A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel)

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “If you cannot moderate your tone, Monsieur Marais,” he said, “perhaps you may in future have the foresight to set a ward beforehand. My personal guards are inclined to be protective.”

  “My apologies, m’lord,” Gray choked.

  With a gesture like a child spinning a top, Orléans muttered something under his breath; Gray nearly stumbled from the force of the warding-spell that shuddered through him, stronger than the most powerful ward he had ever felt Sophie cast.

  Orléans regarded him thoughtfully. “You are a scholar, are you not?” he said.

  “I am,” said Gray.

  “Ordinarily, scholars do not consider it their métier to give unsolicited advice to military commanders,” he said, “and still less to kings and emperors.”

  “As you have remarked yourself, sir,” he said, “I am not altogether an ordinary scholar.”

  To his astonishment, Orléans laughed. “That is certainly so,” he said. He waved Gray to a chair, and Gray, bemused but relieved, sank into it. His skin buzzed with the aftershocks of the warding-spell. “I must tell you, Marais,” Orleans continued, “that I expected an appeal to sentiment. It is fortunate for you that I was mistaken.”

  “There seemed no need to appeal to sentiment,” said Gray, now very glad indeed that he had not done so, “with such a wealth of pragmatical arguments to be made.”

  “Indeed. Nevertheless, it bears mentioning: Men of sentiment, I have no use for; men apt in the arts of strategy, on the other hand, may go far in my service.

  “I shall think on what you have said,” Orléans continued, “and in return, think on this: When the first sorcerer-century has taken Ivry-sur-Eure, Château-du-Loir, Klison, Vernon-sur-Seine, and the rest, it will fall to the second to take and hold the keystones at Karnag, and you and your fellows must be ready.”

  Gray now had intelligence which, so far as he knew, none of the others had—but he could make no sense of it. The second sorcerer-century, so called, as yet numbered only eighty men; but what in Hades was at Karnag that Orléans should send seventy mages after it? Take and hold the keystones—the keystones of what? Take them how, from whom, for what possible purpose?

  He did not ask any of these highly suspect questions, however; it was a firm rule among the Emperor’s people, from his generals to the boys who fetched and carried for the crews of the great saltpetre-cannon, that whatsoever they might need to know, the Emperor would tell them.

  Everything he had heard in the course of this day, he should soon be repeating to Ollivier and Lécuyer, to one of whom—it was Lécuyer’s turn, if he did not mistake—would fall the task of conveying it to Colonel Dubois. And perhaps he may make some sense of it.

  “I understand, sir,” he said, therefore.

  “So I hope, Marais. So I hope. You are dismissed.” Orléans snapped his fingers negligently to release his ward, and Gray fled the room with as much dignity as he could manage.

  We are to be sent to Breizh; I am bound for home at last! From Karnag, it would not be beyond him to disappear into the Breizhek countryside—Gray spoke the local language, as the officers of the sorcerer-century did not—and a few days’ travel would take him to An Alre or even Gwened, where he might decant any further discoveries to the garrison commander and then find passage home. Amelia presented a more difficult problem, to be sure—but if Orléans meant to take the battle elsewhere, was she not safest where she was? And Appius Callender . . .

  Appius Callender is my concern only insofar as his fate affects Amelia’s.

  It was only much later that the other implication of Orléans’s words dawned upon him: To be ready for battle, in the terms of the Emperor’s soldier-mages, was to be linked to the mages of the reserves. The realisation woke him, gasping and sweating, in the middle of the night, and not until he had calmed his breathing and reached through the aether to find his connexion to Sophie—still stable and persistent across a kingdom and a half, though, in the terms of the peculiar sight-metaphor in which their magicks chose to represent themselves, finer than a single thread—could he even begin to attempt sleep once more.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  In Which Sophie Attends to Her Geography, and Roland to His Books

  The news reached London across the final days of August that armies under a banner which no one in the field could identify, except in its resemblance to the arms of Orléans, had overrun three British garrisons: first Ivry-sur-Eure in Normandie; then Klison, on the river Sèvre in Breizh; and finally the long-disputed Mainois fortress town of Château-du-Loir.

