Lady of Magick (43 page)

“There we are,” she breathed, gathering up the cut ropes—or most of them—as they fell away, and pressing the handle of the paper-knife into Joanna's stiff, numbed hands. “Now, we must not let him see.”

As though I needed telling.

She tucked the knife carefully back into the lining of her sleeve, and flexed her fingers cautiously, keeping her gaze downcast lest any sign of her present relief, trepidation, or furious calculation show on her face.

The guard paced to and fro before the door, pausing now and then to peer out through the grille into the corridor, or to glare down at Joanna and Gwendolen—torn, seemingly, between concern for his comrades and distrust of his prisoners. Joanna watched him from the corner of her eye and developed an idea.

“He is wild to know what is happening without,” she murmured, when next she heard the minute creaking of the door as he leaned upon it. “If he thinks we are too ill to escape, or too exhausted, perhaps he may risk going to investigate.”

Gwendolen did not reply in words but (to Joanna's immense and secret satisfaction) by coughing pathetically and slowly subsiding rightward until she lay curled in a limp heap upon the flagstones—her no-longer-bound wrists still concealed between her slim betrousered hips and the dressed stone wall.

When next their captor turned to look at them, another damp cough and a little whimper emerged from the heap.

Joanna debated briefly the relative merits of bolstering Gwendolen's charade by means of some appropriate theatre of her own, and of joining her in it. Which approach might their captor find most persuasive, or least suspect?

The natural, the obvious response in such circumstances would be that which had come so naturally to her when Sophie had been so ill during their visit to Donald MacNeill: panic, quickly suppressed; demands for assistance; an insistence that everything possible be done for her cousin, and that she herself take charge of the doing of it.

Natural, too, to demand that their captor free her hands for the purpose; and then he should realise—

Joanna groaned—her despair was only partly feigned—and let her head loll back against the wall, attempting to look as helpless and dispirited as possible, whilst still keeping one eye obliquely on Cormac MacAlpine's henchman. Could she, for the sake of facilitating their eventual escape, muster some tears?

She found that she could—that it was, in fact, disconcertingly easy. Her eyes stung, her nose prickled; her throat clogged, and she coughed wetly, her shoulders held rigid against the wall to preserve the illusion that she remained bound and helpless. She let slip the tight rein she had been keeping on the part of her mind which insisted upon imagining, in minute detail, what dreadful things might have happened to Gray during his captivity, and might now be happening to Sophie also; the nightmare images bloomed behind her half-closed eyelids, and a gasping sob tore from her throat.

Booted footsteps approached, heavy and slow. Joanna forced her eyes open, and through the distorting lens of brimming tears she saw her captor regarding her and Gwendolen with mouth downturned in an expression of bemused disgust. “Shut up,” he growled, in heavily accented Latin, and prodded at Gwendolen with the toe of his boot. “Useless children.”

It was exactly the reaction which Joanna had hoped to produce, and she was in equal parts elated that they had managed it and profoundly ashamed of the extent to which her play-acting was nothing of the kind.

A renewed commotion in the corridor—rapid footsteps, incomprehensible shouting—drew the Alban's attention away once more; he crossed to the door, peered out through the grille, and gave vent to what was unmistakably a string of curses. He glanced back at Joanna and Gwendolen—both shamming despair, resignation, and bodily weakness for all they were worth—and out through the grille again, and at last he opened the door and slipped out into the corridor.

Joanna's elation crowded out her shame, even whilst she heard the distinctive metallic
chunk
of a key turning in the lock on the far side of the door.

A long moment passed in tense, expectant silence. When at length no sound or movement signalled the return of their captor, Gwendolen sat up, shaking out her wrists.

“That was well done,” she said. Her voice was prudently low, but she wore a broad grin, plastered precariously over a wild-eyed exhilarated terror. “The maidenly tears, especially.”

Joanna scrubbed the sleeve of her pelisse (no longer very clean) across her eyes, dug her handkerchief out of her bodice, and blew her nose. “One does one's best with what the gods send one,” she said primly.

Gwendolen climbed to her feet, a little unsteadily, and reached down a hand to pull Joanna up. Joanna reeled, light-headed, and was forced to lean one shoulder against the wall for a few breaths, so as to regain her equilibrium.

“He has locked the door,” said Gwendolen, striding across the room to investigate. Her stride was half a stagger, but Joanna, equally unsteady on her feet, forbore to comment.

