Lady of Magick (42 page)

Cormac MacAlpine gave her a look with daggers in it, and
someone—it must be the red-bearded man—cuffed her bloodied ear. Sophie closed her eyes briefly, swallowing a yelp.

Catriona turned on one heel and regarded her levelly, and shifting into Latin she said, “I have offered my magick in exchange for your lives. You had rather surrender your own?”

There was no particular affection in her gaze; indeed, Sophie saw, she had not been wrong to suppose that Catriona did not much like her. And yet she was playing along with Sophie's ruse; and yet she was offering—

Did Catriona understand, in fact, what she was offering to do?

“Catriona,” Sophie repeated, “you must not—it is not safe—”

“That is very generous of you, Catriona MacCrimmon,” Cormac MacAlpine interrupted, with a curl of his lip, shifting back into Gaelic. “But the spell needs more than you or I can offer it, my dear. The power of Clan MacAlpine, as you know, is sadly diminished since the days when the spell was wrought.”

He gave Sophie a look of such thorough contempt as no one had directed at her since she left her stepfather's house, and added, “You surely cannot think that I would feed it on the magicks of strangers, had we sufficient power of our own?”

Catriona appeared to consider this.

At last she said, in the flat grey voice of one bowing to the inevitable, “Then at the least, let
him
go. Look at him; he can be of no use to you now.”

There were footsteps approaching.
Rescue? Or more of Cormac MacAlpine's bully-boys?

“I think not,” said Cormac MacAlpine, who seemed not to hear them. “He is a hostage to his wife's cooperation.”

Catriona scoffed, and he looked astonished and displeased.

“I see,” said Catriona, her voice regaining some of its customary bite. “And are you finding it an effective strategy? Because, if so, I must say that your standards for success appear to be—”

As she spoke, Cormac MacAlpine's lips were drawing back in a snarl, his hand clenching into a fist. The unseen footsteps were growing louder; the red-bearded man turned his head, listening.

“Catriona,” Sophie cried, desperate to divert attention from what she devoutly hoped was some sort of rescue party. “Go carefully! Whatever you have been saying to him, I fear that it is making him angry!”

As she had hoped, both Catriona and Cormac MacAlpine turned to glare at her; the red-bearded man stepped towards her, menacingly, then recoiled again at Cormac MacAlpine's furious “Look to your work, man!”

On the far side of the clearing, an unexpected flash of movement caught Sophie's eye. Her heart leapt:
Gray!
She nearly turned her head to look but, catching herself just in time, looked sidelong instead, keeping her face to Cormac MacAlpine and Catriona.

The oblique angle made her eyes ache, but she scarcely remarked it. Gray had raised his head—
Oh, thank all the gods!
—and was gazing at their captors with narrowed eyes, his bleeding mouth set in a grim line.

Once again Sophie's magick reached for his, leaping up with desperate energy—no longer bent on destruction, but simply yearning towards its other self—and this time she made no effort to restrain it. Was it only her wishful fancy that made her believe she felt Gray's magick reaching back?

He straightened slightly, and turned his head to meet her gaze.

Catriona! Help us!

Gray struggled up towards consciousness at the sound of Sophie's cry, though the words made no sense to him. He opened his eyes cautiously, and his bafflement grew; before him stood Cormac MacAlpine and the man he had dubbed Ginger, and with them—
By all the gods, how comes this?
—Catriona MacCrimmon.

He could not have told how he had come to be in the yew-grove; his last clear memory was of staggering back into the interdicted cell, propelled by a rough hand to his shoulder-blade, and collapsing against the wall, after which were only confused flashes which might well have been hallucinations, for surely Joanna had not really been wandering the corridors of Castle MacAlpine with a smooth-faced boy from Cymru? But he knew at once that Sophie was near; nothing else could account for this abrupt change of heart, from despair to hope, from grim resignation to a heady, almost drunken relief. It was not mere freedom from the interdiction—though that, too, was as always a blessed relief—but a more positive sense of something healed that had been sundered, something restored to him that he had lost.