  There had been no formal declaration of war, no negotiating for terms—and, for that matter, no battles to speak of, for the attacks had come in the dead of night, and the British forces, felled by some powerful sleeping-spell, woke in the morning to find their arms and fortifications in the hands of the enemy, and themselves prisoners. After the first such assault, it was said, garrison commanders all along Britain’s borders with the Duchies—forewarned of the fate of Ivry—had mustered both mundane and magickal defences as best they could; but Klison and then Château-du-Loir had fallen just the same. Whether the intervening positions had fended off the enemy, or whether there had been no assaults there to fend off, was as yet impossible to say—but thus far all the available evidence pointed, bafflingly, to the latter.

  Joanna, Sophie, and Gwendolen, who had taken possession of the Kergabets’ library and filled it with crates of rescued books and documents, abandoned their (mostly) systematic study thereof, whenever some new piece of news arrived, in favour of an assault upon Sieur Germain’s unfortunately small collection of up-to-date maps.

  They knew a great deal about present circumstances on the continent which the general public did not—to begin with, the likely identity of the man behind that mysterious banner, and, if the evidence of Taylor and Merton were to be believed, the Duchies’ new foray into magickal weaponry—but the choice of targets remained a source of bafflement.

  “Why those garrisons?” Joanna wondered aloud, not for the first time, when the news reached them of the fall of Château-du-Loir.

  They stood round the large table in the library, studying a map of the Duchies with rivers and lakes picked out in blue ink and borders, so far as they were known, in red. Sophie’s fingertip was pressed so hard to the words Ivry-sur-Eure that the flesh beneath her fingernail had gone white—Ivry, whence Gray had last reported in before vanishing into the Duchies—but seeing Joanna’s gaze upon her, she snatched it away and clasped her hands behind her back.

  “There are so many others between,” Joanna continued, circling the table to study the map from a different angle, “and some a great deal less difficult of access—though I suppose,” she added, “if the work of subduing our garrisons is being all done by mages, and not by ordinary soldiers, the terrain of the approach does not much signify. But it is very odd tactics, it seems to me, for an invading army to take so few positions, so widely separated.”

  Sophie frowned, turned away from the map altogether, and began rummaging through a crate at the far end of the room. She had been skittish and strange since Derrien Robic’s death, immersing herself in her centuries-old rescued documents as though she might thus keep the horrors of the present at bay.

  “If Mr. Taylor is to be believed,” said Gwendolen instead, “this army is commanded by a madman. Perhaps we ought not to seek logic in his tactics.”

  Joanna shook her head. “A madman he may be,” she said, “but not a fool, or he could not have accomplished so much. There is some method here, if only we could discover it.”

  Farther down the table was a second map on which, by means of pins and coloured wool, Joanna had been tracing the movements of the various armies arrayed against Britain’s eastern borders, according to the reports which Lord Kergabet and Mr. Fowler, yielding to her pleas not to be left entirely out of their counsels, had been daily bringing home for her. They
had given her to understand, most lately, that they now had an agent in the field in Orléans; she was quite certain in her mind that the agent was Gray, though Lord Kergabet refused to confirm or deny this hypothesis.

  She itched to be back in the centre of things—but as this was not at present feasible, she should take what she could, and endeavour to be grateful for it.

  Leaning close, she studied the line of red wool stretching from pin to pin, following rivers and, where rivers and borders diverged, the borders maintained over the centuries since the last Angevin conflict—except where the taking of Ivry, Klison, and Château-du-Loir pulled the wool into sharply pointed salients. The red shapes reminded her of something, but what . . . ?

  In Sophie’s corner, the rustling ceased. “Jo,” said Sophie, in a tone which instantly made Joanna straighten up and wheel away from the table to face her. “Jo, look at this.”

