The Gates of Sleep

The Gates of Sleep

Elemental Masters Book 3

Mercedes Lackey

Prologue

ALANNA Roeswood entered the parlor with her baby Marina in her arms, and reflected contentedly that she loved this room better than any other chamber in Oakhurst Manor. Afternoon sunlight streamed in through the bay windows, and a sultry breeze carried with it the scent of roses from the garden. The parlor glowed with warm colors; reds and rich browns, the gold of ripening wheat. There were six visitors, standing or sitting, talking quietly to one another, dressed for an afternoon tea; three in the flamboyant, medievally inspired garb that marked them as artists. These three were talking to her husband Hugh; they looked as if they properly belonged in a fantastic painting, not Alanna’s cozy parlor. The remaining three were outwardly ordinary; one lady was in an up-to-the-mode tea gown that proclaimed wealth and rank, one man (very much a countrified gentleman) wore a suit with a faintly old-fashioned air about it, and the last was a young woman with ancient eyes whose flowing emerald gown, trimmed in heavy Venice lace like the foam on a wave, was of no discernible mode. They smiled at Alanna as she passed them, and nodded greetings.

Alanna placed her infant carefully in a hand-carved cradle, and seated herself in a chair beside it. One by one, the artists came to greet her, bent over the cradle, whispered something to the sleepy infant, touched her with a gentle finger, and withdrew to resume their conversations.

The artists could have been from the same family. In fact, they were from two. Sebastian Tarrant, he of the leonine red-brown locks and generous moustache, was the husband of dark-haired sweet-faced Margherita; the clean-shaven, craggy fellow who looked to be her brother by his coloring was exactly that. All three were Hugh Roeswood’s childhood playmates, and Alanna’s as well. The rest were also bound to their hosts by ties of long standing. It was, to all outward appearances, just a gathering of a few very special friends, a private celebration of that happiest of events, a birth and christening.

Alanna Roeswood wore a loose artistic tea gown of a delicate mauve, very like the one that enveloped Margherita in amber folds. It should have been, since Margherita’s own hands had made both. She sat near the hearth, a Madonna-like smile on her lips, brooding over the sensuously curved lines of newborn Marina’s hand-carved walnut cradle. The cradle was a gift from one of her godparents, and there wasn’t another like it in all of the world; it was, in fact, a masterpiece of decorative art. The frothy lace of Marina’s christening gown overflowed the side, a spill of winter white against the rich, satiny brown of the lovingly carved wood. Glancing over at Sebastian, the eldest of the artists, Alanna suppressed a larger smile; by the way he kept glancing at the baby, his fingers were itching to sketch the scene. She wondered just what medieval tale he was fitting the tableau into in his mind’s eye. The birth of Rhiannon of the Birds, perhaps. Sebastian Tarrant had been mining the Welsh and Irish mythos for subjects for some time now, with the usual artistic disregard for whether the actual people who had inspired the characters of those pre-Christian tales would have even remotely resembled his paintings. The romance and tragedy suited the sensibilities of those who had made the work of Dante Rossetti and the rest of the Pre-Raphaelites popular. Sebastian was not precisely one of that brotherhood, in no small part because he rarely came to London and rarely exhibited his work. Alanna wasn’t entirely clear just how he managed to sell his work; it might have been through a gallery, or more likely, by word of mouth. Certainly once anyone actually saw one of his paintings, it generally sold itself. Take the rich colors of a Rossetti, add the sinuosity of line of a Burne-Jones, and lay as a foundation beneath it all the lively spirit of a Millais, and you had Sebastian. Adaptor of many styles, imitator of none; that was Sebastian.

His brother-in-law, mild-eyed Thomas Buford, was the carver of Marina’s cradle and a maker of every sort of furniture, following the Aesthetic edict that things of utility should also be beautiful. He had a modest clientele of his own, as did his sister, Margherita (Sebastian’s wife) who was as skilled with needle and tapestry-shuttle as her husband was with brush and pen. The three of them lived and worked together in an apparent harmony quite surprising to those who would have expected the usual tempestuous goings-on of the more famous (or infamous) Pre-Raphaelites of London. They lived in an enormous old vine-covered farmhouse—which Sebastian claimed had once been a medieval manor house that was home to one of King Arthur’s knights—just over the border in Cornwall.

This trio had been Alanna’s (and her husband Hugh’s) friends for most of their lives, from their first meeting as children in Hugh’s nursery, sharing his lessons with his tutors.

The remaining three, however disparate their ages and social statures—well, it had only been natural for them all to become friends as adolescents and young adults first out in adult society.

And that was because they were all part of something much larger than an artistic circle or social circle.

They were all Elemental Masters; magicians by any other name. Each of them commanded, to a greater or lesser extent, the magic of a specific element: Earth, Air, Fire, or Water, and they practiced their Magics together and separately for the benefit and protection of their land and the people around them. There was a greater Circle of Masters based in London, but Hugh and Alanna had never taken part in any of its works. They met mostly with the double-handful of Masters who confined their workings to goals of smaller scope, here in the heart of Devon.

Marina stirred in her nest of soft lace, but did not wake; Alanna gazed down at her with an upswelling of passionate adoration. She was a lovely baby, and that was not just the opinion of her doting parents.

Hugh and Alanna were Earth Masters; their affinity with that Element was the reason why they seldom left their own land and property. Like most Earth Masters, they felt most comfortable when they were closest to a home deep in the countryside, far from the brick-and-stone of the great cities. Margherita was also an Earth Master; her brother Thomas shared her affinity, and this was why they had shared Hugh’s tutors.

For the magic, in most cases, passed easily from parent to child in Hugh’s family, and there was a long tradition in the Roeswood history of beginning training in the exercise of power along with more common lessons. So tutors, and sometimes even a child’s first nurse, were also Mages.

Hugh’s sister Arachne, already an adult, was long gone from the household, never seen, seldom heard from, by the time he was ready for formal schooling. Magic had skipped her, or so it appeared, and Hugh had once ventured the opinion that this seemed to have made her bitter and distant. She had married a tradesman, a manufacturer of pottery, and for some reason never imparted to Hugh, this had caused a rift in the already-strained relationship with her parents.

Be that as it may, Hugh’s parents did not want him to spend a lonely childhood being schooled in isolation from other children his age—and lo! there were the Tarrants, the Bufords, and Alanna’s family, all friends of the Roeswoods, all Elemental Mages of their own circle, all living within a day’s ride of Oakhurst, and all with children near the same age. The addition of their friends’ children to the Roeswood household seemed only natural, especially since it was not wise to send a child with Elemental power to a normal public school—doubly so as a boarder. Such children saw things—the Elemental creatures of their affinities—and often forgot to keep a curb on their tongues. And such children attracted those Elemental creatures, which were, if not watched by an adult mage, inclined to play mischief in the material world. “Poltergeists” was the popular name for these creatures, and sometimes even the poor children who had attracted them in the first place had no idea what was going on about them. Worst of all, the child with Elemental power could attract something other than benign or mischievous Elemental creatures. Terrible things had happened in the past, and the least of them was when the child in question had been attacked. Worse, far worse had come when the child had been lured, seduced, and turned to evil himself…

So five children of rather disparate backgrounds came to live at Oakhurst Manor, to be schooled together. And they matched well together—four of the five had the same affinity. Only Sebastian differed, but Fire was by no means incompatible with Earth.

Later, Sebastian’s father, educated at Oxford, had become Hugh’s official tutor—and the teacher of the other four, unofficially. It was an arrangement that suited all of them except Sebastian; perhaps that was why he had been so eager to throw himself into art!

Hugh and Alanna had fallen in love as children and their love had only grown over the years. There had never been any doubt whom he would marry, and since both sets of parents were more than satisfied with the arrangement, everyone was happy. Hugh’s parents had not lived to see them married, but they had not been young when he was born, so it had come as no great surprise that he came into his inheritance before he left Oxford. The loss of Alanna’s mother and father in a typhoid epidemic after their marriage had been more of a shock. If Alanna had not had Hugh then—she did not think she could have borne the loss.

At least he and Alanna had the satisfaction of knowing that their parents blessed their union with all their hearts.

Sebastian had taken longer to recognize Margherita as his soul mate. Fate had other ideas, Thomas claimed later; Sebastian could be as obnoxious to his schoolmate as any other grubby boy, but overnight, it seemed, Margherita turned from a scrawny, gangly brat to a slender nymph, and the teasing and mock-tormenting had turned to something else entirely.

Such was the magic of the heart.

Insofar as that magic that Alanna and Hugh both carried in their veins, there was no doubt that their firstborn daughter had inherited it. One day little Marina would wield the forces of Elemental Magic as well, but her affinity, beautifully portrayed in the curves and waves of her cradle, the tiny mermaids sporting amid the carved foam, was for Water. Not the usual affinity in the Roeswood family, but not unknown, either.

Though they had not been part of that intimate circle of schoolfellows, the others here to bestow magical blessings on the infant were also Elemental Mages, and were part of their Working Circle. Two wielded Air magic, and one other, like Marina, that of Water. That third had left an infant of her own behind, in the care of a nurse; Elizabeth Hastings was Alanna’s first friend outside of her schoolmates, and one of the wisest people Alanna knew. She would have to be; she had kept her utterly ordinary husband completely in the dark about her magical powers, and it was unlikely that he would ever have the least inkling of the fact that his lovely, fragile-looking wife could probably command the ocean to wipe a good-sized fishing village from the face of the earth if she was minded to.

Not that gentle Elizabeth would ever so much as consider doing such a thing.

This, the afternoon of the ceremony at the village church, was a very different sort of christening for Marina. Each of these friends was also a godparent; each had carefully considered the sort of arcane gift he or she would bestow on the tiny child. In the ancient days, these would have been gifts of defense and offense: protections for a helpless infant against potential enemies of her parents. In these softer times, they would be gifts of grace and beauty, meant to enrich her life rather than defend it.

There was no set ceremony for this party; a godparent simply moved to Alanna’s side, whispered his or her gift to the sleeping baby, and lightly touched her silken hair with a gentle finger. Already four of the six had bestowed their blessings—from Margherita, skillful hands and deft fingers. From Sebastian, blithe spirits and a cheerful heart. Thomas’ choice was the gift of music; whether Marina was a performer herself, or only one who loved music, would depend on her own talents, but no matter what, she would have the ear and mind to extract the most enjoyment from it. A fourth friend, a contemporary of their parents, Lady Helene Overton (whose power was Air), she of the handsome tea gown and silver-white hair, had added physical grace to that. Now the local farmer in his outmoded suit—a yeoman farmer, whose family had held their lands in their own right for centuries (and another Air Master)—glided over to Alanna’s side. Like most of his Affinity, in England at least, he was lean, his eyes blue, his hair pale. The more powerful a Master was, the more like his Elementals he became, and Roderick Bacon was very powerful. He smiled at Alanna, and bent over the cradle.

“Alliance,” he whispered, and touched his forefinger to the baby’s soft, dark hair.

Alanna blinked with surprise. This was a gift more akin to those given in the ancient days! Roderick had just granted Marina the ability to speak with and beg aid from, if not command, the Elemental creatures of the Air! He had allied his power with hers, which had to be done with the consent of his Elementals. She stared at Roderick, dumbfounded.

He shrugged, and smiled sheepishly. “Belike she’ll only care to have the friendship of the birds,” he replied to her questioning look. “But ‘tis my line’s traditional Gift, and I’m a man for tradition.”

Alanna returned his smile, and nodded her thanks. Who was she to flout tradition? Roderick’s Mage-Line went back further than their status as landholders; they had become landholders because of Magical aid to their liege lord in the time of King Stephen and Queen Maud.

She was grateful for the kinds of Gifts that had been given; her friends were practical as well as thoughtful. They had not bestowed great beauty on the child, for instance; great beauty could be as much of a curse as a blessing. They hadn’t given her specific talents, just the deftness and skill that would enable her to make the best use of whatever talents she had been born with. Even Roderick’s Gift was mutable; it would serve as Marina decided it would serve. While she was a child, the Elementals of the Air would watch over her, as those of her own Element would guard her—no wind would harm her, for instance, nor was it possible for her to drown. Once she became an adult and knew what the Gift meant, she could make use of it—or not—as she chose.

Only Elizabeth was left to bestow her gift. Alanna smiled up into her friend’s eyes—but as she took her first step toward the baby, the windows rattled, a chill wind bellied the curtains, and the room darkened, as if a terrible storm cloud had boiled up in an instant.

The guests started back from the windows; Margherita clung to Sebastian. A wave of inexplicable and paralyzing fear rose up and overwhelmed Alanna, pinning her in her chair like a frightened rabbit.

A woman swept in through the parlor door.

She was dressed in the height of fashion, in a gown of black satin trimmed with silk fringe in the deepest maroon. Her skin was pale as porcelain, her hair as black as the fabric of her gown. She raked the room and its occupants with an imperious gaze, as Hugh gasped.

“Arachne!” he exclaimed, and hurried forward. “Why, sister! We didn’t expect you!”

The woman’s red lips curved in a chill parody of a smile. “Of course you didn’t,” she purred, her eyes glinting dangerously. “You didn’t invite me, brother. I can only wonder why.”

Hugh paled, but stood his ground. “I had no reason to think you would want to attend the christening, Arachne. You never invited me to Reginald’s christening—”

Arachne advanced into the room, and Hugh perforce gave way before her. Alanna sat frozen in her chair, sensing the woman’s menace, still overwhelmed with fear, but unable to understand why she was so afraid. Hugh had told her next to nothing about this older sister of his—only that she was the only child of his father’s first marriage, and that she had quarreled with her father over his marriage to Hugh’s mother, and made a runaway marriage with her wealthy tradesman.

“You should have invited me, little brother,” Arachne continued with a throaty laugh, as she continued to glide forward, and Hugh backed up a step at a time. “Why not? Didn’t you think I’d appreciate the sight of the heir’s heiress?” Another pace, A toothy smile. “I can’t imagine why you would think that. Here I am, the child’s only aunt. Why shouldn’t I wish to see her?”

“Because you’ve never shown any interest in our family before, Arachne.” Hugh was as white as marble, and it seemed to Alanna that he was being forced back as Arachne advanced. “You didn’t come to father’s funeral—”

“I sent a wreath. Surely that was enough, considering that father detested my husband and made no secret of it.”

“—and you didn’t even send a wreath to mother’s—”

“She could have opposed him, and chose not to.” A shrug, and an insincere smile. “You didn’t trouble to let me know of your wedding to this charming child, so I could hardly have attended that. I only found out about it from the society pages in the Times. That was hardly kind.” A theatrical sigh. “But how could I have expected anything else? After Father and Mother determined to estrange me from our family circle, I wasn’t surprised that you would follow suit.”

Alanna strained, with eyes and Sight, to make sense of the woman who called herself Hugh’s sister. There was a darkness about her, like a storm cloud: a sense of lightnings and an ominous power. Was it magic? If so, was it her own? It was possible for a mage to bestow specific magic upon someone who wasn’t able to command any of the powers. But it was also possible for one of the many sorts of Elementals to attach itself to a non-mage as well.

As thunder growled and distant lightning licked the clouds outside, Alanna looked up and met Arachne’s eyes—and found herself unable to move. The rest of their guests stood like pillars, staring, as if they, too, were struck with paralysis.

Hugh clearly tried to interpose himself between Arachne and the cradle, but he moved sluggishly, as if pushing his way through thick muck, and his sister darted around him. She bent over the cradle. Alanna tried to reach out and snatch her baby away, but she could no more have moved than have flown.

“Well, well,” Arachne said, a hint of mockery in her voice. “A pleasant child. But so fragile. Nothing like my boy…”

As Alanna watched in horror, Arachne reached out with a single, extended finger, supple and white and tipped with a long fingernail painted with bloodred enamel. She reached for Marina’s forehead, as all of the godparents had. The darkness shivered, gathered itself around her, and crept down the extended arm. “You really should enjoy this pretty child—while you have her. You never know about children.” Her eyes glinted in the gloom, a hint of red flickering in the back of them. The ominous finger neared Marina’s forehead. “They can survive so many hazards, growing up. Then one day—say, on the eighteenth birthday—”

The finger touched.

“Death,” Arachne whispered.

Like an animate oil slick, the shadow gathered itself, flowed down Arachne’s arm, and enveloped Marina in a shadow-shroud.

Lightning struck the lawn outside the window, and thunder crashed like a thousand cannon. Alanna screamed; the baby woke, and wailed.

With a peal of laughter, Arachne whirled away from the cradle. In a few strides she was out the door and gone, escaped before any could detain her.

Now the paralysis holding all of them broke.

Alanna snatched her child out of the cradle and held the howling infant to her chest, sobbing. As lightning crashed and thunder rolled, as the baby keened, all of her godparents descended on them both.

“I don’t know how she did this,” Elizabeth said at last, frowning. “I’ve never seen magic like this. It doesn’t correspond to any Element—if I were superstitious—”

Alanna pressed her lips tightly together, and fought down another sob. “If you were superstitious—what?” she demanded.

Elizabeth sighed. “I’d say it was a curse. Meant to take effect between now and Marina’s eighteenth birthday. But I can’t tell how.”

“Neither can I,” Roderick said grimly. “Though it’s a damned good job I gave her the Gift I did. She got some protection, anyway. This—well, call it a curse, my old granddad would have—with the help of the Sylphs, this curse is drained, countered for now—else it might have killed her in her cradle. But how someone with no magic of her own managed to do this—” He shrugged.

“The curse is countered—” Alanna didn’t like the way he had phrased that. “It’s not gone?”

Roderick looked helpless, and not comfortable with feeling that way. “Well—no.”

Elizabeth stepped forward before the hysterical cry of anguish building in her heart burst out of Alanna’s throat. “Then it’s a good thing that I have not yet given my Gift.”

She took the baby from Alanna’s arms; Alanna resisted for a moment, before reluctantly letting the baby go. She watched, tears welling in her eyes, hand pressed to her mouth, as Elizabeth studied the red, pinched, tear-streaked face of her baby.

“This—abomination—is too deeply rooted. I cannot rid her of it,” Elizabeth said, and Alanna moaned, and started to turn away into her husband’s shoulder.

“Wait!” Elizabeth said, forestalling her. “I said I couldn’t rid her of it. I didn’t say I couldn’t change it. Water—water can go everywhere. No magic wrought can keep me out.”

Shaking with hope and fear, Alanna turned back. She watched, Hugh’s arms around her, as Elizabeth gathered her power around her like the skirts of her flowing gown. The green, living energy spun around her, sparkling with life; she murmured something under her breath.

Then, exactly like water pouring into a cavity, the power spun down into the baby’s tiny body. Marina seemed too small to contain all of it, and yet it flowed into her until it had utterly vanished without a trace.

The darkness that had overshadowed her face slowly lifted. The baby’s eyes opened; she heaved a sigh, and for the first time since Arachne had touched her, she smiled, tentatively. Alanna burst into tears and gathered her baby to her breast. Hugh’s arms surrounded her with comfort and warmth.

Elizabeth spoke firmly, pitching her voice to carry over Alanna’s weeping.

“I did not—I could not—remove this curse. What I have done is to change it. As it stood, it had no limit; it could have been invoked at any time. Now, if it does not fall upon her by her eighteenth birthday, it will rebound upon the caster.”

