“I have not done with you, Cormac MacAlpine,” she said, and knew not whether she spoke the words aloud.
* * *
Not for years now had Gray seen Sophie lose control of her magick. On those prior occasions, the resulting physical destruction had been immense, and the danger to Sophie herself almost greater; but this time—
This is no loss of control, he thought, astounded; this is Sophie wreaking deliberate havoc.
And what glorious havoc it was!
He could see the branching lines of Cormac MacAlpine’s restored spell-net now, ablaze in weird blue fire; when he closed his eyes, the lines of fire remained behind his eyelids, a bright tracery like the blood-vessels he had seen represented in healers’ diagrams of the human body. The magelight lanterns hung about the tree-shrine blazed so brightly that they hurt to look upon, and tree-roots were snaking up through the layers of leaf-mould to wind about the ankles of Cormac MacAlpine and his men.
But the trees themselves remained untouched, and the men—though terror was writ plain upon their faces—entirely uninjured.
Every cell in Gray’s body thrummed and fizzed with the mingled magicks—his own and Sophie’s, well known and welcome as the touch of her hand in his; the unfamiliar flavours of their fellow-prisoners’ magicks, struggling and uncertain; the chill salt-and-iron tang of Ailpín Drostan’s spell, and that other presence, faint and fading, that tasted of pine forests and the cry of gulls, of rocky crags and the purple of heather, of fierce loyalty and a strong, determined love. Across the clearing, Sophie stood straight and tall against her tree, her eyes burning and her dark hair rising about her like Medusa’s snakes.
She ought to have been terrifying, and in a sense she was, but the small part of Gray that feared what she was capable of was entirely overwhelmed by the heady mix of pride, exhilaration, relief, and fierce love. He caught her gaze across the field of fire and grinned, and after a long, startled moment, an answering smile, small and hesitant, curved her lips.
A moment later, the sound of breaking branches made him turn his head, just in time to see Joanna and a dark-haired young man of about the same age crash through the trees and into the clearing. Joanna started towards Sophie, then checked herself, staring around her with a thoroughly gobsmacked expression. She and her companion were both pale-faced and very dirty, as though they had not only run through the wood but also crawled up a chimney on their way to the grove.
“Joanna!” Gray called. He had to call her name twice more before she at last located him; then her soot-streaked face lit up with relief, and she ran.
“Gray! Thank all the gods! I thought—”
“Have you got a knife?” Gray demanded, cutting off her eager exclamations.
He spoke in Brezhoneg, as she had; the language reminded him strangely of Oxford—Oxford with Sophie—a life for which captivity had given him a strong nostalgia, despite its many imperfections.
With a startled grin, Joanna held up her right hand, in which gleamed Sophie’s paper-knife, last seen on her desk in Quarry Close and now honed to razor sharpness, why? No matter.
“Good,” he said. “Go and cut the others free—they will need food and rest and most of all a healer—I hope you have brought one with you?—and then Sophie, and then me.”
Joanna bit her lip and dropped her gaze at the mention of a healer, from which Gray concluded that there was no healer in their party. Which party, it occurred to him now, was nowhere to be seen.
“Joanna—”
She held up the knife again and ran light-footed to the next occupied elm-tree.
“Your Alban friends took my knives, both of them,” said Joanna’s companion, in a conversational tone. He was real, then, this Cymric boy, and Joanna too apparently. He disappeared behind Gray’s tree, and Gray could feel him prodding speculatively at the cords about his rib cage. There was something familiar about his voice . . . “But I expect one of them might have one to lend me in return.”
“Not the copper one,” Gray said urgently; “Cormac MacAlpine used it in his magick”—he waved his left hand, still sluggishly dripping blood, in the young man’s general direction—“and I do not know what . . . what properties it may have. Ginger, there, has a perfectly ordinary knife, however.”
Reappearing from behind Gray, the young man followed his gaze to Pàrlan Dearg, trapped in a coil of elm-tree roots and glowering furiously in an attempt to hide his uncomprehending terror. “I daresay he does,” he said, and loped away to retrieve it.
