Chantress (23 page)

“I thought we might be reconciled then, but when I learned she was still playing with Wild Magic, I was furious. I tried to make her see that she was risking not only her life but yours. We quarreled, and she went away. For eight years, she hid from me, and she used Wild Magic to cover her tracks. There was no way to find you without using Wild Magic myself, and I knew better than to take that path. So I did not see her again until the night she came to me with news of Scargrave and the grimoire.” Lady Helaine’s voice wobbled. “She would not tell me what she had done with you, not even when I begged. I find that hard to forgive, even now.”

I was still grappling with what she’d said earlier. “She used Wild Magic for eight years?”

It was the first inkling I’d had that Wild Magic did not necessarily lead to swift catastrophe and death.

“She was incorrigible.” Lady Helaine’s jaw became more pronounced. “Absolutely unrepentant.”

“But you said Chantresses who use Wild Magic don’t last long.”

“She had a flair for it,” Lady Helaine said grudgingly. “A few in every generation do, though most have the sense to refrain from making use of it.”

“But she didn’t. Why?”

Lady Helaine’s lips tightened. “Because she was tempted. That is what Wild Magic does. It tempts. It seduces. It gives you power beyond reckoning. No doubt that’s what drew her to it. She said she liked the freedom of it and the joy—though what she meant by that, I can’t understand.”

Perhaps she couldn’t, but I could. It made me think of the wholeness I felt when I heard the wild music again, and the hot light inside me when I sang the kindling song. Had my mother felt the same way?

Lady Helaine’s mouth soured. “Little good it did her in the end. When the Shadowgrims attacked us, her Wild Magic failed her. That is the way of Wild Magic: For all its power, it is chancy and deceitful. It will betray you when you least expect it. And she had nothing to fall back on, no discipline, no memorized songs, no long years of practice at Proven Magic. Indeed, she’d practiced Wild Magic with such abandon that she couldn’t work any Proven Magic even if she had remembered it. Her stone had cracked right through.”

“Her stone
cracked
?”

“Wild Magic can damage our stones as badly as the Shadowgrims can, though the pattern of the cracking is different. Given the kind of powerful magic your mother worked, it’s surprising her stone lasted as long as it did.”

My hand moved to my ruby of its own accord. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

“Because I thought there was no need. You had given your word you would obey me.”

I held the ruby up to the light, and she and I searched it for damage.

“It’s still intact,” my godmother said, unbending just a little.

“And the mind-reading earlier, with Scargrave—that didn’t damage it either?”

“No. I examined it very closely the night we met, and I would have seen the fault if it had been there. Your stone is a strong one, like your mother’s, and it escaped unscathed. But it will not stay that way, not if you keep practicing Wild Magic. Another attempt to kindle flame, another session of mind-reading—anything could be the last straw that starts a crack, or even shatters the stone completely. Then you will be like your mother, up against the Shadowgrims without anything to protect you. And you know what happened to her.”

I heard blame in Lady Helaine’s voice, and it made me angry. “But you were there. You knew the right songs. Why didn’t you save her?”

“You think it is as simple as that? A few songs, and all is well?”
Lady Helaine’s face twisted. “Understand this: The songs I sang were among the most complicated I knew. They required craft and cunning and years of practice. Even I, with all my skill, could only barely manage to save myself. Your mother succumbed so quickly there was no way to rescue her.” She turned away from me, as if the memory were too much to bear. “And if you think that this does not pain me every day of my life, goddaughter, then you may think again.”

Chastened, I stood silent. Thorny-tempered my godmother might be, but her anguish was real.

Lady Helaine squared her sharp shoulders and faced me. “Enough of this. What’s past is past.” The anger had burned out of her voice, leaving only pain and resolute determination. “I was wrong to walk away from you. You are slow—very slow—to master Proven Magic, but the power is there, that is plain. I believe you have as much raw talent as your mother did, and what’s more, you have a self-discipline I never saw in her. If you do exactly as I say, you could become a truly great Chantress.”