“Yes,” said Joanna, rubbing her aching shoulders. “I heard him. What—”

“Give me that knife.” Gwendolen cut across her, holding out an impatient hand. She braced one hand against the wall and crouched down to peer into the keyhole.

Joanna limped towards the door, taking care to stay out of line of sight from the grille and decanting the paper-knife from her sleeve as she went. She crouched beside Gwendolen, heaving a tiny sigh for the
comprehensive wreckage of what had once been a simple but particularly becoming gown, and laid the knife in her outstretched hand.

*   *   *

“Gwendolen Pryce,” Joanna breathed, as the lock snicked softly open, “I believe you have been concealing a very unsavoury past.”

Gwendolen ducked her head. “That's as may be,” she said, all the bravado gone out of her voice, and pressed herself upright, her back against the wall.

Joanna rose from her awkward crouch to the tips of her toes to peer out through the grille. The corridor appeared quite deserted.

“Well?” she said.

But Gwendolen was no longer beside her; glancing back over her shoulder, Joanna saw her hefting a small spade in one hand and a large long-handled broom in the other, as though weighing them against each other. After a moment she dropped the broom and swung the spade over her shoulder, for all the world like the Breizhek groom whose clothing she wore.

A sound like a thunderclap raised the hairs on Joanna's arms; she succeeded in keeping her composure, but only just. They opened the door just enough to slip through one at a time, and Joanna kept watch, her heart pounding unpleasantly, whilst Gwendolen again prodded at the keyhole with her paper-knife and a long sliver of wood, split off from the broken leg of an abandoned wheelback chair, which she then secreted inside her right boot.

“Done!” she said at last, and stood up abruptly, tucking the paper-knife into Joanna's hand. “Come along.”

Moving as quickly and quietly as they knew how, they set off in the direction of the noise.

*   *   *

The corridor was deserted. Once out in the cobbled courtyard, they moved more cautiously, hugging the walls. But here, too, the sentries seemed all to have abandoned their posts, and Joanna and Gwendolen
dared to break for the open and run towards what had now become a roar of unintelligible sound.

The postern-gate had been latched from without, but yielded without much difficulty to their determined application of Gwendolen's salvaged spade, in the character of a hatchet; the noise of this undertaking was such that had anyone at all been within earshot, they must have been discovered at once—yet no one came to investigate.

They stumbled through the gate and looked wildly about them for the source of the deafening roar that seemed to come from everywhere at once. It was nearing dawn; Joanna had had no sleep to speak of in what by now seemed like days, and had become thoroughly disoriented in their wanderings through the bowels of Castle MacAlpine—all of which might be supposed to explain, if not excuse, her mistaking the glow along the northern horizon for the sunrise.

Then the breeze shifted, and Joanna smelled smoke. She turned her head into the wind and saw the marks of milling footsteps taper off into a faint trail.

“There!” she cried, catching at Gwendolen's elbow, and took off running, following the footmarks towards the coppiced wood that lay to the northwest of the postern-gate.

*   *   *

The forest was not burning.

Or, at any rate, it was not burning in the usual sense, but lines of flame, bright and weirdly blue, ran along the ground beneath the trees. Gwendolen nearly trod on one of them; her squawk of pain, when Joanna yanked her back by the wrist, gave way to a startled
Oh!
when she saw what she had been about to do.

“Will we go over?” she panted. “Or go round?”

Joanna stood for a moment contemplating the line of blue-white fire that blocked their path. It snaked round between the tree-trunks, branching and joining like the tangles of rivers on one of Donald MacNeill's military maps; there seemed no way of going round it. She
crouched long enough to feel about amongst the leaf-mould and grasped the first kindling-sized branch she came across; then, rising again, she reached out with it to prod the flames, ignoring Gwendolen's attempt to stop her.

The branch smoked faintly but did not ignite.

“Over,” said Joanna, dropping it, and began tucking up her skirts.

“Jo—”

“Shut up,”
Joanna hissed fiercely.

They crossed the first fireline at a running leap, and when this produced no worse effect than a sort of buzzing sensation, they forged ahead with more confidence and less care, towards what appeared to be the centre of this uncanny conflagration.

Joanna did not stop to think whether they were running in the right direction, or to consider what they might do when they arrived at the end of their present trajectory; her single goal, at present, was to reach her sister and brother-in-law, and in Joanna's experience the epicentre of some inexplicable catastrophe was always the most likely place to find them.