Who in Hades is that boy? How did he come here?
But no matter; whoever he was, he had retrieved Pàrlan Dearg’s knife and was applying it very usefully to the prisoner at Gray’s left.
Once freed, the man staggered a few steps forward before collapsing to all fours, retching. Joanna’s young man knelt briefly to speak to him, laying a reassuring hand on his shoulder, before springing up again to free the next prisoner.
It was Joanna who first reached Sophie, and in the fierce glare of the magelight lanterns Gray could see tears gleaming on her face as she crouched beside her sister, sawing at the ropes about her ankles. Sophie’s face was grimly set now, and Gray suspected that she was wrestling with forces she did not entirely understand.
The last of the ropes parted under Joanna’s blade, and Sophie fell forward—caught herself—stood for a moment breathing deeply, clasping her elbows—and swung wide about Cormac MacAlpine and Pàrlan Dearg to fling herself at Gray.
Joanna had pelted across the clearing behind her, and both she and her friend were now sawing industriously at Gray’s bonds, but he scarcely noticed, and cared not at all, for he had Sophie in his arms again, and for the moment life could hold no greater reward.
* * *
Sophie clutched the folds of Gray’s robe, her ear pressed to the rough wool over his heart, and squeezed her eyes shut. Breathe. Calm.
Gray was speaking to her—Joanna, also—but she could not hear the words, nor even discern in what languages they were spoken. In the grip of this magick that spoke to all of Alba, she was no longer certain even of the borders of her own body, and she had lost all sense of the borders of her mind, or of her magick.
One thing she had seen clearly from the moment of her absorption into the spell: Cormac MacAlpine might have remade its pathways, but he was no longer in control of its working, if indeed he ever had been. It was her blood, her magick, and those of the other prisoners, which had fed enough power into the spell to begin to bring it to life—Gray’s that had completed the circuit—and that tenuous golden thread of Clan MacNeill magick, still clinging to her own as Cormac MacAlpine opened her veins, that governed its effects. The power now flowing through those pathways would never answer to Cormac MacAlpine, no matter how direct his descent from the great Ailpín Drostan. For he had fatally misunderstood the nature of the spell; it was not that the magick made the clan chieftain, or that the clan chieftain made the magick, but that they made and mended one another, through the will of the clan-lands and the people who inhabited them. The clans had chosen their chieftains, and the clan chieftains had chosen Donald MacNeill, and approved his choice of Lucia MacNeill as his heir; now Sophie and Cormac MacAlpine, the one unwilling and the other unknowing, had bound Lucia MacNeill’s magick (if not, perhaps, Lucia MacNeill herself) into the ancient magick of her kingdom, as Cormac MacAlpine must have hoped to do for himself.
But in one matter he had spoken true; there was healing to be done in Alba. Through the web of the spell Sophie heard the blighted fields as dull, throbbing aches—tasted the emptied storehouses like the gap left by a missing tooth—felt the hunger of man and beast in dark and hollow silences. There was a tract of pine forest felled by drought, a flash of sere brown in her mind’s ear; here a sheep-cote succumbing to some ovine plague, a hot insistent whine that tasted of copper.
But if the magick will do my bidding . . .
Hesitantly, wary of making some misstep, Sophie reached towards the nearest point of pain and poured her magick into it through the web. The pain did not disappear, but it eased a little, from sharp agony to dull ache. She flew along the lines of magick, somehow riding all of them at once—I am my father’s heir, she heard Lucia MacNeill say; my range is the whole of Alba—singing the warped melody true again, shaping the power to fill the gaps and the silences.
When the well of her own magick threatened to run dry, she reached out for Gray—blind, deaf, and drunk, but finding him no less readily for that—and drew him down into a long, searching kiss; his magick rushed towards hers, and hers welled up to meet it, and she was out again amongst the clan-lands of Alba, making whole what Cormac MacAlpine had put asunder.
