The Midnight Queen

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “The Professor,” she said tremulously, “is he . . . he is not dead?”

  “No,” said Gray firmly. He coughed, his throat raw from the heat and smoke. “Perhaps he fainted; I—I believe his arm is broken.”

  “Thank all the gods,” said Sophie, who looked as miserably ill as Gray felt. “He was warm, when I touched him—but he did not stir, and I thought—”

  “Touched him? What possessed you?” said Gray. “His companion was already calling for the Proctors—”

  She put her hand into the pocket of her coat and brought out a ring of keys. “I took these from his pocket,” she said. “He always keeps them in the same one. I thought—we succeeded so ill in convincing Lord Halifax of the danger to his life, that I fear we shall have no luck at all in persuading His Majesty, without some proof of what they mean to do—”

  Gray was torn between admiration of her presence of mind and retrospective terror—what if she had been caught in the act? “That was very well thought of,” he managed to say. “We must go quickly if we are to have any time to search.”

  He let his small magelight die away. Clasping Sophie’s hand, that she might more easily follow him in the dark, he peered out through the hanging boughs; seeing no one abroad, he pulled her after him back out into the night.

  CHAPTER XVII

  In Which Sophie and Gray Encounter Further Difficulties

  “What’s the hour?” Sophie whispered.

  “Nearly midnight, I should think,” said Gray. “Softly—I heard footsteps just now.”

  Their progress was slow and erratic; the distance from the Master’s Lodge to Professor Callender’s rooms was not very great, but they were both so battered and fatigued that they could not go far without rest, and so dreaded pursuit that they flinched at every small nighttime sound.

  The footsteps came closer. Gray and Sophie crouched behind a statue of some Saxon king, so weathered that his face was a smooth oval, and waited for their owner to pass: a College Proctor with a magelight lantern—whether alerted by the Professor and his friend, or merely patrolling the grounds as usual, it scarcely mattered. Concealing magick was all very well, but solid stone, ceteris paribus, must be safer.

  The Proctor paused a moment, perilously near, looking about him with narrowed eyes while Gray held his breath, desperately smothering a cough; then he shook his head and passed on.

  The night was darker now; tattered clouds had blown in, by turns covering and revealing the moon. It had grown colder, too, and the air smelled of impending rain.

  Gray shivered and suppressed a cough. His shirt and waistcoat were soaked through with perspiration, and in the chill air they clung unpleasantly to his skin. Sophie moved closer to him as they emerged from behind their stone protector; she too was shivering, and he hoped that she was only cold.

  Her tangled, dirty hair smelled of soot and ashes; her clothes were singed and torn and bloodied, the purloined commoner’s gown spotted with burnt-out holes and hanging limply from her shoulders. She coughed quietly, further muffling the sound by pressing her face into the crook of her elbow. Gray himself was in little better case—bedraggled and dirty, bone weary, his chest tight and aching, his throat raw. If only one could lie down and sleep just a little . . .

  “Come along,” he whispered, taking Sophie’s icy hand in his. “This way.”

  * * *

  To gain entrance to the Professor’s staircase they must traverse a grassy quad, some fifty paces across, with open archways to the left and right. In daylight, on legitimate business, a matter of moments; in their present circumstances, a tense, prolonged, perilous exposure, all the while waiting for a Proctor or a Senior Fellow to pass by or for someone not yet abed to spy them from an upstairs window. Still they might have passed unnoticed, had they not so lately survived a conflagration.

  The wind freshened, driving ever thicker clouds across the face of the moon and plunging the College farther into obscurity; the air grew steadily colder, and each breath Gray drew caught in his smoke-roughened throat and threatened a new fit of coughing. Throat, lungs, and rib cage burned with the effort of keeping silence.

  As they left the shelter of the wall, a gust of wind tore across the quad, scattering fallen leaves and rattling branches. Assaulted by the chill blast, Gray inhaled sharply; the cold air convulsed his lungs, and he bent almost double, racked with tearing coughs.

