“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 sub rosa, lessons taken in a shadowy cell at the back of the Bodleian library. I had been granted this as a result of my grandfather, cleric and scholar, endower of a college that was already three hundred years old. I had learned a great deal about rivers, about the sea, in this land-locked, placid city in the middle of the wheat-pale hills.
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 shoulders, twined with weed. Not a recent ghost, then. He spoke to me, and I did not know the language, either: something Northern and harsh. I looked over his shoulder to his fellow spirits and saw a woman in a long, draped dress, her aquiline features downcast and somber. These were ghosts from the far past of Albion, and so many of them: summoned from every well and river and spring, every shore. The reek of under-hill magic hung about them. I looked back to Coldgate and saw the gleam of gold beside Lord Oldmark. The queen had arrived.
The stream of ghosts was slowing, and soon no more crawled out of the depths of the fountain. I went slowly back into the palace.
“I have sent word to my cousin Under-Hill,” Queen Aeve said. I began to curtsey but she waved me up again. “I have told her that I know of her plot with the Dutch court, that I will not tolerate it.”
Lord Oldmark and I waited; neither of us wanted to be the one who asked her what she planned to do. But she went on, “I’ve ordered the fleet of Albion to the mouth of the Thames, to sail for Dutch waters.” Her face twisted. “We have made mincemeat of the Spanish. Let the Dutch see if they have better luck, shall we? Oldmark, see that Mistress Dane is paid.” With that, she swept back into the palace.
One does not question the actions of a queen, at least, not out loud. But Aeve was ever one for the grand gesture. Sending the navy to chastise the Dutch, on what was still little enough evidence, was characteristic. And the navy, though still great, was not what it had been when Aeve first came to the throne, before its flagship, the Rose, had gone down under Spanish guns, taking Albion’s Admiral Drake with her.