Phoenix and Ashes (46 page)

He
was even whistling when he came down to breakfast to find his aunt and Lady
Virginia just beginning their own meal.

“Good
morning, my lady, Aunt April,” he said cheerfully as he went to the sideboard
to help himself—noting with a sigh that it was a dark-bread day. If there
was one thing he missed more than anything else since rationing had begun, it
was good white bread.

“Your
dear mother is up and out as usual,” his aunt told him, after presenting
her cheek for him to kiss. “And where she gets that energy from at this
hour of the day, I could not tell you. Certainly not from my side of the
family. Positively indecent. No one should be that awake at six. Well,
excepting milkmen, I suppose. And farmers. And one’s maid. But they
shouldn’t be so cheerful about it. And your dear mother should know
better. It troubles the servants when the mistress is up as early as they
are.”

Lady
Virginia, said nothing, neatly and economically disposing of grilled tomatoes,
while Aunt April talked and buttered toast without shedding a crumb.

This
was Aunt April’s usual sort of chatter; if there was a silence, she moved
to fill it with whatever came into her head, which made for some interesting
social moments, now and again. Reggie could still remember the time at a dinner
party in this very house, during his first year at Oxford, when she had asked
an eminent member of the the House of Lords, just as he was filling his lungs
to pontificate, if there was a reason why his shirt-front popped every time he
took a deep breath. Since the poor man had—up until that moment, at
least—clearly been unaware that his shirt-front did any such thing, he
had been left gaping at her like a stranded fish and had completely lost his
train of thought. Nor was that the end of it; he had been so self-conscious for
the rest of the evening that he never spoke more than a sentence or two. As
this had the result (at least according to his father) of preventing at least
three arguments, any one of which might have erupted into a major disagreement
if not a diplomatic incident, Aunt April had earned the undying gratitude of
the rest of the guests and standing invitations to more events than she could
ever possibly attend. And if she had a reputation as being more than a bit
dotty, every hostess worth her salt-cellar knew Aunt April could be counted on
to defuse potential disasters with an unfocused laugh and a disingenuous remark
at precisely the right moment. And if a stuffed-shirt or two was left embarrassed
and wondering how it had happened, at least it was nothing he could take
exception to.

“Mother’s
been an early riser for as long as I can remember, Aunt April,” Reggie
said, sitting down with his own plate of grilled tomatoes and eggs. “And
I doubt that the servants even notice. This is the countryside; people get up
earlier than they do in town.”

“And
I can’t think
why
,” Aunt April responded, waving her knife
for emphasis, her brows furrowed. “What is there to get up early
for
?
It’s not as if there was shooting at this time of year, and anyway, by
the time it’s shooting season, getting up early isn’t early
anymore, it’s properly late.”

Reggie
didn’t even try to wrap his mind around that statement; it made sense to
Aunt April, so that was all that counted.

“You
do rattle on, April,” said Lady Virginia without rancor. “Reginald,
I want to speak with you as soon as you have finished your breakfast.
Privately.”

“Oh,
good,” Aunt April said, looking suddenly cheerful. “We’ll get
that
over with, then, and it won’t be hanging over our heads
like a rock of Sophocles, or was it the sword of Thucydides? Whichever it was,
it was a terribly uncomfortable object to have hanging over your head, and I
would hate to have it hanging over ours, spoiling the entire visit—”

“Damocles,”
Lady Virginia said, interrupting. “It was the Sword of Damocles, dear, as
if you didn’t know, since I know very well you were making better use of
your brother’s classics tutor than your brother did. Now, if you could
take your tea to the terrace—”

“Oh,
I’m finished, Virginia, and I’ll run off and find nothing to
do,” Aunt April said, with a gay little wave of her hand as she rose in a
flutter of lace flounces. “Do get him to come around to taking up his
powers again, will you, dear? Of course you will, if he doesn’t want to,
you’ll threaten him with Smith.”

