The Gates of Sleep

She’d have laughed at the expression on his face, if she hadn’t known that would make him turn against her. What a joke! To think that she, a skeptic above all else, had raised up a pious little Satanist! Could Satanists be pious? A true believer, at any rate, and she wondered how, as careful as she had been with him, she had missed the signs of it developing.

And how far had he gone down that road? Did he go so far as to keep a shrine to the Dark One in his room? Oh, probably not; of all the servants, only Mary Anne and his valet were aware of anything unusual in the household, and Mary Anne only because she had discovered Reggie’s secret when she first became his mistress. She had, in fact, been an actress, and a clever one at that—but not a good one. Good enough to get the secondary parts, but never the leads; graceful enough to ornament the stage, but nothing else. So she augmented her status and income with gentlemen, and she managed to snare Reggie. But she had plans, she did—plans for a comfortable old age, having seen far too many of her kind tottering around as street whores, without even a room to take a customer to. She was not satisfied with all the accompanying privileges and presents of being Reggie’s regular, for she wanted something more in order to keep her mouth shut. Clever girl; you couldn’t eat a dinner twice, if the man didn’t keep paying for your flat you had to find a way to pay for it yourself or be out in the street. Presents of flowers were worthless—presents of jewelry always pawned for less than they cost. She wasn’t in love with Reggie. It was entirely a mercenary relationship with nothing in it at all of affection.

That something more that Mary Anne wanted was a permanent position—involving no more work than she’d put in on stage, at the same rate of pay as a star turn—in the household, whether or not she was in Reggie’s bed. She was shrewd enough to know that Madam was not about to pay her for doing nothing, but she was perfectly willing to perform something as minimal as assisting Madam’s own maid, for instance. And the other privilege she wanted was her own separate apartment for as long as she stayed with the household.

Things became a little more complicated with the move to Oakhurst, for Reggie insisted on having her along. Well, she kept Reggie satisfied, and that took some imagination and athletic ability, and her presence at Oakhurst was probably the only thing keeping Reggie here at all. The Oakhurst household did not know what Mary Anne’s position was, and Arachne had not wanted them to discover it. In light of Mary Anne’s stage experience, Arachne had decided that playing lady’s maid to the girl fit the criteria of “no more work than she’d put in on stage” and she’d proved herself useful in that regard as well.

But that was beside the point, given this new revelation. That Reggie actually believed and worshipped, now, that was something that Arachne would not have even guessed at until this moment. How had he gotten that way, and what was the cause? Surely there must have been a cause.

Yet so far as she knew, he had never seen anything during a rite that she hadn’t seen. There had never been any manifestations of lesser demons or devils, much less His Infernal Majesty himself at a single Black Mass, however perfectly performed. The only things that had appeared when summoned were the physical manifestations of Elementals—the nastier sort of Elementals, that is; Lamias Incubi, Trolls, Hobgoblins, Manticores, all the inimical fauna of a fabulous bestiary. Never a hint of a devil. Not a single demon in the classical sense of hellspawn. Plenty of things that fed on negative energies, on pain and despair, on sorrow and fear, but not a single creature that was itself despair.

Her eyes narrowed as she regarded him with speculation. Could it be that he had been holding rites on his own? And had gotten unexpected results? Had he accomplished things he had not troubled to tell his mother?

Could he, in fact, have gone so far as to invoke a devil and make a classic pact?

If he had, that put another complexion on this conversation entirely.

“I suppose—” he said finally, and she didn’t much like the expression, or rather, lack of it, in his face and hooded eyes. “—I suppose you’re right. It’s not belief, it’s results that count.”

She countered his mask with one of her own. “And in the realm of results, it would be best to have every option ready to put into motion,” she purred. “I am by no means out of plans, yet. And I am by no means limited to the ones we have already discussed.”

She was, in fact, perfectly prepared to perform the Great Rite with her own son, if everything fell apart and she needed to do so to protect herself from the backlash of the curse—though she had a notion that she would have to drug or otherwise disconnect Reggie’s mind from his body to accomplish that particular feat. Even her unshockable son might consider that going a bit too far.

Well, that was what she had her own pet doctors and chemists for. A little of this, a smidgen of that, and a glass of that brandy he was so fond of, and he’d be seeing and hearing what she chose, and doing exactly what she wanted.

Yes, and what was more, she was equally prepared to channel that backlash through him if she had to. Especially if he was getting above himself. If she was going to have to eliminate him, she certainly wouldn’t waste his potential. He could be eliminated, and it wasn’t likely that when the body was found, anyone would ever suspect her hand behind the death. Someone else could be trained; the valet, perhaps. She’d done without an Infernal Celebrant before, and she could do so again, awkward though it might be.

And less effective.

That was the problem with the Satanic rituals; so damned misogynistic, so infernally patriarchal.

Perhaps… when all this was sorted, she ought to pay someone to research the rites of the Magna Mater, or the goddess Hecate, or some other goddess of black powers. Perhaps endow three or four scholarships, or even get someone to search the proscribed sections of the Vatican library and abstract the appropriate texts. Then she wouldn’t need any Celebrant but herself.

No time for that now, though. The days and weeks were ticking past; March was half over, and spring would be here too soon. Already the snow was gone, and cold rain had taken its place. Then summer, and the birthday…

“Woo the girl, and win her if you can,” she ordered. “If nothing else, it will make inheritance easier if you’re married to her when the curse takes her. There will be no nonsense about probate courts and dying intestate and a minor; you’ll already have it all, no questions, no hesitation.”

“A good point.” He grimaced, and seemed to revert to his usual indolent self—though having seen the Believer behind the mask, Arachne was never going to trust to that mask again. “All right, Mater, I’ll do what—I’ll do the best that I can.”

“I’m sure you will,” she replied as he rose and walked out of the room. Though at that moment, she was not at all certain that he would.

After all—if she died in the backlash of the curse, he stood to inherit all that she owned. And then, if he chose, he could have his freedom to live his life as he chose, or his pick of heiresses couldn’t he?

For all she knew, if he actually had made a pact, that would be the sum of it.

Treachery, treachery. It might all come to which of them betrayed the other first.

Marina was wracking her brains, trying to come up with a reason, any excuse at all, to get Reggie and Arachne to take her to the pottery at Exeter. She’d considered feigning some mysterious female illness, considered a toothache that would require a visit to a dentist. But both those ploys could involve having her ruse exposed as such, and would involve—particularly in the case of the dentist—a certain amount of pain. If she wanted books, well they could be ordered, and the same for the shoes she actually needed.

She’d even gone so far as to make a handwritten list of plausible approaches last night, but nothing seemed particularly inspired. She was still turning things over in her mind as she followed Mary Anne to breakfast the next morning, trying on this idea, then that, and coming up with nothing.

Still, when she discovered that Madam was not down to breakfast that morning, leaving her alone with Reggie, it seemed as though the opportunity to approach him directly was too good to let slip. So she listened to his interminable boasts and pointless stories with wide-eyed patience, then, after a description of some petty triumph in business, she sighed theatrically.

At least he managed to pick up on that, although he was utterly obtuse to the fact that she was bored silly with him. “Why the sighs, fair cuz?” he asked, with an empty grin. “Do my triumphs on the field of commerce so entrance you? Or is it just that, like a good little feminine creature, you’ve no head for business and would like me to change the subject?”

It was about as good an opening as she was ever likely to get. “Actually, in a peculiar way, it’s partly both. I am fascinated by your enterprises,” she replied, making her eyes wide, and looking at him with great seriousness. “Since I’m part of your family now, I’ve come to the conclusion that I really ought to see your business, first hand, so I can understand it when you discuss it. Oh, Reggie! Could you take me to the pottery at Exeter?” She made her voice turn wheedling, though she cringed inside to hear herself. “Please? That is the closest one, isn’t it? I should so like to see it, and even more, to see you in charge of all of it! It must be thrilling, like seeing a captain command his warship!” Good gad, am I really saying this tripe?

For a moment, he looked so startled that she had to swallow an entire cup of tea in three gulps to keep from laughing aloud. “Are you serious, cuz?” he said incredulously. “Do you really want to see the pottery and watch me at work?”

“Absolutely,” she replied, looking straight into his eyes. “More than wanting to see it, I feel that I must see it, and that I can never properly understand you or Madam unless I see you in command of it all. Could you take me? Perhaps on your next business trip?” She actually stooped so low as to bat her eyes at him, and tried not to gag.

“By Jove, I not only could, but this will fit in with my plans splendidly!” he exclaimed with such glee that she was startled. “Just yesterday Mater was saying that I ought to take you to some place bigger than Oakhurst and let you see the sights; maybe do a trifle of shopping, I know how you little creatures love to shop—”

She stifled the urge to strangle him and concentrated on looking overjoyed with the prospect of a day away from the house and the village. It wasn’t that hard to do, given the promise of “a little shopping.” Perhaps she could manage to get hold of some money in the process.

“I would like that above all things, so long as I can also see the pottery,” she said, gazing at him with feigned adoration. “Oh, Reggie, you are so good to me, and I know I must bore a worldly fellow like you to distraction. I can’t help it, I know I’m too serious, and so horribly provincial. I must seem like such a bumpkin to a man of the world like you.”

“Oh no—you have other things to distract me with, fair cuz,” he flattered, with such complete insincerity that she wondered why every woman he met didn’t see through him immediately. “Well then, this is Saturday—I’ll send Hibdon down to reserve a first-class compartment on the first train down to Exeter Monday morning and the last returning Monday night. We’ll be up at dawn, catch the train and have breakfast on it, be in Exeter by ten. We’ll trot you about the shops, a handsome little luncheon, perhaps a little more shopping, then we’ll off to the pottery. I’ll do my duty to the old firm, don’t you know, then we’ll catch the train, have a good tea on it, and be back here in time for a late dinner!” He laughed then, and winked at her. “I know that won’t be nearly enough shopping for you—you ladies don’t seem to want to do anything but shop, but maybe you’ll take pity on a poor fellow and let me make a promise to take you up again another time.”

She simpered, and dropped her eyes, to avoid having to look at him. “Oh, cousin Reggie, I really have very simple tastes. I would like to see a bookshop, and I haven’t nearly enough gloves, and perhaps a hat—”

He guffawed—there was no other word for it. “A hat? My dear cuz, I have never yet seen a woman who could buy a hat! If you manage that feat, I will fall dead in a faint!”

I just wish you’d fall dead, she thought ungenerously, but she managed to fake a giggle. “Shoes, too,” she added as an afterthought. “And riding boots, at least. Mine,” she added with genuine regret, “are a disgrace.”

“That’s enough to fill a morning and an afternoon. Gloves, hats, books—romances, I’ll be bound, or poetry—and shoes. Hands, head, heart and—” he grinned at his own cleverness, “—soles.”

She did the expected, and groaned and rolled her eyes at the pun. He looked pleased, and chuckled. “I’ll tell the Mater; she’ll be cheered. She thinks you ought to see the big city—well, something bigger than a village, anyway. Maybe we can go down for a concert or recital or whatnot after this, if the sight of all those people in one place doesn’t give you the collywobbles.”

“I shall do everything on my part to avoid the collywobbles,” she promised solemnly. She managed to be flatteringly good company until he finished his breakfast, then went off to whatever task he had at hand. She finished hers, then took herself off to the long gallery for her newest lessons, which were occupying her mornings now.

The long gallery was a painting and statue gallery, with windows looking out on the terrace on one side, and the artworks on the other. To show off the art, the walls had been painted white and had minimal ornamentation. And now, during autumn, winter, and early spring, the ornamental orange trees in their huge pots from the terrace were kept at the windows inside. The highly polished stone floor echoed with every footstep, and a glance at the rain-slick terrace outside made Marina shiver.

Mary Anne was conducting these lessons, but Marina had hopes that they would be over relatively soon, since she was mastering them more quickly than the dancing lessons. And for once, the wretched girl was actually being helpful instead of superior. It didn’t seem as though one ought to need lessons in how to move and walk once one was past babyhood, but as Marina was discovering, it wasn’t so much “how to walk” as it was “how to walk gracefully.”

The first mistake in her carriage that Mary Anne had corrected had been that Marina always swung her right foot out and back when she moved—she wasn’t sure why, or how she had gotten into the habit, but now she understood why it was that she was always stubbing the toes of her right foot on things she should have passed right by. Then Mary Anne had made her shorten her stride and slow down by tying a string between her ankles, so that she couldn’t take a long stride and was constantly reminded by the string not to.

Yesterday, at the end of the lesson, the string had come off so that Mary Anne could view her unimpeded progress.

Today, Mary Anne ordered her to walk the long gallery with a proper stride without the string. She began, taking steps half the size of the ones she was used to, and feeling as if she was taking an age to traverse the distance.

“Now, mind, if you’re in a great hurry, and there’s no one about to see you,” Mary Anne said, as she reached the other end of the Gallery, “then go ahead and tear about with that gallop of yours. But if there’s anyone who catches you at it, they’ll know in an instant that you’re a country cousin.”

Eh? “What on earth do you mean by that?” she replied—pitching her voice so that it carried without shouting, which had been Madam’s personal lesson for the afternoons when she wasn’t at the vicarage.

“You can’t race about a townhouse like that without tripping over or running into something,” the maid replied smugly. “Nor on a city sidewalk. You have to take short strides in a city; dwellings are smaller, there’s much less space and more people and things to share it. Why do you think people talk about going to the country to ‘stretch their legs’?”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” she admitted.

“I’m not going to put a book on your head, though Madam said I should,” the maid said thoughtfully, watching her as she approached. “That’s only to keep your chin up and your shoulders back. I must say, for someone tossed about in a den of artists, you have excellent posture.”

“My uncles used to have me pose for ladies’ portrait bodies and busts, so that the ladies themselves only had to sit for the faces,” she said, giving a quarter of the truth. “And I posed for saints, sometimes—Saint Jeanne d’Arc, for one. You can’t slouch when you’re posing for something like that. They have to look—” she pitched her voice a little differently now, making it gluey and unctuous, like the utterly wet individual who had commissioned a Madonna and Child once, when she was very small and posing as Jesus as a young child, with Margherita standing duty as Mary.

“—drrrrawn up, my child, drrrawn up to Heaven by their faith and their hair—”

For the first time in all the weeks that she had been afflicted with the maid’s presence, Mary Anne stared at her—then burst out laughing. Real laughter, not a superior little cough, or a snicker.

“By their hair?” she gasped. “By their hair?” Tears rolled down her face to the point where she had to dry her eyes on her apron, and she was actually panting between whoops, trying to get in air. Marina couldn’t help it; she started giggling herself, and made things worse by continuing the impression. “As if, my child, they are suspended above the mortal clay, by means of a strrrrring attached to the tops of their heads—”

“A string?” howled Mary Anne, doubling over. “A string?”

When she finally got control of herself, it seemed that something had changed forever, some barrier between them had cracked and fallen. “Oh,” the maid said, finally getting a full breath, the red of her face fading at last. “Thank you for that. I haven’t had such a good laugh in a long, long time.” She dabbed at the corners of her eyes with her apron. “Imagine. A string. Like a puppet—” she shook her head. “Or suspended by their hair! What fool said that?”

“A fool of a bishop who got his position because he was related to someone important,” she replied, with amusement and just a touch of disgust at the memory. “Who knew less about real faith than our little vicar down in the village, but a very great deal about whom and how to flatter. But my u—guardian Sebastian Tarrant needed his money, and he did a lovely painting for the man, and since it was for a parlor, that is how he painted it. To be ornamental, just as if it was to illustrate something out of King Arthur rather than the Bible. Sebastian said he just tried to tell himself that it was just an Italian bucolic scene he was doing, and it came out all right.”

She smiled at the memory. She could still remember him fuming at first over the sketches that the Bishop rejected. “Damn it all, Margherita! That pompous ass rejected my angels! Angels are supposed to be powerful, not simpering ninnys with goose-wings! The first thing they say to mortals is ‘Fear not!’ for heaven’s sake! Don’t you think they must be saying it because their very appearance is so tremendous it should inspire fear? The angels he wants don’t look like they’re saying ‘Fear not!’, they look like they’re saying, ‘There there’.…”

“Mary Anne,” she said, sitting down—insinuating herself into the chair, as the maid had just taught her—”I know that you aren’t comfortable going to church with me. I don’t see why you should still have to, honestly—in the beginning, yes, when I might have done something foolish like crying to the vicar about how horrid my guardian was and how she was mistreating me, but not now. Why don’t you ask Madam to be excused?”

The maid gave her a measuring look. “I believe that I will, miss. And you are correct in thinking that Madam assumed you might do something foolish. There was, after all, no telling how you’d been brought up out there—nor what you’d been told about Madam.”

Oh yes; something has fallen that was between us. She is never going to be a friend, but she’s not my enemy anymore.

“Well—” she shrugged. “What child likes a strict tutor? But the child has to be readied for business or university, and I have to be readied for society. I know a great deal from books, and nothing at all about society.”

There. That’s noncommittal enough.

Mary Anne unbent just a little more. “A wise observation, miss. And may I say that thus far you have been a good pupil, if rebellious at first.”

Marina smiled and held out her hand to the maid. “I promise to be completely cooperative from now on, even if I think what you’re trying to teach me is daft.” She lowered her voice to a whisper as the astonished maid first stared at, then took her hand in a tentative handshake. “Just promise to keep the fact that I posed for saints a secret. Reggie and Madam already think I’m too pious as it is.”

“It’s a promise, miss.” The handshake was firmer. “Everyone has a secret or two. Yours is harmless enough.”

“And I’d better practice walking if I’m not to look like a country-cousin Monday in Exeter.” She got to her feet—ascending, rather than heaving herself up—and resumed her walk up and down the Gallery.

But she couldn’t help but wonder just what that last remark of the maid’s had implied.

Everyone has a secret or two. Yours is harmless enough.

Chapter Eighteen

To Marina’s immense relief, all she had to do was act naturally on the trip to Exeter to keep Reggie amused. It was, after all, her first train ride, and she found it absolutely enthralling—they had their own little first-class compartment to themselves, so she didn’t have to concern herself about embarrassing rather than amusing him. The speed with which they flew through the countryside thrilled her, and she kept her nose practically pressed against the glass of the compartment door for the first half of the journey. By the time she had just begun to tire—a little, only a little—of the passing countryside, it was time to take breakfast, and for that, they moved to the dining car.

This, of course, was another new experience, and she looked at the menu, and fluttered her eyelashes and let Reggie do all the ordering for her. Which he did, with a great deal of amusement. She didn’t care. She was having too much fun. Eating at a charming little dining table with lovely linen and a waiter and all, while careening through the countryside at the same time, was nothing short of amazing. Mind, you did have to take care when drinking or trying to cut something; there was certainly a trick to it. For once, there was an advantage to wearing black!

