The Midnight Queen (36 page)

Though the courtyard was nearly empty, the noise seemed to have tripled, the confusion multiplied; fire-spells left the air thin and shimmering with heat. But Sophie's song-spell still held King Henry from drinking the fatal draught.

*   *   *

Suddenly a stocky little figure scaled one corner of the dais, to balance precariously atop the altar beside the heap of offerings. The Queen scrabbled frantically at her son's ankles, but he shook her off. “What is this madness?” Prince Roland demanded. “Who are you? What is it that you want?”

Everyone ignored him—or nearly everyone.

At the sound of her half-brother's furious voice, wavering uncertainly between baritone and treble, tears stung Sophie's eyes. Blinking furiously, she pulled off her masque, the better to scrub them away, but her own voice caught in her throat, and her song died into choked silence.

She stared up at him—Joanna's age, or nearly, bewildered by the flames and noise but prodded into reckless bravery by fear for those he loved—and felt that to be this boy's near kin might be something.

“Sophie!” Alerted by Gray's urgent summons, she saw, to her horror, that the whisperers had prevailed; King Henry was lifting the chalice again, preparing to finish the rite she had interrupted.

“No! Your Majesty, please, you must not!” she cried, half sobbing with frustration and dismay. From all directions familiar voices echoed her words, but the invocation went on—though even from this distance she could see the trembling of her father's hands.

“Sophie,
you must stop him
!” Gray's voice was ragged. He had put off his masque and shed his coat; his shirt was damp, and his face ran with perspiration.

Sophie searched her mind frantically for some fragment of melody, and—for the first time in her memory—could think of none. Her heart seemed too large for her breast; its desperate pounding threatened to burst her ribs; the prayer was almost at an end, and then—

I am safe from Lord Carteret and the Iberian Emperor now, even if they discover who I am. But my father is not. Surely this is the moment Mama's letter spoke of, the moment I must recognise when it comes.

*   *   *

King Henry bowed low to the altar; straightened; began to raise the cup to his lips. Gray tried to shout one last warning, but the words would not come.

But from behind him there came another voice—familiar yet utterly strange: “Henry!”

The King raised his head.

“Henry, as you love me,
do not drink!
”

The King's eyes widened. His face drained of all colour; the chalice slipped from his fingers and rang against the stone steps at his feet.

Lord Merton—Woodville—allies and enemies wheeled to stare at him. The fair-haired man alone did not seem drawn to the spectacle; even before the sound of chalice's impact died away, he was reaching into the breast of his coat—metal gleamed briefly in the torchlight—Gray heard Sophie cry out in alarm.

The long poniard was whisked from the stranger's hand just as Gray was beginning to summon it; it rose high into the air, then fell, hilt down, to strike its owner smartly on the crown of his head. He staggered, and Master Alcuin, appearing behind him seemingly from nowhere, dropped him where he stood with a neat, sharp blow to the back of the skull.

The Queen cried, “Edric!” and fell to her knees beside the fair-haired man; the King, however, seemed not to have noticed the momentary disturbance.

Gray turned on one heel, following Henry's gaze, and drew a deep, shuddering breath. Though he had seen only once, and not in life, the face Sophie wore, he knew it at once for the young Queen Laora—the Midnight Queen herself.

All around them the air buzzed with gasps, whispers, the rustle of heavy skirts, as His Majesty's guests surged forward, forgetting their terror in the wonder of this revelation.

Then—after a moment that seemed to last an age—King Henry's voice, heavy with some strong emotion: “Laora . . .”

And Queen Laora vanished, giving place to a slender young woman of middling height, dark-eyed and chestnut-haired, who clasped her slim sun-browned hands and said, “Your Majesty, I ask your pardon, for indeed I am not she . . .”

But all those present could guess, now, who this stranger must be, and—save perhaps for her father—found the return of the lost Princess at least as scandalously exciting as that brief, misleading glimpse of the long-dead Queen.

“Your Majesty.” Sieur Germain turned his prisoner over to the nearest guardsman and approached the dais with a respectful bow. “The Princess and her friends, myself among them, ask pardon also for this . . . disruption. That cup, from which you would have drunk, contained a poison—” Indignant protests from the conspirators, and gasps of horror from the crowd.

