Mistress by Magick

by Laura Navarre

  Not to mention wreaking havoc on Calyx’s own plan.

  “Madre de Dios, that’s nothing new. Half the officers in this fleet despise each other,” Calyx muttered. “Did you ever manage to choose a battle formation, or should we wait for another council tomorrow after the bleeding Mass?”

  His contemptuous tone made an ugly tide of color rise in Nicanor’s sallow face. Swiftly Diego stepped in. “Don Alonso fell back upon the classic formation—the line of ships with flanking horns.”

  That was the conventional choice, which worked well enough when the opposing navy agreeably engaged them head on. His secret belief, clearly shared by the discredited Don Pedro, was that the English seadogs—with their smaller, more maneuverable race-built galleons—would eschew a classic engagement in favor of less traditional tactics.

  Under other circumstances, Calyx could have dictated their placement, but the Admiral of the Ocean Sea had denied him his seat in these councils. Fortunately, his crew’s loyalty was rock solid. He’d confirmed that while Nicanor was playing capitán on the San Martin. In the heat of battle, every sailor aboard would rally behind him and mutiny at his command.

  In fact, Calyx was counting on it. But he must also count on Thomas Knyvett, a man he’d never met.

  “How many men did we lose in Corunna?” Nicanor asked, sounding sullen. That was a sore point with the young capitán, who’d permitted generous shore leave for both tercio and crew. Dozens had failed to return, which meant the tercio was now under strength.

  A lieutenant obediently launched into the tally. Calyx seized his moment and slipped away.

  From the bonaventure deck, high in the stern, the Armada’s glowing lanterns spread across the midnight sea. Don Alonso had issued no orders to conceal their presence. Calyx pulled out his spyglass and carefully uncovered the precious lens. The list of rendezvous points provided by Knyvett floated through his brain.

  Portland Bill. The Isle of Wight. Sandwich.

  If they met no resistance in the Channel tomorrow, the Arcángel could reach Portland Bill by nightfall. Of course, he fully expected to meet resistance.

  As he squinted into the spyglass, hands delicate as angel’s wings on the sensitive instrument, a cool voice floated to him on the crisp salt breeze.

  “What do thy stars and planets foretell?”

  His shoulders stiffened. He cocked a wary eye from the scope to find the Blade of God lounging against the mast. On the eve of battle, the man had shed his cleric’s robes for a breastplate and vambraces that sheathed his corded forearms in steel. His blue enameled broadsword he wore openly, belted at his side, with the air of a man accustomed to its presence.

  The impression that surfaced in Calyx’s mind was of a man who’d shed a distasteful disguise and reclaimed his rightful place.

  Frowning, he raised the spyglass and resumed his patient efforts with the focus. “I didn’t know you studied the stars and planets, priest.”

  Mordred said nothing.

  Calyx sighed. What harm would it do to tell him? Since his replacement by the unpopular Nicanor, the entire ship was already awash in superstitious mutters.

  “Mars, the planet of war, is heavily afflicted,” he said flatly, “and poorly placed in Philip’s chart. Mercury is Retrograde, which means miscommunication, missives gone astray, travel mishaps and the like. Finally, when we sailed, the Moon was Void of Course—an ill-omened time to launch any venture. Usually, that means unexpected reversals.

  “In brief, señor, disaster is written in our stars. But I’m not Philip’s personal astrologer. The man who is lacked the courage to tell him.”

  As he gazed out to sea, the Blade of God looked impenetrable as a fortress. The dim glow of the stern lantern cast the red scar raking across his brow in sharp relief. The light picked out the lines around his ruthless mouth, the grooves of hardship and pain between his brows.

  Not a young man, Calyx thought suddenly. Nor a particularly happy one.

  He’d heard the Blades of God embraced a harsh discipline. But this particular Blade had never struck him as particularly godly.

  “I see,” Mordred said softly. “In that case, Philip’s fate is sealed. I was raised with an abiding respect for the power of prophecy.”

  Still the man seemed curiously untroubled by what he was hearing. Calyx trained his spyglass toward the northern horizon. Where the indigo bowl of heaven curled down to meet the sea, the dark blot of the English coast stood out.