The enjoyment continued after they disembarked from the train, though the sheer number of people pouring out of their train alone was bewildering, and there were several trains at the platforms. In fact, it seemed to her that there were more people on their train than were in the entire village of Oakhurst! And they all seemed to be in a very great hurry. For once, the Odious Reggie was extremely useful, as he bullied his way along the platform, with Marina trailing in his wake. Literally in his wake; he left a clear area behind himself that she just fitted into. The engine at rest chuffed and hissed and sent off vast clouds of steam and smoke as they passed it, and she followed the example of the other passengers and covered her nose and mouth with her scarf until they were off the platform.

The Odious Reggie continued to prove his utility; he took her arm as soon as they were out of the crush. She didn’t get much chance to look at the terminal, though; he steered her through a mob of people who streamed toward the street. Once there, he commandeered a hansom cab and lifted her into it.

“Head, heart, hands, or soles first?” he asked genially, once he was safely in beside her. She could only shake her head in bewilderment.

“Lightest first, then, since I’m likely to end up as your beast of burden.” He tapped on the roof with his umbrella, and a little hatch above their heads opened and the driver peered down at them through it.

Evidently Reggie knew exactly where to go, too. He rattled off a name, the hatch snapped shut, and they were off, the horse moving at a brisk trot through streets crowded with all manner of vehicles—including motorcars. Marina couldn’t help it; she stared at them with round eyes, causing Reggie still more amusement.

“Soles” proved to be Reggie’s first choice; the cobbler. This was for the very simple reason that the shoes would have to be sent, being “bespoke,” or made to Marina’s measure. She chose riding boots, two pairs of walking shoes, and at Reggie’s urging, a pair of dancing slippers. When she protested that she had no use for such a thing, he laughed.

“Do you think I’m going to let you keep treading on my toes in what you’re wearing now?” he said, making her blush. “Dancing slippers, m’gel. My feet have had enough punishment. If you’re going to keep treading on them, let it be with soft slippers.”

From there, they went to the glover—which was a thing of amazement to her, that there was an establishment that sold nothing but gloves—and she got a full dozen pairs, all black, of course, but of materials as varied as knitted lace and the softest kid-leather. Reggie overruled her completely there, when she would only have gotten one satin pair and one kid. He’d gone down the entire selection in black, picking out one of everything except the heavy wool, and two of the kid.

Then the milliner. And at that establishment, Reggie excused himself. She had conducted herself with dispatch—or at least, as much as would be allowed, given that the cobbler took all the measurements necessary to make a pair of lasts to exactly duplicate her feet—but here she stopped in the entrance and just stared.

Hats—she had never seen such hats, except in pictures. Enormous cartwheel picture-hats, hoods, riding hats, straw hats, little bits of netting and feathers that could hardly be called a hat, plain, loaded with everything under the sun.

“I’ll be back in an hour, m’gel,” Reggie said, patronizingly. “I expect by that time, you’ll have just gotten started.”

By that point, an attentive young woman in a neat skirt and shirtwaist had come up to them. “Whatever she wants, and put it on Madam Arachne Chamberten’s account,” he told the assistant, and took himself off, leaving Marina in her hands.

Marina shook herself out of her daze, and determined that, although it was unlikely she was going to escape with only the single hat she had promised Reggie, she was going to keep her purchases down to only what she needed. She faced the eager assistant. “I’m in full mourning,” she said firmly. “So we will not be purchasing anything frivolous. I need a riding hat. And a foul-weather hood, or something of the sort—”

“Yes, indeed, miss,” the assistant said with amusement, sounding fully confident that the very opposite was going to happen.

No you don’t—she swore to herself, despite the fact that her eyes kept going to a particularly fetching straw for summer.

When Reggie returned, she was waiting for him—with only a single hatbox. Granted, there were three hats in it, but she had managed to select items that fit together neatly so as to all fit in a single box. It had been a narrow escape, but she’d done it.

“One hat?” Reggie asked incredulously, staring at the box. “One hat? You’re escaping this Aladdin’s cave with one hat?”

“No,” she admitted. “Three small ones.”

“It’s one box. It counts as one hat. My heart fails me!” He clutched theatrically at his chest, and the assistants giggled over his antics, stopping just short of flirtation with him—probably because the milliner’s eye was on them.

“Off to the bookshop, then,” he said, “Then luncheon at the Palm Court, and the old firm, then homeward bound.” He scooped up her, her hat- and glove-boxes, and carried them all off to the waiting cab.

If there was one blot on the day so far, it was that Madam seemed to have accounts everywhere, and not a single actual penny had changed hands, so Marina hadn’t been able to say something like “Oh, I’ll take care of it while you visit the tobacconist,” and keep back a shilling or so for herself.

The same case proved to hold at the bookshop—which was the biggest such establishment that Marina had ever seen, and had actual electric lights, which had been turned on because of growing overcast that threatened rain. She tried very, very hard not to stare, but it was extremely difficult, and she couldn’t help but wish for such a thing at Oakhurst.

Not that it was going to be possible for years, even decades yet. Electricity hadn’t come anywhere near the village, which didn’t even have gas lighting either. It would be paraffin lamps and candles for some time, she suspected.

“Electric lights,” she said wistfully. “What a magical invention!”

“We’ve gas at the pottery,” Reggie said, giving close attention to the electrical lamps, which burned away the gloom with steady light not even gas could rival. “I wonder if this is more efficient, though. I believe I’ll look into it.”

Since he seemed more interested in the lamps than in books, she left him there, and penetrated deep into the recesses of the closely set shelves. Bewildered, she was not, but dazzled, she was. It was one thing to encounter a wealth of books in a private library like that of Oakhurst—such collections were the result of the work of generations, and (not to put too fine a point upon it) a great many of the resulting volumes stored in such libraries were of very little use to anyone other than scholars. Often enough you couldn’t, daren’t read them, for fear of them crumbling away, the pages separating as you tried to turn them. But here were twice or three times that number, all of them eminently readable, in modern editions, brand new. A feast—that was what it was! A feast for the mind…

It was consideration of how much she could carry and not anything else that led her to limit her selection. She decided that since she wanted some volumes anyway, there was no harm in feeding Reggie’s assumptions about her. So in her chosen stack there was some poetry, and some novels, and some very interesting volumes that Elizabeth had recommended, books that raised an eyebrow on the clerk who was tallying them up. He didn’t say anything though, and Reggie was deep in another flirtation with a lady wearing one of those frothy confections of lace and velvet that made her wilt with envy, knowing how silly she would look in it, at the front of the store. And when he finally did make his way to the till, he picked one of the books up and looked at the title with no sign of recognition, anyway.

“Madam Arachne Chamberten’s account,” he said as usual. “Have the parcel made up with this young lady’s name on it and send it to the station to catch the afternoon train to Eggesford. The four-fifteen, that would be. Have the porter stow it in our compartment. And here—” he handed over the hat- and glove-boxes. “Send these along with it, there’s a good fellow.”

“All but this—” Marina said, taking one of the poetry books out at random, mostly because it was small and fit in her reticule. Just in case, she wanted to have something with her to read. Reggie might choose to abandon her someplace for a while.

The clerk bowed, Reggie grinned, and she tucked the book into her bag. “Yes, sir,” the clerk said, briskly. “Marina Roeswood, Oakhurst, by way of the four-fifteen to Eggesford.” He wrote it all down on a card that he tucked into the front cover of the topmost book, and handed off the lot to an errand boy. Reggie handed the lad a half crown by way of a tip as Marina bit her lip in vexation. The boy grinned and averred he’d take care of it all personally.

Then there was nothing for it, but to let Reggie sweep her off into yet another cab, which disgorged them on the premises of an hotel. The Palm Court proved to be its restaurant, which must have been famous enough in Exeter, given the crowds of people. Not merely middle-class people, either; there wasn’t a single one of the ladies there who wasn’t be-gowned and be-hatted to the tune of several tens of pounds, judging by the prices that Marina had noted today. She felt so drab in her black—at the next table was a woman in a wonderful suit of French blue trimmed in purple velvet, with a purple silk shirtwaist and a huge purple velvet rose at her throat, cartwheel hat to match. She felt raw with envy, even though you had to have a neck like a Greek column to wear something like that flower at the throat, not an ordinary un-swanlike neck like hers. Then Reggie spoiled everything when the waiter came and he ordered for her, before the waiter could even offer her a menu, quite as if she hadn’t a will (and taste) of her own.

Marina got a good stranglehold on her temper and smiled as the waiter bowed and trotted away. “I’ve never had lobster salad, Reggie,” she said.

“Oh, you’ll like it, all ladies do,” he said vaguely, as the waiter returned with tea and a basket of bread and rolls. He chose, cut and buttered one for her. Was this supposed to be gallantry?

She decided to take it as such, or at least pretend to, and thanked him, even though it was a soft roll, not the hard sort with the crunchy crust that she preferred.

She did actually enjoy the lobster salad when it came, although it wasn’t the meal she’d have chosen on a cold day. Fortunately, it turned out to be one of those things that she did know how to eat, although she had waited for its appearance with growing dread, not knowing if this meal was a sadistic ploy on Reggie’s part to discomfit her in public. But Reggie was either inclined to treat her nicely today, or else had been ordered to be on his best behavior, because other than taking complete charge of everything but the actual choice of hats and books for the entire day, he’d treated her rather well.

Perhaps it’s because I haven’t objected to all those flirtations, she thought, watching him exchange another set of wordless communications with a lady two tables over, whom he evidently knew of old. There was the glover’s girl, the milliner’s apprentices, the lady at the bookshop—and now here. Whatever the exchange portended, however, must not have been to his benefit, as the lady shortly after welcomed another gentleman to her table with every evidence of pleasure, and Reggie applied himself to his saddle of mutton with an air of having been defeated.

The defeat must have been a very minor one, though, as he was all smiles again by dessert.

“All right, m’gel,” he said, when the bill was settled, to the waiter’s unctuous satisfaction, “It’s off to work for us! Let’s collect our traps and hie us hence.”

All the pleasures of the day faded into insignificance at that reminder of what she was here for in the first place. And as they collected their “traps” from the cloakroom girl and piled into yet another cab, Marina tried to prepare herself to hunt—even though she didn’t really know what she was looking for.

Andrew Pike drummed his fingers on the desk-blotter, stared into nothing much, and tried not to worry too much about Marina. After all, it wasn’t as if she was going to open herself up to anything dangerous just by passive observation. And it wasn’t as if they’d had any evidence that either her guardian or the Odious Reggie (how he loved that nickname!) were the ones responsible for the occult drain on Ellen. It was just as likely that the pottery had been built on the site of some ancient evil, and that the presence of someone with Ellen’s potentials had caused it to reach out and attach itself to her. For heaven’s sake, it was equally possible that she’d done something unconsciously that awoke the thing! It was equally likely that one of her so-called gentleman friends had done it, figuring the girl was ignorant, and perfectly willing to drain her and throw her away when he was satisfied. After all, the rotters were equally willing to do the same sort of thing physically.

Still.

Still, just because Madam hasn’t shown any signs of otherworldly abilities, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have them.

Andrew was not a Scot—he was from Yorkshire, actually—but he had taken his medical degree in Scotland, where there was a strong occult tradition—which was how he’d come to find another Earth Master to teach him beyond what his Air Mage mother had taught him in the first place. And up there, he’d encountered a number of—interesting fragments. There had been rumors among the Scots Masters for centuries, for instance, that perfectly ordinary folk, without any discernible magical abilities, could steal magic from others by frankly unpleasant means. Yes, and use that magic too, even though they were effectively working blind. Some of those fragments attested that a cult of Druids were the ones who practiced this theft, some that it was a splinter of the Templars that really did worship the old god Baphomet as was claimed, and some—well, the majority actually—said it was Satanists. A group of Satanists recruited and taught by the infamous Gilles de Rais to be exact, who then came to England when he was caught in his crimes and brought the teachings with them. The trouble was, no one had any proof—and it was a difficult proposition to track down what was essentially a Left-Hand Path magician when he didn’t look like a magician, didn’t have shields like a magician, and could not be told from ordinary, non-magical folk.

And as it happened, neither Madam nor her son looked like magicians, had shields like magicians, or seemed in any way to be anything other than ordinary, non-magical folk.

He had many questions that were bothering him at this point, of which one was why, exactly, had Marina not been living here with her parents? No one in the village knew—although there were stories that something terrible had happened shortly after the child’s christening that had sent Marina’s mother into “a state.” Coincident with that, it seemed, the child was sent away.

Why was it that no one had seen or heard anything of this sister of Hugh’s for years? Interestingly enough, it was common knowledge that Madam had had a falling-out with her parents over her choice of husband, and had not been seen at Oakhurst ever again until the Roeswoods died so tragically. But why, after the parents were dead, had brother and sister not made some attempt to reconcile? Unless Hugh Roeswood was of the same mind as his parents about Arachne. But then, why not have a will, just in case, to prevent Arachne from ever having anything to do with the Roeswoods? But if the rift was so insurmountable, why had Arachne claimed the girl and taken her directly into her household? Why not just leave her where she was, washing her hands entirely of her? No law could force her to become Marina’s hands-on guardian.

It was all fragments that instinct told him should fit together, but which didn’t.

He wished that he’d had more uninterrupted time to talk to her. He wished that Clifton Davies had discussed more of her past and less of chess-moves and music with her. Merely mentioning her mother seemed to make her wary, as if there was something about her mother that she didn’t much want to think about.

Though what it could be—if there was anything—he was hanged if he could imagine!

Well, old man, there is one route to find out what you can about her that you haven’t taken.

Not that he hadn’t thought about it—but magicians as he knew them up in Scotland were odd ducks. Insular, self-protective, and inclined to keep things close to their chests. Those that had formed groups tended to look a little suspiciously on outsiders, and if anyone was an outsider here, it was definitely Dr. Andrew Pike, with Clifton Davies from the Welsh Borders a close second. Still—

They’re sending their sick to me, and mage-born children of ordinary parents when they find them in trouble. So I might not be so much of an outsider that I can’t get information out of these Devonian mages after all. It’d serve me right to discover that the only reason no one’s told me anything is because I didn’t ask.

Fauns would be the best messengers, he reckoned. They weren’t at all troubled by cold weather—didn’t go dormant to sleep until spring like some Earth Elementals. They went everywhere there was a patch of wildwood, and every Earth mage he had ever seen had a patch of wildwood somewhere about. That was one reason why they didn’t much like being in cities, truth to tell. When he got done sending out his messengers, he could get Clifton to send out—oh, Sylphs, he supposed. They were the Air Elementals he was most familiar with, though perhaps there was something else that was more suitable. Then… hmm. Who did he know that he could trade on favors to help him with Water and Fire?

Oh, good Lord—two of the children, of course! Naiads hung about Jamie Cooper like bees around a honey pot, and Craig Newton was always talking to Salamanders in the fire. He couldn’t send messengers from those two Elements, of course; the children didn’t command anything at the moment, and now that he’d gotten them over their fears that they were going mad, his main job was to shield them from the nastier Elementals of their types until they could protect themselves. But he could ask them to ask their Elementals to do the favor, and if the creatures didn’t lose interest or get distracted by something else, they probably would.

But—send out his own Elementals, first, and see where that got him.

The one good and reliable thing about Fauns was that unlike Brownies, they were pitiably easy to bribe with things from the human world. Unfortunately, they were also scatterbrained. But as long as they could lick their lips and taste the honey he’d give them, and as long as their little flasks held the wine he’d offer them, they’d remember, and they’d keep to the job.

After a quick stop in the kitchen for a peg of the vin ordinaire that the departing family had deemed too inferior to take with them or to try and sell, a big cottage-loaf, and a pot of honey, he bundled himself up in his mackintosh and went out into the wet, tying his hood down around his ears.

It was a wild day, one of the “lion” days of March, full of wind and lashings of rain, and he was glad that there hadn’t been two fair days in a row, for weather like this would doom any buds that had been coaxed out before their time. He bent his head to the rain and trudged down to the bottom of the garden, then beyond, into the acres that had once been manicured parkland but had been allowed to fall into neglect. Near the edge of the property he owned was a coppice that had grown up around what had once been a tended grove of Italian cypress, and in the center of that grove was still a marble statue of Pan in one of his milder moods—Pan, the musician, boon companion of Bacchus, not Great God Pan of the wilderness and Panic fear. Even without casting a shield-circle and doing a formal invocation, such a setting was still potent to bring and hold the little fauns (and he sometimes wondered if they were homesick for the warmer winds and cypresses of Italy that they came so readily here).

He shoved his way into the grove, past a couple of gorse bushes grown up like rude boys pressing on the edge of the circle of cypress trees. Something about this spot had suited the cypresses; they had grown tall and thick in this place, and what had once been a circle of graceful, thin, green columns with marble benches at their bases facing the statue that stood at the south-point of the circle, was now a green wall. He edged himself sideways between two of the Italian cypresses, whose dark green, brackenlike branches resisted him for a moment, then yielded.

Then he was within the tiny grove itself, a disk of rank, dead grass, protected from the wind and so marginally warmer than the space outside it. There was Pan, staring down at him with a benign, slightly mischievous grin, holding his syrinx just below his bearded lips. The benches were all toppled, shoved over by the roots and thickening trunks of the cypresses. The marble of the statue was darkened with grime in all the crevices, which had the effect of making it look more like a living creature rather than less. The hair was green with moss, a green which in this light looked black, and the eyes had been cleverly carved so that they seemed to follow whomever walked in front of it.

Here was relative warmth, peace, no Cold Iron, the trees of the Italian peninsula and wilderness. Only two things were lacking to bring the Fauns—food, and drink.

He pulled the cork from the bung-hole of the cask, and dribbled a little on the plinth that Pan stood upon, tore off a bit of bread, dipped it in the honey, and laid it at Pan’s feet. Ideally, he’d have had olive oil as well, but that comestible was a bit difficult to come by in the heart of Devon.

“You could have brought butter,” said a piping voice at his elbow. “We’ve gotten used to butter. Cheese, too, we like cheese.”

“Next time, then I will,” he replied, looking down into the slanted, goatlike golden eyes of the little faun. The shameless little faun, without even a loincloth to cover his privates. Unlike Pan’s—which in the statue were modestly screened by an enormous fig leaf. Fortunately, fauns were not as priapic in nature as the god of whom they were the votaries and earthly representatives.

“It would only get wet,” the Faun pointed out cheerfully. “Have you ever worn a wet leather loincloth? Misery.”

“You have a point,” he admitted. “And I have a favor to ask.”

