Chapter Four
Delia spent at least part of every day with the magical beasts she had adopted in the months since her marriage.
In the stable block that had been converted to a menagerie, with no audience but the creatures, she did not have to be Lady Baradine, or the lady catalyst, but merely Delia, the ordinary girl who liked animals. It was there that Jasper found her.
He stood for a moment outside of the stall where she was cuddling a kitten that had been born with wings, and so tormented by its brothers and sisters that the farmer’s wife whose cat was its mother had brought it to Delia, “For it’ll need to be hand-raised, my lady, and that I cannot do, what with it being sowing season, and the children being in school each morning, and all. ”
That was a dig at the Baradines, for the farmers and their wives had been most indignant at the decree from the manor requiring all children aged between six and twelve to attend three hours of lessons each day.
Most of them grumbled about the loss of labor, but none of them dared to openly defy the dragon.
Jasper had put his foot down when Delia declared her intention of keeping the kitten in their bedchamber so she could feed it hourly. He deputed the youngest stable-hand to the job, releasing him from all other duties other than keeping the menagerie clean and the animals’ water troughs full.
It had worked wonderfully well. The kitten was healthy and growing, the boy was in heaven, and Delia was considering giving him permanent work as aide to her animal keeper.
That poor man was so overworked that just the night before he had failed to latch the cages of the hawk-dogs, and one of them had escaped and wreaked havoc on some of the gardens, digging to hide bones.
Delia had been quite distressed over the extra work that had made for the gardeners, but Jasper had pointed out that they had always intended to give the beasts away once they were old enough, and if they could fly, it meant they were old enough.
“I know you are there,” she said. She always did, though he had been standing still and making no sound.
It was the catalyst gift she had explained.
One strand of her power was connected to Jasper, unless he went beyond its range.
She had progressed in her control enough that she could follow that one strand to find Jasper wherever he went within a fifteen-mile radius.
She knew his location and, when he was close enough to her, his current emotion.
“How is the cat-bird?” he asked.
“Misty is well, thank you,” she replied. The little creature had been sitting, purring, on her lap, but now stood, stretched, and bounded across the stall to greet Jasper, its wings flapping as it ran.
He bent to scoop it up by a hand around its belly. It had been a mere palmful weeks ago when Delia adopted it, but on a diet of goats’ milk it had already grown large enough to hang down both sides of his hand.
Delia had called it Misty for its color—both its fur and the down that covered its wings and the backs of its hind legs were varying shades of gray. He cupped its behind on the palm of one hand, let it lean against his chest, and scratched it behind its ears. It rewarded him with a loud purr.
“At least one of our foundlings shows some gratitude,” he commented.
“Is Persephone sulking again?” Delia asked, sympathetically.
“She is always either sulking or scorning,” Jasper grumbled.
“I try hard to sympathize, dear heart. She was, after all, left motherless as a child, neglected by her father, and then exiled, and—from what the man who collected her from Shropshire said—alternately ignored and abused by her grandmother. But she has an inflated sense of her own importance and a huge chip on her shoulder.”
“She is not an easy person,” Delia admitted. “I believe she is very unhappy, Jasper. Apart from anything else, it cannot be easy having a traitor for a father. Did her lessons go poorly? I had to leave early, as you know, but she seemed to be working hard.”
Jasper sighed. “Yes and no. She is getting the kinds of results to be expected from a completely untrained and unusual power. She, however, expects perfection, and when her gifts don’t behave exactly as she wishes, she loses her temper.
Not with me, I hasten to add. With herself.
And then she accuses me of being patronizing when I try to tell her she is doing well. ”
The kitten rubbed its head against his hand, clearly indignant he was ignoring it, and he obediently resumed his scratching.
“Our approach to training gifts is not widely accepted,” Delia commented.
She was right. Witness the reception the College of Mages had given their ideas for a more diverse approach to young mages.