There was a paean and formal supplication to the Mother Goddess, which in Britain was sung each spring at the festival of Matronalia; it thrummed under the surface of her mind as she worked, and though the gods of Alba might disdain its origins, Sophie felt they might nonetheless appreciate its substance:
Lava quod est sordidum,
Riga quod est aridum,
Sana quod est saucium.
Flecte quod est rigidum,
Fove quod est frigidum,
Rege quod est devium.
She could not have said how long she swam the currents of the spell-web—it might have been moments or days, months or years. She might almost have been content to do so forever, for each hurt that she used her magick to heal—though in the full knowledge that it was not hers alone—was also a balm to the wounds left on her soul by every inadvertent act of destruction which it, and she, had ever wrought. But after some unknowable time, she found that the music of the spell had changed, relief and thankfulness rippling through it to crowd out the warped and discordant echoes so strongly felt at first; the fainter those echoes grew, the more Sophie grew conscious of the world outside the spell.
Gray’s arms, solid and familiar, still held her fast. Gray’s heart still beat steady and strong beneath her ear. But nothing else, she found when at last she closed her eyes to the aetheric Alba and opened them upon the earthly one, was as she remembered it.
It was full day, and a brisk northwesterly wind sent woolly puffs of cloud scudding across a clear azure sky. Cormac MacAlpine and his men had gone; the men they had kidnapped were disposed about the clearing, variously seated or reclining, but all snugly wrapped in clean woollen blankets and spooning up some sort of fragrant soup from wooden bowls. Beneath a spreading yew-tree, Joanna and Gwendolen, with blankets trailing from their shoulders, stood talking quietly with a puffy-eyed and tearful Catriona MacCrimmon. And all about them—Sophie blinked in astonishment, certain at first that her eyes deceived her, but indeed the ten well-armed young men and two slightly older women who now guarded the perimeter of the tree-shrine all wore the badge and gear of Donald MacNeill’s household guard.
Angus Ferguson’s men, I could have made sense of; but how comes this to be?
“Sophie,” said Gray quietly. “Love, have you come back to us?”
His voice came from somewhere above her head; Sophie twisted awkwardly in an effort to look up at him and, finding it did not answer, sank back into his arms again. She was half sprawled upon a blanket, she found, her hips slotted between Gray’s drawn-up knees—someone had found him a proper pair of trousers, it appeared—and another blanket covering her from ribs to toes; an almost embarrassingly intimate posture, save that no one had any attention to spare for their particular corner of the forest at present.
“Nearly,” she said, reaching for Gray’s hand where it wrapped about her shoulder, and spreading her own over it, her fingers slotting into the interstices of his. “Another moment; I can see now how to go on.”
She tested her connexion to the spell-net and found it as firm as ever, but now that she had seen the magick from within, she could see too the way to break free of it—to free herself, and Gray, and all the others, without material damage to any. Reclining against Gray’s chest, her head pillowed on his bony shoulder, she closed her eyes again to shut out the physical world, and reached after the thread that linked her magick to the great elm-tree. From there it was no difficult matter to trace the magick from tree to tree, and from tree to man, and to sever each thread that tethered one of the mages into the spell, and draw them all together with her own, through the heart of the great elm, and now . . .
The last trace of Lucia MacNeill’s magick gleamed bright red-gold amidst the blue-white flower-petals that Sophie’s mind used to represent her own magick—easily seen, and easily drawn out to stand alone. It was Clan MacNeill’s magick that would feed the spell-net, and could command it; if, when that last thread returned to its source, it carried with it the full strength of the half-dozen links which Cormac MacAlpine had created, would that not close the circuit once for all? Sophie wove together the strands, her own and Gray’s and Professor Maghrebin’s and the stranger-mages’, with the red-and-golden thread of Clan MacNeill; at last, when the plaited rope seemed to pulse with life before her mind’s eye, she reached for her own link to the spell and, with a deft twist of a metaphorical wrist, severed it cleanly.
She fell back into her own aching, bruised, and half-starved body with a resounding, if metaphysickal, thump.
“It is done,” she said, and, burrowing closer into Gray’s arms, closed her eyes again and tumbled headlong into sleep.