I frowned. Lady Helaine remembered only a handful of song-spells, didn’t she? There didn’t seem to be much prospect of greatness in that.

But when I raised the point, Lady Helaine shook her head. “Do not trouble your head over that. If it is meant to be, it will be—provided you give your whole heart and body and mind to what I am teaching you. And provided you never do Wild Magic again.”

“I never meant to do more of it, anyway,” I said, though I knew
this was only half-true. Once the ruby was off, the music had beguiled me, and it had been hard to resist it.

“No one ever means to do more, not at the start. That is the way of Wild Magic.”

“I tell you, I won’t take the stone off again.” I had no wish to end up like my mother—betrayed by Wild Magic, surrounded by Shadowgrims. Perhaps Proven Magic was not as powerful, but it was safe. And ever since I had walked into Scargrave’s mind, safety was what I craved most.

My eye fell on the candle in front of me. “Let me try again.”

“Try what?”

I blew out the flame. “To light it your way.”

“I think you’ve done enough for one afternoon,” Lady Helaine began.

But I had already started to sing, drawing breath in the way that she had taught me.

I can do this.

The song-spell still felt wrong to me, burning and scorching and making my head ache, but this time I didn’t let the feeling rattle me. I had learned something from the Wild Magic that carried over here: the sense of how a kindling song was put together, and how it needed to work as a whole. Beat after beat, my voice rang out stark and strong.

And yet still the candle stayed dark.

I trained my whole mind on it and kept singing, concentrating fiercely on each pitch and beat and phrase.

But now the last notes were escaping from my mouth—and
still the wick was cold and black. Heart sinking, I sang the final tone, long and low.

The song was over. It was done. And yet again I had failed. I turned away, hands shaking.

Next to me, Lady Helaine gasped.

I spun around. At the top of the wick, a flame quivered, faint but indisputably there.

I had made the song-spell work.

The next weeks passed in a blur of singing and magic. Every day there was something new for me to learn, and sometimes I could feel myself making progress almost by the hour.

Not that the road was entirely smooth.

“Again!” Lady Helaine continued to bark, day after day, hour after hour. More demanding than ever, she jumped on me for being too loud, too soft, too piercing, too husky, too passionate, too glib, and too reckless. Some days almost nothing I did passed muster.

“Again—and sing it properly this time!” I heard the curt command even in my dreams.

Yet I found that Lady Helaine’s criticism did not sting as much as it once had. Slowly, painstakingly, with many stops and stumbles, I was learning the song-spells I needed, and that was what mattered.

And if I took more time over this than either I or Lady Helaine
would have liked, I was making faster strides with another magical task: that of reading the Chantress manuscript with the song for destroying the grimoire.

Covered with scratching and hatch marks, the pages appeared indecipherable at first, but as I held the scraps in my hands and listened to Lady Helaine’s explanations, I started to grasp the relation between each page of symbols and the sound of the song-spell it denoted.

Lady Helaine tapped her fingers together with excitement. “You have a gift for this.”

I scrutinized the pages, my mind absorbed by their mysteries.

“A remarkable gift,” Lady Helaine mused, now with an air of quiet calculation. “And a very useful one. It will serve you well.”

I looked up from the vellum in my hand. “I thought hardly any Chantress manuscripts were written down—and that Scargrave had burned most of them.”

“He burned
my
library.” Lady Helaine’s voice was smoky with anger and regret. “Still, I expect he has not burned everything. Surely some scraps remain to be found.” She pointed to a line on my page. “Enough talking. Sing that to me. And be sure to hold your chin up exactly as I have directed.”

As I continued to work with the manuscript, I sometimes caught Lady Helaine looking at me with pride, and occasionally with a certain wary respect as well. And that respect only increased when, after hours of agonizing practice, I finally made the song-spell for concealment work.

“Excellent, excellent,” Lady Helaine murmured. “I can hardly
see you even full in front of the candles. And you are virtually invisible in the shadows.”