Alanna gulped down her sobs and looked up quickly at her friend. Elizabeth’s mouth was pursed in a sour smile. “Injudicious of Arachne to mention a date; curses are tricky things, and if you don’t hedge them in carefully, they find ways of breaking out—or leaving holes. And injudicious of her to come in person; now, if it is awakened at all, she will have to awaken it in person, and I have buried it deeply. It will not be easy, and will require a great deal of close contact.”

“But—” Alanna felt her throat closing again, and Elizabeth held up her hand.

“I have not finished. I further modified this curse; should Arachne manage to awaken it, Marina will not die.” Elizabeth sighed, wearily. “But there, my knowledge fails me. I told you that curses are difficult; this one took the power and twisted it away from me. I can only tell you that the curse will not kill outright. I cannot tell you what it will do…”

Alanna watched a hundred dire thoughts pass behind Elizabeth’s eyes. There were so many things that were worse than death—and many that were only a little better. What if the curse struck Mari blind, or deaf, or mindless? What if it made a cripple of her?

Then Elizabeth gathered herself and nodded briskly. “Never mind. We must see that it does not come to that. Alanna, we must hide her.”

“Hide her?” Hugh said, from behind her. “By my faith, Elizabeth, that is no bad notion! Like—like the infant Arthur, we can send her away where Arachne can’t find her!”

“Take her?” Alanna clutched the infant closer, her voice rising. “You’d take her away from me?”

“Alanna, we can’t hide her if you go with her,” Hugh pointed out, his own arms tightening around her. “But where? That’s the question.”

Hot tears spilled from Alanna’s eyes, as the others discussed her baby’s fate, heedless of her breaking heart. They were taking her away, her Marina, her little Mari—

She heard them in a haze of grief, as if from a great distance, as her friends, her husband, decided among them to send Marina away, away, off with Sebastian and Thomas and Margherita, practically into the wilds of Cornwall. It was Hugh’s allusion to Arthur that had decided them. Arachne knew nothing of them; if she had known of Hugh’s childhood schoolmates, she hadn’t recognized the playfellows that had been in the artists of now.

Elizabeth tried to comfort her. “It’s only until she’s of age, darling,” her friend said, patting her shoulders as the tears flowed and she shook with sobs. “When she’s eighteen, she’ll come back to you!”

Eighteen years. An eternity. An age, in which she would never see Marina’s first step, hear her first word, see her grow…

Alanna wept. Wept as they bundled Marina up in a baby-basket and carried her away, leaving behind the little dresses that Alanna had embroidered during the months of her confinement, the toys, even the cradle. She wept as her friends smuggled the child into their cart, as if she was nothing more than a few apples or a bottle of cider.

She wept as they drove away, her husband’s arms around her, her best friend standing at her side. She wept and would not be consoled; for she had lost her heart, and something told her she would never see her child again.

Chapter One

BIRDS twittered in the rose bushes outside the old-fashioned diamond-paned windows. The windows, swung open on their ancient iron hinges, let in sunshine, a floating dandelion seed and a breath of mown grass, even if Marina wasn’t in position to see the view into the farmyard. The sunshine gilded an oblong on the worn wooden floor. Behind her, somewhere out in the yard, chickens clucked and muttered, and two of Aunt Margherita’s cats had a half-minute spat. Marina’s arm was starting to go numb.

The unenlightened might think that posing as an artist’s model was easy, because “all” one had to do was sit, stand, or recline in one position. The unenlightened ought to try it some time, she thought. It took the same sort of simultaneous concentration and relaxation that magic did—concentration, to make sure that there wasn’t a bit of movement, and relaxation, to ensure that muscles didn’t lock up. If the pose was a standing one, then it wasn’t long before feet and legs were aching; if sitting or reclining, it was a certainty that some part of the body would fall asleep, with the resulting pins—and—needles agony when the model was allowed to move.

Then there was the boredom—well, perhaps boredom wasn’t quite the right word. The model had to have something to occupy her mind while her body was frozen in one position; it was rare that Marina ever got to take a pose that allowed her to either read or nap. She generally used the time to go over the basic exercises of magic that Uncle Thomas taught her, or to go over some more mundane lesson or other.

Oh, modeling was work, all right. She understood that artists who didn’t have complacent relatives paid well for models to pose, and in her opinion, every penny was earned.

She’d been here all morning posing, because Uncle had got a mania about the early light; enough was enough. She was hungry, it was time for luncheon, and it wasn’t fair to make her work from dawn to dark. How could anyone waste such a beautiful autumn day inside the stone walls of this farmhouse? “Uncle Sebastian,” she called. “The model’s arm is falling off.”

A whiff of oil paints came to her as Sebastian looked up from his canvas. “It isn’t, I assure you,” he retorted.

She didn’t pout; it wasn’t in her nature to pout. But she did protest. “Well, feels as though it’s falling off!”

Sebastian heaved a theatrical sigh. “The modern generation has no stamina,” he complained, disordering his graying chestnut locks with the same hand that held his brush, and leaving streaks of gold all through it. “Why, when your aunt was your age, she could hold a pose for six and seven hours at a time, and never a complaint out of her.”

Taking that as permission to break her pose, Marina leaned the oriflamme, the battle banner of medieval France, against the wall, and put her sword down on the floor. “When my aunt was my age, you posed her as a reclining odalisque, or fainting on the couch, or leaning languidly in a window,” she retorted. “You never once posed her as Joan of Arc. Or Britannia, in a heavy helmet and breastplate. Or Morgan Le Fay, with a snake and a dagger.”

“Trivial details,” Sebastian said with a dismissive gesture. “Inconsequential.”

“Not to my arm.” Marina shook both of her arms vigorously, grateful that Sebastian had not inflicted the heavy breastplate and helmet on her. Of course, that would have made the current painting look rather more like that one of Britannia that he had recently finished than Sebastian would have preferred.

And since the Britannia painting was owned by a business rival of the gentleman who had commissioned this one, it wouldn’t do to make one a copy of the other.

This one, which was to be significantly larger than “Britannia Awakes” as well as significantly different, was going to be very profitable for Uncle Sebastian. And since the rival who had commissioned “Saint Jeanne” was a profound Francophobe…

Men, Marina had long since concluded, could be remarkably silly. On the other hand, when the first man caught wind of this there might be another commission for a new painting, perhaps a companion to “Britannia Awakes,” which would be very nice for the household indeed. And then—another commission from the second gentleman? This could be amusing as well as profitable!

The second gentleman, however, had made some interesting assumptions, perhaps based upon the considerable amount of arm and shoulder, ankle and calf that Britannia had displayed. He had made it quite clear to Uncle Sebastian that he wanted the same model for his painting, but he had also thrown out plenty of hints that he wanted the model as well, perhaps presuming that his rival had also included that as part of the commission.

Marina wasn’t supposed to know that. Uncle Sebastian hadn’t known she was anywhere near the house when the client came to call. In fact, she’d been gathering eggs and had heard voices in Uncle Sebastian’s studio, and the Sylphs had told her that one was a stranger. It had been quite funny—she was listening from outside the window—until Uncle Sebastian, with a cold remark that the gentleman couldn’t possibly be referring to his dear niece, had interrupted the train of increasingly less subtle hints about Sebastian’s “lovely model.” Fortunately, Sebastian hadn’t lost his temper. Uncle Sebastian in a temper was apt to damage things.

Marina reached for the ribbon holding her hair in a tail behind her back and pulled it loose, shaking out her heavy sable mane. Saint Joan was not noted for her luxuriant locks, so Uncle had scraped all of her hair back tightly so that he could see the shape of her skull. Tightly enough that the roots of her hair hurt, in fact, though she wasn’t apt to complain. When he got to the hair for the painting, he’d construct a boyish bob over the skull shape. In that respect, the pose for Britannia had been a little more comfortable; at least she hadn’t had to pull her hair back so tightly that her scalp ached. “When are you going to get a commission that doesn’t involve me holding something out at the end of my arm?” she asked.

Her uncle busied himself with cleaning his palette, scraping it bare, wiping it with linseed oil. Clearly, he had been quite ready to stop as well, but he would never admit that. “Would you rather another painting of dancing Muses?” he asked.

Recalling the painting that her uncle had done for an exhibition last spring that involved nine contorted poses for her, and had driven them both to quarrels and tantrums, she shook her head. “Not unless someone offers you ten thousand pounds for it—in advance.” She turned pleading eyes on him. “But don’t you think that just once you might manage a painting of—oh—Juliet in the tomb of the Capulets? Surely that’s fashionably morbid enough for you!”

He snatched up a cushion and flung it at her; she caught it deftly, laughing at him.

“Minx!” he said, mockingly. “Lazy, too! Very well, failing any other commissions, the next painting will be Shakespearian, and I’ll have you as Kate the Shrew!”

“So long as it’s Kate the Shrew sitting down and reading, I’ve no objection,” she retorted, dropped the cushion on the window seat, and skipped out the door. This was an old-fashioned place where, at least on the ground floor, one room led into the next; she passed through her aunt’s workroom, then the room that held Margherita’s tapestry loom, then the library, then the dining room, before reaching the stairs.

Her own room was at the top of the farmhouse, above the kitchen and under the attics, with a splendid view of the apple orchard beyond the farmyard wall. There was a handsome little rooster atop the wall—an English bantam; Aunt Margherita was very fond of bantams and thought highly of their intelligence. They didn’t actually have a farm as such, for the land belonging to the house was farmed by a neighbor. When they’d taken the place, Uncle had pointed out that as artists they made very poor farmers; it would be better for them to do what they were good at and let the owner rent the land to someone else. But they did have the pond, the barn, a little pasturage, the orchard and some farm animals—bantam chickens, some geese and ducks, a couple of sheep to keep the grass around the farmhouse tidy. They had two ponies and two carts, because Uncle Sebastian was always taking one off on a painting expedition just when Aunt Margherita wanted it for shopping, or Uncle Thomas for his business. They also had an old, old horse, a once-famous jumper who probably didn’t have many more years in him, that they kept in gentle retirement for the local master of the hunt. Marina rode him now and again, but never at more than an amble. He would look at fences with a peculiar and penetrating gaze, as if meditating on the follies of his youth—then snort, and amble further along in search of a gate that Marina could open for him.

There were wild swans on the pond as well, who would claim their share of bread and grain with the usual imperiousness of such creatures. And Uncle Thomas raised doves; he had done so since he was a boy. They weren’t the brightest of birds, but they were beautiful creatures, sweet and gentle fantails that came to anyone’s hands, tame and placid, for feeding. The same couldn’t be said of the swans, which regarded Aunt Margherita as a king would regard the lowliest serf, and the grain and bread she scattered for them as no less than their just tribute. Only for Marina did they unbend, their natures partaking of equal parts of air and water and so amenable to her touch, if not to that of an Earth Master.

She changed out of her fustian tunic with the painted fleur-de-lis and knitted coif, the heavy knitted jumper whose drape was meant to suggest chain mail for Uncle Sebastian’s benefit. Off came the knitted hose and the suede boots. She pulled on a petticoat and a loose gown of Aunt Margherita’s design and make, shoved her feet into her old slippers, and ran back down the tiny staircase, which ended at the entryway dividing the kitchen from the dining room and parlor. The door into the yard stood invitingly open, a single hen peering inside with interest, and she gave the sundrenched expanse outside a long look of regret before joining her aunt in the kitchen.

Floored with slate, with white plastered walls and black beams, the kitchen was the most modern room of the house. The huge fireplace remained largely unused, except on winter nights when the family gathered here instead of in the parlor. Iron pot-hooks and a Tudor spit were entirely ornamental now, but Aunt Margherita would not have them taken out; she said they were part of the soul of the house.

The huge, modern iron range that Margherita had insisted on having—much admired by all the local farmers’ wives—didn’t even use the old chimney. It stood in splendid isolation on the external wall opposite the hearth, which made the kitchen wonderfully warm on those cold days when there was a fire in both. Beneath the window that overlooked the yard was Margherita’s other improvement, a fine sink with its own well and pump, so that no one had to go out into the yard to bring in water. For the rest, a huge table dominated the room, with a couple of tall stools and two long benches beneath it. Three comfortable chairs stood beside the cold hearth, a dresser that was surely Georgian displayed copper pots and china, and various cupboards and other kitchen furniture were ranged along the walls.

Margherita was working culinary magic at that huge, scarred table. Quite literally.

The gentle ambers and golds of Earth Magic energies glowed everywhere that Marina looked—on the bread dough in a bowl in a warm corner was a cantrip to ensure its proper rising, another was on the pot of soup at the back of the cast-iron range to keep it from burning. A pest-banishing spell turned flying insects away from the open windows and doors, and prevented crawling ones from setting foot on wall, floor, or ceiling. Another kept the mice and rats at bay, and was not visible except where it ran across the threshold.

Tiny cantrips kept the milk and cream, in covered pitchers standing in basins of cold water, from souring; more kept the cheese in the pantry from molding, weevils out of the flour, the eggs sound and sweet. They weren’t strong magics, and if (for instance) Margherita were to be so careless as to leave the milk for too very long beyond a day or so, it would sour anyway. Common sense was a major component of Margherita’s magic.

On the back of the range stood the basin of what would be clotted cream by teatime, simmering beside the soup pot. Clotted cream required careful tending, and the only magic involved was something to remind her aunt to keep a careful eye on the basin.

Occasionally there was another Element at work in the kitchen; when a very steady temperature was required—such as beneath that basin of cream—Uncle Sebastian persuaded a Salamander to take charge of the fires in the stove. Uncle Sebastian was passionately fond of his food, and to his mind it was a small enough contribution on his part for so great a gain. The meals that their cook and general housekeeper Sarah made were good; solid cottager fare. But the contributions that Margherita concocted transformed cooking to another art form. Earth Masters were like that, according to what Uncle Thomas said; they often practiced as much magic in the kitchen as out of it.

Of all of the wonderful food that his spouse produced, Uncle Sebastian most adored the uniquely Devon cream tea—scones, clotted cream, and jam. Margherita made her very own clotted cream, which not all Devon or Cornish ladies did—a great many relied on the dairies to make it for them. The shallow pan of heavy cream simmering in its water-bath would certainly make Uncle Sebastian happy when he saw it.

“Shall I make the scones, Aunt?” Marina asked after a stir of the soup pot and a peek at the cream. Her aunt smiled seraphically over her shoulder. She was a beautiful woman, the brown of her hair still as rich as it had been when she was Marina’s age, her figure only a little plumper (if her husband’s paintings from that time were any guide), her large brown eyes serene. The only reason her husband wasn’t using her as his model instead of Marina was that she had her own artistic work, and wasn’t minded to give it over just to pose for her spouse, however beloved he was. Posing was Marina’s contribution to the family welfare, since she was nowhere near the kind of artist that her aunt and uncles were.

“That would be a great help, dearest,” Margherita replied, continuing to slice bread for luncheon. “Would you prefer cress or cucumber?”

“Cress, please. And deviled ham, if there is any.”

“Why a Water-child should have such an appetite for a Fire food, I cannot fathom,” Margherita replied, with a laugh. “I have deviled ham, of course; Sebastian would drive me out of the house if I didn’t.”

Margherita did not do all of the cooking, not even with Marina’s help; she did luncheon most days, and tea, and often made special supper dishes with her own hands, but for the plain cooking and other kitchen work there was old Sarah, competent and practical. Sarah wasn’t the only servant; for the housecleaning and maid—of—all—work they had young Jenny, and for the twice-yearly spring and fall house cleaning, more help from Jenny’s sisters. A man, unsurprisingly named John, came over from the neighboring farm twice a week (except during harvest) to do the yard-work and anything the uncles couldn’t do. There wasn’t much of that; Thomas was handy with just about any tool, and Sebastian, when he wasn’t in the throes of a creative frenzy, was willing to pitch in on just about any task.

Marina stirred up the scone dough, rolled it out, cut the rounds with a biscuit cutter and arrayed them in a baking pan and slipped them into the oven. By the time they were ready, Margherita had finished making sandwiches with brown and white bread, and had stacked them on a plate.

Sarah and Jenny appeared exactly when they were wanted to help set up the table in the dining room for luncheon: more of Margherita’s Earth magic at work to call them silently from their other tasks? Not likely. It was probably just that old Sarah had been with the family since the beginning, and young Jenny had been with them nearly as long—she was only “young” relative to Sarah.

After being cooped up all morning in the studio, Marina was in no mood to remain indoors. Rather than sit down at the table with her uncles and aunt, she wrapped some of the sandwiches in a napkin, took a bottle of homemade ginger beer from the pantry, put both in a basket with one of her lesson books, and ran out—at last!—into the sunshine.

She swung the basket as she ran, taking in great breaths of the autumn air, fragrant with curing hay. Deep in the heart of the orchard was her favorite place; where the stream that cut through the heart of the trees dropped abruptly by four feet, forming a lovely little waterfall that was a favorite of the lesser Water Elementals of the area. The bank beside it, carpeted with fern and sweet grass, with mosses growing in the shadows, was where Marina liked to sit and read, or watch the Water Elementals play about in the falling water, and those of Air sporting in the branches.

They looked like—whatever they chose to look like. The ones here in her tiny stream were of a size to fit the stream, although their size had nothing to do with their powers. They could have been illustrations in some expensive children’s book, tiny elfin women and men, with fish-tails or fins, except that there was a knowing look in their eyes, and their unadorned bodies were frankly sensual.

Of course, they weren’t the only Water Elementals she knew.

She’d seen River-horses down at the village, where her little stream joined a much greater one, and water nymphs of more human size, but the amount of cold iron in and around the water tended to keep them at bay. She’d been seeing and talking with them for as long as she could remember.

She often wondered what the Greater Elementals were like; she’d never been near a body of water larger than the river that supplied the village mill with its power. She often pitied poor Sarah and Jenny, who literally couldn’t see the creatures that had been visible to her for all of her life—how terrible, not to be able to see all the strange creatures that populated the Unseen World!

Her minor Elementals—Undines, who were about the size of a half-grown child, though with the undraped bodies of fully mature women—greeted her arrival with languid waves of a hand or pretended indifference; she didn’t mind. They were rather like cats, to tell the truth. If you acted as if you were interested in them, they would ignore you, but if you in your turn ignored them you were bound to get their attention.

And there were things that they could not resist.

In the bottom of her basket was a thin volume of poetry, part of the reading that Uncle Sebastian had set for her lessons—not Christina Rossetti, as might have been assumed, but the sonnets of John Donne. She put her back against the bank in the sun, and with her book in one hand and a sandwich in the other, she immersed herself in verse, reading it aloud to the fascinated Undines who propped their heads on the edge of the stream to listen.

When the Undines tired of listening to poetry and swam off on their own business, Marina filled her basket with ripe apples—the last of the season, left to ripen slowly on the trees after the main harvest. But it wasn’t teatime by any stretch of the imagination, and she really wasn’t ready to go back to the house.

She left the basket with her book atop it next to the stream, and strolled about the orchard, tending to a magical chore of her own.

This was something she had been doing since she was old enough to understand that it needed doing: making sure each and every tree was getting exactly the amount of water it needed. She did this once a month or so during the growing season; it was the part of Earth Magic to see to the health of the trees, which her aunt did with gusto, but Margherita could do nothing to supply the trees with water.

