When she would have stepped through the new-hewn doorway, however, the crossed handles of Mr. Goff’s axe and Mr. Tredinnick’s halted her in her tracks. “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” said the latter, “but you’ll not be going first. Anything might be lurking in there.”
“But—”
“Consider our poor nerves, ma’am,” said Goff, politely but firmly, “and imagine our fate at your honoured father’s hands if anything should befall you that we might have prevented through perfectly reasonable precautions.”
The heavy stress which he laid upon those two words, Sophie felt, was entirely superfluous to requirements—but it was true that she ought not to force them into such an equivocal position.
“Very well,” she said, graciously enough; “I concede to you the honour of first setting foot in the pages of history. Give me that lantern,” she added, in a more prosaic tone.
Mr. Tredinnick handed it to her, and she chivvied her magelight into it and handed it back.
“I thank you, ma’am,” said Mr. Goff, with a little bow which Sophie strongly suspected of irony.
“I beg you will not think of it,” said Sophie.
The two guardsmen turned their faces to the ruined door and, moving confidently but cautiously, in single file, stepped over the threshold. Sophie and the others crowded around the opening—torn into the wall of ivy like a wound—and watched them, or their magelight lantern, away into the deep, dark stillness.
CHAPTER XXIV
In Which Gwendolen Makes a Discovery
After what seemed a very long time—though judging by the movement of the sun, it was no more than a quarter-hour at the most—Goff and Tredinnick emerged once more from the gaping doorway, looking very sober and rather wide of eye, but otherwise none the worse for their experience.
“If it please Your Highness,” said Tredinnick. His jaw tightened briefly. “There seems no immediate danger within.”
“But?” said Roland, after a moment.
Tredinnick hesitated, and exchanged a worried look with his comrade.
“But there is something within,” said Goff at last, “that . . . something that may pose a risk to your safety, sir, and to that of the Princess.”
Lucia saw the lift of Sophie’s chin and repressed a sigh. Did Sophie’s guardsmen, after so many years’ close observation, understand her so little?
Then, glancing from Sophie to the two men who stood upon the steps, she saw the expression of betrayal which Tredinnick was directing at Goff—Goff who was, Lucia remembered now, a countryman of Sophie and Joanna’s, born and raised in the province of Breizh. For the first time it came home to her that Roland’s kingdom might be as rife with shifting and conflicting loyalties as her own, and as difficult to navigate.
“What thing, Mr. Goff?” Sophie inquired.
The two guardsmen shifted from foot to foot and looked anywhere but at Sophie or each other. Goff was again the first to yield to Sophie’s expectant silence: “Not . . . not so much a thing, ma’am,” he said, speaking miserably to his boots. “More of a feeling. Er. A feeling of dread.”
Sophie pressed her lips together briefly. “I see. Mr. Tredinnick, do you concur?”
Tredinnick raised his head. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“That does not seem very dangerous,” muttered Gwendolen Pryce.
The next step in the dance was entirely predictable. “Mr. Goff,” Sophie said, “give me that lantern, if you please.”
Less predictably, Goff descended the steps and did so. He said something to Sophie as the lantern changed hands, which made her smile very slightly and Joanna, overhearing, produce and quickly muffle a snort of astonished laughter.
“Sophie,” said Roland, “I do not think you ought—”
Sophie spun to face him, eyes blazing, and—as though actuated all by the same impulse—Lucia, Joanna, and Gwendolen hurriedly converged to separate them.
“Sophie, there is no need for that,” Lucia heard Joanna say soothingly, behind her, as she herself caught Roland by the shoulders and said, low and urgent, “I beg of you, Roland, do not antagonise your sister.”
“I am not antagonising her,” he protested, sinking his voice to match hers. “I am attempting to keep her safe.”
“To hear you,” said Lucia, “one would think you did not know Sophie at all. Truly, Roland, I can think of nothing more likely to antagonise her than an attempt to shield her from the consequences of her own decisions, in the course of an expedition under her command.”
