M'Lady Witch Read online

  M'Lady Witch

  By Christopher Stasheff

  ISBN: 0-441-00113-0

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  CHAPTER 1

  "My son," said the King, "thy mother and I have decided that 'tis time thou wert wed."

  "As thou dost wish, my father and sovereign." Alain bowed. "I shall inform the lady straightaway."

  And he turned and strode out of the solar, leaving his parents gaping after him.

  Wooden-faced, the sentry closed the door behind the Prince. The sound jarred King Tuan and Queen Catharine out of their shock.

  "Who can he mean?" he asked, round-eyed.

  "Who but Gwendylon's daughter?" It was characteristic of Catharine that she didn't mention Rod Gallowglass, Cordelia's father.

  "The High Warlock's daughter!" Tuan had the opposite problem. "He must be stopped!" He rose from his chair. But Catharine restrained him with a hand on his arm. "Let him be, husband. If he doth as I think he will do, he may learn a most signal lesson."

  Much as she loved her son, Catharine knew him to be something of a conceited prig. Admittedly, the realization had only dawned on her this last year, when the boy had turned twenty-one and she had finally begun to think of him as a swain going a-wooing. Looking at him in that light, she had begun to realize that her son had some serious romantic defects. They all began with attitude, of course—but if she knew Cordelia, her son might soon have that attitude corrected.

  Alain rode the high way toward the High Warlock's castle with a high heart, enjoying the lovely spring day, the cascades of birdsong, and the ribald chanting of his entourage—a dozen young knights in doublet and hose, their swords at their hips. He felt his whole being relaxing, surging upward in delight. It was grand to be young and courting on a day such as this—it even made him feel moderately good-looking.

  Actually, he was a handsome young man, though he had been raised with so much emphasis on modesty that he denied it to himself, relying instead on his wardrobe. But he was well muscled, blond, with large blue eyes, a strong chin, and a straight nose; his face was open and ingenuous, though usually too serious.

  On a day like this, though, he was perilously close to admitting that he was attractive. He certainly felt so, for all the world must love a lover. And it was such a relief to be away from Runnymede and his parents' court, from intrigue and the need to be formal and wary!

  Alain didn't know it, of course, but the girl to whom he planned to propose was even more of a hot potato than a hot tomato. That wouldn't have stopped him—he was a trouble-magnet himself; crown princes always are. Assassins and conspirators lie in wait for them, ready to seduce them into plotting against their parents, or to kill them if they aren't seducible. That was why Alain travelled with a bodyguard of knights, and why his father had made sure he was well trained with sword and battle-axe.

  Cordelia, on the other hand, wasn't apt to have any bodyguards around; her parents cultivated the simple and humble image, as much as you can when the King and Queen have insisted that you live in a castle. But she was easily more lethal than Alain could ever be, if she wanted to be—she was, in the eyes of the superstitious peasants, a witch, and a very powerful one.

  Actually, she was an esper, a person born with powers of extrasensory perception and, in her case, extrasensory activity. She was a telepath, a projective, a telekinetic ... and the list went on. About all she couldn't do was teleport.

  Of course, it was possible that she might run into something that even she couldn't handle—say, an army or two. If that happened, all she had to do was call for help from the Wee Folk, and a brigade or two of elves, pixies, and brownies would pop out of the woodwork to aid her. If anything stopped them—such as too much Cold Iron, which tends to accumulate around knights—she could always send out a mental call for the rest of her family, and her father would teleport to her, with her brothers right behind. Her mother would arrive a little later, by broomstick. The family had not yet encountered any enemy that could stand against them—provided, of course, that nothing kept them apart.

  Rod Gallowglass wasn't quite as adept at using his ESP powers as his wife and children were, because he had spent half his life under the blithe impression that he was an ordinary mortal. Shortly after the birth of his fourth child, he had found out the hard way that he could work "magic," as the local superstitious peasants called the results of his ESP work. He had decided that magic was catching.

