Phoenix and Ashes

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Copyright ©2004 by Mercedes R. Lackey. All rights reserved.

Jacket art by Jody A. Lee DAW Books Collectors No. 1306

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All characters and events in this book are fictitious. All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

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First Printing, October 2004 123456789

DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

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—MARCA REGISTRADA

HECHO EN U.S.A.

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

To Janis Ian; amazing grace

Acknowledgments

When I needed to populate the village of Broom and Longacre Park, the denizens of the Dixon's Vixen bulletin board sprang to my aid by volunteering to be scullery maids, war-heroes, or villains as I chose. So if the names of the inhabitants are not consistent with the conventions of 1917, that is why.

And

Thanks to Richard and Marion van der Voort (www.atthesignofthe dragon.co.uk), who vetted my historical and colloquial accuracy.

And

To Melanie Dymond Harper, who, when I lost my map and pictures of Broom, went out into wretched weather to recreate them for me.

1

December 18,1914

Broom, Warwickshire

HER EYES WERE SO SORE and swollen from weeping that she thought by right she should have no tears left at all. She was so tired that she couldn't keep her mind focused on anything; it flitted from one thought to another, no matter how she tried to concentrate.

One kept recurring, in a never-ending refrain of lament. What am I doing here? I should be at Oxford.

Eleanor Robinson rested her aching head against the cold, wet glass of the tiny window in the twilight gloom of her attic bedroom. With an effort, she closed her sore, tired eyes, as her shoulders hunched inside an old woolen shawl. The bleak December weather had turned rotten and rainy, utterly un-Christmas-like. Not that she cared about Christmas.

It was worse in Flanders, or so the boys home on leave said, though the papers pretended otherwise. She knew better. The boys on leave told the truth when the papers lied. But surely Papa wouldn't be there, up to his knees in the freezing water of the trenches of the Western Front. He wasn't a young man. Surely they wouldn't put him there.

Beastly weather. Beastly war. Beastly Germans.

Surely Papa was somewhere warm, in the Rear; surely they were using his clever, organized mind at some clerking job for some big officer. She was the one who should be pitied. The worst that would happen to Papa was that he wouldn't get leave for Christmas. She wasn't likely to see anything of Christmas at all.

And she should be at Oxford, right this minute! Papa had promised, promised faithfully, that she should go to Oxford this year, and his betrayal of that promise ate like bitter acid into her heart and soul. She'd done everything that had been asked of her. She had passed every examination, even the Latin, even the Greek, and no one else had ever wanted to learn Greek in the entire village of Broom, except for little Jimmy Grimsley. The boys' schoolmaster, Michael Stone, had had to tutor her especially. She had passed her interview with the principal of Somerville College. She'd been accepted. All that had been needed was to pay the fees and go.

Well, go meant making all sorts of arrangements, but the important part had been done! Why hadn't he made the arrangements before he'd volunteered? Why hadn't he done so after?

Hadn't she had known from the time she could read, almost, that she all she really wanted was to go to Oxford to study literature? Hadn't she told Papa that, over and over, until he finally agreed? Never mind that they didn't award degrees to women now, it was the going there that was the important part—there, where you would spend all day learning amazing things, and half the night talking about them! And it wasn't as if this was a new thing. There was more than one women's college now, and someday they would give degrees, and on that day, Eleanor meant to be right there to receive hers. It wasn't as if she would be going for nothing. . . .

And it wouldn't be here. Not this closed-in place, where nothing mattered except that you somehow managed to marry a man of a higher station than yours. Or, indeed (past a certain age) married any man at all.

"Oxford? Well, it's—it's another world . . . maybe a better one."

Reggie Fenyx's eyes had shone when he'd said that. She'd seen the reflection of that world in his eyes, and she wanted it, she wanted it. ...

Even this beastly weather wouldn't be so bad if she was looking at it from inside her study in Somerville ... or perhaps going to listen to a distinguished speaker at the debating society, as Reggie Fenyx had described.

But her tired mind drifted away from the imagined delights of rooms at Somerville College or the stimulation of an erudite speaker, and obstinately towards Reggie Fenyx. Not that she should call him Reggie, or at least, not outside the walls of Oxford, where learning made all men (and women!) equals. Not that she had ever called him Reggie, except in her own mind. But there, in her mind and her memory, he was Reggie, hero-worshipped by all the boys in Broom, and probably half the grown men as well, whenever the drone of his aeroplane drew eyes involuntarily upward.

And off her mind flitted, to halcyon skies of June above a green, green field. She could still hear his drawling, cheerful voice above the howl and clatter of his aeroplane engine, out there in the fallow field he'd claimed for his own, where he "stabled" his "bird" in an old hay-barn and used to land and take off. He'd looked down at her from his superior height with a smile, but it wasn't a patronizing smile. She'd seen the aeroplane land, known that in this weather he was only going to refuel before taking off again, and pelted off to Longacre like a tomboy. She found him pouring a can of petrol into the plane, and breathlessly asked him about Oxford. He was the only person she knew who was a student there, or ever had been a student there—well, hardly a surprise that he was a student there, since he was the son of Sir Devlin Fenyx, and the field, the aeroplane, and everything as far as she could see where she stood belonged to Lord Devlin and Longacre Park. Where else but Oxford was good enough for Reggie Fenyx? Perhaps Cambridge, but—no. Not for someone from Warwickshire and Shakespeare country. "I want to go to university," she had told him, when he'd asked her why she wanted to know, as she stood looking up at him, breathless at her own daring. "I want to go to Oxford!"

"Oxford! Well, I don't know why not," he'd said, the first person to sound encouraging about her dream since her governess first put the notion in her head, and nearly the only one since, other than the Head of Somerville College. There'd been no teasing about "lady dons" or "girl-graduates." "No, I don't know why not. One of these days they'll be giving out women's degrees, you mark my words. Ought to be ashamed that they aren't, if you ask me. The girls I know—" (he pronounced it "gels," which she found fascinating) "—work harder than most of my mates. I say! If your parents think it's all bunk for a gel to go to university, you tell 'em I said it's a deuced good plan, and in ten years a gel'd be ashamed not to have gone if she's got the chance. Here," he'd said then, shoving a rope at her. "D'ye think you can take this rope-end, run over to there, and haul the chocks away when I shout?"

He hadn't waited for an answer; he'd simply assumed she would, treating her just as he would have treated any of the hero-worshipping boys who'd come to see him fly. And she hadn't acted like a silly girl, either; she'd run a little to a safe distance, waited for his signal after he swung himself up into the seat of his frail ship of canvas and sticks, and hauled on the rope with all her might, pulling the blocks of wood that kept the plane from rolling forward out from under the wheels. And the contraption had roared into life and bounced along the field, making one final leap into the air and climbing, until he was out of sight, among the white puffy clouds. And from that moment on, she'd hero-worshipped him as much as any boy.

That wasn't the only time she'd helped him; before Alison had come, she had been more out of the house than in it when she wasn't reading and studying, and she went where she wanted and did pretty much as she liked. If her mother had been alive, she'd likely have earned a scolding for such hoydenish behavior, but her mother had died too long ago for her to remember clearly, her father scarcely seemed to notice what she did, and she had only herself to please. Reggie had been amused. He'd ruffled her hair, called her a "jolly little thing," and treated her like the boys who came to help.

In fact, once after that breathless query about Oxford, he had given her papers about Somerville College, and magazines and articles about the lady dons and lecturers, and even a clipping about women who were flying aeroplanes—"aviatrixes" he called them—with the unspoken, but clearly understood implication that if anyone gave her trouble about wanting to go to Oxford, she should show them the clipping as well as give them his endorsement of the plan to show that "nice girls" did all sorts of things these days. "Women are doing great things, great things!" he'd said with enthusiasm. "Why, women are doctors—I know one, a grand gel, married to a friend of mine, works in London! Women should go exercising their brains! Makes 'em interesting! These gels that Mater keeps dragging round—" He'd made a face and hadn't finished the sentence, but Eleanor could guess at it. Not that she had any broad acquaintance with "ladies of Society," but she could read about them. And the London newspapers were full of stories about Society and the women who ornamented it. To her way of thinking, they didn't seem like the sorts that would be terribly interesting to someone like Reggie. No doubt, they could keep up a sparkling conversation on nothing whatsoever, and select a cigar, and hold a dinner party without offending anyone, and organize a country weekend to great acclaim, but as for being interesting to someone like Reggie—not likely. Even she, an insignificant village tomboy, was more interesting to him than they were ever likely to be.

Not that she was all that interesting to someone like Reggie. For all that she looked up to him, and even—yes, she admitted it—was a bit in love with him, he was as out-of-reach as Oxford was now. . . .

In fact, everything was out of reach now, and the remembered sun and warmth faded from her thoughts, replaced by the chill gloom of the drafty attic room, and the emptiness of her life.

Nothing much mattered now. The war had swallowed up Reggie, as it had swallowed up her father, as it had smothered her hopes. The bright and confident declarations of "Home by Christmas" had died in the rout at Mons, and were buried in the trenches at Ypres, as buried as her dreams.

She had thought she was through with weeping, but sobs rose in her throat again. Papa, Papa! she cried, silently, as her eyes burned anew. Papa, why did you leave me? Why did you leave me with Her?

For it wasn't the war that was keeping her from Oxford, anyway. Oh, no—her current misery was due to another cause. Surely Papa would have remembered his promise, if it hadn't been for the manipulations of Alison Robinson, Eleanor's stepmother.

Two more tears oozed out from under her closed lids, to etch their way down her sore cheeks.

She wouldn't be able to treat me like this if Papa hadn't gone. Would she?

Horrible, horrible woman. She'd stolen Papa from her, then stole her very life from her. And no one else could or would see it. Even people that should know better, who could see how Alison treated her stepdaughter, seemed to think there was nothing amiss. I’ll hear one more time how lucky I am that Papa married her and left her to care for me while he's gone, I think I shall be sick. . . .

The day she first appeared had been, had Eleanor only known it, the blackest day of Eleanor's life.

She pounded an impotent fist against her thigh as she stifled her sobs, lest She should hear. . . .

Papa had gone on business; it had seemed just like any other of dozens of such absences. Eleanor was accustomed to Father being absent to tend to his business from time to time; most fathers in Broom didn't do that, but Charles Robinson was different, for he was in trade, and his business interests all lay outside Broom, even outside of Warwickshire. He was a man of business, he often told her when she was old enough to understand, and business didn't tend to itself.

Although her father never flaunted the fact, she had always known that they lived well. She'd had a governess, when most children in the village just went to the local school. Miss Severn had been a good governess, one, in fact, who had put the idea of Oxford into her head in the first place, and good, highly educated governesses were (she knew now) quite difficult to find, and expensive.

Besides that, they had maids and a cook—well, there were others in Broom who had "help," but not many had maids that lived in, or a cook at all. And they lived in one of the nicest houses in Broom. "The Arrows," a Tudor building, was supposed to have been there at the time Shakespeare passed through the village after a poaching expedition, got drunk and fell asleep under the oak tree in front of the tavern.

But her papa hadn't made much of their prosperity, so neither had she. He socialized with the village, not the gentry, and other than visits to Longacre to see Reggie fly, so had she. They weren't members of the hunt, they weren't invited to dinners or balls or even to tea as the vicar was. The governess, the special tutoring later—this was, to her, not much different from the piano lessons the butcher's and baker's daughters got.

In fact, she hadn't really known how prosperous they were. Papa's business was hardly glamorous—he made sacks, or rather, his factories made sacks. All sorts of sacks, from grain-bags to the rough sailcloth duffels that sailors hauled their personal gear in. Well, someone had to make them, she supposed. And from time to time, Papa would visit one or another of his factories, making sure that everything was operating properly, and look over the books. His trips always happened the same way; he'd tell her and Cook when he was going and when he would be back and they'd plan on simple meals till he returned. He would drive their automobile, chugging and rattling, to catch the train, and at the appointed time, drive home again.

But last June something different had happened.

He'd gone off—then sent a telegram that something had happened, not to worry, and he would be back a week later than he had planned and he'd be bringing a grand surprise.

She, more fool, hadn't thought any more of it—except, perhaps, that he was buying a new automobile. That was what he had done when he'd gotten the first one, after all, come back a week later, driving it, all bundled up in goggles and hat and driving-coat, and full of the adventure of bringing it all the way from London.

And he came back, as she had half expected, not in the old rattle-bang auto, but in a sleek, long-bonneted thing that purred up the street.

The problem was, he hadn't been alone.

She had been with him. And right behind them, in their own car, They had come.

She had come arrayed in an enormous scarlet hat with yards and yards of scarlet scarves and veils, and a startling scarlet coat of dramatic cut. Father had handed her out as if she was a queen, and as she raised a scarlet-gloved hand to remove her goggles, he had said, beaming with pride, "And here's my surprise! This is your new mother—" he hadn't said "stepmother," but Eleanor would never, ever call that horrible woman "Mother" "—Alison, this is my daughter. And look, Eleanor, here are two new sisters to keep you company! Lauralee, Carolyn, this is your sister Eleanor! I'm sure you're going to be the best of friends in no time!"

Two elegant, languid creatures descended from the rear of the second automobile, wearing pastel blue and lavender versions of her getup, and removed their goggles to regard her with stares as blank and unreadable as the goggles had been.

Broom had never seen anything quite like them. They looked as if they had come directly from the pages of some London quarterly. Only she smiled, a knowing little smile, a condescending smile that immediately made Eleanor aware of her untidy hair that was loosely tied with a ribbon like a child's, her very plain linen day-dress, not in vogue and not new, of her uncorseted figure, and her thick, clumsy walking shoes. The two girls raised their heads just a trifle, and gave her little patronizing smirks of their own. Then all three had sailed into the house without so much as a word spoken.

And with a shock, Eleanor had found herself sharing the house and her papa with a stepmother and two stepsisters.

Except—from the moment they entered the door, there wasn't a great deal of "sharing" going on.

The first sign of trouble came immediately, when the girls inspected the house and the elder, Lauralee, claimed the second-best bedroom—Eleanor's room—as her own. And before Eleanor could protest, she found herself and her things bundled up the stairs to an untenanted attic room that had been used until that moment as a lumber room, with the excuse, "Well, you'll be at Oxford in the autumn, and you won't need such a big room, now, will you?" Followed by a whispered "Don't be ungracious, Eleanor—jealousy is a very ugly thing!" and a frown on her papa's face that shocked her into silence.

The thing that still baffled her was the speed with which it had all happened. There'd been not a hint of any such thing as a romance, much less a marriage, ever! Papa had always said that after Mama, no woman could ever claim his heart—he'd gone a dozen times to Stoke-on-Trent before, and he'd never said a word about anything but the factory, and she thought that surely she would have noticed something about a woman before this.

Especially a woman like this one.

Oh, she was beautiful, no question about that: lean and elegant as a greyhound, sleek dark hair, a red-lipped face to rival anything Eleanor had seen in the newspapers and magazines, and the grace of a cat. The daughters, Lauralee and Carolyn, were like her in every regard, lacking only the depth of experience in Alison's eyes and her ability to keep their facade of graciousness intact in private.

Eleanor only noticed that later. At first, they were all bright smiles and simpers.

Alison and her daughters turned the house upside down within a week. They wore gowns—no simple "dresses" for them—like nothing anyone in Broom had seen, except in glimpses of the country weekends held up at Longacre. They changed two and three times a day, for no other occasion than a meal or a walk. They made incessant demands on the maids that those poor country-bred girls didn't understand, and had them in tears at least once a day. They made equally incredible demands on Cook, who threw up her hands and gave notice after being ordered to produce a dinner full of things she couldn't even pronounce, much less make. A new cook, one Mrs. Bennet, and maids, including a lady's maid just for Alison called Howse, came from London, at length, brought in a charabanc with all their boxes and trunks. Money poured out of the house and returned in the form of tea-gowns from London and enormous hats with elegantly scrolled names on the boxes, delicate shoes from Italy, and gloves from France.

And amid all of this upheaval and confusion, Papa beamed and beamed on "his elegant fillies" and seemed to have forgotten Eleanor even existed. There were no tea-gowns from London for Eleanor. . . .

Not that she made any great show against them. She looked like a maid herself, in her plain dresses and sensible walking shoes. They didn't have to bully her, not then, when they could simply overawe her and bewilder her and drown her out with their incessant chattering and tinkling laughter. And when she tried to get Papa alone to voice a timid protest, he would just pat her cheek, ask if she wasn't being a jealous little wench, and advise her that she would get on better if she was more like them!

She might have been able to rally herself after the first shock— might have been able to fight back. Except that all those far-off things in the newspapers about assassinations and Balkan uprisings that could never possibly have anything to do with the British Empire and England and Broom—suddenly did.

In August, the world suddenly went mad. In some incomprehensible way, Austria declared war on Serbia, and Prussia joined in, and so did Germany, which apparently declared war on everybody. There were Austrian and Prussian and German troops overrunning France and England was at war too, rushing to send men to stop the flood. And though among the country-folk in Broom there was a certain level of skepticism about all this "foreign nonsense," according to the papers, there was a sudden patriotic rush of volunteers signing up to go to France to fight.

And Papa, who was certainly old enough to know better, and never mind that he already had been in the army as a young man, volunteered to go with his regiment. And the next thing she knew, he was a sergeant again, and was gone.

Somehow Oxford never materialized. "Your dear father didn't make any arrangements, child," Stepmother said, sounding surprised, her eyes glittering. "But never mind! This will all be over by Christmas, and surely you would rather be here to greet him when he comes home, wouldn't you? You can go to Oxford in the Hilary term."

But it wasn't over by Christmas, and somehow Papa didn't manage to make arrangements for the Hilary term, either. And now here she was, feeling and being treated as a stranger, an interloper in her own house, subtly bullied by glamour and not understanding how it had happened, sent around on errands like a servant, scarcely an hour she could call her own, and at the end of the day, retreating to this cold, cheerless closet that scarcely had room for her bed and her wardrobe and desk. And Papa never wrote, and every day the papers were full of horrible things covered over with patriotic bombast, and everything was wrong with the world and she couldn't see an end to it.

