A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel)

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  “Our brothers of the first sorcerer-century now hold all of the line of fortress-stones, but the wellspring of the magick is here: three thousand stones, three thousand repositories of power, sleeping since the days of Divus Iulius. When we possess the stones, we shall wield unimaginable power. Our task now is to secure the stones—no great matter, as the local people are ignorant of their power, and suppose them no more than an historical curiosity—and then to wake them.”

  “To wake them?” muttered someone, close enough for Gray to hear. “Three thousand stones?”

  And how, exactly, does one wake a stone?

  Gray did not have long to ponder this question; the answer went some way towards explaining why the half-trained and undermanned second sorcerer-century, and not any of the large, well-equipped infantry regiments presently mustered at Orléans, had been sent to Karnag: To wake the power that slept within the stones, it appeared, required an infusion of magick from without. But how much magick? There were three thousand stones, so said the Centurion, and but eighty mages; how long could each of them keep feeding their own magick into stone after stone after stone, before—reserves or no reserves—they came to the end of themselves?

  But he had what he needed now, more or less; there was little to be gained by staying longer.

  “When our task is done, the Emperor himself will come to take possession of the legacy of Divus Iulius. All hail the Emperor of Gaul!”

  “All hail,” Gray muttered along with the others.

  * * *

  They departed their camp as they had entered it, in twos and threes, and as they filtered into the long field of standing stones, he cast about for some opportunity of escape, placing himself deliberately on the right edge of the field.

  From afar, the stones in their long straight rows had looked more or less uniform; close to, however, they varied in size from the height of Gray’s knee to well above his head, and were far more irregular in shape than he had supposed. Here and there one had fallen on its side; Gray wondered whether it would be part of the mages’ task to right these deviants from the regimented pattern, and, if so, how the Centurion proposed that they do so. Moss and lichen patched their surfaces, particularly on the north faces and in the deep clefts that marked some of the larger oblong stones, bright and pale and deep greens, brown and gold and rust-red. Around their feet, grasses still green or autumn-gold stirred gently in the breeze.

  Towards the middle of the sea of stones, a particularly large specimen, just barely taller than Gray and three times as wide at waist height, offered him temporary cover, and whilst the men to his left advanced, he slipped away into the trees to the south. Once out of sight amongst the trees, he moved more quickly—sometimes, when the way was relatively clear, breaking into a run—and when he judged he had got clear, he settled down with his back to a large tree-trunk and repeated his finding-spell.

  Sophie was away to the west, now—not because she had moved much, Gray judged, but because he had come so far east since the previous night’s attempt. His possessions were scattered across three separate military camps in two kingdoms; he owned, at present, absolutely nothing but the clothes on his back and the meagre contents of his pockets; but the relief of simply following where the finding-spell led him, as he had done hundreds of times in his life (though seldom for so high a stake), was indescribable, and a weight seemed to lift from his shoulders as he strode along the lanes towards Le Ménec.

  * * *

  “A gentleman to see you, ma’am,” said the innkeeper to Sophie, not a quarter-hour after Sophie had left the breakfast-table and retreated to her bedchamber. Sophie’s heart leapt; she quashed the feeling firmly. But who else could it be?

  “Please show him up,” she said, and folded her trembling hands in her lap. She chanced to be quite alone at present, for Lucia and Roland and Joanna and Gwendolen had developed an unexpected passion for long, exploratory walks about the village and the countryside, which they were presently indulging, and none of the Oxford men had yet emerged from their rooms. When the door opened again and Gray walked through it, she thanked all the gods for the blisters on her heels.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Cariou,” she managed to say. “You may leave us, if you please.” At the innkeeper’s frankly dubious expression, she added, “It is most irregular, I know; but this gentleman is my husband, who is just come from England to join me and our friends.” Without bag or baggage, and looking as though he has been sleeping under a hedge.

  “Very good, ma’am,” said the innkeeper, with the air of one who has many questions which she has decided not to ask, and finally, finally went away.

  “Sophie,” said Gray, in a voice thick with exhaustion and relief.

  He held out his arms, and she ran the length of the room on her blistered feet to fling herself into them, clinging as tight as though she had suspected him of wishing to escape.

  * * *

  By the time Lucia, returning from her walk, pushed open the door of their shared chamber, Sophie had subjected Gray to a hot bath, two helpings of breakfast, and other things not for public consumption; had demanded an accounting in the matter of Amelia, and attempted to come to terms with the revelation that his “rescue” thereof had apparently consisted in sending her off into the Orléanais countryside with a pair of Breizhek mage-officers; and was well along in explaining how she, her brother and sister, her sister’s intimate friend, the heiress of Alba, and five Merlin men had come to be filling up all the guest-rooms of the Ship at Rest in Le Ménec.

  “Gray Marshall!” cried Lucia, grinning widely. “Brìghde’s tears, you are a sight to see!”

  Footsteps thumped along the corridor, and Joanna, Gwendolen, and Roland crowded in behind her. After the barest greetings, Sophie shushed all of them, in order to carry on with her tale.

  “And so,” she concluded, “now that you are come, we ought to be able to make the spell work, and renew the keystones, so that the magick of blood and stone can help my father’s armies to repel Orléans.”