He pressed his lips together tightly, lest he yield to his instinct to call out to her, and slowly, painfully, raised his head.

Cormac MacAlpine and Catriona MacCrimmon were arguing in low voices—so low, indeed, that Gray could not hear what they said, though that might be only the effect of the persistent ringing in his ears. He watched them through slitted eyes, wary, but they appeared for the moment to be paying him no heed.

His magick was welling up now—sluggish and uncertain yet, but gathering strength apace—and the deep thrumming of it seemed to vibrate through his bones. And almost, almost, Gray could hear the high clear singing of Sophie's magick, so closely attuned to his own. If the sound in his mind's ear was yet indistinct, however, the direction from which it came was not.

Slowly, cautiously, he turned his head to face the far side of the yew-grove.

Sophie!
He did not shout her name across the clearing, but it was a close-run thing. She was closer even than he had suspected—directly opposite him, and bound to a tree-trunk just as he was: the great elm tree, the anchor-point of Ailpín Drostan's spell.
Apollo, Pan, and Hecate!
Gray knew too well what that meant; did Sophie? Her face was ashen; blood stained her throat and the bodice of her gown; but her eyes burned bright as they met Gray's, and now he truly heard the singing of her magick.

It seemed an age that he gazed into Sophie's eyes, feasting upon the sight of her after long deprivation; but in fact only moments passed before an ominous silence announced that Cormac MacAlpine had registered the altered state of affairs amongst his prisoners.

“Well,” he said, reverting to Latin. “How very interesting.”

Gray turned his head towards the slow, speculative voice, and from the corner of his eye he saw Sophie do likewise. Cormac MacAlpine gestured sharply to someone outside Gray's field of vision, then paced towards them, graceful as a hunting cat.

A little smile was playing at the corners of his lips.

Gray's heart sank, and his belly roiled, and his attempts to channel his magick into some useful offensive spell were floundering and slow.

“Gray!” cried Catriona, slipping past Cormac MacAlpine to approach Gray's tree. She stopped just short of arm's reach and stared up at him. “Brìghde's tears! I thought they had killed you.”

Gray gaped at her, still too baffled by her presence here—though his notion of their precise whereabouts was distressingly hazy—to parse the import of her words.

“Catriona,” said Sophie again, and this time her voice held a warning. A warning of what? How in Hades did Catriona MacCrimmon come to be here? For it was apparent even in Gray's advanced state of befuddlement that she was not a prisoner like themselves, and surely no one would single her out as a rescue party.

Now more baffled than ever, Gray closed his eyes briefly and leant his head back against his tree.

When next he raised his head and opened his eyes, he saw Cormac MacAlpine standing tense and still, looking from Gray to Sophie and back again with narrow-eyed intensity.

“How very,
very
interesting,” he repeated, at last; and then, speaking in Gaelic now, and quietly as though to himself, he said, “What manner of spell is that, I wonder? One without words, at any rate; we were not speaking so loudly that I should not have heard one of them saying a spell. And it must be
her
spell, for the boy has not used it before.”

“Cormac MacAlpine,” said Catriona. “I beg of you—”

“Pàrlan Dearg!” he barked, ignoring Catriona entirely. Ginger—in whose hand was a worryingly large and keen-edged knife—fairly leapt to attend him. “Keep this one out of the way.”

Ginger—Pàrlan Dearg, then, which came to much the same thing—had neatly stowed away his knife and taken Catriona MacCrimmon by the wrists almost before the first outraged protests had left her lips, and he quickly silenced them by clamping his free hand over her mouth. “No spell-words,” he said, jerking his head at Gray, then at Sophie. It was not difficult to imagine how quickly his grip on Catriona's jaw could become a fatal twisting of her delicate neck. She kicked furiously at his booted ankles, to no avail.

Cormac MacAlpine meanwhile had unsheathed his own unpleasantly familiar knife and was approaching Sophie. Her dark eyes
tracked his every step, equally terrified and determined not to give him the satisfaction of showing it.

