The Midnight Queen

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “Perhaps . . . if we set a ward on the whole house?” said Sophie. “Or a shielding-spell? Might such a spell be constructed particularly to evade findings?”

  Master Alcuin’s thoughtful frown deepened, and he began toying with the end of his beard. “Such a construction ought certainly to be possible—”

  “He is still there,” said Joanna, erupting suddenly into the breakfast-parlour.

  Sieur Germain rose from his chair, glowering, and strode out of the room, calling for Treveur.

  “I thought him gone away,” Joanna continued, “before Gray and Sophie came down, but he is still there, or he is come back. He is alone now, at least.”

  “And will see us the moment we pass by any window facing the street, I suppose,” said Sophie, “or venture a single step out of doors.”

  “Then you must not let him see you,” said Jenny firmly. “Perhaps he will give up and go away.”

  Below, the front door opened and closed with some violence.

  “An excellent plan, Lady Kergabet,” Mrs. Wallis said dryly, “save that it may cause us some difficulty in accepting Their Majesties’ invitation to the Samhain ball.”

  Gray, who had been thinking exactly this, raised his eyebrows. “Have you any alternative to propose, madam?”

  “Of course I have,” said Mrs. Wallis, smug. “You did not think I had been visiting about Town all this time, to no purpose?”

  Their attention caught, they all of them waited in silence for her to explain herself, until at last Joanna burst out, “Well, then? Tell us what it is!”

  Mrs. Wallis smiled—a slow, inward-looking smile. “All in good time, Miss Joanna.”

  “But you must tell us something, Mrs. Wallis,” said Sophie.

  “Indeed,” said Master Alcuin, “how can we form a strategy, in the absence of full intelligence as to our own defensive capabilities?”

  “And if my efforts should prove unsuccessful—what then?” Mrs. Wallis retorted. “You may rest assured, all of you, that I shall tell you all that is necessary, at the proper time.”

  Sophie, anxious not to violate the Kergabets’ hospitality by expressing her opinion of this behaviour, excused herself, sans breakfast, as quickly as politeness allowed. She took refuge in the library, whither she was followed by an anxious Gray.

  “There is nothing the matter with me,” she assured him, with some impatience. “I am only feeling extremely annoyed with Mrs. Wallis, and trying not to show it.”

  “You felt, then,” said Gray, perching on the edge of the table and smiling crookedly down at his wife, “as though you must get away, or else shake her secrets out of her.”

  Sophie was smothering a very unmatronly fit of giggles when the library door opened and Master Alcuin stalked into the room.

  “Your guardian,” he said to Sophie, fairly quivering with irritation, “can be most infuriatingly secretive.”

  “Can we not ask Jenny—” Sophie began, but Gray shook his head.

  “I have asked her,” he said gloomily. “She first took me to task for suggesting that she spy on a guest in her house—after being treated so shabbily as a guest of the Professor, she wondered that I dared ask such a thing, and how should I have felt had she used her talent on you, Sophie, or on the Magister, in such a way? And when I persisted, she admitted at last that she had tried it already, in secret, and could see nothing at all.”

  “Well.” Master Alcuin shook his head ruefully. Then, with a more cheerful look, he rubbed his palms together in the manner of one settling down to work. “Our host appears to have rid us of our besetting Fellow, at any rate for the time being, by dispatching young Harry in pursuit of the Watch.

  “And now—I have no wish to pry, you understand, but—tell me—the warding-spell you worked upon your room: Apart from deflecting our unpleasant visitors, it was successful? Or—unnecessary, perhaps, after all?”

  Instinctively Sophie glanced at Gray, wondering whether she ought to let him answer this question. Then giving herself a mental shake, she looked into their teacher’s keen, kindly eyes and replied, “Not unnecessary, Magister. But successful, yes—or, at any rate, I have not seen any damage elsewhere in the house—”

  “It was not damage,” Gray protested.

  “Not damage?” she repeated, incredulous. “What do you call it, then?”

