A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel)

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “Well,” said Gray.

  He stepped out of his own drawers—much easier to do it now than later—and crouched down in his turn, feeling each small lump and pebble against the soles of his feet, then tilted forward until most of his weight rested on his toes.

  This working no longer required much conscious thought; once summoned, his magick flowed easily into the channels of his owl-shape, and muscles and sinews followed in its wake. His bones were lighter already, primaries springing through the skin of his arms, his bare toes splaying into talons.

  Owl-shaped, Gray remained taller than his companions—though less so than before—which Lécuyer, the eagle owl, clearly found irksome. Gray spread his wings cautiously, conscious of the number of things he might possibly dislodge or damage; Lécuyer spread his own, slightly longer, in answer. Ollivier, the barn owl, bobbed his head and hooted in avian laughter.

  Perhaps fortunately, the dark head and broad shoulders of the Colonel’s runner leant in through the tent-flap before the conversation could proceed any further. “Ready to be off, are we, gentlemen? The sun is well down.”

  He threw open the tent-flap, revealing himself to be wearing a lance-corporal’s uniform and a falconer’s heavy leather gauntlets, and crouched down to lift first Lécuyer, then Ollivier, onto his wrists. Then, for a long moment, he frowned at Gray, who tilted his head and stared back. At last an idea seemed to occur to him; he shifted the eagle owl from his left wrist to his right—the barn owl ruffled his feathers indignantly, but finally shuffled a little way up his arm to make room—then extended his left arm towards Gray.

  “I am Lance-Corporal Kerambrun, my lord,” he said. “If you will permit me . . . ?”

  It was not a graceful process, and Gray’s temper was not improved by the knowledge that Ollivier and Lécuyer, as well as having seen the evidence of his experiences in the bowels of Castle MacAlpine, were watching him hop and flap about to keep his balance. Gray’s weight was evidently less than Kerambrun had expected, which occasioned some shifting of the passengers. At length, however, Lance-Corporal Kerambrun straightened up and emerged from the scouts’ tent, with an owl on either wrist and a third clinging to his shoulder, and strode eastward through the twilit camp.

  CHAPTER XIX

  In Which the Princess Royal Mounts an Expedition

  “And what on earth has he told his mother?” said Lucia, incredulous, when Sophie had finished her tale. She had risen from the floor and resumed her seat on the far side of the small table which held the abandoned chessboard, and was leaning forward, her elbows resting on her knees, in rapt attention.

  Sophie peered at her over the rim of her teacup, clasped tightly in both hands; the tea was almost too sweet to drink, but the heat seeping through the porcelain warmed her chilled fingers. “That, I expect,” she said, “he has left to Lord Kergabet.”

  “I certainly should do, in his place,” said Roland unexpectedly, and with some feeling.

  Sophie and Lucia looked up at him in surprise.

  “Well,” he said, his cheeks going rather pink. “Mothers can be rather . . . excitable—” Then, recollecting perhaps that both of his companions had lost their mothers before the age of ten, he muttered, “Never mind,” and turned away to make a noisy pretence of tidying the tea-things on the sideboard.

  “In any case,” said Sophie, “it is entirely possible that Gray’s mama will be pleased as much as alarmed; his father planned a military career for him, you see, and went so far as to purchase him a mage-lieutenant’s commission, when he was nineteen. It was because Gray refused to leave Merlin College and take it up that Edmond Marshall disinherited him.”

  Roland had not ceased to rattle the teacups, but Sophie fancied she could see his attentive listening in the set of his shoulders.

  “I mean no disparagement of your husband, Sophie,” said Lucia, whose russet-gold eyebrows had flown up at the words mage-lieutenant’s commission, “but truly it is difficult to imagine a worse notion.”

  Sophie laughed—a shaky, ragged-edged thing, but laughter nevertheless. “Quite so,” she said; “still, I must suppose that Kergabet knows what he is about. This must go no further,” she admonished. “I ought not even to have told the two of you, but it beggars belief that either of you should—” She swallowed, and against her better judgement took a large swallow of too-sweet tea.