  Rod Gallowglass's late development was understandable, considering that he hadn't even known there was a planet where there were so many espers, until he came there; he had been born and raised on a high-tech planetoid where the family business was the manufacturing of robots, and had run away from home to spend his twenties bumming around the civilized, modern planets, looking for wrongs to right. Sometimes he wondered how he had ever gotten into this situation. Then he would look at his wife, even now in her fifties, and decide it had just been good luck.

  Being a little more honest with himself, he would admit that it had been a matter of needing a purpose in life. He had found one by becoming an agent for the Society for the Conversion of Extraterrestrial Nascent Totalitarianisms, an organization dedicated to spreading democracy by sniffing out dictatorships and other forms of oppressive government, and steering their societies toward one of the many forms of democracy. Exploring the galaxy for new totalitarian governments to topple, he had stumbled across Gramarye. Now he was assigned here for the rest of his life—because SCENT knew how important Gramarye was going to be. Rod, on the other hand, had known how important the beautiful, voluptuous "witch" Gwendylon was going to be, and had married her, cleaving unto her forever—and therefore, of course, to her planet and people, too.

  The planet of Gramarye was the only place in the Terran sphere of colonized planets where so many espers existed. All the rest of the Terran planets together had produced only a few rather weak telepaths—so Rod Gallowglass had a very important duty guarding the planet of Gramarye from invasion and subversion by the agents of dictatorship and anarchy.

  SCENT believed that one of the prime factors in keeping a democracy alive was speed of communications. If it takes too long to get a message from the parliament to the frontier planets, the frontier planets will eventually set up their own governments and break away. The only way to prevent this is to do away with democracy and resort to some form of government that keeps such a tight hold over its colonies that they can't break away—and that tight hold always turns into oppression, in one form or another. So to keep democracy viable, the telepaths of Gramarye were going to be absolutely essential.

  Unfortunately, the future totalitarians knew that, tooand so did the future anarchists. Each of them had its own time-travel organization, dedicated to fostering totalitarian governments (VETO) or to destroying governments altogether (SPITE)—and both were directly concerned with keeping Gramarye from becoming a democracy.

  Which meant they were out to kill Rod Gallowglass, if they could—and his family. Especially his children. They had found out, over the last couple of decades, that they couldn't kill Rod—no matter how hard they tried, he always fought them off, and where he might have failed, his wife and her elf-friends and children had beaten off his enemies for him. Together, they were unstoppable—but the Futurians could, at least, make sure his influence didn't go on in
to future generations. They were bound and determined to kill his children if they could or, if they couldn't, to at least keep them from having children of their own.

  So far, the new SPITE chief, Finister, had succeeded in giving the eldest son, Magnus, a very unhealthy distaste for sex in any form, and especially for women as sexual beings. As a result, he had left home to go traipsing around the galaxy, looking for wrongs to right and oppressive governments to overthrow.

  Now Finister had set her sights on Cordelia. How she would prevent Cordelia from ever being married, or even seduced, she didn't know—but she would improvise. Half the fun of her job, she had decided, was in finding how things came out.

  So Alain rode through a golden morning, blithely unaware of the Futurian witch who was setting her sights on himself and his beloved. Not knowing, he was able to delight in the day.

  "How shall you greet the lady, Your Highness?" asked young Sir Devon.

  "With cordiality and respect, Hall" It was such a pleasure to speak so freely, without all that ridiculous and unnecessary formality that the older folk used. "Thee" this and "thou" that, when a simple "you" would suffice! "As I would greet any fine lady!"

  Sir Devon didn't seem so sure. "Mayhap, Highness, you should treat her in some degree warmer than that."

  "What? And have her forget that I am her sovereign-to-be? Pooh, Hal! It would be beneath my station!"

  Hal started to say something more, then bit his tongue. Alain saw. "Come, come! You must speak your mind with me, Hal—for if my own friends do not, who will? What had you in mind to say?"