Roland’s brows drew together and his lips pursed up at her military terminology, or perhaps at its use in connexion with his sister. “Do you have any notion, Lucia MacNeill,” he said, vehement through gritted teeth, “what my fate will be at my father’s hands should any harm befall Sophie?”
Lucia had not the patience at present, she decided, to debate with Roland his imagined hierarchy of paternal affection. She dared a look back over her shoulder and found Sophie consulting with Goff and Tredinnick over the draughtsman’s plan of the College Library which Sophie’s historian friend, Gareth Evans-Hughes, had unearthed from a drawer of uncatalogued plans and charts in the library at Merlin College.
“There is no stopping her,” she said, turning back to Roland, “short of knocking her flat and sitting on her, which I hope we can all agree to be an overreaction in this case. If you are wishful to keep your sister safe—or at any rate to be on hand to make the attempt—”
“Yes, yes,” said Roland impatiently. He shrugged out of Lucia’s grip on his shoulders, caught her hand in his—she drew breath in surprise, and returned his grip with interest—and started up the steps.
* * *
“I hope we may not regret this, Jo,” Gwendolen muttered, her shoulder pressed close against Joanna’s in the dark. All about them loomed silent shrouded shapes—bookcases and tables and reading-desks. Outside, the sun had been shining; here the air—as unnaturally still as in the quadrangle—was dry as paper-dust and cold as Midwinter Night.
Joanna, greatly daring, found Gwen’s hand and squeezed it. “We have done many a stupider thing,” she said, “and lived to tell the tale. What horrors are we like to find in an abandoned library, worse than those we saw on the Ross of Mull?”
Gwendolen (who had been so brave on that dreadful night, so calm and so quick-witted) shuddered a little and pressed closer still. “But all the same,” she said, “Mr. Goff and Mr. Tredinnick are not wrong: I do feel something here, Jo, and it is most unpleasant. As though . . . as though we were not wanted.”
“That is only damp, I expect,” said Joanna stoutly.
The magelight lantern, followed closely by Roland’s and Lucia MacNeill’s lights, was drawing farther ahead. Gwendolen called her own small globe of magelight and sent it aloft to hover above their heads.
A pale shape, very nearly human, leapt into relief in the light of Sophie’s lantern. There was a chorus of gasps and yelps—Joanna’s among them—which gave way to a startled burst of laughter from the vanguard when Tredinnick, tallest of the party, held the lantern aloft to reveal a perfectly ordinary marble statue of Minerva with an owl upon one shoulder, set in a raised alcove to the left of a massive set of oaken doors.
Lucia MacNeill’s light grew brighter, illuminating the doors and the large square signboard upon the rightmost, which read in large letters, Closed Stacks. The doors bore heavy wrought-iron handles, gracefully curving left and right.
Sophie turned to face the others, her eyes alight with a dangerous glee. “Mr. Goff!” she said. “Opened you this door, in the course of your reconnaissance?”
“No, ma’am,” said Goff. “In any case I should have supposed it locked.”
“We shall see, then,” said Sophie. Turning away again, she set her hand to the right-hand door-handle.
Joanna, watching with her heart hammering in her ears, saw
Sophie’s shoulders tense and her elbow draw sharply back an instant before Roland, Sophie, and Lucia MacNeill, in voices taut with dismay, said, “Oh, no.”
* * *
It was not surprising, of course, that a college library should contain a very large number of books. Nor was it astonishing, after two centuries’ neglect, that the said books should be in a distressing condition. But this was not mere neglect; this was vicious, wanton destruction. The foreboding which had pressed upon her (upon all of them, if Mr. Tredinnick and Mr. Goff were to be believed) since the moment of entering the building grew abruptly heavier, as though someone had thrown over her shoulders a cloak lined with lead.
