But this too, it seemed, their enemies had anticipated; their combined magicks met some palpable barrier, and His Majesty continued his invocation undeterred.
Sing to him, Sophie, Gray silently pleaded, as though there were some possibility that she might hear. Had she seen what her stepfather was doing, or guessed it? Did she understand what might be at stake?
Then the rolling Latin cadences faltered, and—yes, there—from somewhere far to Gray’s left, in the fraught, puzzled silence, a clear, sweet voice was singing.
The voice grew stronger. Lowering the chalice, the King stared out into the throng, his brow furrowing. For one exulting moment Gray thought the danger past. Then Lord Carteret leant across the corner of the altar, apparently remonstrating with his monarch, and from the ends of the dais a fair-haired man and a dark one edged over to join the conference.
All about them, people began to whisper, and the whispers grew as Gray wove through the crowd, towards the sound of Sophie’s voice.
“Your Majesty.” Lord Carteret’s voice was low and urgent. “Remember your duty—to the gods—to your kingdom—to your people . . .”
The King made no answer—or none that Gray could hear.
“The King of Britain,” said the fair-haired man, “surely will not be persuaded by a siren song to dishonour Britain’s gods . . .”
“Remember Ulysses at the mast, Your Majesty . . .”
The low, cajoling voices went on and on—working some persuasion, magickal or otherwise, which Sophie could hold at bay but not defeat. The tide of whispers ebbed and flowed, but Gray could hear nothing clearly but her voice. It seemed to him that all the world revolved around the two fixed points of Sophie and her father—revolved at an excruciating crawl, as though caught in some immense Arachne’s Web.
Some instinct warned him in the nick of time that a more immediate danger threatened. He ducked sharply, just avoiding the spurt of flame that passed harmlessly over his head to scorch the opposite wall; on one side of him a woman screamed, on the other a man cried, “Jove’s blood! What foolery is this, on such a night?” Turning, he muttered a hasty shielding-spell to fling a wall of magick between himself and his assailant. Somewhere just behind him, Sophie sang on—an Erse melody in the Mixolydian: It will not be long, love, till our wedding day . . .
Around him, vaguely, Gray heard more people shouting, shrieking. He struggled against a tide of panicked flight as his fellow guests took to their heels. At last, across an empty expanse of cobbled courtyard littered with festive debris, he spied the source of the threat.
Sophie’s voice faltered.
“Sing!” he hissed, risking a backward glance. “I can hold off the others, but you must stop him from drinking; the poison is in the wine, I am sure of it. Look, they are whispering at him still.” As he spoke he held out one hand; when Sophie clasped it, he drew her forward and pulled her tight against his side. Though her eyes were wide, her face ashen, the words of her oddly chosen spell-song again rang clear and true. Reassured, he let her go.
But the effort of fighting her father’s sense of duty had taken its toll of her other magick. “You had better have stayed at home, boy,” Lord Merton taunted, with a mocking smile of recognition, as he raised his hands for a renewed assault.
Gray poured magick steadily into the shielding-spell wrapped about himself and Sophie, and held resolutely still as a rain of fire-spurts, increasingly large and numerous, fizzled into nothingness about them. His opponent’s confounded expression gave him more satisfaction than he cared to admit, but it would not do to be overconfident. For now they were safe enough—but no mage could hold a shielding-spell forever.
“To me!” cried Lord Merton, staring wildly about him. “Foul treachery! They mean harm to the King!” Flames streaked towards Sophie and Gray, only to rebound harmlessly. Their author roared in frustration.
And why, indeed, Gray wondered, should Lord Merton be fighting all alone?
He spied his brother-in-law, just east of the altar, in the act of subduing some elegantly dressed stranger; Master Alcuin had come to magickal blows, not, to Gray’s surprise, with the Professor, but with Woodville. Of Mrs. Wallis he could see no sign; she might, he supposed, be on the far side of the altar—or, indeed, have sensibly taken shelter from this storm, no place for a healer’s magick.