  She was holding in her hands—was it? Yes—the old field-map Joanna had found in the library. Three strides, four, and she was laying it out on the table beside the one Joanna and Gwendolen had been studying.

  “There,” she said, pointing with her right forefinger to the salient at Ivry-sur-Eure, “and there.” Her left forefinger stabbed at one of the mysterious red markings on the field-map—also at Ivry. “And look—”

  “Mother Goddess,” said Joanna.

  Gwendolen, peering over her shoulder, breathed, “Oh, no.”

  There were red marks at Klison and at Château-du-Loir, too.

  “That cannot possibly be coincidence,” said Sophie. “Can it? Surely not.” She sounded shaken and uncertain. “But if it is not . . . the question is, what does Orléans know, that we do not—and how?”

  “No,” said Joanna positively. “That is, I should very much like to know what he knows, and how—but for the moment we are strategists, not scholars, and so the question is, where next?”

  Sophie blinked. “Yes,” she said, after a moment. “Yes, of course.”

  They bent once more over the two maps, gazes flitting from one to the other. The red markers, if strung together like the pins on Sieur Germain’s map, would have made a wobbling, irregular outline of Britain’s continental provinces, from the northernmost at Haudricourt-sur-Seine, marching southward along the frontiers of Normandie and Maine, then striking north and west to Martigné-Ferchaud where Maine and Breizh met the lost province of Anjou, then south again to Klison and finally to the unexplained grouping at Karnag, on the Breizhek coast.

  “There, perhaps,” said Gwendolen, touching a fingertip gently to the marker at Valennes, “as it is so near Château-du-Loir, and might be taken without spreading his forces too thin. Or perhaps at Martigné-Ferchaud, by sending troops north from Klison and west from Château-du-Loir at once.”

  In the event, however, it was neither; the guardsman bearing their urgent missive to Sieur Germain at the Royal Palace crossed with the one he had himself dispatched to tell them of an assault upon Vernon-sur-Seine by ships from l’Île-des-Francs, which now were continuing northward towards Rouen.

  * * *

  His Majesty’s Privy Council, in the aggregate, received the theories of the ladies of Grosvenor Square with a degree of scepticism which was not ameliorated by the revelation of their being premised upon a centuries-old document unearthed from the library of Lady Morgan College. Undeniably, however, dispatches from the border garrisons and from the regiments newly deployed to reinforce them did suggest that the Duc d’Orléans appeared—for reasons at present unfathomable—to be working from the same mysterious map.

  Alas, none of this brought either His Majesty or the commanders of his troops any nearer to discovering how Orléans might be defeated, or to identifying the spies or turncoats whose intelligence, and perhaps even direct connivance, had facilitated his successes to date.

  “The Princesses Regent were in the secret of this magick of blood and stone,” said Sophie positively, “and we know from the Library’s records that their papers were given to the College at the end of their regency; and so it follows—does it not?—that somewhere amongst this . . . collection of materials”—she gestured comprehensively at the crates and shelves and untidy heaps which presently surrounded her—“we shall find the things they knew, and which they meant someone to find one day.”

  “Unless whoever ransacked the library succeeded in destroying them,” said Gwendolen, at the same time that Joanna said, “But if they did mean us to find them, why in Hades were they not in the box with the other papers?”

  “We are strategists, not scholars.” Sophie’s face, as she threw Joanna’s words back at her, wore a sort of bright-eyed, frantic glee that boded very ill indeed for someone; Joanna hoped the someone might prove to be Henri-François d’Orléans, and not Sophie herself.

  Joanna had not fully understood before how much they had all of them been going through the motions. Now they plunged back into their researches with renewed enthusiasm—not to say manic energy—not merely cataloguing and categorising but searching with purpose. Each morning she awoke eager to get through breakfast and begin, and Sophie fairly hummed with the urgency of the search.

  “What do you hear from Gray, Sophie?” Joanna inquired, one morning after breakfast, as they bent together over a stack of tattered manuscript pages.