“No!” Gray shouted—or, rather, croaked. Sophie's head jerked towards him. He coughed wetly and tried again, this time achieving a sort of hoarse bellow: “No! If you must have blood to feed your horror-spell, let it be mine, not hers.”

And it was the truth—yet not all the truth, for if he could do again whatever he had done on that other occasion, and so confound them . . .

Cormac MacAlpine smiled broadly, and Gray's heart sank still further. “The time for striking bargains is past, Graham Marshall,” he said, his voice a silken murmur, and gestured at someone out of Gray's line of sight. “I shall have your blood indeed, however; yours and your Princess's both, and then we shall see.”

Steel-Eyes emerged silently from the shadows beyond the clearing, and at a nod from his master, he approached Gray's tree, smiling grimly.

“Shut him up,” said Cormac MacAlpine, reverting once more to Gaelic, “and make certain that he does nothing which he may regret.”

Steel-Eyes nodded sharply, and Cormac MacAlpine turned away. Digging in the leather purse that hung from his belt, Steel-Eyes produced a large handkerchief, then another. The first he wadded up and, after a brief scuffle—which Gray inevitably lost—stuffed into Gray's mouth; the second he then tied tightly about Gray's jaw, forcing his lips and teeth apart, so that he was effectively muzzled.

“Now then, Princess.” Cormac MacAlpine was unsheathing his gleaming copper knife. As before, he sliced his thumb and slicked the knife-blade with his own blood, but rather than cutting her cheek as he had cut Gray's, he bent close and stroked the knife's edge along the sluggishly bleeding wound behind her left ear. Then he cupped her jaw in his right hand, a hideous parody of a caress, and pressed the palm thus bloodied against the tree-trunk above her head. Sophie was rigid with revulsion, her face white and her eyes blazing, and Gray was not at all surprised when he felt the air about him stir, then bite, and finally howl.

Cormac MacAlpine frowned at Sophie, whilst Steel-Eyes and Pàrlan Dearg squinted suspiciously at Gray.

“Now,” Cormac MacAlpine repeated, impatient, and Steel-Eyes left Gray's side, crossed the clearing, and disappeared behind Sophie's tree.

Temporarily unobserved, Gray tugged at his bonds as hard as he dared. The knots were solid, and the movement jarred his raw-scraped back and bruised ribs painfully, but perhaps if he could put enough strain on the ropes, they might stretch sufficiently to allow some hope of escape . . .

Sophie's arms fell free, hanging limp at her sides. Steel-Eyes reappeared from behind the tree and grasped her right wrist, holding her arm out straight; Cormac MacAlpine took her hand, sliced across the back of it, and squeezed it—to Gray's furious eye, not at all gently—and as her blood fell against the roots of the great tree, the hum of magick in Gray's mind's ear grew suddenly louder and higher.

Cormac MacAlpine moved to Sophie's other side and repeated his rite—less graceful now that he must do all the work himself, Gray noted, with a small and bitter satisfaction. The wind was so strong now that it whipped the branches of the elm-trees and scattered their few small leaves; and its howling mounted higher, a mad keening that Gray felt as well as heard, at the second infusion of Sophie's blood.

The tearing wind, the flying leaves, the whipping branches: Gray could not help recalling the story she had told him—half a lifetime past, even then, but made all too vivid by her halting, horrified recital—of her mother's sudden and untimely death. He saw the moment when Sophie recalled it also, in the minute shift of her face from terror and revulsion to the grim expressionless masque which meant that she was fighting hard for control.

He caught her gaze and held it.
You are not that child now, Sophie. Your magick does not master you.

The wind did not die down, but it seemed to Gray that its frantic howling eased a little.