But for the group round the altar, frozen between panic and devotion to duty—the spellbound King and his earnest lecturers; the plump little Queen sobbing; the foreign dignitaries crouched on the steps with their arms about their heads—none now remained in the courtyard but attackers and attacked. Those of the invited guests who had not vanished altogether were ranged along the outer rim of the courtyard, hugging the walls or cowering behind pillars or the half-denuded trees. The men of the King’s Guard standing to attention on either side of the gates had come forth, pikes at the ready, to defend their monarch—but against whom, or what? Though Sophie had let go her own concealing magick, all but she were still shielded by her mother’s charms, which few guardsmen would be equipped to defeat. Rather than level their fearsome weaponry against one unarmed girl, they stood and looked bewildered, while Lord Merton, the Professor, and Sieur Germain’s prisoner bellowed orders at them, which they could not understand how to obey.
Though the courtyard was nearly empty, the noise seemed to have tripled, the confusion multiplied; fire-spells left the air thin and shimmering with heat. But Sophie’s song-spell still held King Henry from drinking the fatal draught.
* * *
Suddenly a stocky little figure scaled one corner of the dais, to balance precariously atop the altar beside the heap of offerings. The Queen scrabbled frantically at her son’s ankles, but he shook her off. “What is this madness?” Prince Roland demanded. “Who are you? What is it that you want?”
Everyone ignored him—or nearly everyone.
At the sound of her half-brother’s furious voice, wavering uncertainly between baritone and treble, tears stung Sophie’s eyes. Blinking furiously, she pulled off her masque, the better to scrub them away, but her own voice caught in her throat, and her song died into choked silence.
She stared up at him—Joanna’s age, or nearly, bewildered by the flames and noise but prodded into reckless bravery by fear for those he loved—and felt that to be this boy’s near kin might be something.
“Sophie!” Alerted by Gray’s urgent summons, she saw, to her horror, that the whisperers had prevailed; King Henry was lifting the chalice again, preparing to finish the rite she had interrupted.
“No! Your Majesty, please, you must not!” she cried, half sobbing with frustration and dismay. From all directions familiar voices echoed her words, but the invocation went on—though even from this distance she could see the trembling of her father’s hands.
“Sophie, you must stop him!” Gray’s voice was ragged. He had put off his masque and shed his coat; his shirt was damp, and his face ran with perspiration.
Sophie searched her mind frantically for some fragment of melody, and—for the first time in her memory—could think of none. Her heart seemed too large for her breast; its desperate pounding threatened to burst her ribs; the prayer was almost at an end, and then—
I am safe from Lord Carteret and the Iberian Emperor now, even if they discover who I am. But my father is not. Surely this is the moment Mama’s letter spoke of, the moment I must recognise when it comes.
* * *
King Henry bowed low to the altar; straightened; began to raise the cup to his lips. Gray tried to shout one last warning, but the words would not come.
But from behind him there came another voice—familiar yet utterly strange: “Henry!”
The King raised his head.
“Henry, as you love me, do not drink!”
The King’s eyes widened. His face drained of all colour; the chalice slipped from his fingers and rang against the sto
ne steps at his feet.
Lord Merton—Woodville—allies and enemies wheeled to stare at him. The fair-haired man alone did not seem drawn to the spectacle; even before the sound of chalice’s impact died away, he was reaching into the breast of his coat—metal gleamed briefly in the torchlight—Gray heard Sophie cry out in alarm.
The long poniard was whisked from the stranger’s hand just as Gray was beginning to summon it; it rose high into the air, then fell, hilt down, to strike its owner smartly on the crown of his head. He staggered, and Master Alcuin, appearing behind him seemingly from nowhere, dropped him where he stood with a neat, sharp blow to the back of the skull.
The Queen cried, “Edric!” and fell to her knees beside the fair-haired man; the King, however, seemed not to have noticed the momentary disturbance.
Gray turned on one heel, following Henry’s gaze, and drew a deep, shuddering breath. Though he had seen only once, and not in life, the face Sophie wore, he knew it at once for the young Queen Laora—the Midnight Queen herself.