When Lady Hardcastle, dean of the college, had kindly explained to Delia, in terms suitable for a five-year-old, that all mages needed to have a sound grounding in the basics, and that a person like Delia would not understand, the dragon that slumbered within Jasper had wanted desperately to tear her head off.
“It is ridiculously obvious, though, that we are right and they are wrong. Persephone is a case in point. Declared a dangerous failure and exiled, just because her magic didn’t behave as predicted. You read the report from the examining mage that I unearthed in the files. Outrageous.”
“Dangerous to herself and others. Keep her from using her powers and breed her as soon as possible. It is as well that the man caught an ague and died, for I should like to give him to Sapphire.”
Sapphire was the unicorn that had been Delia’s when Jasper first met her. The beast, as was typical for its kind, could not tolerate men, and had already killed one—Persephone’s father, in fact, who had invaded the sanctuary set aside for the unicorn and Delia.
Jasper understood Delia’s anger at the examiner, but the testing mage had been merely a symptom of the problem.
“He was acting according to his training,” he reminded his beloved.
“I was nearly rejected myself, and was fortunate to be given a tutor who was more open-minded. The fault is in the system.”
“Yes, and so we must keep demanding changes for those who cannot be crammed into their tidy categories,” said Delia. “For the sake of the Jaspers and Persephones still to come. And regarding Persephone, would you like me to have a word with her, dearest?” Delia asked.
“Please. She is not nearly as unpleasant with you as she is with me.”
“Just as well,” said his wife. “You become very dragonish when people are rude to me, husband.”
“As it should be,” Jasper told her. “No one is permitted to be disrespectful to the dragon’s lady. Also, there is a message from Findlater about the current news from the war, dear heart. When you are finished here, come to my study where we can talk without risk of being overheard.”
*
As the buds on the most promising seedlings swelled and revealed more and more of themselves, they remained blue, though Taz had a feeling that at least some of them would shade to mauve in the center. The next few days would tell.
The one he thought might be black was proving to be a very deep red. If, once it was fully blown, the center stayed dark, it might work at the far edge of the red end of his planned rainbow.
He hadn’t seen Miss Thornton since she’d sought him out to complain about the Hawk’s message. He didn’t think the woman was cut out for undercover work. She seemed to have a vast sense of entitlement and no initiative.
She was nice to look at, though. And to listen to, as long as a person ignored what she actually said.
Perhaps she was grieving for her father and her granny.
Taz had heard other servants talking about her history.
If rumor had it right, Miss Thornton was alone in the world, except for the Duke of Findlater, her uncle, who was a cold, distant sort of a man, and the two who lived here in the manor, Lord and Lady Baradine.
Her father had died nearly a year ago, trying to help a Welsh mage who wanted to kidnap the lady catalyst. It had been in the English papers at the time. The lady had been living at a castle somewhere in the Peak country, and the Welsh had laid siege to the castle.
From what Taz had read, a traitor—or a Cymru patriot, depending which side you were on—had set the castle up to fall, but the traitor had been skewered by a unicorn that was being hand raised by the lady catalyst, and the lady herself had been carried away by the dragon that had killed one of the Cymru attack force and injured several others.
The papers had never named the traitor, and now Taz understood why. He had been the brother of the Duke of Findlater, and the uncle of the dragon lord. How embarrassing for the English!
And how sad for Miss Thornton. After all, committed as he was to the fight to free Cymry, he had worked among the English long enough to know they were just people like anyone else. Capable of great meanness and violence. But capable, too, of generosity and kindness.
Witness the way the Baradines had taken Miss Thornton into their home and their lives.
According to the grooms and the maid who had been sent with the chaperone who collected her, she had been living alone except for the servants in a house in Shropshire.
It had been a house owned by Findlater, used for poor relatives, including his brother’s mother-in-law.
Why the girl had been left there after that lady died, the gossipers could only speculate, but the servants in the house had made it clear she had been on her own for months, and that they had not known what to do about it beyond feeding her and cleaning up after her.
