A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel)

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  Clutching Gwendolen’s left hand and Roland’s right, she struggled to her feet, then leant heavily on Gwendolen’s arm, panting, until the horizon steadied again. Walking was a frustratingly strenuous exercise, for her feet seemed at once larger than usual and farther from the ground; but at last Gwendolen and the hovering Roland delivered her to what had until now been Sophie’s stone, and she sank to her knees beside it.

  Her thumb was still bleeding sluggishly; she had the invocation by heart, having heard it several dozen times in the past two days, but how in Hades did one persuade magick to flow out of oneself and into an inanimate object, or, indeed, to do anything whatever?

  Sophie and Gwendolen knelt on either side of Joanna, each clasping one of her hands; she was pathetically grateful for these tethers to the world of solid and observable things.

  “You have only to do one thing,” said Sophie, “and I shall tell you how to go on.”

  Joanna nodded, then at once wished she had not.

  “Keep your eyes shut,” Sophie said. Her voice was low, soothing, as though Joanna had been a child waking from a nightmare. “Breathe deeply and slowly, and listen for the beating of your heart.”

  Breathing slowly was an effort, but Joanna’s heartbeat was already thudding in her ears. She forced herself to focus on it, however, and felt it slow and steady as she brought her rapid breathing under control.

  “Now,” said Sophie, “go deeper—imagine you are diving to the bottom of a pond, and rising out of the muck and weed is something beautiful—in your case, I should imagine, something shining in gold and scarlet—”

  All of these instructions were entirely incomprehensible, and impossible to carry out, until, quite suddenly, the black nothingness behind Joanna’s eyelids was interrupted by a gleam of gold. The gleam grew—slowly, then by rapid bursts—into a maelstrom of fire, scarlet and gold and almost too bright to look upon.

  “Yes,” she breathed, clutching Sophie’s hand. “I see it, like a fiery whirlpool.”

  “Well done,” said Sophie, her voice warm with relief. “We are nearly there, Jo. Now, can you reach into the whirlpool—gently, now—and pull out a thread from it—wrap it about your wrist, I think, so as not to lose hold of it—and now back up through the water—”

  Joanna’s metaphorical hand was wrapped about with shining streamers of magick; her physical hands—indeed, the whole of her body—thrummed with a weird amalgam of nervous and magickal energy. What might be happening in the world around her, she could not begin to imagine, so strange and vast and inexplicable was the terrain of her own spirit.

  Her left hand was moving—Gwendolen was lifting it—her thumb pressing against rough lichen-covered stone.

  “O gods great and small,” Sophie prompted gently, and Joanna repeated the words, ran through the whole of the invocation without pausing for breath. The magick flowed out into the stone—was pulled out, spiralling down into a yawning chasm which, she saw at once, would take and take and never be filled; and then, in an eyeblink, it was filled, was overflowing, was not a chasm but a wellspring, and the air was humming with a sound like bees in a clover-field in summer, and there were arms about her and the laughter of relief, and the ground fell away and her face was pressed into the smells of wool and sweat and woodsmoke and sea air.

  “I shall go to sleep, I think,” said Joanna.

  * * *

  Sophie could never afterwards recall the details of their journey back to the inn on the afternoon of the Autumn Equinox; the whole of it was a blur of triumph, terror, and a determined focus on evading the notice of Orléans’s legions of mages. She walked beside Gray, clutching the tail of his coat, so that she should not have to look where she was going; Joanna hung limp in Gray’s arms, her sturdy boots and one plump little hand swinging with the rhythm of his stride.

  They had succeeded this time, that was the important thing; the magick of the keystones had been replenished, and so the spell could now be used as its makers had intended. But what, precisely, were they to do with a defensive boundary, now that the enemy was on the wrong side of it?

  They deposited Joanna in her bed, leaving her to the care of a pale and grim-faced Miss Pryce, and foregathered with the remainder of the party in the cramped private dining-room which Mrs. Cariou, the innkeeper, had provided for their use. Lucia had taken the precaution of ordering a substantial meal, in case of magick shock, and they applied themselves to their bread, hard cheese, ham, and apple-tart with cautious enthusiasm.