She had done a great deal of work over the years here with her own Elemental Power. The stream flowed pure and sweet without any need for her help now, though that had not always been the case; when she had first come into her powers a number of hidden or half-hidden pieces of trash had left the waters less than pristine. The worst had been old lead pipes that Uncle Thomas thought might date all the way back to Roman times, lying beneath a covering of rank weed, slowly leaching their poison into the water. Uncle Thomas had gotten Hired John to haul them away to an antiquities dealer; that would make certain they weren’t dumped elsewhere. She wished him well as he carted them off, hoping he got a decent price for them; all she cared about was that they were gone.

Still, there was always the possibility that something could get into the stream even now. She followed the stream down to the pond and back, just to be sure that it ran clean and unobstructed, except by things like rocks, which were perfectly natural; then, her brief surge of restlessness assuaged, she sat back down next to her basket. She leaned up against the mossy trunk of a tree and took the latest letter from her parents out of the leaves of her book and unfolded it.

She read it through for the second time—but did so more out of a sense of duty than of affection; in all her life she had never actually seen her parents. The uncles and her aunt were the people who had loved, corrected, and raised her. They had never let her call them anything other than “Uncle” or “Aunt,” but in her mind those titles had come to mean far more than “Mama” and “Papa.”

Mama and Papa weren’t people of flesh and blood. Mama and Papa had never soothed her after a nightmare, fed her when she was ill, taught her and healed her and—yes—loved her. Or at least, if Mama and Papa loved her, it wasn’t with an embrace, a kiss, a strong arm to lean on, a soft shoulder to cry on—it was only words on a piece of paper.

And yet—there were those words, passionate words. And there was guilt on her part. They were her mother and father; that could not be denied. For some reason, she could not be with them, although they assured her fervently in every letter that they longed for her presence. She tried to love them—certainly they had always lavished her with presents, and later when she was old enough to read, with enough letters to fill a trunk—but even though she was intimately familiar with Uncle Sebastian’s art, it was impossible to make the wistful couple in the double portrait in her room come alive.

Perhaps it was because their lives were also so different from her own. From spring to fall, it was nothing but news of Oakhurst and the Oakhurst farms, the minutiae of country squires obsessed with the details of their realm. From fall to spring, they were gone, off on their annual pilgrimage to Italy for the winter, where they basked in a prolonged summer. Marina envied them that, particularly when winter winds howled around the eaves and it seemed that spring would never come. But she just couldn’t picture what it was like for them—it had no more reality to her than the stories in the fairy tale books that her aunt and uncles had read to her as a child.

Neither, for that matter, did their home, supposedly hers, seem any more alive than those sepia-toned sketches Uncle Sebastian had made of Oakhurst. No matter how much she wished differently, she couldn’t feel the place. Here was her home, in this old fieldstone farmhouse, surrounded not only by her aunt and uncles but by other artists who came and went.

There were plenty of those; Sebastian’s hospitality was legendary, and between them, Thomas and Margherita kept normally volatile artistic temperaments from boiling over. From here, guests could venture into Cornwall and Arthurian country for their inspiration, or they could seek the rustic that was so often an inspiration for the artist Millais, another leader in the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Their village of a few hundred probably hadn’t changed significantly in the last two hundred years; for artists from London, the place came as a revelation and an endless source for pastoral landscapes and bucolic portraits.

Marina sighed, and smoothed the pages of the letter with her hand. She suspected that she was as much an abstraction to her poor mother as her mother was to her. Certainly the letters were not written to anyone that she recognized as herself. She was neither an artist nor a squire’s daughter, and the person her mother seemed to identify as her was a combination of both—making the rounds of the ailing cottagers with soup and calves-foot jelly in the morning, supervising the work of an army of servants in the afternoon, and going out with paintbox to capture the sunset in the evening. The Marina in those letters would never pose for her uncle (showing her legs in those baggy hose!), get herself floured to the elbow making scones, or be lying on the grass in the orchard, bare-legged and bare-footed. And she was, above all else, nothing like an artist.

If anything, she was a musician, mastering mostly on her own the lute, the flute, and the harp. But despite all of the references to music in her letters, her mother didn’t seem to grasp that. Presents of expensive paints and brushes that arrived every other month went straight to her Uncle Sebastian; he in his turn used the money saved by not having to buy his own to purchase music for her.

Oh, how she loved music! It served as a second bridge between herself and the Elemental creatures, not only of Water, but of Air, the Sylphs and Zephyrs that Uncle Sebastian said were her allies, though why she should need allies baffled her. She brought an instrument out here to play as often as she brought a book to read. I’m good, she thought idly, staring at words written in a careful copperplate hand that had nothing to do with the real her. If I had to—I could probably make my own living from music.

As it was, she used it in other ways; bringing as much pleasure to others as she could.

Just as she used her magic.

If she didn’t make the rounds of the sick and aged of the village like a Lady Bountiful, she brought them little gifts of another sort. The village well would never run dry or foul again. Her flute and harp were welcome additions to every celebration, from services in the village church every Sunday, to the gatherings on holidays at the village green. They probably would never know why the river never over-topped its banks even in the worst flood-times, and never would guess. Anyone who fell into the river, no matter how raging the storm, or how poor a swimmer he was, found himself carried miraculously to the bank—and if he then betook himself to the church to thank the Lord, that was all right with Marina. Knowing that she had these powers would not have served them—or her. They would be frightened, and she would find herself looked at, not as a kind of rustic unicorn, rare and ornamental, but as something dark, unfathomable, and potentially dangerous.

Her uncles and aunt had never actually said anything about keeping her magics a tacit secret, but their example had spoken louder than any advice they could have given her. Margherita and Thomas’ influence quietly ensured bountiful harvests, fertile fields, and healthy children without any overt displays—Sebastian’s magic was less useful to the villagers in that regard, but no one ever suffered from hearth-fires that burned poorly, wood that produced more smoke than heat, or indeed anything having to do with fire that went awry. It was all very quiet, very domestic magic; useful, though homely.

And working it paid very subtle dividends. Although the villagers really didn’t know the authors of their prosperity, some instinct informed them at a level too deep for thought. So, though they often looked a bit askance at the bohemian visitors that were often in residence at Blackbird Cottage, they welcomed the four residents with good-natured amusement, a touch of patronization, and probably said among themselves, “Oh, to be sure they’re lunatics, but they’re our lunatics.”

They did grant full acknowledgement of the mastery of the talents they could understand. They thought Aunt Margherita’s weaving and embroidery absolutely enchanting, and regarded her lace with awe. If they didn’t understand why anyone would pay what they did for Uncle Sebastian’s “daubs,” they recognized the skill and admired his repainted sign for the village pub, which was, almost inevitably, called “The Red Lion.” And then there was Uncle Thomas. There wasn’t a man for miles around who didn’t know about Thomas’ cabinet-making skills, and admire them.

Marina’s room was a veritable showplace of those skills. In fact, it was a showplace of all three of her guardians’ skills. Uncle Thomas had built and carved all of the furniture, from the little footstool to the enormous canopy bed. Aunt Margherita was responsible for the embroidered hangings of the bed, the curtains at the windows, the cushions in the window seat, all of them covered with fantastic vines and garlands and flowers. Uncle Sebastian had plastered the walls with his own hands, and decorated them with wonderful frescos.

He had nobly refrained from painting his beloved medieval tales—instead, he’d given her woods filled with gentle mythological creatures and Elementals. Undines frolicked in a waterfall, a Salamander coiled lazily in a campfire for a pair of young Fauns with mischievous eyes, a Unicorn rested its horn in the lap of a maiden that bore more than a passing resemblance to Marina herself. The room had grown as she had; from a cradle and a panel of vines to the wonder that it was now. The number of hours that had gone into its creation was mind-boggling, and even now that she was grown, she could come into the room to find that Uncle Sebastian had touched up fading colors, or Aunt Margherita had added a cushion. It was the visible and constant reminder of how much they cared for her.

No one could possibly love her as much as her aunt and uncles did, and never mind that the titles of Aunt and Uncle were mere courtesy. She had never questioned that; had never needed to. There was only one question that had never been properly answered, so far as she was concerned.

If my parents love me so much, why did they send me away—and why have they never tried to be with me again?

That there was a secret about all this she had known from the time she had begun to question the way things were. She had never directly questioned her parents, however—something about the tone of her mother’s letters suggested that her mother’s psyche was a fragile one, and a confrontation would lead to irreparable harm. The last thing she wanted to do was to upset a woman as sweet natured and gentle as those letters revealed her to be!

And somehow, I think that she is so very fragile emotionally because of the reason she had to send me away.

She sighed. If that was indeed the case, it was no use asking one of her beloved guardians. They wouldn’t even have to lie to her—Uncle Sebastian would give her a look that suggested that if she was clever, she would find out for herself. And as for the other two, well, the look of reproach that Aunt Margherita could (and would) bend upon her would make her feel about as low as a worm. And Uncle Thomas would become suddenly as deaf as one of his carved bedposts. It really wasn’t fair; the chief characteristic of a Water Master was supposed to be fluidity. She should have been able to insinuate her will past any of their defenses!

“And perhaps one day you will be able to—when you are a Master,” giggled a voice that bubbled with the chuckling of sweet water over stones.

She turned to glare at the Undine who tossed her river-weed-twined hair and with an insolent flip of her tail, stared right back at her.

“You shouldn’t be reading other people’s thoughts,” Marina told her. “It isn’t polite.”

“You shouldn’t be shouting them to the world at large,” the Undine retorted. “A tadpole has more shields than you”

Marina started, guiltily, when she realized that the Undine was right. Never mind that there wasn’t real need for shields; she knew very well that she was supposed to be keeping them up at all times. They had to be automatic—otherwise, when she really did need them, she might not be able to raise them in time. There were unfriendly Elementals—some downright hostile to humans. And there were unfriendly Masters as well.

“I beg your pardon,” she said with immediate contrition to the Undine, who laughed, flipped her tail again, and dove under the surface to vanish into the waters.

She spent several moments putting up those shields properly, and another vowing not to let them drop again. What had she been thinking? If Uncle Sebastian had caught her without her shields, he’d have verbally flayed her alive!

Well, he hadn’t. And what he didn’t know, wouldn’t hurt him.

And besides, it was time for tea.

Checking again to make sure those shields were intact, she picked up her basket, rose to her feet, and ran back up the path to the farmhouse, leaving behind insolent Undines and uncomfortable questions.

For now, at any rate.

Chapter Two

SEBASTIAN had paint in his hair, as usual; Margherita forbore to point it out to him. He’d see it himself the next time he glanced in a mirror, and her comments about his appearance only made him testy and led to growling complaints that she was fussing at him. Besides, he looked rather—endearing—with paint in his hair. It was one more reminder of the impetuous artist who had proposed to her with a brush behind one ear and paint all over his hands.

At least these days he generally got the paint off his hands before he ate!

Instead, she passed the plate of deviled ham sandwiches to him, and said, “Well, they’re off to Italy. They caught the boat across the Channel yesterday, if the letter was accurate.”

No need to say who, Alanna and Hugh Roeswood, unable to bear their empty house in the winter, had fled to Italy as soon as their harvest was over that first disastrous year, and had repeated the trip every year after. It was a habit now, Margherita suspected; Earth Masters tended to get into comfortable ruts. The Roeswoods always took the same Tuscan villa, and Alanna was able to pass the time in a garden that was living through the winter instead of stark and dormant. As an Earth Master herself, Margherita suspected that it helped her cope with her grief. By now, the earth there knew them as well as the earth of Oakhurst did.

Sebastian helped himself to sandwiches, and nodded. He seldom read Alanna’s letters; Margherita suspected they were too emotional for him. Like all Fire Masters, his emotions were volatile and easily aroused. And Alanna’s letters could arouse emotion in a stone.

As Margherita had suspected he would, he shifted the subject to one more comfortable. “I’ll be glad when winter truly comes for us. With all the harvesters moving in and out, it fair drives me mad trying to keep track of the strangers in the village.”

Strangers—the unspoken danger was always there, that Marina’s real aunt had finally found out where she was, that one of those strangers was her spy.

Never mind that Marina was known as “Marina Tarrant” and everyone thought she was Sebastian’s niece. Never mind that they managed to preserve that false identity to literally everyone in the world except her real parents and that handful of guests at the ill-fated gathering after the christening. Such a transparent ruse would never fool Arachne, if the woman had any idea where to look for the child. The single thing keeping Marina safe was that Thomas, Sebastian, and Margherita were the Roeswoods’ social inferiors, and it would probably never enter Arachne’s head to look for her brother’s child in the custody of middle-class bohemians. She had, in fact, looked right past them when she had made her dramatic entrance; perhaps she had thought they had been invited only because they were part of something like the great Magic Circle in London. Perhaps she had even thought they were mere entertainers, musicians for the gathering. It had been clear then that to her, they might as well not exist.

And why should they come to her notice then? Their parents had been the equivalent of Roeswood servants; Sebastian was hardly known outside of the small circle of patrons who prized his talent. As for Thomas, he was a mere cabinetmaker; he worked with his hands, and was not even the social equivalent of a farmer who owned his own land. That was their safety then, and now. But they had always known they could not rely on it.

The danger was unspoken because they never, ever said Arachne’s name aloud and tried not even to think it. Arachne’s curse lay dormant, but who knew what would happen if her name was spoken aloud in Marina’s presence? Names had power, and even if that sleeping curse did not awaken, saying Arachne’s name still might draw her attention to this obscure little corner of Devon. Whether Arachne’s magic was her own or borrowed, it still followed no rules of Elemental power that Margherita recognized, and there was no telling what she could and could not do.

That was why they had kept the reason for Marina’s exile a secret from her all these years, and up until she was old enough to keep her own counsel, had even kept her real name from her. If she knew about the curse, about her real aunt—she might try to break the curse herself, she might try to find Arachne and persuade her to take it off, she might even dare, in adolescent hubris, to challenge her aunt.

She might not do any of those things; she might be sensible about it, but Margherita had judged it unwise to take the chance. Marina was sweet-natured, but there was a stubborn streak to her, and not even a promise would keep her from doing something she really wanted to. Marina had a very agile mind, and a positively lawyerlike ability to find a way, however tangled and convoluted the path might be, of getting around any promises she’d made if she truly wanted something. That was a Water characteristic—the ability to go wherever the will drove. Perhaps they had done her no favors by keeping her in ignorance, but at least they had done her no harm.

Other than the harm of separating mother from child.

It hadn’t been Marina that had suffered, though; Margherita would pledge her soul on that. The happy, carefree child had grown into a remarkable young woman, and if she had not had all the advantages her parents’ relative wealth could have bought her, she had obtained other advantages that money probably could not have purchased. Freedom, for one thing; she’d learned her letters and reckoning from Margherita, and all the other graces that young ladies were supposed to require, and a great deal more. From Thomas, who had a scholarly turn, she’d learned Latin and Greek as well as the French she got from Margherita—and from Sebastian, Italian. She learned German on her own. When she was little, they’d given her formal lessons, but when she turned fourteen, they let her choose her own subjects for the most part, though she’d still had plenty of studying to do. This year was the first time they’d let her follow her own inclinations; there was no telling what she’d choose to do when she passed that fateful eighteenth birthday and her parents collected her. Thomas hoped that she would go to Oxford, to the women’s college there, even though women were not actually given degrees.

Meanwhile, she had the run of the library, and devoured books in all five languages besides her native English. Winter-long, there wasn’t a great deal to do besides work and read, for the long winter rains kept all of them indoors. Margherita reflected that she would have to keep an eye on Sebastian and his demands for Mari’s time as his model; it had already occurred to him that by next summer he would lose her, and he was painting at a furious rate. Mari was being very good-natured about all the posing, but Margherita knew from her own experience that it was hard work, and that Sebastian was singularly indifferent to the needs of his models when a painting-frenzy was on him.

Thomas reached for the teapot and let out his breath in a sigh. “Eight months,” he said, and there was no indication in his voice that the sigh was one of relief. Margherita nodded.

They had always known that this last year, Marina’s seventeenth, would be the hardest. Even if Arachne was not aware that her curse now had a limitation on it, she would still be trying to bring it to fruition in order to achieve that self-imposed deadline. The older Marina got, the stronger she would be in her powers, and the better able to defend herself. Nor could Arachne count on Marina remaining alone; although the help that her friends could give her was, by the very nature of the magic that they wielded, somewhat limited, that did not apply to true lovers, especially if they happened to be of complementary Elements. In a case like that the powers joined, magnifying each other, and it would be very difficult for a single Power to overwhelm them. The older Marina was, the more likely it became that she would fall in love, and Magic being what it was, it was a foregone conclusion that it would be with another Elemental magician.

Arachne would want to prevent that at all costs, for her curse would rebound on its caster if it was broken, and heaven only knew what would happen then.

So this seventeenth year of Marina’s life would be the most dangerous for her, and her guardians were doing everything in their power to keep her out of the public eye.

Not her image—that was harmless enough. She didn’t look strikingly like either of her parents; the resemblance had to be hunted for. She had Hugh’s dark hair, a sable near to black, but it was wavy rather than straight as his was, or as curly as her mother’s. In fact, virtually everything about her was a melding of the two; her face between round and oblong, her mouth neither the tiny rosebud of her mother’s, nor as wide as her father’s. She was tall, much taller than her mother. And her eyes—well, they were nothing like either parent’s. Hugh’s were gray, Alanna’s a cornflower blue. Marina’s were enormous and blue-violet, a color so striking that everyone who saw her for the first time was arrested by the intensity of it. There had been no hint of that color when she’d been a baby, and as far as anyone knew, there had never been eyes of that color in either family.

So Sebastian had been using her as a model all this past year, both because she was a wonderful subject and to keep her busy and out of the village as much as possible. And if because of that his pictures took on a certain sameness, well, that particular trait hadn’t hurt Rossetti’s popularity, nor any of the other Pre-Raphaelites who had favorite models.

In fact, the only negative aspect to using Marina as a model had so far been as amusing as it was negative—that certain would-be patrons had assumed that the model’s virtue was negotiable. After the first shock—the Blackbird Cottage household was known in the artistic community more as a model for semi-stodgy propriety than otherwise—Sebastian had rather enjoyed disabusing those “gentlemen” of that notion. If going cold and saying in a deathly voice, “Are you referring to my niece?” was not a sufficient hint, then turning on a feigned version of a Fire Master’s wrath certainly was. No one ever faced a Fire Master in his full powers without quailing, whether or not they had magic themselves, and even theatrical anger was nearly as intimidating as the real thing.

And Sebastian being Sebastian, he usually got, not only an apology, but an increase in his commission out of the encounter. He’d only lost one patron out of all of the years that he’d been using Marina, and it was one he’d had very little taste for in the first place. “I told him to go elsewhere for his damned ‘Leda,’ if he wanted the model as well as the painting,” was what he’d growled to Margherita when he’d returned from his interview in London. “I wanted to knock him down—”

“But you didn’t, of course,” she’d said, knowing from his attitude that, of course, he hadn’t.

“No. Damn his eyes. He’s too influential; I’m no fool, my love, I kept my insults behind my teeth and managed a cunning imitation of sanctimonious prig without a sensual bone in my body. But I wanted to send his damned teeth down his throat for what he hinted at.” Sebastian’s aura had pulsed a sullen red.

