Sixteen

For the next few nights, Sophia slept without trouble. She was nervous enough the first night to consider drinking wine before bed, but decided that she’d need unclouded judgment if Valerius did send another nightmare, and spent a good long time staring into the darkness, making herself breathe regularly in and out, before she relaxed enough to doze off.

Her undisturbed nights after that were not entirely reassuring. Whether Valerius needed to gather strength again or could only send the dreams when the stars were right, every night that progressed without a nightmare was one closer to the next occurrence. Sophia had been granted time to prepare. Knowing that weighed on her, keeping her always conscious that she should be working, and that she could be doing more.

Then there came an afternoon when she couldn’t.

The laboratory was full of work. Near the window, the burned remains of the holly, blended with powdered jet and the skin of a snake, sat in a clear glass beaker and caught what sunlight the winter day was able to provide. A little solar energy to go with the saturnine would harm nothing, Sophia had thought, and it was almost always essential to the fermentation phase.

Where more blatantly solar forces were concerned, she’d nursed a small amount of her precious stock of cloves through the calcination process once more, had transferred it to a blue glass bowl and carefully added water to start the dissolution phase. The topaz was powdered and ready for calcination itself, but there would be several hours before the planets aligned properly for that, or for Sophia to begin any of the other processes that she could manage just then.

As she always did, and as she had done more often in the days since the first dream, Sophia had turned from action to contemplation, seeking both to strengthen her own will and to bring it into harmony with that of the Most High. Barred by her age, sex, and unmarried state from studying the Sefer Bahir, the book that explained greater secrets of the universe, she’d nonetheless picked up bits from books and teachers, as birds picked up crumbs in the street. She bent her mind to understanding what she could and prayed in all ways she felt might be acceptable.

At times, as she shaped her lips around the words, she felt her will almost like a hand, capable of reaching out, of grasping or of striking, if she only knew what to do with it. At other times she felt that her mind opened and she saw a light that was only light because she could think of no other word for it, a light that was in reality everything.

Such moments were few. They were brief. They almost always left her weary, as though she’d been running uphill or lifting heavy loads rather than just standing and focusing on words. Pushing herself too far in contemplation, as with anything else, could be disastrous. She knew that from both teaching and instinct.

Besides, there were hours for contemplation too, and once she’d added water to the topaz, the timing would be wrong.

One wanted to become part of the right harmony, after all. She’d heard a few stories about what could happen otherwise. Opening those doors under the wrong circumstances could let in beings Sophia hoped never to encounter.

So she found herself standing in a room where she could do nothing, with the afternoon ahead of her, and feeling more alert and restless than she would have expected. It might have been the approaching spring—it was hard to tell with the snow, but the days were getting longer, the air a shade less frigid.

At home, the snow would have melted weeks before. By now, at least the first tightly furled crocuses would have come up. There might be grass and the earliest buds on the rosebushes and in the trees. Mother would sit outside on the first day of real sun and risk scandal by uncovering her hair. I’m an old woman, she said, and God made the spring breeze. He’ll understand.

Memory hit Sophia in the pit of her stomach.

It was spring, and the remembrance of other springs. It was Alice saying, Someone should tell your parents. It was Passover approaching. She’d accommodate, if she was still here, doing what she could and trusting that her work would justify her failures in the end, but she didn’t want to adjust, to make do or leave out. She wanted the preparation, her father’s voice at the table, all the small rituals that marked the greater one, that marked off the passage of time and the smooth turning of the world.

Alice had always liked watching the city celebrate Lent around them, observing the same way she listened to songs out here: This is not mine, but that doesn’t matter. The celebrations in the street had always made Sophia feel a touch left out, but back home that had been a minor, momentary pang. She’d had her family, her friends, her own part of the world.

Here, there were just her and Alice, and a good fifty people who, kind as they were, might turn much less so if they knew precisely what kind of women lived under their roof. But then again, the Scots weren’t necessarily the English.

Everything was cold here, and alien.

Sophia looked down at her skirt and found her fists clenched in the black wool. Foolishness, she told herself, sentimental foolishness, and you’re too old for that. She’d left home knowing that her absence was apt to be long, and that she was going among strangers. Her mother had wept, and her father had cleared his throat more than necessary, but every child leaves eventually. She might have married and moved to Holland, as one girl they’d known had done. As it was, if she didn’t die, she’d at least return in a year or so.

Uncurling her fingers, she told herself that Cathal knew her and was still kind. (More than kind, and that memory wisped across her body with a tingling pleasure, but that was not the point.) His people had been kind too, and friendly enough, given that she was still clumsy with the language, and perhaps inclined to accept anyone Edward of England had wronged. She didn’t know. She didn’t have to find out.

She was here with a task, and she was here to learn. Once those goals were complete, she’d go home, and Loch Arach’s inhabitants could think as they wished. Standing about moping wouldn’t help.

Out of both habit and caution, Sophia made a last inspection of her vessels, made sure that progress was steady and that neither instability nor contamination was a danger. Then she descended the staircase, walking briskly and not giving herself time to think very much.

