But I need not obey this man’s command unless it serves my own purposes, Gray reminded himself. He was not that boy of barely one-and-twenty, almost equally lacking in friends and funds, and forced to choose, in effect, between incarceration as his tutor’s guest and an accusation of murder. Perhaps most importantly, he had—unlike that frightened, baffled younger version of himself—the full use of his talent, and the certain knowledge that he was not alone in the world.
He returned the priest’s smile and leant back a little in his seat. “Do tell, monsieur,” he said.
So it was that by the following morning, Gray found himself travelling south through the Île-des-Francs in the company of one Charles Durand, priest of the Temple of Ceres, who wished to make him known to the man he called the Emperor of Gaul.
CHAPTER XXIII
In Which Roland Makes Himself Surprisingly Useful
In the morning, armed with several slim iron rods made to Sophie’s specifications by an obliging blacksmith, and sundry other useful tools, they renewed their assault upon the College gate. Sophie and Lucia—her good spirits much restored by the attentions of the talented healer whom Roland had insisted upon summoning from the Infirmary—had sat up late the previous night in their room, racking their brains for some better method than crude trial and error, but, in the almost total absence of information, had been forced to concede defeat. Accordingly, therefore, Joanna produced a wax candle in a brass holder, and held it steady whilst Gwendolen called fire to produce another of her focused, blue-hot flames; Sophie carried a basin, soap, and towels borrowed from the inn; and Lucia extracted from her reticule a bodkin and a stack of clean handkerchiefs collected from the rest of the party and passed the former through the flame.
“Let me be first to try,” said Ceana MacGregor, predictably.
She did not so much as flinch when Lucia ran the bodkin deep into her thumb, or when she squeezed it to encourage the blood to drip onto the first of the iron rods. But when tried in the lock, Ceana MacGregor’s blood, like Lucia’s, had no effect upon the spell at all.
There followed a brief debate between Sophie and her guardsmen as to which of them should make the next attempt, which Mr. Goff won—only to discover that, alas, his blood was no more to the spell’s taste than Ceana MacGregor’s.
Mr. Tredinnick, Miss Pryce, and Joanna all tried their luck, to the same effect, before any of the others would agree to either Sophie’s or Roland’s doing so. The morning was wearing on, however, and the discouraging failures (and bloodied handkerchiefs) mounting up; when Joanna was nursing her bleeding right thumb and Mr. Goff beginning to talk of calling in the rest of the guardsmen presently off-duty at the inn, and Ceana MacGregor of summoning some of her subordinates, to try their luck, Sophie and her brother exchanged a meaning glance, and Roland said firmly, “I shall take the next turn.”
At his own insistence, Lucia turned over to him the iron rod smeared with his blood, to be tried in the keyhole. Sophie tensed involuntarily as he inserted it. So much occupied was her mind in anticipating the outcome that she did not register the stiff click-clank of the tumblers turning, or even the low groan of the hinges, until Roland said, in a stupefied tone, “The . . . the gate is opening.”
Through the ivy-covered gateway Sophie went—magick buzzed in her mind’s ear like swarming bees, then rippled as a sheet of water falling—and before she quite understood what she was doing, she found herself the first living person in more than two centuries to set foot inside the walls of Lady Morgan College.
She stopped in her tracks, causing someone to jostle her shoulder and someone else to tread painfully on her heel, and stared about her.
Even in the dungeons of remote Castle MacAlpine on the Ross of Mull, she had never seen such thorough dereliction. So high was the frontage that only the verdigris-green dome had been visible from without—or was there magick at work there, too, concealing the true state of things from the casual observer?—but here within, massive oaks and plane trees (and one lightning-split horse-chestnut) spread their branches overhead in a near-unbroken canopy, and underfoot the carpet of leaf-mould and acorns and rotting conkers was ankle-deep in places, interrupted by springy tree-shoots at various stages of growth. Clusters of primrose-yellow and harebell-blue swirled about the feet of the great old trees, like supplicants on their knees before the great gods.