And, indeed, when at last she and Gwendolen, running hand in hand, burst through a tangle of bracken, between two closely spaced yew-trees, and into an unnaturally round clearing, Joanna at once beheld Sophie, glowing with furious anger and tied to the trunk of an enormous elm-tree.

Her first instinct was, of course, to dart forward and cut away the cords that bound Sophie at ankle, waist, and breast; the sharpened paper-knife was already in her right hand and her feet carrying her forward when at last the evidence of her eyes reached her conscious mind, halting her in her tracks.

Whoever might need rescuing in this wood at present, it was not Sophie.

The first revelation
was that Catriona MacCrimmon had been right, and both Rory, with his talk of legends, and Cormac MacWattie, who would not opine on the truth or otherwise of that elusive phenomenon known as the magick of the land, entirely wrong; and the second, that Cormac MacAlpine had done precisely what he had set out to do.

Sophie could feel the branching tendrils of Ailpín Drostan's spell-net, great and small, immediate and distant, stretching in all directions from the hub of the great elm; could hear them singing in a thousand separate voices; could see their branching, intertwining paths.

Cormac MacAlpine had drawn power from every mage whose blood had been spilled in this shrine and fed it into a web woven through every corner of the kingdom. But the magick ran both ways: from web out through tree and field, stream and firth and loch, into the bedrock of the land—and from the land back into the spell-net.
The magick of the land, indeed.

The magick channelled into the spell fed on her own, and fed it; it reached towards the faint thread of Lucia MacNeill's magick, and the two flickered and darted about each other like swordsmen testing
one another's defences; then, as sudden and fierce as two cataracts meeting, they rushed together and flooded the pathways laid down in Ailpín Drostan's time, from the greatest to the least.

And Sophie, pinned at the hub of the spell, could sense the flow of that power—all shot through now with the bright red-gold flavour of Lucia MacNeill's magick; could see how, by means of her connexion to that magick, she might reach through the web and use it to heal or to harm.

At present, however, she could not think beyond the threat to Gray and their fellow prisoners. If Ailpín Drostan's spell-net worked in the way she suspected, there was work to be done—but first, the enemy at her own gates.

She reached carefully for her blood-bond with the great elm-tree, and through it to its companions in the grove; there was a long, fraught moment as the trees sought and tested the red-and-gold thread of Lucia MacNeill's magick that she yet carried, and she found that she could wield their roots and branches like an extension of her own hands.

“I have not done with you, Cormac MacAlpine,” she said, and knew not whether she spoke the words aloud.

*   *   *

Not for years now had Gray seen Sophie lose control of her magick. On those prior occasions, the resulting physical destruction had been immense, and the danger to Sophie herself almost greater; but this time—

This is no loss of control,
he thought, astounded;
this is Sophie wreaking deliberate havoc.

And what glorious havoc it was!

He could see the branching lines of Cormac MacAlpine's restored spell-net now, ablaze in weird blue fire; when he closed his eyes, the lines of fire remained behind his eyelids, a bright tracery like the blood-vessels he had seen represented in healers' diagrams of the human body. The magelight lanterns hung about the tree-shrine blazed
so brightly that they hurt to look upon, and tree-roots were snaking up through the layers of leaf-mould to wind about the ankles of Cormac MacAlpine and his men.

But the trees themselves remained untouched, and the men—though terror was writ plain upon their faces—entirely uninjured.

Every cell in Gray's body thrummed and fizzed with the mingled magicks—his own and Sophie's, well known and welcome as the touch of her hand in his; the unfamiliar flavours of their fellow-prisoners' magicks, struggling and uncertain; the chill salt-and-iron tang of Ailpín Drostan's spell, and that other presence, faint and fading, that tasted of pine forests and the cry of gulls, of rocky crags and the purple of heather, of fierce loyalty and a strong, determined love. Across the clearing, Sophie stood straight and tall against her tree, her eyes burning and her dark hair rising about her like Medusa's snakes.

She ought to have been terrifying, and in a sense she was, but the small part of Gray that feared what she was capable of was entirely overwhelmed by the heady mix of pride, exhilaration, relief, and fierce love. He caught her gaze across the field of fire and grinned, and after a long, startled moment, an answering smile, small and hesitant, curved her lips.