The hall was crowded as always: benches pushed back against the walls between meals, servants cleaning or changing tapers or simply going hither and yon on various errands, and a few people with more leisure sitting by the fire. Sophia spotted Alice’s blond curls among the last crowd. She sat listening to an old man play the harp. The tune was one that Sophia recognized by now, and she found, as she heard Alice’s voice mingle with both the old man’s and the sound of the harp itself, that she could even pick out a few of the words: eat and I, know, and lady.

She didn’t know enough to follow the song, not as quickly as they were singing it, and she had no taste just then for standing by and watching, but she smiled as she passed by, glad to see the intent look on Alice’s face. At least her friend was gaining something from the journey, other than freezing and worrying about Sophia; she’d always claimed to, but it was good to see impartial evidence.

Out of the great hall, Sophia descended into the kitchen, welcoming the heat that almost immediately surrounded her. When her experiments demanded flame, the tower was warm enough, but otherwise it became quite chilly—the small hearth that could fit into the room didn’t quite make up for the height of the place and the age—and Sophia stretched out her hands in pleasure.

“Lady,” said Matain, the dark-haired page she’d slightly met on her first morning in the castle. He came toward her quickly, smiling. He was a helpful one, or well trained, or just eager for a change in routine. He also might have been glad for an excuse to stop turning the spit—there was sweat running down his face. “Are you hungry?”

It was one of the sentences she knew, but he still spoke slowly and as clearly as he could, given the noise of the kitchen: a considerate lad.

“If you have anything,” Sophia said, and for a moment she could tell herself that it was because she didn’t want to waste his time, and that mayhap a good meal would put her in a better mood, even if she felt not at all like eating just then.

“Half a meat pie,” he said. “From dinner. But—”

His hesitation told her what she’d already guessed would happen: a few of the servants, at least, had realized that she ate no flesh. “No, that will be good,” said Sophia.

If she’d wanted to, she could have kept deceiving herself a little while longer. She could have told herself that she’d only accepted to try to keep suspicion down, and that any subsequent ideas had sprung into her head only later, when she didn’t want to throw good food to the dogs. She could have lied inside her head, but she didn’t.

Strengthening her willpower—putting all of that force toward contemplation, experiments, and resisting Valerius’s subsequent dreams—hadn’t left her very much for daily life, it seemed, and tearing herself away from melancholy had used a great deal of what remained. As soon as Matain brought the pie back, wrapped in a white cloth, she headed not to the kennels, nor to the hall, but to the staircase that she’d walked her first night, the one that led to Cathal’s solar.

The door was closed when she arrived, but she knocked—she’d come too far to waste the effort—and gruff as his “Come!” was, it relieved her. She would have felt foolish indeed if she’d faced an empty room.

Cathal was leaning back in his chair, booted feet on his desk. A bottle of wine was open in front of him, but he didn’t look drunk. Indeed, he was carving into a block of wood, which argued either that he was sober or that he could regrow fingers. When he saw her, his hands stopped moving.

“Are you well?” he asked, giving her face and body each a quick look that was nonetheless hot with intensity.

“Yes,” she said, and it wasn’t an untruth, just a wholly inadequate description. “I… My work doesn’t require me at this moment.”

“I can say the same. That I’m not needed,” he added as he got to his feet with a smile that might have been apologetic.

His mouth looked very firm. It had been when he kissed her—but not hard, not brutal, though she thought he could have been, and the idea wasn’t entirely unpleasant either. He’d simply known what he wanted and guessed very well what she did. But then, he wouldn’t lack experience, really, even less than most men of the world.

She dropped her gaze from his lips to his hands, which didn’t help, and tried to ignore the warmth between her legs. “I came with a bribe,” she said and held out the pie, an inadequate and not entirely welcome shield. Then, because it was the first thing that came to mind that wasn’t his body pressed against hers, she asked, “What’s the song that sounds like this?” and hummed a few lines.

Briefly Cathal frowned, puzzled, and then his face cleared. “Ah. ‘Twa Corbies’ I think is the title. It’s two crows, talking over a dead knight.” He lifted his voice, a pleasant baritone if nothing that would have impressed Alice, and sang:

His hound is tae the huntin gane,

His hawk tae fetch the wild fowl hame.

His lady’s ta’en anither mate-o

Sae we may mak oor dinner swate-o.

“It is,” he added, with a shrug of his broad shoulders, “a wee bit grim for some. My brother never liked it.”

“No? But it’s not untrue… It’s almost comforting in its way. Life going on, even after us, and our mortal remains being useful at the end. Though I suppose nobody really wants to think of the world going on, even if we should.”

“We should?” Cathal asked, not disagreeing, just interested to see what she’d say.

Sophia shrugged in her turn. “It would be good of us to want the ones we love to be happy, even without us, yes? To keep on with their lives and their work? But I don’t think very many do.”

“I’m no’ sure hawks and hounds are truly loved ones, at that,” Cathal said, his eyes glinting a little with good humor, “but aye. It’s one of the reasons not many mortals know who we are, or get close to us when they do…or so I’ve heard, not being one myself. But you wouldn’t have come with a bribe just to hear the meaning of a song, I think.”

Recalled to her purpose, such as it was, Sophia shook her head. “No. I have questions about you…and your people.”

“I might answer. You did bring me food.”