  He frowned in thought, settling back in his chair and folding his long arms across his chest. “Metamorphosis,” he said. “Transformative magick. Or perhaps . . .”

  “Transformative magick?” Master Alcuin asked. By now Sophie had half forgot that a third person was present, and she started a little at the interruption. “Transformative of . . . what, exactly?”

  Between them they detailed, as best they could, their observations, and when they had done, Master Alcuin looked from one to the other, twisting the end of his beard about one finger.

  “There must be some precedent,” he said at last, “but I cannot recall encountering it in my reading. I shall have to look farther . . . would that I had all my books to hand!” A pause, and a rueful smile: “You will both be too fatigued, then, I suppose, to experiment with warding the house against finding-spells.”

  It was only now that Sophie recognised what was perhaps the oddest aspect of this thoroughly odd affair: that, far from being exhausted by that tremendous expenditure of magick, she felt rested, refreshed—almost buoyant. She closed her eyes and slowed her breathing, slipping down into the centre of herself; sure enough, the blue-white flame-flower of her magick burned as brightly and sang as high and clear as ever. Perhaps, in fact . . .

  Through her confusion and discomfiture she heard Gray’s voice, slow and incredulous, speaking her own thoughts: “No. No, indeed—it is impossible, but—I believe I have more magick now than I had yesterday.”

  She looked at him, and then at Master Alcuin—who had once told them that he had a talent for seeing others’ magick. He scrutinised each of them in turn, head on one side, eyes narrowed; his face paled a little, and he opened his eyes wide and shook his head like a hound after rain. “It is true,” he said, sounding awed. “Quite impossible, but perfectly true. Both of you—more than before . . .” Now he was scrabbling among the scholarly detritus that littered the table, at last unearthing a pen and a scrap of writing-paper. “For this I am sure there is no precedent. Fascinating! It is the sort of thing spoken of in oracular prophecies, the stuff of legends . . .”

  Sophie’s mouth was dry. “Magister,” she said softly. But he was writing frantically, and seemed not to hear. Gray reached across the table to lay his hand over hers. “What does this mean?” she whispered.

  “I cannot think,” he said, in the same tone, “but we shall not let it part us, whatever it may mean.”

  This thought gave Sophie courage, and she smiled.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  In Which Joanna Is Disappointed Again

  “If you have nothing to do, Gray, cannot you at least keep still?” said Jenny, closing her book with quite unnecessary violence. “You will drive us all mad with your pacing and prowling, and wear my carpets to shreds.”

  Gray—who had indeed been pacing the length of the drawing-room for more than an hour—turned on his heel to glare at her. “I might say the same of you,” he said. “You have quarrelled with your seat five times this evening, by my count, and fetched down three different books—”

  They might have continued thus, had not Master Alcuin growled from across the room, “Children! May we not have a moment’s peace?”

  These days of waiting for the eve of Samhain had begun to seem a foretaste of Tartarus. They had done what they could. They had their means of entry to the Royal Palace: the invitation to the Samhain ball for Sieur Germain and Lady Kergabet, Lady Kergabet’s uncle and aunt, and two young cousins of Sieur Germain’s. They had planned, as well as was possible, the moves of t
he game they should have to play once there—had composed a letter to King Henry and commissioned Sieur Germain’s helpful informant to deliver it as early as possible after the royal family’s return from Caernarfon; had marshalled what real evidence they had, and discussed ad infinitum how best to make that evidence persuasive. It was maddening to possess, in the form of the Professor’s ring of keys, what might have been damning evidence in the hands of a skilled scry-mage, were it not for the inevitable suspicion of magickal tampering.

  Then—only a few days before His Majesty’s expected return to London—Gray had received a letter from Oxford, enclosed in one directed to Jenny which read, simply, Please send on after reading.

