Read Snow White and Rose Red Online
Authors: Patricia Wrede
Snow White and Rose Red (8 page)
Now the two men stood half-crouched over the brazier, chanting steadily in low voices. Suddenly, John Dee straightened, then bent backward and seized the two wax tablets. Without pausing in his chanting, he handed one of the tablets to his companion. Then he held his own above the brazier and called in a strong voice, “Omnia in terra tradita sunt in manus nostros; all things on earth are given into our hands.” In a single, smooth motion, he dropped the tablet into the brazier and leaned back to pick up the bowl of wine.
The flames in the brazier flickered and seemed to die, then suddenly shot upward in a long, ruddy tongue. “Hic est verus ordo orbis terrarum,” Kelly said, holding up his own tablet. “This is the proper order of the world.”
A second tongue of flame reached up from the brazier as Kelly dropped the square of wax onto the coals. Dee lifted the silver bowl. “Animae aetheriae invocamus vos ipsos,” he said.
“Invocamus vos ipsos perferre volutatem nostrum,” said Kelly. “We summon ye to work our will.” He dipped his fingers in the wine and scattered droplets into the coals below, being careful to let none of the liquid fall outside the brazier’s rim. There was a hissing noise as the wine vaporized, and a puff of steam rose from the fire. It did not dissipate, but hovered above the heads of the two men, a barely visible clump of mist. Kelly repeated his action. The mist thickened, and there was a brief, bright gleam from the silver bowl.
Dee handed the bowl to Kelly and picked up the knife. “Sanguinem et vinum donamus vobis,” he said. “Blood and wine we give ye.” He pulled back one of his sleeves and made a sudden, swift slash with the knife. Blood welled from the cut in his arm and dripped onto the coals. Black smoke rose from the brazier to mingle with the hovering mist.
“Sanguinem et vinum donamus,” Kelly repeated, baring his own arm. The knife made another swift movement, and the brazier smoked again.
“Fiat,” said Dee, and again Kelly echoed him. Dee turned and picked up the dish of crushed herbs. Lifting it high above the brazier, he cried, “Ferrte et coercete vim ex faeriae in vasem preparatum sibi; bring and bind the power out of Faerie into the vessel that is prepared for it.” With a final flourish, he poured the herbs into the fire.
Golden, glowing smoke billowed out of the brazier, briefly hiding the two sorcerers who stood beside it. The air filled with a pungent aroma. The glow touched the small, dark cloud of mist and black smoke that still hung above the brazier, and it began to coalesce. Soon a small, pulsing globe no larger than a man’s fist floated above the brazier like a giant will-o‘-the-wisp. The air was clear of smoke, and the fire in the brazier had gone out.
Dee looked up. “Ite!” he commanded, and the globe vanished. He sighed heavily, looking suddenly very tired and old, and turned to his companion. “Now we wait.”
“How long?” Kelly demanded.
“I know not,” Dee replied, staring into the shadows where the border of Faerie lay. “But till the bringer returns, do not leave this protected ground.” He waved at the square of red silk on which they stood. Kelly nodded absently, and the two men lapsed into silence.
Beneath the bushes at the edge of the clearing, Blanche nudged Rosamund and pointed urgently back the way they had come. Rosamund shook her head, her mouth set in a determined line. Blanche gestured again, and again Rosamund mutely refused. Unable to argue lest the sorcerers overhear their whispering, Blanche breathed a sigh, and thought dark thoughts, and stayed where she was.
The glowing spell-globe flickered through the lands of Faerie. It was neither alive nor intelligent, though Dee would have argued otherwise; the “spirits of air” on whom he had called were far too canny to be so easily entrapped. The spell-globe was simply that: a spell, formed of power and skill and deep desire, shaped and directed by the wishes of the men who had made it. Compared with the might of even the least of the Faerie folk, the globe was a feeble thing, for the skills of the two sorcerers were not as great as they believed. So, for a relatively long time as such things go, the spell-globe found no creature vulnerable to its imperatives, no being whose essence it could steal.
At last the globe reached a glen, deep within the forest of Faerie. There it paused, balanced between the charms that guarded the glen and the potential within that drew it onward. It waited, hidden among the lush foliage of the trees, while a little way beyond the Queen of Faerie conversed with her two sons.
