Phoenix and Ashes (10 page)

“Easily
done,” the thing croaked, and it—divided, right before their eyes,
into six identical creatures, each one-sixth the size of the original.
“We pledge by the bond,” they chorused.

Alison
nodded, and tapped the side of the bowl with her willow-wand. “Then I
release you from the bowl. When you have infested the young men, you will be
released from the room.”

She
inscribed the appropriate sigils in the air, where they glowed for a moment,
then settled over the six creatures and were absorbed.

“When
you have come to the place across the sea where thousands of young men have
gathered to train as warriors,” she continued, still inscribing the
sigils of containment in the air, “You will be free to infect and spread
as far as you please, save only myself and my daughters,” she wrote her
own glyph and those of Carolyn and Lauralee, and the sigil of prohibition on
top of those three names. All this sank down to rest briefly on the little
Elementals, before being absorbed into them. The flow of power was
minimal—one of the reasons why this was such a useful conjuration.

“And
now, you may conceal yourself within this room, until the vessels have
come,” she concluded, breaking the containment with a flourish of her
wand. The entities gave her a mocking little bow, and faded away.

The
girls looked at her, wide-eyed. “Did you just—create a
disease?” Lauralee gaped.

She
shrugged. “It is better to say that I altered one to suit our purposes.
It will probably be a pneumonia or influenza, but when it is released, it will
be something quite different from any other of its kind. It will certainly be
bad enough to decimate the ranks of the Americans long enough to keep them from
winning the war in a few months. And that is all that we will need.” She
smiled at her girls, who stared at her, wide-eyed. “I doubt it will kill
one in four of those that are really healthy; the Elemental I conjured is not
strong enough for that. But it will cause a great deal of havoc. That is
something else to remember. Sometimes you do not need to confront your enemy
directly; you only need to interfere with him.”

She
began putting her supplies away; neither girl offered to help, as was proper.
She would not have allowed them. They were
never
to touch her Working
materials.

That,
after all, was how she had managed to get control over her teachers.

“And
now,” she added brightly, putting the last of her equipment away and
locking the little trunk in which it was kept. “I believe it is time we
went downstairs to dine.”

March 14, 1917
Broom, Warwickshire

WHEN ELEANOR WAS
CERTAIN THAT Alison and the girls were on the train to London, the first thing
she did was to go straight to the kitchen, throw open the pantry doors and plan
herself a feast.

Brushing
aside Alison’s magically laid prohibitions like so many cobwebs, Eleanor
could not help but gloat. She felt the barriers, certainly, but she was able to
push right through them. And the irony of it was, there had never been any good
reason to make the pantry off-limits while the Robinsons were gone, nor to
restrict Eleanor to the foodstuffs that Alison allowed her to keep in the
kitchen. When they returned, there were things in here that would have had to
be thrown in the bin because they were spoiled, that Eleanor could perfectly
well have eaten while the others were gone. It made no sense, no sense at all.

It
was all just spite, just pure meanness.

She
surveyed the shelves, and decided that she would clean out her ever-simmering
soup-pot and give it a good scrubbing before starting a new batch, while she
ate those things that would go bad before long. And she could include the end
of that ham in the soup.

It
wasn’t all cream for her, though; most of Alison’s magics still
worked. Before she had done much more than empty out the soup-pot into a
smaller vessel to leave on the hearth, and fill the pot with soapy water, the
compulsions to clean struck her. Up the stairs she went, discovering that she
still had to sweep and dust, air the rooms out and close them up again, mop and
scrub down the bathroom. True, she didn’t have to spend as
much
time at it, nor work quite as hard, but she couldn’t fight the compulsion
off altogether. And although she tried, she discovered that she couldn’t
leave the house and garden either, even with Alison gone. But after some
experimentation, she had the measure of the compulsions. She finished
everything she needed to do in the upstairs rooms by luncheon, which meant that
she would have the rest of the day free for herself.

