense, but lines of flame, bright and weirdly blue, ran along the ground beneath the trees. Gwendolen nearly trod on one of them; her squawk of pain, when Joanna yanked her back by the wrist, gave way to a startled Oh! when she saw what she had been about to do.
“Will we go over?” she panted. “Or go round?”
Joanna stood for a moment contemplating the line of blue-white fire that blocked their path. It snaked round between the tree-trunks, branching and joining like the tangles of rivers on one of Donald MacNeill’s military maps; there seemed no way of going round it. She crouched long enough to feel about amongst the leaf-mould and grasped the first kindling-sized branch she came across; then, rising again, she reached out with it to prod the flames, ignoring Gwendolen’s attempt to stop her.
The branch smoked faintly but did not ignite.
“Over,” said Joanna, dropping it, and began tucking up her skirts.
“Jo—”
“Shut up,” Joanna hissed fiercely.
They crossed the first fireline at a running leap, and when this produced no worse effect than a sort of buzzing sensation, they forged ahead with more confidence and less care, towards what appeared to be the centre of this uncanny conflagration.
Joanna did not stop to think whether they were running in the right direction, or to consider what they might do when they arrived at the end of their present trajectory; her single goal, at present, was to reach her sister and brother-in-law, and in Joanna’s experience the epicentre of some inexplicable catastrophe was always the most likely place to find them.
And, indeed, when at last she and Gwendolen, running hand in hand, burst through a tangle of bracken, between two closely spaced yew-trees, and into an unnaturally round clearing, Joanna at once beheld Sophie, glowing with furious anger and tied to the trunk of an enormous elm-tree.
Her first instinct was, of course, to dart forward and cut away the cords that bound Sophie at ankle, waist, and breast; the sharpened paper-knife was already in her right hand and her feet carrying her forward when at last the evidence of her eyes reached her conscious mind, halting her in her tracks.
Whoever might need rescuing in this wood at present, it was not Sophie.
CHAPTER XXXIII
In Which Sophie Makes a Surprising Discovery, and Lucia MacNeill Pays a Debt
The first revelation was that Catriona MacCrimmon had been right, and both Rory, wit
h his talk of legends, and Cormac MacWattie, who would not opine on the truth or otherwise of that elusive phenomenon known as the magick of the land, entirely wrong; and the second, that Cormac MacAlpine had done precisely what he had set out to do.
Sophie could feel the branching tendrils of Ailpín Drostan’s spell-net, great and small, immediate and distant, stretching in all directions from the hub of the great elm; could hear them singing in a thousand separate voices; could see their branching, intertwining paths.
Cormac MacAlpine had drawn power from every mage whose blood had been spilled in this shrine and fed it into a web woven through every corner of the kingdom. But the magick ran both ways: from web out through tree and field, stream and firth and loch, into the bedrock of the land—and from the land back into the spell-net. The magick of the land, indeed.
The magick channelled into the spell fed on her own, and fed it; it reached towards the faint thread of Lucia MacNeill’s magick, and the two flickered and darted about each other like swordsmen testing one another’s defences; then, as sudden and fierce as two cataracts meeting, they rushed together and flooded the pathways laid down in Ailpín Drostan’s time, from the greatest to the least.
And Sophie, pinned at the hub of the spell, could sense the flow of that power—all shot through now with the bright red-gold flavour of Lucia MacNeill’s magick; could see how, by means of her connexion to that magick, she might reach through the web and use it to heal or to harm.
At present, however, she could not think beyond the threat to Gray and their fellow prisoners. If Ailpín Drostan’s spell-net worked in the way she suspected, there was work to be done—but first, the enemy at her own gates.
She reached carefully for her blood-bond with the great elm-tree, and through it to its companions in the grove; there was a long, fraught moment as the trees sought and tested the red-and-gold thread of Lucia MacNeill’s magick that she yet carried, and she found that she could wield their roots and branches like an extension of her own hands.
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