A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel)

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  Who can say how we may be remembered, if at all? But Edward VI shall be remembered as a good and wise king, and thus we shall have our posterity.

  Sophie looked up once more, blinking owlishly. “And that,” she said, “is all there is of it. As well that we have no need to replicate their grand mysterious working, for they have told us nothing whatever about it!”

  “Sophie, they were writing a deathbed confession, not reporting the results of an experiment for the Transactions,” said Lucia MacNeill, much more gently than Joanna could have managed.

  “And, as you say,” said Roland, “we have no need of such a working.”

  The four women exchanged a long, meaning look, but made him no reply.

  “At any rate,” said Joanna, when the silence threatened to grow impossibly long, “we have solved your mystery, Sophie. Only, I do not suppose that we ought to make this tale public.”

  “We should certainly put paid to any notion of restoring Lady Morgan College, if we did so,” said Sophie dryly.

  “Did the Princesses Regent die along with their brother?” said Lucia.

  “Oh, indeed,” said Gwendolen. “It is a well-known tale. King Edward perished in the sinking of the frigate Titania, en route from Portsmouth to Honfleur, and his sisters on the same day, of a fever, in the infirmary of the Temple of Minerva at Bath—they were old women by then, for Edward’s reign was a long one. And now I suppose we know why.”

  A shiver seemed to pass through all of them, then, though the day was warm and the inn’s sunny sitting-room, with its south-facing windows, warmer still.

  There was a long, thoughtful silence, until at last Sophie said, in a small voice, “Suppose Lady Morgan College is cursed? Suppose the Princesses Regent did thwart the will of some god or gods, and were punished accordingly? Ought we to . . . ought we to interfere?”

  “Think, Sophie,” said Joanna, in some exasperation. “If, as their confession claims, they bargained with the gods for their brother’s life, then the worst that can be said of them, in that respect, is that perhaps they sought to play one god or goddess off against another, which I daresay most of us have done more than once; it is not a greater crime in this case, surely, simply because the gods in question happened to take notice.

  “And, besides,” she added, “have not whichever god or gods sought Edward’s death, if so any of them did, had ample opportunities to kill off his descendants? There have been Tudor kings on the throne of Britain almost without interruption since the time of Henry the Great’s father; that does not seem to me a sign of divine disfavour.”

  “No-o,” Sophie conceded, her brow crinkling in earnest thought. “But that this working of theirs was so great a secret that even in confessing to it they should avoid describing how it was done—does that not suggest something very . . . very wrong? Or, at any rate, very dangerous?”

  “Or possibly both,” said Joanna, who did not disagree with her sister’s analysis—only her conclusions.

  “There is another possibility, of course,” said Lucia thoughtfully.

  “Oh?”

  “Have you never, in making your own notes on a particular working, used some form of shorthand to refer to another working, which you need not explain in detail because you know it well already, or have made fuller notes of it elsewhere?”

  “Certainly I have,” said Sophie, “but I should not do so if I were making notes for someone else!”

  “Not even if the working referred to were one which that someone else might also be expected to know perfectly well?” Lucia countered. “That is, if you were to write me out instructions for a sleeping-draught, I daresay you should not begin them with half a page’s worth of explaining how to call fire to boil the water?”

  “No,” said Sophie again. “So, then, your theory is that this . . .” She shuffled through the pages in her hands. “This ancient magick of blood and stone is—was—common knowledge amongst . . . whom, exactly?”

  “The Fellows of Lady Morgan College, to begin with,” said Joanna, “as we are told they disapproved of it. They must have known of it in order to disapprove, though of course it does not follow that they understood it.”

  Sophie chuckled darkly. “As a particular contingent of the Fellows of Merlin have lately demonstrated,” she said. “Though, in fairness to them, I am no longer altogether persuaded that I understand what we are about in this business.”

  “That may be,” said Joanna. “But I cannot think that, because one pair of female mages once overstepped the bounds of magickal ethics, they—we—must therefore all be forced to piece together what education we can from scraps and fragments, for lack of any organised alternative. After all, to hear Gray tell it, Merlin men have created magickal disasters enough, without their College’s being closed and forgotten in punishment for their mistakes.”

  “That is certainly true,” said Sophie. “Indeed, not even treason on the part of a Senior Fellow—”

  She broke off at the sound of brisk knocking on the sitting-room door, started a little, and began gathering the papers into a stack and stuffing them back into the box. When she had closed the lid and stowed the box away under the table, she snapped her fingers to release her wards upon the room, and called, “Quo vadis?”

  “An express is come from London for Mrs. Marshall.” It was the voice of the innkeeper himself—he who but rarely climbed the stairs on his twisted leg—and Joanna sprang up from her chair to cross the room and open the door.

  “Our apologies for having kept you waiting,” she said, and thanked him.

  Even before she had closed the door and turned back to the others, Sophie was at her shoulder, reaching for the letter in her hand. Its source was perfectly evident—it was directed in Mr. Fowler’s hand and bore Kergabet’s personal seal—but whether it contained good news or ill was impossible to guess.