  “Well,” said Roland at last. “We have brought the spell back to life—the magick of blood and stone—and now what are we to do with it?”

  There was a general chorus of what, indeed? around the table, and a ring of expectant stares in Sophie’s direction.

  “She who would wield the magick of blood and stone need not be Queen,” Sophie recited, “but she must be a loyal subject of the Kingdom of Britain, and a mage of some talent and skill. She must possess the map of the keystones, and the spell that wakes their power to rouse the kingdom to its own defence. That is what we are to do with it—to rouse the kingdom to its own defence.”

  They looked at her doubtfully, as though she had not told them all exactly this, not so very long ago in Oxford.

  Bevan and Roland (who appeared to have forgot for the time being that he was a prince) cleared away the remains of the meal and stacked the dishes on the sideboard, and Sophie spread out the map on which the magickal stones were marked in red and the manuscript page containing the relevant spell. The writings of the Princesses Regent on the subject of the magick of blood and stone were frustratingly cryptic—or, more probably, relied on the context of the time to convey their meaning—but both map and spell were mentioned as requirements. A spell, as Sophie had been told often and often, is merely an aide-mémoire, a means of focusing mind and magick on the desired working or its outcome; the difficulty here was that they had no real notion of the nature of the spell, or of what it was meant to do.

  “Perhaps,” Roland suggested, oddly diffident, “the spell will do whatever you wish it to do. Within the limits of its capacity, that is.”

  “That would be a very useful spell,” said Gareth.

  “And unimaginably complex to design,” said Proulx, frowning thoughtfully. “But more easily worked than a collection of simpler spells designed to produce the same outcomes, and less prone to error.”

  “Queen Ahez knew what she was about, I am sure,” said Sophie, with some asperity.

  “If I were designing such a spell,” said Lucia, “if I knew how, which alas I do not, I should give the land and the people the power to resist invasion, and leave to them the choice of means to do so. After all, the same tactics are unlikely to be equally useful against longship raiders and siege-engines.”

  “And sorcerer-centuries,” added Roland. Lucia smiled at him, and laced their fingers together atop the table-cloth.

  “Indeed,” said Sophie. “But—”

  “It seems to me,” said Gray, leaning forward with his chin in his hands, “that as the stones are now all in the hands of Orléans, the most important thing is to prevent him from making use of them. He supposes, apparently, that waking all the stones of Karnag—there are three thousand altogether—will give him dominion over the whole of Roman Gaul.”

  “How?” said d’Allaire, bewildered. “And . . . how?”

  “That information,” said Gray, “was not conveyed to the rank and file, alas. For myself, I do not greatly care, so long as he is stopped. It is any ruler’s right to seek to expand his territory by conquest, of course, but to declare war on the gods who were worshipped here before the Roman Conquest, and to enslave men, not to mention mages, by compulsion to risk their lives for the sake of victory in battle—no.”

  There was a general shudder around the table; Sophie, who (with Roland, Lucia, and Joanna) had heard all of this in more detail al
ready, flinched and swallowed back nausea at the thought of those mages linked to Gray who, in the wrong circumstances, could be drained of their magick without warning and through no will of his.

  “In any case, it scarcely signifies what his foul purpose may be,” said Lucia, “if we can prevent whatever it is by invoking Queen Ahez’s spell. Sophie, you are the only one who can wield the magick, or so the Princesses Regent tell us; you need not wait for the rest of us to conclude our debate before acting as you see fit.”

  Sophie glanced round the table again, and was heartened to see no censure or disapproval of this last remark. “Very well,” she said. “I shall do my best.”

  They fell silent, waiting—they were all of them mages, after all, and knew the value of a quiet room. Sophie read over the spell again, twice more, so as not to stumble, and focused her mind on what seemed to her the desired outcome: the absence of the Duc d’Orléans, his mages, and his troops from all of Britain’s provinces; peaceable borders between Britain and the Duchies; and peaceful coexistence amongst the old gods and the new.