“Serve the blackguard right,” Margherita returned. Sebastian had smiled at last, and kissed her, and she had known that, as always, his temper had burned itself out quickly.

But common perceptions were a boon to Marina’s safety; Arachne would never dream that Marina Roeswood would be posing for paintings like a common—well—artist’s model. The term was only a more polite version of something else.

For that matter, if Alanna had any notion that Sebastian’s lovely model was her own daughter, she would probably faint. It was just as well that the question had never come up. The prim miniatures that Sebastian sent every Christmas showed a proper young lady with her hair up, a high-collared blouse, and a cameo at her throat, not the languid odalisques or daring dancers Sebastian had been painting in that style the French were calling Art Nouveau.

“Once harvest’s over and winter’s begun,” Sebastian said through a mouthful of deviled ham, “it will be easier to keep the little baggage indoors.”

“Unless she decides it’s time you made good on your promise to take her to London,” Thomas pointed out.

“So what if she does?” Sebastian countered. “London’s as good or better a place to hide her than here! How many Elemental magicians are there in London? Trying to find her would be like trying to find one particular pigeon in Trafalgar Square! If she wants a trip to the galleries and the British Museum, I’ll take her. I’m more concerned that she doesn’t get the notion in her head to go to Scotland and meet up with the Selkies.”

Thomas winced. “Don’t even think about that, or she might pick the idea up,” he cautioned, and sucked on his lower lip. “We’ve got a problem, though. We can’t teach her any more. She needs a real Water Master now, and I think she’s beginning to realize that. She’s restless; she’s bored with the exercises I’ve set her. She might not give a hang about the Roeswood name, fortune, or estate, but she’s going to become increasingly unhappy when she realizes she needs more teaching in her Power and we can’t give it to her.”

Sebastian and Margherita exchanged a long look of consternation; they hadn’t thought of that. Of all the precautions they had taken, all the things they had thought they would have to provide for, Marina’s tutoring in magic had not been factored into the equation.

“Is she going to be that powerful?” Sebastian asked, dumbfounded.

“What if I told you that every time she goes out to the orchard she’s reading poetry to Undines?” Thomas asked.

That took even Margherita by surprise. Sebastian blanched. Small wonder. When Elementals simply appeared to socialize with an Elemental mage, it meant that the magician in question either was very, very powerful, powerful enough that the Elementals wanted to forge friendships with her, or that she would be that powerful, making it all the more important to the Elementals that they forge those friendships before she realized her power. One didn’t coerce or compel one’s friends… it just wasn’t done.

“Oh, there is more to it than that,” Thomas went on. “I’ve caught Sylphs in her audiences as well. I can only thank God that she hasn’t noticed very often, or she’d start to wonder just what she could do with them if she asked.”

So the Air Elementals were aware of her potential power too. The Alliance granted her by Roderick did go both ways…

Thomas was right; they couldn’t leave her at loose ends. If she began trying things on her own, they might as well take her to London and put her on top of Nelson’s column with a banner unrolling at her feet, spelling out her name for all—for Arachne—to see.

“What about asking Elizabeth Hastings for a visit—or more than one?” Margherita asked slowly.

Sebastian opened his mouth as if to object—then shut it. Thomas blinked.

“Would she come?” her brother asked, probably guessing, and accurately, that she had been feeling Elizabeth out on that very subject in her latest letters. “She’s not an artist, after all. And we are not precisely ‘polite’ society.”

“We’re not social pariahs either, brother mine,” she pointed out. “Silly goose! She wouldn’t harm her reputation by visiting us, even if anyone actually knew that was what she was doing here. A mature lady just might take up the invitation of a perfectly respectable couple and the wife’s brother, all well-known for their scholarly pursuits—”

Thomas primmed up his face, and Sebastian drew himself up stiffly, interrupting her train of thought with their posing.

“Stop that, you two!” she said, torn between exasperation and laughter. She slapped Sebastian’s shoulder lightly, and made a face at Thomas. “Like it or not, we are respectable, and only old roues like some of your clients, Sebastian, think any different!”

“Dull as dishwater, we are,” Thomas agreed dolefully, as Sebastian leered at her. “We don’t even amuse the village anymore. We give them nothing to gossip about.”

“Oh, but if they only knew…” Sebastian laughed. “Now, acushla, don’t be annoyed with us. There’s little enough in this situation to laugh about, don’t grudge us a joke or two.”

He reached out to embrace her, and she sighed and returned it. She never could resist him when he set out to charm her.

“Now, what about Elizabeth? Obviously you two women have been plotting something out behind our backs,” Sebastian continued.

“Well, to be honest, it never occurred to me that we’d need to have her here, I just thought it would be good for Mari to be around another Water-mage, and even better to have someone around who was—well—more like Hugh and Alanna. Someone who could get her used to the kinds of manners and social skills she’ll have to have when she goes to them.” Margherita sighed. “I don’t want her to feel like an exile. And she likes Elizabeth. I thought if Elizabeth could come for a few weeks at a time, it would help the transition.”

“So, that makes perfect sense; all the better, that you’ve clearly got something in motion already,” Thomas said, with his usual practicality. “So, what was your plan? How did she figure to get away from all of her social obligations? I should think given the season that it would be nearly impossible.”

“Not this year!” Margherita said in triumph. “You know she hates both the shooting season and the hunting season—”

“‘The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible,’“ her brother muttered, quoting Wilde.

“—and now that her daughter’s married and both her sons are at school, she’s got no real reason to stay and play hostess if she truly doesn’t want to,” Margherita continued. “Her husband, she tells me, has always wanted to try a season in Scotland instead of here. He’s had tentative invitations he never pursued because she didn’t care to go.”

She stopped there; both her brother and her husband were canny enough to fill in the blank spaces without any help from her. The Hastingses had been the host to more than enough pheasant-shoots and fox-hunts over the years that they must have an amazing backlog of invitations that Stephen Hastings—always a keen hunter—could pursue with a good conscience without worrying that Elizabeth was going to make no secret of being bored.

“So he’ll get to be that most desirable of social prizes, the ‘safe single man,’“ Margherita observed with irony. “He can escort the older widows to dinner without feeling put-upon, and he won’t target or be a target for unsuitable romance. He won’t cause a quarrel with anyone’s fiance, and he can be relied upon, if there’s a country dance, to make sure all the wallflowers get a waltz.”

“That alone will probably ensure he gets his choice of shoots,” Sebastian said, his face twitching as he tried not to laugh.

Elizabeth had said as much herself, pointing out the rest of her husband’s good points as a sporting guest. He was a good and considerate gun too; not a neck-or-nothing rider, but that wasn’t necessary in a middle-aged man to preserve his standing in the Hunt Club. All things considered, in order to give him a free conscience in accepting one or more of those long-standing invitations, all that Elizabeth would have to do would be to find some excuse that could reasonably take her off to this part of the country for some extended period of time.

“Let’s put our heads together on this one,” Sebastian said immediately. “What on God’s green earth could Lady Elizabeth Hastings want in this part of the world?”

Thomas blinked again—and said, “Folk tales and songs.”

Margherita clapped her hands like a girl, and Sebastian’s smile lit up the entire room. “Brilliant, Thomas!” he shouted. “By gad, I knew I’d made a good choice of brother-in-law! Absolutely brilliant!”

The collection of folk ballads and oral tales was always an appropriate and genteel pursuit for a lady with a scholarly bent; this close to Cornwall there were bound to be variations on the Arthurian mythos that no one had written down yet. During the seasons of planting, tending, and harvesting, no farmer or farm-worker would have time to recite the stories his granny had told him—but during the winter, if Elizabeth wanted to lend verisimilitude to her story, all she would have to do would be to have Thomas run her down to the pub in the pony-cart now and again to collect a nice little volume of tales and songs.

“We’ve already had her out here during the summer and spring over the years, so she’s seen the May Day celebrations and the fairs,” Margherita said, planning aloud, “She can look through her sketches and notes and ‘discover’ what a wealth of untapped ballads we have here and make visits the rest of the winter. One long one up until the Christmas season, say, and another between the end of January and spring.”

“That’s a rather long time. You’re sure her husband won’t mind?” Sebastian asked, suddenly doubtful, remembering the other half of the Hastings equation.

Margherita smiled. “I didn’t think you two ever listened when I read her letters aloud. Let me just say that they are on cordial terms, the best of terms, really, but Elizabeth has gotten confirmation about some of her suspicions about her husband’s frequent visits to London.”

Thomas shook his head; Sebastian snorted. “Actress?” he asked bluntly.

“Dancer,” she replied serenely. “Well, if Elizabeth chooses to look the other way, it is none of my business, and if Stephen has another interest, he won’t be unhappy if Elizabeth doesn’t go in to London with him this winter.”

“Stephen got his local Parliament seat last year, didn’t he?” Sebastian asked, showing that he had paid a little more attention to Elizabeth’s letters than Margherita had thought.

“He did, and Elizabeth loathes London.” The plan unrolled itself in Margherita’s mind like a neatly gridded tapestry. “Stephen can pretend to live at his club and visit his dancer while Parliament is in session, and she can stay with us.” Her lips twitched in a bit of a smile. “Perhaps if he gets a surfeit of the girl he’ll tire of her.”

“He probably will,” Sebastian predicted loftily. “It’s nothing more than an attempt to prove he isn’t middle-aged, I suspect. If he doesn’t tire of her, she’ll tire of him. There’ll be a dance-instructor or a French singing-master hanging about before the New Year, mark my words. And at some point, Stephen will show up at her establishment unexpectedly, and discover that there’s something other than lessons going on.”

Margherita hid a smile. Sebastian had met Stephen several times, and on each occasion she was reminded of a pair of dogs circling one another in mutual animosity, prevented from actually starting a fight by the presence of their masters. Sebastian was the utter opposite of Stephen Hastings, describing him as a “hearty gamesman” and intimating that the only reason he’d actually gotten his Cambridge degree was that his instructors wanted to see the last of him. There might have been some truth in that. He certainly hadn’t taken a First, and seemed to be absurdly proud of the fact.

It wasn’t her business why Elizabeth had married him, when all was said and done. Perhaps, besides a certain amount of affection, it had been because he was so very incurious, so utterly without imagination, that she could carry on her Magical Workings without rousing any interest in him. That arrangement wouldn’t have suited Margherita—but it was infinitely better than having to sneak about in deathly fear of being caught. And if one couldn’t find someone to love—society being what it was, a woman of Elizabeth’s position had little choice except to marry—the best compromise was to find someone it was possible to be friends with.

“I’ll write her,” Margherita said. “Unless you want to use a dove to send her a message?” She cast a glance of inquiry at Thomas. He shook his head.

“It’s not that urgent, not while Marina has other things to occupy her. There’s plenty to do around here until the end of harvest,” he said.

“I’ll find things for her to do,” Margherita and Sebastian said together, then looked at each other and laughed.

“It’s settled, then,” Margherita said for both of them, and felt a certain relief. That would be one more person here to watch over Marina as well. One more pair of eyes—one more set of powers.

Most importantly, someone to help the child master the powers that would protect her better than any of them could.

“And just what is it that you are thinking about that makes you frown so?” asked the Undine. Her pointed chin rested on her hands, her elbows propped on the bank of the brook. The faintly greenish cast to her skin was something that Marina was so used to seeing that she seldom noticed it unless, like now, she stopped to study an Undine’s expression.

The Undines didn’t trouble themselves with individual names; at least, they never gave her their names. Though that might simply have been excessive caution on their part. Names had power, after all.

“Was I frowning?” Marina asked. She rubbed her forehead; on the whole, she really didn’t want to discuss her internal conflicts with an Undine that wouldn’t understand anyway. Undines didn’t have parents, at least, not so far as Marina knew, just sisters. Marina had never seen anything but female Undines. “Just concentrating, I suppose.”

“Well, at least you aren’t shouting your thoughts anymore,” the Undine replied, with a toss of her green-blond hair. “You ought to stop thinking and come have a swim. It won’t be long before it’s too cold—for you, anyway. Enjoy yourself while you still can.”

“You’re right,” she agreed, only too pleased to leave the problem of her parents to sort itself out another day. The Undine laughed liquidly, and plunged under the surface of the brook to become—literally—one with the water. For all intents and purposes, the Undine vanished in a froth of foam and a wave.

Marina followed the brook upstream, above the little falls, to a pond the family waterfowl seldom visited. It stood in the midst of a water meadow, and the verge was dense with protective reeds. An intensely green scent hung over the pond; not the scent of rotting vegetation, nor the stale smell of scum, just the perfume of a healthy watering hole densely packed with growing things. In fact, the water was pure and clear, thanks to a fine population of little fish and frogs. Herons came here to hunt, and the smaller, shy birds of the reed beds, but never any people—if the folk of the neighboring farm knew about this place, they didn’t think it held fish large enough to bother with, and her own family left her alone here. This was Marina’s summertime retreat by common consent, and had been since she was old enough to come up here alone. It wasn’t as if she could get into any trouble in the water, after all—even in the roughest horseplay, the Undines would never permit her to come to harm in her proper element. She had been able to swim, and be safe in the water, since before she could walk.

She slipped out of her dress and petticoat and underthings and left them folded on a rock concealed among the reeds, where they would remain safe and dry without advertising the fact that there was someone swimming here to anyone who might be passing. This time of year there were always strangers, itinerant harvesters, and gypsies passing through the village. The villagers themselves might not come here, but the strangers, looking for a place to camp, might happen upon it by accident. Not the gypsies, though; the Undines managed to warn them off.

There hadn’t been anyone around the pond today, or the Undine wouldn’t have invited her to swim. They might not understand much about a mortal’s life, but they did understand that strange men lurking about could be a danger to Marina.

She took a moment to tie her hair loosely at the nape of her neck, then slipped into the sun-warmed water wearing nothing more than her own skin.

Immediately she was surrounded by Undines wearing nothing more than theirs, and an exuberant game of tag began. She was at a partial disadvantage, not being able to breathe underwater, but she managed to compensate with her longer reach. There was a great deal of splashing and giggling as they chased one another. The warm water caressed Marina’s skin like the brush of warmed silk; as the Undines slid past her, a tingle of energy passed between them, a little like the tingle in the air before lightning strikes. The pond was surprisingly deep for its small size, and as she dove under to elude a pursuer or to chase her own quarry, she reveled in the shock of encountering a cooler layer of water beneath the sun-warmed surface. Other, lesser Elementals gathered to watch, chattering excitedly among the reeds, applauding when someone made a particularly clever move. A family of otters appeared out of nowhere and joined in the fun, and the game changed from one of tag to one of “catch the otter” by common consent.

The otters took to this new game with all the enthusiasm that they brought to any endeavor, and soon the pond was alive with splashing and shrill laughter. Undines chased otters in every direction; slippery otters slid right through Marina’s fingers, though truth to tell, she didn’t try very hard to hold them. It was more fun watching them twist and turn in the water to avoid capture than it was to try and wrestle a squirming body that just might deliver an accidental nasty kick—with claws!—if you weren’t careful.

Only when Marina was completely out of breath did she retreat to her rocks and watch the Undines continue the game on their own. The smallest of the otters evidently ran out of energy at the same time, and joined her. After she combed out her hair with her fingers and coaxed most of the water out of it, she stroked the otter’s smooth, dense fur and scratched its head as it sighed with content and erected its stiff whiskers in an otter-smile. It rolled over on its back, begging for her to scratch its tummy. She chuckled, and obliged.

But the sun was westering; it was past teatime, and neither the Undines nor the otters seemed prepared to give up their game any time soon. They might be perfectly free to play until dark and afterwards, but she did have things to do. Reluctantly, she donned her clothing again—reluctantly, because after the freedom of being in the water, it seemed heavy and confining—pulled her skirts up above her knees, and waded back to dry land.

She stopped in the orchard long enough to retrieve her basket of apples and her book. With the basket swinging from one hand, she took her time strolling back to the farmhouse.

In the late afternoon sunlight, the gray granite glowed with mellow warmth. When winter came, the stone would look cold and forbidding, but now, with all the doors and windows open, flowers in the window boxes, and roses twining up trellises along the sides, it was a welcoming sight.

Tea was over, but as she’d expected, Aunt Margherita had left her scones, watercress sandwiches, and a little pot of clotted cream in the kitchen under a cheesecloth. There was no tea, but there was hot water on the stove, and she quickly made her own late repast. She arranged the apples she’d brought in a pottery bowl on the kitchen table, and retreated to her room to fetch her work. After her swim, she was feeling languid, and her window seat, surrounded by ivy with a fine view of the hills and the sunset, seemed very inviting. Uncle Sebastian would be fiddling with his Saint Joan, working on the background, probably; Uncle Thomas was carving an occasional table, a swoopy thing all organic curves. And Aunt Margherita was probably either at her embroidery or her tapestry loom.

Her uncles expected a great deal of her in her studies; they saw no reason why she couldn’t have as fine an education as any young man who could afford the sort of tutor that Sebastian’s father had been. Granted, neither Sebastian nor Thomas had attended university, but if they’d had the means or had truly wanted to they could have. So, for that matter, could Aunt Margherita. Perhaps women could not aspire to a university degree, but they were determined that should she choose to attend the single women’s college at Oxford regardless of that edict, she would be as well or better prepared than any young man who presented himself to any of the colleges there. She was not particularly enamored of the idea of closing herself up in some stifling building (however hallowed) for several years with a gaggle of young women she didn’t even know, but she did enjoy the lessons. At the moment she was engaged in puzzling her way through Chaucer in the original Middle English, the Canterbury Tales having caught Uncle Sebastian’s fancy. She had a shrewd notion that she knew what the subjects of his next set of paintings was likely to be.

Well, at least it will be winter by the time he gets to them. If she was going to have to wear the heavy medieval robes that Uncle Sebastian had squirreled away, at least it would be while it was cold enough that the weight of the woolens and velvets would be welcome rather than stifling.

At the moment, it was the Wife of Bath’s Tale that was the subject of her study, and she had the feeling that she would get a better explanation of some of it from Aunt Margherita than from the uncle that had assigned it to her. Uncle Sebastian was not quite as broad-minded as he thought he was.

Or perhaps he just wasn’t as broad-minded with regard to his “niece” as he would have been around a young woman who wasn’t under his guardianship. With Marina, he tended to break out in odd spots of ultra-middle-class stuffiness from time to time.

She curled herself up in the window seat, a cushion at her back, with her Chaucer in one hand, a copybook on her knee, and a pencil at the ready. If one absolutely had to study on such a lovely late afternoon, this was certainly the only way to do so.

Chapter Three

SEBASTIAN had gone down to pick up the post in the village; no one else wanted to venture out into the October rain and leave the warmth of the cottage. Marina was supposed to be reading Shakespeare—her uncle was making good his threat to paint her as Kate the Shrew and wanted her to become familiar with the part—but she sat at the window of the parlor and stared out at the rain instead. Winter had definitely arrived, with Halloween a good three weeks away. A steady, chilling rain dripped down through leafless branches onto grass gone sere and brown-edged. Even the evergreens and the few plants that kept their leaves throughout the winter looked dark and dismal. The air outside smelled of wet leaves; inside the foyer where the coats hung, the odor of wet wool hung in a miasma of perpetual damp. Only in the foyer, however. Scented candles burned throughout the house, adding the perfume of honey and cinnamon to counteract the faint chemical smell of the oil lamps, and someone was always baking something in the kitchen that formed a pleasant counter to the wet wool.