A moment later, the sound of breaking branches made him turn his head, just in time to see Joanna and a dark-haired young man of about the same age crash through the trees and into the clearing. Joanna started towards Sophie, then checked herself, staring around her with a thoroughly gobsmacked expression. She and her companion were both pale-faced and very dirty, as though they had not only run through the wood but also crawled up a chimney on their way to the grove.

“Joanna!” Gray called. He had to call her name twice more before she at last located him; then her soot-streaked face lit up with relief, and she ran.

“Gray! Thank all the gods! I thought—”

“Have you got a knife?” Gray demanded, cutting off her eager exclamations.

He spoke in Brezhoneg, as she had; the language reminded him strangely of Oxford—Oxford with Sophie—a life for which captivity had given him a strong nostalgia, despite its many imperfections.

With a startled grin, Joanna held up her right hand, in which gleamed Sophie's paper-knife, last seen on her desk in Quarry Close and now honed to razor sharpness, why? No matter.

“Good,” he said. “Go and cut the others free—they will need food and rest and most of all a healer—I hope you have brought one with you?—and then Sophie, and then me.”

Joanna bit her lip and dropped her gaze at the mention of a healer, from which Gray concluded that there was no healer in their party. Which party, it occurred to him now, was nowhere to be seen.

“Joanna—”

She held up the knife again and ran light-footed to the next occupied elm-tree.

“Your Alban friends took my knives, both of them,” said Joanna's companion, in a conversational tone. He was real, then, this Cymric boy, and Joanna too apparently. He disappeared behind Gray's tree, and Gray could feel him prodding speculatively at the cords about his rib cage. There was something familiar about his voice . . . “But I expect one of them might have one to lend me in return.”

“Not the copper one,” Gray said urgently; “Cormac MacAlpine used it in his magick”—he waved his left hand, still sluggishly dripping blood, in the young man's general direction—“and I do not know what . . . what properties it may have. Ginger, there, has a perfectly ordinary knife, however.”

Reappearing from behind Gray, the young man followed his gaze to Pàrlan Dearg, trapped in a coil of elm-tree roots and glowering furiously in an attempt to hide his uncomprehending terror. “I daresay he does,” he said, and loped away to retrieve it.

Who in Hades
is
that boy? How did he come here?

But no matter; whoever he was, he had retrieved Pàrlan Dearg's knife and was applying it very usefully to the prisoner at Gray's left.

Once freed, the man staggered a few steps forward before collapsing to all fours, retching. Joanna's young man knelt briefly to speak
to him, laying a reassuring hand on his shoulder, before springing up again to free the next prisoner.

It was Joanna who first reached Sophie, and in the fierce glare of the magelight lanterns Gray could see tears gleaming on her face as she crouched beside her sister, sawing at the ropes about her ankles. Sophie's face was grimly set now, and Gray suspected that she was wrestling with forces she did not entirely understand.

The last of the ropes parted under Joanna's blade, and Sophie fell forward—caught herself—stood for a moment breathing deeply, clasping her elbows—and swung wide about Cormac MacAlpine and Pàrlan Dearg to fling herself at Gray.

Joanna had pelted across the clearing behind her, and both she and her friend were now sawing industriously at Gray's bonds, but he scarcely noticed, and cared not at all, for he had Sophie in his arms again, and for the moment life could hold no greater reward.

*   *   *

Sophie clutched the folds of Gray's robe, her ear pressed to the rough wool over his heart, and squeezed her eyes shut.
Breathe. Calm.

Gray was speaking to her—Joanna, also—but she could not hear the words, nor even discern in what languages they were spoken. In the grip of this magick that spoke to all of Alba, she was no longer certain even of the borders of her own body, and she had lost all sense of the borders of her mind, or of her magick.

One thing she had seen clearly from the moment of her absorption into the spell: Cormac MacAlpine might have remade its pathways, but he was no longer in control of its working, if indeed he ever had been. It was her blood, her magick, and those of the other prisoners, which had fed enough power into the spell to begin to bring it to life—Gray's that had completed the circuit—and that tenuous golden thread of Clan MacNeill magick, still clinging to her own as Cormac MacAlpine opened her veins, that governed its effects. The power now flowing through those pathways would never answer to Cormac MacAlpine, no matter how direct his descent from the great Ailpín Drostan. For he had fatally misunderstood the nature of the spell; it
was not that the magick made the clan chieftain, or that the clan chieftain made the magick, but that they made and mended one another, through the will of the clan-lands and the people who inhabited them. The clans had chosen their chieftains, and the clan chieftains had chosen Donald MacNeill, and approved his choice of Lucia MacNeill as his heir; now Sophie and Cormac MacAlpine, the one unwilling and the other unknowing, had bound Lucia MacNeill's magick (if not, perhaps, Lucia MacNeill herself) into the ancient magick of her kingdom, as Cormac MacAlpine must have hoped to do for himself.