Oak-trees, thought Sophie vaguely, are sacred to Jupiter.
With a scraping and a creaking of hinges, the gate closed (or was closed) behind them; and then silence. Utter silence, but for the breathing of the five women and three men who stood just inside the gate, suspended in Sophie’s indecision.
Sophie drew a deep, slow breath, shut her eyes, and reached for her magick. The unspeakable relief of finding it just as usual took her aback—she had not understood until this moment how much she had dreaded the reverse, had feared that they might be crossing the boundary of an interdiction—and she stood for a moment perfectly still, steadying her breathing, willing her pulse down from its panicked hammering in her ears. That done, she reached out cautiously, seeking touchpoints in the not-quite-space about her: near at hand the bright red-gold touch of Lucia’s magick, to which her own had once been linked; far away, so far as to be nearly undetectable, the deep blue-green thread of Gray’s, linked to hers still though the connexion was faint and attenuated by the distance between them. Gray’s magick had had a flavour of feathers about it for some time now, and on one recent night the sizzle of stormy weather and a worrying flash of pain; this morning, however, it tasted only of deep sleep.
Easy to ponder the significance of this, to worry at the possibilities like a terrier with a rat, to be drawn aside from the concerns of the here-and-now—
Sophie gave herself a mental shake, drew in her wandering wits, and put forth the tendrils of her magick to prod (carefully, gently) at the barrier which logic suggested must enclose the College grounds. At first she could detect nothing, and frowned in bafflement; had she and her companions, in passing through the circumference of the spell, somehow released or erased it? Such a thing was not impossible—not, at any rate, more impossible than some of the other things they had seen and done since arriving in Oxford—but it would be an odd sort of mage, or group of mages, who so constructed any sort of barrier-spell as to permit some unknown future invader to undo it.
And, besides that, there is something. I felt it, and I feel it still.
No, she corrected herself almost at once, remembering: There are two things. Two layers of magick—and of quite different magicks, if she had read the signs aright—one encircling and enclosing the other.
Those generations-ago mages, whoever they had been—even this much, none of the books she had found and read could tell her—what had they been thinking, what seeking to achieve?
Following the logic of that thought, and peripherally aware of her companions’ soft footfalls all about her, Sophie shifted and broadened the focus of her explorations; it might be a cleverly modified concealment-spell, the thing she sought, but equally it might be some species of warding-spell, of shielding, of protection—all related, of course, but nonetheless distinct from one another. And there, there—
That shimmering inner layer followed the exterior walls, she found—unsurprising—but curved high overhead, too, and—astonishing!—deep beneath her feet. A shielding-spell, or the essence of one, a perfect sphere constrained and contorted by the shape of the walls about its middle, like a ball of wool forced through an arm-ring.
The magick tasted familiar, somehow—not like her own, or Gray’s, or Lucia’s, not like that of anyone she knew, and yet . . . and yet. The scent of it echoed in her mind’s ear, as though she should recognise it if only she could find just the right angle of observation. She touched it with a tendril of her magick (a single petal of the blue-white flame-flower by which her mind chose to represent her power, pulled out into a fine thread),
steeling herself against some hostile reaction. To her astonishment, however, the only response was a brief shiver, rippling outwards from the point of metaphysickal contact like the concentric waves a still pond makes when a small stone is dropped into it; it was not hostility she felt, shimmering back along that hair’s-breadth tendril of her magick, but . . . surely it could not be . . . recognition?
Now, the outward layer, on the other hand—
A hand on her arm wrenched her back to the world of leaf-mould and ancient, overgrown trees; she opened her eyes to find Joanna peering anxiously up into her face.
“Sophie,” she said quietly, “is all well? Ought we to proceed, or . . . ?”
Sophie felt anxious eyes upon her from all sides. She straightened her spine, squared her shoulders, and said, “We proceed. Mr. Tredinnick, the maps, if you please.”