And yet, for Marina at least, the weather wasn’t entirely depressing. Water, life-giving, life-bearing water was all around her.

If the air smelled only dank to the others, for her there was an undercurrent of potential. She sensed the currents of faint power that followed each drop of rain, she tasted it, like green tea in the back of her throat, and stirred restlessly, feeling as if there ought to be something she should do with that power.

She heard the door open and shut in the entranceway, and Uncle Sebastian shake out his raincape before hanging it up. He went straight to the kitchen, though, so there must not have been any mail for her.

She didn’t expect any; her mother didn’t write as often in winter. It was probably a great deal more difficult to get letters out from Italy than it was to send them from Oakhurst in England.

Italy. She wondered what it would be like to spend a winter somewhere that wasn’t cold, wet, and gray. Was Tuscany by the sea?

I’d love to visit the sea.

“I don’t suppose you remember Elizabeth Hastings, do you?” asked Margherita from the door behind her. She turned; her aunt had a letter in her hand, her dark hair bound up on the top of her head in a loose knot, a smudge of flour on her nose.

“Vaguely. She’s that Water magician with the title, isn’t she?” Marina closed the volume in her lap with another stirring of interest. “The one with the terribly—terribly correct husband?”

Margherita laughed, her eyes merry. “The only one with a ‘terribly—terribly correct husband’ that has ever visited us, yes. She’s coming to spend several weeks with us—to teach you.”

Now she had Marina’s complete interest. “Me? What—oh! Water magic?” Interest turned to excitement, and a thrill of anticipation.

Margherita laughed. “She certainly isn’t going to teach you etiquette! You’re more than ready for a teacher of your own Element, and it’s time you got one.”

The exercises that Uncle Thomas had been setting her had been nothing but repetitions of the same old things for some time now. Marina hadn’t wanted to say anything, but she had been feeling frustrated, bored, and stale. Frustrated, because she had the feeling that there was so much that was just beyond her grasp—bored and stale because she was so tired of repeating the same old things. “But—what about Mrs. Hasting’s family?” she asked, not entirely willing to believe that someone with a “terribly—terribly correct husband” would be able to get away for more than a day or two at most, and certainly not alone.

“Elizabeth’s sons are at Oxford, her daughter is married, and her husband wants to take up some invitations for the hunting and fishing seasons in Scotland this year,” Margherita said, with a smile at Marina’s growing excitement. “And when the hunting season is over, he intends to go straight on to London for his Parliament duties. Elizabeth hates hunting and detests London; she’ll be staying with us up until Christmas.”

“That’s wonderful!” Marina could not contain herself any more; she leapt to her feet, catching the book of Shakespeare at the last moment before it tumbled to the floor out of her lap. “When is she coming?”

“By the train on Wednesday, and I’ll need your help in getting the guest room ready for her—”

But Marina was running as soon as she realized the guest would arrive the next day. She was already halfway up the stairs, her aunt’s laughter following her, by the time Margherita had reached the words “guest room.”

Once, all the rooms in this old farm house had led one into the other, like the ones on the first floor. But at some point, perhaps around the time that Jane Austen was writing Emma, the walls had been knocked down in the second story and replaced with an arrangement of a hall with smaller bedrooms along it. And about when Victoria first took the throne, one of the smallest bedrooms had been made into a bathroom. True, hot water still had to be carted laboriously up the stairs for a bath, but at least they weren’t bathing in hip baths in front of the fire, and there was a water-closet. So their guest wouldn’t be totally horrified by the amenities, or lack of them.

It would be horrible if she left after a week because she couldn’t have a decent wash-up.

She opened the linen-closet at the end of the hall and took a deep breath of the lavender-scented air before taking out sheets for the bed in the warmest of the guest rooms. This was the one directly across from her own, and like hers, right over the kitchen. The view wasn’t as fine, but in winter there wasn’t a great deal of view anyway, and the cozy warmth coming up from the kitchen, faintly scented with whatever Margherita was baking, made up for the lack of view. Where her room was a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy, this room was altogether conventional, with rose-vine wallpaper, chintz curtains and cushions, and a brass-framed bed. The rest of the furniture, however, was made by Thomas, and looked just a little odd within the confines of such a conventional room. Woolen blankets woven by Margherita in times when she hadn’t any grand commissions to fulfill were in an asymmetrical chest at the foot of the bed, and the visitor would probably need them.

She left the folded sheets on the bed and flung the single window open just long enough to air the room out. It didn’t take long, since Margherita never really let the guest rooms get stale and stuffy. It also didn’t take long for the room to get nasty and cold, so she closed it again pretty quickly.

Fire. I need a fire. There was no point in trying to kindle one herself the way that Uncle Sebastian did. She was eager, almost embarrassingly eager, for their visitor to feel welcome. When Elizabeth Hastings arrived, it should be to find a room warmed and waiting, as if this house was her home.

Marina solved the problem of the fire with a shovelful of coals from her own little fire, laid onto the waiting kindling in the fireplace of the guest room. She might not be able to kindle a fire, but she was rather proud of her ability to lay one. Once the fire was going and the chill was off the air, she made the bed up with the lavender-scented sheets and warm blankets, dusted everything thoroughly, and set out towels and everything else a guest might want. She made sure that the lamp on the bedside table was full of oil and the wick trimmed, and that there was a box of lucifer matches there as well.

She looked around the room, and sighed. No flowers. It was just too late for them—and too late to gather a few branches with fiery autumn leaves on them. The bouquet of dried straw flowers and fragrant herbs on the mantel would just have to do.

She heard footsteps in the hall outside, and wasn’t surprised when her Aunt pushed the door open. “You haven’t left me anything to do,” Margherita observed, with an approving glance around the room.

“Well, really, there wasn’t that much work needed to be done; that tramping poet was only here last week.” The “tramping poet” was a rarity, a complete stranger to the household, who’d arrived on foot, in boots and rucksack, letter of recommendation in hand from one of their painterly friends. He’d taken it in his head to “do the Wordsworth”—that is, to walk about the countryside for a while in search of inspiration, and finding that the Lake District was overrun with sightseers and hearty fresh-air types, he’d elected to try Devon and Cornwall instead. He was on the last leg of his journey and had been remarkably cheerful about being soaked with cold rain. A good guest as well, he’d made himself useful chopping wood and in various other small ways, had not overstayed his welcome, and even proved to be very amusing in conversation.

“You can’t possibly be a successful poet,” Sebastian had accused him. “You’re altogether too good-natured, and nothing near morose enough.”

“Sadly,” he’d admitted (not sadly at all), “I’m not. I do have a facile touch for rhyme, but I can’t seem to generate the proper level of anguish. I’ve come to that conclusion myself, actually. I intend to go back to London and fling myself at one of those jolly new advertising firms. I’ll pummel ‘em with couplets until they take me in and pay me.” He’d struck an heroic attitude. “Hark! the Herald Angels sing, ‘Pierson’s Pills are just the thing!’ If your tummy’s fluttery, hie thee to Bert’s Buttery! Nerves all gone and limp as wax? Seek the aid of brave Nutrax!”

Laughing, Margherita and Marina had thrown cushions at him to make him stop. “Well!” he’d said, when he’d sat back down and they’d collected the cushions again, “If I’m doomed to be a jangling little couplet-rhymer, I’d rather be honest and sell butter with my work than pretend I’m a genius crushed by the failure of the world to understand me.”

“I hope he comes back some time,” Marina said, referring to that previous guest.

“If he does, he’ll be welcome,” Margherita said firmly. “But not while Elizabeth is here. It would be very awkward, having a stranger about while she was trying to teach you Water Magic. Altogether too likely that he’d see something he shouldn’t.”

Marina nodded. It wasn’t often that someone who wasn’t naturally a mage actually saw any of the things that mages took for granted—that was part of the Gift of the Sight, after all, and if you didn’t have that Gift, well, you couldn’t See what mages Saw. But sometimes accidents happened, and someone with only a touch of the Sight got a glimpse of something he shouldn’t. And if magic made some change in the physical world, well, that could be witnessed as well, whether or not the witness had the Sight.

“Now that the room’s been put to rights, come down with me and we’ll bake some apple pies,” Margherita continued, linking her arm with Marina’s. “There’s nothing better to put a fine scent on the house than apple pies.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Marina laughed. “And besides, if you give me something to do, I won’t be fretting my head off.”

“Teh. You’re getting far too clever for me. It’s a good thing Elizabeth is coming; at least there will be someone here now whose habits you don’t know inside and out.”

That’s a lovely thought. One of the worst things about winter corning on was that she was bound to be mostly confined to Blackbird Cottage with people she knew all too well—loved, surely, but still, she could practically predict their every thought and action. But this winter would be different. Oh, I hope it’s very, very different!

As usual, it was raining. Uncle Sebastian had intended to go to the railway station in the pony cart, but Aunt Margherita had stamped her foot and decreed that under no circumstances was he going to subject poor Elizabeth to an open cart in the pouring rain. So he had arranged to borrow the parson’s creaky old-fashioned carriage, which meant that there was enough room for Marina to go along.

Marina peered anxiously out the little window next to the door; the old glass made the view a bit wavery, and the rain didn’t help. Finally Sebastian arrived with the carriage, an old black contraption with a high, arched roof like a mail coach, that looked as if it had carried parsons’ families since the time of the third George. The parson’s horse, the unlikely offspring of one of the gentry’s hunters and a farmer’s mare, a beast of indeterminate color rendered even more indeterminate by his wet hide, looked completely indifferent to the downpour. The same could not be said of Sebastian perched up on the block where he huddled in the non-existent coachman’s stead, wrapped up in a huge mackintosh with a shapeless broad-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes.

He shouldn’t complain; he’d have been just as wet on the pony cart.

Marina, her rain cape pulled around her and her aunt’s umbrella over her head, made a dash across the farmyard for the carriage and clambered inside. The parson’s predecessor had long ago replaced the horsehair-covered seats with more practical but far less comfortable wooden ones, and as the coach rolled away, she had to hang on with both hands to guard herself from sliding across the polished slats during the bumps and jounces. When the coach was loaded with the parson’s numerous family, the fact that they were all wedged together against the sides of the vehicle meant no one got thrown against the sides, but with just Marina in here, she could be thrown to the floor if she didn’t hang on for dear life. The coach creaked and complained, rocking from side to side, the rain drummed on the roof, and water dripped inside the six small windows, for the curtains had long since been removed in the interest of economy as well.

Poor Elizabeth! She’ll be bounced to bits before we get home!

The station wasn’t far, but long before they arrived, Marina had decided that their guest would have been far more comfortable in the pony cart, rain or no rain.

But then I wouldn’t have been able to come meet her.

She’d thought that she’d be on fire with impatience, that the trip would be interminable. It wasn’t, but only because she was so busy holding on, and trying to keep from being bounced around like an India rubber ball from one side of the coach to the other. It came as a welcome surprise to get a glimpse, through the curtain of rain, of the railway station ahead of them, and realize that they were almost there. She didn’t even wait for the coach to stop moving once they reached the station; she flew out quite as if she’d been launched from the door, dashing across the rain-slicked pavement of the platform, leaving her uncle to tie up the horse and follow her.

She reached the other side of the station and peered down the track, and saw the welcome plume of smoke from the engine in the distance, rising above the trees. As Sebastian joined her on the platform, the train itself came into view, its warning whistle carrying through the rain. Marina remembered not to bounce with impatience—she wasn’t a child anymore—but she clutched the handle of the umbrella tightly with both hands, and her uncle smiled sideways at her.

It seemed that she was not the only one impatient for the train to pull into the station. There was one particular head that kept peeking out of one compartment window—and the very instant that the train halted, that compartment door flew open, and a trim figure in emerald wool shot out of it, heedless of the rain.

“Sebastian!” Elizabeth Hastings gave Uncle Sebastian quite as hearty an embrace as if he had been her brother, and Marina hastened to get the umbrella over her before the ostrich plumes on her neat little hat got soaked. “Good gad, this appalling weather! Margherita warned me, and I didn’t believe her! Hello Marina!” She detached herself from Sebastian and gave Marina just as enthusiastic a hug, with a kiss on her cheek for good measure.

“You didn’t believe her about what?” Marina asked.

“Oh, the rain, of course. She swore that in winter, this part of Devon got more rain than the whole of England put together, and I swear to you that it was bright and sunny a few miles back!” She took the umbrella from Marina, as a porter hauled her baggage out of the baggage car onto the platform behind them. “Not a cloud, not a sign of a cloud, until we topped a hill, and then—like a wall, it was, and just a wall of clouds, and most of them pouring rain!”

“That’s what you get for not believing Margherita when she tells you something,” Sebastian said, with laughter in his eyes. “You should know the Earth Masters by now! They don’t feel it necessary to exercise their imagination unless it’s in the service of art. When they tell you something, it’s unembroidered fact!”

“Oh, you tiresome thing, I told you that it was my own fault!” She shook her head, and little drops of rain flew from the ornaments on her bonnet as she laughed. “Come along with you, let’s get my things into whatever contraption you’ve commandeered to get me, and get ourselves home, before we all drown!”

“You’re a Water Master,” Sebastian teased, a grin creasing his face. “You can’t drown. Now me, if I don’t find myself drowning in this antagonistic Element, I’m probably going to perish of melancholy.”

But as the train pulled away from the station with a whistle and a great rush of steam and creaking of metal, he rounded up the stationmaster’s boys and got Elizabeth’s baggage fastened up behind and atop the coach. There was quite a bit of it; three trunks and some assorted boxes. But she was staying for weeks, after all, and given the weather, couldn’t count on regular washdays.

Oh, I wonder what she’s brought to wear. She’s a lady, and in society—what kind of gowns did she bring? Marina was torn between hoping that Elizabeth had brought all manner of fine things, and fear that she had, and that her wardrobe would be utterly unsuitable for Blackbird Cottage and a Devon winter.

The rain did not abate in the least, and Sebastian looked up at the sky before he climbed aboard the coachman’s box, his hat brim sending a stream down the back of his mackintosh. “I don’t suppose you’re prepared to do anything about this, are you?” he asked Elizabeth.

Elizabeth paused with one foot on the step. “In the first place, I’m a Water Master, not an Air Master; storms are not my venue, and I would need an Alliance with Air at the very least to clear this muck away permanently—or at least, for more than a day. In the second place, all I can do by myself—without interfering in a way that would shout to everyone with a Gift that a Magus Major was here—is to create just enough of a pause in the rain to give you time to get the horse turned toward Blackbird Cottage. Now if that’s what you want—or if you really think it’s prudent to let every Power in the county know that I’ve arrived—”

Sebastian heaved a theatrical sigh. “No, thank you, Elizabeth,” he said, and reached up, grabbing the rail at the side of the box, and climbing up onto his perch. Elizabeth closed the umbrella and handed it to Marina, then climbed inside. Marina followed her and laid the umbrella at her feet. It would end up there anyway.

“Good gad, he borrowed the parson’s rig, didn’t he?” Elizabeth exclaimed, as she settled herself on the hard wooden bench across from Marina. “I’d almost rather he’d brought the pony cart!”

The coach swayed into motion, and they both grabbed for handholds.

“Your lovely hat would have gotten ruined,” Marina protested weakly.

“Yes, and all the rest of my turnout as well,” Elizabeth agreed ruefully. “I fear I’ve cut rather too dashing a figure for this weather of yours. Well, no fear, my dear, I haven’t come laden like a professional beauty; this is about as fine a set of feathers as I’ve got with me. And there’s a certain relief in being among the savage Bohemians; you don’t feel required to attend church every Sunday, so if the weather’s foul, neither shall I! And at long last, I’ll be able to get through a day without changing my dress four or five times!”

Marina laughed. She had forgotten how outspoken Elizabeth was, and—to be honest—how very pretty. She could easily be a professional beauty, one of those gently-born, well-connected or marginally talented ladies whose extraordinary good looks bought them entree into the highest circles. The PBs (as they were called) had their portraits painted, sketched, and photographed, figured in nearly every issue of the London papers, and were invited to all important social functions merely as ornaments to it. And even to Marina’s critical eyes, educated by all of her exposure to art and artists as well as the press, Elizabeth Hastings, had she chosen to exert herself, could have had a place in that exalted circle. She must be nearing forty, and yet she didn’t look it. Her soft cheeks had the glow that Marina saw on her own in the mirror of a morning; her green-green eyes had just the merest hint of a crow’s-foot at the corners. That firm, rounded chin hadn’t the least sign of a developing jowl; the dark blonde hair was, perhaps, touched a trifle with silver, but the silver tended to blend in so well that it really didn’t show. And in any case, as Marina well knew, there were rinses to change the silver back to gold.

“Remarkably well-preserved for such a tottering relic, aren’t I?” Elizabeth asked, the humor in her voice actually managing to get past the gasps caused by the jouncing of the coach.

Was I thinking loudly again? A rush of blood went to Marina’s cheeks. “Oh—bother!” she exclaimed, as she felt tears of chagrin burn her eyes for a moment. “Lady Hastings, I apologize for—for being so—”

But Elizabeth freed a hand long enough to pat her knee comfortingly. “Please, dear, you are a Water child, and a powerful one—anyone of the same Element would have picked up the train of your thoughts no matter how much energy you put into those basic shields Thomas taught you.”

Marina shook her head. “But I wasn’t really trying hard enough—”

“Perhaps, but he hasn’t taught you how to make those shields effortless and unconscious; well, I can’t fault him for that. It isn’t as if Earth Masters are often called on to work combative magics.”

“What has that to do with my being rude?” Marina asked, the flush fading from her cheeks.

“That is what you will learn for yourself. And it’s Elizabeth, my dear. Or Aunt Elizabeth, if you prefer. I am one of your godparents, after all.” Elizabeth smiled into Marina’s astonished eyes. “You didn’t know? I should have thought someone would have told you.”

“No, Aunt Elizabeth,” Marina said, faintly. “But—”

Elizabeth chose to change the subject, bending forward to peer out one of the dripping windows. “I will be very glad when we’re all safely in Margherita’s kitchen, dry, and with a hot cup of tea in front of us.” The coach hit a deep rut, and they both flew into the air and landed hard on their seats. “Good heavens! When was this coach last sprung? For Victoria’s coronation?”

“Probably,” Marina said, torn between laughing and wanting to swear at her bruises. “The parson hasn’t much to spare, what with having all those children; his hired man fixes and drives this rig along with all his other duties—”

“Well, I hope that the parsonage ladies are considerably more—” the coach gave another lurch “—more upholstered than we are.”

Marina’s laugh was bitten off by another bump, but it was very clear to her that she and “Aunt” Elizabeth were going to get on well together. Heretofore, Elizabeth Hastings had been something of an unknown quantity; like the artists that arrived and left at unpredictable intervals, she was the friend of Marina’s guardians, and hadn’t spent much time in Marina’s company.

Oh, Marina had certainly had some interaction with Elizabeth in the past, but there had been that distance of “adult” and “child” between them.