He sensed more of them all around him, some in hiding, some stealing up behind him. The faun at his elbow sniffed at the wine-smell longingly, his nose twitching. “They don’t make wine here,” he complained. “Only cider. It’s very good cider, really excellent cider, but we’re tired of cider.”

“So this should be very welcome,” he responded, putting the cork back in the bunghole, and carefully placing the cask, bung-end up, on the ground. He added the loaf of bread and the jar of honey beside it. “I’m trying to find anyone who knows the Water Mage up the hill and would be willing to talk to me. The girl-mage, not the man.”

“Not the Christ-man in the village?” This was another faun, who practically quivered with eagerness as his nose filled with the scent of bread and wine.

“No, the young lady who lives in the big house now—”

“We can’t get near,” complained a third, drumming on the ground with one hoof. “They drove us out of the garden and closed the bounds! She made us welcome there, the gentle She with sad eyes, but they drove us out when they came!”

That would have been Madam and her son—small wonder. He’d seen the garden now, manicured to a fare-thee-well, and bristling with wrought-iron ornaments. Madam apparently liked wrought-iron trellises and arbors, lampposts and what not. Taming the wildness and planting iron everywhere would have made the fauns flee as fast as they could.

“You don’t have to try and go near her to catch her scent; she has come to me once, and many times to the Christ-man,” he said patiently. “Besides, to look for those who know her, you do not need the scent. You only need the name. Names are like scent to men.”

“Both is better,” said the first, “But we can do this, if we can find her scent. Did she do magic there, too?”

Fauns needed a great deal of simple explanation, sometimes. “Yes, she did—Water magic, for she is a Water Mage. Her scent will be there, where the Christ-man dwells, with their magic mingled with mine. And her name is Marina Roeswood.” He stepped away from his offerings, just in case any of the Cold Iron he was wearing in tiny bits all over his person troubled them. Fauns were fairly robust about that, but it didn’t hurt to be certain. “To the fruit of the vine, the harvest of the field, be welcome,” he added, the litany that allowed them to take what he had placed there.

A half-dozen of them swarmed his offerings like locusts, and a moment later, they were all gone but the one that had first addressed him. That one stood hipshot, still looking up at him.

“Marina Roeswood, blood of Earth, born of Water,” the faun said. Andrew nodded, though he hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant. “Good. We will send askings, for as long as we remember.”

“Then remember this, too. I will continue to bring Vine and Harvest here every two days for the next six, so if you have anything to tell me, there will be more to share.” He smiled to see the faun’s eyes widen. “And since you have gotten accustomed to butter and cheese, there will be some of that, as well.”

“Butter is good,” the faun said meditatively. “And cheese. I think remembrance will run long, if you come every two days.”

Fortunately, there was a bit left in the original cask of vin ordinaire, and no one at the sanitarium drank wine.

Isn’t that a line out of Bram Stoker’s novel? “I never drink… wine.…”

Odd thought, that. But it was the truth at Briareley. The staff was Devon born and bred, except for Eleanor, and your true Devonian wouldn’t look at wine when there was cider about. Old fashioned fermented cider, that is, the stuff that had a kick like a mule, and was stronger than anyone outside the county usually suspected.

He didn’t drink wine, either, as a rule. A glass of whisky by preference, if he felt the taste for spirits coming on—that was where Scotland had rubbed off on him. Otherwise, tea was his drink. And he’d never seen Eleanor touch a drop of spirit even when offered it; tea for her as well. So the fauns could have the wine and welcome to it.

“Vine and harvest, bee-sup and butter and cheese, all to come if wearing word. We will remember, Earth Master,” the faun said, with a stamp of his hoof to seal the bargain.

Then Andrew was once again alone in the clearing, with only the knowing eyes of Pan upon him, the faint purple stain and the bit of bread still on the plinth. The fauns would not take that bit of an offering to their god; a bird or a mouse might steal it, but that was Pan’s will.

He saluted the god with no sense of irony, and turned to push his way back out of the grove and into the workaday world again.

Marina sat at a desk in one of the inner offices and trembled. She had never been so glad of anything in her life as she was glad of the fact that Reggie had left the tour of the pottery to one of his underlings—and that business conferences with his managers had kept him pent up in his office all afternoon. Because it took her all afternoon to recover from what she found in the painting-room.

It had been bad enough to discover that the pottery was a blight, a cancer, a malignant spring spewing poison into the land, the water, the very air. Everyone and everything around here was poisoned, more or less—the clay-lees choked the Exe where the runoff entered it, and no living thing could survive the murky water, not fish nor plant. Clay clogged the gills and smothered the fish, coated the leaves of water-plants and choked them. The clay choked the soil as well—and the lead from the glazes killed what the clay didn’t choke. Even the air, loaded with lead vapor and smoke from the kilns, was a hazard to everything that came in contact with it. But those were the least of the poisons here.

The rather dull young clerk who took her around didn’t even notice when the blood drained out of her face and she grew faint on the first probing touch of the paintresses and their special environs. The girls themselves were too busy to pay attention to her—she was only a female, after all. There weren’t any of their gentleman friends there at the time, but Marina had the idea that they’d been chivvied out long enough for her to take her look around, and would pop out of hiding as soon as she was gone. So there was no one to notice that she clutched at the doorpost and chattered ridiculous questions for a good fifteen minutes before she felt ready to move on.

Thank heavens that was the end of the tour, she thought, shuddering. The clerk had tucked her up in one of the managers’ offices with apologies that he couldn’t put her in Madam Chamberten’s office, because it was Madam Chamberten’s orders that it was locked up unless she was expected. She waved him away and asked for a pot of tea, then changed her mind and left it untouched when she realized how much lead must be in the water. She didn’t want to go into Madam Chamberten’s office. Not when—that sinkhole of evil lay so close to it.

So instead, she propped her forehead on her hand and pretended to read her poetry book, strengthening her shields from her inner reserves, and trying to make them as invisible as all her skill could. One touch, one single touch had told her all she needed to know.

Ellen was by no means the first, nor the only girl with untapped magic-potential that had been drained. Every girl in that painting-room was being drained, and more than being drained, was being corrupted. Oh, it was insidious enough; and really, Marina could not imagine how Ellen had escaped permanent harm. It began with being brought into the painting-room, with flattery as the poison worked its fatal changes and made the girls beautiful, with pretty dresses made available to them, and cosmetics in the form of the glaze-powders. Then the temptations began in the form of the men who visited, and their presents, invitations, the stories of good times and pleasure from girls who had been here a while. There were two of those girls whose sexuality was so robust and honest that they actually got no spiritual harm from yielding to that temptation. They enjoyed themselves to the hilt, taking what was offered and laughingly thrust away anything that was perverse, that was the wonder of it. But the rest were tempted to do things they felt in their hearts were wrong, saw themselves as fallen—because they saw themselves as fallen, they became fallen, grew hard, and then—

And then realized with horror that they were dancing with death, as the first signs of trouble came on them. Understood that they were doomed, and saw themselves as damned by their own actions, and despaired.

And that cesspit, that sinkhole hidden beneath the floor of the painting room, drank it all in and stored it up, aged and refined it, then distilled it in a dark flame of pure evil.

And then what?

She didn’t know. Something came and tapped off the unwholesome vintage, more poisonous than the lead dust that floated in the air of that place. It was power, that wine of iniquity; power stolen from the girls, from their magic, from their guilt, from their despair. Three separate vintages blended into a deadly draught that something or someone drank to the dregs.

And she had a horrible feeling that she knew who that someone was.

The office door opened, and she looked up. “Ready to go?” asked Reggie, with obscene cheer. “We have a train to catch!”

She set her mouth in a false smile, and got up. “Of course,” she replied, and managed to step quite calmly into the coat he held out for her.

He caught up her hand and all but propelled her out of the offices and down to the street to the inevitable cab. A glance at the station-clock as they arrived showed the reason for his haste; they were cutting it fine, indeed, and she broke into an undignified run beside him as they dashed for the train.

It was only as the train pulled out of the station and she settled into their compartment and caught her breath—taking care that she put her face in shadow, where her expression would be more difficult to read—that Reggie finally spoke to her again.

“Well, cuz, did you learn all you wanted to?” he asked genially.

And she was very, very glad for her caution, because she was certain that her eyes, at least, would have betrayed her, as she answered him.

“Oh yes, Reggie,” she said, exerting every bit of control she had to keep her voice even. “I certainly did. More than I ever dreamed.”

Chapter Nineteen

MARINA had never been so sure of anything in her life as she was that Reggie and his mother were behind the dreadful evil beneath their pottery.

And yet within the hour, Marina was sitting across from Reggie in the dining car, a sumptuous tea laid out on the table between them, listening to him chatter with bewilderment.

“Good for me to show the face every so often there,” he said, after she had sat across from him, numb and sick, trying to get as far from him as she could and still be unobtrusive. “Never on a schedule, of course. Unexpected; that way they can’t play any jiggery-pokery. Mater gives me a pretty free hand there—well, except for that emergency, I don’t think she’s set foot in the place for a year. So the running of the place is my doing.”

Madam hasn’t been there for a year? How could that be possible? That sinkhole didn’t have that sort of capacity, and it must have been tapped off several times in the last year. Could Reggie be tapping it?

Surely not—”Of course, when things happen like kilns blowing up, Mater wants to get right in there; in her nature, you might say.

But the Exeter works are half mine, and she reckoned it was a good place for me to get m’feet wet, get used to running things.” He grinned at her, as pleased as a boy making the winning score at rugby.

Surely not Reggie—

That sort of seething morass couldn’t be handled at a distance—yet Madam couldn’t have tapped it. So if she wasn’t tapping that unhealthy power, who was?

Surely not Reggie. Not possible. No matter what Shakespeare said, that a man could “smile and smile and still be a villain,” evil that profound couldn’t present a surface so—banal.

And besides, there was nothing, not the slightest hint of power, evil or otherwise, about him! Nor, now that she came to think about it, was there anything of the sort about Madam.

She had followed him out of the compartment at his urging as contradictions overwhelmed her and left her confused and uncertain. The touch of his hand on her elbow left her even more uncertain. There was nothing in that touch. No magic, no evil, nothing to alert her to danger. Perfectly, solidly ordinary, and no more odious than the Odious Reggie usually was, in that he took possession of her arm as if he had already taken possession of her entire person and was merely marking his claim to her.

It was so baffling it made her head ache, and she sought comfort in the familiar rituals of teapot and jam jar. Although the teapot was heavy silver, and the jam jar not a jar at all, but a dish of elegant, cut crystal, the tea tasted the same as the China Black from Aunt Margherita’s humble brown ceramic pot with the chipped spout, and the jam not quite as good as the home-made strawberry she’d put up with her own hands. Still, as she poured and one-lump-or-twoed, split scones and spread them with jam, the automatic movements gave her a point of steadiness and familiarity.

“… jolly fine deposit of kaolin clay under the North Pasture,” Reggie was saying, showing almost as much enthusiasm as he’d had for his flirtations with all those strange young women today.

“With Chipping Brook so deep and fast there, we’ve got water-power enough for grinding, mixing, anything else we’d want. Plenty of trees in the copse at the western edge for charcoal to fire the kilns—plenty of workers in the village—the road to the railroad or going up north to the sea for cheap transport—there’s nothing lacking but the works itself!”

Chipping Brook? North Pasture? My North Pasture? Her scattered thoughts suddenly collected as she realized what he’d been babbling about for the past several minutes.

Putting a pottery—another of those poisonous blots—in the North Pasture beside Oakhurst. On her land. Spewing death into her brook, her air—devouring her trees to feed the voracious kilns, turning her verdant meadow into a hideous, barren scrape in the ground.

And taking the villagers, people I know, or their children, offering them jobs and then poisoning them with lead dust and overwork.

“I think I can do without that, Reggie,” she said, attempting to sound smooth and cool, interrupting the stream of plans from her cousin. “Your potteries are astonishing, and surely must be the envy of your peers, but I haven’t the interest or the ability to run one, and I prefer the North Pasture as it is. I certainly have no desire to live next to a noisy factory, which is what I would be doing if you put a pottery in the North Pasture.”

“Well, cuz, obviously you don’t have to live next to it—there are hundreds of places you could live!” Reggie said with a fatuous laugh as the train sped past undulating hills slowly darkening as the light faded. “Why live at Oakhurst, anyway? It’s just an old country manor without gas, much less electricity, and neither are likely to reach the village in the next thirty years, much less get to the manor! A London townhouse—now there’s the ticket!”

She winced inwardly. That much was true, too true. But she wasn’t about to admit to him that she would very much have liked to have the option to modernize within her own lifetime. “Nevertheless, Oakhurst is my inheritance, to order as I choose, and I do not choose to have it turned into a factory, so you can put that notion out of your mind,” she said sharply—so sharply that he was clearly surprised and taken aback.

Oh dear. She softened her posture immediately and smiled winsomely. “Silly man! I haven’t even gotten to know the place, and already you want to change it entirely! Haven’t you come to know me well enough by now to know that given any other choice, I would still live here? I like the countryside, and Oakhurst is particularly beautiful. Surely there are cities enough where you can put another factory without ruining my peace and quiet and my views!”

Reggie regained that superior smirk. “I forgot, cuz, you’re just a little country-cousin at heart,” he said condescendingly.

“I’m afraid so,” she admitted, lowering her gaze and looking up at him through her lashes. “After my trip today, I am only more confirmed in my notions, I must admit. Exeter was exciting but—there were so many people!”

She might have despised herself for being so manipulative; might, except for all that was at stake. She could not, would not allow another diseased blight to take root here. She would fight it to the last cell of her body.

“You’ll change your mind,” he said, dismissing her and her concerns out of hand. “Especially when you’re out, when you’ve had a real London season, when you’re going to parties and balls and the theater—you’ll like cities so much you’ll wonder how you ever thought a pasture worth bothering your pretty head about. Heh—and when you start seeing how much of the ready it takes to buy all those gowns and froofahs and things you ladies are so fond of, you’ll realize just how much good a factory could do your pocket-book. Can’t be seen in the same frock twice, don’t you know. You can’t support a lively Town style on farm rents. It needs a lot of the ready to be in the mode.”

We’ll see about that, she thought grimly. If the choice was between fine feathers and the preservation of this land—she would be willing to make a regular guy of herself in London. She would do without that promised London season! No gown, no string of balls, nothing was worth despoiling Oakhurst, raping the land, poisoning the waters.

The real question was—since she had no direct control of her property, how was she to keep Reggie from plunging ahead with his plan no matter what she wanted? She had no doubt that Madam would be only too happy to give ear to this idea, and Madam was the one who was making the decisions at the moment, where Oakhurst was concerned.

“Oh, Reggie, you can’t want to make me miserable!” she pouted. “That pottery just gave me the awfullest headache, and I just know I’d have nothing but headaches with one of those things right in the next field!”

“But you wouldn’t be here, you’d be in London,” he tried to point out, but she sighed deeply and quivered her lower lip.

“Not all the time! And how can I have house parties with a factory in the next field? People don’t come to house parties to see factories, they come to see views, and to shoot—and oh, everyone around here of any consequence will just hate us, for the shooting will be quite spoilt for miles around!”

That actually seemed to get through to him, at last, and he looked startled. Encouraged, she elaborated. “Oh, we’ll be a disgrace! My season will be a disaster! No one will want to be seen with the girl who had the audacity to drive all the game out to the moor!”

“Well—not to the moor, surely—” he ventured, looking alarmed.

She turned an utterly sober gaze upon him. “I’m the country-cousin, remember? Oh, do trust me, Reggie, all it will take is for your factory to drive the red deer out of this neighborhood—or worse, the pheasants!—and we will be entirely in disgrace and everyone who is anyone will know what we’d done and who’s to blame! You just wait—wait and see how your London friends treat you when shooting they were counting on isn’t there anymore! Not everyone goes to Scotland, you know—people depend on Devon and Surrey for their sport!”

That turned the trick; he promised not to do anything about his plans until she knew she would want to live in London and not at Oakhurst, after all—and until he had made certain that there were no notable shoots anywhere around the vicinity.

“But you just wait, little cuz,” he laughed, as he escorted her back to their compartment. “Once you’ve had a taste of proper life, you won’t care if I blow the place up if it buys you more frocks and fun.”

She settled herself in the corner under one of the ingenious wall-mounted paraffin lamps that the steward had lit in their absence. He dropped onto the seat across from her beneath the other and opened his paper. She took out her poetry book and stared at it, turning the pages now and again, without reading them.

“You won’t care if I blow the place up if it buys you more frocks and fun.” Callous, unfeeling, greedy, selfish—but is that evil? Evil enough to account for that horror beneath Exeter? Or is it just plain, ordinary, piggy badness? It didn’t equate, it just didn’t—evil wasn’t bland. Evil didn’t worry about ruining its reputation by running off the game. Evil probably would be perfectly happy to ruin anything.

If not the son, what about my first thought, the mother? She’s the only parent he’s had for ever so long, so she’s had the only hand over him—he should reflect her. Madam was cold, yes. Selfish, yes. Utterly self-centered. And she’s all business and money and appearances. Still. That doesn’t add up to horror either. Evil should slaver and gnash its teeth, howling in glee at the rich vein of nourishment beneath Madam’s office. It shouldn’t wear stylish suits and smart frocks and give one strenuous lessons in etiquette.

There was only one possible conclusion here. There had to be something else behind the cesspit of vileness back there in Exeter.

And she would be hanged if she could figure out who was feeding off of it. Or what.

My head hurts. She felt a sinking sort of desperation. Out of her depth, unable to cope. Too much was happening at once, and on such wildly disparate levels that she couldn’t begin to imagine how she was to deal with it all. I am out, completely out, of ideas or even wild guesses. She stared at her poem, unseeing, as the railway carriage rocked from side to side. Someone else will have to solve this mystery. They can’t expect me to solve it—all they asked me was to see if there was anything there, after all… come to that, they never asked me, I volunteered to look.

She told herself to breathe deeply, and calm down. No one was expecting her to do anything—except herself. And anyway, it wasn’t her outlook to actually do anything about it either! Hadn’t Dr. Pike and Mr. Davies virtually volunteered to be the ones to track this thing down to its cause and eliminate it? She was only seventeen, after all, and no Master of her element! She wasn’t anywhere ready to go charging off, doing battle with vile magics!

They simply can’t expect me to do anything about this! It would be like sending me out into the desert after the Mad Mullah, for heaven’s sake—with only my parasol and a stern lecture to deliver! At some point, Marina, she continued, lecturing herself in her thoughts, You simply have to let someone else do things and allow that you can’t.

Well, there was one thing at least that she could do—and that was to let the proper people know about the—the vileness.

And another—to keep that poison away from Oakhurst.