For a dizzying, horrified moment, Sophie was transported back to the Master’s Lodge of Merlin College as she and Gray had seen it on the night of Lord Halifax’s death—a wasteland of torn and half-burnt codices, broken glass and toppled furniture, the hiss and crackle of flames, the thick air choking her—and began instinctively to look amongst the mangled books for a human victim. With an effort she wrenched herself back to the present, gently disentangled herself from Roland’s hand gripping her elbow, and advanced into the wreckage of the closed stacks.
She picked her way cautiously amongst the debris, picking up objects more or less at random—here the front half of an edition of Virgil’s Eclogues, there a single page of Cymric verse—and gently putting them down again. Puffs of dust rose underfoot at every step.
The mutilated books, the overturned chairs and tables and reading-stands, her own hands moving before her, grew blurred and indistinct; Sophie heard someone muttering, louder and louder, Who could—how could—what monster has done such a thing?
Only when gentle hands took hold of her shoulders, turning her away from the wreckage, and pressed her face into Lucia’s shoulder, did she recognise that the outraged muttering was her own, and that she was weeping.
“I was wrong,” she said, raising her head and surveying her little company. “I was wrong—Gray was wrong—we were all of us deluded. There is nothing left here, and we shall never be permitted to rebuild it, any of it. I am sorry to have so misled all of you, and wasted so much of your time and—and—”
Sophie turned away from Lucia and sat down hard on the filthy floor, her back against the end of a bookcase, wrapped her arms about her shins, and hid her face against her drawn-up knees. She was distantly aware that she was behaving like a thwarted child, but to have come here with such bright hopes, so have poured so much hard work and will and magick—even, quite literally, the blood from their veins—into the effort to gain access to this place, and then to find it in such a state . . .
“Sophia Marshall!”
Sophie looked up, startled—then farther up, into her sister’s furious face looming above her.
“How dare you!” said Joanna. “After—after everything, Sophie, how dare you give up, when we have come so far, only because some sheep-witted, ham-handed dolts have made a mess of a few old books!”
Gwendolen stood at Joanna’s right elbow, and Roland at her left with Lucia beside him; beyond the circle of their anxious, indignant faces, Mr. Goff and Mr. Tredinnick hovered, inwardly debating, Sophie supposed, whether this constituted a threat of the sort against which they were meant to be protecting her, or a salutary check upon her temper.
“It is not a few old books, Jo!” Sophie protested. She did not trouble to keep her despair from leaking into her voice or from showing on her face. “It is thousands of books—it is all the books—there may be some that existed nowhere else. Even to collect up all the fragments would be the work of a month, before we could begin piecing them together, to see what has been lost; and as for repairing them—!”
Lucia MacNeill dropped to her knees in the dust and debris and caught one of Sophie’s hands in hers. “A college is not its books, Sophie,” she said. “A college is the minds and hearts and voices of its scholars—its Fellows, its students—and the knowledge they make together. This”—she tilted her head at the destruction—“hurts my heart as it hurts yours; but a library can be rebuilt, Sophie, within as well as without.”
Sophie blinked slowly, considering this. There was a large and obvious flaw in Lucia’s reasoning: At present, Lady Morgan College lacked not only books (or, at any rate, books in a condition to be read and used) but Fellows, students, librarians, servants, gardeners, patrons, tutors, and lecturers as well. And what hope had they now of discovering the secrets of the place, if even its ordinary, everyday possessions had been visited by such destruction?
“Sophie,” said Joanna again—her voice not angry now, but sharp with sudden worry. She crouched directly in front of Sophie, hands on her knees for balance, and looked searchingly into her face. “Sophie, this is not . . . you are not missing Gray again, as you did in Alba?”
This query, at which Roland’s brow furrowed in confusion, sharpened Sophie’s mind as perhaps nothing else could have done at this moment. “I,” she said, and bit her lip in concentration. “No, I think—”
She let her eyes fall shut, reached inwards with practised ease and then, tentatively, outwards—found the thread of Gray’s magick once more, and gauged the strength of her own. “No,” she said positively, opening her eyes. “He is far away, and, I think, going farther still, but—no.”