  "Only that it is a perfect day for so joyous an occasion, Highness," Sir Devon said slowly.

  "It is that." Alain looked around him with a broad grin. Yes, it was a perfect day to become engaged, to kiss a lucky maiden for the first time. The thought was somewhat heady—he had always more or less planned to marry Cordelia, and the notion of actually doing so made his heart sing, though it also roused a nervous fluttering in his stomach. However, he could ignore that—as he could overlook the fact that she wasn't a princess.

  He also overlooked the possibility of sending a page ahead, to announce his coming.

  Gregory looked up; pale light was beginning to lend color to the leafy roof overhead. He folded up his notes with a satisfied sigh; it had been a good evening's watching, and he had learned quite a bit about the habits of the great horned owl. He rose to his feet with a wince as cramped muscles protested, and noted that he must not be doing enough yoga exercises. If only eight hours of immobility for a night's watch made him stiff, how would he endure the round-the-clock spell of meditation that he knew was coming? His mind was working itself up to that—when it brimmed over with new knowledge, he would have to go into a trance to sort it all out. He didn't dare do that when Mother and Father were home, of course—but they travelled a good deal these days, so he was free to keep night—long vigils in the forest if he chose, or twenty-four-hour sessions of meditation. He knew it would worry his sister Cordelia, but she would only hover over him, not interrupt.

  And, of course, there was the problem of trying to contact his eldest brother Magnus, halfway across the galaxy.

  He felt the need of that, too, from time to time, and it was very demanding of both body and mind. Heaven knew the lad wrote seldom enough!

  His body was making its needs felt in other ways, too. Gregory felt a pang of hunger, and decided, with regret, that he would just have to devote half an hour to taking on some food. He made his way out of the forest and off toward the nearby village, where there was an inn that would be serving breakfast.

  As he came into the inn, the serving maid looked up, then gave him a very, very warm smile; her lips seemed to glisten, her eyes to grow larger. Gregory gave her an automatic smile in return, instantly concerned—was the girl beset with a fever? But no, on closer look, he could see no other symptoms—the swellings in her bodice looked natural enough.

  He sat at a table, asked her for ale and porridge, then instantly forgot her as he noticed the motion of dust motes in a sun-ray that hinted at a pattern ...

  Something tugged at his attention; irritated, he glanced at the wench's retreating back. He noticed the exaggerated swaying of her hips, and remembered his older brother Geoffrey telling him that when a woman walked that way, she was seeking a dalliance. Then Gregory finally remembered that the look on her face had been one that Geoffrey had told him of, too—but he also remembered his brother's caution that the lass might have a shallow dalliance in mind, or a very deep one, or anything in between, and that a man had to move slowly, trying to read her intentions, for frequently she wouldn't know them herself.

  It all sounded very tedious to Gregory, and singularly unproductive. He supposed that he would have to try it some day—but just now, he had far more interesting matters to deal with. He was only sixteen, after all. And, to be quite frank, he couldn't imagine how the physical pleasures Geoffrey described could ever approach the ecstasy of intellectual insight, the long hours of study and meditation that led to the rapture of new understanding of natural phenomena.

  Of course, women were natural phenomena, too—but somehow, he doubted that they wanted to be analyzed. And he was quite sure they didn't want to be understood.

  The drawbridge was down, the porter sitting at his ease on a stool in the shade of the gatehouse, cutting bits of apple and nibbling at them. He stiffened abruptly at the cry of the sentry in the tower above; then the troop of horsemen came into view, and the guards snapped their halberds down. "Who comes?"

  "Alain, Prince of Gramarye!" cried the foremost knight, and behind him, the golden Prince himself sat, cocksure and smiling, head tilted back, resplendent in cloth of gold and velvet, with a plume in his hat.

  "Your Highness!" The porter bowed, his expressionless face hiding his surprise, almost shock, at the suddeness of the Prince's arrival. "I regret that Lord and Lady Gallowglass are not within!"