  “But, Sophie, I have been thinking,” said Joanna. “We have not got a mage from Breizh, either.”

  “We have got Sophie,” Gwendolen objected. After a further moment’s thought, however, she exclaimed, “Herne’s horns! What if Jo is right?”

  Sophie felt very cold, suddenly, though a moment since she had been warm and contented, pressed against Gray’s side with his arm wrapped firm about her shoulders.

  “Sophie is more Breizhek than I am Kernowek,” said Gray. “I shall go and round up the others for another attempt, before—well.” He was on his feet now, and crossing to the door. “I shall have to explain as we go. But, Sophie, it will not overtax your strength, to conceal all of us at once?”

  “No,” said Sophie firmly; of that, at least, she was quite certain. “Not now.”

  * * *

  Navigating the standing stones and the seventy-odd mages now wandering about in them—thank all the gods, and Ceana MacGregor’s plea to see something besides those gods-accursèd stones, that their morning’s walk had taken them in the opposite direction!—was a new and nerve-stretching undertaking. It was not, of course, that Lucia did not trust Sophie’s magick to conceal them from unwelcome notice; there was always the danger of running against someone emerging from behind a stone, however, not to mention the unknowable consequences of success, or of failure, with upwards of half a hundred hostile mages all about them who might well be able to detect the effects of the spell they were presently attempting.

  Sophie arrayed her forces—Bevan, then Roland, d’Allaire, Proulx, Gray, and last of all herself—and told off Joanna, Gwendolen, and Evans-Hughes as signalmen between them, and Lucia to make sure that Gray spoke the invocation correctly. Then she paced out an irregular sort of ellipse encompassing all six keystones and set a ward around it, so powerful that when the magick rippled through Lucia’s consciousness, she staggered with the
force of it.

  For all of them but Gray, the spell was by now tiresomely familiar, and they were not so long about it as they had been the first time, or even the second. Unfortunately, however, the results were more or less the same.

  “It was working,” Sophie insisted, near tears with exasperation. “Better than the second trial; all of the stones but mine responded, this time.”

  “Which means, I fear,” said Gareth Evans-Hughes, “that birth and not descent is the deciding factor, and we are still short one mage born in Breizh.”

  Joanna was listening intently to this exchange, her expression growing increasingly grim.

  “Your spell, the one you worked on Sophie in Din Edin,” she said, low, edging closer to Lucia. She caught Lucia’s wrist and held it; her grip was surprisingly strong, for all that her hand was scarcely bigger than a child’s, and Lucia was reminded that Roland had described her as a thorough horsewoman. “You cannot give your magick to the stones, but if you will share it with me, then—”

  “No,” said Lucia, almost simultaneously with every other person present.

  “But do you not see? If birth is the criterion,” Joanna insisted, “then we have no other choice. Sophie was born in London, but I was born in Breizh, and the only obstacle is—”

  “Joanna, the spell does not work that way,” said Lucia, helplessly. “It is meant for one mage to share magick with another, not—”

  “Has it ever been tried?” Joanna demanded.

  “I—”

  “Has it? And, more importantly, can we afford not to make the trial now?”

  “The danger is—”

  “We are all in danger already—we are, quite literally, surrounded by the enemy!—and the kingdom, and everyone in it—and all of those ‘reserve mages’ held prisoner at Orléans, and Kergabet’s spies—”

  Lucia tried to pull away, but Joanna held fast; her grey eyes had gone a little wild, an impression not hindered by the mad tangle of chestnut-coloured curls about her face, and Lucia suspected that she looked rather wild herself.

  “What makes you suppose that the magick will answer to you?” she said. “How shall you know how to wield it? Joanna, no one has ever done what you ask of me, that I know of. I do not know whether it can be done, or, if it could, what the consequences might be. We cannot properly control the parameters of the experiment, and—”

  “Whatever the consequences,” said Joanna, “they cannot be worse than allowing the Duc d’Orléans to march the armies of the Duchies over Britain’s borders and declare war upon our gods.”

  She was not wrong; but nor was Lucia.

  Lucia tried again to wrench her arm away; this time, Joanna let her go. She resisted the urge to cast a beseeching look at Sophie, at Gray, at Roland—in the course of her debate with Joanna, the rest of the party had surrounded them, and giving the choice over to someone, anyone, else would be all too easy. When you sit the chieftain’s seat of Alba, Lucia MacNeill, she told herself sternly, it will be your task to make difficult decisions. Had you not better begin as you mean to go on?

  But this did not feel like a decision that ought to be made by one person alone.

  “I am willing to try the spell,” she said at last, slowly, making sure to meet each person’s eyes as she looked about her, “but only on condition that all of us agree.”

  Sophie’s betrayed expression—there and gone in the instant before the blank bland mask descended—was terrible to see. Gray interposed himself between them and drew her into his arms, bending his head to speak into her ear; Joanna, wisely, kept clear of this conversation.

  “I should not ask this of you—of anyone—if I thought there were any other choice,” she said, looking up at Lucia with both defiance and apology in her wide grey eyes.