She didn’t have any more time to think about it, though, for the train was pulling into the station, and Reggie was making all the motions of gathering up their things.

Reggie opened the door and helped her out onto the platform. The carriage was waiting for them, the coachman already taking up the parcels from the shops and stowing them away as they approached; they were inside and on the way within minutes. The coach rattled over cobblestones, passing the lights of the town, then jolted onto a dirt road; a crack of the whip, and the horses moved out of a fast walk into a trot. The coachman seemed in a monstrous hurry, for some reason; perhaps he sensed yet another wretched March storm coming, for he kept the horses moving at such a brisk pace that Marina was jounced all over her seat, and even Reggie had to hang on like grim death.

“I’ll be—having a word—with our driver—” he said between bounces. “Damn me! See if I—don’t!”

But the moment he said that, the reason for the rush became apparent, as the skies opened up and poured down rain.

This was a veritable Ark-floating torrent, and no wonder the coachman had wanted them to get out and on the road so quickly. It drummed on the coach roof and streamed past the windows, and Reggie let out a yelp and a curse as a lightning bolt sizzled down with a crash far too near the road for comfort. There was a sideways jolt as the horses shied, but the coachman held them firm and kept them under control.

The coach slowed, of necessity—you couldn’t send horses headlong through this—but they were near home now. The lights of the village loomed up through the curtains of rain; not much of them, no streetlights at all, just the lights over the shops, and the houses on either side of the road all veiled by rain—a moment of transition from road to cobbles and back again, splashing through enormous puddles. Then they were past, the lights of the village behind them, and they were minutes from Oakhurst. Over two hills, across the bridge, climbing a third—

Then the lights of Oakhurst appeared through the trees and just above them, although the rain was showing no signs of slackening off. Marina peered anxiously through the windows; lightning pulsed across the sky, illuminating Oakhurst in bursts of blue-white radiance. The coach slowed as they neared the front and pulled up as close to the door as possible, and servants with umbrellas dashed out into the downpour to shelter both of them inside and fetch the parcels.

To no avail, of course, with the rain coming as much sideways as down; Marina was soaked to the skin despite the umbrella held over her. Once inside the door she was swiftly separated from Reggie by Mary Anne and chivvied off to her own—warm!—room to be stripped and regarbed from the skin outward. For once Marina was glad, very glad, of the tendency of her room to be too warm for her taste, for she was cold and shivering, which combined with her headache made her ache all over. The flames in her fireplace slowly warmed her skin as Mary Anne rubbed her with a heavy towel then held out undergarments for her to step into.

“Madam’s got a bit of a surprise for you,” Mary Anne said, lacing her tightly into a brand new corset, which must have been delivered that very day. “Seems she found something in the attics she thinks you’ll fancy. She must have been that bored, to send someone to go rummaging about up there. Been raining all day, though, so perhaps that was it.”

“I didn’t even know there was an attic,” Marina ventured, wondering if she dared mention her splitting head to Mary Anne. She decided in favor of it. “Now I wish I hadn’t asked Reggie to take me to that pottery—I’ve such a headache—”

Mary Anne tugged her rustling silk trumpet skirt over her head with an exclamation of distaste. “I shouldn’t be surprised!” she replied. “Nasty, noisy, filthy places, factories. I’ll find a dose for you, then you’re to go straight to Madam. She’s in the sitting-room.”

The dose was laudanum, and if it dulled the pain, it also made her feel as if there was a disconnection between her and her thoughts, and her wits moved sluggishly. It occurred to her belatedly that perhaps she shouldn’t have taken it so eagerly.

Well, it was too late now. When she stepped out of the door of her room, she moved carefully, slowly, more so than even Madam would have asked, because her feet didn’t feel quite steady beneath her. She was handicapped now.

But I must look at her—really look at her, she reminded herself. I must know for certain if she has anything to do with that vileness. It seemed days, and not hours ago, since this morning, weeks since her encounter with what lay under the pottery, months since she had vowed to investigate. She had gone from utter certainty that Madam was behind it to complete uncertainty. She kept one hand pressed to her throat, trying to center herself.

As she passed darkened rooms, lightning flashed beyond the windows; the panes shook and rattled with rain driven against them and drafts skittered through the halls, sending icy tendrils up beneath her skirt to wrap around her ankles and make her shiver. The coachman had been right to gallop; it was a tempest out there. It was a good thing that it had been too cold for buds to form; they’d have been stripped from the boughs. The thin silk of her shirtwaist did nothing to keep the drafts from her arms; she had been warm when she left her room, and she hadn’t gone more than halfway down the corridor before she was cold all over again.

The sitting room had a blazing great fire in it, and by now Marina was so chilled that she had eyes only for that warmth, and never noticed Madam standing half in shadow on the far side of the room. She went straight for the flames like a moth entranced, and only Madam’s chuckle as she spread her icy hands to the promised warmth reminded her of why she was here.

“A pity the horses were slow,” Madam said, as Marina turned to face her. “Reggie has been complaining mightily and swearing I should replace them.”

“I don’t think any horses could have gone faster in the dark, no matter how well they knew the road, Madam,” she protested. “Before the rain started, Reggie was angry that he was going so fast, actually. And the coachman could hardly have made the train arrive any sooner,” she added, in sudden inspiration.

“True enough.” Madam’s lips moved into something like a smile, or as near as she ever got to one. “True, and reasonable as well. So, my dear, you have begun to think like a grown woman, and not like an impulsive child.”

Marina dropped her eyes—and took that moment to concentrate, as well as she could through the fog of the drug, to search her guardian for any taint of that terrible evil.

Nothing. Nothing at all. Magic might never exist at all for all of the signs of it that Madam showed. Never a hint; marble, ice showed more sign of magic than she.

Not possible then—She didn’t know whether to be disappointed or glad. “Mary Anne said you had found something you wished me to see, Madam?” she said instead.

“Not I—although I guessed that it might exist, given who and what the people your parents had sent you to stay with were.” The words were simple enough—but the tone made Marina look up, suspecting—something. What, she didn’t know, but—something. There was something hidden there, under that calculating tone.

But as usual, Madam’s face was quite without any expression other than the faintest of amusement.

“So,” she continued, looking straight into Marina’s eyes, “I asked of some of the older servants, and sent someone who remembered up to the attic to find what I was looking for. And here it is—”

She stepped aside and behind her was something large concealed beneath a dust-sheet. The firelight made moving shadows on the folds, and they seemed to move.

Madam seized a corner of the dust cover and whisked it off in a single motion.

The fire flared up at that moment, fully revealing what had been beneath that dust-sheet. Carved wood—sinuous curves—a shape that at first she did not recognize.

“Oh—” Of all of the things that she might have guessed had she been better able to think, this was not one of them. “A cradle?”

“Your cradle, or so I presume,” Madam said silkily. “Given your name and the undeniable marine themes of the carving. Not to mention that it is clearly of—rather unique design. An odd choice for a cradle, but there is no doubt of the skill of the carver.”

Marina stepped forward, drawn to the bit of furniture by more than mere curiosity. Carved with garlands of seaweed and frolicking mermaids, with little fish and naiads peeking from behind undulating waves, there was only one hand that could have produced this cradle.

Uncle Thomas.

She had seen these very carvings, even to the funny little octopus with wide and melting eyes—here meant to hold a gauzy canopy to shield the occupant of the cradle from stray insects—repeated a hundred times in the furnishings in her room in Blackbird Cottage. All of her homesickness, all of her loneliness, overcame her in a rush of longing that excluded everything else. And she wanted nothing more at this moment than to touch them, to feel the silken wood under her hand. With a catch at her throat and an aching heart to match her aching head, she wanted to feel those familiar curves and take comfort from them.

Madam stepped lightly aside as her hand reached for the little octopus, moving as if it had a life of its own.

A lightning bolt struck just outside the sitting-room windows; she was too enthralled even to wince.

Something bright glinted among the octopus’s tentacles. Something metallic, a spark of wicked blue-white.

She hesitated.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” Madam crooned, suddenly looming behind her. “The wood is just like silk. Here—” she seized Marina’s wrist in an iron grip. “Just feel it.”

Marina didn’t resist; it was as if she had surrendered her will to her longing for this bit of home and everything else was of no importance at all. She watched her hand as if it belonged to someone else, watched as Madam guided it towards the carving, felt the fingers caress the smooth wood.

Felt something stab through the pad of her index finger when it touched that place where something had gleamed in the lightning-flash.

Madam released her wrist, and stepped swiftly back. Marina staggered back a pace.

She cried out—not loudly, for it had been little more than a pinprick. She took another step backward, as Madam moved out of her way.

But then, as she turned her hand to see where she had been hurt, the finger suddenly began to burn—burn with pain, and burn to her innermost eye, burn with that same, poisonous, black-green light as the evil pit beneath Madam’s office!

She tried to scream, but nothing would come out but a strangled whimper—stared at her hand as the stuff spread like oil poured on water, as the burning spread through her veins like the poison it was—stared—as Madam began to laugh.

Burning black, flickering yellow-green, spread over her, under her shields, eating into her, permeating her, as Madam’s triumphant laughter rang in her ears and peals of thunder answered the laughter. She staggered back one step at a time until she stood swaying on the hearthrug, screams stillborn, trapped in her throat, which could only produce a moan. Until a black-green curtain fell between her and the world, and she felt her knees giving way beneath her, and then—nothing.

Reggie stepped out of the shadows and stared at the crumpled form of Marina on the hearthrug. “By Jove, Mater!” he gasped. “You did it! You managed to call up the curse again!”

Arachne smiled with the deepest satisfaction, and prodded at the girl’s outstretched hand with one elegantly clad toe. “I told you that I would, if I could only find the right combination,” she said. “And the right way to get past those shields she had all over her. Not a sign of them from the outside, but layers of them, there were. No wonder she didn’t show any evidence of magic about her.”

“So you knew about those, did you?” Reggie asked, inadvertently betraying that he had known about the shields—and had not told his mother. Arachne hadn’t known, she had intuited their presence, but she hadn’t known. She’d simply decided that they must be there, and had worked to solve the problem of their existence.

So how had he known about them, when nothing she had done had revealed their presence?

“Well, it was obvious, wasn’t it?” she prevaricated. “I decided to take a gamble. It occurred to me that shields would only be against magic, not something physical—and that no one would think to shield her beneath the surface of her skin.”

She watched him with hooded eyes. He frowned, then nodded, understanding dawning in his face. “Of course—the physical vehicle—the exposed nail—delivering the curse past the shield in a way that no one would think of in advance. Brilliant! Just brilliant!”

She made a little sour moue with her lips. “It won’t do for you to forget that, Reggie dear,” she said acidly. “I am far more experienced than you. And very creative.”

Would he take that as the warning it was meant to be?

He stiffened, then took her hand and bowed over it. “Far be it from me to do so,” he replied. But his face was hidden, and she couldn’t see the expression it wore.

Resentment, probably. Perhaps defeat. Temporary defeat, though—

“But surely that wasn’t all,” he continued, rising, showing her only an expression as bland and smooth as Devon cream. “If that was all, why all the rigmarole with the cradle?”

“Because the vehicle had to be something that was within the influence of the curse when I first set it, of course,” she said, with a tone of as you should have figured out for yourself covering every word. “That was why the cradle—and why I had that little octopus-ornament removed. I wanted metal as the vehicle by preference, and the nail holding the octopus in place was perfect. At that point, it was easy to have it reversed and driven up and out to become the vehicle.”

“Brilliant,” Reggie repeated, then frowned, and bent over Marina’s form. “She’s breathing.”

Arachne sighed. “She’s not dead, sadly,” she admitted, meditatively. “The curse was warped, somehow; it sent her into a trance. I did think of that—I have her spirit trapped in a sort of limbo, but that was the best I could do. But she will be dead, soon enough. She can’t eat or drink in that state.”

The solution was simple enough; call the servants, have her taken to her room, allow her to waste away. How long would it take? No more than a few weeks, surely—less than that, perhaps. Reggie’s jaw tightened. “Mater, we have a problem—” he began.

“Nonsense,” she snapped. “What problem could there be?”

“That someone is likely to think that we poisoned her—”

“Then we call a doctor in the morning,” she said dismissively.

“And if we let her waste away, that people will say that we did so deliberately!” he countered angrily. “There will be enquiries—police—even an inquest—”

She felt anger rising in her. “Then get a doctor for her now!” she responded, throttling down the urge to slap him. Here she had done everything, and he had the cheek to criticize her! Why shouldn’t he stir himself to deal with these trivial problems? “Use some initiative! Must I do everything? For heaven’s sake, there’s a sanitarium just over the hill—call the doctor and send her there!”

“What, now?” he replied, looking utterly stunned.

“Why not?” It had been a spur-of-the-moment notion, but the more she thought about it, the better she liked it. “Why not? It will show proper concern on our part—our poor little niece collapsed and we send our own carriage out into the storm to get help for her! The man isn’t local, no one will have told him anything about us, all he’ll be concerned about is his fee. He can’t keep her alive long, no matter how cleverly he force-feeds her, but the fact that we’re paying for him to try will show everyone that we’re doing our best for her.”

“And if he brings her around somehow?” Reggie countered stubbornly.

“How? With magic?” She laughed, a peal of laughter echoed by the thunder outside. “Oh, I think not! And just in case those meddlesome friends of Hugh’s manage to get wind of what we’ve done, the sanitarium is the safest place she could be! No old servants to slip them inside, and even if they manage to find where she is, hidden away amongst a den of lunatics—there are guards, no doubt, meant to keep as many folks out as in.” She shook her head with amazement at her own perspicacity. “Perfect. Perfect. Take care of it.”

As he stared at her without comprehension, she repeated herself. “Take care of it, Reggie,” she said sharply. “Rouse the household! Get the carriage! I want that doctor here within the hour!”

“And just what will you be doing, Mater?” he asked, with a particularly nasty sneer.

“I,” she said with immense dignity, “will be having a truly operatic fit of the vapors. So if you don’t wish to have your eardrums shattered—I suggest you be on your way.”

And feeling particularly sadistic, she did not even give him enough time to leave the room before filling her lungs and producing the shrillest and most ear-piercing shriek she had ever coaxed out of her throat in her entire life.

She needn’t have told him to summon the household after all—she was doing that quite well on her own.

Not that it was going to help Marina. Nothing was going to help her now.

Chapter Twenty

ANDREW Pike had thought to spend his evening in his study, the room of burled walnut walls and warm, amber leather furniture that stood triple duty as his library and office as well, but found he couldn’t settle to anything. Neither book nor paper nor journal could hold his interest for long, and he found himself staring alternately into the fire, and out into the gloom, as the sun set somewhere behind the thick clouds. He felt both depressed and agitated, and had ever since early afternoon. He had been a Master long enough to know that, though he had no particular prescient abilities, he was sensitive enough to the ebbs and flows of power to intuit that there was trouble in the air. And the longer he watched and waited, the more sure of that trouble he became.

He’d done what he could to cushion his patients from whatever it was, and had strengthened the shields about the place, layering walls built as solid as those of the Cotswold limestone, the red-baked brick, the cob and wattle. Now all he could do was sit and wait, and hope that the trouble would pass him and anyone else he knew by.

Moments like these were hard on the nerves of those who had no ability to see into the future. The Earth Masters were particularly lacking in that talent; their minds tended to be slow and favor the past and the present, not the future. The past in particular; Earth Masters could take up a thing and read its history as easily as scanning a book, but the volume of the future might as well be in hieroglyphs for it was just that closed to them. Water Masters were the best at future-gazing when they had that particular gift, and even those poorest in the skill could still scry in a bowl of water and be certain of getting some clue to what lay ahead. Air Masters, known best for crystal-gazing, and Fire, who favored black mirrors, were twice as likely at their worst as an Earth Master at his best to have the ability to part the veils and glimpse what was to come. So with no more help in divining what was troubling him than any other mortal might have, all Andrew could do was wait for whatever it was to finally descend on them.

Teatime came and went with no signs other than an increasing heaviness of spirit. Eleanor felt it too, though as was her wont, she said nothing; he read it in her wary eyes, and in the tense way she moved, glancing behind her often, as if expecting to find something dreadful following. When he saw that, he increased the strength of the shields yet again, and gave Eleanor orders to add sedatives to the medications of certain patients that evening.

“Ah,” she said. “For the storm—” but he knew, and she knew, that it was not the March thunderstorm she spoke of, though the flickers on the horizon as the sun sank behind its heavy gray veils and gray light deepened to blue warned of more than just a springtime’s shower.

When the storm broke, it brought no relief, only increased anxiety. The storm was a reflection of the tension in the air, not a means of releasing it. This was no ordinary storm; it crouched above Oakhurst like a fat, heavy spider and refused to budge, sending out lightning and thunder and torrents of rain.

By now, Andrew’s nerves were strung as tightly as they ever had been in his life, and he couldn’t eat dinner. He wondered if he ought to prescribe a sedative dose for himself.

But as he sat in his office-cum-study, watching the lightning arc through the clouds, and in the flashes, the rain sheeting down, he decided that he had better not. He should keep all his wits about him. If the blow fell, and he was needed, he could not afford to have his mind befogged.

Having once shattered a fragile teacup and once snapped the stem of a wineglass when feeling nervy, he had chosen a thick mug for his tea this evening. His hands closed around it and clutched it tightly enough to make his fingers ache, and had the pottery been less than a quarter-inch thick, he was certain it, too, would have given way under his grip. As well, perhaps, that he was no Fire Master—his nerves were stretched so tightly that if he had been, the least little startlement might have sent the contents of his office up in flames.

He stretched all of his senses to their utmost, searching through the night, questing for any clue, or any sign that something was about to fall on his head. It was dangerous, that—looking out past the shields that he had set up around the walls of Briareley. But he couldn’t just sit here anymore, waiting for the blow to fall—he had to do something, even if it was only to look! Every nerve in his body seemed acutely sensitive, and the muscles of his neck and shoulders were so tight and knotted they felt afire.

Suddenly, a bolt of lightning struck practically outside his study window—he jumped—and as the windows shook with the attendant peal of thunder, another sound reverberated through the halls.

The booming sound of someone frantically pounding on the door with the huge bronze knocker. Great blows echoed up and down the rooms, reverberated against high ceilings and shuddered in chimneys.

This was what he had been waiting for. Or if not—at least it was something happening at last—something he could act on instead of just waiting. The tension in him snapped, releasing him as a foxhound set on quarry.

He leapt to his feet, shoved back his chair, and headed for the door; ahead of him he saw Diccon hurrying to answer the summons, and poking from doorways and around corners were the heads of patients and attendants—curious, but with a hint of fear in their eyes.

The pounding continued; there was a frantic sound to it. Was there a medical emergency down in the village? But if there was, why come here rather than knocking up the village doctor?