The
first thing that she did was to make herself a
proper
luncheon, and to
read while she ate it; she chose a book from the library, a room which had been
mostly unused since her father died.

She
ate in the library, too, in defiance of crumbs—after all,
she
was the one who was going to be doing the cleaning-up—curled up in her
father’s favorite old chesterfield chair with her feet to the fire she
built in the fireplace.

After
she had finished eating, the compulsions urged her into work briefly, but she
discovered that she could satisfy them merely by making a few swipes with a
dust-mop and the broom in each room so long as they were
visibly
clean. By this time her soup-pot had soaked enough, so she gave it a good
scrubbing inside
and
out, and put beans to soak in it. She returned
again to the library with a tray laden with teapot and the cakes that would
have gone stale, there to lose herself in a book until the fading light and
growing hunger called her back to the kitchen and that feast she had promised
herself.

Then—luxury
of luxuries!—she drew
herself
a hot bath, and had a good long
soak and a proper hair-washing. Baths were what she got at the kitchen sink
these days, and often as not, in cold water. She used Lauralee’s
rosewater soap, knowing from experience that it was something Lauralee
wouldn’t miss, whereas if she purloined Alison’s Spanish
sandalwood, or Carolyn’s Eau de Nil bars, they
would
be missed.
After a blissful hour immersed to the neck in hot water, and an equally
blissful interlude spent giving her hair the good wash she had longed for, she
emerged clean and scented faintly with roses.

Her
hair wasn’t very long, though it was unlike the girls’
ultra-fashionable bobs—Alison hacked it off just below her shoulders on a
regular basis—so it didn’t take long to dry in front of the kitchen
fire. She slipped a bed-warmer into her own bed to heat it while she dried her
hair, and after banking the fires in the kitchen and the library, and making
sure the stove had enough fuel to last through the night and keep the hot-water
boiler at the back of it ‘warm, she went to bed at last feeling more like
her old self than she had since before her father had left on that fateful
trip.

She
fell asleep at once, relaxed, warm, and contented.

She
hadn’t expected to dream, but she did. And her dreams were—rather
odd. Full of fire-images, of leaping flames themselves, of odd, half-fairy
creatures whose flesh glowed with fire and who had wings of flame, of the
medieval salamanders that were supposed to live in fires, of dragons, and of
the phoenyx and the firebird. They weren’t nightmares, nothing like, even
though she found herself engulfed by fires that caressed her like sun-warmed
silk.

In
fact, she found herself
wearing
the flames, like an ever-changing
gown. In her dreams, she found these mythical beings welcoming her as a friend,
and in her dreams, that seemed perfectly natural and right. They were lovely
dreams, the best she’d had since before Alison came—and she
didn’t want to wake up from them.

The
compulsions broke into those dreams, jarring her awake her at dawn.

Full
of resentment, she resisted them for a moment, pondering those dreams while
they were still fresh in her mind. What on earth could they mean? That they
meant
something
, she was sure.

And
once or twice, hadn’t she felt a sense of familiarity about them? As if
the things she did and saw were calling up an echo, faint and far, in her
memory?

Finally
she could resist the compulsions no longer, for her legs began to twitch, and a
nasty headache started just between her eyebrows. She knew those signs of old,
and got reluctantly out of bed to start her round of morning chores.

At
least she was going to get more to eat this morning than a lot of tasteless
porridge.

The
sun was just coming up over the horizon, and distant roosters were crowing, as
she began the day. This was the day of the week when Eleanor usually did the
heavy laundry, the sheets and the towels, and her own clothing, and there was
no real reason to change her schedule. Usually she looked forward to the day,
as she often got a chance to wash up in the laundry-water, though the lye-soap
was harsh enough to burn if she wasn’t careful.