  “Of course we shall neither of us say anything to anyone, Sophie,” said Lucia. Her tone suggested that she was suppressing further comment on the general theme of What do you take me for?

  “Certainly not,” said Roland indignantly; after another moment, in a more diffident tone, he added, “May we help you plan your expedition to Oxford, then?”

  * * *

  If Sophie’s heart was no longer entirely in her Oxford scheme—if, in fact, a considerable proportion of it was in Normandie with Gray—it seemed her friends were prepared to embrace it wholeheartedly. Watching as they set aside their misgivings, and the many other demands upon their time, to assist her in planning and undertaking the initial exploratory visit to Oxford, Sophie strongly suspected that the interest and assistance of Kergabet, Jenny, and Mr. Fowler, at any rate, was owing not to any personal enthusiasm for the scheme but to a wish that Joanna should be got out of the way of the search for her father, and that Sophie should be diverted from pining over Gray’s absence.

  In light of the last such occasion, she reflected, it was not an idle worry.

  Lucia’s reasons for participating in the scheme she judged to be two parts genuine enthusiasm and one part longing to escape the Royal Palace; Roland’s, almost entirely a wish to please Lucia. As for Joanna and Miss Pryce . . .

  But there again, when have I ever been able to discover what either of them is thinking?

  Whatever might be the motivations of the participants, their eager energy made quick work of the planning, and she was duly grateful.

  That Mr. Goff and Mr. Tredinnick, her faithful shadows since first she and Gray set up housekeeping in Oxford years ago, should be of the party, was taken as read; His Majesty, however, had insisted upon the addition of a further half-dozen guardsmen under their joint command—despite Sophie’s protests that this could only serve to make them conspicuous—and Lucia MacNeill’s guard captain, not to be outdone, had volunteered herself and her troop as escort.

  Lucia had rolled her eyes at this—Ceana MacGregor, Sophie had learnt early on, had known Lucia from birth and had been captain of her personal guard for the past decade, and the two were accustomed to take quite astonishing liberties with one another. Ceana MacGregor, however, had folded her arms and said, “Either we all of us go to Oxford, Lucia MacNeill, or none of us goes, least of all yourself,” which pronouncement caused Lucia to throw up her hands in exasperation and give in.

  The party which eventually departed Grosvenor Square for Oxford, therefore, comprised one prince, four ladies, and sufficient men- and women-at-arms to have cowed any but the most enterprising assailant.

  * * *

  Having taken possession of the entire first floor of the Dragon and Lion for the accommodation of her retinue, being the only respectable hostelry in Oxford presently able to offer hospitality to such a large party, Sophie left the other ladies to their unpacking and, in the sole company of Mr. Tredinnick, set off on foot up the High-street towards the Broad, and Merlin College.

  The Porter manning Merlin’s gate was unfamiliar to her and showed no sign of knowing who she was. Quite prepared for this eventuality, Sophie nodded to Mr. Tredinnick, who stepped forward and said affably, “We are come to see Doctor Evans-Hughes; is he in college at present?”

  The Porter narrowed his pale-blue eyes at them but conceded grudgingly that Doctor Evans-Hughes was indeed in his rooms. “Is ’e expecting you?” he inquired.

  “No,” said Tredinnick; “that is, not today in particular. Mrs. Marshall”—nodding at Sophie—�
��has been in correspondence with him, however, and forewarned him of our coming.”

  This was true, assuming that Sophie’s latest letter, posted two days since, had been opened and read. In any case, if Gareth had not been here, Master Alcuin certainly should be, and could be counted upon to welcome them in.

  The Porter looked askance at this, but, having informed Mr. Tredinnick that female visitors were not permitted to wander the College grounds unescorted, sent one of his minions to inquire whether Doctor Evans-Hughes were willing to come down to the Porter’s Lodge to speak with them. Sophie and her companion loitered comfortably upon the pavement, observing the sparse late-summer foot traffic along the Broad and looking up at the walls of Merlin. Not so long ago, she had been—and Mr. Tredinnick had pretended to be—a student there, and it surprised her to find that she did not much regret giving it up.