  He had half forgot the letter to which this one was a reply—a hastily scrawled note to Henry Crowther, dispatched from a posting-inn somewhere between Aleth and Rostrenen, asking for news of Crowther himself, and of Evans-Hughes and Gautier—and it had evidently languished in the Porter’s Lodge at Merlin until very lately, awaiting Crowther’s return from his parents’ home in Yorkshire.

  My dear Marshall, it ran, Have just received yours of Midsummer, and hope that your sister will forward this on to you, wherever you are, for I have been at some pains to find out her direction. First things first: As you must know by now, it is true about poor Gautier. Whatever anyone says, Marshall, you are not to blame: Taylor was occupied, and Evans-Hughes was knocked flat, but I was neither, and you may take my word on it. I am perfectly well now, and Evans-Hughes also; I pray the same may be true of you. It is true then, I collect, that you went to Finisterre with Callender? When you disappeared, Evans-Hughes told me that Callender had made off with you (and other things of which the less said, the better), but then C. returned without you, and the next any of us heard was that you and old Alcuin had broken into the Master’s Lodge and run Lord Halifax through with that great rusty old spear that used to hang upon the wall of his study—you remember it, I am sure—which of course no one could believe. At any rate, I felt I must warn you and your sister that C. has managed to get himself elected Master, and has been going up to Town more often than anyone can at all account for; and I cannot help thinking that he must also have discovered Lady K’s direction. And he has made known that he intends to be in London on Samhain-night, which as you may imagine has caused some consternation: the Master of Merlin, to absent himself from the College’s Samhain rites? I think therefore that he must have some particular business afoot; and as he has not boasted of its importance to all and sundry—

  “Listen to this,” Gray said, breaking into the murmur of breakfast-table conversation, and read the letter out. “Does this not look as though they mean to make their attempt on Samhain-night itself?”

  This conclusion was not universally embraced—Sieur Germain, in particular, arguing that while a public festival might be the ideal setting for cutpurses and pickpockets, surely a poisoning was more easily conducted in privacy—but the danger was acknowledged to be sufficient that they must plan for this contingency as well.

  The remainder of that morning was therefore spent in composing what proved to be a distressingly long list of the means by which a poison might be administered to the most recognisable man in the kingdom, in full view of thousands of his guests, and in devising strategies by which they might keep both His Majesty and the members of the conspiracy under their collective surveillance. If the poison in question was the one they believed it to be—that which Master Alcuin’s book named Levenez an kalon, “heart’s delight”—then its flavour and odour were such as to be remarked in a bland dish but readily enough concealed in any sufficiently strong wine or “well-flavoured meat,” which might have helped to narrow the field at an ordinary family dinner but was of no use at all in the present case. That the conspirators could not afford the suspicions that must arise from any further deaths in the course of the ball, and that their supply of a poison so difficult of manufacture must be limited, suggested that there could be no question of adulterating whole tureens of soup or decanters of wine; the poison must be introduced more directly. If, therefore, His Majesty could not be persuaded by their warnings, they must try to catch the conspirators in the act, and to prevent its consequences. More they could not do, until Samhain-night itself.

  By now the occupants of the house had begun in earnest to grate on one another’s nerves. Sophie and Joanna bickered; Sieur Germain was by turns morose and garrulous, and Master Alcuin began to display a lack of patience that Gray, had he not been himself in a state of tension bordering on distraction, would have found quite shocking. Mrs. Wallis continued both infuriatingly vague and uncharacteristically fretful.

  For Gray, the vexatious daylight hours were made bearable by the long, blissful nights, which seemed almost to belong to another existence. If nothing else, he told himself, he and Sophie should at least have had these few nights together—alone together, with their wards shutting out all the rest of the world.

  That the wards had in fact been intended to shut in something else, however, was difficult to forget. Though that first morning’s strange metamorphoses had reversed themselves by nightfall and were every day less persistent, the accompanying phenomenon seemed concomitantly stronger; to wake each morning abuzz with magick not only replenished but, to all appearances, increased was not only a source of puzzlement and worry but made the coming day’s enforced captivity all the more exasperating.

