Chantress Fury (10 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

BEHIND THE VEIL

The “something” my men had found turned out to be a woman.

“We haven’t taken her in yet.” Captain Knollys’s voice rang out robustly in the confines of the guardroom, but he stopped short when he caught sight of Gabriel, who had followed me down.

At a nod from me, he accepted Gabriel’s presence and went on. “The scouts say she’s what you’re looking for—a wise woman with a reputation for working water magic. Keeps herself pretty much out of sight, but we’ve tracked down where she lives, in rooms right by the river.”

“People call her a miracle-worker,” Barrington added. “They pay fees for her help.”

“And there’s talk of some odd rituals, too,” Knollys said. “River­side offerings and suchlike. Melisande’s the name she goes by.”

That took me by surprise. “Melisande” was said to be another name for Melusine. Maybe there was a Chantress connection here after all.

“Do you want us to bring her in?” Knollys asked. “Or do you want to go there yourself?”

“I’ll go.” I’d learn more that way. And if it was magic she was using—whatever it might be—then I didn’t want my men facing her without me.

Leaning languidly against a stone wall, Gabriel had listened to Knollys in silence. Now he turned to me and spoke. “I’ll go with you.”

I hesitated, not sure this was wise. Perhaps he saw my doubts, for he continued, “In fact, you could send me in first. I could pretend to be someone seeking her services. That would put her off her guard.”

“That’s not a bad idea.” Knollys looked at Gabriel with new appreciation. “Might be a better chance of taking her by surprise that way.”

I had to agree. “It’s worth considering.”

Barrington glanced at Gabriel, clearly annoyed at him for stealing the limelight. “I could do it, Chantress. Send me.”

I shook my head. An actor Barrington was not. His open face revealed every emotion he felt. But Gabriel had the gift of theater; I knew he could pull off a role with aplomb.

“I want you in the crew that surrounds the house,” I said to Barrington. “I need you ready to fight.” Raising my voice, I spoke to the men ranged behind him as well. “But you all must keep back and well out of sight until Lord Gabriel and I have gone inside.”

“I thought I was going in alone,” Gabriel said.

“I have a better idea,” I told him.

And so we made our plans.

My men had reported that Melisande lived in the darkest part of the filthiest alley in the disreputable riverside neighborhood of St. Katharine’s—and they hadn’t been lying. When Gabriel and I finally reached the place, he rapped on the door and winced as he stepped on something repulsive with his once immaculate boots. Behind him, I was grateful for the gauzy scarves and oversize hood that covered most of my face. They had been meant solely as a disguise, but they helped screen out a little of the smell. The whole alley was full of stinking trash and scraps, and the rainwater that pooled everywhere was turning them into a foul-smelling stew.

A flap in the door opened up at eye level. Through my scarves, I caught the scent of magic—teasingly brief and faint.

If I’d had my godmother’s keen nose, I might well have been able to identify the type and source of magic from that single whiff. I wasn’t Lady Helaine, however, and for me the smell was impossible to categorize. All I could tell was that magic of some sort was here.

Still, that was enough. It meant we were on the right track.

Through the flap, beady amber eyes squinted at what little they could see of us. “What d’ye want?”

A gruff tone, but I was pretty certain she was female. Was it Melisande?

“Well?” Beady-eyes was growing impatient.

“My sister’s had a bad accident,” Gabriel said in a low voice, starting on the story we’d concocted. “She’s not healing, and I fear she may be disfigured for life. She needs help.” Lowering his voice still further, he added, “From Melisande.”

The beady eyes swept over me, then fixed on Gabriel again.

“I can pay.” He held up a gold sovereign.

He’d hit on the right password. The slot shut. The door opened.

“In with you,” came the gruff order. “Be quick.”

The room inside was even darker than the alley, but there was enough light to see that I was right. It had been a woman at the door, though she was younger and slighter than I’d expected. Behind my veil, I sniffed the air again. This time I smelled no magic.

The woman put out a scrawny hand and said to Gabriel, “Your sword.”

We’d expected this, but he gave a show of reluctance before pulling it out of its scabbard and turning it over.

The woman clenched her hand around the hilt. “And the gold?”

Gabriel handed it to her.

She tested it with her teeth, then eyed us both. “So what’s behind the veil?”

I shrank back, feigning maidenly shyness.

“Cat got your tongue?” She chuckled—not a pleasant sound. “Melisande’s used to grand visitors like you, you know. Even gets highborn Court ladies coming to ask for help.”

Court ladies? I wondered who.

“It’s usually love-potions they want, of course,” the woman went on. “Perhaps that’s what you really want too.”

