A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel)

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  She grinned at him, and his round plain face lit up with his answering smile.

  The smile quickly faltered, however, as his gaze returned to the plan of Lady Morgan College. “Sophie,” he said, slow and careful, “are the rumours true? That you mean to . . . to sponsor a college for women, as Lady Morgan did?”

  Sophie studied his expression—troubled; hopeful?—for some time before replying, “If I can manage it, yes.”

  “There is a good deal of . . . of feeling against it,” said Gareth. “At Merlin particularly, but in the other Colleges also.”

  “The august Fellows have made their views very clear to me, never fear,” said Sophie dryly. Where was this leading?

  “Sophie, why did you not tell me?” The question did not surprise her particularly, but the tone—

  “Why do you suppose? My father is not indulging me in this scheme from any real interest in its success, but only because—well, never mind exactly why, but to keep me out of something else entirely; there is every chance that this will all end in some costly and humiliating mess. Can you suppose that I wish to bring my friends into such a mess with me, who must go on living and working at Merlin when I have run back to Din Edin with my tail between my legs?”

  Mr. Tredinnick, whose presence Sophie (from long habit) had momentarily forgot, laughed aloud. Sophie turned to glare at him; subsiding to a chuckle, he said, “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but if you were at all disposed to run away from trouble, I should soon find myself out of work.”

  Gareth, infuriatingly, joined in Tredinnick’s laughter, and Sophie glared harder at both of them, to little avail. Exasperated, she turned away and stared resolutely out of the window.

  “If you have quite finished,” she said coolly, after a moment. They caught her tone and subsided, and Sophie turned away from the window again to address her friend. “I may take it, I collect, that—in principle, at any rate—you are rather in favour of my scheme than otherwise?”

  “Certainly I am,” said Gareth. His soft tenor voice held a trace of indignation, and the Cymric tilt that marked his speech in Latin, ordinarily almost too subtle to hear, had become very pronounced. “. . . but, there, I had forgot that you are not acquainted with any of my sisters.” The bright grin resurfaced momentarily, though now with a wry edge. “If you had been—and my sister Angharad particularly—you could not doubt it for even a moment.”

  It was always a clever sister, Sophie reflected—half jubilant, half rueful—to make a man think twice about this matter; never, it seemed, any sense that the generality of women might benefit from, or might have any right to enjoy, the privileges which their brothers serenely accepted as their right. Gift horses, she reminded herself sternly, not for the first time.

  “I am very glad to hear it,” she said, taking care that none of this inward argumentation should show on her face or in her voice. “And when—if—when matters have progressed a little—if it seems likely that—”

  She paused, looking at her hands. The investigation into Merlin’s Archives, though it had yielded such unexpectedly useful results, had been only half the reason for this visit—the more or less official, the openly acknowledged half. They were now come to the other, of which Mr. Tredinnick was very likely to disapprove—and not without reason. Can I afford to trust Gareth with this secret? On the other hand, how should I account for myself before the gods, if I did not use all the resources at my disposal?

  “I have another favour to ask of you,” she said at last, making up her mind.

  Mr. Tredinnick straightened his shoulders and frowned. “Mrs. Marshall—”

  It was not often that Sophie made use of her rank to cow her father’s guardsmen; she did so now, however, without compunction, for her sisters’ sake. “Mr. Tredinnick,” she said, her tone as much the Princess Royal as she could make it, “you may wait in the corridor outside, or you may stay here and refrain from interfering, and from revealing to anyone else whatever you may hear. The choice is yours; I suggest you make it at once.”

  “Ma’am.” Mr. Tredinnick set his teeth. “I am yours to command, of course.”

  She waited long enough for him to decamp, should that be his intention; when instead he settled himself in a corner, perched on a tall stool tucked between two bookcases, she turned back to Gareth and extracted from her reticule the only other possession of Amelia’s which she had been able to discover: one of the pair of silver-and-garnet ear-drops given to her by the Professor for her sixteenth birthday, which Katell had found trodden into the thick carpet beneath the dressing-table in the Kingfisher room. The others she had had to leave behind in Jenny’s care, if she were not to be required to confess to Jenny—and, worse, to Lady Maëlle and Joanna—that she intended revealing their private trouble to a rank outsider.