  Sophie’s arms went about his shoulders, and she whispered urgently in his ear, but what she said he could not distinguish.

  Until, finally straightening and drawing a cautious breath, he heard the heavy, rapid footfalls approaching from the left side of the courtyard.

  “Now, Gray!” Sophie hissed, tugging at his arm.

  He caught her hand again, and they ran, but too late: “You, there, boyo! Stop where yez are!” shouted the Proctor’s bulldog rounding the turn into the quad. It did not occur to Gray to obey the order, but the man’s next words, carried on the wind, stopped him in his tracks: “Oi! Cleaver! Swithin! ’Tis yon long lad as Proctor Morris axed us to watch for! Look alive, men!”

  More footfalls thundered towards the quad.

  Sophie was staring at him, aghast, and he could well imagine what she must be thinking. He groped with his fingers for the shielding-charm tied about his wrist—had it been somehow damaged or disabled?—and found no charm there at all, only a circlet of burn-blisters where the silk cord had been seared away. Previously unremarked amidst his other hurts, they flowered into pain at his touch, and he set his teeth on a silent howl.

  And there was Sophie still beside him, clutching at his hand, and three bulky Proctors arraying themselves across the quad to block their escape. “Run, Sophie!” he urged, frantic with worry. “They do not see you yet; you might still—”

  She glared at him. “No more do they see you,” she interrupted, sounding angry. “Look.”

  Gray did so—and was astonished to see the three men revolving on their heels, their faces screwed up in frank bewilderment. “Where in ’Ades . . .” one of them began.

  As if on cue, Gray’s abused throat and lungs rebelled again, and this time, her body’s endurance clearly at an end, Sophie joined in the choking cacophony. Though the noisy interlude was brief, when Gray looked up again he could see plainly enough that the Proctor’s men were no longer fooled.

  The closest was only thirty paces away; if Gray and Sophie tried to reach her father’s rooms, they would be followed there and taken at once. On the other hand . . .

  “There is another way out,” he hissed. He could breathe more easily now, he found. Still holding fast to Sophie’s hand, he sprinted towards the entry to the Professor’s staircase.

  * * *

  There was no time for Sophie to wonder where on earth Gray might be leading her, and when such a thought did try to obtrude itself, she quashed it sternly; here they were on his home ground. Now at least, with no one about to see them, she could abandon her increasingly erratic efforts at concealment. Still it was difficult not to protest when, after a mad serpentine dash up and down staircases, in and out of doors, she found herself face-to-face with a high stone wall, devoid of any evident foothold.

  But Gray, somehow, was halfway up already; before Sophie could say anything at all he had shed his gown, scaled the wall, and flattened himself along the top, dangling the heavy black cloth down towards her as a sort of makeshift rope. Steeling herself, Sophie took hold of its lower edge with both hands and began to climb.

  The wall was rougher-textured than she had first thought, and she found, in fact, plenty of footholds, but her blistered feet ached, her breath came short in her lungs, and when at length she reached the top she was gasping and dizzy with pain. Arms clasped about her knees, she crouched atop the wall—surprised to find it nearly two feet thick—and concentrated on slowing her rapid, ragged breathing.

  At length Gray, now crouched b
eside her on all fours, put a hand on her shoulder and whispered, “Drop the gowns inside the wall. We shall be out of the College almost straight away, and they would only make us the more conspicuous.”

  Shuddering, she scrambled out of her stolen garment, and they let them fall, vanishing into the darkness below.

  Gray crept along the top of the wall on hands and knees, glancing back at her every few moments. “Stop it,” she hissed at him. “Look where you are going, for the gods’ sake.”

  He looked affronted, but did as he was bid. So profound was the chill, humid darkness by now that Sophie could see nothing before her but the soles of his boots, inching along the rough stone just ahead.