Two more tears burned their way down her cheeks. Her head pounded, she felt ill and feverish, she was exhausted, but somehow too tired to sleep.

Today had been the day of the Red Cross bazaar and tea dance. Organized by Stepmother, of course—"You have such a genius for such things, Alison!"—at the behest of the Colonel's wife. Though what that meant was that Eleanor and the maids got the dubious privilege of doing all of the actual work while Stepmother and "her girls" stood about in their pretty tea-gowns and accepted congratulations. Eleanor had been on her feet from dawn until well past teatime, serving cup after cup of tea, tending any booth whose owner decided she required a rest, watching with raw envy as her stepsisters and other girls her age flirted with the handsome young officers as they danced to the band Stepmother had hired for the occasion. Dances she didn't know— dances to jaunty melodies that caused raised, but indulgent eyebrows among the village ladies. "Ragtime"—that's what they called it, and perhaps it was more than a little "fast," but this was wartime, and beneath the frenetic music was an unspoken undercurrent that some of these handsome young men wouldn't be coming back, so let them have their fun. . . .

Eleanor had cherished some small hope that at last someone who knew her would see what Alison was doing and the tide of public opinion would rise up to save her. Alison, after all, was the interloper here, and with her ostentatious ways and extravagance, she had surely been providing more than a little fodder for the village cats. But just when she was handing the vicar's wife, Theresa Hinshaw, a cup of tea, the woman abruptly shook her head a little, and finally looked at her, and frowned, and started to say something in a concerned tone of voice, out of the corner of her eye she saw Alison raise her head like a ferret sniffing a mouse on the wind, and suddenly there she was at the woman's elbow.

"Mrs. Hinshaw, how are you?" she purred, and steered Eleanor's hope away into a little knot of other women.

"I was wondering why we haven't seen Eleanor about," the vicar's wife began.

"Yes, she used to run wild all about the village, didn't she, poor thing," replied Alison, in a sweetly reasonable tone of voice. "A firm hand was certainly wanted there, to be sure. You'd never guess to look at them both that she's the same age as my Carolyn, would you?"

Eleanor saw Mrs. Hinshaw make a startled glance from the elegant Carolyn, revolving in the arms of a young subaltern, to Eleanor in her plain frock and apron and ribbon-tied hair, and with a sinking heart, saw herself come off second best.

"No, indeed," murmured Mrs. Sutherland, the doctor's wife.

Alison sighed heavily. "One does one's poor best at establishing discipline, but no child is going to care for a tight rein when she's been accustomed to no curb at all. Keep her busy, seems to be the best answer. And of course, with dear Charles gone—"

The vicar's wife cast a look with more sympathy in it at Eleanor, but her attention was swiftly recaptured by Lauralee, who simpered, "And poor Mama, not even a proper honeymoon!" which remark utterly turned the tide in Alison's favor.

From there it was all downhill, with little hints about Eleanor's supposed "jealousy" and "sullenness" and refusal to "act her age"—all uttered in a tone of weary bravery with soft sighs.

By the time Alison was finished, there wasn't a woman there who would have read her exhaustion and despair as anything other than sulks and pouting.

The music jangled in her ears and made her head ache, and by the time the car came for Alison and her daughters ("Dear little Eleanor, so practical to wear things that won't be hurt by a little wet!") and Eleanor was finished with the cleaning up and could trudge home again, she felt utterly beaten down. Her aching legs and feet were an agony by the time she reached an unwelcoming home and unfriendly servants. Alison and the girls held high celebration in the parlor, their shrill laughter ringing through the house as they made fun of the very people they had just been socializing with.

She got plain bread-and-butter and cooling tea for supper in the kitchen—not even a single bite of the dainty sandwiches that she had served the ladies had she eaten, and of the glorious high tea that the cook had prepared for Alison and her daughters there was not a scrap to be seen. And by the time she went up all those stairs to her freezing-cold room, she'd had no strength for anything except hopeless weeping.

What does she want from me? The question echoed dully in Eleanor's mind, and there seemed no logical answer. She had no doubt that Alison had married Papa for the money—for her all her airs at the tea, there was nothing in the way that Alison behaved in private that made Eleanor think that her stepmother found Papa's absence anything other than a relief. But why did she seem to take such pleasure in tormenting Eleanor?

There didn't seem to be an answer.

Unless she was hoping that Eleanor would be driven to run away from home.

Oh, I would, but how far would I get? If that was what Alison was hoping, the very nature of this area—and, ironically, the very picture that Alison had painted of her stepdaughter today!—would conspire to thwart her. Eleanor wouldn't get more than a mile before someone would recognize her, and after that carefully constructed fiction of a sullen and rebellious child that Alison had created, that same someone would assume she was running away and make sure she was caught and brought back!

And if Alison had wanted to be rid of her by sending her away, surely she would have done so by now.

She'll never let me go, she thought bitterly. Not when she can make up lies about me to get more sympathy. And who believes in wicked stepmothers, anyway?

She must have dozed off a little, because the faint, far-off sound of the door knocker made her start. At the sound of voices below, she glanced out the window to see the automobile belonging to Alison's solicitor, Warrick Locke, standing at the gate, gleaming wetly in the lamplight. He looked like something out of a Dickens novel, all wire-rimmed glasses, sleek black suits and sleek black hair and too-knowing face.

Oh. Him again. He seemed to call at least once a week since Papa had gone. Not that she cared why he came. It was odd for him to come so late, but not unheard-of.

Someone uttered an exclamation of anger. It sounded like Alison. Eleanor leaned her forehead against the cold glass again; she felt feverish now, and the glass felt good against her aching head. And anyway, the window-seat was more comfortable than the lumpy mattress of her bed.

Her door was thrust open and banged into the foot of the bed. She jerked herself up, and stared at the door.

Lauralee stood in the doorway with the light behind her. "Mother wants you, Eleanor," she said in an expressionless voice. "Now."

Eleanor cringed, trying to think of what she could have done wrong. "I was just going to bed—" she began.

"Now," Lauralee repeated, this time with force. And then she did something she had never done before. She took two steps into the room, seized Eleanor's wrist, and dragged her to her feet. Then, without another word, she continued to pull Eleanor out the door, down the hall, and down the narrow servants' stair.

The stair came out in the kitchen, which at this hour was empty of servants—but not of people. Alison was there, and Carolyn, and Warrick Locke. The only light in the kitchen was from the fire on the hearth, and in it, the solicitor looked positively satanic. His dark eyes glittered, cold and hard behind the lenses of his spectacles; his dark hair was slicked back, showing the pointed widow's peak in the center of his forehead, and his long thin face with its high cheekbones betrayed no more emotion than Lauralee's or Carolyn's. He regarded Eleanor as he might have looked at a black beetle he was about to step on.

But Alison gave her a look full of such hatred that Eleanor quailed before it. "I—" she faltered.

Alison thrust a piece of yellow paper at her. She took it dumbly. She read the words, but they didn't seem to make any sense. Regret to inform you, Sergeant Charles Robinson perished of wounds received in combat—

Papa? What was this about Papa? But he was safe, in Headquarters, tending paperwork—

She shook her head violently, half in denial, half in bewilderment. "Papa—" she began.

But Alison had already turned her attention away towards her solicitor. "I still say—"

But Locke shook his head. "She's protected," he said. "You can't make her deathly ill—you've tried today, haven't you? And as I warned you, she's got nothing worse than a bit of a headache. That proves that you can't touch her directly with magic, and if she had an—accident— so soon, there would be talk. It isn't the sort of thing that could be covered up."

"But I can bind her; when I am finished she will never be able to leave the house and grounds," Alison snarled, her beautiful face contorted with rage, and before Eleanor could make any sense of the words, "you can't touch her directly with magic" her stepmother had crossed the room and grabbed her by one wrist. "Hold her!" she barked, and in an instant, the solicitor was beside her, pinioning Eleanor's arms.

Eleanor screamed.

That is, she opened her mouth to scream, but quick as a ferret, and with an expression of great glee on her face, Carolyn darted across the room to stuff a rag in Eleanor's open mouth and bind it in place with another.

Terror flooded through her, and she struggled against Locke's grip, as he pulled her over to the hearth, then kicked her feet out from underneath her so that she fell to the floor beside the fire.

Beside a gap where one of the hearthstones had been rooted up and laid to one side—

Locke shoved her flat, face-down on the flagstone floor, and held her there with one hand between her shoulder blades, the other holding her right arm, while Alison made a grab for the left and caught it by the wrist. Eleanor's head was twisted to the left, so it was Alison she saw—Alison, with a butcher's cleaver and a terrible expression on her face. Alison who held her left hand flat on the floor and raised the cleaver over her head.

Eleanor began screaming again, through the gag. She was literally petrified with fear—

And the blade came down, severing the smallest finger of her left hand completely.

For a moment she felt nothing—then the pain struck.

It was like nothing she had ever felt before. She thrashed in agony, but Locke was kneeling on her other arm, with all his weight on her back and she couldn't move.

Blood was everywhere, black in the firelight, and through a red haze of pain she wondered if Alison was going to let her bleed to death. Alison seized the severed finger, and stood up. Lauralee took her place, holding a red-hot poker in hands incongruously swallowed up in oven-mitts. And a moment later she shoved that poker against the wound, and the pain that Eleanor had felt up until that moment was as nothing.

And mercifully, she fainted.

She woke again in the empty kitchen, her hand a throbbing sun of pain.

Like a dumb animal, she followed her instincts, which forced her to crawl to the kitchen door, open it on the darkness outside, on rain that had turned to snow, and plunge her hand into the barrel of rainwater that stood there, a thin skin of ice forming atop it. She gasped at the cold, then wept for the pain, and kept weeping as the icy-cold water cooled the hurt and numbed it.

How long she stood there, she could not have said. Only that at some point her hand was numb enough to take out of the water, that she found the strength to look for the medicine chest in the pantry and bandage it. Then she found the laudanum and drank down a recklessly large dose, and finally took the bottle of laudanum with her, stumbling back up the stairs to her room in the eerily silent house.

There she stayed, wracked with pain and fever, tormented by nightmare, and unable to muster a single coherent thought.

Except for one, which had more force for grief than all her own pain.

Papa was dead.

And she was alone.

2

March 10, 1917

Broom, Warwickshire

THE SCRUB-BRUSH RASPED BACK AND forth against the cold flagstones. Eleanor's knees ached from kneeling on the hard flagstones. Her shoulders ached too, and the muscles of her neck and lower back. You would think that after three years of nothing but working like a charwoman, I would have gotten used to it.

The kitchen door and window stood open to the breeze, airing the empty kitchen out. Outside, it was a rare, warm March day, and the air full of tantalizing hints of spring. Tomorrow it might turn nasty again, but today had been lovely.

Not that Eleanor could get any further than the kitchen garden. But if she could leave her scrubbing, at least she could go outside, in the sun—

But Alison had ordered her to scrub, and scrub she must, until Alison came to give her a different order, or rang the servants' bell. And if Alison "forgot," as on occasion she did, then Eleanor would be scrubbing until she fainted from exhaustion, and when she woke, she would scrub again. . . .

The nightmare that her life was now had begun on the eighteenth of December, three years, two months, and a handful of days ago, when Alison Robinson hacked off the little finger of her left hand, and buried it with spells and incantations beneath the third hearthstone from the left here in the kitchen. Thus, Alison Robinson, nee Danbridge, had bound Eleanor into what amounted to slavery with her black magic.

Magic. . . .

Who would believe in such a thing?

Eleanor had wondered how Alison could have bewitched her father—and it had turned out that "bewitched" was the right word for what had happened. That night and the nights and days that followed had given her the answer, which only posed more questions. And if she told anyone—not that she ever saw anyone to tell them—they'd think her mad.

For it was madness, to believe in magic in these days of Zepps and gasworks and machine guns.

Nevertheless, Alison was a witch, or something like one, and Warrick Locke was a man-witch, and Lauralee and Carolyn were little witch's apprentices (although they weren't very good at anything except what Alison called "sex magic" and Eleanor would have called "vamping"). Alison's secret was safe enough, and Eleanor was bound to the kitchen hearth of her own home and the orders of her stepmother by the severed finger of her left hand, buried under a piece of flagstone.

She dipped the brush in the soapy water and moved over to the next stone. Early, fruitless trials had proved that she could not go past the walls of the kitchen garden nor the step of the front door. She could get that far, and no farther, for her feet would stick to the ground as if nailed there, and her voice turn mute in her throat so that she could not call for help. And when Alison gave her an order reinforced by a little twiddle of fingers and a burst of sickly yellow light, she might as well be an automaton, because her body followed that order until Alison came to set her free.

When her hand had healed, but while she was still a bit lightheaded and weak, Alison had made her one and only appearance in Eleanor's room. Before Eleanor had been able to say anything, she had made that gesture, and Eleanor had found herself frozen and mute. Alison, smirking with pleasure, explained the new situation to her.

Her stepdaughter had not been in the least inclined to take that explanation at face value.

Eleanor sighed and brushed limp strands of hair out of her eyes, sitting back on her heels to rest for a moment. Under the circumstances, you would have thought that the moment would have been branded into her memory, but all she could really remember was her rage and fear, warring with each other, and Alison lording it over her. And then a word, and her body, no longer her own, marching down to the kitchen to become Mrs. Bennett's scullery maid and tweenie.

Perhaps the eeriest and most frightening part of that was that Mrs. Bennett and all the help acted, from that moment on, as if that was the way things had always been. They seemed to have forgotten her last name, forgotten who she really was. She became "Ellie" to them, lowest in the household hierarchy, the one to whom all the most disagreeable jobs were given.

The next days and weeks and months were swallowed up in anger and despair, in fruitless attempts to break free, until her spirit was worn down to nothing, the anger a dull ache, and the despair something she rose up with in the morning and lay down with at night.

She even knew why Alison had done this—not that the knowledge helped her any.

She, and not Alison, was the true owner of The Arrows, the business, and fourteen manufactories that were making a great deal of profit now, turning out sacks for sandbags to make trench-walls, and barricades, and ramparts along the beaches . . . for in all of her plotting and planning, Alison had made one tiny mistake. She had bewitched Charles Robinson into marrying her, she had bespelled him into running off to be killed at Ypres, but she had forgotten to get him to change his will. And not even Warrick Locke could do anything about that, for the will had been locked up in the safe at the Robinsons' solicitor's office and it was the solicitor, not Alison, who was the executor of the will. There was no changing it, and only because Eleanor was underage was Alison permitted to act as her guardian and enjoy all the benefits of the estate. That was why she had been so angry, the night that the death notice came.

And after Warrick Locke investigated further, that was why she was forced to keep Eleanor alive and enslaved. Because if Eleanor died, the property went to some impoverished cousin in the North Country, and not Alison at all. Periodically, Eleanor was called into the parlor and given paper and pen, and wrote a letter under Alison's sorcerous dictation to the solicitor, directing him to give Alison money for this or that luxury beyond the household allowance. Alison fumed the entire time she was dictating these letters, but Eleanor was far, far angrier.

There were times when Eleanor wished she could die, just out of spite. . . .

She had eavesdropped on as many conversations as she could, which wasn't as difficult as it sounded, because Alison and Locke discussed such matters as if she wasn't present even when she was in the same room. She knew that her stepmother was something called an "Elemental Master" and that her power was over earth. What that meant, she had no real notion, but that was probably why Alison had buried Eleanor's severed finger. She knew that Warrick Locke was an "Elemental Mage," and that his power was also over earth, and that he was nothing near as powerful as Alison was. Lauralee and Carolyn were one rank below Warrick, evidently.

That Alison had far more power even than she had demonstrated against Eleanor was not in doubt. Eleanor had overheard plenty in the last three years, more than enough to be sure that the two of them were up to a great deal of no good. But of course, they wouldn't care what she heard; even if she could get out of the house, who would believe her wild tales about magicians?

For that matter, she hardly knew anything of what was going on in the world outside this house—just what she could glean from the occasional newspaper she saw. In the early part of the war, she had been able to get more information by listening to the servants, but—well, that was one way in which the war had affected her. There had been nine servants in the Robinson household—three more than the six that Eleanor and her father had thought sufficient—at the time when her father was killed. A man-of-all-work, a gardener, a parlormaid, three house maids, the cook Mrs. Bennett, and two ladies' maids, one (Howse) for Alison herself, one shared by Carolyn and Lauralee. Now there were two, Eric Whitcomb from the village who had returned from the war with a scar across the front of his head from some unspecified wound, and rather less than half his wits, and who did the gardening, the rough work and heavy hauling, and Alison's maid Howse. All the rest of the work was done by Eleanor. No one outside the house knew this, of course. Alison's status would have dropped considerably.

The man-of-all work had gone first, not so much out of patriotism (for after March of 1915 as the true nature of the slaughter in the trenches became known, it became more and more difficult to find volunteers) than because he had caught wind of conscription in the offing, and at the same time, was given the opportunity to join up with a regiment that was going somewhere other than France. "I'm off to the Suez, lovey," he'd told the downstairs house maid, Miranda Reed. "I'll bring you back a camel. I'll still be FBI, but at least my feet'll be dry."

Miranda had wept steadily for two months, then turned in her notice to go and train as a VAD nurse ("It can't be more work than this, and I'll surely get more thanks," she'd said tartly on departing]. The next to go had been the parlormaid, Patricia Sheller, after her brothers were conscripted, leaving no one to help at her aged parents' London shop, and it wasn't long before Katy Feely, the stepsisters' maid, followed, when the work of the upstairs maid was added to her own load—she claimed she too was going to be a VAD nurse, but it wasn't true. "I've had enough of those cats, Mrs. Bennett," Katy had whispered to the cook in Eleanor's hearing. "And enough of this grubby little village. I'm off! There's heaps of better positions in London going begging now!"

By then, even married men were being conscripted, and Mrs. Bennett's son had been killed, leaving a wife and two tiny children with a third baby on the way; Mrs. Bennett turned in her notice to go and help care for them.

