Home From The Sea: The Elemental Masters, Book Seven (30 page)

“Oh you would so dream,” Trefor accused. “Such a liar you are!”

“I never would even think—” Rhodri protested. And at Trefor’s continued skeptical looks, he colored a little, and muttered, “—well, maybe a little. But only think!”

“You are all pagans,” Mari said severely, but her dark eyes were sparkling with amusement.

“Well we certainly aren’t Christians now, are we?” Siarl pointed out, logically. “But aye, we’ll be gentlemen. Our oaths on it.”

“Well, whatever fancy city-woman things you plan to bring, bring a spare set,” Mari said, all practical now. “You’ll be swimming in salt water, you ken, you won’t want that drying under your dress, and you surely won’t want it all dry and itchy on the walk back to Gower Cottage.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Nan admitted. “But then, I’d thought we would be wearing swimming dresses.”

“If those are anything like the daft things I’ve seen in the papers, Rhodri is right,” Mari said bluntly. “You’ll drown. Skirts and trousers and jackets… the sea here isn’t for paddling in. It looks calm and lovely, but once out of the shallows, it’s tricky and it can turn traitor on you.”

Well, that just made Nan the more determined to learn to swim. “Then we’ll do what we did in Africa,” she said firmly.

“Well, if you’ve done with the talk of teaching land-folk to swim, do you suppose something could be done about that hamper?” Trefor was always hungry—and all the Selch were eager for the foodstuffs Nan and Sarah brought down from Gower Cottage. Which, Nan supposed, only made sense. There were not a lot of chickens in the sea… nor bake-ovens (though Mari could, and did, make fine pies and bread). Nor were there strawberries, or cows, and fizzy lemonade was a complete unknown. Even Mari hadn’t had fizzy lemonade before the girls brought down bottles to share, and now she looked forward to the luncheon as much as the Selch did.

Now, Mari could have fed the Selch too, just as well as the girls did if not better… but Mari was the keeper of the household money, and Nan had the shrewd notion that Mari didn’t care to
expend a single precious penny on her visitors, nor did she see any reason to feed four perpetually hungry young men who could very easily go jump in the sea and hunt their own dinners. But if Nan and Sarah wished to share, that was another thing altogether.

Not that Nan and Sarah came the worse out of it. The hamper always came back up with some sort of sea-delicacy in it.

And there’s worse things than fresh kippered herring for breakfast
, Nan thought to herself with a little smug content.
Or lovely salmon!

She was keeping a careful eye on Rhodri, mindful of what Sarah had told her, and she wasn’t at all sure Sarah was wrong. The handsome fellow
did
seem to pay her more attention than he did Mari. His eyes
did
seem to linger on her longer than was strictly necessary.

Then again, it was probably no more than curiosity. The women he knew were all country Welsh or his own kind. She must seem as exotic to him as a lioness.

And possibly just as dangerous!

“Today, you will learn to touch on, and use, Air and Earth magic,” Idwal said, calmly, as if he was saying “Today we will bake bread.”

Mari stared at him. “That’s daft!” she exclaimed. “How can—”

“Because every Master can make use of the magic of her allied Elements,” Idwal replied, interrupting her. “That is part of what makes her a Master. You will not be able to use them
well
, no better than a simple Elemental Magician at best, but you will be able to use them. And it is important that you learn.”

By now, she knew that when Idwal made statements like that, he was waiting for her to reason out the
why
for herself. So she thought about it.

“I might be some place someday where there are no Water Elementals about,” she said, finally. “So I’d have to use what I’ve got.”

He nodded. “Or an enemy who is a Dark Master of Water has cut you off. There is this: those who are Dark Masters almost never know the magic of more than their own Element.”

Again, he waited for her to reason out the
why.

“Because they work by coercion, and they’ve got their hands full
dealing with the Elementals they can control from their own Element,” she declared. That one was easy. “If they started mucking about with Elements they aren’t strong in, they’re likely to get themselves into trouble.”

“And then?”

“And then…” she thought about this, hard, because he hadn’t actually encouraged her even to
think
about Dark Masters until now. “Their own Elementals would revolt as soon as they sensed there was trouble?”

Idwal smiled. She felt warm all over. “And they would rend him in pieces. Another good reason why we do not coerce. It does tend to engender hard feelings.” His eyes twinkled, and she giggled.

They had left Nan and Sarah and the Selch boys on the shore, where the boys were going to teach the girls to swim. Nan and Sarah had brought with them the prettiest underthings Mari had ever seen to use as swimming costumes. “Combinations,” the girls called them, something like a chemise with legs to it, made of lovely snow-white, soft linen, thick enough not to do anything revealing when wetted down, but with such pretty embroidery and lace! Compared to her own plain chemise and drawers… Mari’s heart had immediately yearned after the garments, and she’d had to quite wrench her mind back to where it should be, on her lessons.

Idwal had taken her quite a distance from the beach, and now they were sitting in a little sheltered grove in a pocket valley between two low hills—absolutely invisible from the road or the sea. Although he was as lean and dark as the other Selch, he had the most interesting eyes, eyes that changed color with his mood. Right now they were a blue-gray, but she had seen them go almost silver, and all the way to storm-cloud black.

“Now, the easiest way to learn to use the magic of other Elements is to layer the energies into your shielding,” he was telling her. “It also makes your shields that much more effective. You must layer it, because you can never actually
mix
the magics. Put earth and water in a jar and shake them together; no matter how hard you shake, the
earth separates from the water once you stop agitating the jar. Send water into the air as mist and eventually it will condense and turn back into water. So today you will learn how to make layers. On another day, I will teach you how to braid the magics together. Begin by making a simple Water shield of one layer.”

At this point that was second nature. She enclosed them both in a bubble of green iridescence.