  “This belonged—belongs—to my sister Amelia,” she said, unfolding the handkerchief in which she had wrapped it and holding it out on her flattened palm. “She has . . . that is, we have reason to believe that she has run away with, with Henry Taylor.” Speaking over Gareth’s shocked intake of breath, she hurried on: “As you knew Mr. Taylor in his student days, you will understand why we are anxious to locate her. Gray’s sister, as you may know, is a scry-mage of some talent, and she has done her best with some other objects of my sister’s, but she has not the training you have, Gareth, as she herself is the first to admit, and so . . .”

  Gareth had listened to all of this with a troubled frown, and in silence. If she desired his help, she must ask for it outright.

  “And so,” she said, measured and deliberate, “I should be very much in your debt, Gareth, if you were to consent to scry this earring, though I have not its owner’s permission to do so, and tell me what you see of my sister, which may shed any light on her present circumstances or whereabouts.”

  After another long, considering silence, Evans-Hughes sighed, leant forward, and reached for the ear-drop in Sophie’s hand. “Your sister would not be the first young woman to follow her own inclinations in marriage, in opposition to her family’s,” he said pointedly, “nor the first to take this means of doing so, and sometimes with good reason. If you had not said with Henry Taylor, Sophie, I should refuse to have anything to do with the business, and I should advise you—”

  “If Henry Taylor were not in the case,” Sophie retorted, “or someone very like him, I should be wishing my sister joy of her choice, not joining in the hunt for her. What sort of hypocrite do you think me, Gareth Evans-Hughes? But it is Henry Taylor, and therefore—”

  “And therefore, I shall do as you ask,” said Gareth. “Now, be quiet a moment, if you please.”

  Sophie clasped her hands in her lap, pressed her lips together, and did her best to keep still.

  * * *

  At length Gareth surfaced from what Sophie could only call a trance and laid Amelia’s ear-drop carefully upon the table beside the weighted-down parchment.

  “Marshall has gone off to Normandie to look for your sister, I suppose?” he said.

  Sophie, startled, recalled that just before introducing them to one another, Gray had ducked his head to murmur in her ear, Evans-Hughes is a good, solid man, and trustworthy; but you must always bear in mind that he is at least twice as clever as he looks. And it was not, perhaps, very difficult to draw the necessary connexions in this case. “Yes,” she conceded.

  At least he has not guessed what else Gray is about.

  “Not a bad guess,” said Gareth, rather cryptically, “but not far enough.”

  “Gareth—”

  “I apologise.” He held up a hand, then, absently, began turning the delicate silver filigree round and round between the fingers of the other hand, studying it as though, having just probed into this object’s accreted secrets, he now could not imagine what its original purpose might have been. “Your sister-in-law has told you, I expect, that . . . may I call her Amelia?”<
br />
  Sophie shrugged; what could it matter?

  “That Amelia, at the time when she was making ready to leave London, believed herself to be bound for Normandie, by way of Portsmouth and then Honfleur?”

  “Yes,” said Sophie, “more or less. Is that—”

  “That is certainly what she believed, yes. But, as you say, Henry Taylor.” Gareth sighed gustily, and his shoulders sank back against the threadbare damask of his chair. “Or perhaps—Well. Not so far from Honfleur,” he said, recapturing the thread of his narrative after this cryptic digression, “as the crow flies more or less north—and very near indeed to Dover, as the ship sails—is the port of Calais, in the Comté d’Artois, which presently owes allegiance to the Duc de Bourgogne.”

  “And . . . Amelia is going to Calais? Or has gone there?”

  “Oh! Certainly. From London to Dover, from Dover to Calais. And from there . . . from there,” Gareth repeated, “things are murkier; but Bourgogne is known to be friendly with Orléans, though of course it does not follow that Artois should necessarily feel likewise—”

  “Gareth,” Sophie broke in, “my sister?”