The result had been a sea change in how meals were dealt with in this household. Alison could compel Eleanor to cook—but she couldn't compel Eleanor to cook well. And it appeared that no matter how great Alison's powers were, they weren't enough to put the knowledge of an expert cook into Eleanor's mind, nor the skill of that cook into her hands. Eleanor hadn't done more than boil an egg and make toast in her life, and cooking was an undisclosed mystery to her. So for one week, Eleanor labored her way through the instructions in the cookery books, but the resulting meals were anything but edible. After that week, Alison gave up; the White Swan had supplied most of the components of luncheon and dinner to the household from that time on, while Brown's Bakery provided bread, crumpets, scones, muffins, cake and pie for afternoon tea.

The rest of the help had followed when Alison proved disinclined to pay for their meals from the pub as well as hers. Kent Adkins the gardener and Mary Chance the other maid vanished without bothering to give notice.

Eleanor still wasn't more than an adequate plain cook, and she took a certain amount of grim satisfaction in the fact that no more dishes with fancy French names graced Alison's table unless they came ready-made out of a tin. She could not bake much of anything—her bread never seemed to rise, and her pie crust was always sodden. She could make ordinary soup, most eggy things, toast, tea, and boil veg. She could make pancakes and fry most things that required frying. Anything that took a lot of practice and preparation came from the Swan or out of hampers from Harrods and Fortnum and Mason, things that only required heating up before they were presented at table.

There was rationing now—sugar, according to complaints Eleanor overheard or saw in the newspaper, was impossible to get, and the authorities were urging meatless days. There were rumors in the newspapers that other things would soon be rationed—but none of that touched this household as privation. However it happened, and Eleanor strongly suspected black-marketeering, there were plenty of good things stocked away in the pantry and the cellar, including enough sugar to see them through another two or three years, and plenty of tinned and potted meats, jams and jellies, honey, tinned cream, white flour, and other scarce commodities, enough to feed a much larger household than this one. Not that Eleanor ever saw any of that on her plate. Rye and barley-bread was her lot, a great many potatoes roasted in the ashes or boiled and served with nothing but salt and perhaps a bit of dripping, and whatever was left over from the night before put into the ever-cooking soup-pot, sugarless tea made with yesterday's leaves, and a great deal of sugarless porridge. In fact, the only time she tasted sweets now was when an empty jam jar came her way, and she made a little syrup from the near-invisible leavings to pour over her porridge or into her tea.

She glanced at the light coming in through the door; almost teatime. This, of course, was Howse's purview, not hers. There was a spirit-kettle in the parlor; Howse would make the tea, lay out the fancy tinned biscuits, bread, scones, crumpets, tea-cakes, butter and jam. If toast was wanted, Howse would make it over the fire in the parlor. And then Howse would share in the bounty, sitting down with her employers as if she were their equal. Thus had the war affected even Alison, who, Eleanor suspected, had learned at least one lesson and would have done more than merely sharing meals in order to avoid losing this last servant. A lady's maid was a necessity to someone like Alison, who would have no more idea of how to put up her own hair or tend to her wardrobe than how to fly an aeroplane. The laundry could be sent out, prepared foodstuffs brought in, and Eleanor's strength was adequate to the rest of the needs of the household, but if Alison and her daughters were to keep up their appearances, and to have a chance at ascending to the social rank they aspired to, Howse must be kept satisfied. And silent, where the true state of the household was concerned.

Eleanor sighed, and stared into the flames on the kitchen hearth. There was a patent range here too on which most of the actual cooking was done, with a boiler and geyser in back of it that supplied hot water for baths and washing, both upstairs and down, but Eleanor liked having an open fire, and wood was the one thing that Alison didn't keep her from using. Since the spell that bound her was somehow tied to the kitchen hearth, it would have seemed more natural for Eleanor to hate that fireplace, but when she was all alone in the kitchen at night, that little fire was her only friend. In the winter, she often slept down here now, when her room was too cold for slumber, drifting off beside the warmth of that fire, watching the glowing coals. Now and again, it seemed to her she saw things in the flames—little dancing creatures, or solemn eyes that stared back at her, unblinking. The truth also was that no matter what she did around the fires, she never got burned. Leaping embers leapt away from her, smoke always went up the chimney properly, even when the north wind drove smoke down into the parlor or Alison's room. No fire ever burned out for her, and even that ever-cooking soup-pot never scorched. Her fare might be scant and poor, but it was never burned. Which could not always be said of Alison's food, particularly not when she or Howse undertook to prepare or warm it themselves, at the parlor hearth . . . and though Eleanor kept her thoughts to herself, she could not help but be glad when hard, dry, inedible food and burned crusts came back on the plates to the kitchen.

Sometimes Eleanor wondered why her stepmother hadn't simply done to Howse what she had done to Eleanor and turn her into a slave, but even after three years, she didn't know a great deal more about magic than she'd learned on that December night. Alison clearly used it, but she had never again performed a spell or rite where Eleanor could see her. Perhaps the reason was no more complicated than that while crude, unskilled work could be compelled, skilled work required cooperation. . . .

And even as she thought that, Eleanor realized with a start that she had been sitting on her heels, idle, staring into the flames on the hearth, for at least fifteen minutes.

The thought hit her with the force of a hammer blow. Could Alison's magic be losing its strength?

With a mingling of hope and fear, and quietly, so as not to draw any attention to herself, Eleanor climbed carefully to her feet and tiptoed to the kitchen door. The high stone wall around the garden prevented her from seeing anything but the roofs of the other buildings around her and the tops of the trees. There was a wood-pigeon in the big oak on the other side of the east wall, and the cooing mingled with the sharp metallic cries of the jackdaws. She stood quietly in the late afternoon sunshine, closing her eyes and letting it bathe her face.

Then she stepped right outside onto the path between the raised herb beds, and had to bite her lower lip and clasp her hands tightly together to avoid shouting in glee. She was outside. She was not scrubbing the floor—

But as she made a trial of approaching the garden gate, she found, with a surge of disappointment, that she could not get nearer than five feet to true freedom. The closer she got to the big blue wooden gate, the harder it was to walk, as if the air itself had turned solid and she could not push her way through it. This phenomena was not new— unless Alison was there and "permitted" her to approach the gate, the same thing had always happened before.

Still, to be able to break free from the spell at all was a triumph, and Eleanor was not going to allow disappointment to ruin her small victory. And after a quick, breathless, skipping run around the dormant garden, she was not going to allow discovery to take that victory from her, either. She went back to her scrubbing. Except that she wasn't scrubbing at all. She was sitting on her heels where she could quickly resume the task when she heard footsteps and simply enjoying the breathing space.

The sound of high-pitched voices in the parlor told her that the ladies were having their tea. Just outside the door, starlings had returned to the garden and were singing with all their might. The kitchen was very quiet now, only the fire on the hearth crackling while the stove heated for dinner. Alison's mania for forcing her to clean meant that the kitchen was spotless, from the shining copper pots hanging on the spotless white plaster walls to the flagstone floor, to the heavy black beams of the ceiling overhead. It looked very pretty, like a model kitchen on show. But of course, no one looking at a model kitchen ever thought about the amount of work it took to make a kitchen look like that.

She stared into the fire, and thought, carefully. If this glimpse of limited freedom wasn't some fluke, if incomprehensible fate had at last elected to smile on her—well, her life was about to undergo a profound change for the better.

Her stomach growled, and she smiled grimly. Yes, there would be changes, starting with her diet. Because one of the things that the spell on her did was that it prevented her from going into the pantry late at night to steal food.

In many households, the food was kept under lock and key, but Eleanor's father had never seen the need for that. He felt that if the servants needed to eat, they should feel free to help themselves.

Alison hadn't felt that way, but the pantry still had no lock on it, and while Mrs. Bennett had lived her, it hadn't needed one. The cook had kept a strict accounting of foodstuffs, but that wasn't why there was no pilferage. Mrs. Bennett had kept everyone so well fed that none of the other servants had seen the need to raid the stores.

With Mrs. Bennett gone, however, Alison had changed the spell that bound Eleanor to keep her from the stores. Howse, of course, never appeared in the kitchen, and wasn't going short either, since she shared Alison's meals.

But Eleanor had heard all the servants' gossip, before they'd given notice, and she knew all the tricks for stealing food now that she hadn't known back before Alison came. So if she had even one chance at the pantry—well, she knew how and what to purloin so that even if Alison inspected, it would not be apparent that anyone had been into the stores.

What a thought! No more going to bed hungry—or feeling sick from eating food that had "gone off" and been rejected by Alison because that was all that there was for her to eat. Or at least, there would be none of that if she could bend the spell enough to get into the pantry at least once.

And suddenly, with a great leap of her heart, she realized that within a few days or a week at most, she would have the house to herself, as she always did in spring and fall. The annual pilgrimage to London was coming, when Alison and her daughters went to obtain their spring and summer wardrobes. Always before this, she had found herself restricted to the kitchen and her own room entirely for those few days. But perhaps this spring—

The sound of fashionable shoes with high heels clicking on hard stone broke into her reverie, and she quickly bent to her scrubbing. When Alison appeared in the doorway, striking a languid pose, Eleanor looked up, stony-faced, but did not stop her scrubbing. But she was much more conscious of the fire on the hearth than usual, and to keep her face still, she concentrated on it. The warmth felt—supportive. As if there was a friend here in the room with her. She concentrated on that.

Alison wore a lovely purple velvet tea-gown with ornaments of a cobwebby gray lace, with sleeves caught into cuffs at the wrist. As usual, her every dark hair was in place—and there was a tiny smile on her ageless face. She made a tiny gesture towards her stepdaughter, and Eleanor fought to keep her expression unchanging, as she saw, more clearly than she ever had before, a lance of muddy yellow light shoot from the tip of that finger towards her, and briefly illuminate her.

But she also saw, with a sense of shock, something entirely new. As that light struck her, there appeared a kind of cage of twisted and tangled, darkly glowing cords that pent her in. The cords absorbed the light, writhed into a new configuration, then faded away, and Eleanor sat up straighter, just as she would have if she had felt the compulsion to scrub ebbing.

"That's enough, Ellie," Alison said. "The laundry's been left at the tradesman's entrance. Go get it and put the linens away, then leave the rest for Howse."

"Yes, ma'am," Eleanor said, casting her eyes down, and thinking, wishing with all her might, Tell me you're going to London! Go to London! Stay for a long time, a fortnight, or morel Go to London!

And she bit her lip again to stifle the impulse to giggle, when Alison added thoughtfully, "I believe we'll be going on our London trip in two days, if the weather hold fine. You'll be a good girl while we're gone, and do all your work, won't you, Ellie."

"Yes, ma'am," she replied, getting to her feet, slowly, and brushing off her apron, using both actions as an excuse to keep her head down.

"Go tend the laundry." And once again, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a lance of grayish yellow light strike that tangle of "cords" and make it visible for a moment, saw the cords writhe into a new configuration. But this time she felt something, the faint ghost of the sort of compulsion she usually experienced, driving her towards the hall and the tradesmen's entrance. She allowed it to direct her, because the last thing she wanted was for Alison to guess that her magic was no longer controlling her stepdaughter completely.

As she folded and put away the linens, though, she wondered— what had happened? And why now?

I'd better take advantage of it while I have the chance, she decided, finally. Who knows how long this respite will last?

The usual chores occupied her until dinner, more floor-scrubbing, bath-drawing, tidying and dusting and dishwashing, while Howse tended to her own duties, and Alison and her daughters went out to pay calls or do their "work." It wasn't what Eleanor would have called work—sitting in meetings debating over what sort of parcels should be sent to "our boys in the trenches," or paying visits to the recovering wounded officers in the hospital to "help" them by writing letters for them or reading to them. Alison and her daughters did not deign to "help" mere unranked soldiers.

Eleanor heard them return and go upstairs to change for dinner. That was when she prepared what she was able to cook, then laid the table and waited in the kitchen until summoned by the bell. Then she served the four courses to the four diners in the candlelit dining room with a fresh, white apron over her plain dress. It was ham tonight, from the Swan, preceded by a delicate consomme from a tin, a beetroot salad, and ending with a fine tart from the Browns' bakery. Though this was one of the more difficult times of the day, as she served food she was not allowed to touch and watched the girls deliberately spoil what they left on their plates with slatherings of salt and pepper so that she could not even salvage it for herself, tonight she comforted herself with the knowledge that her dinner was not going to be as meager as it had been for far too long—

While Alison and the girls were lingering over their tart, she went upstairs and turned down the beds, picked up the scattered garments that they had left on the floor and laid them ready for Howse to put away. She swept out the rooms for the last time today, then went back down to the kitchen to wait for them to leave the table. When she heard them going back up to their rooms for the evening, she went into the dining room again to clear the table and return the ham and a few other items to the pantry. But she smiled as she did so, because once she had closed the pantry door, she made a little test of opening the door again—and found that she could.

Ha!

It was her turn to linger now, and she did so over the dishes, over cleaning the kitchen, until she heard all four sets of heels going up the stairs to their rooms. Then she waited, staring into the fire, until the house quieted. Oddly, tonight there seemed to be more than a suggestion of creatures dancing in the flames—once or twice she blinked and shook her head, sure she had also seen eyes where no eyes could be.

And then she stole to the pantry, and opened it again. There was a faint feeling of resistance, but nothing more. And the culinary Aladdin's cave was open to her plundering.

Now, she knew this house as no one else did, and she knew where all of the hiding places in it were. One, in particular, was secure to herself alone. There was a hidden hatch under the servants' stair that for some reason her father had never shown Alison. Perhaps it was because Eleanor had been the one to discover it, and as a child had used it to store her secret treasures, and sometimes even hid in it when she had been frightened by storms. The hatch disclosed a set of narrow stone stairs that led down into a tiny stone cellar that he thought was a priest's hole, perhaps because of the little wooden crucifix, about the size to fit on the end of a rosary, they had found on the floor of the place. Eleanor had always thought it was a place where Royalist spies had hidden; perhaps it had served both functions.

Here Eleanor kept those few things she didn't want to fall into Alison's hands, such as most of the books that she had been using to study for the Oxford entrance examinations, other volumes she managed to purloin in the course of cleaning, and her mother's jewelry. Alison and her daughters didn't know about the jewelry, and never missed the books, which didn't much surprise Eleanor, as they seemed singularly uninterested in reading. Now the place was going to serve another purpose, as the repository for her stolen bounty of food, in case Alison managed to strengthen her magic, and there was not another chance for a while.

For the next hour or so she went back and forth between the pantry and the closet, never carrying much at a time, so that if she heard Alison or the girls coming, she could hide what she had. Jam, jelly, and marmalade, two bags of caster-sugar, some tinned meats and bacon, tinned cream and condensed milk, and many more imperishable things went into that cellar that night. She was very careful not to take the last of anything, and in fact to take nothing that was not present in abundance, removing items from the back of the shelf rather than the front. By the time she was finished, she had a small wealth of foodstuffs hidden away that made her giddy with pleasure.

Then she cut herself a generous slice of ham and a piece of buttered white bread to go with her soup, cut a little slice of the tart, and added milk and sugar to tea made with fresh leaves. And she had the first filling meal she had gotten since Mrs. Bennett left. She felt so good, and so sleepy with content, in fact, that she didn't bother to go up to her own room. Instead, she cleaned up every last trace of her illicit meal, and pulled the pallet she used in cold weather out of its cupboard, spreading it out in front of the fire.

And as she fell asleep, she smiled to think she saw sleepy eyes blinking with contented satisfaction back at her from the coals.

3

March 10, 1917

First London General Hospital

AT THIS TIME OF DAY, the ward was full of people; relatives hovering over their boys—though some of the boys were almost old enough to be Reggie's father, had Devlin Fenyx still been alive. Reggie was in the officer's wards, which meant that he had the luxury of being in the hospital building, and not outside in a tent as the enlisted men were. He usually didn't have any visitors, since his mother was afraid to travel alone and to her, "with a servant" qualified as "alone." Today, however, was different. Two of the men from 11 Squadron were on leave and had come to visit.

"Dashed handsome young fillies they've got hovering about you, Reg," said Lt. Steven Stewart, enviously. One of the "handsome young fillies"—a VAD called Ivy Grove—clearly overheard him. She blushed, bit her lip, and hurried off. Small wonder; almost any pilot got the hero-treatment from the women, and Steven was an infernally handsome fellow, who still hadn't shaken the "Oxford manner."

Reginald Fenyx could not have cared what the VAD nurses—or any others—looked like. All he cared about was that they were there, they talked to him, kept his mind on other things during the day—that they noticed when he was about to "go off," and came over on any pretext to keep the shakes away. Because when they were gone—

Tommy Arnolds, Reggie's flight mechanic and a wizard with the Bristol aircraft, wasn't nearly as subtle as Steven was; he stared after Ivy's trim figure with raw longing. He was a short, bandy-legged bloke, but what he could do with a plane was enough to make the pilot lucky enough to get him weep with joy when he took a bird that had been in Tommy's hands up. "Blimey," Tommy said contemplatively. "Wish they'd send a trim bit like that over, 'stead of those old 'orses—"

"They do send the trim bits over, Tommy," Steven said, fingering his trim moustache with a laugh. "But the old horses keep them out of your way. Your reputation precedes you, old man!"

Reggie managed a real smile, as Tommy preened a little, but his heart wasn't in it. They'd generously spent five hours of leave time here with him, but there was a limit to their generosity.

"And speaking of trim bits—" Steven tweaked the hem of his already perfect tunic. Steven, like Reggie, did not have to rely on the fifty-pound uniform allowance for his outfitting, and like Reggie had been before the crash, he was never less than impeccably turned out. "If Tommy and I are going to find ourselves a bit of company on this leave, we'd better push off. Can't have the PBIs showing up the Flying Corps, what?"

"Thanks for turning up, fellows," Reggie said, fervently. "Give my best to the rest of the lads. But not too soon."

"You can bet on that!" Steven laughed, and he and Tommy sketched salutes and sauntered out of the ward, winking at Ivy, the VAD girl, as they passed her, making her blush furiously.