  They had gone perhaps twenty paces along the wall, moving at a snail’s pace, when Gray halted abruptly and sat up, swinging his long legs over the far side of the wall. “This is where we jump,” he said calmly. Sophie’s stomach clenched with naked terror, and she spoke sternly to herself: You have survived far worse tonight already, you silly girl.

  Surely Gray would never lead her wrong.

  Still, she nearly cried out when he dropped out of sight.

  * * *

  Gray landed, rather harder than he had expected, on the impromptu compost-heap that hugged the College wall just at this spot. He picked himself up, took a moment to catch his breath, and then, now they were outside the Proctors’ jurisdiction, called just enough light to see by and sent it aloft to hover a little below the top of the wall, illuminating Sophie’s dangling trousered legs, white-knuckled hands, and soot-streaked, terrified face.

  “The jump is perfectly safe,” he called up to her. “Do you see? I am quite all right—shall I catch you . . . ?”

  She nodded, lips pressed together. Then she shut her eyes and pushed herself off the wall.

  Gray caught her, stumbled a little, righted himself. She opened her eyes, her face only inches from his, and whispered, “I thank you.”

  Then he loosened his grip, and she slid to the ground and looked up at him expectantly. “Where next?”

  Gray was silent a moment, trying to see in his mind the quickest and safest return route. This was not quite so easy as he had anticipated; he had escaped the College this way many a time in his undergraduate days, but always with some less distant goal in view—an evening card-party in the town, or the wherewithal for some entertainment in College, to be purchased at a nearby public-house. No doubt many of his fellows had trod the path to Leda and the Swan, or to other houses closer and more unsavoury, but on this sort of expedition Gray had never been invited.

  At last, however, he got his bearings, and they struck out to their right across the fields and woods.

  They reached the South Road without incident, though once in it, passing such a number of lighted windows that they went always in fear of discovery. Some fifty paces along this road, Sophie caught Gray’s arm and turned him back to look at her. “Can you fly, do you think?” she said. “Because, if you can, you ought to do it—I am so tired, I’m sure I could not hide us both if anyone should come, and aloft you might not be seen at all . . .”

  “And if you should be unable to hide yourself, what then?” Gray hissed. “Do you take me for a faithless oath-breaker, Your Highness?”

  Her expression—the huge, shocked eyes, the trembling lips—called to his mind the only time he had made Jenny cry, the occasion when, in their childhood, he had been angry with her over some half-imagined slight and had said he should never speak to her again.

  “I am sorry, Sophie,” he choked.

  Her throat worked, and she drew one sooty, bloodied sleeve across her eyes. “I meant nothing of the sort,” she said, with dignity, “as you ought to know. I could not ask for a braver champion, Gray, or a kinder brother.”

  These last words, which so recently would have warmed his heart, Gray now absorbed in a spirit of profound melancholy.

  “I thought,” she went on, “that you could fly ahead a little way, and call a warning if you should see anyone coming—”

  “Of course!” he exclaimed, and stooped down impulsively to kiss her upturned forehead. Buoyed by her trust, and ignoring the discomforting inner voice that wondered whether in his present state he could accomplish a shape-shift, let alone sustain it, he stripped off his coat and thrust it into her arms. “There is not much left of it, I know, but Ned’s clothes fit me a great deal better than my own, and I should not like to lose them . . .”

  * * *

  Her arms full of bundled-up clothing and dangling a pair of boots the size and shape of Breizhek fishing-boats, her ears pricked for Gray’s warning call, Sophie paced cautiously along the half-familiar cobbled street. She braced herself up with the thought that before long they would be across the Cherwell and their chances of running against anyone at all, leave alone the Watch, vanishingly small.

  “Oi!” called a voice behind her. “’Oo goes there?”

  Sophie kept on, a little faster now; perhaps it might be addressing someone else. Next, however, she heard quickening footfalls, and the same voice, more urgent now: “Stop, you! Halt for the Watch!”

  With a sigh, she obeyed, turning about to face the men of the Watch.