  He had the grace to look a little sheepish; it made his face suddenly altogether familiar, and Sophie bit her lip to tamp down a wholly unexpected pang of regret for those things at Merlin College which she had loved, and those persons who had welcomed her unreservedly, during her brief and difficult sojourn here—Gareth Evans-Hughes included.

  Quickly, before she could lose her nerve once more, she said, “Amelia left London intending to marry Mr. Taylor; did she—have they—”

  She scarcely knew which of the two possibilities was the more dreadful. On the one hand, an elopement without some reasonably official form of marriage, should it become known, must materially damage any gentlewoman’s reputation and prospects; but, on the other, for Amelia to be the wife of Henry Taylor . . . !

  This time Gareth took pity on her stammering. “In fact, so far as I have been able to see,” he said gently, “not only has there been no marriage, but from Dover your sister appears to have been . . . to be travelling alone.”

  “Travelling alone!” Sophie exclaimed, incredulous. “Amelia?”

  What to think of this development? Sophie could not imagine. On the one hand, the world was full of perils for a woman—particularly a young and beautiful woman—travelling alone; on the other hand . . .

  “Go on,” she said.

  “Well,” said Gareth. “The aetheric echoes attaching to this . . . item”—he gave it another vaguely baffled look—“have by now been very much attenuated, you understand; but your sister, so far as I can tell, has been thinking very little about Henry Taylor—I fancy he disappointed her, not by refusing to marry her, but by attempting to alter their destination; but that may be only my imagination, you understand—and a great deal about their original plan, in which she was to be reunited with her beloved papa, and of how she might accomplish it for herself, without Taylor’s assistance. Also, of the much happier life she shall have, when her papa is a great man again, and when—”

  He shut his mouth abruptly, with a guilty look.

  Sophie sighed. “Tell me.”

  After some hesitation, he said, “. . . when you are not in it.”

  With few exceptions, it was only what Katell had told them, or they had known, already; why should it sound so very much worse now? Sophie sat very still, concentrating hard; a friend Gareth might be, but still she had no intention of going all to pieces in front of him.

  “Sophie?” he said hesitantly, after what might have been a moment or half an hour.

  With some effort, she forced herself to meet his gaze. “Where?” she said. “Do you know, can you tell, Gareth, where this reunion is to take place?”

  “Alas, I cannot,” he said. “And what I can tell you, I regret to say, makes no sense at all.” He frowned, shrugged his broad shoulders, dropped Amelia’s earring back into the folds of Sophie’s handkerchief, and handed it across to her. “According to your sister, who had the tale from Taylor,” he said at last, “Appius Callender is presently employed as an advisor to the Emperor of Gaul.”

  CHAPTER XX

  In Which Gray Reconsiders Long-Held Prejudices

  The passage through the encampment of Lance-Corporal Kerambrun and his passengers drew a considerable number of stares. This surprised Gray—Lécuyer and Ollivier in their owl-shapes must after all be a familiar sight here—till he recollected that only the night-scouts themselves, Colonel Dubois, Mage-Captain Tremblay, and, it now appeared, Kerambrun knew of this particular manifestation of his talent. The rest must all be wondering at two owls’ having become three.

  Over the course of a long and frankly indolent afternoon largely given over to sleep and games of chance—for Captain Tremblay’s night-scouts, it appeared, enjoyed a somewhat equivocal status in their off hours, which were many, as a consequence of performing a difficult and wearing duty in which none of their fellows could replace them—Ollivier and Lécuyer had given him some notion of their modus operandi. Though in fact they flew patterns, separately and together, designed to give them sight of as much of the land below them as possible—just as a patrol on foot or on horseback might spread out and quarter their ground, in order not to miss any square foot of it in their passing—their survival might at any time depend on their not appearing to do so. All the scouts, it appeared, had of necessity become scholars of the behaviour, hunting techniques, and flight patterns of birds of prey, so that they might pass for natural, ordinary birds and attract no untoward attention.