The exercise of seeking out her link to Gray, however, had made her senses more awake to the presence of other magicks around her, and it became clear to her now that the foreboding which had dogged all their steps since first they passed the College gate was not a product of anyone’s imagination but a real and very nearly tangible thing. That it was, in fact, exactly what some long-dead mage, or mages, had meant subsequent intruders to feel.
Well, then: Whoever you are—were—I decline to oblige you. Sophie smiled down at her knees. Then she turned the smile upwards and outwards, let it begin to blaze away the fog of despair in which she had been about to lose herself, and levered herself to her feet.
“My apologies for my outburst,” she said briskly, dusting her hands on her skirts. “I shall not let it occur again.” I hope. “Mr. Goff—Mr. Tredinnick—Ceana MacGregor—I believe we have useful work here for your troops to do; you may assign the most careful of them to begin collecting and organising all of this . . . material . . . so that it may be properly catalogued hereafter.”
“Ma’am,” said Mr. Goff. Ceana MacGregor nodded.
Sophie looked about her, and found she could imagine the skewed and gaping shelves straightened, repaired and filled with books once more.
* * *
Though the mere sight of it very evidently pained her, Sophie insisted—over the protests of the others—upon a full exploration of the ruined library stacks. This proved a fortunate choice, however; the destruction, they discovered, was far less complete than had at first appeared, and they left the closed stacks greatly encouraged, to proceed to the reading rooms.
It was in the Fellows’ Reading Room—once a place of ease and comfort, even luxury, to judge by the shapes of the dust-furred sofas and the array of cobwebbed bottles and decanters upon the sideboard—that this strange day began to grow even stranger.
“Jo,” said Gwendolen, sending her small magelight up to hover near the ceiling, at the corner formed by the room’s south and east walls.
The corner was occupied by a triangular glass-fronted curio-case, well above six feet tall, from behind whose square panes (only one of them broken, for a wonder) could be glimpsed, inter alia, a bronze knotwork buckle, several large shells, a silver welcome-cup entirely black with tarnish, and a small bust of Hypatia of Alexandria. What might be on the top of it, however, Joanna could not possibly determine.
“If you will give me a leg up,” said Gwendolen—as though they had been discussing the logistics of mounting a particularly tall horse—“I shall be able to get it down, I think.”
“Get what down?” said Joanna.
“Once I have laid hands on it,” Gwendolen said patiently, “perhaps we may discover what it is.”
Joanna, grumbling more for the look of the thing than from any genuine reluctance, took a knee and cupped her hands to boost Gwendolen up the last few inches.
The thing which had caught Gwendolen’s eye proved to be a box: a perfectly ordinary oblong box, or chest—such as a lady might use to keep her jewellery in, or her love-letters—of polished wood, with brass hinges to one side and a robust lock to the other. Perfectly ordinary, that is, but that over the course of two centuries it appeared to have gathered no dust.
Joanna and Gwendolen looked at one another, and at Lucia.
“Sophie!” Joanna said. “Come and look what Gwen has found.”
Gwendolen carried the box to the table by the vast cold hearth on the west wall and set it down very carefully, as though she feared it might burst into flame. Sophie straightened up from investigating the bottom drawer of the sideboard, and they gathered round the table, Roland and Tredinnick having set out to investigate the bindery where once on a time, according to Edwina Antonia Calixta’s plan, the College’s librarians had maintained and repaired their own books.
The lock resisted first Gwendolen’s attempts upon it with a pair of hair-pins and Joanna’s paper-knife, and then Lucia’s unlocking-spell, but opened with a soft snick when Sophie laid her hand upon it and murmured, “Libera quod hic habeant in carcere.”
The four of them exchanged a look of trepidation; then Sophie carefully lifted the hinged lid of the box—like the lock, the hinges seemed not to have remarked the passage of time, for they swung easily and silently.
Within, the box was lined with crimson velvet, unworn and unfaded by time, and filled with closely written pages; perched atop them, a folded and sealed letter was directed—in a flowing, exuberant hand—To she who has succeeded in opening the box.
A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel) Page 32