A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel)

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  They stared at it, frozen in a silence pregnant with terror and exhilaration, the length of four long breaths. Joanna could hear the others breathing—fancied, indeed, that she could hear their hearts beating, though it must be only her own pulse hammering in her ears.

  Then Lucia MacNeill said, in a sort of strangled whisper, “That will be you, then, Sophie.”

  Sophie made no reply, unless her quickened breathing might be so construed.

  “Ought we to read it here?” said Joanna, when the silence had again begun to stretch unbearably. “Or take it away with us?”

  “Ought we even to touch it?” said Gwendolen. “Is it not likely to be a trap?”

  She was staring at the open box, Joanna saw, like a mouse watching a cat: wary and preternaturally still, as though seeking to make herself invisible. That is Sophie’s bailiwick, Gwen; the rest of us had better not attempt it.

  “What sort of trap?” said Joanna, practically.

  “It may be poisoned.” Gwendolen looked down at her, brow furrowed with worry. “Or—or perhaps removing the letter from the box may trigger some other sort of trap, or—”

  Her next horrible idea remained unspoken, however, for she broke off abruptly when Sophie reached out, picked up the letter, and broke the seal.

  When—contrary to her expectation—no flash of mage-fire or magickal explosion followed, no shriek of pain or sudden swoon, Joanna relaxed minutely; from which she understood, as she had not before, how tightly she was wound. Wincing, she flexed her fingers and shifted surreptitiously from foot to foot.

  There was not much else to be done: Sophie was reading the letter—if letter it was—in a tense, breathing silence, whilst everyone else watched her doing so; and though Joanna should not have hesitated, in the normal course of things, to ask importunate questions, peer round her sister’s shoulder, or demand that the letter be read aloud, the present atmosphere made all of these possibilities altogether unthinkable.

  She could, however, edge closer to the box, the better to peer at the topmost paper in the stack, and this she did—though very slowly, so that Sophie might not remark it.

  The swooping hand was the same as that which had directed the letter, and not easily intelligible; Joanna found herself wishing that the document had been only enciphered, rather than written two centuries ago by someone now long dead, and thus impossible to interrogate. Sophie, she supposed, must often have encountered documents of similar or even less recent vintage, in the course of her studies; at any rate, though her perusal of the mysterious letter was by no means rapid, it seemed not to be giving her any particular difficulty. The documents which crossed Joanna’s desk in the course of her work, by contrast, were seldom more than a month old. Not for nothing, however, had she spent so much of the past five years in translating the hurried shorthand notes of a variety of persons into legible and consistent fair copies; she had grown adept at spotting patterns, and at leaps of logic premised on nothing more than the vague shape of a word.

  And the shapes of the words before her now . . .

  No. Surely not.

  She blinked—blinked again, hard—but having resolved the swooping whorls and decorative loops and slashes into intelligible words, she could not unsee them.

  Being the true tale of the deathe and life of Edward, by the gods favour Rex Britannicus, in the VIth yr of hys reigne

  attested this XVth day of May, anno XX Edw. VI R.

  by his sisters—

  It was a forgery, surely—it could not be what it appeared—could it? The death and life of Edward—what in Hades could that mean? Joanna’s fingers itched to reach for the page, to turn it over so that she might see the next.

  She glanced at Sophie, and found her gazing at the last page of the letter as if transfixed.

  “Tell me I am not mad,” she said abruptly, thrusting the pages at Joanna, who was nearest. “Look at these . . . these signs-manual, and tell me I am not mad.”

  Joanna stared at it—Lucia MacNeill and Gwendolen crowded in to do the same—they exchanged incredulous glances, and stared still more.

  The names were unmistakable, written in letters nearly as high as the preceding paragraph, and each underscored with a complicated arrangement of interlocking horizontal loops:

  Mathilda Julia

  Edith Augusta

  “Either that is the cleverest forgery I have ever seen,” said Joanna at last, “or this letter was written to you by the Princesses Regent.”