Reggie lay back against his pillows, feeling exhausted by the effort to keep up the charade that he was perfectly all right, aside from being knocked about a bit. It was grand seeing the fellows, but—it was easier when people he knew weren't here and he didn't have to pretend. He had more in common with the lad in the next bed over, a mere second lieutenant by the name of William West, for all that West was FBI and Reggie was—had been—a pilot, a captain, and an ace at that. All the shellshock victims were in this end of the ward, together. Sometimes Reggie thought, cynically, it was so that their screaming in nightmares and their shaking fits by day wouldn't bother anyone else.

There weren't many shellshock cases in the Royal Flying Corps, anyway. The pilots and their support crew were well behind the lines, out of reach of the guns and the gas. That was the lot of the FBI—the "Poor Bloody Infantry," upon whose lines in the trenches the pilots looked down in remote pity, chattering and clattering through the sky.

Or we do just before Archie gets us, or the Huns shoot us down— Reggie amended, and then the first sight of that azure-winged Fokker interposed itself between him and the ward, and the shaking began—

He clawed at his bedside table for a glass of water, the paper the lads had brought him, anything to distract himself. But then, before he could go into a full-blown attack, something altogether out of the ordinary distracted him. Because, coming towards him down the aisle between the beds, accompanied by his usual medico, Dr. Walter Boyes, was another doctor, but this time it was someone he recognized.

"Captain Fenyx—" Boyes began, quietly, so as not to disturb West, who had subsided into a morphine-assisted sleep,"—I believe you already know my colleague."

"I should say so!" he exclaimed, sitting up straight. He had never been so pathetically glad to see anyone in his life. "Doctor Scott! Maya! I had no idea you were on the military wards!"

"I'm not," the handsome, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman said, with a smile. Her exotic beauty was more than enough to make even the stark white hospital coat and severe black skirt look out-of-the-ordinary. "Good heavens, Reggie, can you see the War Department unbending enough for that? Now, if I were unmarried and prepared to volunteer for Malta, they would take me, and they might even allow me to practice in Belgium or France, but here? Oh, they would accept me as a VAD aide, of course. But because I'm married, they won't take me any other way. Heaven forfend that Peter might have to supervise the household once in a while."

"Well—when you put it that way—" He shrugged. The War Department was full of idiots, everyone knew that. Unfortunately, they were the idiots in charge. Maya Scott and her fellow female doctors, few though they were, would have made a big difference to the wounded. And if they were worried about the morals of the patients being corrupted, or even those of the other military doctors, wouldn't a married doctor be "safer" rather than more dangerous? "But why are you here, then? Surely not just for me?"

"Entirely just for you; I've been sent by a higher power." A little smile curved her lips, suggesting that this was a joke. "Walter is a friend of mine; he worked in our charity clinics before the war," she continued. "I didn't know you were here until Lady Virginia got hold of me two days ago; she gave me your doctor's name, and that was when I went hunting for him and you."

Ah, that explained "higher power." His godmother was a force of nature.

"I would have been here sooner, but until I got hold of Walter, I wouldn't have been allowed near you." It was her turn to shrug. "I'm a female, not your relative, your fiancee, nor a nurse, you see. Never mind that I'm a doctor; evidently it is expected that you would immediately corrupt my morals, or I yours. Fortunately, Walter has made all smooth. He is allowed to bring in anyone he likes as a consulting physician, so long as I don't expect to be paid."

In the course of that exchange, Reggie and Maya communicated something more, wordlessly. A lift of an eyebrow on Reggie's part towards Dr. Boyes—does he know? The tiniest shake of the head from Maya, confirming his initial impression—no. So, Doctor Walter was neither an Elemental Mage himself, nor was he among the few who were not Mages that nevertheless knew of the existence of Mages and magic.

Doctor Maya, however, was an Elemental Mage. In fact, she was an Earth Master.

"Walter, can the patient leave his bed?" she asked in the next moment. "I'd like to talk to him privately."

"I don't want him to put weight on that leg yet, but yes," Doctor Walter replied, and sent the VAD girl for a wheelchair. Then he added, in a hushed voice Reggie was sure he was not meant to overhear, "If you can get something out of him about his experience—"

"That's what I'm here for," Maya said soothingly. "I haven't seen a great many shellshock cases myself, but I've gotten some. Nurses are coming back to us in sad condition, particularly the ones who've been on transports that were torpedoed, or shelled while working near the lines or riding with the ambulances. His grandmother and Lady Virginia DeMarce, his godmother, thought he might be more willing to unburden himself to someone he knows."

Reggie almost laughed with pent-up hysteria. Someone he knew! Good God, if that was all it was! If they only knew, all those medicos— if they only knew!

But the chair arrived, and he levered himself into it, wanting nothing more than to be out of this ward, quickly, where he could finally talk to someone who would at least understand. Because he was not "just" a victim of shellshock. Oh no. That was only the smallest of his problems. . . .

It was an unseasonably warm day, he discovered, as Maya wheeled him briskly and efficiently out into the hospital garden. That was a relief, for she was able to find a little alcove where they could be quite private, and park him with his "back to a wall. He blessed her exquisite sensitivity, but she was an Earth Master, after all, and a Healer to boot, and sensitivity came with that description.

"Well, Reggie," she said, the moment she settled down across from him, with their knees practically touching. She took out a bit of paper from her pocket and consulted it. "I'm going to make this easier and more difficult for you. I have been studying Doctors Freud and Jung's works, and as you heard, I have already seen several normal cases of shellshock. I did my studying of your case before I arrived, so let me tell you quickly what I know, then we'll get to what I don't know. I know you were shot down, your observer was killed—" she looked at the paper in her hand "—Erik Kittlesen, wasn't it?"

He nodded, numbly, both desperately grateful that he wasn't actually having to tell all this himself, and appallingly afraid of what he was going to have to say when she started asking questions.

"You came down close to the Hun side in No-Man's Land. Some of the Huns came to get you out of the wreckage, and a barrage hit, killing everyone but you. Then one of our parties got you out, dragged you to a bunker, and another barrage hit, burying you in the bunker for two days until another rescue party dug you out. Is that the long and the short of it?"

He nodded. His mouth felt horrible dry, and when he licked his lips, he fancied he could still taste that horrible substance that passed for air in the trenches and the bunkers—a fetid murk tainted with the smell of past gas attacks, and thick with the stench of death, of blood and rotting flesh, rats and foul water.

"Now comes the hard part," she said, and reached over to take his unresisting hand. "Now I ask you questions. And Reggie, you must answer them. I can't help you if you don't, or won't."

Once again, he nodded, feeling his throat closing up with panic, and the sting of helpless tears behind his eyelids.

"Why did you get shot down?" she asked implacably. "You are an Air Master, one of the most skilled I know. We both know it wasn't luck that was keeping you in the sky, particularly not given the horrid old rattletraps you were often given. So what happened?"

"I went up," he croaked. "And—Maya, this is a damned wretched thing to say, but—look, the only way I was ever able to face what I was doing was to never, ever think about the Hun as anything other than a target." He made a sound like a laugh. "Actually, I was Erik's only chance to go up at all, which was why I was in a two-seater instead of flying solo as usual. Everyone knew that even though Erik crashed more birds than he flew, anything he aimed at, he hit—he even took down a Hun with a half-brick, once! He'd crashed his plane as usual; the only things available were my usual bird, which was having a wonky engine anyway, and the two-seater. They knew if he was in the observer's seat, I could concentrate on flying the bird and he could concentrate on what he was good at. But if it hadn't been for me, he wouldn't even have been up there that day."

Maya nodded. "I see why you feel doubly responsible." Pilots were not in such plentiful supply that Erik would not have been up on his own. He knew that; he'd been told that too many times. She didn't say it, because she must have known that he'd been told it and didn't believe it, and he was grateful that she didn't say it aloud again because she understood it wouldn't help. There were a great many things in this war that people understood, but didn't say aloud. It was probably the only way most people kept from going mad.

But of course, I'm already mad . . . or getting there. . . .

"But why were you shot down?" she persisted, as if she knew that this was where the first crack had appeared in his armor. Maybe she did.

"Because—" he swallowed. "Because this time, when I went up, there was someone I'd never seen before up there to stop me. Bright blue Fokker. Maya, he was one of us. He was an Air Master too. And—" he shook his head, "and I felt something. From him. Not his thoughts, more like what he was feeling. He was—he was in mourning." He closed his eyes for a moment, to fight down his own tears. Words were totally inadequate to what he had felt in that single moment. Mourning? It was deeper than mourning. It had been self-revulsion, hatred for what the man had been doing, and a terrible, terrible sense of loss.

The Hun hadn't only been mourning what he had to do—he was in mourning for the loss of everything he cared for. "He was—" Reggie groped for words, "flying with sorrow, the deepest, blackest sorrow I ever felt in my life. And it was because by doing his duty, which was the honorable thing to do, he was being forced to kill us, who should have been his comrades. Because his beautiful blue heavens were filled with a rain of blood, and his beautiful blue wings belonged to the Angel of Death. He knew he would never, for however long he lived, fly in skies free of blood. His world was shattered, and he'd never really feel happiness again."

Maya's fingers tightened on his. "Vishnu preserve us," she replied, her voice full of the shocked understanding he had hoped to hear.

"I—couldn't shoot him. He couldn't help but shoot me. I—" he shook his head. "I didn't evade. He got Erik first, then my tank, and then my engine. He got Erik, and I felt him die, and it was my fault— my fault—"

Once again her fingers tightened on his, but she did not say, as so many fools had, that it wasn't his fault. "You made a mistake," she said instead. "At some point, Reggie, you have to stop paying for it, and forgive yourself. But only you can decide how much payment is enough." Then her voice strengthened. "You were shot down. Your collarbone and your knee were both shattered, your ribs were cracked, and I think only your Mastery saved you from worse. Then the Huns came to get you out before your plane went up in flames. Something happened then, too, didn't it?"

"A Hun came to get me out," Reggie corrected. "A young fellow came pelting out regardless—I suppose our boys must have seen what he was doing, because they held their fire. He came pelting out, into No-Man's Land, over the wire, and hauled me out while the bird was burning. And he went back for Erik, and—" he swallowed "that was when the shell hit. Young fellow, he couldn't have been sixteen. Maybe less." He felt his throat closing again at the thought of that earnest young face, at the young voice that told him "Stille, stille, bitte. Ja, das ist gut, stille." "The boys that came after me found some bits of his things, a letter from home, a picture of his mother. His name was Wilhelm, that's Hun for William, like West in the next bed over from me in the ward. FBI, like young Willie, too. Wilhelm Katzel. That's two fellows that died because of me, in less than five minutes."

She nodded, but said nothing for a moment. "I think," she finally said, "When this is over—you should tell his mother how brave he was."

That was not what he was expecting to hear. "How will that help?" he asked angrily.

"I don't know," she replied, not reacting to his anger at all. "But I do know that it won't hurt. It will let her know he hadn't lost his decency or his honor in this vile slaughter, and that's something for her to hold onto. This war has made beasts of so many—perhaps it will comfort her to know that her Wilhelm was still a man."

It was not the answer he had been expecting, and he flushed a little. But she was right. She was very right.

But of course, the worst was yet to come.

"That isn't where the real trouble lies, though, is it?" she continued. "Oh, it's horrible, and you are burdened terribly with guilt, but that isn't the worst." She tugged a little on his hand, forcing him to look up, into her eyes. "The worst came when you were safe, didn't it? In the bunker. Buried alive."

He almost jerked his hand out of hers, and began to shake uncontrollably. "How did you—"

"Reggie, I'm an Earth Master. The ground in France and Belgium is saturated with blood," she said, with a thin veneer of calm over her words. "I know what that attracts. There are monsters in the earth of France, Reggie, and they are fattening and thriving on that slaughter—and when that shell hit that bunker, they had a tidbit of the sort they could only crave and dream about in their power. Air and Earth are natural enemies, and they had you in their territory, in their grasp, to do with what they wanted." His vision began to film over as panic rose in his chest; he clutched her hands, as though clutching a lifeline, as she put into words what he could not. "They had you, Reggie, their greatest enemy, a Master of Air and a Master of the Light, helpless, on their ground." He couldn't see, now, as all the memories came flooding back. He heard his breath rasping in his throat, his heart pounding, and could not move for the fear. Dimly, through the roaring in his ears, he heard her ask the question he did not want to answer.

"What did they do to you, Reggie? What did they do?"

Maya Scott sat with her husband in a place in the Exeter Club where—before her marriage to Peter Scott—no woman had ever been before. It was a lovely day outside, still; the windows stood wide open to the warm air, and the sun streamed down onto old Persian rugs, caressed brown leather upholstery, and touched the contents of brandy bottles with gold.

"So," said the Lord Alderscroft, often called the Old Lion—older now than when she had first met him, and aged by more than years. "You've seen the boy."

She nodded.

Lord Alderscroft sat like the King on his throne, in his wingback chair in his own sitting room in his private suite on the top floor of the Exeter Club, and raised a heavy eyebrow at Maya. "Your report, please, Doctor Scott?"

Maya never sat here without feeling a distant sense of triumph. It had been her doing that had broken down the last three barriers of the White Lodge housed here in the Exeter Club—of gender, lineage, and race. She would have failed the Edwardian tests on all three counts; female, common, and of mixed Indian and British blood. But King Edward was gone, and King George was on the throne, and after the defeat of her aunt, there was not a man on the Council who felt capable of objecting to her presence. And truth to tell, they needed her. They had needed her before the war. She was one of a handful of Earth Masters who could bear to live and work in the heart of a great city.

Now they needed her—and the other women they had admitted to the White Lodge—more than ever. The war had been no easier on the ranks of the Elemental Masters than it was on the common man.

Today, however, triumph was not even in the agenda. "He's in wretched shape, my lord," she said slowly. "It is not helping that so many physicians and most officers, all of whom should know better, are convinced that shellshock is just another name for malingering. Even as he, himself, acknowledges that he is not well, there is the subconscious conviction that if he only had an ounce more willpower, he would get over it and back to the fight. I can tell him differently until I turn as blue as Rama; until he believes it in his heart, he will continue to berate himself even as he suffers."

Lord Alderscroft—who, not that long ago, would have agreed with those physicians and officers—sighed heavily. He knew better now. All Elemental Masters knew better; the war was hellish, but it was worse on the minds and nerves of Elemental Masters. The truth was, most of the Masters that had gone into the trenches, if they survived the senseless, mindless way in which the War Department threw away their lives, were there for less than six months before their minds broke. "So he is in no fit state, as Doctor Boyes reports, with a ripe case of shell-shock as well as physical injuries. And as if that were not enough, then there is what he faced, in the earth."

She shook her head, and swallowed, as her husband closed his hand over hers. She had closed herself off as much as she had dared, but as a Healer and a physician, she had needed to know something of what he had experienced.

She had been ready for it, and of course, it had come at second hand, but it had been too horrific for anyone to really understand without sharing it.

She gave Peter a faint smile of thanks. "You do not wish to know the details, my lord. Horrors. That is enough, I think. The inimical forces of all four Elements can terrify, but I think that those of Earth are most particularly apt at destroying the mind with fear. They swarmed him and tormented him from the moment the earth was shattered around him to the moment that the rescue party broke through and got him out. The records say he was more dead than alive. I am not at all surprised. What I am surprised at is that he has a mind left at all, much less a rational one."

"Well," Alderscroft rumbled, his face creased and re-creased with lines of care, "We humans have taught them about torment and horror all too well, have we not?" He sighed again.

"Do not lay too much upon the shoulders of mere mortals, my lord," Maya replied, grimly. "Recall that it is Healing that is in the Gift of the Earth Mages and Elementals. The converse is harm, and it is naturally true of the dark side of that Element." She thought with pity of the poor fellow, who she last recalled seeing as a bright young Oxford scholar, utterly shattered and weeping his heart out, bent over her knees. It was a state she had wanted to bring him to—for without that initial purging, he could not even begin to heal—but it had been painful for her to do so, and only the fact that she had done it before, to others, even made it possible for her to carry it through. But she was a surgeon, and surgeons became hardened to necessity after a time. You could not cleanse a wound without releasing the infection. You could not heal the mind without letting some of the pressure off. "The larger consequence for us, my lord, is that he has cut himself off from any use of his powers."

Lord Alderscroft closed his eyes. "I feared as much. And we cannot afford that. Too many of us are gone—"

"Nevertheless, he has closed off his mind to his power," she replied. "And it is of no use trying to get him to open it now. He tells me that the things that attacked him destroyed his Gifts, and he believes it with every iota of his being."

"And that isn't true?" A second figure stepped away from the shadows beside the fireplace; another nobleman, Peter Almsley, lean and blond, nervously highbred, and the Scotts' best friend. He was in a uniform, but he was on some sort of special duty with the War Department that kept him off the Front. She suspected that special duty was coordinating the magical defense of the realm. Certainly Alderscroft wasn't young enough anymore to do so.

She closed her eyes for a moment. Even if Fenyx never flew again, he could be put to doing what Almsley was doing—with more effectiveness. The Air Elementals actually controlled winds and weather to some extent, and if an Air Master could see to the physical defenses of the country—

She did not shudder, she had endured worse than bombardment by Zepps and Hun aeroplanes, but—it was hard, hard, to hear the drone of those motors in the sky, in the dark, and look up helplessly at the ceiling and wait for the first explosions and wonder if you were sitting on the target, or if you would be able to scramble away to somewhere safer when you knew where the bombs were falling. And if the latter—who, of your friends, was sitting on the target. If Reggie could be persuaded—

She shook her head. "There is nothing wrong at all with his Gifts," she said, decidedly. "But I think that, in those dreadful two days underground, he understood instinctively that his very power was what attracted the Earth creatures to him, and that if he closed that power off, they would cease to torment him. At some level deeper than thought—Doctor Freud would have called it the id—in the most basic of his instincts, he walled that part of himself away. And now he truly does not believe it exists anymore."

"So you can get him back—" Alderscroft began, eagerly, looking optimistic for the first time this interview began.

