A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel)

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “And not you only,” said Gwendolen, pulling a face. She sat back on her heels, and after a moment said—as though changing the subject—“What news from Prince Roland and Lucia MacNeill?”

  Joanna sighed. “None to speak of,” she said. “I suspect Her Majesty of keeping them under house arrest, for safety’s sake—and I confess I cannot blame her.”

  “If I were in their shoes,” said Gwendolen, “I should take ship for Din Edin as soon as I might, and stay there until the . . . the prisoners are back in the Tower, or better yet at the end of a rope.”

  Joanna blinked at her, and she scowled, defiant: “You think me bloodthirsty, I suppose?”

  “Not at all,” said Joanna frankly. “I could not understand at the time what His Majesty was about in commuting the traitors’ sentence to imprisonment, and the present circumstances certainly have not changed my opinion on that point.”

  Gwendolen’s scowl had shifted into an expression of puzzled speculation. She retrieved Joanna’s abandoned fancy-work from its scatter across the carpet, stacked the coiled skeins of silk in a tidy heap atop the folded muslin, and placed it squarely across Joanna’s lap, then rose to her feet (too neatly by half, for a person with such long legs, thought Joanna in irrational annoyance), turned, and settled herself beside Joanna on the sofa, pressed close against her side.

  “But your father,” she began. “Do you not think—”

  “Gwen, you cannot suppose that after all this time—after everything—I should still be sentimental about my father?”

  Dropping her gaze to her own hands clasped in her lap, Gwendolen said softly, “I hope you do not think the less of me, because I cannot help feeling sentimental about mine?”

  Joanna, shocked out of her indignation, reached for Gwendolen’s hands and covered them with her own. “When your father has been convicted of treason, murder, and attempted regicide,” she said, “when he has laid a fatal trap for some friend of yours, and without regard to the possibility of its killing you instead, then I shall wonder at your regretting him.”

  Raising her eyes, Gwendolen turned her hands palm upwards, the better to wrap her fingers about Joanna’s, and produced a grim smile.

  Joanna swallowed hard, increasingly aware that this conversation was too fraught, skirted too close to violent emotion, to be conducted in broad day, in Jenny’s morning-room, where anyone might interrupt it. She searched for words—some sardonic remark, inflected with gentle humour, which would turn Gwen’s grim smile true—but found none; and, not for the first time, she cursed whatever god’s whim made her so tongue-tied in the presence of the person with whom she most longed to be eloquent.

  * * *

  The fateful day began in a perfectly ordinary manner: with Joanna and Gwendolen saddling their horses in the stable mews just after dawn, and waving off Gaël’s attempt to do it for them. Trailed by Gaël and Loïc, they rode to the park at a sedate walk—conspicuous only in being two young women riding astride in a Mayfair street—and once through the gates, paused side by side to survey the bridle-path.

  In fact, it was no ordinary morning, being the first since the escape of the prisoners from the Tower upon which Joanna and Gwendolen had once more been permitted their daily ride—and then only under escort.

  The prospects seemed good: The path was dry and almost deserted, and the sky as clear as it ever was in London. Joanna—feeling half out of her mind with joy simply at being out of doors again—turned her head to look at Gwendolen; Gwendolen met her gaze with a sly grin and, with a minute pressure of her calves and an almost imperceptible twitch of her hands on the reins, urged her chestnut mare, Elain, into motion.

  Joanna and Kelvez were only a breath behind her. They walked, then trotted, then cantered past several startled gentlemen ambling along the bridle-path, and at last—when they had outstripped the last of these, as well as their own indignant escort—leant forward and urged their mounts into a gallop.

  Kelvez and Elain had been stablemates two years and more and had each other’s measure; their own hearts were in the race as surely as their riders’, and they flew down the straight leg of the bridle-path neck and neck. At the last moment Joanna urged, “Just a little farther, lovely!” and they drew ahead by the length of Kelvez’s glossy head, just in time to pass under the pair of bay-trees, arching together over the path, that marked their usual finishing line.

