The Last Days of Magic: A Novel

by Mark Tompkins

  The decision to invade in late fall and brave the wet, cold Irish weather was also Richard’s. He believed that his archers would be at their most effective when the forests and undergrowth were barren. It would also surprise the Irish, since historically armadas sailed in the calm summer months.

  In a particularly poetic moment while lounging in bed, Richard mused to de Vere, “I want you to gallop behind a gale of arrows sweeping away the Irish forces and splash through a river of their blood.” Anne’s slim, pale hands clapped almost soundlessly while de Vere laughed.

  16

  What peace, so long as the whoredoms of thy mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts are so many?

  —2 Kings 9:22, King James Version

  And he [Manasseh] caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom: also he observed times, and used enchantments, and used witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards: he wrought much evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke him to anger.

  —2 Chronicles 33:6, King James Version

  Paris, France

  December 1392

  Queen Isabeau of France was dreaming of Ireland before she awoke to flat, silver light streaming into her opulent bedroom. The first full moon following the winter solstice was framed in a floor-to-ceiling window. Tonight she had made sure her husband, King Charles VI—now known more often as “the Mad” rather than his preferred “the Beloved”—was being cared for by her sister-in-law in his slightly less opulent bedroom on the other side of the royal residence, the Hôtel Saint-Pol, in the fourth arrondissement of Paris. While the nominal seat of government and the court of Charles the Mad was at the nearby Palais du Louvre, the true power of the throne lay here, in Isabeau’s shadow court, the witch court, known throughout Europe, by those few who knew, as the High Coven, for which she was the Grande Sorcière.

  A small clock on the mantel chimed 2:00 A.M., the time for her witches to gather. Before she could join them tonight, she must renew her bond—a bond through blood and time—to the founder of their coven, as she did after each solstice. Though still exhausted from her most recent trip to Norway, she climbed out of her canopy bed and pulled a silk robe over her nightgown. Gliding across her moonlit bedroom, she approached the wall and pressed a piece of molding. With a click a panel swung open.

  The Grande Sorcière entered into a perfectly square, windowless room. In the center, on a small gilded table, a single golden candle burned, filling the room with liquid yellow light. The Grande Sorcière knew that as long as she performed the rite, this candle, first lit by her kinswoman Taddea de la Barthe 112 years ago, would not go out and would not burn down. She sat on a plain wooden chair, gazed into the flame, and began the ritual of remembering.

  She was rowing a boat up a river of blood under a dark purple sky, where a sun and a moon spun in a tight arc. Along the black sand bank, row upon row of women, thousands of them, each of them on fire, turned their heads to watch her pass.

  She tied the boat to a stone wharf and stepped out onto a staircase, which led down farther than she could see.

  She walked down the staircase and entered one of the many doors along its edge.

  She was in the body of eight-year-old Taddea, standing at a familiar second-story window at the edge of a large square in a town she knew to be Toulouse in 1275.

  She could feel the man’s rough hand under her chin, squeezing her face, smell the ale and sausage on his breath as he bent down to her. “You must watch,” he growled. The Grande Sorcière and her predecessors did not care enough about him to remember the man’s name. “See what happens to your kind, what we’ve done to your mother.”

  He thought he was forcing her to watch. He was not; she would have watched anyway. “Some, they start off blubbering, some try to be brave, like your mother, but they all end up thrashing in the flames.” He laughed as her mother’s thin shift burned away.

  It was true, the body that had once held her mother, Angéle de la Barthe, was screaming and flailing against its bonds, tied to a stake in the center of the flaming pyre as a large crowd cheered. What was untrue was that a real witch’s body writhed in pain at the stake. It flailed in anguish because its spirit had flown, and the body was lost without it. Before the first lick of flame on skin, Taddea had felt her mother’s spirit enter her body, her mother’s blood surge within her own veins.