But in one matter he had spoken true; there was healing to be done in Alba. Through the web of the spell Sophie heard the blighted fields as dull, throbbing aches—tasted the emptied storehouses like the gap left by a missing tooth—felt the hunger of man and beast in dark and hollow silences. There was a tract of pine forest felled by drought, a flash of sere brown in her mind's ear; here a sheep-cote succumbing to some ovine plague, a hot insistent whine that tasted of copper.

But if the magick will do my bidding . . .

She had often wished for a healer's talent; if the gods (which gods?) had chosen this bizarre means of offering her that gift, what sort of ungrateful fool could possibly refuse it?

Hesitantly, wary of making some misstep, Sophie reached towards the nearest point of pain and poured her magick into it through the web. The pain did not disappear, but it eased a little, from sharp agony to dull ache. She flew along the lines of magick, somehow riding all of them at once—
I am my father's heir,
she heard Lucia MacNeill say;
my range is the whole of Alba
—singing the warped melody true again, shaping the power to fill the gaps and the silences.

When the well of her own magick threatened to run dry, she reached out for Gray—blind, deaf, and drunk, but finding him no less readily for that—and drew him down into a long, searching kiss; his magick rushed towards hers, and hers welled up to meet it, and she was out again amongst the clan-lands of Alba, making whole what Cormac MacAlpine had put asunder.

There was a paean and formal supplication to the Mother Goddess, which in Britain was sung each spring at the festival of Matronalia; it thrummed under the surface of her mind as she worked, and though the gods of Alba might disdain its origins, Sophie felt they might nonetheless appreciate its substance:

Lava quod est sordidum,

Riga quod est aridum,

Sana quod est saucium.

Flecte quod est rigidum,

Fove quod est frigidum,

Rege quod est devium.

She could not have said how long she swam the currents of the spell-web—it might have been moments or days, months or years. She might almost have been content to do so forever, for each hurt that she used her magick to heal—though in the full knowledge that it was not hers alone—was also a balm to the wounds left on her soul by every inadvertent act of destruction which it, and she, had ever wrought. But after some unknowable time, she found that the music of the spell had changed, relief and thankfulness rippling through it to crowd out the warped and discordant echoes so strongly felt at first; the fainter those echoes grew, the more Sophie grew conscious of the world outside the spell.

Gray's arms, solid and familiar, still held her fast. Gray's heart still beat steady and strong beneath her ear. But nothing else, she found when at last she closed her eyes to the aetheric Alba and opened them upon the earthly one, was as she remembered it.

It was full day, and a brisk northwesterly wind sent woolly puffs of cloud scudding across a clear azure sky. Cormac MacAlpine and his men had gone; the men they had kidnapped were disposed about the clearing, variously seated or reclining, but all snugly wrapped in clean woollen blankets and spooning up some sort of fragrant soup from wooden bowls. Beneath a spreading yew-tree, Joanna and Gwendolen, with blankets trailing from their shoulders, stood
talking quietly with a puffy-eyed and tearful Catriona MacCrimmon. And all about them—Sophie blinked in astonishment, certain at first that her eyes deceived her, but indeed the ten well-armed young men and two slightly older women who now guarded the perimeter of the tree-shrine all wore the badge and gear of Donald MacNeill's household guard.

Angus Ferguson's men, I could have made sense of; but how comes this to be?

“Sophie,” said Gray quietly. “Love, have you come back to us?”

His voice came from somewhere above her head; Sophie twisted awkwardly in an effort to look up at him and, finding it did not answer, sank back into his arms again. She was half sprawled upon a blanket, she found, her hips slotted between Gray's drawn-up knees—someone had found him a proper pair of trousers, it appeared—and another blanket covering her from ribs to toes; an almost embarrassingly intimate posture, save that no one had any attention to spare for their particular corner of the forest at present.