Diccon hauled the huge door open, and a torrent of rain blew in, carrying with it two men wrapped in mackintoshes. The was no mistaking the second one, who raked the entrance hall with an imperious gaze and focused on Andrew.

“You! Doctor!” he barked. “You’re needed at Oakhurst! Miss Roeswood has collapsed!”

Andrew folded his stethoscope and tucked it into his pocket, using iron will to control face and voice. His heart hammered in his chest; his expression must give none of this away. They must not know, must not even guess, that he had ever seen Marina more than that once on the road, or all was lost.

“This young woman is in a coma,” he said flatly, looking not at poor Marina, so fragile and pale against the dark upholstery of the couch she had been laid on, but at the impassive visages of Madam Arachne and her son. Marina might have been some stranger with a sprained ankle for all that they were reacting. Oh, certainly the Odious Reggie had come dashing through the storm to drag him here—not that he’d needed dragging—but now that he was here, Reggie merely watched with ironic interest, as if he expected Pike to fail and was pleased to find his expectations fulfilled. And as for Madam—he’d seen women evidence more concern for a toad than she was showing for her own niece. In fact—she seemed amused at his efforts to revive Marina. There was some devilment here.

Was devilment the right word? If those wild surmises of his were true, it might well be…

But he could do nothing here. Especially not if his guesses were true. “She is completely unresponsive to stimuli, and I am baffled as to the cause of her state. It might be a stroke—or it could have some external cause. If she had been outside, I might even suspect lightning—”

There was a flash of interest at that. The woman seized on his possibly explanation so readily that even if he hadn’t suspected her of treachery, he’d have known something was wrong. “She was standing right beside that window when she collapsed,” Madam said, and her even and modulated tones somehow grated on his nerves in a way he found unbearable. “Could lightning have struck her through the window?”

“I don’t know. Was it open?” he asked, then shook his head. “Never mind. The cause doesn’t matter. This young woman needs professional treatment and care—”

This young woman needs to be out of here! he thought, his skin crawling at the sight of Madam’s bright, but curiously flat gaze as she regarded the body of her niece. The hair on the back of his neck literally stood up, and he had to restrain himself to keep from showing his teeth in a warning snarl. You are responsible for this, Madam. I don’t know how, but I know that you are responsible.

He had to control himself; he had to completely, absolutely, control himself. He daren’t let a hint of what he felt show.

And he had to say things he not only didn’t mean, but make suggestions he did not want followed. “—for tonight, it will be enough to put her to bed and hope for the best, but if she has not regained some signs of consciousness by tomorrow, you will need both a physician and trained nurses,” he continued, knowing that if he showed any signs of interest in Marina, Madam would find someone else. Devilment… she’ll want indifferent care at the best, and neglectful at the worst. I have to convince her that this is what I represent. And to do that, I have to pretend I don’t care about having her as a patient. “A physician to check on her welfare and try methods of bringing her awake, and nurses to care for her physical needs. She will need to be tube-fed, cleaned, turned—”

“What about you?” Reggie interrupted, his eyes shrewd. “What about your people? You’re not that far away, why can’t you come tend her here?”

“We have a full schedule at Briareley,” he replied, feigning indifference, though his heart urged him to snatch Marina up, throw her over his shoulder, and run for the carriage with her. “I cannot spare any of my nurses, nor can I afford to take the time away from my own patients to—”

“Then take her to Briareley,” Madam ordered, quite as if she had the right to give him orders. “There’s the only possible solution. Where best would it be to send her? You are here, Briareley has the facilities, and you have the staff and the expertise.” She shrugged, as if it was all decided. “We want the best for her, of course. It should be clear to you that no one here knows what to do, and wouldn’t it be more efficacious to get her professional help immediately?”

“It would be best—the sooner she has professional care, the better—” he began.

Madam interrupted him. “What is your usual fee for cases like this?”

She might have been talking about a coal-delivery, and if he had been what she thought he was—

He had to react as if he was.

He didn’t have a usual fee for cases like this because he’d never had one—but he blandly (and with open skepticism, as if he expected them to balk) named a fee that would pay for a half dozen more nurses and two more strong male attendants for Briareley, a fee so exorbitant that he was sure they would at least attempt to bargain with him. But he knew that he dared not name a price so low they would think he was eager to get Marina to Briareley—much less simply volunteer to take her without being paid. He had to look as if he was exactly what Madam thought him; a quack who was only interested in what he could get for warehousing the weak-minded and insane. He was walking a delicate line here; he had to make them think he was motivated by nothing more than money, yet he didn’t dare do anything that might cause them to send Marina elsewhere.

Stomach churned, jaws ached from being clenched, heart pounded as if he’d been running. Everything told him to get her out of here—

“Naturally,” Madam said, so quickly it made him blink. “Poor Marina’s own inheritance will more than suffice to cover your fees, and as her guardian, I will gladly authorize the disbursement.” The Odious Reggie made a sound that started as a protest, but it faded when his mother glared at him. “I’ll ring for a servant; she can be moved, of course?”

“Of course,” he agreed, then did a double take, “You mean, you wish me to take her now? Tonight?”

“In the Oakhurst carriage, of course,” Madam replied breezily. “I should think it would be the best thing of all for her to be in the proper hands immediately. We know nothing—we might make errors—she could even come to some harm at our hands.” The woman gazed limpidly up at him. “You understand, don’t you, doctor? There must be no question but what we did the best for her immediately. No question at all.”

He shook, and strove to control his trembling, at the implications behind those words. That this creature was already calculating ahead to the moment when—she expected—Marina’s poor husk would take its final breath, and Briareley would boast one less patient. If nothing else would have told him that Madam was behind this, the cold calculation in her words would have given him all the proof that he needed. This had been planned, start to finish.

“Well,” he said slowly, concentrating very hard on pulling on his gloves, “I can have no objection, if you are providing the carriage. And-ah-I can expect my fee tomorrow? I bill for the month in advance, after all.”

“Of course,” Madam agreed, and rang for a servant.

Not one, but three appeared, and when Madam had explained what she wanted, they disappeared, only to return with heavy carriage-rugs, which they wrapped Marina in carefully. Then the largest of the three picked her up.

“My people will show you to the carriage,” Madam said, needlessly.

The first two servants beckoned to him to follow, and the third carried Marina, following behind Andrew to the waiting carriage, his face as full of woe as Madam’s was empty of that emotion.

The rain had stopped; they stepped out into a courtyard lit by paraffin torches, puddles glinting yellow, reflecting the flames. A closed carriage awaited, drawn by two restive horses; one of the servants opened the carriage door, while the other pulled down the steps. Andrew got into the waiting carriage first, followed by the giant carrying Marina, who took a seat across from him, still cradling the girl against his shoulder. “Ready to go, sir.”

Andrew blinked. He had expected the man to put his burden on the seat and leave. Madam didn’t order this.

But the look in the man’s eyes spoke volumes about what he would do, whether or not Madam ordered it.

Good gad. She has the servants with her. No wonder Madam was worried about appearances.

He cleared his throat as the carriage rolled forward into the damp night, the sound of the wheels unnaturally loud, the horses’ hooves even louder. “When Miss Roeswood collapsed—did you see or hear anything—ah—”

“Peter, sir,” the giant supplied.

“Yes, Peter—have you any idea what happened to Miss Roeswood?” He waited to hear what the man would say with some impatience. “Was she, perhaps, discussing something with Madam Arachne?”

“No, sir,” the young fellow sighed. “I was polishing the silver, sir. Didn’t know nothing until Madam started shrieking like a steam-whistle, sir. Then I came running, like everybody else. We all came running, sir. Madam was standing by the fire, Miss was on the hearth-rug in a heap, Master Reggie was running out the door.”

Interesting. “Madam screamed?” he prompted.

“Yes, sir. Said Miss Roeswood had took a fit and fell down, sir, and that we was to send the carriage with Reggie to get you, on account of that you have to do with people’s brains. Said it was likely a brainstorm, sir.” The young man’s voice sounded woebegone, choked, as if he was going to cry in the next moment. “I moved her to the couch, sir, thinking it couldn’t do her any good to be a—lying on the hearth—rug. I hope I didn’t do wrong, sir—I hope I didn’t do her no harm—”

He hadn’t seen any sign that anyone had hit Marina over the head—hadn’t seen any sign that she might have cracked her own skull as she fell—so he was able to reassure the poor fellow that he hadn’t done wrong. “This could be anything, Peter—but you did right to get her up out of the cold drafts.”

“Sir—” the young man’s voice cracked. “Sir, you are going to make her come out of this? You’re going to fix her up? You aren’t going to go and stick her in a bed and let her die, are you?”

Good Lord. His spirits rose. Whatever devilment Madam and her son had been up to at Oakhurst, it was clear that Marina had the complete loyalty of the underservants. With that—if there were any signs of what they’d been up to, all he had to do was ask for their help. And then there would be a hundred eyes looking for it at his behest, and fifty tongues ready to wag for him if he put out the word to them.

“I swear I am going to do my best, Peter,” he said fiercely. “I swear it by all that’s holy. But if there was anything going on—anything that Madam or her son were doing that might have had something to do with what’s happened to Miss Roeswood—” He groped after what to ask. “I don’t think this is an accident, Peter. And I can think of a very good reason why Madam would want something that looks like an accident to befall Miss Roeswood—”

“Say no more, sir.” Peter’s voice took on a fierceness of its own. “I get your meaning. If there was aught going on—well, you’ll be hearing of it. Hasn’t gone by us that Madam’s to get Oakhurst if aught was to happen to Miss.”

He couldn’t see the young man’s face in the darkness, but he didn’t have to. This young man was a stout young fellow, a real Devonian, honest and trustworthy, and loyal to a fault. And not to Madam. Allies. Allies and spies, of the sort that Madam is likely to disregard. By Heaven—

“Thank you, Peter,” he said heavily, and then hesitated. “There might be things you wouldn’t know to look for—”

“Cook’s second cousin’s your cook,” Peter interrupted, in what appeared to be a non sequitor. “And your cook’s helper’s my Sally’s sister, what’s also her niece. Happen that if someone were to come by the kitchen at teatime, just a friendly visit, mind, and let drop what’s to be looked for, well—the right people would find out to know what to winkle out.”

Good God. Country life… connections and connections, deep and complicated enough to get word to me no matter what. “I may not know anything tomorrow—perhaps not for days,” he warned.

“No matter. There’s always ears in kitchen,” the young man asserted, then seemed to feel that he had said enough, and settled back into silence for the rest of the journey, leaving Andrew to his own thoughts. Thoughts were all he dared pursue at the moment. He didn’t know what had been done, and he didn’t want to try anything magical until Marina was safely inside triple-circles of protection. He certainly didn’t want to try anything with the girl held in a stranger’s arms, a stranger who might or might not be sensitive himself.

All he could do was to monitor her condition, and pray.

Andrew rubbed at gummy eyes and started at a trumpet call.

No. Not a trumpet call. He glanced out of the window behind him, where the black night had lightened to a charcoal gray. Not a trumpet call. A rooster.

It was dawn, heralded by the crowing of the cook’s roosters out in the chicken—yard.

He turned his attention back to his patient, who could too easily be a mannequin of wax. Marina lay now, dressed in a white nightgown, like Snow White in the panto-face pale, hands lying still and cold on the woolen coverlet, in a bed in a private room at the back of Briareley, a room triply shielded, armored with every protection he knew how to devise. And she lay quite without any change from when he had seen her at Oakhurst, silent and unmoving but for the slight lift and fall of her breast. She lived—but there was nothing there, no sense of her, no sense of anything.

No poison was in her veins, no blow to the head had sent her into this state. In fact, he found no injury at all, nothing to account for the way she was now. In desperation, he had even had one of the most sensitive of his child-patients awakened and brought to her, and the boy had told him that there was nothing in her mind—no dreams, no thoughts, nothing. “It’s like she’s just a big doll,” the child had said, his fist jammed against his mouth, shaking, eyes widened in alarm. “It ain’t even like a beast or a bird—it’s just empty—” and he’d burst into tears.

Eleanor had taken the boy away and soothed him to sleep, and Andrew had known that he wouldn’t dare allow any more of his patients to sense what Marina had become. He racked his brain for a clue to his next move, for he had tried every thing that he knew how to do—ritual cleansing, warding, shielding—his medical and medical-magic options were long since exhausted. As the roosters crowed below the window, he sat with his aching head in his hands, pulling sweat-dampened hair back from his temples, and tried to think of anything more he could do. The fauns? Could they help? Would growth-magic awaken her? What if—

Someone knocked on the door, and opened it as he turned his head. It was Eleanor, whose dark-circled eyes spoke of a night as sleepless as his own. “There’s someone to see you, Doctor—” she began.

“Dammit, Eleanor, I told—” he snapped, when a tall and frantic-looking man with paint in his red-brown hair and moustache pushed past her, followed by another, this one dark-haired and tragic-eyed, and a woman who could only have been his sister, eyes red with tears.

“God help us, we came as soon as we could,” the man said, “We’d have telegraphed, but the fauns only found us last night—and they were half-mad with fear. So we came—”

“And we felt what happened,” said the second man, as the woman uttered a heart-broken cry and went to her knees beside Marina. “On the train. Christ have mercy—how could we not have!”

“Fauns?” Andrew said, confused for a moment. “Train—” then it dawned on him. “You’re Marina’s guardians?”

“Damn poor guardians,” the tall man said in tones of despair. “Sebastian Tarrant, my wife Margherita, her brother Thomas Buford. Lady Elizabeth’s on the way; we left word at the station where to go, but half the town already knows Marina’s here, and the other half will by breakfast—oh, and she’ll sense us, too, no doubt.”

“It’s the curse,” the woman said, lifting a tear-stained face. “It’s the curse, right enough. Damn her! Damn her!” and she began to cry. Her brother gathered her to his shoulder, trying to comfort her, and by the look of it, having no success.

“Curse?” Andrew asked, bewildered by the intruders, their sudden spate of words that made no sense—the only sense he had was that these people were the ones he had sought for, Marina’s guardians. “What curse?” There was only one thing he needed, needed as breath, to know. “What’s happened to Marina? I’ve tried everything—”

“Stronger Masters than you have tried everything, and the best they could do was to warp that black magic so that it sent her to sleep instead of killing her,” Sebastian Tarrant said gruffly, and patted him on the shoulder awkwardly. He glanced at the bed, and groaned. “And there’s nothing we can do in the next hour that’s going to make any difference, either.”

Andrew shook his head, and blinked eyes that burned as he squinted at the stranger’s face, trying to winkle out the sense of what he was hearing. A curse… a curse on Marina. But—who—how—why? The man’s eyes shone brightly, as if with tears that he refused to shed. “You look done in, man,” Tarrant continued. “Come show me the kitchen and let’s get some strong tea and food into you. I’ll explain while you eat; you aren’t going to do her any good by falling over.”

Sebastian Tarrant’s will was too strong to be denied; Andrew found himself being carried off to Briareley’s kitchen, where he was fussed over by cook and seated at the trestle table where a half dozen loaves of bread were rising, a mug of hot black tea and a breakfast big enough for three set in front of him. He ate it, untasted, as Sebastian Tarrant narrated a story that—if he had not seen Marina—would have sounded like the veriest fairy tale. A tale of a curse on a baby, an exile to keep her safe, and all the plans undone. A tale of blackest magic, sent from a bitter woman who should have had none—

“And now I’m sorry we didn’t follow her here, and damned to Madam,” Tarrant said, the guilt in his face so overwhelming that Andrew didn’t have the heart to take him to task over it. “But we were afraid that if we showed our faces in the village, Arachne would take her somewhere we couldn’t follow, or worse. At least while she was here, we figured that Arachne hadn’t worked out a way to make her curse active again, and we knew she wouldn’t dare try anything—well—obvious and physical in front of people who’d known and served Hugh and Alanna. And the child didn’t write, so we had to assume that Arachne was keeping too close a watch on her for us to try and contact her that way.” Tarrant rubbed at his own eyes, savagely. “Dear God, how could we have been such cowards, such fools?”

“But—what is this curse?” he asked finally. “How on earth can something like that do what it did?”

“You tell me how someone without the least little bit of magic of her own could create such a thing,” Tarrant countered, wearily, running his hands through his hair and flaking off a few bits of white and yellow paint. “Not a sign, not one sign of the Mastery of any of the Elements on Arachne or her son—so where is the magic coming from? And how are they able to channel it, if they aren’t Masters and aren’t sensitive to it? But it’s there, all right, if you know what to look for, or at least I saw it—the curse-magic is on Marina, like a shield, only lying right under her skin, a poisonous inner skin—a blackish-green fire, and pure evil—”

Pure evil The words hit him between the eyes and he gaped at the stranger. “Pure evil? Pure evil?” he repeated, as all of the pieces fell together.

Ellen—Madam and her son—the curse—the pottery in Exeter—curses, and black magic, in the traditional and legended sense of the words.

And the stories, the accounts in those old traditions of the Scottish Masters—the tales of Satanists.

And yesterday, Marina had gone to the pottery in Exeter, looking for whatever had attached itself, lampreylike, to Ellen with the purpose of draining her. What if she’d discovered black magic there, the Left-Hand Path, which needed no inborn abilities to walk? What if Madam realized that Marina was about to unmask that evil?

And if Madam and her son were Satanists, if they had set up the pottery as a place where they could batten on the energies of the marginally gifted as they were poisoned, physically and spiritually—that could be the source of the power behind the curse. That would be why no one had seen any signs of Power on or around them. They didn’t have any power until they stole it, and once stolen, they had to discharge it immediately, store it elsewhere, or lose it.

And that would be why Andrew could not unravel the dreadful net that ensnared Marina. It was like no magic he or any Master he knew had ever seen before. Certainly nothing that any Master still alive had seen before. Ah—still alive—

As it happened sometimes when he was exhausted, the answer came in a flash of clarity. Still alive; that was the key to this lock, the sword to sever this Gordian Knot. Because there were Masters of the past who had certainly seen, yes, and even worked to combat such evil.

And to a Master of Earth, the past was an open book.

“My God,” he breathed—a prayer, if ever there was one. “Tarrant, I think I have an idea—”

“Well, I’ve got one, at least,” Sebastian interrupted him. “Thomas and Margherita are Earth Masters themselves—not strong ones by any means, but one thing they can do is, keep Marina going. We’re fresh; you’re not. Do you want to get to work on this idea of yours now, or get a spot of rest first?”