Between that last visit and this, that relationship had changed. For the first time Elizabeth Hastings was treating her as an adult in her own right, and Marina was discovering that she liked the older woman. Certainly Elizabeth was making it very easy to become a friend; inviting friendship, welcoming trust and offering it.

Without knowing she’d been worried about that, Marina felt a knot of tension dissolve inside her. So, as well as they could amid the bouncing of the coach, they began to learn about each other. Before very long, it almost seemed as if she had known Elizabeth Hastings all her life.

Sebastian brought the coach as close to the door as he could, and a herd of flapping creatures enveloped in mackintoshes and rain capes converged on it as soon as it stopped moving—Uncle Thomas, Sarah, and Jenny, with Aunt Margherita bringing up the rear. Elizabeth was ushered straight into the kitchen by Margherita; Marina stayed outside with her uncles and the servants just long enough to be loaded with a couple of bandboxes before being shooed inside herself.

She shed her rain cape and hung it, dripping, on its peg, then brought her burden into the kitchen. Elizabeth had already divested herself of hat, coat, and jacket, and Marina found herself eyeing the fashionable emerald trumpet skirt with its trimming of black soutache braid and the cream silk shirtwaist with its softening fall of Venice lace with a pang of envy. Not that she didn’t love the gowns that her Aunt Margherita made for her, but… but they weren’t fashionable. They were lovely, very medieval, and certainly comfortable, but they weren’t anything like fashionable. Plenty of magazines found their way here, and Marina had been known to peruse the drawings in them from time to time, gazing with wonder at the cartwheel hats, the bustle skirts, the PBs in their shoulder-baring gowns and upswept hair. The village was hardly the cynosure of fashion; most of the people who came to stay at the cottage were of the same ilk as her guardians. Only Elizabeth Hastings came in the feathers and furbelows of couture, and Marina’s heart looked long and enviously at its representative. She wanted an emerald suit, an ostrich-plumed hat.

But you’d have to wear corsets! a little voice reminded her. Look at her waist—think about how tight you’d have to lace them!

But oh—replied another side of her—it would be worth it to look like that, to wear clothing like that.

She shook herself out of her reverie and joined them over their hot tea.

“—and no, I am not going to prance around your farmyard in a ridiculous rig like this!” Elizabeth was saying as Marina took a seat at the table. “Honestly, if you must know, the reason I tricked myself out like a PB on a stroll through Hyde Park was so I would be treated with disgusting servility by the railroad staff. A woman traveling alone needs all the advantage that perceived rank and wealth gives her. I wanted porters to present themselves to me without having to look for them. I wanted instant service in the dining car and no mashers trying to seat themselves at my table. I didn’t want to find myself sharing my compartment with some spoiled little monkey and his or her nursemaid; in fact, I didn’t want to share it at all, and I couldn’t get a private compartment on that train. The best way to ensure privacy is to dress as if you’re too important to bother. It’s what I do when I go to suffrage meetings. No one raises his hand or voice against me when I’m dressed like this. I may get surly looks, but they’re deferential surly looks, even from the police.”

Margherita shook her head. “I can’t picture you as a suffragist, somehow.”

“I only go often enough to make it clear where my sympathies are. And I supply money, of course,” Elizabeth replied matter-of-factly. “But frankly, the Magic takes up so much of my time I can’t give the Cause the physical support I’d like to.” She shook her head. “Enough of that; if you really want to know about it, I’ll talk about it some evening with you. Now, I want you to know clearly that—exactly as last time I visited—I’m not expecting any more service than any of your other guests. I can take care of myself quite nicely, thank you, I don’t need to be waited on hand and foot by a maid, and not dressing for dinner is going to be something of a relief.”

Aunt Margherita broke into a gentle smile that warmed her eyes. “You know, I think that I had known that, but it’s good to hear it from your own lips. We’ve never had you for longer than a long weekend, you know, and a weekend guest is very different from a long-term guest.”

“True enough.” Elizabeth drank the last of her tea, stood up, and picked up her hat and jacket. “Now, since the bumping and swearing in the staircase has stopped, I think we can assume that the men have finished hauling my traps up the stairs, and I can change into something more appropriate.” She dimpled at Marina. “Then you will stop treating me as if I didn’t want to be bothered.”

All three of them laughed. “I’ll show you your room,” Marina offered, and took the lead up the stairs, the bandboxes in hand.

“Oh lovely—you gave me the other kitchen-room!” Elizabeth exclaimed as soon as she recognized what part of the house she was in. She breathed in the scent of baking bread from below appreciatively. “These are the best rooms Blackbird Cottage has in the winter.”

“I think so too,” Marina said, as Elizabeth hung her jacket up in the wardrobe and bent to open one of the three trunks. Then, suddenly shy, she retreated back down to the kitchen to help her aunt.

Elizabeth came down to join them in a much shorter time than Marina would have thought, and the plain woolen skirt and shirtwaist she wore were nothing that would be out of place in the village on a weekday. Marina couldn’t help a little pang of disappointment, but she tried not to show it.

Then came a supper that was astonishingly different because of a new face and some new topics of conversation around the table. This time, though, Marina was included in the conversation as a full equal. There was no discussion; it just happened, as naturally as breathing.

And one of the new topics was magic…

“The Naiads and I had to drive a River-horse up the Mersey, away from people,” Elizabeth said over the apple pie, as light from the candles on the table made a halo of her hair. “We don’t know where it came from, but it seems to have been retreating from the poisoning of its stream. You haven’t seen anything of water-poisoning around here, have you, Marina?”

She shook her head. “No. After I cleaned out all of the mess that had been left from before we took the land, I haven’t had any trouble.”

“It’s probably just some disgusting factory then,” Elizabeth said with a frown. “Honestly! You would think that when fish and animals begin to die, the owners would figure out for themselves that the poison they’ve dumped in the water is going to spread!” Her eyes flashed with anger. “How can they do this?”

“But it never spreads to where they live,” Sebastian pointed out dryly, though anger smoldered in the back of his eyes as well. “That’s the thing. If it was their children that suffered, coughing out their lives in black air, dying from poisoned water, it would be different. It’s only the children of the poor, of their workers. And there are always more children of the poor to take their places.”

“It’s doing things to the magic.” Elizabeth’s frown deepened. “Twisting it. Making it darker. I don’t know—if I were able to find a Left Hand Path occultist behind some of this, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised. But I haven’t, and neither has anyone else.”

“Then it has to be just a coincidence,” Thomas said firmly. “Don’t look for enemies where there are none. We have enemies enough as it is.”

Elizabeth let out a long breath. “Yes, and I should be concentrating on—and training our newest Mage to deal with—those existent enemies, shouldn’t I? Well said, Thomas.”

Enemies? We—I—have enemies?

“The least of the many things you need to teach her, and I am profoundly grateful that you are here, my dear,” Thomas replied with a smile. “I hope I have given her a thorough grounding, but your teaching will be to mine as university education is to public school.”

It is? The thought of enemies evaporated from her mind.

“Which leads to the question—when do you want to start?” Margherita asked.

“Tomorrow,” Elizabeth replied, to Marina’s unbounded joy, though for some reason, there seemed to be a shadow over the smile she bestowed on her new protegee. “Definitely tomorrow. No point in wasting time; we have a lot to share, and the sooner we start, the better.”

Chapter Four

BREAKFAST was a cheerful affair, despite the gray clouds outside. The rain had stopped at least, and one of Margherita’s favorite roosters crowed lustily atop the stone wall around the farmyard. Sarah did the breakfast cooking. She excelled at solid farm food, and her breakfasts were a staple at Blackbird Cottage. Everyone ate breakfast together in the kitchen, including little Jenny the maidservant, with Sarah joining them when she was sure no one else would want anything more.

This morning there was a new face at the table when Marina came down: Elizabeth, with her hair braided and the braid coiled atop her head, a shawl about her shoulders, cheerfully consuming bacon and eggs and chatting with old Sarah.

The cook was one of those substantial country women, once dark-haired, but now gone gray in their service. She was seldom without a shawl of her own knitting about her shoulders; plain in dress, plain-spoken, she had mothered Marina as much as Margherita, and usually was the one to mete out punishments that the soft-hearted Margherita could not bear to administer.

What she thought of the strange guests that often stayed here, she seldom said. Certainly she was plied for information about her employers whenever she went down to the village, but if she ever gossiped, no harm had come of it. And she was the perfect servant for this odd household; she was the one who found the new maidservants (usually from among her vast network of relatives) when their girls were ready for more exacting duties (and higher pay) in larger households. The hired man John was one of her many nephews. Sarah was the unmoving domestic center of the household, the person who made it possible for all three artists to get on with their work without interruption. She trained the succession of maids—Jenny was the eighth—and made them understand that the free-and-easy ways of this household were not what they could expect in the next. Thus far, the girls had all chosen to move on when places in wealthier households opened, but it looked as if Jenny might stay. She was timid by nature; they all treated her with consideration for her shyness, and Sarah had confided to Marina one day that the idea of going into a Great House was too frightening for Jenny to contemplate. Sarah had seemed pleased by that; Marina thought that their cook was getting tired of the continual succession of girls, and would welcome an end to it.

“Oh, bless you, mum,” Sarah said, in answer to some question of Elizabeth’s that Marina hadn’t heard. “E’en when this table’s crowded ‘round with daft painterly chaps, I’d druther be workin’ for Master Sebastian.”

“And why would that be, Sarah?” Thomas asked, grinning over a slice of buttered toast. “Could it be that our company is so fascinating that you would be bored working for anyone else?”

“Lor’ help you, ‘cause none of you lot ever wants breakfuss afore eight.” Sarah laughed. “Farmer, now, they’re up before dawn, and wants their breakfuss afore that! As for a Great House, well e’en if I could get a place there, it’d be cooking for the help, an they be at work near as early as a farmer. Here, I get to lie abed like one of th’ gentry!”

“You are one of the gentry, Sarah,” said Margherita from the doorway, her abundant dark brown hair tumbling down around her shoulders, shining in the light from the oil lamp suspended above the kitchen table. “You’re a Countess of Cooks, a Duchess of Domestic Order.”

Sarah giggled, and so did little Jenny. “Go on with you!” Sarah replied, blushing with pleasure. “Anyroad, as for going on to a Great House, like I says, my cooking’s too plain for the likes o’ they. And I’m not minded to fiddle with none of your French messes. Missus Margherita can do all that if she wants, but plain cooking was good enough for my old mother, and it’s good enough for me.”

Margherita took her place at the broad, heavy old table and Sarah brought over the skillet to serve her fresh sausages and eggs.

Marina poured more tea for herself and her aunt. She wanted to ask their guest what they were going to start with, but she was constrained by the presence of the two servants.

“I think I’ll borrow one of your workrooms for my visit, Margherita,” Elizabeth said casually. “The little one just off the library. I’d like to organize the notes I brought with me, then get started on my project.”

“Project, ma’am?” said Sarah, who was always interested in at least knowing what the guests at Blackbird Cottage were about. Perhaps in any other household, she’d have been rebuked or even sacked for her curiosity, but curiosity wasn’t considered a vice here, not even in servants.

And Elizabeth already knew that from her previous visits, so she answered Sarah just as she would have another guest, or a visitor from the village. “I’m trying to do something scholarly, collecting old songs, Sarah,” she said. “Very old songs—the ones that people might have heard from their grandparents.”

“What, them old ballads? Robin Hood an’ Green Knights an’ witches an’ ghosts an’ all?” Sarah answered, looking both surprised and a little pleased. “Is this something for them university chaps?”

“Why, exactly! How did you know?” Elizabeth might very well really have been here to collect folk ballads from the way she responded. Marina wasn’t surprised that Sarah knew that scholars were collecting folk songs for their studies; with all of the talk around this table, Sarah picked up a great deal of what was going on in the world outside their little village.

“Well, stands to reason, don’t it? Clever lady like you? Went to university yourself, didn’t you?” Sarah chuckled, and tenderly forked slices of thick bacon onto Marina’s plate, then onto little Jenny’s. After all these years, she knew exactly what each of them liked best, and how much they were likely to want. “I could ask around, down in village for you,” she offered deferentially. “Some folks might know a song or two, and a pint would loosen tongues, even for a strange lady.”

“If you would be so kind, I would greatly appreciate your help, Sarah,” Elizabeth replied with all sincerity, though her eyes were twinkling. Marina knew why; her feigned errand had gotten an unexpected touch of veracity.

“Pleased to, ma’am,” Sarah replied, and turned back to her cooking with a flush of pleasure.

But Marina knew that the “little workroom” was the one room in the house used for serious and involved Magical work. Margherita had put compulsions upon the door that worked better than any orders forbidding Jenny or Sarah—or anyone else who was not a magician—from entering. That was a special ability of the Earth-Master, to create compulsions that worked even on those without a hint of magic in their souls. Oh, others could do it, but the trick came most easily to Earth Masters.

Each compulsion was gently tailored to the individual. For Jenny, the moment she touched the door, she would be under the impression that she had just cleaned the room and was leaving. Sarah, on the other hand, would suddenly think that there must be something on the stove or in the oven that needed tending. Visitors would believe that the door was locked, even though it wasn’t, and would promptly forget about the room the moment they turned away.

“That will be fine, Elizabeth. Would you like Marina to help you?” Margherita replied casually.

“I certainly would! You know me—completely hopeless when it comes to organization!” Elizabeth laughed, and the conversation went on to other things, leaving Marina tingling with excitement and anticipation.

Elizabeth lingered over her tea until Marina finished her breakfast, then nodded at her as she rose. Marina jumped to her feet, and followed the older woman out of the kitchen and down to the workroom. As an Elemental Master herself, Elizabeth was not affected by the compulsions on the door, and opened it without a pause, beckoning to Marina to follow.

According to Uncle Thomas, many Elemental Masters preferred to have a religious cast to their magical workrooms; they often had an altar and religious icons such as crucifixes, statues of ancient gods or goddesses, censers for incense, and other religious paraphernalia. But since this room was shared by three—counting Marina, four—magicians, all of whom had their own very definite ideas about their magic, the compromise had been reached of leaving it bare. Uncle Thomas had installed cupboards with shutters to close them on all of the walls, and whatever each person felt was absolutely necessary to his or her working lived in the cupboards until needed. There were two benches pushed up against one wall, and a small table (which could presumably serve as an altar) against another. Although the room did not have a fireplace of its own, the back wall of the library fireplace radiated quite enough warmth for the small space.

And it had only one small window, ivy-covered and high. Marina would have had to stand on tiptoe to see through it. So it would be fairly difficult for anyone to spy on whatever was going on in here.

The floor was of slate, like the rest of the ground floor of the farmhouse; the panels of the shutters were of wood with grain that suggested far-off landscapes and distant hills. Between the panels, Uncle Thomas had carved the graceful trunks of trees that never grew in any living forest. The two benches were also Uncle Thomas’ work, as was the table.

“Close the door, dear,” Elizabeth said, and pulled one of the benches out further into the room while Marina did as she asked. “Now, come sit down, please.”

Obediently, Marina did so.

“One of the great advantages of using a permanent workroom is that the basic shields are already in place, and one needn’t bother with putting them up,” Elizabeth said with satisfaction. “I know that you’ve been taught perfectly well in all the basics, so I shan’t bother going over them again. Nor am I going to put you through a viva voce exam on the subject.”

Oh! Well that’s a relief! Marina had been expecting something of the sort, and was very pleased to discover she was going to escape it.

“No,” Elizabeth continued, “What you need first from me is the understanding of how you access the energy of your own element.”

“Shouldn’t we be outside for that?” Marina asked curiously. “Near the stream or something?”

But Elizabeth shook her head. “Nothing of the sort. Water is all around you; in the ground beneath your feet, in the air—good heavens, especially in the air around here!” She laughed, and Marina giggled nervously. “You would be hard pressed to isolate yourself from a single element; even in the heart of the driest desert on earth there is water somewhere, if only in your own body. Each element has a sphere in which it can dominate, but none can be eliminated. Now, I assume you know how to recognize the energy of Water?”

Marina nodded.

“Good. Then call upon your inner eye, and watch what I do.”

Marina clasped her hands in her lap and let fall the guard she usually kept on that sense that Thomas called Sight, but which was so much more than merely seeing beyond the material world. And the moment she did so, she was aware that the room was alive with energies.

The golds and browns of Earth Magic and the reds of Fire invested the shields around them, forming an ever-changing tapestry of moving color, scent, taste, and sensation. Earth magic had a special scent to Marina, of soil freshly-turned by the plow; its taste, rich and smooth, vanilla-flavored cream. And it seemed to wrap her in warm fur. Whereas Fire tasted of cinnamon, smelled of smoke, and felt like the sun on her skin just before she was about to be sunburned.

Water, though, smelled exactly like the air the moment before it was about to rain, mingled with new-mown hay; it tasted of all the waters of the world, faintly sweet and cool, and it felt exactly like chilled silk sliding across her bare arms. In color it was every shade of green there had ever been, from the tender, yellow-green of unfolding leaves, to the deep black-green of ancient pines in a thunderstorm. This was what she saw now, investing the very air of the room, condensing out of it like fog, or like her breath on a frosty morning, or a cloud blooming overhead in the sky. Tender threads, tiny tendrils of it, coalescing out of nowhere, each one a different shade of green; they sprang up and flowed toward Elizabeth, joining thread to thread to make cords, streams, all of them flowing to her and into her, and she began to glow with the growing power she had gathered into herself.

“Oh, my!” Marina breathed. But she wasn’t going to just sit there and admire—Elizabeth had said to watch what the older woman was doing, and she set herself to finding out just how Elizabeth was doing this.

It took some time of studying and puzzling before she figured it out.

The clue was in what Elizabeth had said earlier, that the energy was everywhere. It was, and it could be coaxed into a more coherent form by application of the energies of her own mind, the ones that Uncle Thomas had already taught her how to use.

“You see?” Elizabeth said softly, and she nodded. “Good.” Abruptly the older woman stopped gathering in the energies and looked at her pupil expectantly. “Now you try it.”

Knowing how it was done and doing it herself were two different things… akin to the difference between knowing how to ride a horse and actually staying on its back. But this was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it?

Be careful what you ask for, she reminded herself ruefully, and set to work.

And work it certainly was. Elizabeth made it look so effortless, but compared with dipping energy out of the aura of a free-flowing stream, a spring, or a deep well, it was anything but effortless.

Exhausting was more like it. It took a peculiar combination of relaxation and concentration that was infernally hard to master, and by the time she had managed to coax the first tentative tendrils of power out of the aether, she was limp with fatigue.

“That will do for now,” Elizabeth said, and she let the burgeoning streamlets go with no little relief. “Luncheon, I think; then a little rest for both of us, perhaps an hour or so, and we’ll start again.”

So soon? she thought with concealed dismay. Uncle Thomas had never made her work for this long! But it couldn’t be helped; if that was what Elizabeth wanted, then there was probably a reason for it.

“I want you to have a firm grasp on this technique today,” Elizabeth said, as she got up and offered Marina her hand to aid her to her feet. Marina took the offered help; her knees felt so shaky she wasn’t certain she could have stood up without it. “If we left things at the point where they are now, by tomorrow it would all have to be done over again. We have to make a pathway in your mind and spirit that rest or sleep can’t erase. Then you can take a longer respite.”

Marina sighed, and followed her out; her stomach gave a discreet growl, reminding her not only that she had used a great deal of physical energy, but that she would feel better about resuming once she wasn’t so ravenous.

