The Gates of Sleep

by Mercedes Lackey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  There was nothing moving out there.

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

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

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

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

  Perhaps their shields are a little too good…

  After all, shields obscured as well as protected.

  Now that was an uncomfortable thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Six

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

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