But she shook her head emphatically. "Not I. This is too complicated a case for me. Doctor Andrew Pike in Devon is the man you need—"

But Almsley groaned. "Not a chance of a look-in there, Maya. Not now, not ever. It's one thing to unburden his weary soul to you, my heart—but if you call in the good Doctor Pike, or worse, send the boy to him, our Reggie will have to admit that he's gone balmy, and that he can never do."

Maya looked from Almsley to Alderscroft and back again, and felt like stamping her feet with frustration at what she read there. Men! Why did they have to be so stubborn about such things?

"Maya, think," her husband said, quietly. "If he's sick with guilt over the idea that he's malingering, what do you think the mere sight of Andrew Pike at his bedside do to his feelings about himself?"

Defeated, she could only shake her head.

"Going 'round the bend is just not the done thing, my heart," Almsley said sadly. "It's what your dotty Uncle Algernon does, not an officer and a gentleman. Andrew could probably have him right and tight in months, but that doesn't matter. If he saw Andrew, he'd be certain that we all think he's mad, and if he's mad, he's broken and useless, and worse, he's a disgrace to the old strawberry leaves and escutcheon. If he's gone mad, he might just as well die and avoid embarrassing the family."

She leveled her gaze at Alderscroft. "Then you had better hope he can get well and work his way through his troubles on his own," she said, doing her best to keep accusation out of her tone. "But I don't think that he will. Not without a powerful incentive to break through that wall of fear that keeps him away from his power, and I can tell you right now that duty, honor, and pride are not powerful enough. Duty, honor, and pride aren't enough to get him through the shell-shock, much less break through to his Gifts again. Furthermore—"

Should she tell them?

She was a physician; she had to.

"Furthermore, I consider that without Doctor Pike's help, there is a real possibility that he may do away with himself if he can't manage to get himself through. Because I am not sure he can live with the pain, the fear, and the conflicts inside himself as he is now."

There. She'd said it.

She expected them to look shocked, to protest. They didn't; they only looked saddened and resigned.

"It won't be the first one we've lost that way," Almsley said softly, revealing the reason for their reaction. He turned to Alderscroft. "What do you think, send him home on recovery leave?"

Almsley hadn't asked her, but she answered anyway. 'At least if he is at home, he will be in familiar surroundings and far away from anything military. It might help."

Alderscroft nodded his massive head, slowly. "Get his grandmother to keep an eye on him; I think it's the best we can do. I'll talk to some people, and get him leave to recover at home." He turned back to Maya. "Thank you, doctor. You have been of immense help; more than you know. I only wish it were possible to take more of your advice. I promise, we will see to it that everything that can be done, will be. And it will not be for lack of—flexibility—on our part."

That was a dismissal if ever she had heard one, and reluctantly, she allowed her husband to assist her to her feet and took her leave.

But it did nothing to end her anger—which was the only way she could keep her own profound depression at bay. I hate this bloody, senseless, useless, stupid war.

4

March 14, 1917

London

THE ROBINSONS HAD TAKEN THE first train to London, set themselves up at the Savoy Hotel, and gone straight out to take care of the most urgent need for all three of them—new wardrobes. But their visits to the first three fashion houses—their usual haunts—were less than a success.

"Have you ever seen such ugly colors?" Carolyn complained (rather too loudly) to her mother, as she and her sister followed hard on their mother's heels out to the pavement in front of the third. "Drab brown, drab olive, drab navy and drab cream. Khaki, khaki, khaki! And nothing but tweeds and linens! And for spring and summer! What about silk? What about muslin? Do they think we're all Land Girls?"

Her mother shrugged. "We'll try another atelier, dear," she said, with a glance up the street, looking for a taxi. "Someone who isn't trying so hard to be patriotic and dress us all in uniforms."

"I don't see why one has to be plain to be patriotic," Lauralee pouted. Her sister sniffed.

"Plain? Made up like a Guy, more like!" Carolyn exclaimed. "I don't want to look like I'm in uniform and I don't want to look like a—a suffragette! I want—"

"Leave it to me, girls; I have some notions," Alison replied, and spied a free taxi in the same moment. Taxis were thin on the ground in London now, but Alison had no intention of subjecting herself to the Underground or the 'buses. It didn't take much more than a lifted finger and a spark of magic to summon it, as it passed by five other people trying to hail it, including one disgruntled cavalry officer.

She leaned over and gave the driver—a very old man indeed—an address that made him look at her in surprise. But he said nothing, and she took her place beside her daughters. It was pleasantly warm; unpleasantly enough, they were all three wearing last year's spring gowns. This would never do.

To the surprise of her daughters, the establishment that the taxi left them at was not any of the usual fashion houses Alison patronized. She ignored their surprise, for it was painfully clear to her that the usual establishments would not do this year. There was probably a good reason why all the houses that she could afford to patronize were using domestically produced fabrics this spring, and it was a reason she should have anticipated, given the start of rationing.

She would have to resort to another ploy—though the rather grubby theater district was not a place one would normally go to find one's wardrobe. She opened a door with the cryptic words Keplans Haberdashery painted on the frosted glass. The girls followed her up a narrow, rather dirty wooden staircase with no small trepidation; she smiled to herself, knowing what awaited them at the top.

She and the girls emerged from this place feeling a glow of triumph. Here, at least, fashion was not being subjected to patriotism. But then again, the ladies who frequented this dressmaker absolutely required every aid to seduction that fine clothing could provide, for most of them had "arrangements" with the gentlemen of Whitehall, the City, and both Houses of Parliament—arrangements that did not include wedding rings. As a consequence, they were unlikely to sacrifice beauty for the appearance of respectability. Alison knew of this place from her early days as one of the demimondaine—but of course, unlike the rest of her sisters-in-sin, she'd had the means at her disposal to ensure she got a wedding ring before too long into her arrangement.

This particular dressmaker spent half the time creating costumes for the theater, and half dressing the kept ladies of the town; but because she did the former, she had a huge storehouse of fabric to pull from. After the third house had disappointed, Alison had come to the reluctant conclusion that it was possible the war and the Hun submarine blockade had begun to affect even those with money to spend on London dressmakers. This dressmaker had only confirmed that, as she had pulled out roll after roll of silk and muslin with the comment, "You won't see that, thanks to the Kaiser." Silks came from China by way of Paris; muslin from India or the United States. Both had to come by way of the ocean, and between ships being sunk, and ships being commandeered to bring over military goods—luxury goods probably still were coming, but now their prices had gone beyond the reach of a minor industrialist's widow.

Of course, even in Broom, one didn't go to a theatrical costumier for one's wardrobe—but Alison had a way around that. When the dresses arrived in their plain packaging, she would have Ellie cut the labels out of last year's gowns and sew them into the unlabeled new ones. Perhaps it was a bit foolish to do so, but after all, the laundry was sent out—and the laundress would take note if this year's gowns had no labels anymore—or worse, had labels from Keplans Haberdashery rather than a fashion house that was cited in the London society pages.

Half of keeping up appearances was in attending to details.

Alison smiled, as the girls chattered happily on the way back to the Savoy. There was a slight drawback to patronizing Miss Keplan. They would have to stay in London for nearly a week to accomplish all the fittings, whereas the establishments they usually used had mannequins and fitting-dummies made to all three women's measure. Still, the results would be worth the extra days. The girls would look like butterflies among the caterpillars at every garden party and fete this spring and summer. Men responded to these things. They would outshine much prettier girls, just because their frocks were prettier. With any luck, one of them, at least, would catch someone with a title, money, or better still, both to his name.

Robinson's fortune was reasonable, and since by magically enhanced maneuvering, Alison had secured the monopoly of supplying sacks for sandbags to the army, it was not likely to run out any time soon—but Alison was weary of being reasonable, weary of Broom, weary of being the leading light in a claustrophobically tiny and insignificant social sphere. She had wearied of it very soon after ascending to the throne of unofficial queen of Broom. She had much larger ambitions.

Alison aspired to Longacre Park.

It was not a new desire. As a scrawny adolescent, hard-eyed with ambition, she had aspired to the circles of those who feted royalty. She would gather with other spectators on the pavement whenever a grand party or ball was being held, and vow that one day she would be among such invitees. When she had been taken up by an aging courtesan with enough of the gift of Earth Magery to recognize it in another, she had seen it as a first step to those circles and deserted her dreary working-class family, even though all such a relic of Victoria's time could hope for was the company of prosperous shopkeepers and minor industrialists.

But Alison had bided her time, and ensnared the first of the unmarried gentlemen moderate means to cross her path, sacrificing wealth temporarily for respectability. She had slipped up a trifle, allowing him to get her with child twice—well, he was more virile than she had thought. She had rid herself of him soon enough, which left her a comfortably off widow, and had laid the foundations for better conquests by learning the lessons that would fit her for the circles of the exalted, while at the same time mastering her Magery. Etiquette, elocution—especially elocution, for Bernard Shaw was right, the wrong accent guaranteed failure at this game—she had instructors for everything. A good nanny for the children and the proper boarding schools gave her the time she needed to attain full command of Earth Magic at the same time.

That had been at the hands of a male Earth Master, of course, and a suitably old one, who flattered himself that the attentiveness of this attractive widow was genuine and not inspired by the desire to have all of his secrets. Strange how male mages never seemed to learn from the lesson of Merlin and Nimue. A female would not have been so easy to manipulate, nor so hopelessly naive. She had learned all he had to teach, and then—well, he got his reward, and had not survived die experience. He had, however, died with a look of incredulous pleasure on his face. She had owed him that much. She wondered what the coroner and undertaker had made of it. And had made of the fact that he might have been sixty, but when he died, he had looked ninety.

"Mama, we're here]" Carolyn called out, shaking her out of her reverie. She followed the girls out of the taxi, paid and tipped the driver, and entered the hotel.

No one took any note of them—well, no one except a couple of young officers in the lobby who gazed at the girls appreciatively. She repressed a grimace. Had the family been of note, there would be concierges and porters swarming about them, eager to know their slightest whim, even with the hotel staff so seriously depleted by the war—

Well, if she had anything to say about it, they would be swarmed, one day.

They entered the elevator, and with a nod and a shilling to the operator, ascended to their floor.

Which was not the best floor. Respectable, and the denizens of Broom would have been overwhelmed by the elegance, but it was by no means the best the Savoy had to offer. And that rankled.

But she would not show that before the girls. They required ambition, and they had it, but it must be unclouded by envy. Envy would put disagreeable lines in their faces. They must be like athletes, or perhaps warriors, with their eyes and minds firmly fixed on the prize. They must be ruthless, of course, but they should never waste time on so unprofitable an emotion as envy.

The girls fluttered into the salon, still chattering about the gowns. They understood completely that they must not say where the gowns were coming from, of course, but they were bewitched, properly bewitched, by the pastel silks and delicately printed muslins that had been spread out for their approval, and the elegant copies of the gowns that the other fashion houses were showing. As Alison had well remembered, the dressmaker was a very clever little woman; within days of new gowns being shown for the season, she had sketches of every one of them, and was making copies.

And the gowns that she copied were not those of the houses that Alison could afford to patronize. Oh no. These were the gowns that would make their appearance on the lawns of stately homes like Longacre Park. . . .

For the truly, fabulously wealthy, and the extremely well-connected, were no more affected by the blockade than the theatrical dressmaker was. In the case of the latter, it was because she had an entire warehouse of fabrics stockpiled, and besides that, access to dozens, perhaps hundreds of old gowns and costumes that could be remade. In the case of the former—well, where the habitues of the Royal Enclosure were concerned, a bolt or two of fabric could be brought over, somehow. . . .

Well, perhaps this would be the year. And if the faintly frivolous gowns caused a stirring of dismay at the Broom cricket games, or the country club tennis matches, well, perhaps the owners of the gowns could move into territory this summer where their appearance would harmonize with the surroundings, rather than stand out from them.

She shook off her reverie. There was, of course, more to this biannual visit than just the replenishing of a wardrobe. She had other calls to make while she was here.

"I'm going out, girls," she called out to them. "Have your dinner sent up. And you are not—"

"On any account to stir from these rooms," they replied in chorus, and ended with a giggle.

"Practice your charms," she said, with a lifted brow.

"Oh, Mama—" Lauralee objected. "They're so much more difficult here!"

"All the more important that you learn how to set them here," she replied severely. "You have no more magic than the old woman who taught me—but if I have anything to say about it, you'll learn how to make much better use of it than she did." A thought occurred to her that would give them malicious amusement, and would set their minds on the proper task. "Our windows overlook the street. Why don't you exercise your skills and your minds by making unsuitable persons conceive of a passion for one another?"

"Oh, Mama!" Carolyn exclaimed, delight sparking in her eyes. "May we?"

"I would not have told you to do so if I did not mean it," she replied, with a little smile of her own. "Make me a thorough report when I return."

She telephoned the Exeter Club as they set themselves and the small bits of apparatus they would need at the window. There would be no need to find taxis for this visit. Lord Alderscroft would send a car. This was, after all, the business of the War Office.

Maya narrowed her eyes suspiciously as she watched Lord Alderscroft's visitor. He had not invited her into his own rooms; instead, they were meeting in the same Aesthetic public dining room that she had been taken to the first time she entered the doors of the Exeter Club.

What she had not known then was that one of the mirrors was one-way, and hid a tiny spyhole. She didn't think that anyone had been watching her that time, but even if they had been, they hadn't learned anything they couldn't have learned by watching her openly.

Alderscroft wanted her assessment of someone he wanted to keep an eye on Reggie Fenyx. It was another Earth Master. And already Maya disliked her.

"Really?" the elegant woman said, her eyes widening slightly. "Young Fenyx is so badly off as all that?"

No, Maya did not like Alison Robinson; she did not trust Mrs. Robinson one tiny little bit. She had no reason for these feelings, other than her instinct, though, which was not enough to give as a reason to Lord Alderscroft, who distrusted feminine intuition.

Were the rumors true that far too many people that Alison Robinson was intended to keep watch on died instead? And was that enough of a reason for suspicion? Of course, they had all been spies for the Hun, and there was never any reason to point to Alison Robinson as the cause of their deaths but—

But—

Maya toyed with her tea on the other side of the one-way mirror, listened as Alderscroft assigned Alison Robinson to keep an eye on Reginald Fenyx, and reflected with some relief that this was a perfectly absurd assignment. After all, someone like Mrs. Robinson, the widow of a mere small manufacturer, was not going to have entree into—

"But Lord Alderscroft," Alison said, smiling, "This is really quite impossible! I have no entree into such exalted social circles! Why, I should not be able to do more than glimpse the young man at a distance! The closest approach I could manage would be in the autumn, as the hunt goes by, if he even participates in the hunt at all! You know I have no objection to doing anything you and the War Office might ask of me, but really, dropping me behind enemy lines and asking me to pass myself off as a kleine hausfrau would be simpler!"

"Ah, erm—" Alderscroft coughed. "Well, perhaps I should—"

"If I am to carry out this assignment, you shall have to manufacture an appropriate background for me," the wretched woman went on, to Maya's dismay. "You'll have to find an impoverished line in Burke's with a daughter called Alison of the proper age, one that might well have decided that ungenteel comfort was preferable to leaking roofs and no proper plumbing. And then you'll have to arrange a proper introduction to his mother, by letter if nothing else."

"That will take time, I'm afraid," said Alderscroft, sounding apologetic.

"I can wait," she replied gaily, with a delicate little laugh. "After all, a job worth doing is worth doing properly. Thank you, my lord. This is much preferable to investigating the occasional foreigner on a walking tour through Shakespeare country." That sweet little laugh grated on Maya's nerves. One Earth Master to another—that woman was altogether too well shielded. But then, London was unbearable for an Earth Master without being shielded . . . and although it would have been much more polite to forego her shields within the Exeter Club, she wasn't a member of the Lodge, so she couldn't know that it was safe to do so. So that was no good reason to mistrust her, or at least, it was not a reason that Alderscroft would accept.

The creature was back to harping on that introduction. Maya had seen more than her share of social climbers in India, and she knew another one the moment she saw her. Though she might not be able to read Mrs. Robinson, she didn't have to in order to recognize those signs.

Doesn't she have daughters? Oh yes . . . planning on marrying into the family, are you, my dear? If you can manage it, that is. Well, there was the one saving grace of Reggie's condition; he was so heavily blocked that the Robinson woman could run him down with a locomotive-sized love spell and he'd be impervious to it. He was, in fact, the mirror opposite to an Elemental Master now, he was powerfully unmagical. She could throw spells at him for a week, and all that would happen would be that they would be swallowed up without a trace. And as for simple vamping—

Our Reggie's had every sort of woman there is fling themselves at his head by now. He's not going to think much of a couple of provincial belles hanging out for a title and a fortune. And if you can't recognize that, dear lady, you are an utter fool.

And sure enough, she was back on that so-precious introduction again. "It probably should be a letter, Lord Alderscroft," she was saying, with a melting smile. "Or better still, two—one to Lady Devlin directly and one I can hand-carry. Say that—oh, I am too diffident to push myself on her, but would she please look me up as I'm too terribly alone down there in the village?"

Maya gritted her teeth. Oh, please rescue me from these wretched peasants, she means. And she knew that Alderscroft's subconscious would recognize her tone and the cadence of her speech as well as her words and respond to it in spite of the fact that he knew she was as common as a dustbin. That was because she had the proper accent, and the proper manner, and everything in his upbringing and training was screaming out to his subconscious that here was gentry. For one moment she hated Alderscroft, his automatic response to the proper turn of phrase, his automatic assumption that anyone born to the strawberry leaves was "one of us" and deserving of special treatment and protection.

For one moment, she hated them all, and felt a powerful sympathy for the socialists and the Bolsheviks, and it was very tempting to think about throwing a bomb or two into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, just to shake them up a bit. Certainly you could fire a cannon off through there and never hit anyone who would be missed by society—

But then good sense overcame her, and she sighed, and acknowledged that there were aristocrats who were good stewards, and useful. And as for the rest, she forgave Alderscroft and his set for being idiots, and went back to paying attention to the conversation.