Aunt Margherita seemed to have anticipated how hungry she would be, for the main course of luncheon was a hearty stew that must have been cooking since breakfast or before. With fresh bread slathered with butter and Margherita’s damson preserves, and cup after cup of strong tea, Marina felt better by the moment. Sarah, Margherita and Elizabeth chattered away like a trio of old gossips on wash-day, while Marina ate until she couldn’t eat any more, feeling completely hollow after all her exertion.

Finally, when she’d finished the last bit of the treacle tart Sarah had given her for dessert, Elizabeth turned away from her conversation with the others. “Have you any lessons or other work you need to do this afternoon?” she asked, but somehow managed not to make it sound as if she was asking a child the question.

“Work, actually. German,” she replied, with a lifting of her spirits. “Die Leiden des jungen Werther, I’m translating it for Uncle Sebastian; he thinks he might want to paint something from it.”

“Oh good heavens, Sturm und Drang, is it?” she laughed. “Obsessed poets and suicide! Oh well, I suppose Sebastian knows what is likely to sell!”

“Sebastian knows very well, thank you,” her uncle called from the doorway. “Beautiful young dead men sell very well to wealthy ladies with less-than-ideal marriages of convenience. It gives them something to sigh and weep over, and since the young men are safely dead, their husbands can’t feel jealous over even a painted rival.”

Marina didn’t miss the cynical lift of his brow, and suspected he had a particular client in mind.

Evidently, Elizabeth Hastings hadn’t missed that cue either. “Well,” she said dryly, “If the real world does not move them, they might as well be parted from some of that wealth in exchange for a fantasy, so that others can make better use of their money than they can.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Sebastian said, and with the chameleon-like change of mood that Marina knew so well, beamed upon Sarah as he accepted a bowl of stew from her hands. “Sarah, you are just as divine as Miss Bernhardt! In a different sphere, of course—”

“Tch! The things you say! I doubt Divine Sarah’d thank ye for that!” their own Sarah replied with a twinkle, and turned back to her stove.

“I’ll come fetch you from your room in an hour or so,” Elizabeth said to Marina, who took that as her cue to escape for some badly needed rest.

Translating Werther was not what she would have called “work,” even though Uncle Sebastian said it was. She had taught herself German from books; she couldn’t speak it, but she read it fluently enough. German seemed useful, given all of the medieval poems and epics that the Germans had produced that could give Uncle Sebastian subjects for his paintings, and so she had undertaken it when she was twelve.

Mind, she thought, as she wrote yet another paragraph of Werther’s internal agony, I can’t do much with figures. And as for science—all I know is what the old alchemists did! She supposed her education had been rather one-sided.

She was amused, rather than enthralled, by Goethe’s hero. She couldn’t imagine ever being so utterly besotted with anyone as to lose her wits over him, much less kill herself because she could not have him. Poor silly Werther.

But he’d make a fine subject for a painting, her uncle was right about that. Pining over his love, writing one of his poems of wretchedness and longing, or lying dead with the vial of poison in his hand.

I suppose I’ll have to pose for him, too. It wouldn’t be the first time that she’d stood in for a young, callow man. Uncle Sebastian simple gave her a little stronger chin and thinner lips, flattened her curves, and took care to give her a sufficiently loose costume and there she was. More than one lady had fallen in love with the masculine version of herself; Uncle Sebastian never enlightened them as to her sex.

A tapping at her door told her that another sort of lesson—and work—awaited her.

“Come in!” she cried, and put the book aside. “I’ll just be a moment.”

Elizabeth pushed the door ajar, and gazed with delight on the room. “I swear, I wish I could get your guardians to create something like this for me,” she said with a chuckle.

“It would take them eighteen years, I’m afraid,” she replied, tidying her desk and making sure that the ink bottle was securely corked.

Elizabeth sighed. “I know. And it would cost me a hideous amount of money, too—I certainly couldn’t ask them to work for less than their normal commissions.”

“You’d be surprised how many would,” Marina said sourly, thinking of all the people who, over the years, had attempted to trade on past acquaintance to get a bargain.

“No magician would,” Elizabeth said firmly. “No magician could. Well, enough of that; back to work for us.”

Back down to the little workroom they went, and Marina saw when Elizabeth opened the door that she had brought in a lamp and had moved the table to the center of the room. And in the center of the table was a clear glass bowl full of water.

“What’s that for?” Marina asked, as Elizabeth closed the door behind them.

“Later,” her tutor told her. “When I’m sure you’ve mastered the first lesson.”

Marina raised an eyebrow, but didn’t argue; Elizabeth was the Master here, and had presumably taught more pupils in the art of the Element of Water than she. She took a seat on one of the benches, and took up where they had left off.

It was easier this time; at Elizabeth’s signal, she released the power, then gathered it in again. A dozen times, perhaps more, she raised the power and let it flow out again, until the gathering of it was as natural as breathing and almost as easy.

Only then did Elizabeth stop her, this time before she released it.

“Good. Now, hold the power, and watch me again.” Elizabeth cupped her hands around the bowl, and gazed into the water.

Then Marina sensed something curious—she felt a tugging within her, as if she heard a far distant call or summons.

Strange—

Was the summons coming from—Elizabeth?

Yes! It was! Marina concentrated on it, and on her mentor. Slowly she deciphered the silent message written in power, sent out into the world. Not a summons, but an invitation.

But how on earth did Elizabeth expect it to be answered? There were no streams here for the Undines to follow, no way for them to get into this sealed room.

How—

Something stirred in the bowl, like a trail of bubbles in the clear water, a momentary fog passing over the surface. The water in the bowl rippled, as if Elizabeth blew on it, or moved the bowl, but she did neither.

And then—there, perfect in miniature, were an Undine and a Naiad, looking up at Elizabeth in expectation.

And Elizabeth looked up at her pupil, a roguish smile on her lips.

“But—but—” Marina could only stare. How could the Elementals have gotten there—and how, why were they so small?

“They’re creatures of spirit and magic, not flesh, no matter how they look to us, Marina,” the older woman said softly, as the two Elementals gazed around themselves with curiosity. “They don’t follow the rules of the flesh and blood world. Like the energies of Water, they can go where they will, so long as there is a place of their Element waiting for them.”

Now Marina thought about all the times she’d been with the Undines and Naiads, the other elemental creatures of spring and stream—how they would appear and disappear, seeming to dissolve into the water only to appear elsewhere. Why hadn’t that occurred to her before?

“And you just call them?” she asked.

“It isn’t quite that easy, but I’ll show you how to form several sorts of summons. They all require Water energies, of course.” She bent over the bowl. “Thank you, my friends. Would you care to go, or stay?”

“Shall we go, and see if our Fleshly Sister can properly call us too?” asked a tinkling voice that was as much in Marina’s head as in her ears. The Undine cast an amused glance at Marina, then turned her attention back to Elizabeth.

“I think that would be very gracious of you, if you would be so kind,” Elizabeth replied gravely.

“Then we shall.” The two tiny figures seemed to spin in the water for a moment; it sparkled in the light from the lamp, then there was only a trail of bubbles, then they were gone.

Elizabeth looked up into Marina’s eyes. “Now then—your turn.”

Marina was glad that she had eaten a full lunch, because somehow teatime slipped right past them. It wasn’t until after dark that Elizabeth was ready to let her go, and she still hadn’t mastered that most basic of summonings, the simple invitation. As Elizabeth had warned, it was harder than it looked.

Marina felt as limp as wilted lettuce when Elizabeth decreed an end to the work for the day, and as her mentor opened the door and the aroma of tonight’s meal hit her nose, her stomach gave a most unmannerly growl.

Elizabeth laughed at that, and picked up the bowl of water. “Blow out the lamp, dear, and let’s get you something to eat before you faint. That sort of behavior might be de rigueur for debutantes, but I think your uncles would have more than a few harsh words with me if they thought I was overworking you.”

“You’re not!” Marina protested. “I could have asked you to stop any time, couldn’t I?”

“Yes, you could. I trusted that you had gone far enough in magic to be able to judge for yourself when you needed to stop.” Elizabeth waited while Marina closed the door behind herself, and the two of them went out into the library.

Candles and lanterns had already been lit, and warm pools of light shone around them. A savory aroma drifted in from the kitchen, and Marina’s stomach complained—silently, this time.

“Have you any notion where I could pour out this bowl of consecrated water?” Elizabeth asked. “It doesn’t do to just pour it down a drain, it really ought to go somewhere it can do some good.”

“Aunt Margherita has a little conservatory off her loom room,” Marina replied, after a moment of thought. “She grows herbs and things in there—”

“Just the thing; that’s probably her personal workroom. Go join everyone and tell them I’ll be there in a moment.” Elizabeth took the left-hand door that went further into the house. After a moment of hesitation, Marina took the right.

Supper was just being served in the dining room; a shaded oil lamp above the table shone down on the pristine linen tablecloth, and wisps of steam arose from the dishes waiting in the center. Thomas and Margherita were there and already eating, but Uncle Sebastian wasn’t, yet. Marina sat down and helped herself from a random bowl in front of her; it proved to contain mashed squash, of which she was inordinately fond. “Elizabeth had a bowl of water—” she began.

“Ah. She’ll be watering my herbs with it, then,” her aunt said immediately. “Just the thing.”

“That’s what she said—” Sebastian came in at just that moment, trailed by Elizabeth, who still had the now empty bowl.

“I found this prowling in your workroom, dearest, what would you like me to do with it?” Sebastian said, pulling a laughing Elizabeth forward by the wrist.

“Invite it to supper, of course, you great beast. I trust everything went well for the first lesson?” Margherita replied, with a playful slap at her husband’s hand.

“Zee student, she progresses with alacrity!” Elizabeth said, in a theatrical, faux-French accent, which garnered a laugh. She took her place between Margherita and Marina, and spread her napkin in her lap.

“I’m glad to hear it. I assume that means we can socialize this evening?” Thomas wanted to know.

“Certainly. All work and no play—speaking of which, Sebastian, are you going to need the student for work tomorrow?”

Sebastian chewed meditatively on a forkful of rabbit for a moment, thinking. “I could use her. I need more work on the hands at the moment; hard to get them right without her. And I’d like to do some sketches for the next projects. Werther and the Wife of Bath.”

“Then I absolve you of lessons in the morning, but in the afternoon, we’ll take up where we left off,” Elizabeth decreed, and reached for the platter nearest her plate. “Now, what have we here. Stewed rabbit! Nothing illegal, I hope?”

“Sarah’s hutches, and she brought them up this morning. Really, Elizabeth, I hope you don’t subscribe to the notion that everyone living in the country poaches!” Thomas looked indignant, and Marina had to smother a laugh, because she knew very well that Sarah didn’t have rabbit hutches, and that her dear uncle had been talking to Hobson, who did poach, just that morning, for she’d seen him out of her bedroom window.

“Now, don’t you try to pull the wool over my eyes, sirrah!” Elizabeth retorted. “I know the taste of wild bunny from hutched, and this little coney never saw the inside of a wire enclosure in his life!”

“I am appalled—” Thomas began.

“And I did not fall off the turnip-cart yesterday!” Elizabeth shot back.

The two of them wrangled amicably over dinner, until Margherita managed to interject an inquiry about what Elizabeth’s husband was up to. That led to a discussion of politics, which held absolutely no interest for Marina. In fact, as the conversation carried on past dessert and into the parlor, Marina found it hard to keep her eyes open.

She finally gave up, excused herself, and left politics and a pleasant fire for the peace and quiet of her equally pleasant room. Jenny had left a warm brick in the bed and banked the fire; Marina slipped into a flannel nightgown, brushed and braided her hair, and with the sound of rain on her window, got into bed. She thought she’d stay awake long enough to read, but after rereading the same page twice, she realized there wasn’t a chance she’d get through a chapter. And the moment she blew out her candle, that was all she knew until morning.

Chapter Five

RAINING again, rain drumming on the window of the workroom, making the air alive with the energy of the storm. Marina had always been fond of rain, but now it meant so much more than a cozy day indoors, watching the fat drops splash into puddles. Now it meant a ready source of power, power she was only just beginning to learn how to use.

“Watch carefully,” Elizabeth said—as she had so many times during the lessons. But then she added, “Of all the things that you can do with the magical energy you gather, this may be the most important. Everything depends on it.”

Marina was hardly going to be less attentive, but those words put just a fraction of a tingle of warning down her spine.

Because Elizabeth was right, of course. This was the most important thing she could learn to do—because now that she could gather in Water energies almost without thinking, and summon Elementals to the most unlikely places, she was going to learn the shields peculiar to a Water Master.

The basic shields, those walls of pure thought that she placed around her mind and soul, were not enough, she had already learned that much this summer. They couldn’t even contain her thoughts away from anyone else of the same affinity—or her Elementals—when she was thinking hard, or her emotions were involved. How could she expect them to defend her if something really did decide to test them?

So she watched Elizabeth with every particle of concentration she had, her brow furrowed with intent, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. The workroom seemed very quiet, the sound of the rain on the window unnaturally loud.

She had watched Thomas build the shields of an Earth Master and had dutifully tried to copy them, but with no success. He had built up layer upon layer of heavy, ponderous shields, patiently, like building a series of brick walls; somehow she could not manage to construct even a single layer, and had felt defeated and frustrated.

And now, watching Elizabeth, she knew why she had failed—

Elizabeth had taught her how to bring in power from the very air, then had shown her how to touch, then handle, the stronger currents that tended to follow the courses of the waters of the physical world. For instance, there was a water source, an artesian well that was in turn fed from a deep spring, from which the farmhouse pumps got their water. It actually was right underneath Blackbird Cottage; it was also a wellspring of the energies they both used, and Elizabeth tapped into it now.

Marina watched the power fountain up in answer to Elizabeth’s call and waited, her breath catching in her throat, to see how Elizabeth could possibly turn the fluid and mutable energies of Water into the solid and immutable shields that Uncle Thomas had shown her. What did she do? Freeze them, somehow? But how could you do that?

Green and sparkling, leaping and swirling, the energies flowed up and around Elizabeth until they met, above, below, surrounding her in a sphere of perpetually moving force. Marina felt them brushing against the edge of her senses, tasted sweet spring water on the tip of her tongue, and breathed in the scent of more than the rain outside. From within the swirling sphere, Elizabeth summoned yet another upwelling of power, and built a second dancing sphere within the first. And a third within the second.

Layer upon ever-changing layer, she built, and Marina waited for the energies to solidify into walls.

Until suddenly it dawned on her that they weren’t going to solidify; that these were what the shields of a Water Master looked like. Not walls, but something the exact opposite of walls; something that did not absorb attacks, but deflected them, spinning them away—or yielded only to return, renewed.

Perhaps eventually a shield would be ablated away, but that was why all shields were built in layers. Destroy one, and you were only confronted by another, still strong, still intact.

But no wonder I couldn’t make the power do what I wanted it to do! Marina thought with elation. It couldn’t! You can’t make water into bricks, you can only make it do what is in its nature to do!

She clasped her hands unconsciously under her chin, and her beaming smile must have told Elizabeth that she had seen and understood, because Elizabeth returned that smile, and with a gentle gesture of dismissal, allowed the energies to swirl back whence they had come. In mere moments, she stood unprotected again, her hands spread.

“You see?” she asked. “I use a much simpler version most of the time, and obviously I don’t need to bother with shields at all when I’m within the protections of my house or this one.”

“Oh yes, I do see!” Marina cried. “Please, may I try now?”

“You may, but remember—just as with all else I have taught you, it will be much more difficult than it looked the first time—and indeed, for many of the subsequent trials,” Elizabeth cautioned. “Take your time, and don’t be discouraged.”

“I won’t,” Marina promised, and took a deep breath, calmed her elation, and reached for the deep-flowing energies as Elizabeth had taught her.

“You look exhausted, Mari,” her Uncle Sebastian observed, clearly startled, as she paused with one hand on the doorframe of his studio to steady herself.

She smiled; it was a tired smile, but a real one, and he looked a little more reassured. “I am, Uncle—but I’m not at all unhappy about being exhausted.”

“Elizabeth put you through a steeplechase, did she?” Her uncle grinned. “She told me she was going to give you shield-techniques today. And your progress?”

Marina didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she took her place on the rumpled, unmade pallet on the posing-stand that stood in for the bed in young Werther’s garret room. With great care, she arranged herself half on, half off the bed, taking great care to put her head and outflung arms within the chalk marks on the floor. Even when her uncle set her the reclining pose she had not-so-jokingly requested, he couldn’t make it a simple one!

Sebastian came over to her and tweaked and arranged the folds of her jacket and shirt to his liking, then checked the disordered bedclothes and put the empty “poison” bottle beside her outflung right hand.

“I haven’t made much yet,” she admitted, as Sebastian picked up palette and brush and went to work. “But then, I don’t at first. I think that was why Elizabeth started me on other things first, instead of going from energies straight to shielding—so I’d know how difficult the specific Elemental magics are, and wouldn’t be disappointed when I didn’t master shields immediately.”

“I think you’re probably right.” Sebastian sounded as if he wasn’t listening to her, but she knew from past experience that he heard every word and was paying close attention. It wasn’t his mind that was painting so feverishly, or so he often told her. His eye and his hand were practically connected when he worked, and the less interference from the thinking part of him that there was, the better and truer the painting.

She hardly noticed the ubiquitous scent of linseed oil and paint in here anymore—except, as now, when a particularly strong waft of it drifted over to her and she had to fight to keep from wrinkling her nose in distaste.

“At any rate,” she sighed, “I haven’t managed much, yet. But I will. It’s awfully tiring, though—I have to use everything I have to I control the energies I’m calling up. Should I have my eyes open, or closed?”

“It will be less tiring with practice,” Sebastian promised. “Open eyes, please. You’re not supposed to be quite dead yet.”

“Am I going to get better?” she teased, staring up at the beams and boards of the ceiling. It felt very good to be lying down, even if it was in this odd position. Uncle Sebastian had found a small, flattish cushion that didn’t show under her hair for her to rest her head on, and for once, this was a position where nothing had gone numb—or at least, it hadn’t the last time she’d taken this pose.

“No, as you know very well, minx, since you translated Werther’s story for me. But I want the lady who buys this painting to fantasize that she might save him,” Sebastian replied, and that was the last she got out of him, as the rain finally cleared off and the clouds thinned. In fact, he didn’t say a word until the light of the setting sun pierced the many leaded panes of the studio window, and he sighed and stuck his brush behind his ear.

“All right, my wench—that’s enough for today. You can get up now.”

She did so—slowly. Nothing was numb, but after three hours of posing, broken only briefly by two breaks to get up and walk around, she was stiff. At least the posing-platform was wood rather than the flagstones of the floor, and Werther’s clothing, a shabby boy’s suit, was comfortably warm.

“Don’t be discouraged in these shielding lessons of yours, even though it’s likely to take longer than you think, poppet,” Sebastian said, taking up the conversation where it had left off—a disconcerting habit of his, but one that Marina was used to. “Where’s my brush?”

“In your hair,” she answered promptly. “How long do you think it’s going to take?”

“Ah—” he reached up and retrieved the brush, and began to clean it carefully. “I suspect you won’t have mastered shields before Elizabeth has to go home for the Christmas holidays with her family.”