He wanted to work on it now, but what he was going to try would need every bit of concentration he had. “I need to go look through my magic books,” he decided aloud. “There’s one in particular I need to find, what used to be called a grammar in Scotland and Northumberland and—” he shook his head. “Never mind. I’ll find it, make sure it’s the one I need, then I’ll drug myself. I’ll need my wits, and you’re right, if I don’t get a couple of hours of rest, I won’t have them about me.”

“Good man.” Tarrant nodded approval. “We’ll make sure Marina’s all right, you can leave that to us. What about the rest of your patients?”

“Eleanor can see to them—did you say your wife is an Earth Master? Would she be willing to help?” he asked, desperate for anything that might take the burden off his shoulders during this crisis.

“When Lady Elizabeth gets here, I’ll tell my wife to have your nurse Eleanor show her what to do, and I’ll send someone down to the village to telegraph for some more help,” Tarrant promised. “There’s not a lot of us out here in the country, nor powerful, but we’re Devonians, even those of us who weren’t born here. When need calls, we answer.”

“But—the telegraph—?” he replied, puzzled.

Tarrant fixed him with a minatory glance. “Why use power we should save for helping her to do what a telegraph can do, and just as quickly?”

Andrew winced; it was one of his own Master’s constant admonitions. Why use magic to do what anyone can do? Save it for those things that hands cannot accomplish, ye gurtfool.

He closed his eyes as a moment of dizzy exhaustion overcame him, then opened them. “Me for my old books, then—” he shoved away from the table.

“If you’ve got any clues, Doctor, you’re miles ahead of the rest of us,” Tarrant said, his jaw set. “And if you’ve the will and the strength and the knowledge—then you let the rest of us take your burdens off you so you can do what needs to be done. We’ll be the squires to your knight if that suits you.”

He nodded, and headed for his own room at a run, his steps echoing on the staircase as he made for the second floor. An apt comparison, that. Perhaps more so than Sebastian Tarrant dreamed.

Chapter Twenty-One

AS Andrew sat on the edge of his bed and depressed the plunger on a syringe containing a very carefully minimized dose of morphine, he reflected that somewhere in Scotland, his old Master was rotating in his grave like a water-powered lathe. The old man wouldn’t even take a drop of whisky for a cold; he was a strict Covenanter, and how he could reconcile that with talking to fauns and consorting with brownies was something Andrew had never quite managed to get him to explain.

Well, the old boy had a phobia about needles as well; he couldn’t stomach the sight of anyone being injected, much less someone injecting him, and still less the thought of what Andrew was doing, injecting himself. Andrew pulled the needle out of his arm, and the tourniquet off, and felt the rush of immediate dizziness as the drug hit his brain. He didn’t like doing this—he was nearly as against it as his old Master!—but it was the only way he was going to get any sleep.

Which I really should do now—he thought dimly, lying down.

Five hours later—long enough for the morphia to have worn off—Eleanor shook him awake. He had the luck to be one of those who came awake all at once, rather than muzzily clambering up out of sleep. “There’s no change, Doctor,” she said sadly as he sat up, pushing the blanket aside that someone had laid over him. He hadn’t expected there to be any change—but if only—

“But Miss Roeswood’s guardians have been wonderful,” Eleanor continued. “Mrs. Tarrant is so good with the children, and Mr. Buford has charmed the lady guests—and gammoned them into thinking he’s a specialist-doctor you brought in especially to see that they were all right.” She brightened a little at that, for the “lady guests” were especially trying to her. And, truth to tell, to Andrew to a certain extent. There was always the worry of keeping what the real patients were up to away from them, and the fuss they tended to cause as they recovered from their exhaustion, becoming bored but not quite ready to leave. “Oh, and Lady Elizabeth Hastings is here as well. She kept the telegraph office busy for a solid hour, I think.”

He nodded; that was a plus. Say what you would about the old aristocracy, but they were used to organizing things and pushing them through, used to taking charge and giving orders. That was one area, at least, that he would not have to worry about. Lady Hastings had obviously got the more mundane aspects of the situation well in hand.

And right now, he wanted to concentrate solely on the grammary he’d extracted from the old trunk he’d brought with him from Scotland. He’d even put it under his pillow for safekeeping before letting the drugs have their way with him. Now he drew it out, a dark, leather-bound volume of rough-cut parchment; it dated back to before the first James—probably to the time of the Scots queen, Mary. There were no actual dates in it, but Mary had brought courtiers with her from France and had been raised and educated there—and at that time, there was something of a fad for Satanism in the French Court. Some of the Masters of the time blamed it on the Medici influence, but Andrew was inclined to think it went back further than that. There had been enough suspicious deaths and illnesses in the French Court for centuries to make him think that there had been a dark influence there from almost the time of Charlemagne.

He pulled the book out and held it; bound in a soft leather that had darkened to a mottled brown the color of stout, it was entirely handwritten, part journal and part spell-book. Sebastian had taken one look at it and pronounced it a grimoire, rather than a grammary, which at least meant that the artist recognized it for what it was. Andrew could never think of the book without thinking of the old ballad of “The Lady Gay”:

There was a lady, and a lady gay, of children she had three. She sent them away to the North Country, to learn their grammary.

Most, if not all, scholars thought the song meant that the children were being sent to learn reading and writing. Little did they know the song spoke of the long tradition of wizards and witches of the North Country, who fostered the children of Masters and taught them the Elemental Magics that their parents could not… a tradition which Andrew himself had unwittingly replicated, though he’d gone up to Scotland rather than the North of England.

He shook himself out of his reverie. He was going to need a protector while he worked his magics, and for that, he thought, Sebastian Tarrant would be the best suited. Despite not being of the same Element as Andrew, Tarrant had more of the warrior in him than either his wife or brother-in-law. If they could strengthen Marina and pick up his duties—

He pulled on a clean shirt and went to find the newcomers—and predictably, two of the four were with Marina. As Eleanor had said, Margherita and Thomas were—God bless them!—tending his patients. Sebastian and Lady Elizabeth were at Marina’s side, and both stood when he entered.

And the moment he laid eyes on Lady Elizabeth, he knew that she would be better suited to guard his back as he scryed into the past than Sebastian.

In fact, he had to restrain himself from bowing so deeply over her hand that he looked like a fop. He did take her extended hand, and he shook it carefully. “You must be Lady Hastings,” he began. “I’m Andrew Pike—”

“We haven’t time for formalities, Doctor,” she said crisply, before he had done more than introduce himself. “What is it you wish us to do?”

He nodded gratitude, and hoped she saw it as he released her hand. “I’m going to use this to scry into the past, Lady Hastings,” he said, holding up the book that was tucked under his other arm.

“Elizabeth,” she interrupted him. “Why?”

That was when he sat down and explained exactly what he thought had been going on in Madam’s household for all these years. More than once, Sebastian and Elizabeth sucked in a surprised breath. More than once, he suspected, they cursed themselves for not seeing it themselves.

But why should they? Most of those who considered themselves to be black magicians and Satanists were pathetic creatures, more interested in debauchery than discipline, in the interplay of status than power itself. They had neither the learning nor the understanding to make use of any magic that they acquired, either by accident or on purpose. And even if they’d had the knowledge, they simply weren’t interested in anything past the moment. The few times to Sebastian’s knowledge that self-styled Satanists had warranted attention, it was the police that were needed, not the Masters or some other occultists. In fact, to everyone except the dour lot up in Scotland, Satanic worship was more of a joke than a threat. And perhaps, that was what had been the protection for the few real Satanic cults in the modern world; that no one believed in them.

It’s our protection, too, after all. When something becomes a fairy tale, the ordinary sort of fellow can look right at it and not believe in it.

“So, you’re going to go look back in time to when this book was being written and try to see what lay behind those journal entries,” Elizabeth stated, summing up his intentions nicely. “Can you do the work here?”

“It’s the best-shielded room in the place at this point,” he replied. “What I’ll need from you is guarding.” He frowned. “I hope that I don’t sound superstitious to you, but—” He was reluctant even to voice his suspicions, but if he didn’t and something happened—”Look, I know that the idea of demons is something less than fashionable among Masters at the moment, but, well, the only way I can think of for Madam to have done some of what she’s done is to have a servant or a slave that is sensitive to magic power. And as a Satanist—well—I suppose she could have attracted some of the nastier Elementals, but how would she have seen them? So what does that leave but the Satanist’s traditional servant?”

Tarrant made a sour face. “I have to admit that a demon, a Mephistopheles to Arachne’s Faustus, is the most logical answer. I don’t like it. I might as well believe in vampires, next—”

“Or brownies?” Elizabeth said suggestively, and Sebastian flushed. “I agree with you, Doctor. And that is yet another good reason for us to do as little as possible magically, and make most of that passive. I had a feeling I ought to use the telegraph rather than occult means of calling the other Masters, and now I’m glad I did. I wish I knew if holy symbols really worked against demons, though.” She bit her lip. “The wearing of my grandmother’s crucifix is very, very tempting right now.”

“I suspect that depends entirely on the depth of belief of the one using them,” Tarrant replied, regaining his equilibrium. “And I will make no judgment on the state of your belief, Elizabeth. As for myself—” he hesitated. “I suspect for me, that any holy symbol would be as efficacious, or not, as any other. Doctor, if you are ready, so are we.”

With the room already shielded, all he needed to do, really, was to set up the other object he had brought with him besides the book. This was an amber sphere about the size of a goose egg with no inclusions, amber being about the only material suitable for an Earth Master to use for scrying. Then he placed the book in front of it, and sat facing the sphere at the tiny table below the window, both hands atop the book, which was open to the relevant passage.

Then, after invoking his own personal shields, he “touched” the book with a delicate finger of power.

Show me—he whispered to it. Show me your author, and what was happening when he wrote these words.

He was hoping for a scene in the sphere, or at least a few suggestive hints that he could concentrate on to bring things further into focus. At best, he hoped for a clear image of the old Master in the midst of his single combat with the Satanic magician he had tersely described in his entry.

He did not expect what he got.

He was jolted—exactly like being struck by lightning—as power slammed into him from the pages of the book themselves, knocking him back in his chair, and breaking his contact with the volume.

“Bloody hell!” he yelped, shocked beyond measure. But before he—or either of the other two—could react, a column of light flung itself upwards from the open book, reaching floor—to—ceiling—a golden-yellow light, like sun on ripening corn.

“Bloody hell!” Sebastian echoed, as Lady Elizabeth yelped.

And in the very next moment, he found himself looking up into the eyes of a vigorous man of perhaps late middle-years, bearded, moustached, crowned with a flat cap and attired in a laced and slashed doublet, small starched ruff, sleeved gown identical to an academic gown, hose and those ridiculous balloonlike breeches that the Tudors wore. The fact that the fellow was entirely colorless and transparent had no bearing whatsoever on the sensation of force he radiated.

The light radiated from him, and it was as utterly unlike the black-green poison of the curse holding Marina as it was possible to be. Andrew wanted to drink in that light, eat it, pull it in through every pore. And as for that power, that force—

The man also radiated the palpable force of an Earth Master as far above Andrew in power as Andrew was above Thomas Buford. And more.

Details of the man’s appearance branded themselves on his brain. The square jaw underneath a beard neatly trimmed, but with one untidy swirl, as if there was a scar under the hair. The bushy eyebrows that overhung a pair of keen eyes that might have been blue. The doublet, dark and sober, contrasting wildly with the striped satin of the puffy breeches and an entirely immodest codpiece ornamented in sequins and bullion. The equally sober robe he wore over both—a robe of velvet that had been badly rubbed in places, as if it was an old and favored garment that the man could not bear to part with, despite it being a bit shabby.

“God’s Blood!” the man barked—audibly. And with a decided Scots brogue to his words.

Andrew started again; he hadn’t expected the apparition to speak!

The spirit stamped his foot—no sound. “Devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon! Where gottest thou that goose-look? It’s half mad I’ve been, wondering if thee’d the wit to use the book! Damme, man, thee took thy leisure, deciding the menace here!”

A quick glance at Elizabeth showed she was fascinated, staring at what could only be a spirit, as if she could hardly restrain herself from leaping up to touch it. Sebastian Tarrant, however, was as white as a sheet. But it was Tarrant who spoke.

“You—you’re a ghost!” he bleated. There was no other word for the absurd sound that came out of his mouth. Formidable Fire Master Sebastian Tarrant sounded just like a frightened sheep.

The spirit favored him with a jaundiced eye. “That, and ha’pence will buy thee a wheaten loaf,” he said dismissively. He stepped down off the table, which at least put him at eye level with all of them. He was—rather short. But no one would ever dismiss him as insignificant. “Aye, I linked myself, dying, to yon book, in case one day there was need and no one to teach.”

“Teach about the—” he began, and the spirit made a hushing motion.

“Best not to talk about them,” he cautioned. “Not aloud. And my time is short—so I’ll be brief. Thee has caught it, laddie—’tis the selfsame enemy, mine and thine, If thee live through this, thee will have to reck out how they done this. If; that be for later. And the on’y way thee will beat them now is to divide them. Thou—” he pointed at Andrew “—thou’lt confront the man. But she—” he pointed at Marina “—the on’y way she’ll be free is to fight the mother, herself.”

“But—” Andrew began.

“But me no buts!” the spirit interrupted, scowling. “There be twa things thee’ll need to do, an’ I dinna get much time to explain them, so listen proper the first time.”

Sebastian had recovered, and nodded, moving closer, as did Elizabeth. Andrew noticed then that the light surrounding the spirit was dimmer than it had been. Perhaps the power stored in the book was all that held the spirit here. If that was the case—

Later, later. Live through this, first.

The spirit continued, resting his left hand on his book. “The first thing is for all of ye—all five—t’ takit hold of that cursed magic she’s put on the girl an’ give it a good hard pull. Ye shan’t hurt her, but ye’ll get the mother’s attention. Then…”

Holding their breaths lest they miss a word, the three of them leaned forward to take it all in.

Marina was in a garden. A very, very small garden. Not a paradise by any means; this was a tiny pocket of dead and dying growth, struggling to survive in dim and fitful light, and failing, but failing with agonizing slowness. It was walled twice, first in curving walls of brambles with thorns as long as her hand, and beyond them, a wall like a sphere or a bubble, curving gray surfaces, opaque and impermeable—but which flickered with that black-green energy that had engulfed her before she had blacked out. She was disinclined to touch either the walls of thorn or the walls of energy—assuming she could even reach the latter. She mistrusted the look of the thorns—she suspected that they might actually move to hurt her if she approached them. And she’d already had too much close acquaintance with that peculiar magical energy.

Madam was behind this; somehow she had attacked Marina through the medium of her old cradle, and sent her here. The only question in her mind was—was this “here” real, or a construction of her mind? And if it was real—was it solid, everyday real, was she, body and all, sitting in this blighted garden? Or was this her spirit only, confined in some limbo where Madam’s evil magic had thrown her?

She was inclined to think it was the second—not because of any single piece of objective evidence, but because she didn’t think that Madam was powerful enough to have created anything magical that could and would successfully hold up physically for any length of time. Why? Because if she had been able to do so, she would have done something to eliminate her niece on the journey to Oakhurst. And if Marina just vanished, there would be a great many questions asked now, questions which could be very uncomfortable for Madam.

Marina also didn’t think she was dead—not yet, anyway. Elizabeth had taught her all about the magical connection of spirit and body, the thing that looked to some like a silver cord. Although she had not yet made any attempt to leave her own body, Elizabeth’s descriptions had been clear enough. And now that she was calm enough to look for it, that tie of body to spirit was, so far as Marina could tell, still in existence; a dim silver cord came from her, and passed through the gray wall without apparent difficulty.

Well, there’s my objective evidence, assuming I’m not hallucinating the cord. “Here” isn’t “real”

So somehow Madam had separated spirit from body and imprisoned the former here.

Marina felt her heart sink. That would suit her very well. My body is going to live for a while—for as long as she can get doctors to keep it alive. And why shouldn’t she? That would neatly eliminate any suspicions that she had anything to do with what has happened to me. There probably won’t be a sign of what she did. It will all be a terrible tragedy, and of course, in a few weeks or months, when—well, she’ll inherit everything, with no questions asked. She moaned; after all, there was no one here to hear her. I suppose there’s no chance it would be Andrew Pike she calls. No, it will probably be some high-fee London physician, who’ll get to make all manner of experiments to see if he can “wake” me.

Marina was able to think about this with a certain amount of calmness, in no small part because she was already exhausted from what must have been hours of sheer panic, followed by more hours of rage, followed by more of weeping in despair. There was, of course, no way of telling time here. And although she was exhausted, when she lay down in the withered grass, she was unable to sleep, and in fact, didn’t feel sleepy. Another point in favor of the notion that she was only imprisoned in spirit. The evidence at this point was certainly overwhelming.

She had never been so utterly, so completely alone. She had thought that she felt alone when Madam had first taken her away from Blackbird Cottage—but at least there had been other people around, even if they were strangers.

If I am just a spirit—maybe I can call for help? The cord that bound her to her body was able to penetrate the shell around her—maybe magic could, too.

The trouble was, there was no water here; not so much as a puddle. And search though she might, she could find no well-springs of Water energy, nor the slightest sign of the least and lowliest of Water Elementals. Small wonder the vegetation was dying or dead.

So all that remained was—thought, and whatever magic she held in her own stores. Which was not much.

And I was appallingly bad at sending my thoughts out without the help of magic. On the other hand, what choice did she have? Perhaps I can use the cord, somehow.

She concentrated on a single, simple message, a plea for help, trying first to reach Margherita, then Sebastian, then Elizabeth, then, for lack of anyone else, Andrew Pike. Last of all, she sent out a general plea for help, from anyone, or anything. She tried until she felt faint with the effort, tried until there were little sparks in front of her eyes and she felt she had to lie down again. But if there was any result from all of her effort, there was no sign of it.

There was no change in the walls holding her imprisoned, no sense of anyone answering her in her own mind. The only change might have been in the cord—was it a little more tenuous than before? A crushing weight of depression settled over her. She gave herself over to tears and despair again, curling up on her side in the grass and weeping—but not the torrent of sobs that had consumed her before. She hid her face in her hands and wept without sobbing, a trickle of weary tears that she couldn’t seem to stop, and didn’t really try. What was the use? There was nothing that she could do—nothing! There was no magical power here that she could use to try and break herself free, nothing of her own resources gave her strength enough, and she was as strong now as she was ever going to be. As her body weakened—and it would—the energy coming to her down that silver cord would also weaken. Until one day—

She would die. And then what would happen? Was it possible that she would be trapped here forever? Would she continue to exist as a sad, mad ghost here, hemmed in by thorns, driven insane by the isolation?

“Oh, my dearest—she cannot hold you then, at least—”

The sound of the strange female voice shocked her as if she’d been struck with a bolt of lightning. Marina started up, shoving herself up into a sitting position with both hands, although the unreal grass had a peculiarly insubstantial feeling against her palms.