Mr. Tredinnick unshipped from his shoulder the heavy cylindrical case which held the rolled-up maps, and which Sophie herself, to her intense irritation, had not been permitted to carry. The map she wanted (actually the plan of the College located by Evans-Hughes at Merlin) was fortunately the outermost; there being no flat surface to hand, Mr. Goff offered his own back for the purpose, and Sophie—acutely uncomfortable, but unwilling to risk unnecessary delay—unrolled the parchment and flattened it across his broad shoulders, holding it in place with one palm to each of its short edges.
The others crowded round them, so close that Sophie experienced a strong desire to scream.
“Here we are,” she said, nodding at the point towards the lower edge of the plan which represented the gate. Nodding at it was quite useless, but she had no free hand to point with. “Miss Pryce, may I ask—”
Miss Pryce’s slim hands pressed flat the two corners nearest her, and Sophie retracted her right hand and tapped her forefinger upon the spot where—more or less—they now stood. “Here is the Shrine of Minerva; here, the Library, and there the Refectory.”
They had planned to investigate the Library first of all, if they should find the buildings still standing—though it had been a long morning already, and the Shrine of Minerva was temptingly near . . .
Lucia rested one forefinger on the representation of the Library; she glanced up from the map, then down again, orienting herself. “That way, I believe,” she said, pointing. “But the way is not very clear.”
Indeed, the way was choked with brambles—almost entirely dead for lack of sunlight—and twilight-dark besides, for the canopies of two plane-trees and a horse-chestnut met overhead in that spot, and between them contrived to block almost all the sunlight that elsewhere filtered through the branches.
“Well, then,” said Roland cheerfully, “shall we begin?”
Either he was quite unintimidated by the prospect before him—buoyed up, just possibly, by his unexpected (and quite unearned) success with the gate—or he was developing into a far better actor than Sophie had hitherto suspected. For her purposes, however, it did not much matter which.
“Certainly,” she said, and began rolling up the map.
* * *
The guardsmen obligingly hacked their way through the worst of the overgrown brambles and half-fallen trees. Here and there they found the remains of a footpath by the crunching of gravel under their feet, but the place was so still and silent around them that Sophie could not help feeling, uneasily, that they were treading through a tomb. The others followed; conversing at first in whispers, they fell silent one by one, and went unspeaking, single-file, their footsteps slow and cautious as her own.
The College Library hove into view after perhaps a quarter-hour—at a distance which ought not to have taken half that time to traverse—half buried in ivy and old-man’s-beard but instantly recognisable by its two long wings and square central tower. The main doors were easily enough located by reference to the plan, but it took some time, even with three wood-axes to yesterday’s one, to hack away the creeping growth that covered them. So oppressive was the pervading silence that the sound of the axe-blades biting into tough ivy-stems and glancing against stone came, perversely, as something of a relief to Sophie.
She started at a brief touch on her arm, but it was only Roland. Drawing in close beside her, he bent his head to speak in her ear: “Are you quite sure of this, Sophie?”
Sophie stepped back and turned to look at him. “What makes you ask?” she said. “You were eager enough this morning, at the gate.”
Roland pursed his lips, wrinkled up his forehead, and scuffed one boot-toe in the leaf-mould underfoot. “It is too quiet,” he said at last.
“It is that,” Sophie conceded. “I do not quite know what to make of it.”
“La belle au bois dormant,” said Roland. “That is what I make of it.”
“I believe that cryptic utterance was intended to convey some very deep meaning,” said Sophie, after a long moment, “but I must tell you, Roland, that I have not the least notion what it might be.”
She surveyed the scene before her, telling herself that she was the captain of this small expeditionary force and was merely gauging its progress. The truth was that since the moment they had all passed in the gate, a cold vague dread had been creeping through her, winding frigid fingers about her heart; sober reason told her that, if any dire fate was to befall any of her party, it could not be avoided by her watchful eye alone, but nonetheless she did not like to let them out of her sight. Mr. Goff and Mr. Tredinnick were resting from their assault on the ivy, whilst Ceana MacGregor knelt at the foot of the door, prying up matted grass-roots from between the paving-stones with her belt-knife; Joanna and Miss Pryce had spread out the College plan on the lowest step and were discussing it (or something else) in low voices, and Lucia, inexplicably, was picking flowers.