  The inquisitor, Hugo de Beniols, had convicted her mother of having sexual intercourse with Satan. That was not true. It had been an incubus. As for the charge of kidnapping infants to feed the monstrous spawn of that unholy union, there had been no spawn. Her mother took the incubus purely for her pleasure, and the kidnapped infants were used to create reagents for a variety of enchantments.

  “You’ll end up on the stake,” the man said, his voice softened, “if you don’t please your king. You’d be out there burning now if not for his grace.” In the square the body blackened, crisped, and finally stopped moving. The crowd, many holding scented linen handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths, drifted off.

  “Come along,” the man said, moving his grip to her arm and pulling her away from the window toward the door. “As long as your king, Philip the Bold, holds you under his protection, you’ll be safe.” The Grande Sorcière felt Taddea make the decision that it was not she who would need protection.

  The Grande Sorcière withdrew from the candle flame and smiled. She could feel Taddea’s blood, renewed, flowing through her own body.

  Taddea had been loaded into a carriage, which took her to the court of King Philip III. At first she had performed tricks to amuse the court and, in private, divinations for Philip the Bold. Soon, though, he had become afflicted with debilitating dysentery, and her role evolved. Taddea became his constant caretaker and spokeswoman, bringing other women into the court to help her. Philip was the first of an unbroken chain of nine French kings who suffered mysterious maladies, a chain that continued with the Grande Sorcière’s husband. While poison was often whispered about, suspicion never fell on the women of the High Coven.

  As the Grande Sorcière stood, a warm, lustful wave washed through her blood. She would summon the king’s younger brother, the duc d’Orléans, to her bedchamber later. First she must meet with her witches. Since Taddea had formed the High Coven during her second year at court, it had always been ruled by her direct descendants, three of whom, like the Grande Sorcière, had become queen of France. The Grande Sorcière left the candle chamber and walked out of her bedroom and down the short corridor to her private audience room.

  Valentina Visconti, the twenty-six-year-old wife of the king’s younger brother, followed her into the room, trailed by Charles the Mad on tiptoes. The Grande Sorcière gave her a questioning look. Valentina shrugged. “I couldn’t shoo him away.”

  “Your Highness.” The Grande Sorcière gave an almost imperceptible nod in her husband’s direction.

  “What? How can you see Us?” Charles cried. “We are made of glass. It must be these clothes, you can see Our clothes.” Charles began to pull at his clothing.

  “Be careful, Your Highness, you may shatter yourself,” said Valentina.

  Charles froze.

  “Take him over to the corner,” said the Grande Sorcière.

  “Come, Your Highness, I will help you undress.” Valentina carefully led Charles away.

  Valentina had come to the Grande Sorcière’s attention through the system of lower covens spread throughout Europe. At the age of fourteen, Valentina had poisoned her first son, illegitimate and unbaptized, to harvest his blood and fat to make an ointment that allowed her to travel long distances very quickly without being seen. It was this difficult spell that created the false but growing rumor that witches could fly. At fifteen Valentina was initiated into the High Coven; when Valentina was nineteen, the Grande Sorcière arranged for her to marry the king’s brother; and at twenty she was appointed by the Grande Sorcière as the coven’s new Keeper of the King.

  The
other members of the coven rose and bowed to their Grande Sorcière in greeting.

  Joanna of Navarre, also twenty-six, had, when she was but seven, sewn her sleeping father, King Charles “the Bad” of Navarre, into his bedsheet, doused it with brandy, and lit it on fire. While her father squirmed, screamed, and burned to death, she collected his flames into blue glass boxes. Death flames were the most powerful reagent that could be extracted from an adult human and were used in spells to make the living do anything commanded, but only for a short time, until the flames consumed their internal organs. They could also be used to make the freshly dead talk.

  Béatrix de Montjean, seventeen, nursed her daughter, Catherine. The Grande Sorcière could already sense power emerging in the infant. Béatrix was adept in the preparation of potions and poisons, items always useful at court. She was also the coven’s wet nurse. The Grande Sorcière’s own infant daughter, Michelle, was sleeping in a crib beside her chair.