  CHAPTER XXV

  In Which Sophie Reads a Letter

  “Must we stay here?” Roland was pacing—both irritable and irritating—an increasingly rapid circle round the Fellows’ Reading Room. “Whatever this mysterious box has to tell us, can it not be told . . . elsewhere?”

  “If you cannot be still, Roland,” Joanna snapped, “I beg you will at least be quiet.” She spun on one heel to address Lucia: “Can you not knock him down and sit on him?”

  Lucia had for some time been resisting a strong urge to do exactly this, not least because she was not entirely certain of succeeding. She shook her head at Joanna, who, with a small huff of impatience, turned back to Sophie. Tempers were fraying on all sides, it appeared.

  I cannot knock him down and sit on him, but perhaps . . .

  “Roland,” said Lucia quietly, laying a hand on his arm, when next his fretful peregrinations brought him near. He paused, turned, met her gaze; his eyes, blue as the sky at Midsummer, burned fever-bright, and beneath her hand his arm quivered with tension.

  “Can you hear it?” he said. “It has not stopped since we set foot in this room.” In a tone as near to desperate pleading as she had ever heard from him, he repeated, “Must we stay here?”

  Lucia heard nothing out of the ordinary—nothing but Roland’s quiet near-panic and the others murmuring together as they deciphered Sophie’s ancestral artefact—but it was true that the atmosphere in this room was charged as even the quadrangle, with its still air and whispering trees, had not been. Was there something in this place, something only Roland could hear? Were Roland’s pacing, Joanna’s snappish temper, Lucia’s own restless anxiety, linked by something more than their strange uncertain circumstances?

  “What do you hear?” she said. “Is it . . . it is not the trees again, surely? I should hear them, I think—at least a little—if it were that.”

  “No,” he said, twitching. “Not trees. Voices . . . voices and bells. Why bells, by all the gods? Can you—are you quite sure you cannot hear them, Lucia?”

  His voice had risen by now from a low murmur almost to a shout, and from behind Lucia there came a furious bellow: “Roland, be quiet!”

  The next moment found the five of them gaping at one another in speechless shock, and Sophie—whose bellow it had been—most staggered of all.

  There is something here, thought Lucia grimly, tangling us up and bending us awry.

  The question was whether that something resided here, in the College Library—and thus could be run away from—or whether it was tied to that box which only Sophie could open, or to its bizarre contents, and thus would follow them wherever they might go.

  “I think,” said Sophie in a quite different voice, high and a little shaky, “we ought perhaps to resume this conversation elsewhere.”

  * * *

  In the still sun-dappled air of the quadrangle, the trees shivered and rustled, and Lucia and Roland—walking arm in arm, pressed close together, though they seemed not to know it—looked anxiously about them, and started at small sounds.

  Sophie carried the box. It seemed to grow heavier and heavier—it was only that her arms were not so strong as she had thought, she told herself firmly—and she was reminded of Gray’s midnight misadventures in Oxford long ago, of his description of Henry Taylor cradling the teakwood box which, as Sophie and her friends discovered much later, had held a beating
human heart to be used in the Professor’s arcane poison. Might the contents of this quite different box, she wondered, prove equally deadly?

  They collected their much-reduced bodyguard at the College gate, to which—eventually—they had been persuaded to return and wait, in case of inquisitive passers-by. Mr. Tredinnick’s eyes widened at the sight of them; Mr. Goff and Ceana MacGregor seemed disposed to ask questions but were stared into temporary silence by Joanna.

  The return journey to the Dragon and Lion was slow and subdued, as though all of them felt—as Sophie certainly did—far more drained by their afternoon’s labours than the nature of those labours warranted.

  She surveyed her troops, as she fancied a general might, and made a decision.

  “The baths first,” she said firmly, “and then dinner, and then this horrible box.”

  * * *

  “In the sixth year of our brother Edward’s reign,” Sophie read, peering down at the manuscript page on the table before her,

  a sickness came upon him, which, for the first time, all the skill and all the art of the Royal Healers proved powerless to amend. Then as now, the greatest threat to our kingdom was that of retribution from Ferdinand of Aragon and his allies amongst the other Iberian kings, on behalf of his daughter, the first Queen Catherine; a strong hand on the reins was, and remains, necessary to Britain’s survival.

