Phoenix and Ashes (27 page)

After
all, why should Reggie care if
she
turned up? He was probably just
down here to enjoy the solitude of his own meadow. She’d be an invader,
as she had been the first day. Oh, he’d be polite, but he wouldn’t
want her there, surely—

She
almost turned back at the stile; almost didn’t climb it to get into the
wooded end of the field. But she’d come this far—and she had a
lovely tea with her. He’d surely appreciate that. And she wouldn’t
chatter like the girls his mother was inviting for tea.

I
don’t have to stay very long, she told herself, as she clambered over the
stile. The minute it seems as if he wants to be alone, I can go
.

After
all, what did they have in common? She hadn’t been to university, she
didn’t drive a motorcar or fly, she knew nothing about the war except
what she read in the papers, and besides, he wouldn’t want to talk about
that. She was years his junior. She couldn’t even talk to him about
magic, which was probably the
only
thing they had in common. He
probably was only being polite the last time—

And
what happened last time
?
A voice like cool flame in the back of her
mind said, in a reasoned tone
. You didn’t talk about anything. You
listened. He did the talking. Just go. See what happens.

By
that point, she was among the trees, with the meadow just beyond her, golden
sunlight pouring down before her at the end of the corridor of trees.
I
might as well go as not
, she thought, and tossed her head. He did ask me
to come back, and if he didn’t mean it, he shouldn’t have asked me.

When
she came through the trees, at first she didn’t see him. He wasn’t
sitting on the tree trunk where he had been the last time she had seen him.
Then she saw he had spread a blanket out on the new grass, and was lying on his
back—she thought he was looking up at the sky, but as she got closer, she
saw that he was asleep.

She
sat down carefully, just on the edge of the blanket, to avoid waking him. There
were dark circles under his eyes and it seemed to her that he looked more tired
and worn than the last time she had seen him.
Isn’t he getting enough
sleep
? That seemed strange to her; wasn’t that why he was here in
the first place, to rest and recover from his injuries? Why shouldn’t he
be sleeping enough?

He
looked so sad; there were so many lines in his brow that only unhappiness and
pain could have put there.

In
fact, he looked so very vulnerable that she began to feel uncomfortable about
watching him like this; it seemed a violation of his privacy.

She
began to look around, feeling more and more uncomfortable. And that was when
she saw—Them.

Horrible,
ugly, deformed little gnomes.

She
could tell, just by the sickly yellow-brown shimmer around them, that they were
not something that most people would see. So they must be Elementals. They
ignored her completely, concentrating avidly on Reggie, as if he was something
tasty, and they were ravenous.

They
had mouths full of nasty, yellowed, pointed teeth, tiny eyes like black beads,
and they drooled. No two of them were alike, but they all looked misshapen, and
all were colors that just seemed unhealthy.

They
stood on the edge of the meadow, just under the trees, skulking in the
underbrush, and as she stood up, slowly, she saw that they had formed into a
rough circle, completely surrounding the place where Reggie was sleeping.

The
sight of them absolutely infuriated her, for no reason that she could name,
except perhaps that these evil little creatures were clearly ganging up on a
sleeping, helpless man.

She
stood up, and quick as a thought, cast a Fire shield around both of them.

That
certainly got their attention. The expressions on their faces changed abruptly
from the sort you might see on the face of a schoolyard bully, to startled
alarm and shock
.

Now
they looked at her—and she glared back.
Can I call a Salamander here
?
Now
?
Without a physical fire around
? She didn’t think
she dared try anything larger and more powerful, but she didn’t know if
the Salamanders would answer her here, either—

Nothing
ventured, nothing gained
. She sketched the proper signs in the air, and
concentrated, not commanding, but entreating.
The last thing she wanted to
do now was to anger an Elemental by commanding it. Not when she was so new to
this sort of thing
.

To
her amazement and delight, she was answered immediately, and not by one, but by
a bevy of the fiery little creatures, who appeared within the shield as she had
specified, and swarmed all over her, twining around her ankles, her arms,
around her head and neck like so many fiery ferrets. And then, suddenly, they
all stopped moving. And their heads moved as one, as they stared at the evil
gnomes ringing the meadow.