Well, there was one thing that being born a half-caste in India was good for, and that was in knowing what wouldn't work with the British aristocracy. Though she might very much like to point out to the old lion that the Robinson woman had played him like salmon on her line, it would do no good at all.

No, she would simply tell Alderscroft that the woman was heavily shielded and couldn't be read—that she certainly had ulterior motives for wanting that introduction and remind him of the two daughters looking for husbands—and that Fenyx's own grandmother would do a much better job of keeping an eye on him than any stranger ever could.

And then she would go confide her real feelings to her husband Peter—who would certainly, at that point, take them to his "Twin." And there was no one that Peter Almsley did not know among the Elemental Mages inside the peerage. Almsley's grandmother, who was herself a powerful Elemental Master, almost certainly knew Reggie's aunt, who was another. And when those two heard what she had to say. . . .

Now Maya smiled for the first time since she began listening to the conversation, struck by the mental image of a herd of water-buffalo surrounding an injured calf to protect it from a tigress.

The tigress had no notion of what she was about to face.

Alison was pleased with herself. Despite some setbacks, this trip to London had been unexpectedly productive. She sat down at the little desk in the sitting room of their suite to catch up on her correspondence, while the girls unpacked the day's purchases.

"Mama," said Carolyn, idly tracing the line of the fringe on the new shawl she had purchased that morning, "What do you know about the Americans getting into the war?"

Alison looked up from the letter she was writing to Warrick Locke. "The Americans have no intention of entering the war, child. President Wilson is a pacifist. If the sinking of the Lusitania did not accomplish it, nothing will. Why?"

"Well," Carolyn persisted, with a small, sly smile playing about her lips, "It's just that—you had rather they didn't, wouldn't you?"

"It would interfere greatly with my plans, yes," she said sharply. "And it would probably interfere with our income as well. Why do you ask?"

"She asks because she's been meeting with that American boy, from the embassy in the tea room," Lauralee interrupted, frowning with jealousy at her sister. "And she doesn't want to get in trouble over it, so she wants to make you think she's been doing it for—"

"Lauralee—" Alison held up a warning hand. "First, do not frown. Frowns do not improve your looks, and cause wrinkles. Secondly, let your sister answer for herself. Carolyn?"

"He is the ambassador's son," Carolyn protested, pouting prettily, in a way that Alison approved. "And you know Mama has been busy, and you know we've been hearing rumors in the hotel! I thought I ought to find out at first hand!"

"And it has nothing to do with the fact that he's tall, and blue-eyed, and looks like—" Lauralee muttered, sullenly.

"And don't allow jealousy to show, Lauralee," Alison reproved absently. "It gives one jowls. What did the young man tell you, Carolyn?"

"That the President will certainly enter the war next month!" Carolyn said in triumph. "He's going home to enlist! So are most of the young men on the embassy staff!"

Alison's lips tightened. This was no part of her plans. At the moment, the war was at a stalemate—both sides were worn out and weary, and the conflict might well drag on for years, which was very good news for the Earth Elementals that she favored, and for her plans concerning Reggie Fenyx. For the latter, she planned more fear—her Elemental creatures making his life a never-ending round of attacks of terror—until the one girl who could drive them away appeared in his life. At which point, he would probably marry her on the spot. Or at least be willing to.

But to complete the plan, she would need time. Time for the boy to heal physically enough to be sent home on recovery leave. Time for Lord Alderscroft's introduction to bear fruit. Time for her spells to work, time for Carolyn—or Lauralee—to be the answer to his prayers, time for him to propose and for a proper society wedding. And then more time, for she did not intend for him to survive the war, and he would have to recover from his shellshock and go back to the Air Corps, and if the Yanks entered the War—

America was full of brash young men who were perfectly willing to fling themselves into combat. America was wealthy; within months she could turn her factories from making frying pans into making cannon and machine-guns. And America had immense, untapped resources on her own soil; she did not depend on ships to bring those resources to the factories. If America entered the war, it could be over within a year.

Unless—

She couldn't stop them. But she could add a new enemy to the equation . . . one that should add to the attrition in the trenches, and slow the number of troops coming over.

"Carolyn, dear, I believe that we ought to hold a little farewell dinner for all those fine young men at the embassy," she said, in a tone that made Carolyn's eyes narrow. "We ought to thank them for being so willing to serve. Invite them to a little supper tomorrow night."

Lauralee also caught the scent of something in the air. "Mama—" she began, then shook her head. "Come along, Carolyn. Let's go write invitations. I think there are six or seven of them, including the ambassador's son, Mama."

"When you are finished writing the invitations, make the supper arrangements with the Savoy chef," Alison replied, already unpacking what she needed from her trunk. "You should know what to do already."

"Yes, Mama," her daughters chorused, and Alison smiled with content. Well-trained and obedient, everything a mother could ask for.

By the time that all the arrangements were complete, and the invitations sent to the embassy by messenger, Alison was ready. Her implements—deceptively simple ones—were set out on the thick silk cloth that she used as her portable Working table. It already had the runes and circles of containment embroidered into it, dyed with blood—hers, and others. She spread it out over the table they used when they dined en-suite, summoned the girls, doused the electric lights, and lit the candles she had unpacked.

"This may be one of the most underrated incantations in our arsenal, girls," she said, as the two of them moved closer to stand on either side of her. "And yet, it requires surprisingly little power, especially here, in the city. We are going to call an Earth Elemental. The trick to this is that you have to remember to be very specific about what you want from this entity. You already know that one of the great Gifts of the Earth Mage is to heal—but the converse is also true. Watch."

With the precision of a surgeon, Alison placed a deceptively plain bowl (made of clay dug from a graveyard and fired in the same fire as a cremation) in the center of her Working cloth. Into it she dropped a tiny bit of rotting meat (she always kept some sealed in a small jar with her when she traveled), and several more equally distasteful ingredients, burying them all beneath a layer of dirt dug from the piles of tin-waste near a mine. Then she closed her eyes, held her hands over the bowl, and let the power flow from her, into it, chanting her specific invocation under her breath and concentrating with all of her might, and the sullen ocher-colored energies flowed out of her fingertips and into the bowl, pooling there in the candlelight.

Carolyn gasped, and at that sign, she opened her eyes.

The Earth Elemental standing in the now-empty bowl might not look like much—it was a squat little putty-colored nothing, with the barest suggestions of limbs and a head, the sort of crude and primitive object that might be found in an ancient ruin. It looked utterly harmless—but properly used, it was one of the most powerful of all of the inimical Earth Elementals, because it was one of the most insidious.

It was called a maledero, and it brought, and spread, disease.

"I need an illness," she told it. "One that spreads in the air. It should seem harmless, but kill. I don't want it to fell everything that catches it, no more than one in four, but no less than one in ten. It should bring death quickly when it does kill, it should lay out those it does not kill, and it should be hardest not on the very young nor the very old, but those in the prime of life. It should spread rapidly, and be impossible to stop, because by the time victims are dying, it should have passed on to others."

The putty-colored thing smiled, showing a mouth full of jagged and rotting teeth, while above the mouth, a pair of bottomless black eyes looked at her. "How if it spreads through a sneeze?" it suggested. "If it be spread by any other means, this might be countered."

She nodded. "Ideal. There will be six young men here tomorrow night for dinner before they journey homewards. You will infect them, and only them, and you will lie dormant within them until they have ended their journey in a place where there will be thousands of young men like them. Then you will release yourself, and be free to spread as far as you please, across the whole world, if you like—except to myself and my daughters."

"Easily done," the thing croaked, and it—divided, right before their eyes, into six identical creatures, each one-sixth the size of the original. "We pledge by the bond," they chorused.

Alison nodded, and tapped the side of the bowl with her willow-wand. "Then I release from the bowl. When you have infested the young men, you will be released from the room."

She inscribed the appropriate sigils in the air, where they glowed for a moment, then settled over the six creatures and were absorbed.

"When you have come to the place across the sea where thousands of young men have gathered to train as warriors," she continued, still inscribing the sigils of containment in the air, "You will be free to infect and spread as far as you please, save only myself and my daughters," she wrote her own glyph and those of Carolyn and Lauralee, and the sigil of prohibition on top of those three names. All this sank down to rest briefly on the little Elementals, before being absorbed into them. The flow of power was minimal—one of the reasons why this was such a useful conjuration.

"And now, you may conceal yourself within this room, until the vessels have come," she concluded, breaking the containment with a flourish of her wand. The entities gave her a mocking little bow, and faded away.

The girls looked at her, wide-eyed. "Did you just—create a disease?" Lauralee gaped.

She shrugged. "It is better to say that I altered one to suit our purposes. It will probably be a pneumonia or influenza, but when it is released, it will be something quite different from any other of its kind. It will certainly be bad enough to decimate the ranks of the Americans long enough to keep them from winning the war in a few months. And that is all that we will need." She smiled at her girls, who stared at her, wide-eyed. "I doubt it will kill one in four of those that are really healthy; the Elemental I conjured is not strong enough for that. But it will cause a great deal of havoc. That is something else to remember. Sometimes you do not need to confront your enemy directly; you only need to interfere with him."

She began putting her supplies away; neither girl offered to help, as was proper. She would not have allowed them. They were never to touch her Working materials.

That, after all, was how she had managed to get control over her teachers.

"And now," she added brightly, putting the last of her equipment away and locking the little trunk in which it was kept. "I believe it is time we went downstairs to dine."

5

March 14, 1917

Broom, Warwickshire

WHEN ELEANOR WAS CERTAIN THAT Alison and the girls were on the train to London, the first thing she did was to go straight to the kitchen, throw open the pantry doors and plan herself a feast.

Brushing aside Alison's magically laid prohibitions like so many cobwebs, Eleanor could not help but gloat. She felt the barriers, certainly, but she was able to push right through them. And the irony of it was, there had never been any good reason to make the pantry off-limits while the Robinsons were gone, nor to restrict Eleanor to the foodstuffs that Alison allowed her to keep in the kitchen. When they returned, there were things in here that would have had to be thrown in the bin because they were spoiled, that Eleanor could perfectly well have eaten while the others were gone. It made no sense, no sense at all.

It was all just spite, just pure meanness.

She surveyed the shelves, and decided that she would clean out her ever-simmering soup-pot and give it a good scrubbing before starting a new batch, while she ate those things that would go bad before long. And she could include the end of that ham in the soup.

It wasn't all cream for her, though; most of Alison's magics still worked. Before she had done much more than empty out the soup-pot into a smaller vessel to leave on the hearth, and fill the pot with soapy water, the compulsions to clean struck her. Up the stairs she went, discovering that she still had to sweep and dust, air the rooms out and close them up again, mop and scrub down the bathroom. True, she didn't have to spend as much time at it, nor work quite as hard, but she couldn't fight the compulsion off altogether. And although she tried, she discovered that she couldn't leave the house and garden either, even with Alison gone. But after some experimentation, she had the measure of the compulsions. She finished everything she needed to do in the upstairs rooms by luncheon, which meant that she would have the rest of the day free for herself.

The first thing that she did was to make herself a proper luncheon, and to read while she ate it; she chose a book from the library, a room which had been mostly unused since her father died.

She ate in the library, too, in defiance of crumbs—after all, she was the one who was going to be doing the cleaning-up—curled up in her father's favorite old chesterfield chair with her feet to the fire she built in the fireplace.

After she had finished eating, the compulsions urged her into work briefly, but she discovered that she could satisfy them merely by making a few swipes with a dust-mop and the broom in each room so long as they were visibly clean. By this time her soup-pot had soaked enough, so she gave it a good scrubbing inside and out, and put beans to soak in it. She returned again to the library with a tray laden with teapot and the cakes that would have gone stale, there to lose herself in a book until the fading light and growing hunger called her back to the kitchen and that feast she had promised herself.

Then—luxury of luxuries!—she drew herself a hot bath, and had a good long soak and a proper hair-washing. Baths were what she got at the kitchen sink these days, and often as not, in cold water. She used Lauralee's rosewater soap, knowing from experience that it was something Lauralee wouldn't miss, whereas if she purloined Alison's Spanish sandalwood, or Carolyn's Eau de Nil bars, they would be missed. After a blissful hour immersed to the neck in hot water, and an equally blissful interlude spent giving her hair the good wash she had longed for, she emerged clean and scented faintly with roses.

Her hair wasn't very long, though it was unlike the girls' ultra-fashionable bobs—Alison hacked it off just below her shoulders on a regular basis—so it didn't take long to dry in front of the kitchen fire. She slipped a bed-warmer into her own bed to heat it while she dried her hair, and after banking the fires in the kitchen and the library, and making sure the stove had enough fuel to last through the night and keep the hot-water boiler at the back of it 'warm, she went to bed at last feeling more like her old self than she had since before her father had left on that fateful trip.

She fell asleep at once, relaxed, warm, and contented.

She hadn't expected to dream, but she did. And her dreams were—rather odd. Full of fire-images, of leaping flames themselves, of odd, half-fairy creatures whose flesh glowed with fire and who had wings of flame, of the medieval salamanders that were supposed to live in fires, of dragons, and of the phoenyx and the firebird. They weren't nightmares, nothing like, even though she found herself engulfed by fires that caressed her like sun-warmed silk.

In fact, she found herself wearing the flames, like an ever-changing gown. In her dreams, she found these mythical beings welcoming her as a friend, and in her dreams, that seemed perfectly natural and right. They were lovely dreams, the best she'd had since before Alison came—and she didn't want to wake up from them.

The compulsions broke into those dreams, jarring her awake her at dawn.

Full of resentment, she resisted them for a moment, pondering those dreams while they were still fresh in her mind. What on earth could they mean? That they meant something, she was sure.

And once or twice, hadn't she felt a sense of familiarity about them? As if the things she did and saw were calling up an echo, faint and far, in her memory?

Finally she could resist the compulsions no longer, for her legs began to twitch, and a nasty headache started just between her eyebrows. She knew those signs of old, and got reluctantly out of bed to start her round of morning chores.

At least she was going to get more to eat this morning than a lot of tasteless porridge.

The sun was just coming up over the horizon, and distant roosters were crowing, as she began the day. This was the day of the week when Eleanor usually did the heavy laundry, the sheets and the towels, and her own clothing, and there was no real reason to change her schedule. Usually she looked forward to the day, as she often got a chance to wash up in the laundry-water, though the lye-soap was harsh enough to burn if she wasn't careful.

She went out to the wash-house in the little shed at the back of the garden to fire up the wash-boiler out there, a huge kettle built right into a kind of oven, pump it full of cold water, and add the soap. She returned to the house and collected all of the linen before breakfast. A glance up at the sky told her that the day was going to be fair again—a good thing, since it meant she could hang things out in the sunlight, and wouldn't have to iron them dry. With even Howse gone—Alison wouldn't have traveled a step without her maid—there was less of the wash than usual, but Eleanor was feeling unusually energetic. Perhaps it was simply that she wasn't forced to do her work on a couple of spoonfuls of unflavored oat-porridge and a cup of weak tea.

She actually enjoyed herself; the winter had been horribly, dreadfully cold, and doing the household laundry had been nothing short of torture. Today—well, it was cold, but briskly so, and it was grand to have the sun on her back as she pinned up the sheets and towels. By mid-morning, it was all washed and wrung dry and hanging up in the garden, and Eleanor was scrubbing the kitchen floor, exactly as she usually did on wash-day, though it wasn't often that she was done this early.

And that was when a knocking at the kitchen door startled her so much that she yelped, and dropped the brush into her bucket of water with a splash.

She stared at the closed door, sure that what she had heard must have been some accident of an echo—someone out in the street, perhaps, or knocking at one of the neighbors' gates.

But the rapping came again, brisk and insistent.

Who could be knocking at this door? Surely no one knew that she was here—

It must be a tradesman. Or someone about a bill. It couldn't be a delivery; Alison was punctilious about canceling all deliveries when she expected to be gone. The old cook had been quite incensed about that—"As if we're of no account and can live on bacon and tinned peas while she swans about London!"—but she had even done so back when the house was full of servants.

Not that I would mind if there had been a mistake! A delivery of baked goods would be jam on top of the cream. . . .

The knocking came again. Whoever was there wasn't going away. She got to her feet, and slowly opened the door.

There was a woman there—perhaps Alison's age, or a little older, but she was nothing like Alison. Her graying brown hair was done up in a knot at the back of her head from which little wisps were straying. Friendly, amber-brown eyes gazed warmly at Eleanor, though the focus suggested that the gaze was a trifle short-sighted. Her round face had both plenty of little lines and very pink cheeks. She was dressed quite plainly, in a heavy woolen skirt and smock, with an apron, rather like a local farmer's wife, complete with woolen shawl wrapped around herself. She smiled at Eleanor, who found herself smiling back.

"Hello, my dear," the woman said, in a soothing, low voice that tickled the back of Eleanor's mind with a sensation of familiarity. "I'm Sarah Chase."

Sarah Chase! Eleanor knew that name, though she had never actually met the woman. Sarah Chase was supposed—at least by the children of Broom—to be a witch!

Not a bad witch, though—she didn't live in a cobwebby old hut at the edge of the forest, she lived right in the middle of Broom itself, in a tidy little Tudor cottage literally sandwiched in between two larger buildings. On the right was the Swan pub, and on the left, the village shop. Any children bold enough to stand on the threshold of the door and try to peer into the heavily curtained windows never were able to see anything, and the extremely public situation meant that their mothers usually heard about the adventure and they got a tongue-lashing about rude behavior and nosy-parkers. No one in Eleanor's circle of friends had ever seen Sarah Chase, in fact—

But here she was, standing on the threshold, a covered basket in one hand, the other outstretched a little towards Eleanor.

"Well, dear," the woman prompted gently. "Aren't you going to ask your godmother inside?"

Godmother?

Her mind was still taking that in, as her mouth said, without any thought on her part, "Come in, Godmother." And the village witch stepped across the threshold and entered the kitchen like a beam of sunshine.

For the third time in her life, Eleanor's life turned upside down.

She sat, in something of a daze, on a stool beside the kitchen fire, where her prosaic soup-pot full of beans and the end of the ham simmered, and listened to impossible things.

