“Sarah, you must tell me what you mean. Which fleet?” It struck me that, for all her mention of the future, she might still have been speaking of the past: one of the interminable skirmishes with the Spanish navy off the shores of Albion, for instance.
“The fleet that is coming,” she whispered. Her drowned face contorted with the effort of speech: she was enspelled, I saw, and my own magic was trying to counter that which had been placed upon her. And that other magic was stronger. I felt it sweep through the cellar like a tide, washing her away. She spun through the dark air and through the wall, no more than flotsam, and was gone. I was alone in the cold chamber.
I went slowly back up the stairs and found Oldmark. He was standing disconsolately by a window, staring out at the rain streaking down the leaded panes.
“Mistress Dane! Is everything well?”
“I am well, Lord Oldmark, but I’m afraid that I have some bad news. I have spoken with the drowned. They tell me of a fleet that is coming, a fleet of ships, and from the magic that was placed upon the spirit with whom I spoke, we face considerable danger. This was not an ordinary spell. It swept my magic away; only now is it beginning to creep back.” This was true. I could feel it starting to seep into my soul again, refreshing its parched ground.
Oldmark blanched. “Danger! From which quarter?” “I could not say.” This, on the other hand, was not true. In that moment when the tide had caught the spirit in its grasp, I’d sensed something distinctive, familiar—a mossy greenness, a sudden dank and earthy taste in the air. The magic of Aeve’s cousin and mortal enemy, the Queen- under-the-Hill.
Faery magic, then. No surprises there. But Aeve would not be pleased.
The queen wanted me to find out more about the fleet. This time, she spoke to me herself. I was granted audience in the great hall of Coldgate, myself on bended knee, head bowed, Oldmark fidgeting off to one side, and the queen—in the quick glimpses I got of her—sitting upright on the carved stone throne, her skin the whiteness of the stone itself, lending her a statue’s look. Her hair was the pure blood-red of faery, her gaze a slanted green. She did not look to be a hundred years old, but then, in terms of her own family, she was little more than a girl.
“You look afraid,” she said, when I hesitated in the course of my explanation. “Are you?”
I saw no reason to lie. “Yes,” I told her. “I am afraid of the magic of under-hill.”
“You are wise, then,” Queen Aeve said. “Tell me. Can you find out more, or are you too afraid?”
“I am afraid, but I will do as you ask.”
I felt, rather than saw, her smile.
“You’ll be rewarded,” was all that she said, but she did not say how.
If you want knowledge, of magic as well as rivers, you need to go to the source. The Thames rises near Oxford, the city where my mother was born, and in its early stages it is called the Isis: hence, my name. I took my mare from the royal stables at dawn the next day and rode west, setting a hard pace across the chalk hills and the beech groves, until we saw cream-gold towers in the distance and Oxford lay before us.
They’d let me study here, a great favor, since I am a woman. Not officially, of course, but
Now I skirted the city bounds, stopped at an inn overnight, and continued west until I came to a stone by the side of the road that showed the way to Seven Springs. The grotto lies high at the Cotswold edge, river-birth carving limestone into palaces and caverns. When I arrived, early on the morning of the second day, there was no one there. A light mist was spiraling up through the branches. Beech mast and acorns crackled under my boots, and the cave-mouth lay before me, so enveloped in the white exposed roots of the beech that it was hard to tell where wood ended and stone began.
I was glad to be alone, but it also made me afraid. Not good, I thought, to be up here in the hills, the kingdom of faery. The goddess would protect me, or so I believed, but who ever really knew? I remembered walking along the Severn shore, looking westward to the black line of the Queen’s Forest and beyond that the dusk-blue hills of Wales and the line of fortress castles, magic-warded. The court of the Queen-under-the-Hill lay behind that iron band. Aeve’s cousin, Aeve’s rival, and a long enmity between the two thrones of Albion, one dark, one—or so Aeve claimed—the province of the Light.
Sometimes even a dim light can illuminate, if the shadows are dark enough.
Time to face my own darkness. I lit a candle and stepped inside. Water-breath, and presence: not the green deep presence of Thamesis himself, but the Riverine Isis, delicate, a cat-soft whisper in the shadows.
“My Lady?” No reply, but I didn’t expect one, not straight away.
I walked deeper into the temple, as far as the first spring, and held the candle out over black water. I could see my own face reflected in the dark mirror of its depths: I did not look like myself, but older, the woman I would one day be. And behind that, overlaid, was another face that was not myself at all.
Reflected flame flickered. I said, “I spoke to a ghost, and she told me of a fleet. There was magic in it, from Under-Hill. I need to know where the fleet will come from.”
No answer. I stared into wet fire, beginning to think that this, too, would be withheld. Then the lips of my reflection moved, although I myself had finished speaking.
“Watch for the Lowlander,” the reflection said. “Watch for the midnight moon.”
“Who is the Lowlander?” I asked, though I thought I already knew: the Dutch considered that they had a claim to the throne of Albion; there had been incursions, and almost certainly there were spies.
The face was silent and still. A ripple of water, caused by a breeze that I did not feel on my skin, eddied across the surface of the black pool. The chamber grew colder; I was gazing back at myself alone. Though the candle still flickered in my hand, in the water, the flame was no longer to be seen.
I made an offering of cyclamen to the wall shrine, placing the white flowers before the black face of the Riverine Isis, and walked out into the day. The sun was rising, gilding the mist and causing the trees to drip. An insubstantial landscape, luminous, half-real. I rode back to London, thinking of the Dutch.
The queen was of the same mind as myself, Oldmark told me. A Holland spy had been arrested in the grounds of Lydgate Palace only a week before. There had been a diplomatic incident, only half-resolved, and the Dutch court was threatening to raise penalties on shipping.
“It would not surprise anyone,” Oldmark said, “to learn that there is mischief afoot in that quarter.”
“But why involve the dead?” I asked. “And why was there under-hill magic present?”
Oldmark looked uneasy. “I do not know. But an alliance between the Lowlands and Under-Hill would be a sorry thing. There have already been rumors that the Queen-under-the-Hill courts the Spanish, and you know that there are political connections.”
I did know; I nodded. “I wish I’d been able to find out more,” I said.
“I am certain that you did your best,” Oldmark replied.
But that night, the drowned came over-ground.
I was roused from my sleep by distant shouts. The sound was coming from the direction of the palace gardens. Accommodated in the servants’ wing as I was, it took me a little time to throw on a robe and make my way through a maze of passages to the front of the building.
They were coming out of one of the fountains, an endless procession of white-faced, green-haired spirits. Some of them were decomposing away, just as their bodies had done: These were the ghosts of those who had lain long in the water, so long that it had seeped into their souls to rot and stain.
Oldmark appeared beside me, almost as white faced as one of the spirits.
“What are they doing?” he whispered.
“I don’t know.” The procession of ghosts was heading toward the water-stair, the gates that led down to Thamesis. Toward and then through, disappearing into—it must be—the river. Gesturing for Oldmark to stay where he was, I opened the French doors and ran down the steps to where the ghosts walked.
Sometimes they can’t see you. To them, you are as vague and shadowy as they are to you, and perhaps as terrifying. But when I put out a hand, with the fluttering of a spell, one of the spirits turned his head.
A man in a costume I did not recognize: rough trousers and a dull tunic. Long hair straggled down his
