The Midnight Queen

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “Will he teach me still, do you suppose?” Sophie asked, after a long moment. “After what I . . .”

  “He would follow you to the four corners of the world, I should think,” said her sister.

  * * *

  Recalling Joanna’s words as she raised her teacup to her lips, Sophie cast a sidelong glance at Gray. His hazel eyes were fixed on her; when her gaze met his, he reddened—abashed, she supposed, at being caught staring—and assumed a deep interest in his bread-and-butter. When their breakfast had been eaten, and its remains cleared away by another of the innkeeper’s pretty daughters, Sophie rose from the table first, intending to flee upstairs and busy herself with preparations for the day’s journey. But Gray laid a gentle hand along her arm, and she subsided, still avoiding his eyes.

  “Elinor,” he murmured, “I had thought today, perhaps—as we ride, you know—I might teach you a few useful magicks . . .”

  Sophie looked up at him then, and saw her own hurt and embarrassment mirrored in his face—and something else, too, at sight of which her lingering anger evaporated. “I should like that very much indeed,” she whispered.

  * * *

  They rode through a fine drizzle, scarcely felt but for the increasing heaviness of their dampened cloaks. Sophie’s bonnet fell down her back, and droplets beaded her dark hair until she resembled some sort of rain-spirit—perhaps, Gray mused, such as might attend on Thor, northern son of the All-Father, to scatter rain in the wake of the god’s thunderbolts.

  The thought made him smile a little; the smile widened into a yawn, aftermath of the previous night’s surveillance.

  “You are tired,” said Sophie; she wore a guilty look. “I am very sorry to have kept you from the use of your room—”

  “It is not that,” Gray said hastily, stifling another yawn. “I was out last night long after everyone else was abed—scouting, to see whether we had been followed.”

  Far from being reassured, she now looked horrified. “But what if we had been? You might have been caught—or hurt—or—”

  “Nothing of the kind!” he retorted cheerfully. “I am not such a fool as to go on foot. I flew.”

  “I should have liked to see that.”

  “So you shall. But not in broad daylight, and not—” Gray paused. “I expect the horses would be very much put out. Now: Shall we begin your lessons?”

  They began with the first thing every talented child learns: how to call light. “As you may remember, the usual spell is adeste luces,” said Gray, suiting the action to the words; a little burst of light sprang from his open hand and wafted upwards, hanging in midair until he snapped his fingers to vanish it. “But the spell is only an aide-mémoire, a means to—”

  “To ensure that the magickal energy is focused on the correct object or outcome, yes,” Sophie nodded, impatient.

  Gray smiled. “Very well, then: Try.” He pondered briefly whether, given the power she possessed, it were safe to set her such a lesson; the custom was to teach the calling of light to the very young, and of fire to the not much older, that they might learn control while their talent was not yet strong. But Sophie’s magick was by no means fully restored; she ought to be safe enough.

  The object of these ruminations frowned in concentration and, clutching the reins with one hand, held out the other stiffly. “Adeste luces!” she commanded.

  Nothing happened.

  Sophie turned to Gray with an accusing look.

  “It took me the best part of a week to learn to call light,” he reminded her.

  “But you were a child of four!”

  “And as experienced in the conscious, deliberate use of my talent as you are now.”

  She fetched a deep sigh.

  “Teach me, then,” she said grimly.

  It was such a simple task, a trifle, done without thought; yet he had struggled to learn it once, and someone had taught him.

  “Close your eyes,” he directed, “and breathe slowly and deeply.”

  Sophie obeyed; he sidled his mount closer to hers, so as to catch her if she lost her balance, mentally calling down Epona’s blessing on the patient beasts, and the stablemen who must have trained them.

  “Now,” he continued, when he judged that she had attained the correct state of calm reflection, “to use your magick consciously and deliberately—to wield it—you must first summon it, and you cannot summon it unless you know how to find it.”

  “But—” Sophie protested, her eyes still closed.

