The High King was sitting with King Kenig on his right and Queen Mevenne on his left. Two more attendants stood in the background, but I scarcely looked at them. The other people in the room were the old Dominie and the Priest of Kilcannon. My heart began to thunder in my ears as I realised that great doings must be afoot, to cause Donal and the Priest to come together in the same small room.
Ivar was as astonished as I was. “What’s going on?” he demanded, making a hasty bow to the two kings.
“Please take a seat,” said the High King, “and we shall tell you.”
King Farlane was not a well man, I saw, as we sat on the low padded stools put ready in front of him. He was huddled in a royal plaid above his scarlet robes and someone had put a brazier near him for further warmth. But it was his face that showed his illness most. It was white, with a yellowish tinge, and the skin of it was very tight to the bones. What spare flesh there was had drawn into deep wrinkles of pain. But his tired eyes were not subdued by his disease. They gazed at us with a shrewdness and sanity which were almost startling.
“As you know,” he said to us – all of us, though I think he spoke chiefly to my aunt – “ten years ago, the magicians of Logra cast a spell on our islands of Chaldea so that no one from here, however hard they try, can get to Logra.” He nodded to the Priest, who was so grimly eager to speak that he was sidling in his seat.
“We have tried, gracious king,” the Priest burst out. “We have searched the whole of Skarr for some inkling of the spell. We have gone out – I myself have gone out in boats repeatedly – as far as the barrier in the sea, where the boats turn aside as though a current takes them, though there is nothing to be seen. And we have used every craft the gods grant us to break the spell. But we have found no way to break this spell.” He subsided, sort of shrinking into himself gloomily. “I have failed,” he said. “The gods are not pleased with me. I must fast and pray again.”
“There’s no need to reproach yourself,” King Farlane said.
Donal could obviously not resist muttering, “Och, man, leave your gods to punish you. If they are that angry, they can surely take away your next dinner for themselves.”
At this, our old Dominie gave Donal a mildly quelling look and turned his head questioningly to the High King. King Farlane nodded and the Dominie said, wagging his white eyebrows sadly, “I have had my failures too. It pains me, as a scholar, to say this, but I have now searched in every library on Skarr and journeyed to Bernica to search there too, without stumbling across a single hint of how this spell was constructed.”
Oh! I thought. This explained those lovely unexpected days when I had walked to the castle for my lessons to find all the other children rushing around the yard, shouting that old Dominie was on his travels again.
“On the other hand,” the Dominie continued, “the clue may lie all around us in the geography of our very islands.”
I sighed. The Dominie had a passion for geography. He was forever making us draw maps and explaining to us how the lie of the land influenced history: how this inlet made a perfect harbour and caused the town to grow, or how that lone mountain sheltered this valley and made it so fertile that wars were fought for it. Sure enough, he went on instructing everyone now.
“As you know,” he said, “our three islands form a crescent with Skarr to the north, Bernica due west and Gallis in the south, slanted south-eastwards, while Logra forms a very large wedge to the south-east. Now I have it in mind that the three Chaldean islands could be seen to form the sign for the dark of the moon, which also happens to be the sign for banishment. It would take no stretch of the imagination for the Lograns to see Logra as the full moon bearing the shield of banishment before it. The Lograns, as you know, went to war with us purely and simply because their gods told them it was their right to conquer Chaldea—”
This was too much for half the people there. They forgot the reverence that should be due to the High King and burst into protest. Donal contented himself with a sarcastic noise, but the Priest unshrank himself and snarled, “The Lograns will burn for their false beliefs!”
Aunt Beck, who was sitting in a demure and graceful attitude on her stool, which I wished I could emulate, with her red heels sweetly together and her bony, sensitive fingers clasped around her knees, tossed her small dark head and very nearly snorted. “There’s no gods to it,” she said. “It was human greed.”
And King Kenig said across her, “Gods, my left hambone, man! Our islands have gold and silver, tin and copper. Gallis has pearls and precious stone as well. What has Logra got? Only iron. And iron makes weapons to conquer the rest with.”
The Dominie stuck his lower lip out like a small child and his eyebrows bristled around at the rest of us. “When one talks of magic,” he said huffily, “the impossible is possible.”
“Indeed, yes,” the High King put in quickly. “Perhaps we should ask what Beck the Wise Woman has to say about the spell.”
He looked at my aunt, who bowed her head gracefully back. “Very little, I’m afraid, sire,” she said. “Bear in mind that I have had my sister’s child to care for and could not be going out in boats or ranging over Skarr. But I have scried and found no answer. I have put bonds on invisible spirits and sent them out all over Skarr.”
I watched Aunt Beck doing this. She claimed that all the islands swarmed with spirits, but I still found this hard to believe when I couldn’t see them, or hear what they reported when they came back.
“They could find nothing of the spell,” Aunt Beck said, “and nor could they find any way through to Logra. They all say it’s like a wall of glass in the sea between Logra and Chaldea. But they do tell me one thing that worries me. As you know, this world has four great guardians.” She looked to the Priest, who pinched his lips in and nodded grudgingly. “These guardians,” Aunt Beck said, “belong to North, South, East and West, but in the nature of things they each have one of our four islands to guard. Ours, as you know, in Skarr is of the North. Bernica is guarded by the West, Gallis by South. Logra should have East, but the spell has cut guardian off from guardian so completely that none of our three know if East even exists any more.”
“That’s not important,” King Kenig said curtly.
“I regard it as of the utmost importance,” Aunt Beck said.
“Well, it may be, it may be,” the King conceded. “But the main thing from a king’s point of view is that, while this magical blockade is in place, the Lograns can build ships and train armies in perfect peace. And, what is worse, they can send spies through to watch us, while we have no way of spying on them. This is why we’re all meeting here in such secrecy – fear of Logran spies.”
“It is indeed,” the High King agreed, “and of course we may not be seen to build ships or train soldiers because the Lograns hold a most valuable hostage in my son Alasdair. You are aware of that, are you?” he asked, turning to Ivar and me.
Maybe he thought we were too young to know, since I was three when Prince Alasdair was taken and Ivar was eight, but I cannot imagine how he thought we didn’t know. It was, even Aunt Beck grudgingly agrees, the most astounding piece of magic Logra ever did. She says it must have taken far more planning and clever timing than simply making the barricade.
About a year after the barricade was in place, Prince Alasdair – who must have been about Donal’s age then – was coming in from hunting with quite a crowd of courtiers, when, in the very courtyard of Castle Dromray, which is the High King’s seat here on Skarr, a tunnel somehow opened in space and