They had been relieved by the arrival of the chaperone with instructions to bring the girl back to the family—in this case, the Baradines. Perhaps it had taken months for Findlater’s lawyers to realize that Findlater’s niece had been, and still continued to live there.
In any case, the maid had overheard the chaperone tell Miss Thornton that the home was needed for another relative, and that she would be better off nearer to London, anyway. “Who knows, Miss?” the chaperone had said. “Perhaps Lady Baradine will arrange for you to be presented.”
So, how had Miss Thornton become a spy for Cymry? Had she been recruited by the chaperone? Before the chaperone arrived? If so, how did Taz’s people know she was being sent to the Baradines?
He shrugged. More questions than answers, and why was he so interested in Miss Thornton? She had more claws than a wild cat, that one, and was just as likely to maul someone who tried to help her.
And yet, he found himself liking her. She hadn’t let her reverses demoralize her into submission. She used her pride and her anger as a shield against further pain. And if she fought even those who tried to help her, so did any animal that had been frightened, abused, and neglected.
As if his thoughts about her conjured her up, she marched into the greenhouse, hostility in the set of her shoulders and her every stride, and radiating off her so obviously he fancied he could see it, dark clouds shot through with lightning.
He straightened to greet her, thrusting back his own indignation at his sanctuary being invaded. “Miss Thornton.”
“Barberry, can you teach me your songs?”
It was a demand rather than a question, and so unexpected that Taz blinked. “Teach you my songs?”
Miss Thornton stamped her foot. “Everything goes wrong,” she complained.
“I do just what Cousin Jasper says, and it never works—or at least, it never works right. But when I sing to open the sundial, it opens every time. It doesn’t explode, or fly away, or turn into a blankety blank pumpkin!
” She punctuated the last sentence with a shriek through gritted teeth.
Just as he thought. She wasn’t cross with him but with her world—in this case, herself and her magic. But he wasn’t certain he could help her. “I make them up as I go, Miss Thornton,” he told her. “I visualize what I want to have happen, and then I sing it. For example, take these seedlings.”
He led her to a shelf full of small pots.
Each pot held a flower seedling that he had planted out from the seed flats only two days ago.
“These are the next plantings for the knot garden, and they are needed four weeks earlier than I expected, because last night one of Lady Baradine’s hawk-dogs got into the garden and dug up two of the beds.
Apparently, no one expected the puppies to be able to fly yet.
I want the seedling to make four-weeks’ worth of growth in two days.
I need to think about all they will need for that to happen—water, the goodness in the potting mix, sunlight on their leaves. ”
And some sort of charm on the garden beds to repel hawk dogs. No. To repel warm-blooded animals in general, for Heaven alone knew what other sorts of garden-destroying beast the lady catalyst would adopt.
“I need to be specific about what I want, and that is why I can seldom use old spells, for the seasons and conditions change all the time. So, I think of all that the plant needs, and of my intent, which is speedy growth, as I said, and then I put all of that into a song.”
Miss Thornton was frowning in thought. “Isn’t it hard to write a song?”
Taz shrugged. He didn’t find it so. He just opened his mouth, and the tune created itself around the words that came to him. “I don’t write it, Miss Thornton. I just sing it.”
Her bewildered frown turned hostile. “That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “How can you sing something without knowing the words or the tune?”
There was no point in answering. She could believe him or not believe him. It was her choice, and it made no difference to the truth, which was what he had just given her.
She glared at him while the silence stretched, and then huffed a frustrated breath. “Show me,” she demanded.
Very well. Taz faced the seedlings, closed his eyes, and steadied his breathing. He built a picture in his mind of healthy young plants, ready to be transplanted into the garden bed, then opened his eyes and allowed his gift to flow out of his mouth on a river of sound.
He sang of strong root systems, extracting what they needed from the soil, of sturdy stalks, carrying that food and water to the leaves, of lush healthy leaves open to receive the sun’s rays.
He poured his music into the seedlings, so focused on them he forgot the presence of Miss Thornton, standing at his side, watching him silently. He was startled when he finished his song and she spoke.