She
went out to the wash-house in the little shed at the back of the garden to fire
up the wash-boiler out there, a huge kettle built right into a kind of oven,
pump it full of cold water, and add the soap. She returned to the house and
collected all of the linen before breakfast. A glance up at the sky told her
that the day was going to be fair again—a good thing, since it meant she
could hang things out in the sunlight, and wouldn’t have to iron them
dry. With even Howse gone—Alison wouldn’t have traveled a step
without her maid—there was less of the wash than usual, but Eleanor was
feeling unusually energetic. Perhaps it was simply that she wasn’t forced
to do her work on a couple of spoonfuls of unflavored oat-porridge and a cup of
weak tea.

She
actually enjoyed herself; the winter had been horribly, dreadfully cold, and
doing the household laundry had been nothing short of torture.
Today—well, it was cold, but briskly so, and it was grand to have the sun
on her back as she pinned up the sheets and towels. By mid-morning, it was all
washed and wrung dry and hanging up in the garden, and Eleanor was scrubbing
the kitchen floor, exactly as she usually did on wash-day, though it
wasn’t often that she was done this early.

And
that was when a knocking at the kitchen door startled her so much that she yelped,
and dropped the brush into her bucket of water with a splash.

She
stared at the closed door, sure that what she had heard must have been some
accident of an echo—someone out in the street, perhaps, or knocking at
one of the neighbors’ gates.

But
the rapping came again, brisk and insistent.

Who
could be knocking at this door
?
Surely no one knew that she was
here—

It
must be a tradesman. Or someone about a bill. It couldn’t be a delivery;
Alison was punctilious about canceling all deliveries when she expected to be
gone. The old cook had been quite incensed about that
—“
As
if we’re of no account and can live on bacon and tinned peas while she
swans about London
!”—
but she had even done so back when
the house was full of servants
.

Not
that I would mind if there had been a mistake
!
A delivery of baked
goods would be jam on top of the cream…

The
knocking came again. Whoever was there wasn’t going away. She got to her
feet, and slowly opened the door.

There
was a woman there—perhaps Alison’s age, or a little older, but she
was nothing like Alison. Her graying brown hair was done up in a knot at the
back of her head from which little wisps were straying. Friendly, amber-brown
eyes gazed warmly at Eleanor, though the focus suggested that the gaze was a
trifle short-sighted. Her round face had both plenty of little lines and very
pink cheeks. She was dressed quite plainly, in a heavy woolen skirt and smock,
with an apron, rather like a local farmer’s wife, complete with woolen
shawl wrapped around herself. She smiled at Eleanor, who found herself smiling
back.

“Hello,
my dear,” the woman said, in a soothing, low voice that tickled the back
of Eleanor’s mind with a sensation of familiarity. “I’m Sarah
Chase.”

Sarah
Chase
! Eleanor knew that name, though she had never actually met the
woman. Sarah Chase was supposed—at least by the children of
Broom—to be a witch!

Not
a bad witch, though—she didn’t live in a cobwebby old hut at the
edge of the forest, she lived right in the middle of Broom itself, in a tidy
little Tudor cottage literally sandwiched in between two larger buildings. On
the right was the Swan pub, and on the left, the village shop. Any children
bold enough to stand on the threshold of the door and try to peer into the
heavily curtained windows never were able to see anything, and the extremely
public situation meant that their mothers usually heard about the adventure and
they got a tongue-lashing about rude behavior and nosy-parkers. No one in
Eleanor’s circle of friends had ever seen Sarah Chase, in fact—

But
here she was, standing on the threshold, a covered basket in one hand, the
other outstretched a little towards Eleanor.

“Well,
dear,” the woman prompted gently. “Aren’t you going to ask
your godmother inside?”

Godmother
?

Her
mind was still taking that in, as her mouth said, without any thought on
her
part, “Come in, Godmother.” And the village witch stepped across
the threshold and entered the kitchen like a beam of sunshine.

For
the third time in her life, Eleanor’s life turned upside down.

She
sat, in something of a daze, on a stool beside the kitchen fire, where her
prosaic soup-pot full of beans and the end of the ham simmered, and listened to
impossible things.