To see my own body slip away was shocking, and I nearly lost the momentum of the song then and there. But Lady Helaine’s rigorous training stood me in good stead. Though my head throbbed horribly, I kept breathing properly for a full quarter hour, and the magic of the song stayed with me until I lost it in a fit of coughing.

“It is a start,” Lady Helaine said when I became visible again. “But we must build your stamina.”

Our practice sessions became longer and more intense than ever, and as I became more and more proficient, Lady Helaine unbent a little and began telling me stories. At first, these were mostly gripping yarns about her adventures as a Chantress, but later, quieter tales emerged as well: how the women of our lineage had kept their magical nature largely hidden from their husbands (“Men cannot be trusted, neither husbands, nor fathers, nor sons”); how her own husband, a young nobleman, had considered her taste for books and libraries unseemly (“It was fortunate that I had skill with locks”); how she had never borne children but had longed for them (“Daughters all, if I’d had my way”).

She told me stories, too, of the dilemmas my ancestresses had faced and the victories they had won. Instead of dreaming about the island, I now dreamed about Niniane and Melusine and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Knowing their histories—their glories and triumphs, their struggles and defeats—made me determined to prove myself worthy of the long line of Chantresses who had come before me.

Yet even when telling stories, a part of my godmother stayed aloof. If I asked a question she didn’t want to answer, she simply ignored it. If I dared repeat the question, she turned sour and taciturn.

But then I kept secrets too.

† † †

One of the secrets I kept concerned Nat.

I had seen him only three times since the day he had found me practicing Wild Magic. Two of those visits had taken place in full view of Lady Helaine, and I had thought that she must be the cause of the awkwardness between us. But on his third visit, in early March, Lady Helaine allowed us to make a brief expedition by ourselves into the upper realms of Gadding House—and the awkwardness remained.

As we made our way to the minstrels’ gallery above the Great Hall, I could feel the tension between us. I was much too aware of every move that Nat made, and he, too, seemed to be on edge—though perhaps that was only because I was so hard to see. I had reached the point where I could sustain the effects of the concealment song for a full hour, provided I breathed properly and kept the song alive in my head. If Nat looked carefully, he could usually see a slight shimmering in the air where I was, but that was it.

The first time he bumped into me, I heard him inhale sharply.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“No.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

Nat was silent for a moment. “I hate not knowing where you are.”

“But that’s the plan, isn’t it?” I struggled to keep talking while breathing in the proper way. “The only way I can succeed is if no one can see me.”

“Of course.” He pulled away from me. “But it’s unsettling to have a mind-reader on the loose.”

“You’re never going to forget that, are you?” I said under my breath.

He swung around. “What?”

He misjudged the distance, coming so near that his lips almost brushed my cheek. Startled, I stopped breathing—and quick as a blink, turned visible.

In that moment of transformation, I saw dismay in his eyes. But I saw something else, too, something that made my breath catch again.

That must be the look Lady Helaine meant.

“Lucy,” he said.

But someone was coming, and there was no chance to say more. We pressed ourselves into the shadows—and this time he kept a full arm’s length away from me. For the rest of our time together, he was silent, and I felt more unsettled by him than ever.

Perhaps I would have tried harder to say something if I had known what was coming. For when we returned to Lady Helaine, Nat told us that he would be absent for a month or more. The Invisible College was sending him up north to track down another possible moonbriar grove.

Awkward as things were between us, I knew I would miss him terribly.

None of this, of course, did I discuss with Lady Helaine.

† † †

What else did I keep hidden from my godmother? Any number of things, from my occasional explorations around Gadding House while she was asleep to my worries about Nat’s safety. Above all, I hid my fears and doubts about my progress as a Chantress. There was no room for doubt with magic, Lady Helaine said. But doubt continued to haunt me anyway.

I was making progress, it was true. Yet despite relentless practice, none of the song-spells came easily to me. When I was tired or worried or sick, they became almost impossible. One week I caught a bad cold, and for two days my voice was too hoarse to do any magic whatsoever. What bothered me most, though, was that even when the songs did work, they felt all wrong.