She couldn’t help it; her dismay must have shown on her face, as he shrugged sympathetically and pulled the brush from behind his ear. “It took me at least that long,” he admitted. “And I was reckoned to be quick at learning magic.”

“Oh.” She couldn’t help but feel a pang of disappointment, but she decided she might as well put a brave face on it. “I had no idea,” she admitted, squaring her shoulders and trying to look as if she was prepared for that much work.

“Proper shielding is hard, poppet.” He grimaced, and ran his fingers through his hair, leaving a set of ocher streaks to go with the vermilion ones already there. “Really, it uses everything you’ve ever learned about magic. Once you learn personal shields, then you have to learn how to expand them to fit your work space or your home, how to make them permanent, and how to disguise them inside the common shields you already know. Then you have to learn how to make them seem to disappear altogether, so that you look perfectly ordinary to anyone who might look at you with the Sight.”

She’d had no idea, and for a moment, the mere thought of all the work that still lay ahead of her made her heart quail with dismay.

Her uncle seemed to sense that, and put a supporting arm around her shoulders. “You can do it, Mari. If I could, you certainly can.”

She leaned her head against him for a moment of comfort, then managed a laugh. “Oh, Uncle Sebastian, you just said you were quick at learning magic!”

“I was. I was also lazy.” He gave her a quick squeeze and let her go. “Why don’t you hop upstairs and change for supper? You’re probably hungry as well as tired, and you’ll feel better once you’ve eaten.”

“You’re probably right,” she agreed, and dropped a kiss on his cheek. “I love you, Uncle Sebastian.”

“I love you too, poppet,” he said, as she left him among his paints and canvases. “Never forget that.”

As if I ever would!

The rains of October had given way to the cold of November, and then to the deeps of December. It didn’t rain nearly as often, but the skies still remained gray and overcast most of the time. Every morning the ground was coated with a thick cover of hoarfrost, and the windows bore delicate, fernlike traceries of frost on the inside.

Marina had finally progressed to the point where she could bring up and maintain a single shield, and was just able to bring up a second one inside the first, though she could not yet manage to juggle the complicated structures for very long.

It was far easier to build the common shields and disguise her special shield within them—and for some reason she had mastered the ability to camouflage the common shields as the random and chaotic patterns of a perfectly normal person almost immediately. Why that should be, she couldn’t begin to imagine, but it seemed to make her guardians happy.

In spite of the fact that she no longer had formal schooling, she was working harder, and she had less leisure, than ever before. During the best hours of daylight, she posed for Sebastian; the morning and late afternoon and sometimes even the evening belonged to Elizabeth Hastings. There were no rest days for her, and she found herself almost looking forward to the second week of December, when Elizabeth would leave them for Christmas, and not return until after Boxing Day. Almost, but she enjoyed Elizabeth’s company so much…

But the work was so hard. It wasn’t just physical work, either, it involved everything: mind, body, spirit—

And now she wasn’t just sitting there when she posed for Uncle Sebastian, she was practicing those shields; not the full and strong ones that she practiced in the work-room, but wispy little things that were easier to bring up.

Yet Elizabeth was working just as hard, and for no personal gain that Marina could see. When Marina was posing, Elizabeth would either be down at the village making good her pretense of collecting folk ballads, or in the workroom doing—

—well, Marina wasn’t quite sure what she was doing. It obviously had something to do with magic, but she couldn’t tell what it could be.

She was tempted, more than once, to cry halt to all of this. She was so tired that she fell asleep without being able to read in bed as she liked to do for an hour or so at bedtime, and she hadn’t a single moment to herself when all was said and done. But there was some palpable tension in her guardians that made her hesitate whenever she considered asking for a respite. They weren’t saying anything, but for some reason, she sensed that they were extremely anxious about her progress, and she couldn’t bear to increase their anxiety with any delay.

It was, after all, a small enough price to pay for their peace of mind. After all the years that they had given to her, it was something of a blessing that she could finally give something back to them.

The faun tapped his hoof on the floor, and shook his shaggy head. “I am sorry, Lady. It is a Gordian Knot, and there is no sword or Alexander to cut it.” His slanted eyes—normally full of mischief in a faun—held regret, and his mobile, hairy ears drooped a little. Margherita had an extraordinarily good relationship with the fauns; normally around a woman they were ill-mannered and lewd, but they called her Lady, and seemed to consider her as a sort of mother-figure.

Margherita sighed, and dismissed the little goat-footed faun with her thanks. He bowed to her, sinking down on his heels, then continued sinking, sinking, into the stone floor of the workroom, until he was gone. She looked to Elizabeth, who shrugged, and spread her hands wide.

“I had no better luck than you,” her friend said, grimacing. “The curse is still there, and I can neither remove it nor change it further. What about Sebastian?”

“In this case, a Fire Master is no use to us.” Margherita rested both her elbows on the workroom table and propped her chin on her hands. “It’s the inimical Element, remember? His Elementals refuse to touch her for fear of angering their opposite numbers in Water. If he pushes his own powers much further trying to get rid of that horrible curse, he could hurt her.”

Elizabeth massaged her own temples, unwonted lines of weariness creasing her forehead. Margherita had the distinct feeling that she herself looked no better. “I wish we had an Air power here. I wish Roderick were still alive. Or that I could get any interest out of Alderscroft.” The expression on her face suggested that she would like very much to give the latter gentleman a piece of her mind.

“We’re small potatoes to the like of Lord Alderscroft,” Margherita said with some bitterness. “He only bothers with things that threaten the whole of Britain, not merely the life of one girl.”

Elizabeth’s jaw tightened. “Pray do not remind me,” she said shortly. “I plan to have a word or two in person with Lord Alderscroft over the holidays. Not that I think it will change his mind but at least it will relieve my feelings on the subject. Still—” Her expression lightened a little. “—the curse hasn’t re-awakened, either. The—relative—still hasn’t made any moves, magically or otherwise. And even if she actually traced where Marina is and sent someone to find her instead of coming in person, at this time of year, any stranger to the village would be as obvious as a pig in a parlor.”

Margherita nodded. “That’s true enough,” she agreed, once again taking comfort in their surroundings; not a great city like Bath or Plymouth, where strangers were coming and going as often as one’s long-time neighbors, but a tiny place where nothing was secret.

Strangers did come to the village, but unless they were taking the rare permanent position as a servant that wasn’t immediately filled by a local, they rarely stayed. Temporary harvest help arrived and left again; travelers in the summer and spring, sometimes; people on walking tours, for instance. Peddlers came through, of course, and the booth-owners and amusement-operators for the fairs. But that was only in the warm seasons—not in winter. Never in winter, and rarely, once the cold set in, during the fall.

The moment a stranger entered their village at this time of year, people would take note and the gossip would begin. If the stranger stayed, well—he’d have to find a room somewhere. The pub wasn’t an inn; he’d have to find someone willing to let a room to him—not likely, that. In summer, the gypsies and tramping sorts could camp on the common, but he could hardly do that now.

To have any plausible reason to stay, he’d have to find a job somewhere nearby. According to Sarah, there were no positions available in the village or the surrounding farms, or even the two great houses. Of course, if Arachne sent a spy, she might arrange an “accident” to create a position for her hireling, but that itself would cause talk.

People talked a great deal about anything or anyone new in a village this small. And old Sarah, bless her, heard everything, and would faithfully repeat everything she heard to the people she considered as friends as well as employers.

“There are many advantages to being in a small village,” Elizabeth observed, with a faint smile. “Even though we have the disadvantage of being gentry, and people don’t talk as freely to us as they would to someone like you.”

“Oh, the villagers don’t talk to us directly,” Margherita admitted. “We’re newcomers—why, we haven’t a single ancestor buried in the churchyard! But Sarah tells us everything, and everyone talks to her.”

“Watchdogs without ever knowing it—and something you-know-who would never think of. Although I must admit that I never thought of it either, when we decided you should take Marina with you.” Elizabeth tactfully did not mention the third reason—that she had already known that Margherita couldn’t conceive, following a terrible bout with measles a year or two before Marina was born.

Taking care of Marina had filled a void that Margherita had not even known was within her until the baby had been in her arms.

“Well, Sebastian should be finished for the day by now,” she said, shaking off her somber mood. “And both of them are probably starving.”

“Marina will be, anyway. I worked her particularly hard today,” Elizabeth said, with a look that Margherita recognized very well. The pride of a teacher in a student who excelled past expectation. Margherita knew it well, because her face wore that look often enough. “She’s doing very well; she’s quick, and willing, and intelligent. I wish every student of mine had that particular combination of traits.”

They cleaned up the workroom after themselves; Margherita found it easier to summon Elementals when she had the help of incense, salt, and other paraphernalia. All this had to be packed back up and put away in one of the cupboards. Only then did they dismiss the shields that hid their work from the outside world and leave the workroom.

Those shields were so very necessary. Elizabeth had not exaggerated when she had warned Sebastian that any great exercise of her powers would shout to the world that a Magus Major had come to stay in this tiny little backwater village. Thomas—well, he was indeed an Earth Master, but his magic came out in the skill of his hands and his marvelous craftsmanship. It seemed that wood and stone and clay obeyed his will and formed themselves before he ever set tool to them. His power was so contained within himself that it never showed; he had never really needed to shield himself.

Sebastian seldom used his power as a Fire Master; it was ill-suited to his life as a painter. In fact, in all the time that Marina had been with them, he hadn’t (at least to Margherita’s knowledge) worked a greater magic more than a half a dozen times. When he had summoned Elementals or used great amounts of power, it had been in attempts to rid Marina of the curse that burdened her.

As for Margherita—though she had used magic more often and more openly than either of the men, it hadn’t even been in exercise of the healing magics that came so naturally to Earth Masters. No, hers had been kitchen witchery, the magic of hearth and home, more often than not. And again, when she had invoked greater power, it had generally been for Marina’s sake.

There had been magic openly at work in this little corner of Devon, but it had all been minor. Elizabeth had been very wise to be cautious. There was no point in hiding Marina all this time, only to give her presence away in the last year of her danger.

They left the workroom arm-in-arm, and encountered Marina fresh from a hot bath, cheeks glowing, hair damp, enveloped in one of the warm, weighty winter gowns that Margherita had made for her, a caftan of soft olive wool that Margherita had shamelessly copied from a Worth original, with a sleeveless overgown of the same fabric, lined in cream-colored linen, and embroidered with twining forest-green kelp and blue-green fish with fantastically trailing fins.

“Oh, I do like this frock, Mari!” Elizabeth exclaimed involuntarily. “Imagine it in emerald satin! Your embroidery design, of course, Margherita?”

“Yes, but Marina did at least half of the embroidery,” Margherita hastened to point out. “Probably more. She’s as good with a needle as I am.”

“I enjoyed it,” Marina said, blushing a little. “But Elizabeth, I thought the suit you arrived in was just stunning.”

“Hmm. It is one of my favorites, though I can’t say that I’m altogether fond of those trumpet-skirts,” Elizabeth replied. “Your gown is a great deal more sensible. And comfortable. But there it is; fashion never does have a great deal to do with sense or comfort, now, does it?”

“And I suppose I’d look a complete guy, trotting around the orchard in a trumpet-skirt with a mermaid-tail train,” Marina admitted ruefully.

“Believe me, my dear, you would; fashion is not made for orchards. And you’d probably break your neck into the bargain.” They were the first to reach the dinner table after all, and took their places at it, clustering at one end so that they could continue the conversation.

“But a suit like yours is perfectly comfortable in town, isn’t it?” Marina asked, with a wistful expression. “I mean, if I went into London—”

Elizabeth got a mischievous look on her face. “Young lady, if you go into London, I am going to see to it that your wardrobe contains nothing but Bloomer fashions! I want every young man who sees you think that you are a hardened Suffragist with no time for mere males!”

The look of dismay on Marina’s face made both of the older women laugh.

“But Elizabeth, if you dressed me in those, mightn’t they think I’m—fast?” Marina said, in tones of desperation. “After all, aren’t some Suffragists proponents of Free Love?”

“Not in those clothes, they won’t,” Elizabeth responded, still laughing. “Uncorseted, buttoned up to the neck, with more fabric in a single leg of those contraptions than in two trumpet-skirts?”

“I hate to say this, but those Bloomer fashions are hideous,” Margherita admitted, as Thomas and Sebastian entered, listened to the topic of conversation for a moment, and exchanged a thoroughly masculine look of bafflement. “I know that they are sensible and practical, but do they have to be so ugly?”

Elizabeth shook her head ruefully. “Frankly, no, I don’t think so. Well, look at those lovely gowns you make for yourself and Mari! Really, I’m envious of your skill, and if I could find a seamstress to copy them, I would. Those are practical and handsome.”

Mari looked a little surprised. “Are they really?” she asked. “They aren’t fashionable—”

“They aren’t the fashions you see in the society sketches, true,” Margherita agreed, and sighed, exchanging a look with Elizabeth. “I don’t like most of the fashions that PBs wear. I couldn’t breathe, much less work in them, and they’re so tightly fitted I can’t imagine how a lady gets through an hour without splitting a seam.”

“Oh, society!” Elizabeth laughed, after a moment. “PBs and debutantes don’t live in the real world, much less our world! Can you imagine for a single moment the Jersey Lily summoning Elementals to her? Or one of those belles at Margherita’s loom?”

The mere thought was so absurd, of course, that Marina laughed; Margherita smiled, and Sebastian and Thomas looked ridiculously relieved. “Speaking of summoning Elementals—” began Thomas.

“Not over supper!” all three of them exclaimed, and laughed, and turned the conversation to something more entertaining for all five of them.

Marina woke with a start, her heart racing. What had startled her awake?

She listened, heard nothing, and pulled back the covers. Feeling both foolish and groggy, she went to her window to look outside. The clouds were returning, scudding across the face of the full moon, passing shadows across the ground. As the shadows passed, the pale, watery light slicked the bare branches of the tree beside her window with a glaze of pearl.

There was nothing moving out there.

It must have been a cat. Or an owl. But why would a cat or an owl have awakened her? It hadn’t been a sound that made her heart pound—it was a feeling. Marina was troubled, uneasy, and she didn’t know why. She couldn’t sleep, yet her mind wouldn’t clear, either; she felt as if there was something out there in the darkness looking for her. This was nothing as concrete as a premonition; just a sense that there was something very wrong, something hostile, aimed at her, but nothing more concrete than that.

There was no logical reason for the feeling. It had been a lovely evening, Uncle Thomas had consented to read aloud to them, something he very rarely did, although he had a wonderful reading voice. Then she herself had brought her musical instruments down and played, while the other four danced in the parlor, with Sarah and Jenny as a cheerful audience. She had come up to bed in a pleasant and mellow mood, thinking only of what she planned to try tomorrow with Elizabeth in the workroom.

But the sudden fear that had awakened her, the unease that kept her awake, wasn’t going away.

She listened carefully to the sounds of the house. There was nothing from next door, where Elizabeth was. And nothing from the bedrooms down the hall, either. Whatever was disturbing her, it was nothing that any of the others sensed.

Perhaps their shields are a little too good…

After all, shields obscured as well as protected.

Now that was an uncomfortable thought.

And yet, there still was nothing concrete out there, nothing she could put a finger on. She thought about getting a glass of water and summoning an Undine, but—

But if there is something looking for me, that’s the surest way to tell it where I am.

But the unease only grew, and she began to wonder if there was any possibility she could get downstairs into the workroom—which would at least have the primary shields on it—when something else occurred to her.

She didn’t have to summon anything, at least, not of her Element. She had Allies; she had always known about the interest of the Sylphs and other Air Elementals, but Elizabeth had taught her that they had a special connection to her, how to ask them for small favors. And a call to one of them would not betray her presence.

The thought was parent to the deed; she opened the window, and whistled a few bars of “Elf Call” softly out into the night. It didn’t have to be that tune, according to Elizabeth; it could be anything. Whistling was the way that the Finns, who seemed to have Air Mastery in the national blood, had traditionally called their Elemental creatures, so it worked particularly well for one who was only an Ally. It was nothing that an Air Elemental could take offense at. After all, any within hearing distance could always choose to ignore a mere whistle, even one with Power behind it.

There was a movement out of the corner of her eye, a momentary distortion, like a heat shimmer, in the air when she turned to look in that direction.

Then, as she concentrated on the Sight, the heat shimmer became a Sylph.

It did look rather like one of the ethereal creatures in a children’s book—a gossamer-pale dress over a thin wraith of a body, and the transparent insect wings, too small to hold her up in the air, even at a hover; pointed face, silver hair surmounted by a wreath of ivy, eyes far too big for the thin little visage.

She looked, in fact, like one of the child-women ballet dancers often sketched in the newspapers. Except that no ballet dancer ever hovered in midair, and no matter how thin a ballet dancer was, you couldn’t see the tree behind her through her body.

“Little sister,” the Sylph, “I know why you call.”

Marina had often heard the expression, “It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.” Now she understood it.

“There is danger, little sister,” the Sylph said urgently. “Great danger. She is moving, and her eye turns toward you. It is this that you sense.”

“She? Who is she?” Marina asked, urgently.

“Beware! Be wary!” was all the Sylph would say.

Then she was gone, leaving Marina not at all comforted, and with more questions and next to no answers.

Chapter Six

A LUSTILY crowing rooster woke Marina with a start, and she opened her eyes to brilliant sun shining past the curtains at her window. She sat straight up in bed, blinking.

The last she remembered was lying in bed, trying to decipher what the Sylph had said. It had seemed so urgent at the time, but now, with a rooster bellowing to the dawn, the urgency faded. She threw off the blankets, slipped out of bed, ran to the window and pulled the curtain aside.

The window was closed and latched, and although she did recall closing and latching it when she went to bed, she didn’t remember doing so after summoning the Sylph. She thought she’d left it open; she’d been in such a state of confusion and anxiety that she’d gone straight to her bed from the window.

Had she summoned a Sylph? Or had it all been a particularly vivid dream? Other than the window being shut, and that was problematical, there was nothing to prove her fears of last night had been real or imagined.

Except that last night there were clouds crossing the moon and a steady wind—and today there’s barely a breath of breeze and not a cloud in the sky. Could the weather have changed that drastically in a few hours? She didn’t think so, particularly not here, where winter was basically rain interrupted by clouds.

She opened the window, and closed it again quickly—it was also cold out there! It couldn’t be much above freezing, and she didn’t recall it being that cold last night. Surely it would have been colder last night than it was now!

That seemed to settle it—she must have dreamed the whole thing.

There was an easy way to check on it, though. Despite her misgivings of last night—which now seemed very misplaced—her guardian’s shields surely were not strong enough to keep them from sensing trouble.

She turned away from the window, and hurried over to the fire to build it up again, then quickly chose underthings and a gown and dressed for the day. Perhaps her thick woolen stockings were unfashionable, but at the moment, she would choose warm feet over fashion! Then she made for the kitchen, pausing only long enough in the little bathroom to wash her hands and face in the warm water that Jenny had brought up and left there, clean her teeth, and give her hair a quick brushing. I almost wish snoods were fashionable again, as they were ages ago, she thought, pulling the brush through the thick locks, with impatient tugs. Then I could bundle my hair up into the net and be done with it for the day. Sometimes I think I ought to just cut it all off.