* * *
“I cannot understand it,” said Joanna. “Where can they have come from? Who summoned them, and when, and why?”
There were guardsmen everywhere: in the wood and in the courtyard, in the kitchens and the stables, on the battlements and in the cells below the walls. It was not that she objected to their presence—indeed, they had made themselves extremely useful thus far, taking Cormac MacAlpine and his henchmen into custody, bringing food and blankets and even a journeyman healer to the erstwhile prisoners—but it was baffling and inexplicable, and Joanna was not overfond of things she could not explain.
“They were on their ship, out in the firth, were they not?” said Gwendolen reasonably. “Surely they are come here for the same reason as ourselves, thinking the wood was afire. It must have looked it, from a little way offshore.”
“No,” said Joanna decidedly. “That is, I can easily imagine it, but these are not Angus Ferguson’s troops. They are Donald MacNeill’s household guard. Household guard. From Din Edin. It is no part of their business to take ship to Mull to put down a”—she waved a hand vaguely—“whatever this was intended to be. They ought not to travel at all unless—”
“Unless?” Gwendolen prompted, after a moment.
Joanna said nothing, however, for she was staring in openmouthed alarm at the person, decidedly not a guardsman, who had just stepped into the clearing, pushing back the hood of her dark-green cloak to free a riot of red-gold curls. “Horns of Herne,” said Joanna. “Lucia MacNeill has followed us here!”
“Oh,” said Gwendolen. “Well. Birds of a feather, I suppose . . .”
Joanna frowned at her, and she subsided.
The two guardswomen fell in behind Lucia MacNeill as she conducted a sort of makeshift tour of inspection of the late battlefield, pausing to speak to each of the freed prisoners. She spoke longest to Gray—Sophie being still so deeply asleep that it seemed nothing could wake her—and Joanna wished very much to know what they might be saying, but though she sidled close with that purpose in mind, the conversation was all in Gaelic, and her stealth availed her nothing.
At last Lucia MacNeill rose to her feet again, laid one hand briefly on Gray’s shoulder, and began to make her way towards Joanna. Curiously, her route seemed to involve touching the flat of her
right hand to the bark of each tree she passed.
“Joanna Callender,” she said, halting before Joanna and reaching for both her hands.
Joanna unthinkingly reached back and was startled and a little alarmed when the heiress of Alba pulled her into a fierce embrace.
“You were very foolish,” she said, when she pulled away. “All of you. Thanks be that Sophie sent me that note from Dùn Breatainn—”
“Which note?” said Joanna.
“To say that she was not sitting quietly at home, as we supposed—as though one small illusion-spell should hoodwink the whole of her acquaintance!—nor convalescing at the seaside, as she seems to have suggested to Rory MacCrimmon, but staging a landing on the Ross of Mull,” said Lucia MacNeill, “and requesting me to get word to Angus Ferguson’s company, that they might intervene if they saw ‘fireworks.’”
“I see,” said Joanna, who did not.
“But of course I could not trust anything of the kind to Angus Ferguson, and I am not myself empowered to relieve him of his command,” Lucia MacNeill continued, which answered that question; “and so I had to come myself, with our own troops, whose commander can be trusted not to overreact. Though I confess,” she added, with a little shudder, “I was greatly tempted myself to overreact, when we saw the whole of the wood behind the castle apparently afire.”
“It did look rather like that,” said Joanna. “But it was not fire at all, in the end; it was magick. And Sophie has sorted it out, I believe, for there is certainly nothing afire now.”
“That is what you think,” said Lucia MacNeill darkly.
* * *
“It was your magick that the spell wanted,” Sophie explained, between spoonfuls of mutton stew. “Not Cormac MacAlpine’s, and not even ours, truly”—she gestured expansively at the rest of the mages sleeping in cots slung from the ceiling of the spacious cabin aboard the Malmhìn NicNèill—“though it drank our power greedily enough, given the opportunity. But it was only because you had lent me your magick that it . . . came awake.” She paused for another bite. “At least, that is my present theory.”
Lady of Magick Page 44