The Spirit Lens (48 page)

“Certainly. Yes, of course, we should go. I’ll roust the stableman and meet you in the yard.”

“I’ve a few things to gather; then I’ll be down.” As I touched the door latch, he called after me. “You do still have my book, yes?”

His will nudged my hands and tongue, subtler than his earlier attempts to influence me, but unmistakable now I knew to watch. Yet even so small a move unleashed a fury in me. I no longer even questioned that he was capable of magic my studies deemed impossible, but that did not mean I would ignore this crude manipulation.

“So tell me, Master, do you still not trust me, or is it you believe me a pure dullard? Would it make a difference if I repeat that these spell tricks are unnecessary? Or that I prefer us to deal with each other as honest men? Or if I told you that an armed assassin would not have kept me from your side once I saw Camarilla in the palace?”

He appeared in the doorway, the rucksack on his shoulder. To my astonishment, he had donned a mage’s formal blue gown instead of his favored russet tunic and scuffed trousers. Though his silver collar gleamed in the light of his staff, his face remained shadowed. I could imagine its ascetic arrogance well enough.

“I don’t know what to make of you, student. On the one hand, I never met a man who understood himself so little as you. Your own excessively rigid mind plays more tricks on you than I ever could. But on the other hand . . . So tell me, honest man, where is my book?”

“I’ve put it away, as I presumed you wished.” Underneath a bench in the summerhouse, to be precise, as my “excessively rigid mind” had not completely failed me.

“Exactly so. But if I’m to discover anything of interest in it, I’ll need it back, won’t I?”

I bit back a useless retort. We were not children, and the past two days had surely overstretched him as well as me. I’d known from the first he was subject to this choler. “I’ll fetch it with us, certainly. And as we ride, you’ll tell me what you’ve learned from it.”

He stooped to rummage through the heaped contents fallen from a gaping cupboard. “Little enough. A few tricks. Some tedious history. The Mondragoni had no use for this other family, the Gautieri, I’ll say. Evidently the other way round, as well, as the encryption is hideously complex, doubly so for what puling spellwork is written in it. I doubt I’ll ever be able to finish reading the thing, much less grasp its full meaning.” He picked a few items from the heap, carried them into his bedchamber, and stuffed them into his leather satchel.

I gaped for a moment, not sure what I was hearing. Dante, suggesting a magical task he could not perform? A conclusion that wholly contradicted his statement of a day earlier that he would “astonish” me with what he learned from the Mondragoni text. “What foolery is this? You said—”

Caution aborted my retort. Did he speak this way for my benefit or for some other listener—perhaps someone who also knew of Gaetana’s book? His deliberate preoccupation offered no prospect of immediate enlightenment. I would challenge him again, once we were on the road.

So I left him at his packing. It would not pain me to rouse the stableman, Guillam, from a sound sleep. Perhaps with a cannon.

 

 

OTHERS WERE AWAKE IN THE middle-night hours of Castelle Escalon. As I awaited the mage in an unlit corner of the carriageway, an increasing number of footmen and guards raced in and out of the east wing doors. Extra torches were brought out to light the portico steps. Before very long, old Guillam himself led out two palfreys, one white, one sleek bay, both saddled for ladies.

“We’d best be off before we get caught in this lot. The house is in an uproar.” Engrossed in the activity, I near shed my skin when Dante spoke from behind me. He snatched his mount’s reins from my hand.

A troop of guardsmen marched round the corner from the direction of the barracks, just as a knot of people emerged from the east wing: guards, ladies, court officials. Lady Antonia, unmistakable in a yellow cloak, hair piled in billowing curls, descended the steps and was assisted into her saddle. Her voice carried, but not her words. Two more followed her—a tall, slender figure, draped head to toe in black and leaning on Ilario’s arm. It could be no one but Eugenie de Sylvae.

“He’s sending her away,” I whispered. It was the only conclusion that made sense. But was my cousin dispatching his wife to her family’s home in Aubine or his own mountain fortress Journia, or had Gaetana’s treachery pushed him past patience?

