The Gates of Sleep em-3

by Mercedes Lackey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And besides, it was time for tea.

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

  For now, at any rate.

  Chapter Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Other than the harm of separating mother from child.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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