He followed Cormac MacAlpine's progress around the circle of trees as well as he could. How many other victims were there? He
could see two; but to judge by their placement, precisely two trees to Sophie's left and two trees to her right, there would likely be two more outside his line of sight. The man tied to Sophie's right—a small fellow whose tangled hair and ragged beard were black—raised his head as Cormac MacAlpine and Steel-Eyes approached him; with a renewed shock of dismay Gray recognised his erstwhile University colleague Professor Maghrebin, of whom Sophie had been so fond, and who had been called away so suddenly—

No. Not called away. Decoyed away and kidnapped, as I was.

He saw, or heard, the rite repeated over and over, and felt the earth-blood-ocean smell of Ailpín Drostan's magick thrum a little stronger as each was linked into the spell-net.

Why now? Why all together? These men have been here even longer than I—or at any rate some of them have been—

His attention was wrenched back to his own predicament, when a businesslike grip on his left wrist—his arm having been freed apparently whilst his concentration was elsewhere, and tingling fiercely with the returning flow of blood—jarred the accumulated bruises and abrasions, and he choked back a pained yelp.

He knew of course what must be coming, and could think of no way out of it but
through
. The others must know what it was to which they had agreed, or had been forced, to lend their magick; did Sophie know it? Or . . .

Forcing himself to a discipline which he had not found necessary for years, Gray closed his eyes, slowed his breathing, and ruthlessly excised from his consciousness the raw pain in his wrists, the sting of the knife across the back of his left hand, the bite of rough elm-bark against the half-healed skin of his back—the scuffles and blows, the oaths and gasps—the keening of the wind, the tiny sounds of the woodland night—the voices, the tense heavy breaths of his captors—until the thrum of magick about him was so loud in his mind's ear as to drown out all other sounds, all sights, all sensations. He wished, not for the first time, for some of Master Alcuin's talent for the visual perception of magick, so much clearer and less ambiguous than what he could himself perceive.

The sound of it, the
feel
of it, was only half familiar. What could that mean? To begin with, that there was magick here which was neither his nor Sophie's. The magick of Ailpín Drostan's spell-net, certainly, for it had a smell of blood and chill air and the sea which he had felt before, but not that alone. This was . . . this was . . .

But his speculative probing was swept away in an upsurge of magick, or magicks—Sophie's and his own, and Ailpín Drostan's, and others which he could perceive but not identify—which seemed like to take off the top of Gray's head from below, and he came back to the physical world with a ringing thump and a deafening blur of shouting, panicked voices.

*   *   *

Joanna pressed her right shoulder against Gwendolen's, then at once drew away again, ashamed of herself. “Heard you that sound?” she whispered.

“Of course I did,” said Gwendolen. “I should not be at all surprised if it had been heard in London. What was it?”

Joanna had not the least idea. But whatever it was, their guards had heard it also, and plainly it had alarmed them. They argued in rapid, low-voiced Gaelic, their voices gradually rising and their gestures growing more emphatic, and at last the elder of them barked a sharp order to the younger—the tone of command perfectly clear to Joanna, if the words themselves were beyond her—who rocked back, wide-eyed, and departed at a run.

Their remaining captor fixed them with a hard stare which said more clearly than words,
Do not test me
.

Joanna, however, had never been very good at taking orders from men whom she did not respect, and Gwendolen, the gods knew, followed instructions only when it suited her to do so.

When the guard turned away, they edged minutely towards one another, so that their fingers met behind their backs. Their captors had, presumably during their period of insensibility, confiscated Gaël's borrowed clasp-knife from Gwendolen's pocket and the hoof-knife secreted in her boot; their search of Joanna's person, however,
had evidently been more cursory, and (as she had hoped) it had not occurred to them that she might have concealed a small paper-knife, honed to a murderous edge, inside the left sleeve of her pelisse, between the tight-woven wool and the heavy satin lining. Gwendolen, however, knew exactly where it was, and was just enough taller than Joanna—as well as being much cleverer with her fingers, which could set tiny invisible stitches to mend a rent in a muslin sleeve, and dance rapidly across the keys of a pianoforte, as Joanna's could not—as to have it out of its hiding-place and busy about the cutting of their bonds in what seemed very short order.