  “Tanguy had an arrow through his left wing, once,” Ollivier had said, and all of them shuddered. “Though that was in the heat of battle. He has never been sure whether it was excellent aim or appalling luck.”

  Tanguy, Gray found upon inquiring, was one of the company’s day-scouts, a milan royal in his shape-shifted form, and through a fortunate landing and the immediate assistance of a talented healer, he had survived his ordeal with no lasting ill effects but a slight stiffness of his left arm in damp weather.

  “He must have kept his head remarkably well,” said Gray, “to have stayed aloft long enough to make any sort of landing.”

  He was thinking, as from time to time he could not prevent himself from doing, of the occasion when he had himself attempted to go aloft on a badly injured wing; remarking that his companions were looking at him curiously, he discovered that he had clasped his right hand protectively over his left shoulder. Hastily he pretended to be scratching an itch.

  “Tanguy is made of quicksilver and cast iron,” said Ollivier, allowing him the pretence. “Whatever does not rebound from his fortunate hide seems to pass straight through him without leaving a mark. Well,” he amended, “not much, at any rate.”

  He and Lécuyer had grinned, then, and Gray had made himself do likewise, grateful to them for letting the awkward moment pass.

  The night-scouts, it must be said, had surprised him—and Mage-Captain Tremblay, too; none of them at all suited his notion of an army officer. Even Colonel Dubois, as seen through the lens of his gruff kindness to young Mr. Morvand, was altogether more . . . human than Gray had expected. For a moment, even, he caught himself pondering whether his father might not in fact have had his best interests in mind, in purchasing for him a mage-lieutenant’s commission and urging (no: ordering) him to take it up. Here he was, after all, making genuine use at last of what was otherwise an obscure and largely impractical, if impressive, skill which had cost him a great deal of time and painful effort to attain, in the company of other men who had undertaken the same single-minded—some might say mule-headed—journey; they were, some of their manners aside, not brutish louts but brave and clever men who treated him as a respected comrade.

  If they accorded him that respect for all the wrong reasons, well . . .

  The plan they had ultimately made,
such as it was, would allow Gray to conduct his own reconnaissance, closer to the ground, without much interference from the others, and would assure him of hearing their full reports whilst not committing himself to reveal every detail of his own observations (or his own purposes) in return.

  And what, indeed, do you hope to observe that they shall not? he asked himself now, derisively. Both Lécuyer and Ollivier had been flying these twilight sorties for years; both had been stationed at Ivry for some months and knew the territory as he could not possibly do. And of course it was not to be supposed that he should happen upon Professor Callender and his cronies, or upon Henry Taylor and Amelia, in the fields and woods round Ivry at night.

  To Ivry, Sieur Germain de Kergabet had said, and from Ivry, to where the trail may lead you.

  In Captain Tremblay’s tent, the three owls perched on the scarred and battered poles of a wooden contraption clearly built for this purpose, peering at the map unrolled upon the Captain’s desk.

  “Here, here, and here, you see,” said Colonel Dubois, pointing, “are the positions of the encampments reported by the scouts of Captain Howells’s company this morning, when they returned at the third hour before noon. Tanguy and Fournier reported seeing no movement during the afternoon, apart from the ordinary business—foraging and scouting parties and the like,” he added, aside, in Gray’s direction.

  Unthinkingly—as though he had been conversing with Sophie—Gray bobbed his head in acknowledgement of this explanation.

  Questions were bubbling up in his mind like a pot a-boiling: What concealing-spells might the armies of the Duchies be employing? Have they airborne scouting parties of their own? How numerous are these nearby encampments, and whose banners do they fly?—and, less worthily, If one of us should be injured, or worse, how shall anyone here know of it? For almost the first time in his life, he would gladly have traded his wings for his human voice in order to ask them. What fool had thought he and the night-scouts ought to be briefed after shifting and not before?