The answer came swiftly. The queen and Ilario were bustled down the steps and wrenched apart, amid a flurry of sharply announced commands. The lady, surrounded by a bristling forest of spears, was aided to mount. No coach. No baggage. No attendants but her foster mother. A snapped order moved the party forward, and the milling courtiers dissipated like smoke in wind, leaving the pale-haired Ilario alone in the carriageway.

One other watched alone from the east portico as the queen’s party vanished into the dark. Ilario marched up the steps and past my royal cousin without so much as a word. When the king slowly followed the chevalier inside, footmen stepped out and doused the extra torches. A sense of utter failure settled over me like a leaden mantle.

The yard quiet again, Dante and I rode out into a restless city. Lamps blazed. Doors stood open. Knots of citizens had gathered in the streets. Many an eye glared at Dante as we rode by. “Ought to burn ’em all,” yelled a burly taverner, just after we’d passed his doorway.

A crowd of boys and rowdies surged across the road, heading down toward the river. When I asked where they were headed, a boy yelled back, “Sorcerer’s whore is headed to the Spindle.”

I was relieved when we left Merona behind without further incident. For beyond all this, we had still to determine if Michel de Vernase, king’s friend and confidant, who called himself the Aspirant, was trying to drive Sabria into chaos with Mondragoni sorcery or save her from those who were. If any clues were to be found in Michel de Vernase’s house, we needed to get there before his family or co-conspirators thought to remove them.

Surely Philippe would wait for my report from Vernase before he judged Eugenie—surely.

 

 

THE GIBBOUS MOON HUNG HUGE and yellow in the cloudless void, bathing the quiet vineyards south of Merona in ocher and gold. As the road led us into the soft hills, the shadows of clustered hornbeams and downy oaks mottled the roadway, requiring a rider to keep alert for pits and obstacles as well as the ever-present possibility of thieves. Fortunately the horses could see better than either of us.

Dante continued to put off my questions, claiming the concentration required to stay on his horse quite consumed him. When I persisted, he insisted I shut my mouth unless I had something useful to tell him. We had scarce exited Merona’s gates when he had demanded the Mondragoni book. Perhaps if I’d been clever enough to hold it back, I could have pried a few answers from him in exchange.

Well along in the night, the road dipped into a thickly wooded vale creased by a shallow river. “The moon’s too low to do us good,” I said, weary to the bone. “We should halt until sunrise and rest the horses here by the water.”

“Can’t say an hour’s sleep would go amiss,” said the mage, yawning. “Inquisitors don’t heed day or night. They pursue what clues they’re given.” A white glow swelled from his staff, and he urged his mount ahead of mine.

Using his muted, steady light, we found a clearing by the water, a few hundred metres down a side path. Old dung, wheel tracks, and scattered ash evidenced that other travelers had used the clearing. We tended the horses and set them to graze, matters for which the inexperienced mage needed constant direction.

As I wiped sweat and dirt from our saddles, Dante touched his staff to a blackened ash ring and murmured,
“Incendio, confinium a circumna
.
”
Sparks snapped and flew from the heel of the white stick—and inside my skin. The mage tossed in twigs and bits of dry moss he’d gathered from the trampled ground, and in moments flames had sprouted. The bright enchantment devoured me, a surge of cold fire from feet to head that shivered my bones. The questions I’d prepared for him along the way, the arguments, the appeals to his agreement and our effective partnership, all fled before my longing.

“Creator’s Hand, what makes the difference?” I said. No urgency gripped me more than this most fundamental one. “Your enchantments live and breathe. Beside them, every other I’ve known seems but an image of an image.”

Instead of answering, Dante walked. A quarter of an hour . . . half an hour . . . he strode the perimeter of the clearing: thick trees, tangled underbrush, the river, broad and swift-flowing, aglint with the beams of the sinking moon. I could not see his face. He had cleanly and purposefully chosen reticence about the past night’s encounter, but
this
silence seemed a struggle.

When he returned to the fire, he crouched and planted his staff between his knees, gripping it so tightly that his knuckles gleamed pale. Poised on edge, I sensed revelation but a decision away.

“Magic must rise unhindered from one’s own depths,” he said at last. “Only then can it encompass and magnify the entwined keirna of its objects. As I told you, your mind is riddled with barriers solid as mortared walls. And you maintain this stubborn belief in elements, particles, and formulas, as do all those taught at Seravain. Here . . .”