  England, the heretic isle. The island that had cast Jayne out. For the hundredth time, he wondered where she’d fled.

  I ought to have gone with her. I should have made her finish what she was trying to tell me—

  “Thou hast a curious history,” Mordred said. “Thou and thy father. I too suffered, shall we say, troubled relations with mine.”

  Calyx’s gut knotted. He didn’t discuss Rodrigo de Zamorra—not ever. Which made the confidences he’d murmured into Jayne’s tousled hair that night in his bed all the more extraordinary.

  “You’re a Blade of God, señor,” he said curtly. “Your only father is Jehovah.”

  Mordred’s mouth tightened as though the holy Name pained him. His blunt fingers twisted the heavy signet that gleamed against his knuckle.

  “I loved and hated my father.” The Blade’s voice was clipped. “Just as my sons loved and hated me.”

  “Your sons?” Calyx lowered the spyglass and shot him a curious glance. “I thought the Blades of God were celibate.”

  A harsh laugh scraped from Mordred’s throat. “This one is, for certain. But I was not always thus. Once upon a time, I fathered two sons. Both of them dead now, long forgotten by all but me. Forsooth, ’tis better thus.”

  Appalled, Calyx shook his head. He’d dreamed of having sons himself someday—a useless, dangerous dream with his bad blood. “Cristo! Your own sons.”

  “They were monsters.” The other man leaned against the mast and brooded. “The world is better off without them.”

  Abruptly, those glacial eyes slid toward Calyx. “Tell me now about the key at thy throat. Was it an heirloom from thy father?”

  Caught off guard by the abrupt change in topic, he shifted his weight like a sailor on a tilting deck. “No.”

  Those pale eyes bored into him, as though they would pierce through his reluctance and dredge from murky memory all his buried secrets.

  “From thy mother, then.” Mordred nodded. “Dost thou know what lock it opens?”

  What the Devil is he driving at? With an effort that made sweat break out against his brow, Calyx wrenched his eyes away from that burning gaze. His skin tightened and tingled with instinct. The same frisson of awareness arced through him when Jayne worked her weather magick.

  There was magick at play here. He didn’t question how he knew it. Yet the incontrovertible certainty washed through him that he must, under no circumstances, look into the Blade of God’s ice-blue eyes.

  Pivoting, Calyx strode to the rail. The Armada had begun to form the vast, curving crescent that wreaked havoc and sewed terror across the seas. He’d anchored the Arcángel along one of the great horns that guarded the Spanish flank. Before him, a swath of moonlight painted the sea’s obsidian surface, lighting a path straight to Portland Bill—or the Isle of Wight, or Sandwich—where his unknown kinsman waited.

  The floorboards groaned as Mordred stepped up beside him. Calyx stared straight ahead, but kept the man in his peripheral vision. An eddy of tension rippled through him.

  “Thy key,” Mordred murmured. “It dost fascinate the scholar in me, and thou dost always wear it. Indulge my curiosity. Every key must open something.”

  Impatient with the man’s infernal probing, Calyx thrust the spyglass through his belt. “Not this one. If it does, its former master left no instructions. It’s a family keepsake, no more.”

  “The language upon it is Hebrew, is it not?” Mordred paused. “The language of Heaven?”

  Somehow his casual query seemed inf
used with hidden meaning. Calyx sliced him a sharp look. “If you want the key for some religious trophy, you can turn your sights elsewhere. I wear it in my mother’s memory.”

  “Not thy mother.” Those ice-pale eyes seared into him. “I think thou must wear it at thy father’s bidding. I recognized thee the moment I first saw thee. I have seen thy kind before. What I do not yet comprehend, Calyx de Zamorra, is what manner of turmoil roils the legions of Heaven, angel against angel? Why should thou and thy kind interfere in the mortal realm?”

  Angel against angel. The words seared into him like comets flaming across the vault of Heaven. Jayne’s urgent questions on the longboat, the preposterous claims he’d been so quick to dismiss, whispered through his brain.

  “The Bible itself states that Nephilim exist. What if your mother told the truth?”

  His mother had been mortal. Of that, he harbored not a shred of doubt. But she claimed his father had been...