“Now… I brought you here because there is a good source of earth magic at this spot. Can you see it?” he asked.

She unfocused her eyes a moment, and tried to look for something other than the familiar green of water-magic. Was it—

—no—

—or—

—not that either—

Ah!
When she finally saw it, she saw it all at once, a golden glow that was part of a broad band of energy, like a beam of sunlight laid on the ground, running north to south. They were sitting right on top of it.

“It’s gold,” she said. “And we’re sitting on it!”

“So we are. It is what is called a ley-line, and this sort of power is quite strong. It should be relatively easy for you to use it, but take care. I do not want you to disturb the flow.” He reached down to the earth and gently teased up a little strand of golden light. “Like this. And when you have some, make a second shield of it, inside your first one.”

It seemed very heavy to her; reluctant to move out of its path—it felt like heavy grain, or a live fish in her hands. She tried holding on to it tightly, but that only made it slip away faster.

She knew better now than to let herself get frustrated. Instead, she sat and thought.
Well, if trying to hold onto it makes it wiggle away, then what I should do is try and pick it up gently.

She tried again, and this time, the power came up, still a little reluctantly, to her hand.

Once she had it, she found she could treat it more or less like the energy of Water. She made a bubble of it, and expanded the bubble
to fit just inside her bubble of Water. To her great relief, when she released it, it stayed where it was.

“Well done.” Idwal smiled on her, and she warmed all over again. “Now make another of Water, then another of Earth, until you have three of Earth and four of Water. Always begin and end with Water; it is your strongest Element, and it will help shape the others.”

She followed his orders; it was easier to build the Earth shield the second and third time. When she was finished, she just had to stop and
look
at her creation for a while. It was prettier than anything she had ever made before. Prettier than anything she had ever
seen
before, except perhaps a rainbow.

“Do you think you could make a shield of only Earth energy?” he asked.

“Probably… but it wouldn’t be as stable,” she answered, as she studied her construction. “I’d have to keep correcting it. This way, the Water shields do that for me.”

“Very well put.” He put an approving hand over hers. Quick as a thought, she turned her hand over and held his.

Startled, he froze for a moment, then briefly tried to pull his hand away—

Then stopped.

“Mari,” he said, slowly and carefully. “I should like to know what you mean by this.”

Using everything she had learned from him, she hardened the shields, then made them so strong that nothing magical would be able to see or hear what went on inside them. “Mabon is gone,” she told him, lifting her chin and staring into his eyes—which had gone dark—with a note of defiance. “Rhodri fancies the other girls more than me. Siarl never wanted a wife in the first place, but he’s here out of loyalty to Gethin. Trefor—I don’t know, he is trying, but it feels as if his heart isn’t in the courting. Why are you still here, Idwal? You’ve fulfilled the letter of what I asked for. You could have gone a week, two weeks ago. Yet now you are teaching me more than Water Mastery. Why are you here?”

He looked down at her, gravely, but with just a hint of hope in
his expression. “I am here, because I cannot bear to be anywhere else,” he said. “I thought… perhaps… you might be inclined kindly towards me, for all that I am an old man.”

She snorted. “You, an old man? You are younger than my da.”

“Well… I am older than the boys,” he said, and laughed weakly. “And I am not nearly so comely.”

“My da is comely,” she said, “And feckless. He is my da, and I love him, but feckless he is, and if he’d not had the Selch magic and the Prothero bargain helping him all this time, we’d be eating crusts and he’d be working on another man’s boat.” She tossed her head. “I’d rather a kind and sensible
man
than a comely boy.”

Idwal let out his breath in a long sigh. His expression told her all that she needed to know. “Gethin will not like this,” he said, gravely. “The best thing to do will be to wait for the others to do as Mabon did; give up and go back to the clan or declare some other choice. Then Gethin will come to complain to you that you are driving away those who would court you.”

She squeezed his hand, and grinned, a smile full of mischief. “Well, and when that happens should
you
declare to him that to serve the clan, you will take me? Or should
I
declare to him that since you are all that stayed, I’ll just be forced to take you?”

He laughed. “A bit of both, I think. I shall declare that I’ll sacrifice my freedom on the altar of the clan, and you will grudgingly accept, on the grounds that I am at least not some trollish old walrus.”

And with that, he pulled her into his arms. Which was, after all, what she had been hoping for, so she did not even put up a token resistance.

“Ah, you entrancing little thing,” he said, as he bent his head down to give her a proper kiss—and the first she had ever had from a man that was not her father. “Why do I have the feeling this was what you had planned all along?”

“Not
all
along,” she murmured, and then there was no more time for talking.

B
REAKFAST
was almost ready. In the garden, the roses were almost spent, and the asters and pansies were in full bloom. Since they kept their time here by the sun and not the clock, they were rising a little later every day, and lighting the candles a little earlier. But it hadn’t quite dawned on either of them how far the summer had progressed until this morning.

“It can’t be September already!” Sarah exclaimed with dismay, as Nan turned the calendar on the wall to the new month. Or months, actually, it was a Pears Soap calendar that had two months to a page. That might have been why they had managed to ignore the fact that time was passing so quickly; so long as July and August reigned on the wall, they could delude themselves that the summer was endless.

But September it was, there was no doubt of that. And they were still here, in Wales. “I think,” said Nan carefully, “we’ve been lulling ourselves into an illusion that any day now, Lord Alderscroft would order us back, and we would be saying goodbye to Mari with regret and popping ourselves onto a train.” Nan poured herself a cup of tea, and another for Sarah, then set out the scones and double cream and jam. “It was all very well to spend the summer
here, but I think we need Lord A to make some firm decisions,” she said after a moment. “And I think we need to consult with—”