Chapter Seven
The castle was a more commodious prison than Delia’s father’s quarantine shed, but she was just as confined.
Yes, she had comfortable accommodations and a private garden.
Better still, she had company. Not just Polly, Mary and the unicorn, but nuns from the Sisters of the Three Warrior Saints.
The order had decided to depute six of their number to live with her for as long as she needed protection, and Sister Louise had stayed as their leader.
The custodian of the castle, Lord Percival Thornton, had set aside a comfortable house for her and the nuns within the castle’s main bailey.
It had a walled garden accessible only by passing through the house, and Lord Percival had hired a female cook and female servants so that all Delia had to do was care for the unicorn.
In fact, even that duty had been largely taken over by the nuns.
Sapphire adored them all, especially Sister Margaret-Anne, whose gift was for animals and who had a great love for all equine creatures, and Sister Catherine-Therese, whose gift for growing things had, in a bare two and a half months, turned their garden into a tranquil retreat.
Sapphire preferred to spend his waking hours following one or the other of his two favorites from their prayers to their combat training to their assigned work around the house and garden.
All of the nuns shared in the work of the house, the duties divided by common consensus.
The room that had been given over to Delia, Polly, and their charges had probably once been a summer room, as it was large, with tiled floors and double doors that opened onto that garden.
Since Sapphire was fundamentally a horse in his digestive processes, he eliminated waste where he stood, so they had rolled up and taken away the carpet, and they did their best to keep the floor clear so it was easy to clean.
In good weather, they left the doors open so that Sapphire could come in and out as he pleased, which made cleaning up easier.
At night, he wanted to sleep with some part of his body touching Delia, as he had since he was born, though sometimes, as the weeks passed, he stayed with one of the nuns, sleeping on the floor beside their bed as he did in Delia’s room, within reach of a soothing hand should it be needed.
The nuns insisted that Delia and Polly had duties enough, caring for the babies.
As they grew older, this took up only part of Delia’s time.
Polly was happy to nap when the babies did, and to play with them when they were awake and not being fed or bathed.
Delia found herself with time on her hands.
At first, she welcomed the freedom from endless chores and duties, but having nothing to do soon lost its charm.
At Sister Louise’s suggestion, she asked for everything the castle library could give her on the catalyst gift, and those catalysts recorded in history.
And when she’d exhausted the castle’s resources, Mr. Thornton arranged for the London College of Mages to send her copies of the texts in their library.
She added variety to her day by joining the nuns in their prayers and their combat training, the latter exercise taking the place of the long walks that had once encompassed her father’s estate and the neighborhood beyond.
She had once wished for wider horizons than Nettleford Manor and its surroundings.
Now she dwelt in a still narrower world, enlivened only by weekly visits with Mr. Thornton in the commodious visitors’ parlor.
She and Sister Louise—or, more rarely, one of the other nuns—sat at one end of the room and he at least seven paces away at the other, and he brought her news from beyond the walls of the house and garden.
From Mr. Thornton, she learned that the baby minotaur and the little pegasus had both settled into the castle, the former having become something of a favorite with the castle servants, since he was such a cheerful and affectionate baby, and the latter living in the stables with his mother, growing rapidly, and trying short flights when he was exercised in a nearby field.
Mr. Thornton also told her that the king and the College of Mages had organized a rotation of magic users and the relatives of magic users to come and live within the range of her gift, with several experiments underway to determine what that range was, and the length of time it took for various species to be affected.
She felt sorry for the small group who were living in tents a mile away. At least it was now high summer. If the authorities continued their research into winter, some people were going to find themselves very uncomfortable.
But they have the advantage, she thought, that they will be able to go for a walk in the open, even if they are cold and wet. It was an uncharitable thought, and one she would remember, later.
The enemy, whomever they were, made an attempt to winkle her out of from behind the castle walls several weeks after they arrived.
They approached under the cover of a magical illusion, so the sentries at the gate and the watchers in the towers saw only the vegetation blowing in the wind, birds flying overhead, the brook that fed the moat cascading down from the nearby hills.
Delia was one of the first to hear the alarm. She was in the garden helping Sister Therese to plant some seedlings that would soon, the gardening nun promised, give them flowers for their refuge’s makeshift chapel.
“Oh my!” said Sister Therese, suddenly. She was staring fixedly into the watering can she had been about to use to water the seedlings, and there was a shimmer around her that Delia had learned to associate with the use of magic.
All the magical beasts had it constantly, but it appeared around mages only when they exercised their gift.
“Delia, my dear,” said Sister Therese, “fetch Sister Louise. Quickly, now.”
The urgency in Sister Therese’s voice caused Delia to break into a run, and she soon returned with the head nun to find Sister Therese still staring fixedly at the water in the can.
“We are being attacked, sister,” she said.
“The assailants have crossed the practice field and are putting a ladder up against the outer fence on the bank beside the moat. They must be cloaking themselves in some way—I can see the sparkle of magic.”
Sister Louise frowned in concentration, her eyes unfocused. Her mage-gift shimmered as she repeated Sister Therese’s words. “There,” she said. “I have warned Lord Percival and Mr. Thornton. Well done, sister.”
A few minutes passed, while Sister Therese continued to report on the progress of the attackers.
“They are lifting a second ladder up to the men who are sitting on top of the fence. Those men are lowering the ladder to the inside of the fence. Now they are climbing down onto the bank. The others are taking it in turns to climb over. Wait. Something is happening.”
From a distance, they heard shouting and a smattering of gunfire.
“One of the assailants has been shot,” Sister Therese said.