The Queen of Faerie sat on a satin-covered chair in the middle of the glen. Her face betrayed as little as a perfectly sculpted alabaster mask. Her black hair was bound with a diamond-studded net that sparkled and flashed in the late afternoon sunlight. Her black eyes were calm and cold, and her graceful, long-fingered hands lay quiet against a silk gown of the same rich green as the moss beneath her feet. Her ladies stood behind her, near the edge of the clearing where they could see but not overhear. They, too, were all but expressionless, though a close observer might have seen curiosity in a few of the women’s eyes. Madini, watching from the farthest edge, showed no emotion at all as the two men she hated most were greeted by her Queen.
“Thou‘rt well, John?” the Queen asked.
“As well as may be, Mother,” John replied warily. At his side, Hugh shifted very slightly.
“I’m glad of thy return, and in safety,” the Queen said, and there was a hint of warning in her tone.
“I was in no danger,” John said. “Yet I, too, am glad to be home.”
The Queen’s shoulders relaxed minutely. A whisper of a breeze passed through the glen, barely enough to make the leaves quiver, and with it came the scent of apple blossoms. “Thou‘lt attend our revels this night?” said the Queen.
“I shall indeed. I’d never willingly miss them,” John said, smiling. “But shall I still know any of thy court?”
“The greater part, certainly,” the Queen said, returning his smile with a cold one of her own. “Yet thou‘lt find new faces enow.”
“So Hugh hath told me,” John said with a quick glance in his brother’s direction.
“I’ve spoken only of the fairest faces,” Hugh put in. “Tallis and Selena and—”
“Nay, an you twain wish to turn your tongues to such matters, either you or I must needs depart,” the Queen said with some affection.
“We’ll leave thee, Mother, if thou‘lt permit it,” Hugh said quickly.
The Queen nodded and the brothers withdrew. “I think that went off very well,” Hugh said softly as the two crossed the springy moss toward the edge of the clearing.
“Perhaps,” John said. “Yet I am not easy. She said nothing of those restrictions of which thou hast warned me.”
“They are the province of the Queen,” Hugh said. “How should she talk of them, when she meets thee as a mother?”
John stepped over the invisible boundary that barred the spell-globe from entering the glen. The spell-globe quivered, barely disturbing the leaves that concealed it, then subsided into waiting once more. “These fine distinctions like me not,” John replied. “I fear I was never meant for—Hugh!”
While John had been speaking, Hugh had reached and crossed the boundary at the edge of the glen. The spell-globe quivered once more, then fell like a stone straight down onto Hugh’s head. A glowing black cloud enveloped Hugh, pulsed once, and vanished even as John cried his brother’s name, leaving only a stink of burning in the air and Hugh’s unconscious body sprawled upon the ground.
The spell-globe, its primary purpose completed, returned with uncanny swiftness to its makers. Dee and Kelly sensed its coming as it crossed out of Faerie, and their heads came up together like the heads of hunting dogs who scent a stag. The globe, now double its original size and shifting crazily from glowing gold to a dark and smoky blackness, hurtled toward the two men. At the last instant, just before it would have passed over the edge of the red silk square on which Dee and Kelly still stood, the globe veered sharply to the right and plunged down onto the lamp that lay on the bare ground just behind Dee.
The lamp flickered and began to glow with a steady, flameless light. The two sorcerers stared at it for a moment in silence, then Dee’s lips turned up in a slow smile. “We’ve done it, Ned!” he said. “You had the right of it, to make our attempt in daylight.”
“‘Tis not accomplished yet,” Kelly said warningly, but he, too, was smiling. “The power must be drawn into some object more suited to our purposes, and fixed there. That lamp will crumble into dust, an it hold such energy a month.”
“True, but the harder task is finished,” Dee replied. “We’ve time and plenty for the rest, God willing.”
“So be it,” Kelly answered.
The two men picked up the brazier, which was now quite cold, and carefully dumped the dead embers on the ground at one side of the silk square. Only then did they step off the silk. Dee picked up the square cloth and shook it carefully, frowning at the damp stains and streaks it had acquired. “Jane will be angered when she sees this,” he said.
“Keep it from her,” Kelly advised, laughing. “A month from now, you may have a disembodied servant make it clean as new.”
“For shame, Ned!” Dee said. “This power has better uses than to do the washing.”
Kelly shrugged, but made no argument. The two men packed up the remains of their spell-casting, then wrapped the glowing lamp in the red silk cloth and set off toward Mortlak.
Some time later, two wide-eyed girls emerged from beneath the drooping branches of a holly bush, still clutching each other’s hands, and stared around the clearing as if to be quite certain that the sorcerers had gone.
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