I shook my head violently.

“No?” The woman cackled. “Well, your money’s good, so we’ll let Melisande ferret the truth out of you. I’ll see if she’s ready to receive visitors.”

Turning away from us, she opened the door to the back room. I couldn’t hear anything that sounded like magic, but I caught the scent of it again, and that was warning enough. I tensed, ready to sing at any second.

Rustles and whispers came from the back room. Then the beady-eyed woman returned. “She’ll see you now. But you’ve interrupted her work, and she’s not best pleased, so mind your manners.”

She ushered us into an even darker room, lit only by scattered candles floating in bowls, which threw weird shadows on the cluttered walls. As my eyes adjusted, I saw a steamy white plume of smoke rising from a squat cauldron in the center of the room. My head clouded as a strong smell overpowered me.
Not magic
, I thought dizzily. Was it incense?

Veiled by the smoke, a shape stepped forward from the darkest corner. The beady-eyed woman curtsied so low, she was almost bent double. “Melisande,” she breathed.

Trying to see the figure through the smoke, I stepped forward. For just a moment I caught sight of her. She was a woman, and very tall, but what I noticed most were her intense sea-green eyes.

At the same time, she saw me—even through the veil. She turned on her servant. “You fool! It’s the Chantress.”

Through the smoke, Melisande lunged for me.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

WATER AND WALL

Even before Melisande came barreling toward me, I started to sing. The boiling water in the cauldron leaped up, forming a wall around her like searing, bubbled glass. Trapped, she looked at me in fury.

As I finished singing, I heard Gabriel say, “Oh, no, you don’t! That sword is
mine
.” When I turned, it was safely in his hand. The servant, however, was gone.

Gabriel pointed downward. “She went out through there.”

Squinting hard, I could just make out a hole in the floor. Leaving Melisande behind her boiling wall, I knelt by it and heard the river. “It goes out to the Thames.”

“I can’t fit through the hole, or I’d follow her,” Gabriel said.

I probably would fit, but if I went down there, it would mean leaving Melisande behind. It was too big a risk to take.

Moments later, my men piled in, crowding the room. “We heard you sing,” Barrington explained.

“Well done.” That was what we’d agreed beforehand: If I sang, they were to come immediately to our aid. “Simpson, Uddersby, you’re the smallest. See if you can get through this hole. Lord Gabriel, if you could tell them what to look for?”

Leaving them to it, I turned my attention to Melisande, still trapped behind the wall of water. My men had brought torches, and in their light I could see her clearly—a woman who had several inches on me but whose bearing made her look even taller. Her hair was a rich brown flecked with silver, and her age was hard to place, especially now that the fury had ebbed from her face, leaving it cool and curiously blank.

“Is Melisande your real name?” I asked.

She looked right through me.

I sang softly, and the wall of water sizzled and steamed. When it cleared, there was an angry light in Melisande’s green eyes—and also a touch of fear.

“I can make it even hotter,” I warned her. “Answer me. Is Melisande the name you were born with?”

She spat the answer at me. “Yes.”

“Some would say that’s a Chantress name. Are you a Chantress?”

“See for yourself.” She let her drooping sleeves fall back, revealing arms that were smooth and white. She had no Chantress mark, as I did—that small, bone-white spiral at the base of the forearm that set a Chantress apart.

Well, that was one issue settled. “What kind of magic do you practice?”

She gave me a wicked grimace. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“How many of you are there? How long have you been meeting?”

“How long?” A snort of contemptuous laughter. “Since the dawn of time, Chantress. We’ve been here before you, and we’ll outlast you.”

“Do you sing?”

Silence.

“Are you the one who called up the sea creatures?”

She still didn’t speak, but I saw a gleam of sly satisfaction in her eyes.

“Talk, or I’ll sing,” I said. “I can make that wall a lot hotter, you know.”

A look of pure hatred. “You and your walls! That’s the Chantress answer to everything. You did it to the Mothers, and now you’re doing it to me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know.” Her mouth twisted with venom. “The old wall let us slip through, but you put a stop to that, didn’t you? You Chantresses built a wall between us and the Mothers. We honored them; we respected them; we worshipped them in the way our own mothers taught us. But not you, oh no! You Chantresses were too high and mighty for that.”

I stared at her in confusion. What wall was this? And who were the Mothers?

“But all things come right in time,” Melisande said, eyes alight behind the bubbling wall. “We have been faithful; we knew this hour would come. Your wall is breaking down, Chantress. There’s a crack in it, and the Mothers are coming for you. And this time, you cannot stop them!”