  They slowed, laughing breathlessly, and rounded the curve at a jogging trot—just as if all were quite as usual, with no vague and ill-formed threat hanging over London like the sword of Damocles.

  “I told you I should break your streak, Gwen,” Joanna crowed. As she was turning in her saddle to grin at Gwendolen, a strange young man—wild-eyed, his hair and clothing all anyhow, as though he had slept the night in the wood—came crashing through a weeping beech and onto the path just ahead of them.

  He clutched at Elain’s bridle, causing her to snort and back and attempt to rear; had Gwendolen been a less skilful horsewoman, Joanna thought, she should certainly have been thrown, and this reckless, idiotic stranger kicked half to death. Kelvez, almost equally agitated, sidled her hooves and tossed her head, and Joanna had both hands full in calming her.

  “Which of you is Miss Callender’s sister?” the stranger demanded. “Where is she? I must speak with her.”

  Joanna looked up, startled, and very nearly said, I am, before prudence and common sense prevailed. “Unhand my friend’s bridle, sir,” she said instead, infusing her voice with the spirit of Mrs. Edmond Marshall—chosen as the least obliging person of her acquaintance. “What do you mean by assaulting us in this manner?”

  He let go of the bridle, allowing Gwendolen to back Elain away from him, and lurched towards Joanna. He must truly have been sleeping rough, she thought, as he drew nearer, and not only last night: His clothing had been good once, and being now extremely dirty and growing ragged, looked all the worse for the contrast; his hair was lank and long untrimmed, his face long unshaven and its bones too prominent beneath the skin. He smelled not only of unwashed male body (which was bad enough) but of rank fear—to the horses’ more sensitive noses, the smell must be like the fumes of Tartarus—and his eyes—

  Joanna could not bear to look at his eyes.

  He lunged for her bridle, but Kelvez was having none of it. She snorted and whinnied and made to rear, her ears flattened in warning; whilst Joanna fought to keep her seat, bending forward along the mare’s neck to avoid pulling at her mouth, the stranger staggered backwards out of the range of her hooves, with abject terror stamped upon his face.

  “Jo!” Gwendolen’s voice was firm and insistent. “Jo, are you or are you not in charge of that horse?”

  It was not, perhaps, the approach any reputable trainer of horses would have taken, but it put Joanna very strongly in mind of Morvan, her father’s large, patient coachman and stableman-in-chief, who had taught her nearly everything she knew about horses. She had always suspected Morvan of concealing some vast, horse-related magickal talent, for when he spoke, horses stilled and gentled. If so, Gwendolen, she thought, had some of that talent too.

  Whether or not there was any magick in Gwen’s words, however, her voice cut through Joanna’s incipient panic, reminding her that much worse things were possible than falling off a horse.

  Ignoring the madman on the bridle-path, therefore, Joanna settled her weight deep in her saddle and stirrups and turned Kelvez’s head just enough that, off balance, the mare came down onto all four feet again. Then, seizing the moment whilst she could, she straightened her spine, dug in her heels, and said firmly, “Walk on.”

  Kelvez sidled uncertainly; but when Joanna once more urged her forward, she seemed to decide to take what was fast becoming the path of least resistance: around the mad stranger and towards Gwendolen and Elain.

  Close to, Gwendolen looked a great deal more frightened than she had sound
ed; Joanna reached for her arm and squeezed it, murmuring, “Will you trust me?”

  “Of course,” said Gwendolen reflexively. Joanna turned away before the doubt already glimmering in her eyes could become a full-fledged objection.

  She swung her right leg over to the mare’s near side and slid smoothly down to stand on the path. “Stay here,” she said, handing her reins to Gwendolen and surreptitiously squeezing her gloved hand, “in case a diversion is called for.”

  Then she squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, and turned back to face the madman who was seeking Amelia.

  He stood still as she slowly approached him—tensed for flight, like a hare or a deer—and, when she halted just out of arm’s reach, visibly restrained himself from clutching at her to prevent her from escaping.