  “An angel?” Raw with disbelief, the words scraped from his throat. He turned away and gazed blindly at the night-dark sea. “Has the whole world gone mad?”

  “The thing is,” Mordred murmured behind him, “this ship is thick with celestial beings. Thou art only the first of several. The others, the ones who slipped away in Corunna, I know from yore as staunch Tudor allies. As for thy loyalty, and that of thy crew, I can afford to harbor no doubt.”

  Sudden instinct howled a warning in his ear. Gripping his sword, he pivoted—

  The blow caught him in the temple, sharp and sudden, a fist armored in steel and fired by deadly purpose. A white sun of pain exploded in his head, obliterating thought and sense and reason. Then he was falling, the deck tilting away. The ship’s rail dug cruelly against his ribs as he toppled over it.

  He fell like an angel plummeting from Heaven, fell from the light of God and grace, fell into an abyss of endless night.

  When the cold sea closed over his head, the darkness swallowed him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Zamiel sprawled naked in his bed in the inn at Calais, limbs heavy with languor and sexual satisfaction. Beside him, his equally naked wife murmured in her sleep, which made him smile in the darkness. Her Scottish accent, which he’d always found adorable, had thickened while they dwelled at Glencross, hard against the Scottish march.

  The day he married Linnet Norwood, Countess of Glencross and the secret daughter of the last Tudor king, he thought he could never love her more. Yet somehow his love for her continued to grow, exuberantly, by leaps and bounds, in his usual intemperate fashion.

  For a fallen angel, he was an uncommonly contented one.

  If not for the demonic sigil that weighed down his hand, the ring that resisted all his efforts to remove it, he could almost forget he was the Son of Lucifer.

  A restless itch crept over him, shredding the drowsy contentment that followed these wild couplings with his passionate wife. Sighing, he slid away from her silken warmth and smoothed a riot of mahogany curls gently from her sleeping face. Their journey through the Faerie Glasse into this time had wearied her. Their desperate flight from Corunna to Calais in a storm-tossed pinnacle had exhausted all three of them.

  Not that Beltran would allow himself any such weakness. Zamiel had left the Queen’s Enforcer in a dockside tavern, gathering intelligence about the twenty-five years of naval history they’d missed when Linnet brought them forward in time.

  He’s looking for inspiration, Zamiel brooded. Looking for a backup plan, since la Fée refused even to meet with us. Morrigan has made few friends, it seems, during her reign in the Summer Lands.

  In the moonlight streaming through the open door, he slid his legs into a pair of trunk hose and tiptoed out to the tiny balcony. He eased the door closed to avoid disturbing Linnet, who needed her sleep. The serpentine goat’s head leered from his ring. From the docks, a snatch of drink-blurred song drifted through the sleeping streets as he turned toward the moonlit city.

  There, lounging comfortably on the narrow parapet above a three-story plummet, his mirror image crossed his booted legs and smiled.

  “Ten minutes past, a footpad knifed a drunkard to death in an alley thirty ells from thy chamber,” the other murmured. “While thou didst spend thyself between the thighs of thy willing wife. Didst not sense the death?”

  Zamiel’s breath rushed out of his lungs.

  “For Heaven’s sake, Father, you nearly startled me into a seizure. And no, I didn’t sense a thing. In case it’s escaped your notice, I’m not the Angel of Death any longer. I’m a mortal man, living a mortal life.”

  The fallen angel Lucifer, Son of the Morning, laughed softly. He reclined, precariously balanced, along the narrow parapet. His banner of ebony hair, threaded with silver, streamed over the balustrade. A lean leg, fashionably clad in black-and-gold brocade, swung idly over the abyss.

  Although Zamiel knew perfectly well a fall would do nothing to his father—who had, after all, survived a greater Fall and laughed—the uncanny sight made his blood run cold. He’d been mortal long enough, he supposed, to develop a healthy respect for danger.

  “Thou art wedded to a mixed-blood Faerie with the strongest magick that failing race has seen in a generation.” The beauty of Lucifer’s melodic voice could make an angel weep.

  Zamiel ought to know, since the old serpent had gifted his son with all the dark splendor of that voice.