  She found Gray’s hand and clasped it, skin to skin, and felt their magicks well up to meet one another.

  Then she closed her eyes, let her magick flow out into the aether, and spoke the spell.

  * * *

  The magick of the stones raged through Sophie like a river in flood through an opened sluice-gate, vast and old and terrible—but there and gone in the space of two heartbeats.

  “Sophie?” Gray’s voice by her ear; Gray’s large warm hand curling over her shoulder.

  Somewhere, the sound of a door slamming.

  Sophie peeled the side of her face from the table and sat up as straight as she could.

  “Hallo the house!” came a voice from the inn-yard below the window, calling loudly in Français.

  Roland jumped up to peer through the window, followed in short order by every other person in the room, apart from Sophie herself. Gray went last of all and was back almost at once, cursing under his breath.

  “He is here,” he said, low and urgent in Sophie’s ear. “He was to come in triumph when we had awakened the stones—all three thousand of them—but surely—”

  “Who?” said Sophie, in hopes of making him explain. She felt slow and stupid, as though her thoughts were swimming through treacle.

  “Orléans,” said Gray, as though it had been obvious. “Come and see.”

  She levered herself upright, with one arm wrapped tightly about Gray’s waist, then made her way to the window and peered down into the forecourt.

  Sure enough, there stood in the forecourt of the Ship at Rest an elegantly caparisoned black horse and, holding its reins, a small man, resplendent in a blue coat trimmed with gold braid and positively radiating power.

  Sophie straightened away from Gray’s side; half turned, grasping the windowsill for balance; and beckoned to Roland to stand beside her. “We are the generals of this little army, I think,” she said, low, in her brother’s ear. “We stand on the battlefield, face-to-face with the enemy. What say you—will we challenge him?”

  Roland’s hand caught hers and squeezed it tightly. She glanced aside at him and found him wearing a broad, exultant grin. Lucia stood at his other side, her hand on his shoulder, and Evans-Hughes and Crowther behind him; Joanna clasped hands with Sophie on one side, and Gwendolen Pryce on the other; behind the three of them stood Gray, Bevan, d’Allaire, and Proulx.

  Sophie gently detached her hand from Joanna’s, flung open the windows, and let go her mother’s magick before reaching for her sister’s hand once more.

  “Monsieur le Duc d’Orléans!” she called. “We are the Kingdom of Britain, and we and our gods defy you.”

  He looked up at their first-floor window and stared at them in outrage; his voice boomed out so loud that Sophie repressed a yelp: “I am Imperator Gallia. I command legions such as the world has not seen since the great days of Rome; I wield the power of two sorcerer-centuries and of Divus Iulius himself. You, it appears, command an army of eleven. You are a brave and noble band of warriors, I have no doubt, but I need hardly cast the auguries to predict the outcome of this contest.”

  “I urge you to reconsider your plan of campaign,” said Roland. His shoulder trembled against Sophie’s, but his voice was steady. “We are not alone; we have the whole of Britain at our backs, and she is waking in anger at the threat to her sons and daughters, and to her gods.”

  Orléans stared up at them, frowning—not in anger, if Sophie read his face aright, but in bafflement at this bizarre and inexplicable turn of events.

  Then he shook his head, half turned from the window, and began to speak some spell; a spell it was, Sophie felt quite certain, for the very air shivered with the force of his magick drawing in. The air darkened—or were Sophie’s eyes failing under the onslaught?—she swayed and staggered against Roland’s shoulder, and Joanna’s stumbling threatened to pull her off balance from the other side—the air grew thin and hot, and bruised Sophie’s throat as she gasped for breath—

  —until, between one breath and the next, the cobbles of the forecourt cracked across, with a sound like thunder, and Orléans’s horse stumbled and slid, its hind legs sinking hock-deep into the resulting chasm. Orléans himself, stumbling too, backed away from the struggling horse, and the buzz and burn of his gathering magick abruptly ceased as he sat down hard upon the cobbles.