Gray shivered; so near the river, the night air was growing chill and damp. He bent to retrieve his coat, and shrugged it on over yet another ruined shirt and waistcoat.

“The same, we believe,” Sieur Germain continued, “that felled Lord Halifax, late Master of Merlin College. Our warning to you was perhaps not . . . In short, I beg Your Majesty will forgive us our transgressions against the laws of hospitality, for they were motivated only by our earnest fear for Your Majesty's life . . .”

It was a pretty speech, but its object seemed to have caught little of its meaning. “The Princess . . . ?” he said, staring.

“The Princess,” called someone whom Gray could not see, “has saved King Henry's life.”

First a few voices, then many, from all about the courtyard; first ragged and uncertain, but quickly gaining authority:
“Vive la princesse! Vive la princesse!”

Then a man's voice rose above the ovation: “Sons and daughters of Breizh! Have foreigners not ruled our country long enough? Must we wait forty years more for the old Duc to make up his mind? Or shall we unite behind a new champion? Here is our Breizhek Queen—
here
, friends, is our true monarch! You see her lineage; you have seen her power—and her mercy. Will you follow her?”

The cheering faltered for a moment; then a new chant was taken up by fewer, but more vehement, voices: “
Vive ar rouanez
—Long live the Breizhek Queen!”

From those whose allegiance still lay all this side the Manche, rose opposing shouts of “Long live the King!”—“Britain undivided!”—
“À bas la bâtarde!”
For if the Midnight Queen was a kind of heroine in Breizh, here in England Laora was only “that Breton harlot,” the faithless traitoress who had met her death while fleeing with some illicit lover.

At first Sophie seemed struck dumb with sheer surprise. “Stop!” she cried at last, her hands clenching into fists. “Stop it, all of you!”

Disconcertingly, she seemed to have gained several inches in height.

“I am Queen Laora's daughter, indeed,” she went on—the crowd having gone abruptly silent—“and a daughter of Breizh, but there the tale ends. If you have been led to believe otherwise, I am heartily sorry.”

Then, with a determination in which only Gray, perhaps, could have recognised bewilderment and alarm, she approached the dumbfounded King, her eyes downcast, and knelt to him in all her Samhain finery. Her voice low and earnest, but reaching somehow to every corner of the courtyard, she repeated the very words which Gray himself had once been so foolish as to speak to her: “Your devoted servant, Your Majesty.”

Of what happened next, Gray would later remember only that, alerted by the commotion, those of the royal guardsmen on duty—or off it—elsewhere in the Palace, now arrived in rather bewildered force, to swell the noise and confusion of the gathering, and that Lord Carteret, abruptly trimming his sails to this new breeze, gestured expansively at Sophie as though to say,
You see? I promised you your Princess, and here she is . . .

In the presence of so many formidable men-at-arms, Lord Merton prudently took his cue from Lord Carteret by choosing to melt away into the crowd. But young Woodville—actuated perhaps by the now apoplectic Professor, or perhaps by his own enthusiasm—launched an ill-aimed volley of hailstones at Gray and Master Alcuin, who stood between him and Sophie. Gray threw up another hasty shielding-spell and cried a warning to Sophie, who, springing to her feet, did the same.

The only one of Woodville's missiles to connect at all struck the Crown Prince a glancing blow to the temple; he glared at its source, and with a look of contempt drew from the damp air a brief, drenching shower of rain.

The resulting wave of nervous laughter sent the dripping Woodville into a fury. Hailstones and fire-bolts erupted from the air, directed wildly and none too carefully at the Princes, at Sophie, at Master Alcuin, and at Gray—and thus threatening everyone in the general vicinity of the altar dais.

Titters gave way to a new access of shrieking and panicked flight. Now however, the men of the King's Guard came into their own; officers bellowed terse orders, and in short order the milling crowd had been tamed and the unfortunate Woodville was sprawled face downward on the cobblestones, with a guardsman's boot firmly planted in the small of his back.

And so, for a moment, all seemed to be well.

Then someone cried, “A healer, quickly!” and all eyes turned thither on the instant.