  “Thy closest companion, although thou wilt not call him such, is a fallen Archangel who has likewise wedded a mortal. And thou hast lately encountered the only Nephilim to captain a ship in the Spanish Armada.

  “My son,” the fallen angel finished, “thou art nothing like a common mortal.”

  Restless, Zamiel wandered across the balcony, giving the elegant black-and-gold figure a cautious berth. The odor of charred wood, his father’s signature fragrance, hovered sharp and acrid on the night air.

  “Why are you here, Father? I didn’t summon you.”

  “Art not pleased to see Me?” the Prince of Devils said softly. “Do celestial beings visit thee so freely, in the years since thy fall, that My appearance strikes thee as ordinary?”

  Zamiel hesitated. In point of fact, no celestial being had appeared before him since he chose a mortal life—not even Gabriele, the Angel of Mercy, once his only friend. According to Beltran, they didn’t appear to him either. Indeed, Zamiel wondered how often they appeared to anyone in these troubled times.

  All was not well in the restless ranks of Heaven. The angels stewed in their troubles while he lived his mortal life, a span of years no longer than an eye-blink from the celestial perspective. If he behaved well in this life, he’d be back among them soon enough.

  But if Michael himself had strayed—the Angel of War, Archangel of the Presence, guardian of the Gate of Heaven—and fathered a child on a mortal woman! If Michael himself had sired a forbidden Nephilim, matters upstairs must be deteriorating faster than he’d imagined.

  “No one could ever call you ordinary, Father,” he said dryly. “What’s happening up there?”

  “What always happens.” Lucifer shrugged. “Which is to say nothing. Jehovah turns His face from the whole of His creation—grieving, according to thee, for the death of His Son, a senseless ordeal of the grotesque that was entirely His choosing. And He rose again, did He not? All’s well that ends well, et cetera.”

  Zamiel flung a restless leg over the parapet and straddled it himself. Mindful of his wife’s nearness, he kept one bare foot firmly planted on the balcony. She’d made it clear she didn’t like it when he took senseless risks. He was a father now, with a wife and twins to provide for.

  “What of the angels, Lucifer? When they kicked me out, the Seraphim with their flaming swords and the Thrones with their flaming chariots were barring all access to the Seventh Heaven. It wasn’t clear whether they sought to protect Him while He grieved, or to bloody well take over. The many-eyed Cherubim seemed to be, well, turning a blind eye to the problem. The Dominions and Powe
rs in the warrior Choirs were restless. But we—I mean they—have never been able to work together. Unless the Archangels lead them, which they refuse to do.”

  “They should never have expelled Me,” his father murmured. “I would have led them.”

  “But the Archangels!” Zamiel pressed. “If Michael himself is straying, something up there is seriously wrong. Whenever things go astray in Heaven, as you well know, that discord is reflected down here. Witness the Armada and the threat to Elizabeth’s realm—a threat heightened, incidentally, by Michael’s own son.”

  “Michael!” The sliver of a razor-sharp canine winked into view, a certain indication of Lucifer’s pique. “It was he who cast Me out. I too was an Archangel, his chief rival to lead the celestial host. The Angel of War never could tolerate a challenge to his authority.”

  “Yes, Father, but we’re not talking about you. Hell’s Bells, can you stop gazing in the mirror at your own reflection for five minutes and listen to me?”

  Recalling his wife’s proximity, he lowered his voice. It would never do for Linnet to come bursting out here and discover the Prince of Devils on her balcony.

  “Look, Father. You’ve said it yourself. For whatever reason, the angels have ceased their little visitations to the mortal realm. That means you’re all I’ve got—you and Uriel.”

  “Uriel.” Lucifer’s nostrils flared. “If thou art seeking My help, better to leave him out of it. He was Michael’s second-in-command when—”

  “When you fell. Yes, I know. I was there, remember?”

  “Oh, I remember.” Lucifer’s voice turned silken. “I remember when I fell, Zamiel, that thou didst naught to aid Me. Why should I assist thee? If the Seven Heavens hover on the brink of war, if those ancient enmities tear the celestial host apart, why should I not sit on My infernal throne and laugh?”

  Zamiel raised his eyes toward Heaven and prayed for patience, whether anyone up there was listening or not.