  Our father Henry was—like his patron Jove—impetuous, headstrong, and apt at times to be ruled by the bodily passions, but—

  “Jove’s blood!” Roland exclaimed, starting up in his chair. “Do you suppose they dared speak of him so when he was alive?”

  “If they did,” said Joanna, sotto voce, “it was no more than he deserved.”

  Too restless to sit still, she had eschewed all of the available seats in favour of loitering before the window, only half seeing the bustle of the inn-yard below. Gwendolen, standing just behind her left shoulder, prodded her reprovingly in the ribs; Joanna ignored her.

  “I expect,” said Sophie dryly, “that had either of the Princesses been in the habit of insulting their father to his face during his lifetime, they should not later have found themselves among their brother’s Regents. If I may continue?”

  —but he was not a fool; indeed, he possessed both a formidable intellect and an unparalleled grasp of political strategy, though all too often overridden by less noble concerns. In divorcing Catherine of Aragon, he did not act in ignorance of the likely consequences but, rather, in defiance thereof, and in full confidence of Britain’s capacity to defend her own interests. For this reason, when the full consciousness of his impending demise came upon him, he took great care in dictating the terms under which his successor—our brother Edward—should be guided during the years of his minority.

  In another kingdom, perhaps, or in other circumstances, Henry might simply have named one of his daughters—both intelligent women; both thoroughly educated in history, politics, and the theory and practice of magick; the elder already of an age to rule, and the younger very nearly—as his successor. Both Eire and Alba, for example, have from time to time been ruled by women of exceptional strength of character, and neither, we feel bound to note, has been rendered a less formidable foe thereby.

  Lucia MacNeill produced a small, appreciative chuckle.

  Our father, however, Sophie continued, knew such a course to be politically impossible in Britain, and therefore, in the interests of averting consequences which might well have escalated to the point of civil war, chose what seemed to him the next best course, by appointing both of us—together with Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford (later Duke of Somerset) and brother of our late stepmother Genevieve Seymour, and Hugh Dudley, Earl of Warwick (later Duke of Northumberland)—as Regents to the child Edward.

  If you, unknown and yet-unborn scion of the House of Tudor, have any knowledge of history, you will of course know what next befell: the attempt by Somerset to install himself as Lord Protector, and of Northumberland to blow up the spark of conflict with Aragon into the full flames of war; their trial, conviction, and execution on charges of high treason, and our unexpected victory in remaining Edward’s sole regents until his majority; Edward’s successive betrothals, and their various failures; his illness at the age of fifteen, and the struggles for dominance which ensued; his marriage in the following year, and—the Lady Juno willing—the tale of his descendants, down to your own day. What you cannot know—what no one presently living knows, excepting our two selves, nor ever will know from our lips whilst we live—is the true tale of that illness. This we set down here, both as a caution for others who may suffer the same temptations, and as a protest against that other precaution which Edward, against our counsel, intends to take, that of casting into perpetual oblivion that seat of learning which fed and nurtured us, and many another young woman of intellect and spirit, and thus gave us both the knowledge of a means to save him, and the audacity to make the attempt.

  We intend no disloyalty to our brother, to our King, or to our kingdom. Indeed, in every particular we have acted from a determination to safeguard both the King’s person and the kingdom itself.

  “Yes, but what in Hades did they do?” Joanna had spent a great deal of time, these past several years, in cultivating patience; but this aggravated avoidance of the point—and perhaps, too, she grudgingly conceded, whatever mysterious current had so affected all of them whilst they stood about in the College Library—was making her skin crawl and her gut clench and her fingers twitch, not only in impatience but in something very like dread.

  “If you will listen instead of interrupting,” said Sophie, “perhaps we shall all find out.”

  Joanna turned from the window and glared at her, but made a show of pressing her lips tight shut.

  If you now hold in your hands this manuscript, and have read so far as this—

  “Then you have the patience of Prometheus,” muttered Roland, and Joanna, Gwendolen, and Lucia erupted in entirely inappropriate laughter.