Several gentlemen and ladies clutched heads bruised by hailstones or nursed limbs from which the clothing had been singed away; some stood, others sat or knelt on the cobbles, looking dazed. In their midst, however, a single, half-familiar figure lay supine, her arms outspread, her heavy midnight-blue skirts awkwardly twisted about her lower limbs.

Gray saw it and cried out in dismay, but his exclamation, like everyone else's, was lost in Sophie's high, horrified shrieking.

In Which Sophie Makes a Confession

Sophie stared at
the still, supine body of Mrs. Wallis and, for the first time in nearly a decade, remembered.

She remembered a day in early spring, a timid beginning after a long and bitter winter. The girls had teased Mama all the morning to walk out with them, and at last she agreed, though warning them that they must go slowly. She had grown round again, and Sophie was old enough now to understand what this meant, but this time, for some reason, she seemed more cheerful.

The day being mild, they decided at length to strike out from the park into the lanes and byways of the manor. Here Sophie was the leader, knowing as she did almost every corner of the estate, and every tenant, but so happy were they to be free of the house that before long they had wandered beyond even Sophie's knowledge.

They stopped to rest beside an old well in someone's disused orchard; the trees were uncared for, full of deadwood, and the ground beneath them awash in the remains of last autumn's windfalls. It was a lovely spot, in its own way; wild birds and small beasts had come to feast on the bounty of tree and field. But here, too, they met with less congenial company: a brace of adventurers, deserting officers by their dress, who had tried their hand at poaching and were building up a fire to roast their catch.

They had killed a hare, and with an obsequious civility that concealed something quite other, invited Mama and the girls to help them cook and eat it; Mama's polite refusal made one of them angry, but the other only tried harder to persuade her.

“Girls!” Mama called to them, just before the taller man approached her, cupping a hand under her chin to lift her beautiful face to his. “All of you, run away home! I shall follow you in a little while. Go, now!”

Amelia, not waiting to be told again, turned and fled; Joanna hesitated, but at Sophie's urging retreated a little way.

Sophie herself could not seem to move, could not stop herself from watching. The men were grinning, leering, hateful and hopeful at once; Mama twitched away, but they had her cornered against a tree-trunk. She could not speak, it seemed, could scarcely move.

Sophie was both terrified and furious. Whatever the men intended, Mama did not like it; she looked at them as Sophie had often seen her look at Father, a look like a caged fox. Sophie did not stop to think but reached for the pebbles she had been collecting and began hurling them, with more vehemence than care, at the nearest of the attackers. At first her missiles, not surprisingly, scarcely even drew his notice. At the same time, however, a wind sprang up, swift and biting despite the day's mildness, and growing increasingly savage, and now the pebbles began, inexplicably, to burst on impact, while the stones of the old well set up a curious, angry humming and at last begin to splinter and crack.

The tall man took notice now, and turned to glare at her.

“Sophia!” Mama cried. “Sophia, stop it at once, and run away home!”

But Sophie stood frozen, unwilling—unable—to obey. The tall man still held Mama around the shoulders, grinning, and Mama's face still wore that caged-fox look; how could Sophie even contemplate running away? Yet what good did she do by remaining?

The wind had died down a little, and Sophie hurled another stone while no one was looking. Then the smaller man turned, strode towards her, and slapped her face, once—twice—again—she staggered—and once more the wind howled dementedly about them all, fetching down dead twigs from the trees overhead.

Mama's lips moved, and she made a sort of twisting motion with one hand, and Sophie, all unwilling, found herself turning on one heel and setting off towards home. Behind her Mama's voice rose, shouting words she did not recognise or understand. In her panicked fear Sophie managed to surmount whatever force compelled her homeward; the wind gathered strength and speed, and overhead boughs creaked and snapped as she ran towards Mama, just in time to see the two men slide to the ground, as if they had suddenly fallen asleep.

Mama was safe—thank all the gods!—and Sophie pelted towards her, weeping with relief and the aftermath of terror, to fling herself into those outstretched arms.

But before her eyes a deadfall branch, loosened by the sudden breeze that had now died as abruptly as it sprang up, leant away from the trunk of an apple tree—split—plunged—and Mama lay still between her fallen assailants, her arms outflung, and a spreading pool of bright red seeped out into the muddy ground.