  “That was different.” He answered the question she had not asked. “It was unconscious and—need I remind you?—utterly uncontrolled. Magick is—magick is like fire: controlled, an invaluable tool; uncontrolled, a catastrophe.”

  “Yes, I see,” said Sophie, low.

  “Now, attend. You can see your own magick, and hear it, but the looking and listening are of a different sort.” Gray thought for a moment: How had his mother taught him this, all those years ago?

  * * *

  “Listen to the beating of your heart.” Gray’s voice was low and patient. “And when you can hear it, shut out all the other noises around us, until my voice and your own pulse are the only sounds you hear.”

  Sophie obeyed, and the doubled thump—a louder beat, then its echo—seemed to grow until it thundered in her ears. By comparison, Gray spoke in a distant whisper: “Now follow that sound to the centre of yourself—if you listen in the right way, it will lead you aright.”

  She listened; she tried to follow.

  What must I look for? she wondered bemusedly; she could not tell whether she spoke aloud, but was only half surprised when Gray’s voice answered, “Something like this.”

  Opening her eyes, she saw hovering in the air before them the faint image of a bloom—like a huge, half-opened rose, but made all of a deep blue-green flame. With the image came a sort of music, like the deep resonant drone of a bass viol. She knew, without being able to explain how she knew it, that he had made for her a seeming of his own magick, and shivered at the openhearted trust demonstrated by this gesture.

  For what seemed a very long time Sophie let her mind roam while she listened, trancelike, to the beating of her heart. Just as she began to fear that she was doomed to failure, her inner vision shifted imperceptibly, and before her mind’s eye, in her mind’s ear, blazed a blue-white flame-flower, small but dazzlingly bright—like but not like one of Pellan’s vivid dahlias—and each petal singing, high and clear.

  “Good,” said Gray; at the same time, from far ahead came Mrs. Wallis’s voice: “Are we to ride all day, you two?” Startled, Sophie opened her eyes and nearly fell off her horse.

  “Did you see it, too? Or hear it?” she demanded of her companion; then, remembering, she said, “Were you reading my thoughts?”

  Gray chuckled. “That is a rare talent indeed,” he said. “No: I answered the question you asked, and made a picture for you, and then I saw your expression change and knew you had found it. You had the same look as my brother Alan.”

  “Are all your family talented, then?” Sophie could not resist this opportunity to inquire, albeit obliquely, about the brothers whom Gray almost never mentioned.

  “Strictly speaking, yes,” he said. “All of us can do the ordinary things—calling light and fire, small summonings. Jenny, as you know, is gifted at scrying, and—” He frowned, seeming to recollect that she had distracted him in midlesson.

  “Close your eyes,” he said firmly, “and find it again.”

  It was so much easier this time that she could scarcely credit her own struggles of a few moments ago. “Now,” said Gray, “keep hold of where it is, and how it feels, and try whether you can maintain your hold on it when you open your eyes.”

  Sophie concentrated hard—too hard, it seemed, for the sense of her magick slipped away from her. The next time, too, and the next, but at last
she succeeded in grasping some phantastickal thread—a petal of that strange, singing bloom, perhaps—and keeping her awareness of it with her.

  Gray smiled at her, his expression mingling pride and satisfaction. “You are very quick,” he observed. “Now, try the spell again.”

  “Adeste luces,” Sophie whispered, concentrating all her will on kindling that thread of magick into a little orb of light like Gray’s.

  And, for just a moment, a light hovered and flickered above her outstretched hand.

  “I have done it!” she squeaked, thunderstruck, delighted—forgetting temporarily the many and varied worries that pressed in on her mind. “Joanna!” she called, and from twenty feet ahead her sister turned to look—though there was no longer anything to see.

  The next effort lasted some thirty heartbeats, and the next twice as long.

  Thus passed the journey, so rapidly that Sophie was surprised and dismayed when, just after noon, the roofs, walls, and crowded ship-masts of Douarnenez came into view.