Things which she never would have believed—if her finger wasn't buried beneath the hearth-stone.

Sarah looked perfectly comfortable in the sunny kitchen with its blackened beams and whitewashed walls. Eleanor never even thought to invite her into the parlor. But then, these were not particularly discussions for the parlor.

Eleanor was hearing, for the first time, that the woman her father had thought he had married was no more than a fraction of what she actually was.

"... so your father never knew, of course," Sarah concluded. "Never knew that your mother was a Fire Master, or that we were such friends, she and I, never even knew such a thing as magic existed at all." Her cheeks went pinker, and she gave Eleanor an apologetic little shrug. "That's the way of it, usually, when one of Us marries one of Them, Them as has no magic. We generally keep it to ourselves, for more often than not it does no good and a great deal of harm to try and make them understand. The ones with minds stuck in the world they can see are usually made very unhappy by such things. Either they think they have gone mad, or they think their spouse has, and in either case it only ends in tears and tragedy." She nodded wisely. "Like the Fenyxes. Him and his father, they have the magic—or Lord Devlin did before he died, but Lady Devlin, she's got no more idea than a bird."

Eleanor gaped at her. This was somehow harder to believe than that her own mother had magic. The Fenyx family? Were what Sarah called Elemental Masters?

Sarah went right on, not noticing Eleanor's state of shock—or else, determined to get out everything she needed to say without interruption. "So we met here, of a night, or of an afternoon, over cups of tea as two old friends from such a small place often do, and your father would look in on us and laugh and ask us if we were setting the world aright, and of course, we never told him that we were—in small ways, of course, but small ways have the habit of adding up."

"You were—setting the world aright?" Eleanor repeated, and shook her head. "But how—"

"A little magic here, a little magic there; hers more than mine, you understand, since I'm but a mere Witch, and she was a Master. But— oh, she would speak to the Salamanders of a night, and find out whose chimneys were getting over-choked with soot, and I'd have a word with the owner of the house by-and-by, and Neil Frandsen would come along and clean it, and there'd be no chimney fire, do you see?"

Eleanor blinked again. "Is that the plumber, Mr. Frandsen? The man that cleans chimneys with a shotgun?"

Sarah threw back her head and laughed. "Oh, aye! But less often then than he does now, I'm afraid—he was nimbler when he was young; now he don't like to go atop the houses much. But you see what we did? And there was other things—never a house-fire have we had hereabouts once she came into her powers, nor a barn-fire, and no accidents with fire either. If a cottager's baby tumbled into a fire, it tumbled right back out again, with just enough scorching on his smock to make his mama take better heed. No fires from a coal hopping out; no curtains blowing into candles nor gas-flames. Sometimes it isn't so much doing things that's important as it is keeping them from happening." She sighed. "I remember how she used to put you in your cradle next to the fire, or once you were old enough, just on a blanket. No worries you'd be burned, of course—the Salamanders used to frisk and play around you, and you'd laugh and try to catch them with your little hands. Clear enough it was, you'd taken after her. And then—she died."

"She drowned," Eleanor whispered, and shuddered. All her life, the one thing she'd been afraid of was water. Sarah nodded.

"The enemy Element," Sarah said sadly. "The Element that hates hers; the river flooded, you see, and to this day, I don't know if it was accident or an enemy. She could have told me, but—well, the river flooded and washed out the bridge as she was trying to get across to get home to you. Her allies had no power to save her. And your father, well, he couldn't bear to look upon me, who was her close friend, so I stayed away. And you seemed to be flourishing, and I heard about you going up to university and all, and I thought, well, well enough, I'll leave her be, and when she starts to come into her power, I'll send to the Fire Masters who've people at Oxford, and they'll take on the teaching of you. So much more clever than I, those dons and scholars—"

"But She came." Eleanor's voice cracked.

"Then She came." Sarah's voice hardened. "My Element, but a Master, more powerful than me, and better connected by far. In magic as in everything else, it's who you know that gets you places, and what you've got." Sarah grimaced. "She's trusted by them as should know better, but don't; there's no help there—yet. I could no more stand against her than your mother could stand against the flood. But you are coming into your powers, and I can set your feet on the right path, and you can break her, if you grow strong enough. And this is where I can make a start—"

She got up out of the chair where she was sitting and walked over to the hearth. She stared down at the hearthstones for a moment, then bent, and traced a symbol with her index finger on one. It glowed for a moment, a warm, lovely golden-amber, before sinking into the stone.

"Blast her," Sarah muttered under her breath. "She's stronger than I thought."

"What?" Eleanor asked.

"It's a spell that will answer to Fire as well as Earth; it's what She did to bind you here. I know a counter that will work within her spell to free you from this house and hearth for a few hours at a time, though you won't be able to go farther than, say, Longacre," the witch said. "You'll have to learn how to work magic of your own to make her spell answer to you, how to bend it to your will for a little—we'll start you learning Fire magic now, if you're ready, but definitely before she comes back."

"I—Sarah, I don't know, this all seems so—" She was going to say, "impossible to believe," but at exactly that moment, something looked at her out of the hearth-fire. She looked back, feeling her eyes widen as she recognized the fiery-eyed lizard of her dreams.

"Well, and there you are," Sarah said, with triumph, following her startled glance. "Salamander. Sure sign of you coming into your powers, no matter what she's done."

"You can see it too?" she asked incredulously.

"Well, of course. I can see the Elementals, and if they feel like it, they might help me out, but I can't command them, not even Earth. I'm not a Master," Sarah said; wistfully, Eleanor thought. "But you can command the ones of Fire; because you're a Fire Master, you'll have their respect, and because of your mother, you already have their loyalty, and the only way you'd lose that would be to do something they didn't like."

"What do you mean, I have their loyalty?" Eleanor asked incredulously.

"Hold out your hand," Sarah replied. "To the fire, I mean. You'll see."

Dubiously Eleanor did so, and before she could pull away with surprise, that same something leapt out of the flames and began twining around her hands like a friendly ferret. It looked like a lizard made of flame, and it felt like sun-warmed silk slithering through her fingers and around her wrists.

"It's not burning me—" she gasped, staring at the creature in fascination.

"And I'll wager you've never been burned in your life," Sarah replied triumphantly. "Have you?"

"Only—" Eleanor began, then stopped. She had been going to say, "only when Carolyn cauterized my finger," but then she realized that she had not actually been burned, not even then. The bleeding had been stopped, and the wound sealed, but no more, and it hadn't been a burn that had caused her so much pain, it had been the wound itself and the fever that followed. "—ah, I haven't," she admitted, watching the Salamander weave around her outstretched fingers.

"What—what does all this mean?" she asked at last.

"That I need to begin teaching you what I can, and there is no time like the present. Unless you had something planned?" Sarah tilted her head to the side. "A garden party, perhaps?"

That brought a smile to Eleanor's face, and a rueful shrug. "So long as my stepmother isn't here—"

"We must take advantage of that. Let your friend go back to his fire and we'll begin."

By nightfall, Eleanor knew a hundred times more about magic than she had before Sarah knocked on the door. She knew about casting circles of protection and containment, a little about summoning, and something about the Elementals of her own Element, although the only one she had seen as yet was the little Salamander, the weakest of the lot. And she was far more tired than she would have thought likely. It wasn't as if she'd been working, after all, just sitting and walking about the kitchen, nothing more.

"It takes it out of you," Sarah said solemnly, as the two of them worked on a little supper in the evening gloom. "And you're lucky that woman is of another Element, or she'd know when you were working, as she'd be able to cut you off from your power. As it is, she's strong enough to bind you and command you."

By this point, Eleanor had gotten well past the suspension of disbelief and was at the point where she would have accepted the presence of an invisible second moon in the sky if Sarah had insisted it was there. Part of this was due to fatigue, but most of it was simply that she had taken in so many strange things that her mind was simply fogging over.

"Why am I so tired?" she asked, setting down plates on the kitchen table, while Sarah ladled soup into bowls and cut slices of bread for both of them.

"Because the power you've been using to cast circles and all has to come from you yourself, lovey," Sarah replied.

Eleanor frowned, and rubbed her temple with the back of her wrist. "But I thought magic just was—magic!"

"Something out of nothing, you mean?" Sarah laughed. "Not likely, my girl. The only time you get power at no cost to you is when your Elementals grant it to you, or you take it from someone else. And I'll give you a guess where your stepmother gets much of hers from."

Eleanor sat down in her chair. "She'll be back in a day or two—and what will I do then?" she asked. "How am I going to see you, or keep learning?" It was a good question; what would she do? She was kept busy from dawn to dark and then some; how could she ever get time to continue learning and practicing?

"Does she lock the doors?" Sarah asked. "You'll wait until the house is asleep, and then you'll draw the glyph and bend her spell and come to me for an hour or two." She smiled slyly. "You do the cooking, don't you? Well, one advantage of being a mere Witch is that I don't rely on power to do everything. I'll give you some things to put in their food that will send them to bed early on the nights you're to come, and keep them there a-snoring, and they'll be nothing the wiser!"

Eleanor blinked. "Is that safe?" she asked, dubiously. "I mean, what if they—taste it, or something?"

"They won't. And I'll have a charm on it to make sure they eat enough of it to do what I want." Sarah seemed quite confident that she could do exactly what she claimed. Eleanor wasn't nearly as confident—but then, she didn't have anything to lose by trying, either. "Now, you eat," Sarah continued, "so you get your energy back, and we'll practice those shields and wards again."

Eleanor sighed, and applied herself to her food. She wanted to protest; she hadn't had a moment to herself all day. When she hadn't been learning the "shields and wards" that Sarah thought were so important, and which didn't seem very much like magic to her, she'd been taking in the laundry, putting it away, and tidying up. She had been so looking forward to another afternoon in the library—but the promise that she might be able to break herself free of Alison's magic was so tempting that she hadn't so much as whispered a complaint.

As if she had heard all those thoughts, Sarah looked up from her dinner and smiled at her. "I know it's hard, my dear," she said, in a kindly voice. "Cruel hard on you, it is. But I'm having to teach you the hard way, to bring up the protections and take them down without leaving a trace for your wretched stepmother to find. Until you can do that, you daren't even try to work magic here, for she will know, and that will be no good thing at all."

Eleanor shuddered at the idea of her stepmother discovering such a thing.

"And you should shiver," Sarah said, noting it. "Do believe me in that. It would be very, very bad for you. She would bind you in so many spells that you would scarcely be able to walk without being under compulsion, and I should not be able to do a thing about them. Never forget that she is a Master, and until you have Mastery of your own, she can bind you by that finger beneath the hearthstone to whatever she wills."

Eleanor glanced over at the hearth, and shuddered again. "I won't forget," she said, quietly.

"Then eat," the witch replied, "And we'll work tonight until you're too tired to carry on."

And so they did, though to her credit, Sarah Chase helped with the washing up before they did. Over and over again, Eleanor spun out the cinnamon-tasting, warm-red power of the Element of Fire from the crackling blaze on the hearth, and built it into an arching dome around herself, then sent the power back into the hearth and erased all traces of the energy from the very air around her. She wondered now why she had never noticed the power before this, though; although it was easier to see amid the flames of the real fire, there were wisps of it everywhere, like the last breath of fog above the grass on a spring morning, or the trailing bits of smoke above a chimney. There were other colors of power there too, now that she knew what to look for— a warm amber glow that was somehow as sweet as honey that seemed to surround Sarah Chase like sunlight, a hint here or there of a thread of blue or a flicker of green—but none of them called to her as that scarlet flame did.

There were several Salamanders in the hearth-fire by now, and she felt their presence as a friendly and encouraging warmth. That helped her when she faltered, right up to the point at which she ran out of energy altogether, and simply sat right down on the hearth and looked up at the witch with pleading in her eyes. "I can't," she said, plaintively. "I—"

"Ah, then we're finished for now!" Sarah exclaimed. "The one thing your mother always told me is that Fire is the most dangerous of the Elements; handle it carelessly at your peril, is what she said!"

"She did?" Eleanor glanced at the hearth; three little Salamanders coiled quietly amid the flames and blinked slow and sleepy eyes at her. They didn't look dangerous—

But then, neither did a bull, until you got into the field and it charged you.

"She did." Sarah offered her hand; Eleanor took it, and the witch pulled her to her feet with surprising strength. "You sit at the table for a moment, until you're feeling livelier, then get yourself to your bed. I'll be back tomorrow at the same time, unless she's come back by then. And in that case—well, I'll leave you a note in the wash-house. Oh, and any time yon Salamanders want to frisk about you, let them. They'll do a bit of slow healing on you when they do. Give them a month, maybe two, and they'll heal those scullery-maid's hands of yours."

Eleanor nodded. Of all the places in and around The Arrows that Sarah could get to, the wash-house was the safest to leave any such thing; Alison hadn't so much as set foot in it in all the time she'd lived here.

"Now, I'll let myself out, don't get up," Sarah concluded cheerfully. "Maybe have yourself a cup of tea and a bit of toast before you go to bed." She picked up her basket, wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, and suited her actions to her words, slipping out into the night-shrouded garden and closing the door after herself.

Eleanor simply sat, and looked back at the hearth-fire again. The Salamanders were still there, still watching her, reminding her of nothing so much as a tangle of kittens.

If kittens could be made of flames.

"Why didn't I ever see you before?" she wondered aloud.

She was shocked to her bones when the one in the middle raised its head, looked straight at her, and answered her.

Because She was there, and you had not fought her power. Just a touch of scorn came into the creature's tone. Why should we show ourselves to one who would not fight for her own freedom?

It was a good question. "But I thought that I had—" she replied, slowly.

All three of them shook their heads negatively. Hating someone is not fighting them, the middle one pointed out. You pushed, but pushing is not fighting, and you gave up too soon. Yesterday, you fought. That was good. If you fight, we will help. But remember that if Earth can smother Fire, Fire also can consume Earth.

Before she could say, or ask, anything else, the Salamanders faded into the flames, and were gone.

6

March 18, 1917

London

THE ONE DISADVANTAGE OF BEING in London was that even the meals at the Savoy were subject to rationing and shortages. However, if one was forced to pay lip-service to rationing and shortages, at least the Savoy had excellent chefs, who could make a great deal out of very little. While breakfast was something of a disappointment when compared to the same meal served three years ago, it was still superior to virtually anything being served anywhere else in the city.

Still, as Alison regarded her plate with mild disapproval and wished—for just this moment of the day, anyway—that she were back in Broom, the thought of her well-stocked pantry brought something else to mind. This was the first time that Alison and the girls had stayed in London so long since the cook had left. Eleanor was certainly breakfasting on crusts by now. The thought made her smile a little; the wretched girl was such a source of unnecessary complication that not even her usefulness as a servant outweighed it.

After breakfast, as Howse put the finishing touches on her hair, Alison wondered briefly if she ought to do something about the girl back in Broom. It wouldn't do for her to starve. And all alone for so long— was it possible she might be able to get into mischief? Would anyone think to check the house and find her?

Then she dismissed the thought. The girl had plenty of food in the way of potatoes, turnips, dried beans and black bread, and she couldn't get out of the house and garden. No one knew she was there alone, so no one would come looking for her. In fact, Alison was not entirely sure anyone in Broom still remembered her, except vaguely; other concerns occupied Broom now, as they occupied most of Britain. There wasn't a family in Broom that didn't have at least one member fighting, wounded, maimed or dead; most had several. Fully half the jobs in Broom that had once been taken by men were now being filled by women. On consideration, Alison doubted very much that anyone in the village ever thought about Eleanor, even to wonder what had happened to her.

Besides, there were a great many things that could be done here that could not be done in Broom. Warrick Locke was very useful with his black-market connections, enabling her to get hold of all manner of goods that were otherwise unobtainable, having them shipped home in discreet parcels marked as "hessian," "beans," or "oats," or other things that were not in short supply. And it was not only convenient to meet her solicitor here, it was safer. There were no prying eyes noting how often the man came to see her and how long he stayed. Meetings that happened too often made tongues wag in Broom, and she had the image of a respectable widow to maintain if she was to remain the top of the social pyramid.

Not that the thought of taking Locke as a lover ever crossed her mind. If she ever took a lover, and that was not likely, it would be someone who she could not buy with other coin, and the situation would have to have a great deal of advantage in it for her.

Mind—once she got access to the social circles of Longacre Park and the Hall-Well, that was for the future, and Warrick was still very useful. In fact, she had a meeting scheduled with him this morning, at a working-class pub where no one knew either of them. So long as no Zepps or aeroplanes appeared to drop bombs on Southwark, things should go smoothly.

She frowned into her mirror again, as Howse handed her the neat, mauve velvet hat she wanted, and she pinned it on. One true disadvantage of being in London—it was within range of the Hun's Zeppelins and 'planes. That was an annoyance, though Alison was sure enough of her power that she was not concerned that she would fall victim to a Hun bomb. But bombing raids threw such terror into the populace that getting around in the vicinity of one afterwards was a great trial, and one not compensated for by the abundance of energies released by death and fear afterwards.

She took herself downstairs, after warning the girls to remain in the hotel. Since the American boys had left, and her girls didn't find walking or taking the 'bus or Underground amusing, even Carolyn was inclined to obey without an argument. There were plenty of officers frequenting the tea-room and bar of the Savoy; if they wished to flirt, all they had to do was go downstairs.

Since Alison had arranged last night with the concierge to procure a taxi, there actually was one waiting for her without the need for magic. Though the ancient cabby looked at her a bit oddly when she gave the address, he made no comment.

The taxi deposited her on the doorstep of the pub without incident, although the arrival of the taxi itself caused a little stir among the local loungers; these days it was not the usual thing to see a taxi in Southwark. Locke was waiting for her, however, and escorted her into the pub and a private parlor he had arranged for as per her request, and the short-lived moment of interest faded once they were inside.

The private parlor was quite small, scarcely larger than the booth whose high-backed seats framed a window that didn't appear to have been washed for a decade, and looked as if it dated back at least two hundred years. The wood of the walls and the booth itself was nearly black with age, but the place was comfortable enough. They placed an order for luncheon; fish and chips seemed to be the only thing that was available, as the girl said, apologetically, over and over, "Sorry, miss. Rationing."