  “Oh,” Sophie gasped, her stomach churning. Had her spell done that? And not even to the enemy she had meant it for, but to a beast which had no choice in the matter? Or was this the effect of whatever magick Orléans had himself been working?

  “Lady Epona,” she whispered, “let not the blow fall on the innocent.”

  It occurred to her then—whether in answer to this prayer, or by sheer happenstance, she could not have said—that here was a use for the drawing-spell she had feared to use yesterday. She drew a deep breath, fixed her gaze on the foundering horse, and began quietly to hum a jaunty march.

  The horse’s hindquarters rose very slightly; it found its feet just long enough to scramble out of the crack in the cobbles, and stood for a long moment on trembling legs before lifting its head and walking towards the front door—no, the front window. Sophie abruptly ceased humming and let the magick go, sighing with relief when the horse lost interest and wandered away to browse in Mrs. Cariou’s herb beds.

  “We have Orléans at our mercy here,” said Lucia quietly, gesturing at him; he was picking himself up, dusting off his elaborate coat. “This war, the ugly means of prosecuting it, his mad notions about the gods of Rome—cut off the monster’s head, and the body will fall to pieces of itself.”

  Sophie recoiled in horror.

  “Lucia is not suggesting cold-blooded murder, Sophie,” said Roland hastily.

  “Well,” said Lucia, “I—”

  Roland gave her a meaning look, and she swallowed, then went on: “Could not the spell which drew that poor horse out of the crevice in the courtyard also draw our uninvited guest into, for example, the inn’s root cellar? And hold him there until further reinforcements can be summoned?”

  Sophie blinked at her, considering this, and at last smiled a little. “Yes, that is a very good notion,” she said.

  She was still reaching for a suitable melody, and wondering how to overcome the problem of the locked door, when Orléans got his second wind. His brush with the abyss had not diminished either his power or his determination to use it against his opponents, it appeared, for he was snarling as he spread his hands and began chanting another spell. The magick seemed to come at them from everywhere at once—pressing in upon Sophie’s skin, her eardrums, the top of her head—the air like treacle, thick and clinging—Arachne’s Web, thought Sophie, for she had felt something like it before, but surely Arachne’s Web could not be cast on such a scale?

  Gray’s hands descended on
her shoulders, thumbs pressed to the bare skin at the nape of her neck; magick thrummed between them. Sophie straightened her spine, clutched Roland’s hand and Joanna’s, and held on.

  “Mother Goddess, bountiful and kind,” she said aloud. The roaring air swallowed her prayer, but the words came tumbling past her lips, faster and louder: “Gods above and gods below, gods of the rivers and woods and stones, gods of the Britons and gods of the Gauls, gods who made this land and gods who guard it, hear me!”

  “You have no dominion here!” Orléans roared. “Take your petty gods and your hangers-on and begone!”

  The floor trembled beneath Sophie’s feet with the force of his spell, whatever it was; the rafters groaned; before her eyes, the window-frame sagged out of true. The floor tilted, the shutters began to splinter and crack.

  “Hear me!” cried Roland.

  “Hear me! Hear us!” the others echoed, over and over, as the staggering heat and pressure of Orléans’s spell built up around them, driving them one by one to their knees.

  Sharp pain exploded through Sophie’s head as her ears gave in to the onslaught; she swallowed back a shriek, and with it the warm iron tang of blood running down over her lips. Her back bowing over, she struggled to regain her feet—fell to her knees again—cracked her chin against the window-sill.

  If I am to die here, she thought defiantly, at any rate I shall not die alone.

  She opened her mouth—it was an effort, by now—and repeated the words of the spell, the Brezhoneg and English and Cymric and Français and Kernowek phrases tumbling over one another (she could not hear her own voice over the tumult of noise and pressure and pain) as her magick and Gray’s, Roland’s and Lucia’s, Gareth’s and all the others’, rose up to meet the magick of the stones.

  Sophie spoke the last word of the spell, and the gathered magicks erupted.

  Another teeth-rattling thunder-crack resounded through the house, and another chasm opened in the forecourt—this one immediately behind Orléans’s heels, so that he stumbled and nearly fell headlong into it.