  CHAPTER XII

  In Which Joanna Is Disappointed

  In Douarnenez Sophie, Gray, and Joanna passed some hours’ enforced inactivity at an upstairs window of an inn—rather more prosperous-looking than the last—on the rue des Marsouins, facing east across the wide, gentle curve of the bay. The water glowed a deep blue-green, patterned with the white triangular sails of fishing-boats. Half hypnotised by the ever-shifting blue-white lines of breakers rolling in to shore, Gray could easily believe that, as the old tales had it, somewhere beneath these waters rested Dahut’s drowned city of Ys.

  Mrs. Wallis had gone in search of an acquaintance who might, she said, help them on their way.

  “The captain of the Brav Avel will give us passage to the port of Brest,” she announced, when she returned towards midafternoon, “but he draws the line at three horses and a pony. Mr. Marshall, you shall have to sell them before tomorrow’s high tide.”

  “Sell Gwenn-ha-du?” Joanna’s voice wavered between outrage and tears; Gray was doubly glad of his wards upon the room. “You cannot sell him, he is my friend—I have had him since I was a little girl—”

  “Jo.” Sophie rose to put an arm about her sister’s shoulders. Joanna glared at her.

  “Come down to the stables with me, Joanna,” said Gray, gently.

  He had intended only to give Joanna the opportunity of a private farewell, but the result proved better still. They had not been long in the stables before the stableboy, Ewen, struck up a conversation with the tearful Joanna, on the subject of Gwenn-ha-du. No more than an hour later, Ewen had pointed Gray in the direction of a likely buyer for the two mares and expressed such affection for Joanna’s beloved pony that when, on the following morning, Gray ventured to suggest leaving Gwenn-ha-du in Ewen’s care, Joanna acquiesced with many tears but very little real protest.

  * * *

  From Douarnenez they sailed round the Crozon peninsula to the large, bustling port of Brest, where, feeling safely anonymous, they sought their rest at the sign of the Midnight Queen.

  The painting on the inn’s signboard, though clearly meant to represent Queen Laora, looked no more like any living woman than inns’ signboards generally do, and rather less than some. In the dimness within, however, the travellers at once confronted a hanging portrait—an apprentice’s copy, perhaps, of his master’s work—at sight of which Mrs. Wallis fell abruptly silent, and Sophie paled and clutched at Joanna’s arm.

  “What—” said Joanna. Then her grey eyes widened, and she looked from Sophie to the portrait and back again.

  The young Queen Laora—perhaps not yet a queen, when this likeness was taken—had indeed been a great beauty. There was just enough of Sophie in the spare, exquisite features to make their kinship plain, but this woman knew herself beautiful and was accustomed to drawing all eyes. Gray saw Sophie in her frank, challenging gaze, her lifted chin and long white hands, and Joanna, distantly, in the set of her unsmiling lips.

  “Mama,” Sophie whispered, and raised a hand, as though against her will.

  Mrs. Wallis was first to recover her composure, and contrived to shepherd the girls upstairs, almost as though nothing untoward had occurred.

  Gray followed them, forcing a reassuring smile at the innkeeper’s wife.

  “You are wrong, Sophie,” he heard Joanna say as he reached the top of the stairs. When he opened the door to the third-floor sitting-room that was to be theirs, Mrs. Wallis was shushing her irritably, and without reference to any of them Gray solved the immediate problem by means of a warding-spell.

  “You may say whatever you like now, Joanna,” he said.

  “I am not wrong,” said Sophie, ignoring him altogether.

  “You are. I don’t deny it may be meant for Mama, but Mama never looked like that.”

  Abruptly Sophie ceased bristling and subsided into a chair. “I saw her look so, once,” she said, low, “when she thought no one observed her; I have remembered it always. But I had forgot that you were not yet born.”

  Her words seemed to strike some chord with Joanna, which Gray could not divine, for her round face grew still and closed, and she turned brusquely away to gaze out of the window.

  It occurred to him that Mrs. Wallis must know the truth, if anyone did, for if her tale was true, she must have seen the original of this portrait—had even, perhaps, witnessed the taking of it. But when he turned to look at her, his questions died on his lips.