A man and a woman—or rather, the transparent images of a man and a woman—stood at the edge of the thorns. When had they gotten there? How had they gotten there? Had they come in response to her desperate plea for help?

She had no trouble recognizing them, not when she had looked at their portraits every day of her life for as long as she could remember.

“Mother?” she faltered. “Father?”

With no way to measure time, not even by getting tired and sleepy, Marina could not have told how long it took the—others—to convince her that they were not figments of her imagination, not something sent by Madam to torment her, and were, indeed, her mother and father. Well, their spirits. They were entirely certain that the “accident” that had drowned them was Madam’s doing; that made sense, considering everything that had followed. And if Madam had sent a couple of phantasms to torment her, would she have put those words in their mouths? Probably not.

Perhaps what finally convinced her was when, after a long and intensely antagonistic session of cross-questioning on her part, Alanna Roeswood—or Alanna’s ghost, since that was what the spirit was—looked mournfully at her daughter and gave the impression of heaving an enormously rueful sigh.

“After nearly fifteen years of rather formal letters, I really should not have expected you to fling yourself into my loving arms, should I the spirit said, wearing an expression of deep chagrin. “It’s not as if I wasn’t warned.”

Marina held her peace, and her breath—well, she had lately discovered that she didn’t actually breathe so she couldn’t really hold her breath, but that was the general effect. Perhaps being dead gave one a broader perspective and made one more accepting of things.

Especially things that one couldn’t change. Like one’s daughter, who had grown up with a mind and will of her own, and who considered her birth mother to be the next thing to a stranger.

“You aren’t at all as I pictured you, are you?” the spirit continued, but now there was a bit of pride mingled with the chagrin. “Nothing like I imagined.”

Marina couldn’t help but feel guilt at those sad words. Not that it was her fault that her parents had treasured an image of her that was nothing like the reality. “Oh, Mother—” she sighed. “I’m sorry.” She couldn’t bring herself to say anything more, but Alanna unexpectedly smiled.

“Don’t be.” Both of her parents studied her for a moment, as she throttled down a new emotion—

Lightning emotional changes seemed to be coming thick and fast, here. Perhaps it was that there was no reason, here and now, for any pretense. And no room for it. Polite pretense was only getting in the way.

This new emotion was resentment, and after another long moment of exchanged glances, it burst out.

“Why did you just—throw me away?” she cried, seventeen years of pain distilled in that single sentence. “What was wrong with me? Didn’t you want me? Was I in the way?” That last was something that had only just occurred to her, as she saw the way the two spirits stood together. Never had she seen two people so nearly and literally one, and she felt horrible. Had she been an intrusion on this perfect one-ness? It was only too easy to picture how they would have resented her presence.

But the bewilderment on both their faces gave the lie to that notion. “Throw you away?” Hugh said, aghast. “Dear child—don’t you know what we were trying to prevent—what we were trying to save you from? Didn’t anyone ever tell you?”

It was short in the telling, the more so since the curse that Madam had so effectively placed on Marina as an infant was what had patently thrown her here now. She listened in appalled fascination—it would have been an amazing tale, if it had just happened to someone else.

And why? Why did Arachne hate her brother and his wife so much that she declared war on a harmless infant? For that matter, what on earth could Hugh Roeswood have done to anger her—besides merely existing? Hugh had only been a child when Arachne left home to marry her unsuitable suitor.

“So we sent you away, where we hoped Arachne would never find you, and left her only ourselves to aim at,” Hugh finished. “We hoped—well, we hoped all manner of things. We hoped that she wouldn’t find you, and that the curse would backfire on her when it reached its term without being called up again. We hoped that you would become a good enough Master to defend yourself. We hoped someone would find a way to take the damned thing off you!”

“But why send me away and never come even to see me?” she asked softly, plaintively. “Why never, ever come in person?”

“Haven’t you ever seen nesting birds leading hunters away from their little ones?” Alanna asked wistfully. “We couldn’t lead Arachne away, but it was the same idea. We never sent you away because we didn’t love you—we sent you because we loved you so much. And of all the people we could send you to—Margherita was the only choice. We knew that she would love you as if you were her own.”

The pain in her voice recalled the tone of all those letters, hundreds of them, all of them yearning after the daughter Alanna was afraid to put into jeopardy. Marina felt, suddenly, deeply ashamed of her outburst.

“The one thing we didn’t take into account was that she might become so desperate as you neared your eighteenth birthday that she would move against us,” Hugh continued, with a smoldering look that told Marina that he was angry at himself. “I became complacent, I suppose. She hadn’t acted against us, so she wouldn’t—that was a stupid assumption to make. And believe me, there was a will, naming Margherita and Sebastian as your legal guardians. I don’t know what happened to it, but there was one.”

“Madam must have had it stolen,” Marina said, thinking out loud. “She had a whole gaggle of lawyers come and fetch me; perhaps one of those extracted it.” She began to feel a smoldering anger herself—not the unproductive rage, but a calculating anger, and one that, if she could get herself free, boded ill for Madam. “She’s laid this out like a campaign from the beginning! Probably from the moment she discovered that—that cesspit at her first pottery!”

“Cesspit?” they both asked together, and that occasioned yet another explanation.

“My first guess must have been the right one,” Marina said, broodingly. “That must be why she went to the pottery a few days ago—it wasn’t to deal with an emergency, it was to drink in the vile power that she used on me!”

“We never could understand where she got her magic,” Hugh replied, looking sick. “And it was there all along, if only we’d thought to look for it.”

“What could you have done if you’d found it?” Marina countered swiftly. “Confront her? What use would that have been? There is nothing there to link her with it directly—and other than the curse, nothing that anyone could have said against her. She could claim she didn’t mean it, if you confronted her, if you set that Circle of Masters in London on her. She could say it was all an accident. And it still wouldn’t have solved my problem. All that would have happened is that she would have found some way to make you look—well—demented.” She pursed her lips, as memory of a particular interview with Madam surfaced. “In fact, she tried very hard to make me think that you were unbalanced, mother. That you were seeing things—only she didn’t know that I knew very well what those stories you told me in your letters were about. She thought that I was ordinary, with no magic at all, so the tales of fauns and brownies would sound absolutely mad.” She shook her head. “Not that it matters,” she finished, bleakly. “Not now. I could have all the magic of a fully trained Water Master, and it still wouldn’t do me any good in here.”

“But there may be some hope!” Alanna exclaimed. “Your friends—that doctor and his staff—they were the ones that Arachne called! You’re in Briareley as a patient on Arachne’s own orders, and they’ve brought Sebastian and Margherita, Thomas and Elizabeth to help!”

She stared at them. This news was such a shock that she felt physically stunned. And never mind that she didn’t have a way to be physically anything right now. “What?” she said, stupidly.

“Wait a moment.” Hugh winked out—just like a spark extinguishing—then winked back in again. “My dear, it’s better than we knew when we first came to you! They have a plan—but it’s one that you have to follow, too,” Hugh told her. “They’re going to do something to either force Arachne to break this containment, or force her inside it as well. In either case, you will have to be the one to win your own freedom from her.”

He had no sooner finished this astonishing statement than something rocked the orb and its contents—it felt as Marina would have imagined an earthquake would feel. It sent feelings of disequilibrium all through her, quite as if her sense of balance stopped working, then started up again. She didn’t have insides that could go to water, but that was what it felt like.

“And that will be it, I think—” Hugh stated, as another such impulse rocked Marina and the little worldlet. A third—a fourth—if Marina had been in her own body, she knew she would have been sick into one of the dying bushes. Instead, she just felt as if she would like to be sick.

“She’s coming!” Alanna gasped—and the two spirits winked out. With no more warning than that, Marina steeled herself. But she made herself a pledge as well. No matter what the outcome—she was not going to remain here. Whether she came out of here to return to her physical body or not, she was not going to remain.

Chapter Twenty-Two

THE moment after Hugh and Alanna vanished, there was a fifth convulsion, worse than all the previous ones combined. It shocked her mind; shocked it out of all thought save only that of self-awareness, and only the thinnest edge of that.

For a brief moment, everything around Marina flickered and vanished into a universal gray haze, shot through with black-green lightning. She was, for that instant, nothing more than a shining spark on the end of a long, thin silver cord, floating unanchored in that haze, desperately trying to evade those lightning-lances. Something—a black comet, ringed with that foul light, shot past her before she had time to do more than recognize that it was there.

Then it was all back; the withered garden, the ring of brambles, she herself, standing uncertainly at the edge of the circle of brown-edged grass. But there was an addition to the garden. Marina was not alone.

Standing opposite Marina, with her back to the wall of thorns, stood Madam Arachne.

She was scarcely recognizable. Over Arachne’s once-impassive face flitted a parade of expressions—rage, surprise, hate—and one that Marina almost didn’t recognize, for it seemed so foreign to Madam’s entire image.

Confusion.

Quite as if Madam did not recognize where she was, and had no idea how she had gotten here.

But the expression, if Marina actually recognized it for what it was, vanished in moments, and the usual marble-statue stillness dropped over her face like a mask.

Marina held herself silent and still, but behind the mask that she tried to clamp over her own features, her mind was racing and her heart in her mouth. Instinctively, she felt that there was something very important about that moment of nothingness that she had just passed through. And if only she could grasp it, she would have the key she needed.

And now she wanted more than just to escape—for she had realized as she watched her parents together that she wanted to return to someone. Dr. Andrew Pike, to be precise. She must have fallen in love with him without realizing it; perhaps she hadn’t recognized it until she saw her parents together.

And she knew, deep in her heart, that he wasn’t just sitting back and letting her old friends and guardians try to save her. He was in there fighting for her, himself, and it wasn’t just because he was a physician.

I have to survive to get back to him, first, she reminded herself tensely.

“Well,” Madam said dryly. “Isn’t this—interesting.”

Marina held her peace, but she felt wound up as tightly as a clock-spring, ready to shatter at a word.

Madam looked carefully around herself, taking her time gazing at what little there was to see. Then, experimentally, she pointed a long finger at a stunted and inoffensive bush.

Black-green lightning lanced from the tip of that finger and incinerated the half-dead bit of shrubbery—eerily doing so without a sound, except for a hiss and a soft puff as the bush burst into flame.

Madam stared at her finger, then at the little fountain of fire, smoke, and ash, and slowly, coldly, began to smile. When she turned that smile on Marina, Marina’s blood turned to ice.

“Bringing me here was a mistake, my girl,” Madam said silkily. “And believe me, it will be your last.”

That was when it struck Marina—what that moment of nothingness had meant. Although her spirit might be imprisoned here and unable to return to her physical self, this place and everything in it took its shape from the minds of those who were held here.

Madam had realized this fundamental fact first; only the faint rustle behind her and the sense that something was about to close on her warned Marina that Madam had launched her first attack. She ducked and whirled out of reach, barely in time to escape the clutching thorn branches that reached for her, the thorns, now foot-long, stabbing for her. She lashed out with fire of her own, and the thorns burst into cold flame, flame that turned them to ash—and she felt the power in her ebbing.

Belatedly, she realized that this could only be a diversion, turned again to face Madam, and flung up shields—behind her, the thorns scrabbled on the surface of a shield that here manifested as transparent armor—while inches from her nose, Madam’s green lightnings splashed harmlessly off the surface.

Madam smiled—and the ground opened up beneath Marina’s feet.

Andrew dismounted awkwardly from his mare’s back, and walked toward the front entrance of Oakhurst. The place was quiet. Too quiet. It was as if everything and everyone here was asleep… and he knew he was walking into a trap.

He opened the door himself, or tried to—it lodged against something, and he had to shove it open. That was when he realized that it wasn’t as if everything was asleep. For the thing that had temporarily blocked the door was the body of one of the footmen, lying so still and silent that he had to stoop and feel for a pulse before he knew for certain it was sleep that held him, and not death.

Oh, God help us… Past the entrance hall, and he came across another sleeper, the shattered vase of flowers from the hothouse beside her where she had fallen. The silence was thick enough to slice.

His heart pounded in his ears. He knew—or guessed—why every member of the household had fallen. He could only suppose that Reggie had been with or near Madam when her spirit was jerked into the limbo where she had sent Marina. Somewhere in this great house, Madam lay as silent and unresponsive as Marina, for the tie of the curse worked both ways, and as long as Marina was still alive, the magic that bound them together could be used against Madam as well as against Marina. That was the first part of what the old Master had imparted to them; that using that binding, they could throw victim and predator together into a situation where neither—theoretically—had the upper hand. Their environment took its shape equally from both of them; in a fight, they both depended on the power held only within themselves.

Theoretically. But Madam was older, treacherous, and far more ruthless… He couldn’t think about that now. Because Madam was only half of the equation; Reggie was the other half. Satanic rites demanded a Priest, not a Priestess, and it was in the hands of the Priest and Celebrant that most of the control resided. No matter what Madam thought, it was Reggie who was the dangerous one—doubly so, if he, unlike his mother, actually had the gift of Mastery of one of the four Elements. He hadn’t shown it—but he wouldn’t have to. The power stolen from all the tormented souls that he and his mother had consigned to their own peculiar hells was potentially so great that Reggie would never need to demonstrate the active form of Mastery. Only the passive, the receptive form, would be useful enough for him to wield—which was, of course, impossible to detect. But if Reggie could see power and manipulate it, rather than working blind as his mother was, he was infinitely more dangerous than she.

And if he actually believed? He could have allies on his side that no mortal could hope to overcome. The one advantage to this was that such allies were tricky at best and traitorous at worst. “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.”

“Aye, so can I, and so can any man, but will they come when you do call them?”

Countering this was that true believers must be few and far between, and would the Lord of Darkness be willing to squander them?

Andrew felt himself trembling, and tightened his muscles to prevent it. Yes, Reggie was the more dangerous, as this house full of sleeping servants demonstrated. Their condition proved to Andrew that Reggie was, if not a Master, a magician as well as a Satanic Priest. He had, in one ruthless move, pulled the life-energy of every servant in this house that could not resist him into his own hands, draining them just short of death. Not that he would have balked at killing them—but that could not be done by occult means, or at least, not without expending as much energy as he took in. So Reggie was now immensely powerful, bloated with the strength stolen from an entire household—his mother’s collapse a half hour ago had given him plenty of time to array his defenses, and he would, of course, be expecting an attack.

And before he went to face his enemy, Andrew now found himself faced with a dilemma. Of all of those sleeping servants, there must be some who had fallen while doing tasks where their lives would be in danger—tending animals—near fires—

He ran for the kitchen.

Marina, transmorphing into the form of a wren in the blink of an eye, shot up through her own shields and darted into the cover of the dying bushes. All she could do was to thank heaven that she had spent so much time among wild creatures—she knew how they felt, moved, acted. She could mimic them well enough to use the unique strengths they had. And it didn’t take nearly as much power to do so as it did to lash out with mage-fire or change the world around her. If she could keep attacking Madam physically, Arachne could not possibly attack Marina magically. To change into a beast or a bird or some other form cost Marina a fraction of the power it took to lash out with mage-lightning. And she was younger than Arachne; that might be an advantage too.

She left the shields in place behind her, hoping that Madam would be deceived into thinking she was still inside them.

She peered out from under the shelter of a leaf the same color and almost the same shape as she, shaking with fear and anger mingled. Green lightning lashed at the shields, splattering across their surface, obscuring the fact that there was nothing inside them. Madam held both her hands out before her, lightning lashing from her fingertips, her face a contorted mask of hatred mingled with triumph.

Go ahead. Waste your power. You won’t find any more here. Marina let the shields collapse in on themselves. Taken by surprise by the sudden collapse of those defenses, Madam lashed at the empty place for a moment, the energies that pummeled the spot where Marina had stood so blindingly powerful that when she cut off her attack, there was nothing there but the smoking ground.

Madam stood staring at the place for a moment, then cautiously stepped forward to get a better look.

She was so single-mindedly intent on destroying Marina that it had not yet dawned on her that if Marina really had been destroyed, Madam herself should have been snapped back into the real world again.

And in that moment of forgetfulness, it was Marina’s turn to strike.

Madam’s advantage—she was swollen, bloated with stolen power. Still. But bloated as she was—and used to having all the power she needed—she might not think to husband it. And here, probably for the first time, she was able to see what her power was doing, able to use it directly instead of indirectly. That might intoxicate her with what she could do, and make her less able to think ahead.

Marina had to combat Madam in such a way that Madam couldn’t use all that stolen power directly. So it was a very, very good thing that Elizabeth had been so very busy collecting folk ballads as the prime motive for her visit to Blackbird Cottage—and a very good thing that Marina had been employed in making fair copies of them.

Because one of them, “The Twa Magicians,” had given her the pattern for the kind of attack she could make, one that might lure Arachne into making a fatal mistake.

That curse—I can do things against it here that I couldn’t do in the real world. I can see it—and I can move it. It’s a connection between us, and I think I can make that work in my favor.

Swift as a thought, Marina the wren darted out of the cover of the leaves, and in the blink of an eye, had fastened herself in Madam’s hair.

But she didn’t stay that way for long.

With a writhing effort of will, she transmorphed herself again, and a huge serpent cast its coils about Madam in the same moment that the evil sorceress realized that something had attacked her.

By then, it was a bit late, for her arms were pinned and the serpent was getting the unfamiliar body to contract its coils. Belatedly, Madam began to struggle, and Marina squeezed harder.

But Madam wasn’t done yet. And what Marina could do—so could she.

Suddenly, Marina found her coils closing on air, as a little black cat shot out from under the lowest loop just before she collapsed in a heap under her own weight. Then the little cat turned to a great black panther, and leapt on her, landing just behind her head, pinning her to the ground and biting for the back of her neck.

That’s a ploy anyone can play—Marina became a mouse, and ran between its paws. And from behind the panther’s tail, went on the offensive again; became an elk, and charged at the big cat, tossing her into the air with her massive antlers.

Ha! Into the air the great cat flew, and she came down as a wolf.

But not just any wolf—one of the enormous Irish wolves, killed off long ago, but which had, in their time, decimated the herds of Irish elk.

Oh no—! The wolf slashed at her legs, by its build and nature designed to kill elk; Marina leaped into the air—

And became a golden eagle, dropping down onto the wolf’s back, fastening three-inch-long talons into fur and flesh and slashing at the head with her wicked beak. The Mongols of the steppes and the Cossacks of Russia hunted wolves with golden eagles—

But before the beak could connect, fur and flesh melted into a roaring tower of flame, and Marina backwinged hastily into the air before the raging fire Madam had become could set her feathers alight. But evidently Madam hadn’t heard “The Twa Magicians,” or she would have known Marina’s next transformation—

—into a torrent of water. The form most natural to a Water Mage.