  * * *

  At breakfast the next day—the last before Samhain-night—Mrs. Wallis received a letter that caused her to smile in a satisfied manner and, having enveloped herself in a voluminous cloak and strung about her throat an oddly familiar necklace, to absent herself from the house for several hours. When she returned, the rest of the family were summoned to the drawing-room, where—now wearing an assortment of peculiar jewellery—she at last acquainted them with her plan.

  “Your mother,” she began, nodding at Sophie and Joanna in turn, “was for some time in the habit of granting favours to persons who had urgent need of dissimulation or disguise. She was sometimes not particularly . . . discriminating in her choices . . .” Here Mrs. Wallis’s mouth twisted in the way Sophie had known all her life, but her eyes grew soft and distant. “In any case,” she went on after a moment, “there remain in London some few beneficiaries of Queen Laora’s assistance whom I have been able to locate, and who proved willing, eventually, to return to me the tokens they had received from her hands.”

  Ignoring Sophie’s exclamation of surprise at this cavalier treatment of the secrets her guardian had always been at such pains to conceal, Mrs. Wallis bent her head and lifted a thin gold chain up and over her coils of dark hair. Raising her face again, she presented the chain—and its small teardrop of polished obsidian—to Master Alcuin, who sat nearest. “Look at it,” she invited, “and tell them what magick you see.”

  “It is another of my mother’s charms against unwelcome attention,” said Joanna impatiently. “Are there—how many are there?”

  Mrs. Wallis did not reply.

  Examining more narrowly the various ornaments that Mrs. Wallis had not been wearing at breakfast, Sophie spied a slender silver ring set with a tiny globe of onyx; two bracelets—one, like that Gray had lost in Oxford, an obsidian bauble on a silken cord, and the other a heavy silver chain set with three midnight-black ovals; an elegant little copper hairpin topped by a trio of jet beads; and, last of all, a shawl-pin of elaborate design, in which a gleaming black teardrop made one petal of a particoloured flower.

  “Laora always favoured black stones for this purpose,” Mrs. Wallis said. “Sometimes jet or onyx, but obsidian was her favourite; she could feel their memory of the fires of Vulcan, she said.” Then she shook her head as though she had said something foolish.

  While Sophie had been remarking on the varied motifs of these objects, and Jenny and Sieur Germain exclaiming in surprise and wonder, Joanna, it appeared, had been counting them. “There are six,
” she crowed, “and six of us, besides Sophie. There is no reason in the world why I should not come with you—”

  “No, Joanna.” Never before, perhaps, had the rest of them been so well united.

  “Concealment is not everything,” Gray explained.

  “There will be mages present with sufficient talent to see through such charms,” added Master Alcuin, “and it may be that Miss Sophie will need to husband her own magick for other purposes . . .”

  “We must have other means of defending ourselves,” said Sophie, adding, with a nod at Sieur Germain, “magickal or otherwise, and we have no very clear idea of what we may have to do . . . Joanna, if you should be hurt . . .”

  Sophie thought she could perceive a softening in her sister’s eyes, and such kind of arguments might at length have reconciled her, had not Mrs. Wallis then said, “It is quite out of the question, Joanna. Your mother would never have consented to my involving you in such danger, at your age.”

  “I am only four years younger than Sophie,” Joanna retorted, blinking furiously, “and quite as clever—it is not right that I should be made to sit at home, doing nothing—”

  Quite plainly she could remain here no longer without material loss of dignity; Sophie was therefore not at all surprised when, abruptly, she sprang up from her chair and ran out of the room. Shooting a last glare at Mrs. Wallis, Sophie followed her—along the corridor, up the stairs and, at last, through the door of her bedroom, which Joanna tried, but failed, to slam in her sister’s face.

  “It is not fair,” she sobbed. Hot tears soaked into the front of Sophie’s gown. “I am always left out of everything, and—and—”

  “Not everything,” said Sophie, stroking Joanna’s hair. “But—”

  “And how dare she say that I am too young? As though I were a child, or—”