  “We are in Breizh,” said Lucia. “Surely we ought to be able to find a Breizhek mage?”

  The five Oxford mages exchanged a look.

  “What have I said?” Lucia tried to make her voice flat, uncompromising, but did not altogether succeed.

  There was another exchange of looks, the upshot of which, it appeared, was to elect Guillaume d’Allaire as spokesman.

  “The stones,” he said, with a vague one-armed gesture, “are a sort of sink for magick; it is a matter of record—though the local people naturally do not like to advertise the fact—that no mage has been born within thirty miles of them these past two hundred years.”

  “And that those who come from elsewhere tend to go away again after no more than a year or two,” Evans-Hughes added. He ducked his head and scratched absently at the back of his neck. “Now, I suppose, we know why.”

  “Do we?” This from Bevan, the young graduate student. He looked both horrified and fascinated by the notion of a magick-sink, and stared at Gareth as though expecting him to produce a physical artefact of some sort to demonstrate.

  Lucia was about to echo him when at last the pieces fell into place in her mind. “You mean,” she said, “that the stones became a magick-sink only when their own magick was allowed to decay.”

  “Yes,” said Gareth, smiling at her in spite of everything, like the patient tutor he undoubtedly was, pleased with a student’s acuity. “Exactly. Of course, it is a theory that may take generations to test—”

  Crowther jostled his shoulder and said in an exasperated tone, “Do shut up, Gareth, there’s a good chap. The point is, Lady Lucia, that there are likely to be no Breizhek mages within anything like a reasonable distance.”

  Lucia sighed. “I have truly not the least notion whether Joanna’s proposal will work,” she said. “I should not be at all surprised if it did not. But if it were only that—”

  “This spell of yours,” said Rhein Bevan. “How long do its effects persist?”

  “It depends,” said Lucia, “or, rather—for depends implies a cause, and I know of none—it varies, for no apparent reason; but I have never heard of its lasting longer than a se’nnight.” She glanced about her anxiously, then lowered her voice still further: “This magick has been used in my clan for a dozen generations at the least, but only ever between one mage and another; I have truly no means of predicting—”

  “But,” said Henry, “how can any field of inquiry advance, except by experiment?”

  “I am a great believer in the value of experiment,” said Lucia tightly. “That is, of controlled experimental trials. What you propose is—is not that.”

  “I do not see,” said Joanna, evidently deciding that she had kept her prudent silence long enough, “why, if the risk is mine, the decision should not be mine also, if Lucia is willing.”

  “Do you not?”

  Joanna turned sharply at the sound of Gwendolen Pryce’s voice, tight with some barely contained emotion. The Oxford men regarded them curiously—all but Gareth, whose mouth crimped tight in sympathy.

  “Oh,” said Joanna, in a very small voice.

  Gareth turned to Lucia and said, a little more loudly than strictly necessary, “How does the spell work, if I may ask? Professional curiosity, you know.”

  This drew the others’ attention as perhaps nothing else could have done, and Lucia—watching from the corner of one eye as Joanna and Gwendolen slipped away from the group to the shadow of the nearest great stone—was grateful for it, though already bracing for their inevitable disappointment.

  “It is Clan MacNeill magick,” she said. “I should never be forgiven for revealing its secrets outside the clan, and still less to—my apologies—Sasunnach mages. That is”—she held up a hand to forestall the inevitable objections—“British mages.”

  “And no other clan has ever devised a similar spell?” Crowther inquired.

  Lucia shrugged. “Not to my knowledge—though they would scarcely advertise the fact, if they had. We may be a united kingdom now, but the clans and clan-lands still keep their own counsel on some m
atters, and clan magicks are one such.”

  Gwendolen, towing Joanna by the hand, strode back to the circle, followed after another moment by Sophie and Gray, both wearing expressions of grim resignation.

  “Well?” said Lucia, looking round the circle of faces. “What say you all?”

  Though none of them looked happy at the prospect, none objected, and almost before she had time to regret her rash promises, Lucia was seating herself against a hip-high stone and calling fire to a candle-stub to heat her knife.

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  In Which Joanna Rises to a Challenge

  Though her arguments in favour of this course of action had—of course—all been entirely rational ones, that part of Joanna’s mind which was always unflinchingly honest could not deny that the prospect of knowing, once and for all, what it was to have magick was part of its appeal. She put out her hand for Lucia’s knife willingly enough, and watched with interest as Lucia, after wiping the tiny blade and passing it through the candle-flame once more, nicked her own thumb and pressed the two bleeding digits together.

  Then hot sharp fizzing panic swept through her, and the world glowed red and gold and upended itself, and for some indeterminable time she was entirely incapable of observation, analysis, or even coherent thought.

  When next she opened her eyes on an intelligible vision of stones, long grass, sky, and anxious faces, everything was rimmed with the same faintly glowing aura of crimson and gold.

  “Jo,” said Sophie anxiously. “Jo, are you all right?”

  “Yes,” said Joanna at once, though she was not at all certain that she was telling the truth. She had the bizarre impression of feeling her blood flowing through her veins, even the smallest of them; her body felt much too large for the skin meant to contain it; and her head seemed to vary in size according to some pattern of its own devising.