  Could anyone be so white and still, and yet breathe?

  After a moment Mrs. Wallis raised her eyes to his and by a look beseeched his silence. How young she looked, in her distress! Gray averted his gaze, feeling that he had seen what he ought not.

  Then turning to Sophie, Mrs. Wallis said, “It is your mother, indeed, though I know not how that copy came here. The likeness was done at her father’s wish, before we sailed for England.”

  “She prayed that she need not go.” The words were out before Gray could think better of them.

  Sophie was staring at Mrs. Wallis now, as if hypnotised, and Joanna had turned again from the window, regarding Sophie with eyes suspiciously bright.

  “Her father stood firm so long that at last she had no choice but to consent to the marriage, and do her duty,” said Mrs. Wallis to Gray. “But neither he, nor anyone, could force her to go gladly, and her vengeance was that he should be daily reminded that she did not.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Yet when she chose for herself,” said Sophie at last, “she chose the Professor.”

  “There is a world of difference, Miss Sophia,” said Mrs. Wallis, beginning to sound like herself again, “between a maiden of nineteen and a mother of four-and-twenty.”

  * * *

  By now Gray was growing comfortably familiar with the persona of Ned Dunstan and, at times, rather fonder of Ned than of himself. Ned was confident in his business dealings and always had sufficient coin to tip for services rendered; his clothes (purchased in Douarnenez with a little of that same coin) were of good quality and fit him perfectly. Ned stood tall and straight (whereas Gray Marshall, embarrassed by his height and gangling limbs, had tended to stoop a little), and his confidence was surely justified, his parents reposing such trust in him as to charge him with the safe conduct of his sisters and their aunt.

  Joanna, once reconciled to the loss of Gwenn-ha-du, seemed equally happy in the character of Harriet Dunstan, and Mrs. Wallis—though she had been play-acting for so many years that the exercise ought surely to have lost its charms—positively delighted by Aunt Ida. But Sophie, it appeared, took no more pleasure in Elinor than in anything else.

  From Brest, on the proceeds from the Professor’s horses, they travelled post across the broad plain of Léon, keeping at their own request to the less-used roads and passing through, or around, Guipavas, Landerneau and Landivisiau, Trievin, Kervren, and Kersalio
u. They were three days on the road, and passed two nights at rather unprepossessing inns, making their way towards the northern tip of the province of Finisterre, and the port of Rosko. Here Mrs. Wallis took possession of another upstairs sitting-room in another Breton inn, whence she sent the inn’s servants scurrying with letters to all her acquaintance in the town.

  Always the story of their flight followed them, embroidered with ever more preposterous detail. But thus far it did not seem to have occurred to anyone they met to connect that highly entertaining tale with four ordinary, respectable, rather dull travellers. For, since discovering the truth of the young ladies’ ancestry, they had all—and Sophie especially—taken pains to present to the world as unremarkable an appearance as possible. Gray heard one day, while waiting for a change of horses, a version that described the villainous student as unusually tall (though also, helpfully, as dark-haired and strikingly handsome); he took to wearing Mrs. Wallis’s concealing charm tied round his wrist at all times, and thus went unremarked in many a crowded street and dining-room.

  Though he did his best to hide it, Gray fretted. He wondered anxiously whether his letter to Jenny from Douarnenez had reached her, and, if so, whether it had done so in time to stop her writing to him again at Callender Hall. He pondered the various possible consequences if the Professor should seek him and Sophie at Kergabet, and the worrying import of the letter Jenny had brought him from Master Alcuin. As September waned and the time neared when, presumably, the Professor must also be journeying towards Oxford, he worried that they would cross his path and be discovered, or worse.

  When no more specific anxiety presented itself, he fell back to worrying about Sophie, who remained withdrawn and melancholy, whose face, relaxed in sleep during their long hours on the road, showed clearly the dark shadows under her eyes.

  Joanna, when questioned, said merely, “She has always had nightmares. Perhaps being so far from home has made them worse?” And Sophie herself denied that anything was amiss.

  * * *