“I feel very odd indeed,” said Prunella.
She no longer saw salmon or water-women, but the world had acquired an ugly patina. The trees stood too close, their branches raised like a threat, and the water upon the road shone like oil.
“It is the reaction to the spell,” said Zacharias, looking at her anxiously. “The absorption and release of so much magic is unpleasant for any mortal who is not accustomed to working with a familiar. The ill effects ought not to be lasting, however—”
“I am going to be sick,” announced Prunella.
Whereupon she was, at length. When she was done she rolled away from the result and gazed up at the sky, feeling that life was too grim to be borne. Voices spoke above her, but they did not trouble her.
“Don’t stand there staring, man,” snapped Mak Genggang. “Help the girl up and get her home! Prunella, I am sorry to abandon you when you are so ill, poor child! But my women need me, and you have Mr. Wythe, whereas they have only a poor old woman to rely upon. Remember what I have told you.”
Prunella’s thoughts were hazy, but she remembered the core of what Mak Genggang had taught her. It was so simple as to be impossible to forget.
“It comes down to blood,” she whispered.
“Did you speak, Miss Gentleman?” said Zacharias. His worried countenance hove into view. “Mak Genggang has flown, I am afraid. If she stayed she would have been caught, for the Fellows will be arriving soon. However, I have sent a zephyr for a hackney coach, and we shall be gone before anyone sees us. I should have arranged for transport by magic, save that you ought not to have too much to do with magic till you have recovered. How do you feel?”
“It stings a little,” said Prunella. This was an understatement, hardly capturing the overwhelming sense of disillusionment that had swamped her the moment the magic was gone. “Are you hurt?”
Zacharias smiled. “You need not worry about me.”
As she lay upon the street, furious, impotent and distressingly inelegant, Prunella discovered two things about herself.
She liked Zacharias very, very much—perhaps better than she had ever liked anyone in her life.
She loathed being weak with a passion. She had always known that she could not endure a fool, but it was not till this moment that Prunella realised how much less she liked weakness in herself.
It could not be just, she thought, that Zacharias should be so good,and so persecuted. And thatsheshould be exposed to such peril and discomfort was not to be borne. But why should a possessor of seven familiars’ eggs have any anxiety about defending herself, and those she... liked very much?
The situation could not continue. Something must be done. And who better than Prunella Gentleman to do it?
15
ASTRANGESONGentered Zacharias’s dreams that night.
He had harboured some doubts regarding the propriety of Prunella’s remaining at his residence, since Mak Genggang had flown. But there seemed nothing for it, for Lady Wythe was not due to return till the morrow.
“I shall certainly present her to you tomorrow, however,” he said to Prunella. “Until then, the discretion of my servants may certainly be relied upon.”
The Sorcerer Royal’s servants had formerly been bound by a geas against disclosure of any detail of his household affairs, breach of which was visited by the most terrible revenge. That tyrannical practise had been discontinued by Sir Stephen, but the strict code of secrecy continued. The housekeeper still insisted on sending a footman to collect the household’s meat from the butcher under a disguise, so that no one might know whether the Sorcerer Royal had had a boiled fowl or roast beef for his dinner.
Zacharias had thought Prunella might protest, recalling herencounter with outraged propriety in Fobdown Purlieu, but in fact she made no complaint. She seemed distracted, and Zacharias had only just embarked upon an explanation of the mechanism of the geas—a strikingly innovative formula for its time—when Prunella said she was tired. She thought she would retire.
Zacharias suffered no recurrence of his complaint that evening, and he slept remarkably well considering the stresses of the day. He roused reluctantly as the song became harder to ignore. There was something in it that compelled him to consciousness. The music held within it an exhilarating promise; it flooded his being with a sense of—
Magic.
Zacharias sat bolt upright in his bed. The song was a spell. Magic was being done under his roof, and no small magic either. His first thought was that he must be under attack again. His second, when this proved not to be the case, was that Prunella must be in danger.
The scent of magic grew stronger as he hurried to the bedchamber where she had been lodged, at a decorous distance from his. With the morning’s sortie still vivid in his recollection, he scarcely hesitated at her door, though Zacharias was not generally given to entering the bedchambers of young ladies.
Bursting into the room, he found Prunella crouched on the floor, one hand pressed against her breast. The song seemed to come from her, though her mouth was shut, and she gazed down with an air of absorption. Within a small circle of candlelight lay the object of her gaze: three blue stones lying upon a black cloth.
A layperson might have wondered at Prunella’s fascination with a few pebbles. Zacharias saw the stones with a sorcerer’s eyes, and knew them for what they were. Familiars’ eggs—vessels containing the spirits of magical creatures who, weary of their lives in Fairyland, had volunteered for service in the mortal world, and been locked within stone, to be reborn in the earthly realm.
One egg would have been wealth beyond a magician’s wildestdreams. Three eggs were more than Christendom had seen at one time for a hundred years.
This was a shock greater than any other, in a week of surprises.