  “Hear?” Sophie repeated. She looked up, brows drawn together in bafflement, and Joanna nearly rolled her eyes: Never expect sensible conversation from Sophie when she is reading something, she reminded herself.

  “Feel, then,” she said. “See—sense—you do not suppose me to understand anything about magick, I know,” she went on in a rush, at Sophie’s deepening frown, “but I am not a fool, Sophie.”

  Sophie’s face cleared—not in relief or understanding, but in that terribly familiar way which meant I cannot bear anyone to guess what I am feeling—and she said, low and even, “He is well. Or, at any rate, he is . . . not ill. Not hurt, not . . .”

  “I am glad to hear it,” said Joanna. She laid her hand over Sophie’s, where it rested on the table between them, and pressed it briefly. “And . . . and you?”

  In one sense, Sophie’s quick recourse to her concealing magick, a moment ago, had already given her the answer. But Sophie’s magick was not Sophie’s heart—or not entirely—and Joanna and Sophie had been guarding one another’s hearts too long to change the habit now.

  Instead of deflecting the question, Sophie looked Joanna in the eyes, produced a small, grave smile, and said, “Yes.”

  Then, much less astonishingly, she rolled her shoulders and tapped one forefinger against the manuscript page before her. “Now—where were we?”

  * * *

  “I shall go mad, Sìleas,” said Lucia positively.

  “Now, Lucia—”

  Lucia was genuinely fond of her cousin, but at present nothing could have been more calculated to increase her irritation than Sìleas Barra MacNeill’s soothing tone.

  “Why must I be placed under house arrest,” she said, “when the fault was not mine, and the threat is past?”

  The threat, she reminded herself with a carefully hidden wince, being that unfortunate young man, whose death Lucia should forever have upon her conscience, whatever anyone else might say about it.

  “Lucia, put yourself in Henry Tudor’s place,” said Sìleas. She had abandoned soothing, the gods be thanked, in favour of brisk and practical—never her strong suit, but a thousand times more welcome. “It is a perfectly sensible precaution.”

  “My guardsmen,” said Lucia, “are a perfectly sensible precaution; this is absurd.”

  “The Royal Palace is hardly a prison, dear heart.”

  “Any house becomes a prison when one is forbidden to leave it.”

  Lucia paced two circuits of her sitting-room, walking as quickly as she could manage without knocking into any of the furniture. Then she stopped, drew in a deep
breath and let it out in an explosive sigh, and clenched and relaxed her hands.

  “My apologies,” she said. “I shall endeavour to be grateful to Roland’s papa for his care of me, instead of resenting it. And I shall go and see whether Delphine may be induced to take a turn about the Fountain Court, I think.”

  The Princess Delphine, who expected her first confinement in October, was overheated and out of sorts, but was eventually persuaded to try whether a breath of fresh air might improve her spirits. If so, the change was not very evident to Lucia; on the other hand, however, half an hour’s concentrated exposure to Delphine’s fears for her husband, now somewhere on the Mainois frontier with his regiment, had a salutary effect on Lucia, by reminding her how small and petty were some of her own complaints.

  Thus fortified and chastened, she returned Delphine to her ladies-in-waiting and her comfortable settee, and went in search of her betrothed.

  * * *

  Roland opened the door to her himself, looking as cross as Delphine if less fatigued and overheated.

  “Lucia!” he said.

  He was only half dressed, and upon seeing Lucia he blushed, gathering his dressing-gown more tightly about him as he stood aside to let her precede him into his sitting-room.

  “I . . . apologise for receiving you in such a state of disarray,” said Roland, looking at the floor. “I did not expect—well.”

  The circumstances were sufficiently unusual that Lucia stared at him for some time, forgetful of what she had intended to say to him. The spell was broken, however, when Roland pushed the door to and crossed the room to peer into her face.

  “Lucia,” he repeated, “what—”

  “Can you not make your father see reason, Roland?” said Lucia, cutting him off before the earnest, bewildered worry in his eyes could spill over into awkward sentiment of some sort.

  “Not notably, to judge by past experience.” Roland pulled a face.