All around them the air buzzed with gasps, whispers, the rustle of heavy skirts, as His Majesty’s guests surged forward, forgetting their terror in the wonder of this revelation.
Then—after a moment that seemed to last an age—King Henry’s voice, heavy with some strong emotion: “Laora . . .”
And Queen Laora vanished, giving place to a slender young woman of middling height, dark-eyed and chestnut-haired, who clasped her slim sun-browned hands and said, “Your Majesty, I ask your pardon, for indeed I am not she . . .”
But all those present could guess, now, who this stranger must be, and—save perhaps for her father—found the return of the lost Princess at least as scandalously exciting as that brief, misleading glimpse of the long-dead Queen.
“Your Majesty.” Sieur Germain turned his prisoner over to the nearest guardsman and approached the dais with a respectful bow. “The Princess and her friends, myself among them, ask pardon also for this . . . disruption. That cup, from which you would have drunk, contained a poison—” Indignant protests from the conspirators, and gasps of horror from the crowd.
Gray shivered; so near the river, the night air was growing chill and damp. He bent to retrieve his coat, and shrugged it on over yet another ruined shirt and waistcoat.
“The same, we believe,” Sieur Germain continued, “that felled Lord Halifax, late Master of Merlin College. Our warning to you was perhaps not . . . In short, I beg Your Majesty will forgive us our transgressions against the laws of hospitality, for they were motivated only by our earnest fear for Your Majesty’s life . . .”
It was a pretty speech, but its object seemed to have caught little of its meaning. “The Princess . . . ?” he said, staring.
“The Princess,” called someone whom Gray could not see, “has saved King Henry’s life.”
First a few voices, then many, from all about the courtyard; first ragged and uncertain, but quickly gaining authority: “Vive la princesse! Vive la princesse!”
Then a man’s voice rose above the ovation: “Sons and daughters of Breizh! Have foreigners not ruled our country long enough? Must we wait forty years more for the old Duc to make up his mind? Or shall we unite behind a new champion? Here is our Breizhek Queen—here, friends, is our true monarch! You see her lineage; you have seen her power—and her mercy. Will you follow her?”
The cheering faltered for a moment; then a new chant was taken up by fewer, but more vehement, voices: “Vive ar rouanez—Long live the Breizhek Queen!”
From those whose allegiance still lay all this side the Manche, rose opposing shouts of “Long live the King!”—“Britain undivided!”—“À bas la bâtarde!” For if the Midnight Queen was a kind of heroine in Breizh, here in England Laora was only “that Breton harlot,” the faithless traitoress who had met her death while fleeing with some illicit lover.
At first Sophie seemed struck dumb with sheer surprise. “Stop!” she cried at last, her hands clenching into fists. “Stop it, all of you!”
Disconcertingly, she seemed to have gained several inches in height.
“I am Queen Laora’s daughter, indeed,” she went on—the crowd having gone abruptly silent—“and a daughter of Breizh, but there the tale ends. If you have been led to believe otherwise, I am heartily sorry.”
Then, with a determination in which only Gray, perhaps, could have recognised bewilderment and alarm, she approached the dumbfounded King, her eyes downcast, and knelt to him in all her Samhain finery. Her voice low and earnest, but reaching somehow to every corner of the courtyard, she repeated the very words which Gray himself had once been so foolish as to speak to her: “Your devoted servant, Your Majesty.”
Of what happened next, Gray would later remember only that, alerted by the commotion, those of the royal guardsmen on duty—or off it—elsewhere in the Palace, now arrived in rather bewildered force, to swell the noise and confusion of the gathering, and that Lord Carteret, abruptly trimming his sails to this new breeze, gestured expansively at Sophie as though to say, You see? I promised you your Princess, and here she is . . .
In the presence of so many formidable men-at-arms, Lord Merton prudently took his cue from Lord Carteret by choosing to melt away into the crowd. But young Woodville—actuated perhaps by the now apoplectic Professor, or perhaps by his own enthusiasm—launched an ill-aimed volley of hailstones at Gray and Master Alcuin, who stood between him and Sophie. Gray threw up another hasty shielding-spell and cried a warning to Sophie, who, springing to her feet, did the same.