  * * *

  Sophie sank down into the nearest available chair, her heart pounding, and broke the seal on Sieur Germain’s letter. As she unfolded it, a smaller enclosure fell out, enciphered in a more careful version of Gray’s large untidy hand. Which to read first? Sieur Germain’s letter was not enciphered, and thus might be read quickly; but a message from Gray . . . !

  In the end she could not bear the suspense, and read her brother-in-law’s missive straight through before setting her mind to the task of deciphering her husband’s. Neither was long. Sieur Germain wished her to know that Gray had been safe and in one piece when last heard from, but was intending to go into the Duchies in search of the conspirators and Amelia; he thanked her and Joanna once again for the information they had forwarded; and he wished to be told at once should they run across any more.

  Then, the first alarm over—safe and in one piece might conceal a multitude of hurts, but it was enough to be going on with—she smoothed out the even briefer note from Gray and studied it. He had scratched in the numerals of the date at the top, very small: That was Mercuriday, and therefore . . .

  “Sophie!” said Joanna, peering over her shoulder. “You have not memorised all the cipher keys?”

  “Why not?” Sophie did not look up; the deciphered message was taking shape, and she could not spare the time to argue with her sister. “There are not so very many. It is no different from getting Greek noun declensions by heart. And it was you who said I must learn to encipher my own letters, Jo.”

  Am going carefully, the message read; the regiment will have a means of finding me. She smiled at his use of her own words, then said, very low, “But going where?”

  PART FOUR

  Orléans

  CHAPTER XXVI

  In Which Gray Makes a New Acquaintance

  Three days into his journey to the soi-disant Emperor’s court, in the company of Monsieur Durand of the Temple of Ceres, Gray had yet to settle in his own mind the question of his companion’s motives. Had he seen through Gray’
s Angevin incognito and pegged him as a spy? Had he, on the contrary, been taken in by it, and seen Gray as a useful recruit to his master’s cause? Was he, too, reserving judgement, awaiting some revealing word or act which should sway him in one direction or the other?

  And was it his business, truly, to quarter the countryside in search of unemployed scholar-mages whom he might tempt into vowing their service to a man who was, at least at present, Emperor of nothing and nowhere?

  From the first their conversation had been subtly guarded; Durand was not inclined to loquacity, and what he did say was not notably revealing. But he had said that the Emperor was gathering scholar-mages to his court; Gray, for his part, played the eccentric scholar-mage to the hilt, discoursing at length on the theory and practice of illusion-spells and quoting all the dullest authorities he could think of, whenever an opportunity offered.

  Durand, he learnt, possessed only the most rudimentary magickal talent—capable of calling light and fire, and of small summonings, and no more than that—but he claimed other powers granted by his patron goddess, including that of blessing farmers’ crops on her behalf.

  Being a priest of Ceres in the countryside, moreover, Durand could command food and lodging gratis, or, rather, in return for blessings and divinations rather than coin, which at any rate spared Gray’s increasingly thin purse, though he salved his conscience by trotting out his best mending-spells for the benefit of their hosts. They rode briskly, and soon they were threading their way between one lord’s encamped troops and another’s, approaching a great walled city on the bank of what proved to be the river Loire.

  The city was not under siege, whatever the appearances, Durand assured him; these were the Emperor’s own liege-men, gathering here to march with him upon the King of Britain. Gray, lost in frantic calculations (how far was he now from Colonel Dubois’s regiment and Tremblay’s mages with their finding-spells? how soon, as the owl flew, could he reach them with a message?), replied somewhat at random.

  The banner flying from the central tower of the castle keep bore a familiar-unfamiliar blazon: on a crimson field, three vaguely triangular flowerlike emblems in white—the arms of Orléans! Yes, now I see—surmounted by three fleurs-de-lys and what looked very like a Roman eagle.

  “The banner of the New Empire of Gaul,” said Durand grandly.

  * * *

  Once past the sentries and the walls—thanks to the countersign supplied by Durand—Gray was conducted to the castle keep, surrendered Tonnerre to the ministrations of a groom, and was himself handed over to an unsmiling chatelaine accompanied by two pages. She took in his travel-worn clothing, his dishevelled hair, his general air of road-weariness, and burst into a rapid stream of orders; Gray was borne off to the baths, his clothing was taken away to be laundered, and the rest of his possessions vanished up a staircase “to the mages’ quarters.”

  Gray saw them go with considerable trepidation.

  Two hours later, however, scrubbed, shaved and barbered, dressed in clothes which, if they did not quite fit him, at least were not caked in the mud of every road, track, and farmer’s field between Ivry-sur-Eure and Orléans, he was conducted to a small, bare cubicle—almost entirely like a prisoner’s cell, but for possessing clean bedding on the narrow bed, a window out onto the keep’s central courtyard, and an open doorway—where he found his saddle-bags slung over the foot of the bed and his own clothes, still warm from the laundress’s iron, hung up on pegs on the opposite wall. The saddle-bags appeared not to have been tampered with, though of course a man who was collecting mages might have at his disposal more than one means of effecting a search.