  From the corner Charles watched Béatrix move her daughter from one breast to the other. “Polish Us,” he murmured to Valentina as she carefully removed the last of his undergarments. “We must be perfectly clear.”

  “As you wish, Your Highness,” replied Valentina. “Joanna, please bring an empty vial over.”

  Matteuccia de Francesco clapped her hands. “Back to your lessons,” she ordered the three young girls standing next to her. Matteuccia, a sixteen-year-old former Italian nun, had become known as the Witch of Ripabianca due to her success in necromancy, the art of divining through and animating the dead, even those long passed. She had been brought into the High Coven a year earlier as tutor to the Grande Sorcière’s daughters.

  The Grande Sorcière sat at a table off to one side of the large room, where Joanna joined her. A young eunuch, illiterate and mute—his tongue had been cut out—served them hot spiced wine while a similarly maimed boy brought a gold platter stacked with small fig pies and balls of puffed dough covered with honey.

  “We dreamed of Ireland again,” said the Grande Sorcière, selecting a pastry.

  “Have you divined meaning in these dreams, Your Highness?” asked Joanna.

  “Our spies in England tell Us the Vatican has sponsored a full-scale invasion of Ireland for Richard.”

  “They could not possibly succeed.”

  “Probably not. But in war there is always opportunity. We must be vigilant for an opening to extend Our influence into England. Or even, given some weakening in their veil, Ireland itself. That is what the dream is telling Us.”

  The women paused as a platter of cinnamon-custard tarts was added to the table.

  “Our coven in Norway grows powerful within their court,” the Grande Sorcière continued. “However, Our trip there showed Us that the Nephilim are almost all gone. The Vatican has done too good a job killing them off. It will not be the rich pickings We had hoped. Ireland would be a true prize. If Richard fails, We must find some other channel into that magical land, while there is still magic there to be taken.”

  “Just imagine the force of a spell powered by the fat of a pure-blood Sidhe infant,” mused Joanna. “I would keep a clutch of their women just to make them.”

  “That is but a minor part of what We would gain,” said the Grande Sorcière. “You must think in much greater terms. We would force the Sidhe to reveal the secrets of their enchantments and their knowledge of using Ardor. We would become powerful without equal.”

  It was through patience that the High Coven had been built. Bit by bit, king by king, it gained control of the royal family, then the French Church, then the country, building an unassailable power base for the good of the bloodline. But her patience was being tested. Already she had grown the High Coven more than any since its founder, and she hungered to add subjugation of the Sidhe to her legacy.

  Cries of “Yes! Oh, yes, keep polishing,” came from Charles, interrupting her thoughts. The Grande Sorcière cast an irritated look at Valentina, who smiled and gave one of her shrugs from the corner. In a few more strokes, Charles ejaculated into her hand, then ran out the door yelling, “We are completely clear! We are clear!” His shouts faded down the hallway. Valentina scraped the royal semen off her hand into a vial and sealed it. While spells calling for the seed of a king tended to be more flash than substance, it was always handy to have an ample supply available. Valentina wiped her hand on her skirt and joined them at the table, helping herself to the pastries.

  “Valentina.”

  “Yes, Your Highness.”

  “Help Joanna gather more death flames. We may have need of them.”

  “Certainly.” Valentina licked custard off her finger. “It is never hard to find people to burn.”

  SHORTLY AFTER SUNRISE, in a forested valley of the Wicklow Mountains in east Ireland, an old Celt trudged up the trail grumbling to himself about Sidhe in general and Sidhe witches in particular. He led a black bull by a rope tied around its neck, the only bull he had left, the other having been taken by wolves the previous winter. Now it was to be killed for nothing more than a single Taghairm divination ritual, which required the practitioner to be wrapped in the hide of a freshly skinned bull. But he would have to be witless to turn down a request from a Sidhe witch, especially one from the Adhene clan, and the farmer did not consider himself witless. A request my arse, he thought as he spat on the ground. It was an order. Then he looked about to make sure the witch had not seen him being disrespectful. An Adhene witch in her green-and-brown paint could be hard to spot in these woods.