Andrew was not a moment too soon; the cook had fallen across the front of the big bread-oven, although she had only just started the fire in it, and it hadn’t heated up sufficiently to give her serious burns. One of her helpers had been cutting up meat, though, and the last falling stroke of his cleaver had severed a finger.

Blood poured out of the stump, running across the table, dripping off the edge, pooling on the floor. He could easily have bled to death if Andrew hadn’t gotten there when he had.

In a moment, Andrew had the bleeding stopped, though he’d been forced to use the crudest of remedies, cauterizing the stump with a hot poker, for he hadn’t time to do anything else, and blessing the spell that kept the poor fellow insensible. Another kitchen maid was lying too near the fire in the fireplace where the big soupkettle hung—one stray ember and she’d have been aflame. He moved her out of harm’s way.

That cleared the kitchen—with his heart pounding, he ran out into the yard and the stables.

There he discovered that the animals had fallen asleep as well, which solved one problem. At least no one was going to be trampled.

Here the problem was not of fire, but of cold; left in the open, the stablehands would perish of exposure in a few hours as their bodies chilled. He solved that problem by dragging two into the kitchen, which was certainly warm enough, and the third into an empty, clean stall onto a pile of straw, where he covered the man with horse-blankets.

He dashed back inside, painfully aware of the passing of time. It was too late—he hoped—for the maids to be mending and laying fires. He couldn’t go searching room to room for girls about to be incinerated—

But his heart failed him. Oh, God. I must. He began just such a frantic search of the first floor, wondering as he did so just how long it would be before Reggie ambushed him.

Whenever it happened, it would be when Reggie was at his readiest—and he, of course, at the least ready.

Madam was running out of ideas, so she became a huge serpent, at home on land or water—which was just what Marina had hoped for.

The torrent turned immediately to hail and sleet, the enemies of the cold-blooded reptile, and the one thing they were completely vulnerable to. Marina poured her energy into this transformation—which would have to be her last, because she was exhausted, and could sense that she hadn’t much left to spend. But she didn’t have to kill Arachne. All she had to do was immobilize Madam, then get her own two hands on the woman. It was, after all, Madam’s curse, and curses knew their caster; she could feel the thing tangling them together. Over the course of this battle, Marina had been weaving the loose ends of that curse back into Madam’s powers whenever they came into physical contact. Now Marina would just send it back, if she could have a moment when she could concentrate all of her will—her trained will—on doing so.

The cold had the desired effect. The serpent tried to raise its head and failed. It tried to crawl away, and couldn’t. In a moment, it couldn’t move at all. A moment more, and it lay scarcely breathing, sheathed in ice from head to tail. The eyes glared balefully at her, red and smoldering, but Madam could not force the body she had chosen to do what she willed.

Marina fell out of the transformation, landing as herself on her knees on the ice-rimed grass beside the prone reptile. She was spent. I can’t—

I must. There was no other choice, but death. Go past the end of her strength and live and return to Andrew—or die.

Weeping with the effort, she gathered the last of her power, isolated the vile black-green energies of the curse just as she had isolated the poison in Ellen’s veins, and shoved it into her hands and held it there. With the last of her strength, she crawled to Madam—she didn’t need to pierce Arachne’s skin for this—they were both immaterial, after all—

She placed both hands on the serpent’s head—and shoved. And screamed with the seething, tearing pain that followed as the thing that had rooted in her very soul was uprooted and sent back to its host.

Reggie waited for Andrew where he had clearly been for some time; in the center of a red room, with a desk like an altar in the very center of it. An appropriate simile, since on the desk lay the dead body of a woman in a superior maid’s outfit, her throat slit, blood soaking into the precious Persian rug beneath.

Reggie was not alone, either. To one side stood—something.

There had been a sacrifice here to call an ally, and the ally had answered in person.

It wasn’t a ghost, it wasn’t material—it didn’t even have much of a form. To Andrew’s weary eyes, it was a man-shaped figure of black-green flame, translucent, and lambent with implied menace. Reggie pointed straight at Andrew. “Kill him!” he barked—a smile of triumph cutting across his face like the open wound of the woman’s throat.

“No.” The figure shifted a little. “No. First, he is Favored, and I may not touch him. Second—” Andrew got the impression of a shrug. “—think of this as a test of worth. Yours, and perhaps, his.”

Reggie stared, aghast—he had not expected this response. “But the bargain—” he cried. “I’ve worshipped, given you souls, corrupted for you, killed in your name—”

“Which was the bargain. You have received in the measure that you earned. This is outside the bargain. You will see me again only when this combat is decided.”

And with that, the figure winked out, and was gone. Hah, Andrew thought, with a glimmer of hope. “But will they answer when you do call them?”

Reggie stared at the place where it had been with his mouth agape. And Andrew took that moment to attack.

He did what another magician would have considered madness—he rushed Reggie physically, like the rugby player he had been at university, his momentum carrying him over the desk, knocking the body of the poor dead girl off the top, and carrying carcass and Reggie both to the ground. He grabbed for both wrists and got them, pinning the other to the blood-soaked carpet.

Pain lashed him, the pain of Reggie’s mage-fire raging over him, burning him physically as the fire ate into his shields. Reggie still held the sacrificial dagger he had used to sever the girl’s throat; Andrew screamed in agony, but held to the wrist that held that dagger—for he knew, with a cold fear of the sort that he had never felt before, that if Reggie managed to free his hand and use that dagger, it would kill him no matter how slight the wound.

He built up his shields as the pain and fire burned them away; he bit back his screams as Reggie rolled under him and tried to throw him off. And he used tricks learned in the violence of the rugby scrum, bashing his forehead into Reggie’s nose, smashing it in a welter of blood, distracting him just long enough for him to try the desperate call he hoped would be answered. He made a summons of it, calling through the channel that they had shared, hoping that she had been freed to answer it.

Because if it wasn’t—he and Marina were both doomed. “Here!”

The voice in his mind was weary, weary—but he felt Marina’s spectral presence, felt her spirit, tired, battered, but alive and free of the limbo into which she had been sent! Felt her join her power with his—

And knew that it wasn’t enough.

Desperately, he reached for the power of Earth—and found it closed against him, violated by the sacrifice of the servant and more blood shed over the past months, poisoned by blasphemy in a way that made it impossible for him to touch. He could use it—but only if he cleansed it. And he didn’t have time.

With nose smashed aside and bleeding profusely, Reggie grinned up at him, a savage grin that made him cold all over. And in that moment, he knew utter despair. “No, damn it, NO!” Marina cried.

Reggie gathered his own power; Andrew felt it gathering above him—them—like a wave poised to break over them, threatening to send them both back into the limbo where Madam had cast Marina.

Then—from some unguessed depth of her spirit, Marina reached for a source of her power uncontaminated by the blood and black magic—reached down into the village, where a wellspring lay doubly blessed, by Elemental and Christian mage—She should not have been able to touch it—and reaching so far and so desperately might doom her, burn her out forever—He couldn’t stop her.

She wouldn’t let him.

“I love you,” she said, “And I’ll be damned before I let him have you!”

The words gave him a last burst of energy past his own strength in that last instant, and he, too, reached further and deeper than he ever had in his life—and then, two floods met—evil and good, light and dark, life and death—

Andrew was caught up in the maelstrom, and was thrown about like a cork in a hurricane. The power was beyond his control now, or Marina’s, or indeed anyone’s. It was its own creature with its own laws, supremely indifferent to the wishes of a few puny humans. In the depths of the storm he thought he sensed others—one, two, a dozen, more—who found themselves unwitting channels for a power with a will of its own. He lost sight and sense of Marina, lost sight and sense of Reggie, clung only to his own identity, desperately, praying, as the competing waves of power battered him indiscriminately, and finally drove him down into darkness.

And his last thought was that if Marina was not to survive this confrontation—he didn’t want to, either.

The last thing he heard was a dreadful wailing, a howl of the deepest and most profound despair and defeat—and the sound of demonic laughter.

Then he lost track of everything, and knew nothing more.

He woke in a bed in his own sanitarium; he knew that ceiling—it was the one above his bed. He coughed, and suddenly there were half a dozen faces looking down at him. And among the faces around his bed was the one he wanted to see most.

“Marina!” The word came out as a croak, from a throat raw and rasping.

“Alive, thanks to you,” she said, her eyes dark-circled, her voice heavy with exhaustion, her smile bright and full of an emotion he hardly dared name. “And well, thanks to my—our—friends. And so are you.” She turned her smile on the three men, who looked equally exhausted. “Clifton bridged the power-well of the rectory to the greater power of the other Masters—and got a bit of a shock!”

“I should say,” Davies admitted, rubbing the side of his head, as if it still ached. “Never have I seen such an outpouring of power—not only from the Masters we had telegraphed, not only from your Undines and the lesser Water creatures, but from the Mermaids and Tritons, the Hippocampi and other salt-water powers all the way down at the sea, and from the Air, the Sylphs, the Winds, the Fauns and other Earth creatures, the Salamanders and Dragons of Fire—things I can’t even put a name to! They cleansed the earth for you, Andrew! And you reached for your power and it answered with more than I have ever heard of!”

“And you did exactly what that irascible old reprobate told you to do,” Sebastian said, as words failed the Reverend Davies and he shook his head in wonder. “You unwound that curse and wrapped it around Reginald and tied it back to Madam, and then—” He shrugged. “Well, we don’t precisely know what happened then. All we know is that when the brouhaha faded out, when Marina woke up and demanded that we go rescue you, and Thomas and I went into Oakhurst to find you, you were sitting on the front stoop looking as if you’d been in a bare-fisted bout with a champion and come out the worst. Reginald was in Madam’s study, slumped over the body of the poor wench he’d killed—unconscious, exactly as the curse made Marina—and Madam was in the same condition in the next room. The servants were just starting to wake up, so Thomas whisked you away before they saw you, and I laid into the footman, trying to get him to wake up. The servants found Reggie and Madam, by the way—” He grinned sheepishly. “I did take credit for the lad with the finger he’d chopped off, though. Someone had to, and no one could prove that I wasn’t the one who’d used that hot poker to save his life. They couldn’t prove I was any farther into the manor than the kitchen either, which is just as well for all of us.”

“Police?” he managed.

Clifton Davies nodded. “Called, been, gone. Coroner too. He says that Reggie and his darling mother poisoned each other—like they tried to poison you, my dear—” he patted Marina’s hand “—and before Reggie succumbed, he killed that poor girl—Marina’s maid, a lady of, hmm, negotiable virtue with a bit of a past. They say that he slaughtered her in a state of dementia. We suggested that they ought to be seen to by doctors, specialists. I’m told that they’re going to be moved to some place in Plymouth, under police guard, in case they might be feigning their state.”

“And meanwhile, I am living here—convalescing—until they are far away from my estate,” Marina said firmly. “I do not intend to set foot there until they are gone.” She smiled, charmingly, a smile that made him melt. “Besides, it’s perfectly proper. My guardians are here, and you’re not only my physician, you’re my fiance.”

He blinked. Not that he minded, but—when had that happened? “Now wait a bit—” he said.

“Are you saying you don’t want to be my fiance?” she asked, her serene smile wavering not at all.

Of course he wanted to! He couldn’t imagine spending the rest of his life with anyone else! But she was so young—it wasn’t fair to her—”No, but—dammit, Marina, you’re only seventeen!”

“Almost eighteen,” she interrupted.

“You’ve never been anywhere but Blackbird Cottage and Oakhurst!” he continued stubbornly. “You’re wealthy, you’re beautiful, you’ll be pursued by dozens of suitors—”

“—none of whom are worthy to polish your scalpels,” she said impishly.

“And I don’t want you to miss that!” he cried, voice cracking, as he gave words to what he was really afraid of. “I don’t want you to look at me across the room one day, and wish that you hadn’t gone so fast, that you’d had your London season, that you’d had a chance to be petted and courted, seen at the opera and Ascot—had all those things that you should have—”

“Very nicely put, Doctor,” Lady Elizabeth said, patting his hand complacently. “And she’ll have all those things. A little thing like an engagement to a country doctor is not going to put off those hordes of suitors. I intend to see she gets that London season myself. And when she’s had her fill of it, she’ll come back here, and marry you, and between all of Madam’s money and her own, I do believe you’ll be able to turn Briareley into a first-class establishment.”

He blinked as the three women laughed together, exchanging a glance that excluded all the mere males in the room. “Ah—” he managed, and dredged up the only thing he hadn’t exactly understood. “Madam’s money?”

“I’m the only heir—I’ll have all her property and Reggie’s too in a few months,” Marina said—with just enough malicious pleasure that he felt a rush of relief to see that she was human after all. “I doubt that they’ll live longer than that. I’ll be cleaning up the potteries, of course—which will mean they won’t be quite so profitable—but there will still be enough coming in, I believe, to make all of the improvements here that you could wish.” She made a face. “And in addition to having that delightful London season, I’m afraid I’m going to have to learn how to run a business—”

Oh, my love! I won’t let your season be spoiled! “You’ll have help,” he assured her. “Surely there must be someone we can trust to guide you through it. Or even take over for you.”

“My man of business, to begin with,” Lady Elizabeth said airily. “And after that—I think I can find a business-minded Earth or Water Master to become your manager. Someone who, needless to say, will be as careful of the land, the water, and the workers as he is of the pounds and pence.”

“Needless to say,” he repeated, and suddenly felt as if he was being swept up again in something beyond his control.

But this time, it was something very, very pleasant. And it was all in the hands of these utterly charming women, one of whom he had loved almost from the moment she had walked into Briareley to help a little factory-girl she didn’t even know.

“I think I’d like to sleep now,” he said meekly. “Unless—”

Then he remembered his duties, and tried to sit up, frantically. “My patients!” he exclaimed.

“Are fine. They have my personal physician, and the village doctor to attend their needs. And two Earth Masters, a Water Master, and a Fire Master.” Lady Elizabeth pushed him down again. “And if that isn’t enough, my physician is bringing in several fine nurses he can recommend who would very much like to relocate to this lovely slice of Devon.”

“And I am hiring them, so you needn’t worry where the money is coming from,” Marina concluded. “Now, if you won’t sleep, I can’t sleep. So must I prescribe for the physician or will you be sensible?”

“I’ll be sensible,” he replied, giving in with a sigh. “So long as you are, too—”

And he whispered the last two words. “—my love.”

“I will be,” she replied, smiling. “My love.”

One thing was very certain, he thought, as he drifted into real slumber. He was never going to get tired of those two delightful words.

Never.

Epilogue

MARINA’S bridal gown was by Worth, and it satisfied every possible craving that a young woman could have with regard to a frock. It should have—Worth had had more than two years to create it, and the most difficult part of the work had been making certain it stayed up to the minute in mode. Silk satin, netting embroidered with seed pearls, heavy swaths of Venice lace, the fashionable S-shape silhouette, a train just short of royal in length—no woman could ask for more.

The gardens at Oakhurst, cleansed and scoured of all of the blood-magic Arachne and Reggie had done there—with every vestige of Cold Iron removed and hauled off as scrap—and with a section carefully set aside as a “wild garden” where no gardener was allowed to trespass—made the perfect setting for a wedding. And it was going to be a very, very large wedding. Every room at Oakhurst was full, not only with fellow Masters, but with some of the many friends that Marina had made in her two successful London seasons. Most of those were girl friends—a young lady who was safely engaged to a sober and undesirable young working man was no rival, and thus safe to become friends with. Besides, it soon proved that Andrew Pike knew an amazing number of other, quite personable young men, who, even if they weren’t all precisely what a marriage-minded mama would have preferred, made very good escorts. And generally were good dancers into the bargain.

The rooms in all the inns for miles around were full. All of the stately homes and some of the not-so-stately had guests. There were even guests at Briareley, in the special, private rooms. This was a wedding long-anticipated, long in the planning, and long in the consummation.

Andrew had insisted—and had gotten his way—that they not actually get married until Marina was twenty-one. He wanted not a shadow of doubt that she was making a free choice among all the possible suitors. He had almost relented, when his head nurse Eleanor had wed Thomas Buford—finally meeting the mate she deserved over Andrew’s sickbed. Thomas had moved his workshop to Briareley when Andrew burst in on the two and demanded to know just what he was going to do without the best nurse he had.

All in fun, of course, but the workshop was proving to be very useful in providing some of the poorer children with an opportunity to learn a skill. That left the Tarrants alone in Blackbird Cottage for the first time in their lives, a state which seemed to agree perfectly with them. Marina had never seen them so happy.

Margherita was Marina’s matron-of-honor, and Ellen, who was now a nurse herself, her chief maid-of-honor, and Sebastian was giving the bride away. Thomas was standing up for Andrew, who, if Sebastian was to be believed, was as nervous as a cat and white as a sheet.

She didn’t believe it. After all he’d been through, what could possibly make him nervous about a little thing like a wedding?

With Ellen, Margherita, and her society friends hovering around her like a flock of twittering birds, she took a last, long look in the mirror, and was pleased with what she saw. If she was no beauty—despite what Andrew said—she thought she cut a rather handsome figure.

And with Lady Elizabeth in charge of the wedding itself, she’d had only to make easy decisions, and now had nothing to do but enjoy herself to the uttermost.

Drifting through the open window she heard the sounds of the string quartet beginning the melody that would end in the processional. It was time to go.

She gathered up her skirts in both hands and led the way out to the gardens, trailing brightly gowned girls like streamers behind her.

It was a real pity, she thought, that so few of her guests could see the other guests—fauns peeking out from every possible vantage, Sylphs hiding in the trees, a trio of Undines sporting in the fountains, and a veritable bestiary of other creatures of myth and legend hovering at the edge of the human crowd. She beamed at all of them, and if her un-magical guests thought that her smile was a bit unfocused, well, that was to be expected in someone who was only minutes from being married.

The processional began. Andrew was led to his place in front of Mr. Davies by Uncle Thomas (who was wearing what could only be described as a smirk) when suddenly, Marina lost her smile, and stared—

For there were three figures, not one, on the little podium where Clifton Davies stood waiting to do his duty.

For one brief moment, the two of those figures who shone with their own light smiled with delight on their daughter. Holding hands, Alanna and Hugh Roeswood made a gesture of scattering rice, and tiny sparks of Earth-magic flitted from their hands to land on the heads or the hearts of each of the guests in blessing—and two of the largest, flitting like flowers in the wind, settled softly over Andrew’s heart, and Marina’s.

Then they were gone. But Marina knew what they had left behind with her.

Love. Love she could accept with a whole and full heart, at last.

And she stepped forward with the first bars of processional, and into a life she had not even imagined the day she was taken from Blackbird Cottage—and this time, it would not be alone.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Epilogue