The only one of Woodville’s missiles to connect at all struck the Crown Prince a glancing blow to the temple; he glared at its source, and with a look of contempt drew from the damp air a brief, drenching shower of rain.
The resulting wave of nervous laughter sent the dripping Woodville into a fury. Hailstones and fire-bolts erupted from the air, directed wildly and none too carefully at the Princes, at Sophie, at Master Alcuin, and at Gray—and thus threatening everyone in the general vicinity of the altar dais.
Titters gave way to a new access of shrieking and panicked flight. Now however, the men of the King’s Guard came into their own; officers bellowed terse orders, and in short order the milling crowd had been tamed and the unfortunate Woodville was sprawled face downward on the cobblestones, with a guardsman’s boot firmly planted in the small of his back.
And so, for a moment, all seemed to be well.
Then someone cried, “A healer, quickly!” and all eyes turned thither on the instant.
Several gentlemen and ladies clutched heads bruised by hailstones or nursed limbs from which the clothing had been singed away; some stood, others sat or knelt on the cobbles, looking dazed. In their midst, however, a single, half-familiar figure lay supine, her arms outspread, her heavy midnight-blue skirts awkwardly twisted about her lower limbs.
Gray saw it and cried out in dismay, but his exclamation, like everyone else’s, was lost in Sophie’s high, horrified shrieking.
CHAPTER XXXII
In Which Sophie Makes a Confession
Sophie stared at the still, supine body of Mrs. Wallis and, for the first time in nearly a decade, remembered.
She remembered a day in early spring, a timid beginning after a long and bitter winter. The girls had teased Mama all the morning to walk out with them, and at last she agreed, though warning them that they must go slowly. She had grown round again, and Sophie was old enough now to understand what this meant, but this time, for some reason, she seemed more cheerful.
The day being mild, they decided at length to strike out from the park into the lanes and byways of the manor. Here Sophie was the leader, knowing as she did almost every corner of the estate, and every tenant, but so happy were they to be free of the house that before long they had wandered beyond even Sophie’s knowledge.
They stopped to rest beside an old well in someone’s disused orchard;
the trees were uncared for, full of deadwood, and the ground beneath them awash in the remains of last autumn’s windfalls. It was a lovely spot, in its own way; wild birds and small beasts had come to feast on the bounty of tree and field. But here, too, they met with less congenial company: a brace of adventurers, deserting officers by their dress, who had tried their hand at poaching and were building up a fire to roast their catch.
They had killed a hare, and with an obsequious civility that concealed something quite other, invited Mama and the girls to help them cook and eat it; Mama’s polite refusal made one of them angry, but the other only tried harder to persuade her.
“Girls!” Mama called to them, just before the taller man approached her, cupping a hand under her chin to lift her beautiful face to his. “All of you, run away home! I shall follow you in a little while. Go, now!”
Amelia, not waiting to be told again, turned and fled; Joanna hesitated, but at Sophie’s urging retreated a little way.
Sophie herself could not seem to move, could not stop herself from watching. The men were grinning, leering, hateful and hopeful at once; Mama twitched away, but they had her cornered against a tree-trunk. She could not speak, it seemed, could scarcely move.
Sophie was both terrified and furious. Whatever the men intended, Mama did not like it; she looked at them as Sophie had often seen her look at Father, a look like a caged fox. Sophie did not stop to think but reached for the pebbles she had been collecting and began hurling them, with more vehemence than care, at the nearest of the attackers. At first her missiles, not surprisingly, scarcely even drew his notice. At the same time, however, a wind sprang up, swift and biting despite the day’s mildness, and growing increasingly savage, and now the pebbles began, inexplicably, to burst on impact, while the stones of the old well set up a curious, angry humming and at last begin to splinter and crack.
The tall man took notice now, and turned to glare at her.
“Sophia!” Mama cried. “Sophia, stop it at once, and run away home!”
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