"Robbie's got my motor car," Locke announced as she settled herself in the ancient leather of the seat. "I'll have him drop you either back at the hotel or somewhere across the river where you can get another taxi, as you prefer."

She nodded. "Now what was it you wanted to see me about personally?" she asked, with some suspicion. "If it's about those American boys at the embassy, they've gone."

Locke shook his head; his thick glasses glinted in the dim light. His poor eyesight was what had saved him from the front; he was the next thing to blind without his spectacles, and though he might have been accepted at this point had he volunteered, he was hardly inclined to do so. No one even gave him so much as a sour look, with his disability so clear for anyone to see, and he saw no reason to throw his life away in the trenches.

For which Alison was grateful. It would have been impossible to find another solicitor she could have let in on her secrets, much less one as well-connected. In fact, if he was ever called up in despite of his eyesight, she had a little plan in mind to take out his foot or his knee, thus rendering him completely useless as a soldier. It would be easy enough to find someone who would shatter a kneecap for a few pounds; she hadn't given up all of her old contacts when she'd married Robinson. She hadn't told Locke about her plan, of course. He wouldn't have been pleased, even if it allowed him to escape conscription.

That is, she didn't think he'd take such a plan well, but you never knew. He might have had a plan of his own, like shooting himself in the foot. That one not only got you out of being conscripted, it got many a man out of the trenches and home.

Robbie Christopher, his "hired man," had gotten off by virtue of the fact that he could dislocate both shoulders at will. The trick had not only come in handy for escaping conscription, but for escaping police custody in the past.

Robbie was extremely useful to Locke, and not just as a driver and lifter of heavy objects. Robbie liked fires. Locke sometimes arranged them. Robbie liked hearing other peoples' bones break. Locke went places where his slight frame would attract unwelcome attention without someone like Robbie around. And it would not have surprised Alison at all to learn that Locke also arranged for Robbie to break other peoples' bones for a consideration. Locke was clever enough to fix things so that Robbie could enjoy his favorite pastimes without being caught. It was a profitable partnership, no doubt.

"No, I wanted to tell you in person that I've found a loophole in the law regarding your inheritance problem, and I cannot believe that I didn't think of it sooner," Locke told her, with an air of triumph. "All we have to do is to arrange for the girl to be rendered incapable of taking care of herself in some permanent way, and when she's twenty-one the entire estate will be assigned to whoever is her guardian and caretaker. Since you have been her guardian all this time, that will be you, and that wretched solicitor who is the trustee of her fortune will have no more to say about it."

Alison smiled, slowly. "What would you suggest?" she asked. Locke laughed, and leaned back, one arm cast carelessly along the back of his side of the booth they shared. "My first thought was to drive her mad, of course," he replied. "Since we wouldn't want the unwelcome inquiries that an accident might cause, and you certainly wouldn't want to leave her still capable of speaking for herself, so that lets out breaking her back. You're an Earth Master; you ought to have enough nasty beasties at your beck and call to do that. The fact that she's got powers herself means she'll see them, doesn't it?"

Alison frowned slightly. "There are a great many hobgoblins and wraiths that would do," she admitted, "But I don't like to use them. They're expensive in terms of power. Perhaps some other way—"

He shrugged. "We have a year to plan it out. We should be able to think of something. Aren't there poisons that make one mad? I seem to recall something about hatters—"

"Hmm. Mercury, I think." Alison tapped her cheek with one perfectly manicured nail. "Finding a dose that wouldn't kill her could be a problem."

A very nasty smile crept over Locke's face. "You know," he said, leaning over the table and lowering his voice to almost a whisper, "There are—the illnesses that one doesn't talk about in polite society—that do the same thing." He raised an eyebrow. "I could arrange for that—if you could arrange for the disease to act rather more swiftly than it usually does."

Alison stared at him for a moment, then suppressed smile of her own. "Now that is an interesting thought. Especially if I were to lodge a complaint with the police that she had run away, perhaps with a soldier, and she was to be brought back home by you very publicly, and in a—less than pristine state."

Locke spread his hands wide. "Sad thing, but an old story these days," he said. "Sheltered little country-girl, handsome fellow, and Til marry you when I come home, but why should we wait?' Men are such cads."

"And she needn't even actually leave the house," Alison said thoughtfully. "Carolyn bundled in a cloak could stand in for her when you 'return' her. No one would think twice about her not wanting to show her face after such a disgrace."

"The only thing I can think of that would cause a problem is—she still is showing signs of coming into her power as a Fire Mage, isn't she?" Locke asked. "And the nearer she gets to twenty-one, the harder it will be to keep her suppressed."

"Distressingly true; mind you, I've seen no signs, no signs at all, that she's coming into any significant power, only that she isn't ever burned, no matter what she does around fire," Alison replied, and pursed her lips. "Still, all the more reason not to use magic to drive her mad. Much better to use something purely physical."

Locke shrugged. "It's all one to me; one will be expensive in magical coin, the other in real money. I'll have to find the proper man— and it will have to be someone who wouldn't be missed, because when the job is over, if we want to keep things quiet, Robbie will have to take care of him."

"Well, Robbie would enjoy that, wouldn't he?" She smiled silkily.

"And we always like to give Robbie his little pleasures." Locke returned her smile. "He is such a loyal employee, and he asks so little in return for so much."

Deciding to proceed with caution, Alison elected to have Robbie drop her at Victoria Station, and took a taxi back to the Savoy. She was glad that she had; there was a messenger waiting for her in the lobby, and the packet he handed to her in return for her signature was sealed with Lord Alderscroft's signet.

Although she was impatient to see what was inside, she gave no outward sign; she tucked it under her arm and took it upstairs.

This was not just simple caution; the moment she touched the seal, she had known it was not just a physical protection against prying. So whatever lay within would be rendered unreadable if the seal was broken without the magical component being properly released. Not the wisest thing to do in a public place.

The girls were at the window of the sitting-room, putting charms on passers-by in the street below. They had moved on from simple lust-charms; she noted with approval that they were also distributing anger, depression, and quarrelsomeness with an even hand. Not all the charms "took," of course, but every failure was a lesson in what not to do—or who not to do it to. There were those who had mere touches of magic about them who were never touched by such things. It was best to learn to recognize such people so that if one had to curse them, one would know to use a stronger spell.

Seeing that they were gainfully occupied, Alison moved to the little writing-desk and opened the envelope, first tracing the counter-sigil on the seal so that the contents would remain intact. She never failed to feel amused at how those foolish men, with their silly White Lodge, refused to let her past the public rooms of their little club because she was female. They were like schoolboys, with their "No Girls Allowed" signs—or cavemen, superstitiously afraid of the "unclean" woman!

As she had hoped, the letter contained the dossier of the woman she was to impersonate. Alison Stanley, of the Northumberland branch of the Stanleys, had died when the hospital ship Britannia, on which she was a nurse, had been torpedoed, but because no one had printed a new edition of Burke's since the war began, she would still be listed as living. Early in the war, the casualty lists had been suppressed, so only Alison Stanley's immediate circle would be aware she was dead. Alison nodded with satisfaction. The northern Stanleys were as poor as church mice for all their pedigree, what little income they got went straight into trying to keep the roof on their ancient barn of a manor house patched, and no one from Longacre would ever have met any of them.

Lord Alderscroft gave her the particulars of her "family;" it was numerous, and she was going to have to memorize it all later.

And he enclosed a letter of introduction to Reggie's mother that made her smile widen. I have written her ladyship myself, he said in his cover-note. Telling her about my "cousin" who was supposed to have married a fellow called Robinson down there in or around Broom, and asking if she'd heard of you, and if she had, would she look you up to see that you were all right. The rest is up to you. Reginald isn't likely to be discharged until May at the earliest, so you should have time to establish yourself before he's brought to Longacre.

She laughed silently. If Alderscroft only knew how he was setting a fox to guard the hens!

However—

She rested her chin on her hand for a moment, as a complication occurred to her. Whatever she did to Eleanor, it would have to wait. She could not afford a scandal before she got one of the girls safely married to Reggie. Afterwards—well, these things happened to the best of families these days, and at any rate, Eleanor was not, strictly speaking, related in any way to her or her girls. The Fenyx family would move heaven and earth to keep things hushed up. It was the way these things worked, after all.

So—plans for wretched Ellie must go to simmer. It wouldn't matter; Alison would get what she wanted in the end.

She always had, no matter who was in her way.

At night, once all the visitors were gone, but before most of the men fell asleep, was the easiest time of Reggie's day. That was when, freed, perhaps, by the dim light, and the first fuzziness of opiates, freed by being just one more whisper in the dark, the men talked openly among themselves of what they would not tell anyone else.

There was a new patient in the bed to Reggie's right; a cavalry officer, with an empty sleeve pinned against the breast of his pajamas. He had stared at the ceiling all day, saying nothing, not even whimpering when his dressings were changed. Now, suddenly, he spoke.

"Don't you think it's a relief?" he said, with surprising clarity, still staring at the ceiling.

Reggie thought, Do I think what is a relief? but the man continued before he could ask the question.

"Finally—no more ruddy show for the folks back home. No pretending it's all beer and skittles and no one ever gets hurt. Not that they don't know, of course, because they do, but you have to pretend anyway. No reckoning how much life you're going to pack into a ninety-six hour leave 'cause it might be the last one you get, while pretending it's nothing much. No more careful letters that don't let on. No more wondering if you're going to do a funk. It's over, the worst has happened." He did sound relieved. Reggie swallowed, his mouth gone dry. Maybe for his neighbor, the worst had happened.

"That part's a relief," someone else agreed, out there in the dimness.

"No more guns," someone else moaned. "All day and all night-pounding, pounding, pounding—"

"Ah," said Reggie's neighbor in an undertone. "FBI. I'd've done a funk six weeks ago if I'd been FBI."

Reggie turned his head, took in the neat moustache and what he could see of the other man's remaining hand, and made a guess.

"Cavalry?" he suggested.

The other finally turned his head and looked at Reggie. "Most useless waste of man and horseflesh on God's own earth," the other agreed, and though the voice was cheerful, the bleak expression on the man's face gave it the lie. "Should have put my horse on a gun-carriage and me in a trench. All we existed for was to be shot to pieces. All they could think to do with us was send us across the wire again and again and let the machine guns have us."

Reggie winced. The cavalry had not fared well in the war. And the face on the pillow of the bed next to his was, behind its brave moustache, disturbingly young.

"My brother's FBI; told me enough about it before he caught it that I knew I wouldn't last a day," the youngster continued. "Thought, since I was a neck-and-nothing rider, I'd try the cavalry. I," he concluded bitterly, "was an idiot. All a man on a horse is out there is a grand target."

"But the worst is over," Reggie suggested, echoing the young man's own words.

"Oh, yes, the worst is over." The young man sighed, with a suggestion of a groan in it. "If I keep telling myself that, I should start believing it soon."

He blinked owlishly at Reggie, then looked back up at the ceiling; another moment, and his eyelids drooped, and he fell asleep.

Out in the ward, the whispering went on.

"—watched that gas coming closer and closer; couldn't move, didn't dare, had a machine gun above us to get anybody that bolted that took out two of my men that tried—"

"—one minute, passing me a smoke, the next, head gone—"

"—arm sticking out of the trench wall. Men used to give it a handshake as they went past—"

"—sweet Jesus, the smell! If I can just get it out of my nose for a minute—"

"The smell—" Reggie repeated, with complete understanding. No one who had not been in the trenches understood what that meant. He hadn't not really, until he'd been buried in a bunker. One part, the stink of aged mustard gas. One part, stagnant water. One part, rat urine, for the rats were everywhere and only a gas attack got rid of them. One part, unwashed human body, for what was the point of washing when you were standing knee-deep in stagnant water? And one part dead and rotting human flesh. When somebody died, you gathered up as much as you could of him to bury—but sometimes your trenches were dug across an old burial-field, or sometimes, when a bomb or a barrage had hit the trench directly, there were so many bits scattered about that you just cleaned up what you could and dumped what might remain after the stretcher-bearers left into a hole. It wasn't the first time that Reggie had heard a story like the hand and arm sticking out of a trench-wall. Soon enough, you got numb to seeing things like that. Especially if you were in the FBI.

But that stink never left you. It got in your nose, in your hair, lodged in your memory until you couldn't draw a free breath anymore.

Yet his exposure it had been so brief—many of the officers in this ward had lived with it for weeks, months. Maybe they got used to it.

Maybe they just got numb to it.

"Know what the real relief is? Not having to bloody lie to the boys anymore."

That was another new voice, a tired, tired voice from the other side of his new neighbor. Reggie got himself up on his elbow and peered through the gloom.

It was, indeed, a new man—older than Reggie, old enough to have been Reggie's father, in fact. Oh, God, he thought in sudden recollection. They've raised the conscription age to fifty, haven't they? One eye was bandaged; in fact, half his head was bandaged on that side, and his shoulder as well.

"I mean," the man continued, doggedly, "They're just kids, and they believe you when you tell them that bunk about 'one more push’, 'over the top and on to Berlin.' They tell you to tell it to these kids, and you do, and you know you're lying to them, that you're all going over the top and nothing is going to change except that half of them aren't going to be in the trench when you scramble back. Cod how I hate the lying—"

There were uncomfortable murmurs, but no one disagreed with him. What was treason to say on the front was of little matter in the ward. What was the War Department going to do, anyway? Line up a lot of men with empty sleeves and empty pant-legs and shoot them? Especially when they were only telling the truth?

Insanity. Pure insanity—the generals at the rear giving the same orders, over and over and over again, regardless of the fact that all those orders did was to kill a few thousand men and maim a few thousand more without winning back an inch of ground. Reggie lay back down and stared at the ceiling himself, seeing the future stretching on, bleak and full of death. He had the sudden notion that this was never going to end, not until the generals found there was no one to put in the trenches but toddlers and senile old men. Or until one side or another found some weapon so vile, so destructive, that it would sweep from the Western Front to the Eastern Front in a path of lunatic carnage, leaving nothing alive on the entire continent... and he no longer had the illusion that such a weapon, if found, would not be used. Give a man who saw his fellow men as markers on a board such a weapon, and he would use it, and damn the consequences, and there were plenty such men on both sides of this conflict.

"I'm tired," said the man who had said he hated lying. "I want—"

But neither Reggie, nor anyone else, was ever to find out what he wanted, for he suddenly shivered all over so that the bed rattled, and then lay terribly still.

A deathly quiet settled over the ward, a quiet in which Reggie heard a steady thumping as of distant thunder. The sound of the guns across the Channel, carried on the wind.

Someone cleared his throat. "Poor bastard," said someone else, in a voice of detached pity. "He's out of it now."

"Maybe—" Reggie began, then kept the rest of what he would have said behind his teeth, and listened to the barrage falling, somewhere— somewhere—out in the darkness.

Eventually the nurse made her rounds, discovered the death, and an orderly brought screens to put up around the bed. That had never made sense to Reggie; what difference did screens make? Everyone knew the poor blighter was dead. The presence of the screens only confirmed that. A metal frame and a bit of cloth was not going to create the illusion that he was still alive.

A VAD girl put out all of the lamps but the one at her duty-station; and Reggie steeled himself for the night. Night was the worst. Night, when the ward closed in around him, when the men drifted off into drugged slumber, and there was no one conscious to talk. He wasn't supposed to get morphia to sleep, but it was the only way he could sleep, because those horrible things that had tormented him had come in the dark, and even though he didn't have magic to attract them anymore, he lay in fear that they would come for him, anyway, that they would know him without magic and come for him. They'd come out of the shadows and surround him, and take him back under the ground, under the stifling ground, and the torture would begin again. The long, thin, fingers, dry and rustling, that had clutched at his throat—the heavy, leaden weight pressing down on his chest—the lidless, glowing eyes in the darkness—the fetid ooze that had dripped into his face from mouths with swollen tongues protruding from between stained brown teeth—

He clutched the blanket with both hands and stared at the ceiling, willing his eyes to stay open, unable to move, as he had been unable to move then, completely paralyzed. His heart pounded like the distant guns, shaking him. The VAD girl passed and looked at him; he tried to open his mouth to ask for help, for water, for anything to keep her there for a precious few moments, but his body no longer answered to him. He couldn't scream, couldn't speak, couldn't even whisper. Fear flooded him. There was nothing in his world but fear and the darkness, the darkness that was slowly eroding that last circle of light at the end of the ward, and when it was gone, they would come, and they would take him as they had always wanted to do.

Or worse, the nurse would think he was dead, she would tell the orderlies and they would come and take him away and put him, still living and unable to show it, in the ground, and then—

—then, with a sudden spasm, he could breathe again, and move. The fear receded—not much, but enough for relief.

With an effort, he threw the memories off, and stared fixedly at a wavering spot on the ceiling, cast by the dim lamp. They weren't here. The wights, the wraiths, the goblins of the Earth, they weren't here.

They could never find him. He had nothing about himself to tell them where he was.

He wasn't an Elemental Mage anymore. They couldn't touch him, they couldn't see him, they couldn't find him. It was magic that called them, and he had given his up, burned it out, walled it away. He had no magic, nothing for them to find, and without that to call them, they wouldn't find him. No matter what those lipless mouths had whispered into his ear in the dark of that buried bunker.

So he kept telling himself, shivering under his blanket, long past the time when the orderlies came and took away the body on a stretcher and carried off the screens, long past the time when a new, groaning body was placed in the newly changed bed, right into the moment when gray dawn began to creep across the windows. And then, only then, could he let go his hold, and fall, senseless, into exhausted slumber.

7

March 18, 1917

Broom, Warwickshire

EYES NARROWED IN CONCENTRATION, ELEANOR knelt in front of the kitchen fire and stared at the hearthstone directly before her, willing the symbol that she knew was magically embedded there to appear. As she did so, she felt a thin trickle of power flowing from her to it, a sensation that was unsettlingly like blood flowing from a wound.