*   *   *

Sophie remembered Mrs. Wallis arriving at a dead run, falling to her knees beside Mama, weeping, imploring, importuning the gods of healing to save Mama's life; remembered the shade of a smile on Mama's ashen face as she whispered something that Sophie could not hear. Remembered Mrs. Wallis saying, in a voice that shook, “I swear it, Laora. By the love I have for you I swear it.”

Then she had found Sophie and Joanna clinging together—Sophie sobbing, shaking, with blood smeared over her face and trickling sluggishly from her nose, Joanna dry-eyed, ashen-faced, and silent—and knelt to gather them into her arms.

“Your Mama has gone to live in the Elysian Fields,” she told them, her voice breaking, “but I shall always look after both of you—all of you . . .”

Sophie had tried to speak but succeeded only in wailing. At last she managed to get out the single word “Mama,” and then all the rest came tumbling out higgledy-piggledy, and Mrs. Wallis's round, kind face went very still, and she held Sophie tighter.

“We are beyond the interdict,” she muttered to herself. “Laora, Laora, you were right to fear for her. How could you be so foolish, love, how could you?”

Sophie remembered those words, quite without meaning to her at the time, and felt that her heart would break.

*   *   *

Mama was gone, Mrs. Wallis had said so, but the men who had tried to hurt her were only sleeping, and when they awoke a little time later, Mrs. Wallis made them forget.

Mrs. Wallis was calm and kind and dependable. She shepherded Sophie and Joanna back to the house, back to the familiar comforts of the nursery, where Amelia was waiting tearfully, and tucked them all up into their beds, with the nursery-maid to watch over them.

*   *   *

Amelia and Sophie had awoken the next morning while Joanna was yet asleep, and run downstairs calling for Mama. Mrs. Wallis called the whole household together in the kitchen and explained that Mrs. Callender had found a very difficult experimental spell in an old book in the library which she had wished to study and had tried to work it alone; that the spell had proved even more difficult and dangerous than she had expected; that they must all take good care of the little girls now that Mrs. Callender was no longer here to do so. She had written to the Professor, she said, to acquaint him with the sad tidings.

Sophie and Amelia wept, and remembered the tale, and Sophie's waking mind forgot the true one.

*   *   *

A shattering roar erupted from the circumference of the courtyard as every torch blossomed upwards, every magelight lantern flared into a blinding little sun. For a heartbeat the ravaged courtyard showed bright as day; then, just as suddenly, all was plunged into darkness.

Gray had ducked, for a moment, instinctively. Now he called as much light as he could muster and stood straight, battling a sudden, furious, swirling wind. All about him, heedless of their costly finery, people were flattening themselves against the reassuring solidity of the cobblestones.

The source of this elemental chaos stood quite still, oblivious, howling her grief and rage at the night sky. Her nose was bleeding heavily, crimson tracks against her waxen skin—too vast, too wild a release of magickal energy taking its toll of her body, again . . .

“Sophie!” Gray shouted as he struggled towards her, trying in vain to make himself heard over the cries of panic, the keening of the wind in the denuded trees. “Sophie,
stop
!”

When at last he reached her, he saw at once that further speech would be of no use. Mrs. Wallis would have slapped her face, or shaken her, to bring her to her senses; but Mrs. Wallis . . .

In any case, Gray had never in his life struck a woman, and he had certainly no notion of beginning with Sophie.

Instead he drew her rigid, trembling body against his and held her tight. Briefly she fought his encircling arms; then—so abruptly that his ears rang in the unexpected silence—the wind and Sophie's howling ceased together, and she sobbed in his arms like a child.

“Sophie,
cariad
.” Again she seemed not to hear him. She shivered, and clung tighter as he bent to slide one arm under her knees.

Magelights pulsed into existence, small and larger, all over the courtyard, and people staggered to their feet. Guardsmen had surrounded the King and his family, weapons out; stewards with fire-pots emerged from the direction of the ballroom and rushed hither and thither, reigniting the snuffed-out torches; men, and a few women, in the garb of healers followed at a run. All these doings Gray saw but dimly as he passed by, his attention all on Sophie.