They
hissed; it sounded like a hundred steam-kettles, and there was absolutely no
doubt that whatever those things were, the Salamanders hated them on sight.

“Go!”
she whispered. “Get them!” And the Salamanders flowed off her,
surging across the perimeter of the shield, and heading for the gnomes at a
speed that made her blink.

The
gnomes apparently did not intend to wait around to see what the Salamanders
could do to them. They made no sound, or at least, no sound that Eleanor could
hear, but they turned with looks of frantic fear and began
swimming
into the turf.

It
wasn’t digging, because the ground remained physically undisturbed,
without so much as a blade of grass being displaced, and the motions they made
reminded her far more of swimming than of digging. But there was no doubt that
they were trying to escape the Salamanders, and when one of her Elementals
caught up with one of the gnomes that was a little too slow, she saw exactly
why.

The
Salamander writhed around the gnome with blinding speed; there was a
“pop” like a champagne cork, and a puff of muddy brown smoke, and
the gnome was gone.

No
more than a couple of the gnomes were too tardy to escape, however. The rest
were under the turf by the time the Salamanders reached them.

The
Salamanders surged around the periphery of the meadow like terriers hunting for
rats, but the vast majority of the gnomes had escaped, and the Salamanders
didn’t seem able to follow them underground. Finally they gave up, and
flowed back to her, winding around her again until she giggled under her
breath, clearly wanting to be told how clever and brave they had been. She
obliged them, though keeping to whispers, not wanting to awaken poor Reggie.
Finally they seemed content with the praise, and she sensed they were ready to
be dismissed. With a wave of her hand and the proper glyph she obliged them,
and they dispersed, fading into the sunlight, leaving nothing of themselves
behind but the faintest of warmth around her ankles and wrists.

Which
left her still with the unanswered question of what to do about Reggie. Finally
she dispersed the shield, picked up her basket and walked to edge of the
meadow. Once there, she did the only thing she could think of. She began to
whistle, and saunter along as if she had only just arrived.

As
she had hoped, his head popped up immediately; eyes a little startled, but she
ignored that. “Hullo!” she called, waving her hand.
“I’ve brought some nice things for tea, if you want some!”

“And
I’ve brought ginger-beer,” was his reply, as he sat up, shaking his
head, and rubbing at his eyes. “Hang if I didn’t doze
off—must’ve been the sun, makes a chap sleepy.”

She
paced up to him as he stood up and took the basket from her. “I
say,” he said, a little shyly. “I’m awfully glad you came.
I’ve been here nearly every day, hoping you would.”

It
was her turn to blush and feel shy. “It’s hard for me to—to
get away—I have to work, you see—” she managed, around her
stepmother’s prohibitions. “Perhaps you shouldn’t waste your
time.”

“It’s
my time to waste, isn’t it?” he retorted, and softened the words
with a smile. “Besides, this is probably exactly what the medical
johnnies have in mind for me, dozing out in meadows and what-all. They’d
probably be perfectly happy about it. In fact, if it will make you feel any
better, I’ll write one of ‘em and ask her to write out a
prescription for just that. Before I came out here she was threatening to
descend on Longacre to make sure I rested; I’m sure she’d be
pleased to find out I had a reason to want to.”

Her
smile faltered a little. “She?” she replied. “A
lady-doctor?”

Of
course, and a lady-doctor would be just the sort of woman he’d be
fascinated by; able to stand up for herself and clever, and able to talk to him
about all manner of things—

“Oh,
yes, the only one I really know personally, Doctor Maya Scott,” he said
happily, completely oblivious to the fact that she had gone quiet.
“Married to a friend of mine; capital wench, and does she know her
business! If there were any justice, she’d be head of surgery at least,
maybe head of an entire hospital.” He shook his head, as she belatedly
reacted to the words “married to a friend of mine” and brightened
again. “Well, maybe she doesn’t want that, come to think of it.
Can’t say I would.”