After that, Melisande would say no more. Even when I made the water wall boil again, she only laughed more and more wildly.

“She’s mad,” Gabriel said behind me.

Maybe so. But even if Melisande were mad, it didn’t mean she was powerless. I’d smelled magic here. And her wild words about the Mothers sounded uncannily like the vicious warning the mermaid had given me:
We are coming.

“Who are the Mothers?” I asked Melisande again.

Her only answer was crazed laughter.

I turned to Barrington. “Your pike, please.”

He gave it to me without hesitation, and I drove it through the water wall. Melisande shrieked, but I was careful not to let the point touch her, just the iron side of the shaft.

Iron didn’t damage her, still less make her disappear. She looked exactly the same as before, only angrier.

What now? It wasn’t easy for me to keep the wall up, and she had the kind of light in her eyes that said she was prepared to die rather than give in to me. We’d have to find something else to do with her.

I motioned my men forward. “We’ll take her to the Tower.”

Rising up from the east end of the city, the Tower of London was England’s stronghold. Officially it was a royal residence, and some even considered it beautiful, with its domes and battlements and its white-walled central tower. But as we passed through the gatehouse, I shivered. I could never forget how the Shadowgrims had made it a place of horror and death. For me, the Tower would always be more prison than palace. There was no question it was the most secure jail in the city, however, and I wasn’t willing to settle for less when it came to Melisande.

Not that she was any more forthcoming here. As we put her into her cell and bound her with an iron chain, I noticed that she wore a strange ornament around her neck. Made of silver, it was shaped like two snakes, each swallowing the other’s tail. I no sooner started to question her about it than she began rocking and humming, making the stone cell echo with a strange sort of sound that reminded me a little of the sea monster’s keening.

Was she attempting to work magic? I sniffed the dank air but smelled nothing.

“Watch out!” Barrington cried as Melisande writhed backward.

She collapsed on the straw-covered floor.

“She may be pretending,” Knollys grunted.

“I’m not so sure.” Gabriel had his hand on her wrist. “Her pulse is very weak.”

For almost a full hour, we tried to revive her. We shook her. We splashed water on her face. We waved smelling salts under her nose till the room reeked with them. Nothing worked.

Gabriel, still monitoring her pulse, said that it was even weaker than before. “It’s steady, though. Almost as if she were in some sort of trance.”

Barrington crossed his arms. “We could put her to the rack.”

“No.” Looking down at Melisande’s slack, dead-white face, I saw for an instant the ghost of my godmother, who had died in this place.
It isn’t the same,
I told myself.
This woman is dangerous.
Yet it took me a moment to speak with the authority my men expected of me. “Leave her here. The rest of you, come with me.”

Out of earshot of the cell, I gathered them in a tight circle. “We still haven’t found any trace of her servant, have we, Captain Knollys?”

“No sign at all. The trail leads to the water and then stops.”

“Then all we have is Melisande, so we’d better treat her well. Give her plenty of blankets, and have some food and drink sent down. We’ll question her again later.”

Knollys and Barrington looked less than satisfied, but they didn’t try to argue with me. Nor did the others. I knew, however, that they would be happier if I were harsher with Melisande—and perhaps I should be. At any rate, I couldn’t be as lax as I’d been with the mermaid. Yet the dark history of the Tower was itself proof that torture wasn’t the high road to truth. People would say anything to end the pain. What if Melisande told us lies? What if we pushed her too hard and she died? We wouldn’t have learned anything, then.

Even if the others saw it as weakness, I was going to choose another way.

“There is plenty to do while we wait,” I said. “The men who are searching her rooms may have more to tell us, and we can continue the search for her servant. I myself must go to Whitehall; I promised the King I would keep him informed of our progress.”

“I could send a messenger,” Knollys said.

“He’ll want to speak with me himself.” Which was probably true, but the real reason I wanted to go to Whitehall was to tell Sybil about Melisande and see what she made of what the woman had told me so far. Perhaps Sybil would know who the Mothers were. Perhaps she would even be willing to come here and see if Melisande was the same woman she’d met long ago. Though how we would manage that, I wasn’t sure, when Sybil was so carefully encircled by her ladies, and her every movement was a cause for gossip. Still, it was worth a try.

“I’ll return as soon as I can,” I said. “I don’t know what tricks she might have up her sleeve, so don’t interrogate her without me. And keep her chained and guarded.” I wasn’t going to have her escape as the mermaid had.

I left, with solemn assurances from Knollys, Gabriel, and the others that they would keep close watch over Melisande until I came back.