  Gareth Evans-Hughes arrived on the heels of the Porter’s boy—as rumpled as ever and rather rounder, pink-faced and out of breath—and upon beholding Sophie, shocked all present by nearly bowling her over in the enthusiasm of his greeting.

  “Sophie Marshall, as I live and breathe!” he exclaimed, standing back with his hands on her shoulders. He continued, rather less accurately, “How well you look! I did not look for you until tomorrow at the earliest. But let us not stand talking in the street; come in, come in!”

  Ignoring the Porter’s scandalised glare, he ushered them through the gate, signed the Porter’s book on their behalf, and led them across the Quad to his staircase.

  It being the Long Vac., Merlin was very sparsely populated, and they passed no more than half a dozen persons, Senior Fellows mostly, along their way. Sophie nonetheless took the precaution of making herself inconspicuous; there was no benefit to be gained from attracting attention to herself, or to Gareth either.

  Having ushered them into his sitting-room—less altered even than himself, with the same creaking armchairs, the same shelves of odd and miscellaneous artefacts, the same haphazard stacks of books as when Sophie had last seen it—Evans-Hughes turned to Sophie and said, “Wards, I think?”

  “Indeed,” she said, and at once reached for her magick to work the strongest warding-spell she knew.

  “Now,” said Gareth briskly, when she had finished, reaching behind a bronze knotwork buckle and a badger’s skull to retrieve his welcome-cup, “who is your friend, Sophie, and where in Hades has your husband gone off to?”

  Sophie introduced Mr. Tredinnick and Gareth to one another, put off the latter’s second query with the promise of a fuller explanation later, and gratefully accepted his welcome, though the wine he poured into the small, battered copper goblet was so sweet that she had to restrain a grimace. Gareth himself was not so nice—upon tasting it, he had screwed up his face, swallowed hard, and said, “The wine steward will have his little joke”—but what a host might permit himself to say about his own hospitality, a guest ought not.

  They all sat down, Sophie and Mr. Tredinnick arrayed before Gareth as though they had been his students come to read him their essays; Gareth leant forward with elbows on knees, clasping his hands before him, and said, “I have found something in the Merlin Library, Sophie, that I think you shall like; but before I fetch it, will you—can you—tell me what you are about? And—if the, er, circumstances permit—why Marshall is not come with you? That is,” he added, hastily and quite needlessly, “there is no reason on earth why you should not both do just as you please, of course! It is only that I am accustomed to your being inseparable.”

  Sophie sighed. She was as sure of Gareth Evans-Hughes as she could be of anyone—else she should not have involved him in her scheme to begin with—but too many people were already in the secret of Gray’s whereabouts.

  “Gray is on an errand for his brother-in-law,” she said instead, “which is as much as anyone may be told about it; and I am here to break into Lady Morgan College”—she could not help smiling at her two companions’ identical expressions of shock at this turn of phrase—“and poke about in its library—hence my request.” She leant forward in turn. “You did find something, you said? May I see it?”

  Gareth’s face, which had creased unhappily at her refusal to elaborate on Gray’s circumstances or whereabouts, broke into a smile, and he sprang up from his seat to rummage about in a desk drawer.

  “Here we are,” he said at last, turning back to her, and handed over a long roll of parchment, yellow with age and beginning to crumble at the edges, tied up near each end with incongruously bright-new blue tapes. He looked about him, frowning a little. “Let me just . . .”

  “Er, perhaps this table, sir?” said Mr. Tredinnick.

  “Yes! Yes, that will do very nicely.”

  Gareth hurried the scattered notes and documents into an untidy stack and removed it to the top of his desk; Sophie, having untied the tapes, slowly and carefully unrolled the parchment onto the table-top thus exposed, anchoring each side with the tips of her gloved fingers. Although rerolled smoothly, it showed irregular creases, as though having been rolled once, it had then been sat upon for some time.