  Sophie, frowning, raised her voice and overrode them:

  —and have read so far as this, then you have done what Edward and his Privy Council (from which we have long been banished, for the offence of keeping the royal sceptre of Britain safely in our brother’s hand) are bent upon preventing: You have opened the gates of Lady Morgan College, gained entrance to the Library, and succeeded in opening the box into which this manuscript will shortly be sealed. We commend your perseverance; we tremble at your temerity. May the gods protect and aid you in confronting whatever dire peril has led you here.

  Sophie turned over the page from which she had been reading; before she could go on to the next, Roland said, “Why should they suppose that we—that is, that the reader of their words—should be in dire peril? I mean to say—of course there is danger to the kingdom, but—”

  “Why indeed?” echoed Lucia, stepping in (to Roland’s visible consternation) before he could further entangle himself. “After all, Sophie, you did not suppose any such peril existed when you conceived your idea. And—I am sorry to say it, but so it is—we should none of us be here at all, had your father given you leave to go where the true peril is, or appears to be.”

  “One does ask oneself these questions.” Sophie, looking grim, lowered her gaze to the paper before her.

  Know, then, that this last illness of Edward’s did not come near to killing him, as it had done more than once before, but killed him indeed; that we, his sisters, bargained with the gods for his life, and that the bargain we struck gave back his spirit to the world of flesh and blood, in exchange for the lives we should have had, as wives and mothers. Our life’s blood flows now in his veins; our three hearts beat in time; we have taken his ills upon ourselves, and our lives are bound up in his. When he takes ship for Elysium at last, we shall go with him—or, as it may be, shall go down to the depths of Tartarus, as punishment for our desperate arrogance, in th
warting the will or whim of the gods.

  What we did was done for the best, as we have said, for Edward had no heir—nor even a wife—at the time of his death, and though already he showed promise as a shrewd and even-handed ruler, with much of our father’s wit but little of his grosser appetites, we could not predict (or, rather, could predict all too well) what scoundrel, fool, or wastrel amongst the twisted limbs of our family tree might be seized upon to succeed him—or what pretenders might emerge from Bourgogne or Acquitaine, or even from Aragon, to press their suits by claim of law or, worse, by force upon our kingdom’s body.

  “What a very unappealing metaphor,” said Lucia, wincing.

  “Quite,” said Sophie.

  Nevertheless, Edward, upon being told of our great feat and sacrifice when he came of age, declared it a crime against his person (for being in such dire straits, we had not sought to know his wishes, nor sought his consent to what we meant to do) and against the gods (whose will it had clearly been, he said, that he should die on that day, at that hour), and exiled us from his Court. We have taken refuge here, at Lady Morgan College, which has extended to us her protection and welcomed us back within her hallowed walls—but, as we know in our heart of hearts, only so long as nothing is known of our crime, our sacrifice. Edward of Britain and the Fellows of Lady Morgan College agree on very few points, but on the subject of the ancient magick of blood and stone, their views are both alike distressingly rigid.

  “‘The ancient magick of blood and stone,’” Lucia repeated thoughtfully. “What can that mean, do you suppose?”

  “I have not the least idea,” said Sophie. “I must say that this is quite the longest and almost the least useful description of a magickal working I have read in my life; the Princesses Regent appear to have modelled their prose style on that of Xanthus Marinus.”

  In case Edward should carry out his scheme to consign Lady Morgan College to oblivion—as at present we think very likely—we feel duty-bound to record, for posterity if for no other purpose, what the transgression was that has led to the dissolution of this College and the revocation of its Royal Charter. Had we understood at the time that we should be sacrificing not only our own future, but those of the thousands of young women who might have passed through the gates into this place of learning, of knowledge, of seeking after wisdom, we should have acted, not differently, but with infinitely more regret for this consequence of our choice, which falls not on ourselves but on others. Notwithstanding these regrets, however, it is our considered opinion that to permit our brother’s early death to open the way for disorder and strife in the kingdom we love as fiercely as he does himself were the worse betrayal of the two.