“The assault party is shooting back. Ah! That was a mistake! Our guards must have been firing at random, because now they are concentrating their fire. The assault party have put up a magical protective shield. Our bullets are bouncing off. That will exhaust their mage very quickly, I imagine. Yes! They are retreating!”
She continued her commentary, but the assault was over, for all intents and purposes. The enemy had been driven back. The castle lowered the drawbridge and sent out a battle team, Mr. Thornton at their head, and the enemy was routed entirely, though without ever coming into full visibility.
After that, Mr. Thornton asked the War Department for sufficient scryers that, with Sister Therese, they were able to keep watch around the clock, but the next attempt was much more subtle.
Perhaps whoever was behind the attack on the canal and the assault on the castle needed time to adjust their plans, but a full three weeks passed before the morning on which Mary refused her bottle.
The little lindwurm had been an enthusiastic feeder from the first, and was thriving on a diet of goats’ milk—Mr. Thornton, with his usual thoroughness, had arranged a small herd of dairy goats with their own herdswoman and dairy maid.
The growth of Mary’s human torso was consistent with that of a thaumatypicus human, but the snake body, which at her birth had been no more than two feet long, had put on length at an astounding rate.
At three and a half months old, she was a good five feet from the top of her head to the tip of her tail, and at its thickest point, the serpent part of her form was nearly five inches in diameter.
Sister Margaret-Anne measured her, the unicorn, and the egg once a week.
Furthermore, the snake body was already well coordinated.
She had been wrapping it around Polly or whoever else was holding her for more than a month, and in the past week, once she had mastered lifting her head and chest to support herself on her forearms, she had discovered how to twist her snake body to roll herself over and then to propel herself forward.
Mary’s new mobility thrilled herself and Sapphire, and worried her caregivers, since she had no concept of heights and was oblivious to the dangers of fire, falls, and becoming a trip hazard.
They took to keeping the doors to the garden closed, so whenever Sapphire wanted to exit or enter, someone had to open the door for him.
More often than not, that someone was Polly, or if not her, Delia.
Since Mary was a sociable happy little girl, and had never been a fussy feeder, Polly was concerned when mealtime arrived and Mary took one sip, spat out the teat, then clamped her mouth shut, shaking her head from side to side to avoid the bottle.
“Miss Nettleford,” said Polly. “Something is wrong with Mary. She does not want her bottle.”
Furthermore, the lindwurm refused to be held. Delia looked up from the book she had been reading just in time to see Mary twist and wriggle her powerful snake body until Polly had to release her.
Whereupon the baby shot across the room to hide under the nearest bed. The piercing sound she made when in distress emerged to fill the room, the house, and no doubt the castle. Polly and Delia clapped their hands over their ears, but that did little to mute the noise.
Sister Louise arrived to find both girls on their knees, trying to coax Mary out from under the bed.
“I don’t understand it,” Delia told her. “She only ever makes that noise if she is hungry and we are not feeding her fast enough. And she certainly never refuses to feed.”
“I have never heard such a frightful noise,” said Sister Louise. “How can we get her to stop?”
But nothing they tried helped. She wouldn’t be coaxed out from under the bed. Showing her the bottle made her keen louder. Tears were rolling down the baby’s cheeks, and Polly was crying, too.
“Is there something wrong with the milk?” Delia asked, at last.
“I made it the same as always,” Polly protested. “Three quarters goat’s milk and one quarter hot water. But she took one sip and spat it out.”
“Does it taste the same as usual?” Sister Louise wondered.
“I think so,” Polly said.
Delia checked. “There’s some left in the jug.
” It was the jug Polly had used to collect the goat’s milk.
She had added the boiling water directly to the jug then poured the resulting liquid into the feeding bottle, leaving perhaps quarter of an inch of liquid in the bottom of the jug. Delia poured it into a mug.
“I’ll try it,” she said. But Mary’s high-pitched keen turned to an anguished shriek. She threw herself out from under the bed and flicked her tail forward to knock the mug from Delia’s hand.
Sapphire burst out of the corner where he had been hiding, his head buried under a pile of cushions away from Mary’s noise. He leapt toward Delia, horn first. Delia shrank back, certain he was about to attack, but he jerked to a halt and lowered his horn into the milk mix that puddled on the floor.
Mary stopped shrieking, collapsing back into Polly’s arms. She wrapped her own arms as far as they would go around Polly’s neck, shut her eyes, and dropped off to sleep.
Sister Louise said, “What was all that about? I wonder…”
She took the catgut teat off the ceramic feeding bottle and held it out to Sapphire, who first backed away, tossing his head so that his mane flew, and then reversed direction, lowering it to present his horn to the bottle, approaching cautiously.
With Sister Louise’s help, he fitted the tip of his horn to the bottle’s opening, and she tipped it so that the liquid within sloshed up to its touch.
Delia watched, holding her breath, until Sapphire lifted his head and snorted, then turned away. Sister Louise met Delia’s eyes.
“Was it poisoned?” Delia asked.
Sister Louise nodded. “Or cursed.”
Part of the reason the royal house laid claim to any unicorns born in the realm was that they had the power to neutralize most poisons or curses with a simple touch of their horn.
“The milk or the water?” Delia wondered.
“If it was the milk, Mary was the probable target,” Sister Louise said. “If it was the water…”
She did not need to finish the sentence. Everyone in the castle drank from the same well, though those living in the camps outside fetched their water from nearby streams.
Whatever the poison or curse was intended to do, it would have affected the entire castle population, human and animal.