  “Who are you?” Joanna said. “Where are you come from, and what in Hades do you want with Amelia?” And what, she added to herself, do you imagine that Amelia might want with you? She attempted to imagine an encounter between this man—terror-struck and filthy—and her fastidious sister, and could conjure no version of it which did not end with Amelia’s recoiling in disgust and fleeing the scene.

  “You do know her, then,” said the man. “She told me that you often ride here in the mornings, so I have been waiting—She is in London? You must bring her—I must speak with her—”

  Joanna folded her arms and glared. “I shall do nothing of the kind,” she said. “Do you imagine me to be in the habit of delivering up my friends to the clutches of wild men who assault inoffensive young women in public parks?”

  Joanna’s glare—she had modelled it on Lady Maëlle’s—was well known to make grown men quail, and this one was no exception; but, quailing, he nonetheless stood his ground.

  “You must,” he insisted. “I beg of you—”

  “If your business is so very urgent, then, you will not object to give me your name.”

  The stranger stared at her for what seemed an age, biting his lip and worrying his hands.

  “My name is Henry Taylor,” he conceded at last, and Joanna’s unease congealed into horrified disbelief.

  “Then where are all the rest of you?” she demanded. “Six men escaped the Tower and vanished; where are the other five?”

  “I shall tell all I know,” said Taylor (if so he was indeed), “in return for His Majesty’s protection. But I must see Am—Miss Callender.”

  “If you are playing tricks,” said Joanna, lowering her voice to a furious half whisper, “if any harm comes to anyone of my acquaintance by your doing, I shall make sure that you live long enough to bitterly regret it.”

  Taylor held up his hands in surrender. “I have no wish to harm anyone,” he said. “Quite the opposite. That is why I must see Miss Callender, and at once. You need not be afraid; if you are Miss Joanna Callender, then your brother-in-law is Marshall of Merlin College, and I am an old friend of his.”

  “You are nothing of the kind!” Joanna exclaimed, outraged. “You were a tool for my father and the rest of that ill-met company, and hoodwinked Gray into becoming another such. If that is your notion of friendship, Mr. Taylor, I think I may safely say that we are none of us eager to call you friend.”

  “I do not see that Marshall has done so badly out of it,” said Taylor. He no longer sounded at all mad, to Joanna’s relief, but did sound rather like a sulky child.

  Joanna did not attempt to argue the point, for it was true that had not Gray been so stupid as to lend himself to Taylor’s midnight errand on behalf of his tutor, he should not now have been Sophie’s husband, nor the owner of the estate in Breizh which had belonged to several generations of Callenders. But that is down to our making the best of things, she reminded herself, and not to any generous impulse of Mr. Taylor’s.

  “Tell me what it is you want with Amelia,” she said, though she had a sinking feeling that she knew it already, “and I shall convey the message. I make no promises as to what she may choose to do with the information.”

  It could do no harm to convey a message, she reasoned—whereas the longer she stood here arguing, the greater the risk of irreparable harm to her reputation, and to her protectors’, from someone’s happening upon this conversation and spreading the tale all over London. If agreeing to carry his message would induce him to go away . . .

  And it was not impossible that whatever information he possessed, supposing that he could be induced to part with it, might be genuinely valuable.

  “You must bring your sister here,” said Taylor. “Or see that she comes here. Tomorrow, at the same hour—or, if not tomorrow, the day after. She will not be permitted to come alone, I must suppose; let her bring Marshall with her, if needs be, but no one else.”

  “You are very demanding for a man in your position,” said Joanna. Was this some manner of trap? If so, to what purpose? “Why should either my sister or Mr. Marshall agree to such a demand? For that matter, why should I not summon the Watch this moment, and have you taken in charge?”

  Under the layers of grime, Taylor’s face blanched, but again he stood his ground: “Because I have information of value, which I shall be disinclined to share if I am arrested and thrown back into prison.”

  “Very well; you wish to surrender on your own terms,” said Joanna. That was logical enough. “Then why not take advantage of your present audience to convey your information directly to His Majesty’s ear?”

