Chantress Alchemy by Amy Butler Greenfield Page A

happening to me? Was the world going mad? Or was I?
    My face must have recovered enough to reveal my frantic thoughts, because Nat led me away from the window and sat me down in a low chair. I saw then that we were in a library. The walls were filled with books. It was too dark to read the titles, though, or even to guess how many volumes there were.
    “All right,” Nat said, kneeling beside me. “Let’s think this through.” Calmly, deliberately, he ticked off everything that had gone wrong with my magic. The moonbriar song. The strange, muffled music last night. The river song I’d just sung. “There may be one simple explanation behind all of it.”
    I made an effort to sound as rational as he did. “It might just be tiredness. Or illness. Sometimes they weaken me.”
    “As much as this?”
    “After I defeated Scargrave, I was so exhausted that it took me weeks to hear magic again. Don’t you remember?”
    “Of course. But back then the problem was that you couldn’t hear any magic, not that you heard the wrong magic. Besides, you haven’t been fighting great battles lately. And you haven’t been ill—or have you?” He searched my face with concern.
    “No.”
    “So why?” Nat asked again. “Why has your magic gone wrong?”
    “ I don’t know .” In distress, I went back to the window.
    As I looked down on the dark river below, Nat came upbehind me, close enough that I could feel his warmth through the silk of my dress.
    “Lucy, could someone be using magic against you?”
    “I should think I’d be able to smell it, if someone were.”
    “Maybe you can’t smell magic-making anymore,” Nat said. “Just as you can’t sing Proven Magic.”
    It was an awful possibility. I thought of Wrexham and his threats—his confidence that he knew how to deal with Chantresses—and again I almost told Nat about what he’d said to me. But I was too afraid of what Nat might do.
    “I’ve never heard of a way of stopping Chantress magic,” I said instead, arguing the thing out for myself. “If there were, wouldn’t Scargrave have used it?”
    “I reckon he would have,” Nat admitted. “He used everything else.”
    “So maybe there isn’t any magic at work here. Maybe the problem lies with me instead. Maybe there’s something I’ve done, something I’ve sung, something I’ve eaten or drunk— something that’s done this to me.”
    There was a definite note of panic in my voice now. Even I could hear it.
    Nat laid his strong hands on my shoulders and gently turned me to face him. “Whatever’s happened, it’s not your fault.”
    I put my hands over his, trying to draw strength from them. It didn’t work; I felt small and cold.
    “We don’t know that,” I said. “And in the meantime, I’m trapped. They expect me to work magic here—and how can I do that when I can’t trust what I hear?” I shut my eyes. Wild Magicwill betray you when you least expect it , my godmother had warned me. Perhaps this was what she meant. It felt as if my world had turned upside down. “Oh, I wish I’d never left Norfolk!”
    “I wish so too,” said Nat. “But we’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise.”
    “And in the meantime?”
    “In the meantime, we’ll put it about that you’re not feeling well, and you’ll keep safe in your rooms.”
    My rooms weren’t safe with Margery there. But I couldn’t explain that to Nat without telling him about Wrexham. . . .
    “Only let in people you know,” Nat was saying. “And if you have to go out, guard against strangers especially. This court is full of people who have no alibis, and who I wouldn’t trust with tuppence.”
    “Such as?”
    “Lord Gabriel, for one. He spent the Scargrave years in Sweden, studying alchemy, and somehow he’s wangled his way into Sir Isaac’s good graces. And then there’s Sybil Dashwood. Her father was Lord Wycombe, but she and her mother lived on the Continent during the Scargrave years, and she’s only just moved