  Above and below her fingertips, the corners curled persistently inwards, but Sophie scarcely remarked it; she was staring, transfixed, at the centre of the parchment, on which was drawn, in a firm meticulous hand, a detailed plan labelled Lady Morgan College, Oxon.

  “Gareth!” she said, looking up. “Wherever did you find this?”

  “It was rolled up and forgotten at the back of a map-drawer,” he said, “where it had been squashed flat for the gods know how long; I am surprised that it did not fall into bits the moment I touched it.” He was moving about the room, gathering . . . what? “None of the librarians or archivists knew it was there, or even that it existed—or at any rate none of them would admit to knowing—nor what it was; how in Hades did you know that I should find it?”

  “It was a bow drawn at a venture entirely, I admit,” said Sophie frankly. “That is, I know that Lady Morgan College exists—or did exist—and I supposed that plans must have been drawn of it; and several of the books I have found on the subject mention the existence of such a plan.”

  Gareth came back to stand beside her at the table, and now she saw what he had been about. Carefully he lined the edges of the spread-out plan with a series of small objects—the skull of some small creature, about the size of Sophie’s palm; a miniature brass lamp; an ancient-looking stoppered bottle of smoky-blue glass; a paper-knife with a handle in the shape of a porpoise; and so onward—to prevent its curling up again.

  “And having found a view of the place forgotten and uncatalogued in a pigeonhole in the Palace Archives,” she continued, while this proceeding was going forward, “it seemed to me that Merlin’s Archives, being older, might also possess uncatalogued documents of which no one knew anything. Of course,” she added, “we should have staged our invasion in any event, but now we shall be better able to plan our campaign.”

  She bent her head again, tapped one index finger on the blank space labelled Great Quadrangle (like Merlin’s, a quadrangle in name but not in shape), traced the footpaths that crossed and intersected it. Library, she read, arching across the outline of an oblong structure. Refectory. Undergraduate Rooms. Portress’s Lodge. And—yes, there! in the upper left-hand corner, just where memory suggested it ought to be—a small, perfect circle with a square portico, adorned with a tiny drawing of an owl and, inscribed across a decorative scroll, the words Shrine of Minerva Sophia.

  “The dome,” she said, more than half to herself. “The green dome.”

  “Ma’am?” said Mr. Tredinnick, politely baffled.

  Sophie blinked away the memory-vision of the compact copper-green dome, dimmed by mist and rain, rising above weed-grown walls and empty windows. “This,” she said, pointing, “is a shrine to Minerva as Sophia, personification of wisdom. My namesake, or one of them—the one my mother chose for me.” S
he paused, swallowed hard, and continued: “More importantly for present purposes, it is visible from the near bank of the Cherwell, and appears on the plan exactly where I expected to see it, which means, I hope, that the plan can be trusted to reflect the thing itself. Now, I wonder, has the draughtsman recorded the date . . . ?”

  Three dark heads bent over the plan, searching—Gareth with a magnifying glass unearthed from the chaos of his desk; it was Mr. Tredinnick, however, who at length exclaimed, “There!” extending a sturdy forefinger towards a stylised representation of a tree, seen from above, in the lower right-hand corner.

  “By Jove! You have sharp eyes, Tredinnick,” said Gareth, in a tone of admiration quite untainted by envy or resentment. He held the glass over the little tree-top, and the three of them leant still closer—their heads nearly touching—to peer through it at the minuscule letters twined into the stylised branches.

  “Edwina Antonia Calixta fecit,” Sophie read aloud; the feminine name surprised her but, upon consideration, ought not to have done. “Anno xii Henricus VIII.” She paused, eyes closed, to wrestle with the mental arithmetic. The Princess Julia had been born in the tenth year of her father’s long reign, and Prince Edward in the twenty-eighth . . . King Edward had succeeded to the throne at the age of nine, and the College—so far as she had been able to determine—had been closed in the second or possibly the third decade of his reign . . .

  “This was made within fifty years of the College’s closing,” she said at last. “More or less. Of course a great deal may change in fifty years, but—this is a marvellous find, Gareth, truly.”