  If I am to be kept prisoner again, Gray reflected, at any rate I shall be kept comfortably this time.

  The notion was no more appealing for that, however.

  Yet another page appeared shortly thereafter to conduct him into the presence of the great man.

  * * *

  “You are Monsieur Guy Marais of Poitiers?”

  At first glance, Henri-François, Duc d’Orléans and self-styled Emperor of Gaul, was not much to look at—a small man, dark of hair and eyes, clad in buckskin breeches, gleaming boots, and a blue velvet coat adorned with a frankly absurd array of gold braid, and lounging in a massive chair of ornate design which made him appear smaller still—and certainly did not look as though he should inspire terror. The tense shimmering feeling of the air all about them, however, told a different tale altogether; this man fairly radiated power—both magickal and otherwise—and was accustomed to use it without scruple or compunction.

  “I am, Your Imperial Majesty,” said Gray. He had thought the address absurd, when Durand instructed him in how to address the Emperor so that you may not disgrace yourself, or me, and he thought it so still—what was this man Emperor of, after all, but some thousands of men and a few square miles of town?—but not by any betraying twitch of lip or eyebrow did he show it.

  “And you are a mage?”

  “I am, sir.”

  Henri-François d’Orléans sat back in his chair—or, rather, Gray decided, his throne—and studied him, narrow-eyed, in a manner which suggested that he was looking beneath the surfaces of things. “There is vast potential here, certainly,” he murmured, after a moment; and then, shifting his gaze to Gray’s face, “Show me.”

  Gray blinked. “Is there,” he said, “any particular working which you should like to see demonstrated? Sir?”

  Orléans waved a careless hand, but his gaze on Gray perceptibly sharpened. “All those of which you are capable,” he said.

  Take care what you ask this man for, thought Gray, ruefully. He did not mean, of course, to reveal everything of which he was capable; shape-shifting was too distinctive a working to risk, and no scholar-mage such as he was claiming to be would be expected to have a store of offensive spells at the ready, though some might be capable of a shielding-spell or two.

  He began by calling an ordinary globe of magelight, then split it into two, then four, and sent them to spin in a circle overhead: a foolish trick, entertainment for children. He asked for a candle and called fire to light it, working as neatly and precisely as he knew how, then drew raindrops from the air (fortunately rather damp) to put it out again. Then summoning-spells: the book from the top of the stack at the Emperor’s left hand, then the embroidered handkerchief which one of the Emperor’s attendants had just slipped into his pocket. He worked an illusion-spell to create a facsimile of Charles Durand’s hat—the catch, the necessary clue to distinguish illusion from reality, a sprig of bright orange forget-me-not tucked over one ear. He set strong wards about himself, the Emperor, and his attendants, and invited them all to try whether they could pass through them.

  To his secret dismay, Orléans—though none of the others—could, and did, brushing at his shoulders as though sweeping aside strands of cobweb clinging to his coat.

  This man is more powerful even than I feared. Had he sprung a trap from which he should not be capable of escape? We shall see . . .

  “A promising display,” said Orléans at last.

  Gray bowed.

  “Walk with me a little, Guy Marais of Poitiers.”

  Gray, beginning to be sorry he had ever left London, followed him—up to the battlements, as it proved, whence they could see the great river Loire, the great bridge spanning it to give access to the city from the south, the wide flat vista spread out all about them.

  “My legions,” said Orléans, his expansive gesture taking in the thousands, tens of thousands, of men encamped outside the walls to the east, north, and west.

  “If I may be permitted an observation, sir,” said Gray mildly, “you appear to be preparing for war.”

  Orléans turned slightly, leaning one elbow on the battlement, and gave him a long look. “Tell me, Monsieur Marais—where have you been travelling of late, that you should only now have arrived at this conclusion?”


  Gray attempted a self-deprecating laugh but was conscious of its not succeeding very well. “My pursuits and those of kings and armies do not often intersect,” he said. “I confess that when I accepted Monsieur Durand’s invitation to be presented to his patron, I did not expect to find myself in the midst of a military campaign.”

  “All Gallia is at war at present, Monsieur Marais,” said Orléans gravely, “or soon will be. For centuries we have fought amongst ourselves, when we ought to have made common cause against our common foes, to recapture the lands lost to Rome and build a new empire.”

  Gray swallowed. “I see,” he said. “Given such vast and well-equipped armies as you appear to have mustered, however, I confess I do not see what need you have of scholar-mages in your war of empire.”

  “Our war,” Orléans corrected. How could so soft-spoken a man project such menace? “I am only the gods’ instrument in this matter.”

  “The gods of Rome,” Gray said, testing a hypothesis.

  “The great and true gods,” said Orléans, confirming it.

  Perhaps this may explain his appeal to Appius Callender, thought Gray; like not a few other persons of his class and education, Callender was, or had been, conspicuously dismissive of the local gods whose worship was so much a part of the lives of, for example, his tenant farmers. Though, for the matter of that, flattery and other sops to his self-consequence might explain it equally well. The mystery is Callender’s appeal to him.