“If
she is a really good doctor, she probably doesn’t want to be made head of
anything, so long as she’s left to do what she feels is right, and that
she needs to do,” Eleanor replied, thinking as she spoke. “It seems
to me that taking a good doctor and making her into a—a glorified
clerk—isn’t the sort of thing that a good doctor would want.”

“You
probably have something there,” Reggie said, with a nod. He patted the
blanket. “Well, you’re here
now
and I’m glad you
could get away. Come sit down and we’ll have our tea. What have you been
doing with yourself all this time?”

“Work,”
she replied truthfully. “Not at all glamorous. Servant’s work, to
tell the truth.” That last was pulled out of her, almost unwillingly, but
she felt she owed it to him.

He
reached into the basket and handed her a sandwich without faltering. “Our
good vicar would tell you that there’s no shame in an honest day’s
labor,” he replied. “And I’d second him. We got all sorts in
our air-wing. Not just the mechanics and the orderlies, either—truth is,
I never saw where being a cockney guttersnipe or a Yankee cowboy made a fellow
a worse pilot, or being a duke’s son made him a better one. Opposite,
more often than not, in fact.” He bit hungrily into his sandwich, cutting
anything else he was going to say short, and she nibbled on hers to keep from
having to respond. It was a rather astonishing thing for him to have said; he
certainly wouldn’t have felt that way before he went off to war.

Yes,
and he’s been spending all his time down at The Broom, and not at the
Broom Hall Inn, hasn’t he
? she answered herself.

“Did
you meet a lot of Americans?” she asked, seizing on his last statement as
a way to draw him out a little more.

“More
Canadians, which aren’t quite the same thing.” He ate the last few
bites of his sandwich neatly, then uncorked a bottle of ginger beer and handed
it to her, before taking one from his rucksack for himself. “The
Canadians were—quieter. Didn’t seem so intent on making a rowdy
reputation for themselves. Mind you, the Australians are at least as loud as
the Yanks. Only ever met a few of the Yanks, and they were all cut of the same
cloth—right out of a Wild West show, tall, loud, rough. Good lads, but
seemed determined that they were going to show all of us that they were larger
than life.”

She
laughed a little at his quizzical expression. “Maybe they only thought
they had to live up to what’s written in their novels?” she
suggested. “And the only novels I’ve ever heard of that had
Canadians in them were all about the mounted police, not about cowboys and
outlaws.”

“Which
came first, the novel or the stereotype?” He grinned and shook his head.
“Well, if I could answer that, I’d be a wiser man than I am. All I
can tell you is that the Yanks fly like they’re trying to ride a wild
horse, all seat and no science. It makes them either brilliant, or cracks them
up, and nothing in between. The Huns are all science and no seat—”

“And
the French?” she prompted.

“Ah,
the French. Science with style, and a great deal of attitude.” He nodded
wisely. “They fly like their women dress. They take a little bit of
nothing and make everything out of it, throw themselves at impossible targets
and often as not, pull the trick off on the basis of sheer
savoir faire
.
Then when you try and congratulate or commiserate with them, you get the same
answer. ‘
C’est la vie, c’est la guerre
,’ and
then they beg a cigarette off you and make off with the whole pack, and you end
up feeling privileged they took your last fag-end.” He shook his head
again, chuckling.

She
smiled. He seemed easier talking about the war and flying today than he had
been the last time she’d seen him. But she didn’t want to press
things too hard, so she asked him what he had been doing since they’d
last met.

He
sighed. “Oh, being horribly lord-of-the-manor. Meeting my tenant farmers.
Looking at alternatives to some of what we’ve been raising—things
that won’t need as much labor. Going over the books with my estate
manager. Mater didn’t bother; mention the accounts to her and she flaps
her hands and looks a bit faint.”

“Poor
thing,” Eleanor said, feelingly. “I hate accounting. I keep
thinking I’ve put numbers in all the wrong columns, even when I
haven’t.”

“Well,
she
would
do just that and never know it, and that’s a
fact.” He set his empty ginger-beer bottle down, and rummaged in the
basket inquisitively. “I say! Tea-cakes!”