“La belle au bois dormant,” Roland repeated, unhelpfully. “You must know the tale, surely!”
“Joanna knows it, I am sure,” said Sophie, “but—”
“Knows what?” Joanna raised her head and twisted round to look at Sophie and Roland.
“The tale of the beautiful woman in the sleeping wood,” said Sophie.
“No, no,” said Joanna. She sprang to her feet, dusted her hands on her skirts, and descended the three steps in one casual jump. “It is the woman who sleeps, in the tale; the wood goes on growing for a hundred years—or was it a thousand?”
“A hundred,” said Miss Pryce, descending the steps more sedately in Joanna’s wake. “Surely you remember! You heard me reading this tale to Agatha and Yvon very lately—it is Agatha’s favourite at present. The princess pricks her finger on the spindle, and the curse of Alecto, of which she ought to have died, is softened by the blessing of Melpomene, so that instead she falls into a deep sleep, and the whole of her father’s palace likewise. They sleep for a hundred years, whilst the wood grows up all about them, until they are freed by the bold and handsome prince who contrives, with the blessings and aid of the Lady Venus, to break through the barrier of the wood and wake the princess.”
“Was it Melpomene, Gwen?” said Joanna, screwing up her face in thought. “I thought it was Thalia.”
“Oh, certainly, perhaps it might be,” Gwendolen agreed.
Sophie considered this in silence for some moments, and at last, turning to Roland, said, “The resemblances are striking, I must concede.”
“But the wood,” said Roland. “The trees. That is what made me think of it—that, and the terrible quiet. The prince needs the help of the Lady Venus, you see, because the trees are not merely standing in his way, but waging war against him.”
At this last Lucia, who had wandered into hearing distance whilst Roland was speaking, looked up sharply from her fistful of wildflowers. “You hear them?” she said. “You are quite sure? What do they say?”
“You know it is not like that,” said Roland. He sounded rather cross. “They do not want us here; that is all I know.”
&
nbsp; “Roland, what—” Sophie began, but got no further before Lucia and Roland’s conversation went on over and without her.
“Do not want us here?” said Lucia. “Us, particularly? Or—”
“Do not want anyone,” said Roland. “I think. That is, they wish to be left in peace. That is—truly, Lucia, you ask too much!”
To Sophie’s astonishment, Lucia did not dispute this accusation, but only said, “I am sorry.”
Roland blinked.
“These trees will not speak to me at all,” Lucia went on; Roland’s eyes widened, as though this surprised him. “I do not know why they should, in point of fact; who am I, to the trees of Lady Morgan College?”
“And why should they speak to me?” Roland demanded. “This was a domain of women—of women scholars—and I am neither of those things; why in Hades should the trees speak to me, of all people? Yet they do, more or less. Plainly there is no logic or reason in the case.”
Joanna, edging close to Sophie whilst Roland and Lucia were absorbed in their debate, stretched up on tiptoe and muttered into her ear, “I confess I do not find this tale of speaking trees more persuasive with repetition.”
“Hush, Jo,” Sophie murmured. Tredinnick and Goff had begun to swing their axes again, and she was struggling to hear anything over the din.
“But it was your blood that opened the gate,” Lucia was saying. “You cannot deny it—indeed, you were rather preening yourself on it not two hours ago. And if the gate—”
A tremendous cracking sound, and the sharp unsettling shriek of metal striking metal.
“Your Highness,” called Mr. Goff, from the top of the steps. “We are through the door.”
Sophie hesitated—how could she leave that cryptic conversation unexplored?—but the others were surging past her and up the steps to the Library doors, and so she made haste to follow, calling a light to hover over her shoulder as she went, for beyond the splintered oaken doors lay a profound and palpable darkness.
A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel) Page 31