Through a gateway whose guards had left their post, they found the light and relative warmth of an interior corridor; round the next turning Gray found two gilt chairs and a velvet-covered sofa, on which, with a sigh of relief, he deposited Sophie. Her shivering had grown worse, though at least the flow of blood from her nose was slowing; he shed his coat once more and wrapped it about her shoulders, then sat beside her and drew her into his arms again.

Words began to emerge through the racking sobs, the chattering teeth. “Mama! Mama!” Gray heard, incredulous; then, more inexplicably still, “
Mantret on
, Mama,
mantret on . . .
”

I am sorry.

And what in Hades had Sophie to be sorry for?

*   *   *

“Sophie.” That voice—familiar, beloved—at last began to break into Sophie's confused and desperate misery, forcing her to recognise the arms that held her, and behind the iron tang of blood, the scent of the body that supported hers. For just a moment she was herself again—was no longer a terrified child—was confident and comforted; until the weight of what she had seen, what it had made her remember, descended again to crush all hope. To think that her most terrifying nightmares, these nine years, had been simple truth!

Gray let go her shoulders and slid gentle fingers beneath her chin. Irrationally dreading lest he should read in her face the secret of her guilt, she twisted out of his grasp, regained her feet, and made to flee, nearly losing her balance; when he stood and came towards her, she pushed him away, eyes averted, both palms flat against his bloodied breast.

He staggered back, one step, two; then, steadying himself, he stepped forward again and caught her by the shoulders. Confused and frightened, she exerted herself not to be seen—but to no avail.

“Whatever dreadful thing you believe yourself to have done,
cariad
, will be no less dreadful, being hidden.” He spoke so mildly, so reasonably, that once more she took heart; and then she saw again, in her mind's eye, the plunging branch, the spreading blood . . .

“No,” she said, denying—what, she hardly knew. “No, no . . .”

“Sophie!”
A new voice, frightened, urgent; the sound of rapid footsteps against stone, away down the unfamiliar corridor in which they stood. Gray's hands dropped away from her face; she felt rather than saw him straighten into tense alertness, gazing over her head to locate the speaker. Turning to follow his gaze, Sophie had a vague impression of dark hair, a white face, a rumpled green gown—

“
Joanna?
” she whispered, incredulous, as the apparition flung itself upon her.

Joanna it was, miraculously unscathed, and in the same breath berating her sister and thanking all the gods that she yet lived. Half strangled by the younger girl's frantic embrace, Sophie closed her eyes and returned it in grateful silence.

Joanna released her at last and, looking from her face to Gray's, seemed to take in their wretched state. “What has happened out in the courtyard?” she demanded. “You are all over blood! They have not . . . they have not
won
? There was so much shouting and running about—but then I heard Sophie singing—and then more shouting—and the most
dreadful
noise . . .”

Sophie blinked. “I—I hardly know—”

“Sophie,” said Gray urgently, turning her to face him and clasping her shoulders with both hands. “You will be well, now?”

How am I to answer that question?
She nodded, feeling dazed, and clung tighter to Joanna's hands.

“Joanna, look after your sister,” Gray commanded. “Both of you, stay here. I shall be back directly.”

And without another word to Sophie, he strode off in the direction of the courtyard.

“He has gone without his coat,” said Joanna, hefting the mass of deep brown velvet. “You had best put it on; you are shivering.”

“Jo.” Sophie sat quite still as her sister draped the coat again about her shoulders. “Jo, I have remembered something dreadful . . .”

*   *   *

Quite what he had expected to see on reentering the courtyard, Gray hardly knew. There had been time enough, at any rate, for the interrupted rite to come nearly to its end, for the first sight to meet his eyes was that of the King—flanked by three smaller figures that must be his sons, and two larger ones whom Gray could not identify—preparing to add the crowning tribute to the haphazardly reassembled heap on the altar.

For a moment Gray could only think how odd it was that His Majesty should choose to finish his prayers before addressing the other, more urgent demands upon his notice. But though the traitors had spoken with malign intent, in urging that he let nothing prevent him from fulfilling his obligations, they had also spoken truth: It would be a poor sovereign indeed who placed his innocent subjects in jeopardy by slighting the gods.