  "No matter, no matter," Alain said with careless generosity, "so long as the Lady Cordelia is. Say, are there any others of the family present?"

  "His Lordship and Her Ladyship are away for the day, sir. I regret there are none here but the servants, the steward, and myself, saving Lady Cordelia."

  "A most excellent notion," Alain said with joviality. "Save her ladyship, indeed—and summon her!"

  The porter blanched at the thought of "summoning" Lady Cordelia. He decided to summon the steward instead, and let him deal with the lady. After all, porters were not paid that much.

  Cordelia was in the stillery, brewing medicines to replace the stock depleted by the winter chills and agues and fevers of all the peasants on the Gallowglass estates. She enjoyed the work, but it was tiring, not to say messy—her apron was spotted with the extracts of various herbs and the mauve and purple from the juices of various berries. Her hair was tied back in a severe bun, to keep loose strands from being caught in the glassware. Her face, too, was smudged with touches of extract, bits of charcoal, and smudges of soot from tending the burners. The solution in the alembic had just begun to boil up into the cooling tube when ...

  ...the steward stepped through the door and announced, very nervously, "Milady, Prince Alain has come to call on you. He awaits you in the solar."

  "Blast!" Cordelia cried, instantly furious. "How dare he come unannounced! How durst he enter just as my brew has come to the boil!"

  The steward stood mute, stretching out his hands in bewilderment.

  "Well, there's no help for it!" Cordelia snapped, gaze going back to the cooling tube. Drops of distillate had begun to drip into a beaker. "Tell him I will come directly." The steward bowed and left, relieved.

  She would come as soon as the retort was empty and the beaker full, Cordelia decided—two hours' preparation would not be thrown away on a man's oafish whim! As to appearances, well, he would just have to take her as she was.

  Still, she patted her hair, wishing she had time to arrange it properly—not to mention donn
ing a pretty gown and washing her hands and face.

  Actually, she had very little cause for concern. Cordelia had grown into a very beautiful woman, though she gave it very little thought. There was so much to do—peasants with illnesses, children who must be taught, women who must be aided in their daily burdens. Now and then, she might snatch a few minutes to think about a new dress, or even steal an hour to work at making one. There were even odd moments when she would experiment with a new hairstyle, though those tended to be very, very early in the morning, and only on Sundays.

  Makeup? She never thought of it—and never thought it would do her much good, either.

  She was half right. Her complexion was flawless, her cheeks rosy, her lips so red that no paint could improve upon them. Her features were those of the classic beauty, and the curves of her body were generous and perfectly proportioned. Her legs were long, her posture straight, almost regal.

  Of course, these last were almost always hidden under a work-dress of strong, serviceable fabric. There was, after all, so very much to do.

  Even the rough cloth could not hide her loveliness, though—from anyone but herself. Cordelia, of course, did not know she was a beauty.

  "How dare he?" she fumed to herself, watching the last of the solution boil out of the retort. "What the devil could send him here at such a bad time?"

  Alain paced the solar, fretting and chafing. What could be keeping Cordelia so long? His sunny mood was beginning to cloud over, exposing the nervousness underneath. He was remembering that he was proposing a liaison that would last twice as long as he had already lived, and was beginning to wonder if he really wanted that. Still, his lieges, sovereigns, and parents had told him he should wed, so he would.

  He consoled himself with the thought that Cordelia had no doubt rushed to dress in her finest and arrange her hair. It wasn't at all necessary, he assured himself—but it was flattering.

  So he was jolted to his boot-soles when she bustled into the room, unannounced and without ceremony, in a stained white work-apron and blue broadcloth dress, her hair disordered and her face smudged. He stared in shock as she curtsied, then managed to force a smile. He didn't know which was worse—the annoyance that rippled over her face as she looked up at him, or her distracted air, as though she had something more important on her mind. More important than him!