Near spitting with impatience, now he’d sloughed off indecision, he jumped to his feet and beckoned me after him. He halted at the path that had brought us into the clearing. “Learn this path,” he said, brightening the glow of his staff, scooping a handful of the black dirt and cramming it into my hand. “Squeeze this. Smell it. Examine its color and composition. Dark and rich here by the river. Mixed with old dung, bark, the rot of fallen leaves and decaying trunks, and all that’s washed in from the river in flood.”

He scuffed his boots in the rutted track. “See how worn the path is, this wide trough. Consider its uses—tired travelers, maybe fearful ones, scavengers, wheels, horses, mules. This camp is decently protected by the water and the tangled trees, but we ought to build a ward that will warn us if any approach by the path. Where do you begin?”

“Wards require impermeability—base metal. . . .” Rote memory spat out the answer.

“Use your mind, Portier! Think not of divine elements, but of what’s here before you.” Dante crouched down and tapped a pale knot protruding from the dark soil of the path. “The path is laced with roots. Hornbeam clearly, from the color, and the branches hanging over your head. So, examine the tree roots with your fingers. Then look up, recalling everything you know of hornbeam—modest in height, its wood pale as birch but hard as iron, seeds winged like insects. Feel these leaves, crimped like women’s hair.”

He swept his arm back the way we’d come. “Someone’s coppiced most of the hornbeam in this wood, as the shoots make good poles. But the wood has been ill tended, left to grow for a long time—perhaps the Blood Wars wiped out those who minded it. My staff is hornbeam. The wood is strong, almost impossible to work. It binds magic well. Now wait. . . .”

He crashed off into the tangled underbrush. I studied the path and the dirt in my hand, not at all sure what I was doing. Questions and mysteries and sleeplessness nagged at me, yet magic lay at the heart of our mystery. I had to understand it. And Dante was the only mentor I wanted.

The mage emerged from the thicket and thrust a slender limb into my hand. “Here. Use this to scribe your enclosure about the snarl of roots and the dirt from your hand. Encircle them in your mind, as well.”

“Ow!” The hornbeam shoot was approximately the length of my arm, the diameter of a finger, and smooth, straight, and pale, save for one blackened end—still hot, where he’d burned through to cut it.

As commanded, I dumped my handful of dirt atop the exposed roots and used the shoot to draw an elliptical pattern around the pile. Before closing the oval, I hesitated. “Perhaps it’s not wide enough. If I need to block the entire path, or if there are more parti—more objects to contain.”

“The size of the enclosure does not matter,” said Dante. “Stretch it as you work if need be.”

I took his word that this would eventually make sense.

“Now fashion a simple crossing ward: You’re to be wakened when a warm body passes the barrier. Build the spell pattern in your mind. Your hand can serve as the warmth needed. Surely you know your own hand better than anything in the world, just as you know best what warning can wake you from sleep. So, lay your hand atop the roots and dirt within your enclosure. When the pattern is prepared, seek the power that exists in it already, joining it with what lives in you.”

Spell pattern—not so easy as it sounded. As I had learned magic, particles enclosed by a physical boundary—rope or string or circumoccule—provided both the physical and mental structure for spellwork. Formulas prescribed the placement, as well as the balance, of particles—the metal used for spark must sit beside the fabric used for wood and air in the fire spell, for example. I had been taught to hold that exact physical arrangement in my mind as I infused it with will and magic. I’d never been required to create a pattern in my head, a structure of understanding, of random ideas like
crossing
or of properties like
warmth
, provided by physical objects that could be stretched, arranged, molded solely by force of will and inner vision.

But I recalled the runelike structures Dante had shown me, and I worked at creating something similar. Carefully, precisely, as if nurturing the last flame that might keep me living in a tempest, I considered
warmth
,
crossing
,
strength
,
barriers
,
waking
. . . and I imagined each of them as an abstraction of shape and color. My creation looked something like a gate. And then I reached for what magic might live in hornbeam and soil and the night and the warmth of my own hand, as well as that born in my blood. . . .