  There was only one, as it turned out; Gray had said the Watch patrolled always in pairs, and she wondered whether the other of this partnership was ill, or dealing with some genuine miscreant, or had simply decided to stop at home tonight. Her pursuer—slow-moving and solidly built, only a little taller than Sophie herself—approached at a sort of rolling gallop, holding aloft a magelight lantern.

  “And ’oo might you be, then?” he inquired, thrusting the lantern into Sophie’s face; she recoiled, squinting her eyes against the glare.

  “Elinor Dunstan,” she said instinctively, then cursed herself for a fool, remembering—too late—Arthur Randal. But it was in any case not likely that she looked very much like Arthur Randal now.

  The Watchman frowned at her and looked her up and down. “Been in some trouble, ’ave we?” he said.

  “None, I thank you.” Sophie spoke guardedly, not certain what the best answer might be—but as loudly as she dared, that Gray might hear her.

  “Come now.” The grizzled face creased in a sort of leer. “A little lass like you, alone on a dark night, dressed in yer brother’s clothes . . . not as they don’t suit yer, mind . . .”

  Gray, where are you? Whatever do I say to this?

  Sophie wished frantically that she were somewhere—anywhere—else, or that her interlocutor might lose interest in her. While the former desire, not surprisingly, went unfulfilled, she could see by the Watchman’s changing expression that she had still sufficient magick left to give some force to the latter. His leering half grin gave way to a puzzled frown; he squinted at her, evidently wondering why he had found her so interesting a moment before. Slowly, Sophie backed away, still watching his face.

  Thus it was that she saw his eyes widen and his jaw drop some moments before she identified the deep, angry hooting from behind her; then he dropped his lantern, which rolled across the cobbles spraying its light in all directions, and put up his arms to shield his face.

  The owl had clearly no intention of hurting him, but it must be nearly as frightening, Sophie supposed, to be flown at by a large, angry bird of prey as to be genuinely attacked by one. In any event, a mere moment’s hooting and flapping sufficed to thoroughly terrify her antagonist, who fled the scene, leaving his lantern behind him in the street.

  “I thank you, Gray,” Sophie called softly to the grey shape circling above her head, stifling her laughter. “I suppose we had best get on?”

  The owl dipped one wing at her and glided away in the direction of the river. She followed as quickly as she could, pausing only to collect the Watchman’s dropped lantern.

  * * *

  The exhilaration of flying—and of having rescued Sophie, however preposte
rously, from the attentions of the Watch—half succeeded in concealing from Gray that he was dangerously close to his limits. But he had not yet lost his senses altogether, and when the distant gleam of Sophie’s lantern began to develop a prettily striated aura, and the rattle of the wind turning the leaves began to sing in his ears, it occurred to him that he would be of no use to anyone if he fell out of the sky and broke his neck.

  Having seen Sophie safely over the Cherwell bridge, therefore, where the South Road petered out into rutted cart-tracks, he coasted rather drunkenly down to a tree beside the northbound track and alighted on a conveniently low branch a little way ahead of her. When she rounded the bend just past the bridge, he called, as loudly as he dared, until she stopped, draped something over the lantern, and stared into the trees, more or less in his direction. Then he dropped from his branch, shifting back into his own body as he fell, and landed on all fours behind dense strata of underbrush.

  “Sophie!” he called softly. His human eyes strained to see her in the gloom.

  “Gray? Where are you?” she called back, and he heard his own desperate weariness mirrored in her voice.

  “Hiding,” he said. “I shall come out, if you will toss me that bundle in your arms . . .”

  There was no answer, but a moment later he had to dodge a large, heavy boot, then another, and in short order his entire toilette was draped among the brush and trees around him. “I thank you,” he said, just loudly enough to be heard, and began looking for his shirt and trousers.

  It was at this moment that it began to rain.

  Dressing under these damp, thorny conditions, in profound darkness, was neither a rapid nor an agreeable process, but Gray managed it at last, and, scratched and dripping, emerged from the trees to join Sophie on the path.