  . . . . .

  A brown hawk soared along the course of the rain swollen river Dargle as it flowed from the eastern slope of Mount Djouce. With a loud screech, she swooped over the crest of the four-hundred-foot cliff the river tumbled down. She circled once and then flapped her descent toward a clearing along the base of the waterfall. The hawk’s talons reached for the ground, touched, leaving Rhoswen walking to absorb the momentum of her hawk form.

  Rhoswen searched along the river’s edge until she found a slender piece of slate and a granite rock the size of her fist. Using the granite, she chipped the slate and within a few minutes created a sharp, jagged edge.

  The old Celt approached, removing his hat. He held the bull’s rope in one hand while he worried the hat in his other. Somewhat gruffly he said, “Aren’t you required to use a wild bull for Taghairm?”

  “Let go of the rope,” Rhoswen ordered.

  The man immediately obeyed.

  “There, now he is wild.”

  Then Rhoswen addressed the bull. “Your master is unhappy. I must wrap myself in your skin, but that would leave him without your services for his cows. Will you consider just loaning me your skin?”

  The bull craned its neck and let out a bellow.

  “I hope your master remembers what you have done for him today.”

  The bull snorted.

  “Do not worry, I will shed my own blood so you do not have to.” Rhoswen pulled the flint blade across her palm, and a narrow stream of blood splattered on the ground. She smeared her hand across the bull’s neck, leaving a red trail, then pressed her palm between its eyes.

  She was looking out of the bull’s eyes. There was no Sidhe witch standing in the clearing, only an old man with an astonished face. She gazed into the spray from the waterfall, lit with sunlight diffused through thin clouds. White mist filled her vision. She focused on her love for her homeland, and the core of the mist thickened into the shape of Ireland. She asked four questions: When will the English attack? What magical forces aid them? How can the Sidhe stop it? Will Aisling be able to help?

  Sections of mist began to solidify and form not one but several shapes. Before they became identifiable, the mist faded from the lower part of her vision as a gust of black wind scattered it from the upper part. Soon only one strand of light was left, squirming like an injured serpent while it illuminated a solitary three-leaf clover, which she, as the bull, ate.

  Rhoswen stood again in the clearing, squeezing
her fist tight to stop the flow of blood. “The answer to a question I did not ask, few answers to the ones I did,” she said to the bull. “I do not know whether to thank you or skin you. Go back to your cows.”

  The old man walked backward bowing, repeating, “Thank you! Thank you!” He turned and fled, leading his spared animal away.

  Rhoswen wondered what she was going to tell her father, King Fearghal. Little had been revealed that would help him prepare the Middle Kingdom. Only that there was more than one threat, that many sources were working to blind foresight of how things would unfold, and that there was no way to predict if the outcome would be good or bad for the Sidhe.

  There had been no answers, not even hints, about Aisling, which was not surprising given her transitory state. Aisling’s fate was in her own hands—and perhaps the fate of Ireland, at least in the short term.

  Rhoswen walked along the river, contemplating the signs. The final vision—the one of her consuming a three-leaf clover illuminated by a strand of light in the form of an injured serpent—appeared to signify that if the Morrígna was ever to fully return, she, Rhoswen, must hold space for the Goddess, but that it would not be an easy task. And there had been no signs to indicate how long this might take—one year, one hundred years, one thousand years—if the Morrígna returned at all.

  She had spent her young life, barely two centuries, absorbed in her studies of Sidhe enchantments, and humans were largely a mystery to her. But it did not take divination for her to see that foreign humans would be Ireland’s greatest threat over time. If the Morrígna was sending her a message, was truly giving her a mission that might last a millennium, then she needed to learn more about human ways. Maybe it was time, she thought, to take a human mate, or at least one who was half human.