  Taylor first looked baffled, and then—to her astonishment, considering their relative situations—his lip curled, and he said, in a condescending tone with which Joanna was tediously familiar, “What—you—and your friend?” He waved a dismissive hand at Gwendolen; out of his line of sight, she returned a very rude gesture borrowed from Gaël. “I hardly think that would answer.”

  Joanna repressed a strong impulse to pull off one of her boots and clout him with it. “As you like,” she said, with her most unladylike shrug. “I have promised to convey your message; I have made no promises as to the result. If indeed your intent is to turn King’s evidence, I expect we shall meet again before very long. Good morning, Mr. Taylor.”

  And so saying, she turned on her heel and strode away towards Gwendolen and the horses—and the approaching rumble of hooves which presumably heralded Lord Kergabet’s grooms.

  If her heart was pounding in her throat, there was no need for anyone—and Henry Taylor most particularly—to know it.

  * * *

  Smarting from the tongue-lashing they had received from Gaël and Loïc, Joanna and Gwendolen stopped only long enough to see to their horses before banging through the area door, through the kitchen, and up the servants’ stair. At last they burst pink-faced and out of breath into the breakfast-parlour, where the rest of the Grosvenor Square family, together with Lady Maëlle, were sitting over their meal.

  Six faces turned towards the sound of the door, their expressions variously astonished, indignant, and bewildered; six pairs of eyes, beholding the two young ladies in their dishevelled riding-clothes, widened in alarm. Joanna spared a prayer of thanks to Morpheus, god of dreams, that the rest of Jenny’s guests were not yet come down to breakfast; she was in no state to put up a front of unruffled calm for Mrs. Edmond Marshall.

  “Joanna! Gwendolen!” Jenny exclaimed, starting up from her chair with an awkward lurch. “Whatever is the matter?”

  “Henry Taylor,” said Joanna, breathless. “In the park. Hiding.” She turned to her brother-in-law: “Gray, he said—”

  “You rode straight away to summon the City Watch, I hope and trust,” said Sieur Germain. His tone suggested considerably more hope than trust. “Rather than engaging in conversation with a convicted traitor and dangerous fugitive from His Majesty’s justice.”

  Gwendolen’s right hand found Joanna’s left, concealed behind their skirts, and Joanna pressed her fingers gently in reassurance. Even after all this time, it seemed, Gwe
n did not entirely trust that some transgression of hers would not inspire Kergabet or Jenny to pack her off back to Papa and the objectionable Stepmama in Clwyd.

  “I did consider fetching out the Watch,” said Joanna, truthfully enough, “but he did not seem to intend us any harm; he is only very stupid about horses.”

  Sophie frowned; before she could speak, however, Joanna ploughed onward: “We are both perfectly well, and the horses likewise, and there has been no harm done to anyone, so there is no need to discuss it. The point is that this Mr. Taylor says that he must speak privately with Amelia—he would not say why, though I fear it is not difficult to guess—and that he has information of some kind, connected with the conspirators’ escape, which he will consent to reveal in exchange for His Majesty’s protection and, of course, this meeting with Amelia. I tried to gain some hint as to the nature of this information, but he insists upon speaking of it to you, Gray, and no one else—and only if he is permitted to see Amelia.”

  Gray looked deeply baffled. “Why on the gods’ green earth should Henry Taylor wish to confide in me?” he said.

  “He called himself your friend,” said Joanna. Gray snorted. “Which does not accord very well with what we know of him, but perhaps imprisonment has worked some magick upon his heart and mind—or perhaps he has quarrelled with the rest of them, and now finds himself in want of allies. By the look of him, he has not had very good luck since he left his prison.”

  “Or perhaps it is a trap of some sort,” said Jenny. “Whatever is afoot, Jo, I do not like it at all.”

  “It may be a trap, of course,” Joanna conceded. “I have considered the possibility, Jenny, I assure you. I do not know what he hopes to catch in it, however, besides poor Amelia.”

  “A mage, one presumes,” said Kergabet. “Or mages. It would not be the first time.”

  Sophie went very pale, and reached for Gray’s hand across the table-cloth.