She
trotted off, without waiting for a word from either of them, leaving him
staring at Lady Virginia across the breakfast table, nervously crumbling toast
and wishing he’d sent down for a tray instead of coming to the table this
morning.

“Reginald,”
Lady Virginia said, raising her chin a little. “This nonsense of avoiding
magic must stop. Now.”

She
couldn’t have been more direct, and she left him with no graceful way out
of the conversation. He clenched his teeth, and replied just as directly.

“Lady
Virginia—forgive me, but you can’t possibly know
why
I
am—”

She
did something she had never done before, in all of his acquaintance with her.
She interrupted him.

“Actually,”
she said tartly, “I do know. I know exactly why, in excruciating detail.
I have not been idle these three years. I am a VAD—a
working
VAD, though admittedly, a part-time VAD, since my old bones are hardly up to
the long hours the young ones put in, and I have no intention of living in some
squalid little dormitory with a pack of girls. I have been spending many long
hours at the bedsides of young enlisted men, and I wasn’t simply mopping
their brows, as you should by now be aware. Furthermore, they talk to me,
Reginald. I induce them to talk to me, because it is sometimes the only way to
purge them of their horrors.”

Reggie
felt his eyes widen with shock. It had never occurred to him that aristocratic
Lady Virginia would have volunteered to do nursing-aide work. But—she was
continuing.

“And
as for what happened specifically to you, not only did I get the gist of the
experience from Maya, one of my working-class protégés, a clever
Earth magician that I sponsored through nurse’s training, was privy to
some of your experience in the trenches, as you rather unambiguously shared it
with whoever was Sensitive at the time.”

He
stared at her, appalled that he had done any such thing. Granted, he’d
been out of his senses but still, “Who?”

Lady
Virginia shrugged. “You weren’t conscious, so you won’t
recognize the name. A nurse at the first field-hospital you came to, if you
must know; an Earth-worker, as I told you—they can’t seem to stay
away from pursuing healing at the Front. You nearly gave her a breakdown and
she had to come home to me for a month. Fortunately, Maya sorted her out.
Unfortunately, Maya does not seem to have been as successful with you.”

He
blinked at her. There didn’t seem to be anything he could say.
“I’m sorry about your protégée—” he
began.

She
waved his apology away. “She knew that she was going to encounter things
like that before she volunteered, and the experience has given her better
shields. And
you
could learn from her example. As soon as she could,
she was back, using what power she has for the greatest good.”

He
flushed.

She
saw the flush, correctly assumed it was embarrassment, and shook her head.
“You mistake me. I am not going to act like your idiotic grandfather and
call you a coward, because I know you aren’t. That leg of yours
can’t—according to Doctor Maya—be more than half healed. And
I know that
you
think that you have taken the best steps you can to
protect yourself. But Reginald, walling yourself off from magic is
not
going to solve your problem. In fact, it is only going to make things
worse.”

Nettled,
now, he narrowed his eyes. “I can’t see how.”

Lady
Virginia sighed. “Naturally you can’t see how. You haven’t
looked.” She eyed him shrewdly. “You’ve forgotten that
building walls instead of shields blinds you to what is going on around you. I
don’t suppose you’d have the effrontery to tell me you’ve
been sleeping the sleep of the just lately, would you?”

“Last
night—” he began, but she interrupted him again.

“Oh,
last night, of course. But what about for the last month?” She stared at
him, daring him to lie with her eyes.

And
he couldn’t. He gave in, feeling his fragile defenses crumple under the
pressure of the knowledge she had in her eyes. He didn’t know
how
she knew, but she clearly did. “No. I’ve gotten no more than a few
hours of rest at most over the past few weeks. Most nights are as bad as they
were when I was in hospital.”

“I’m
not surprised,” Lady Virginia replied, with satisfaction.
“Considering that until last night you had a small army of revenants
breathing down your neck. Even walled and shielded, you would have sensed them,
and had they gained in power, you would have been at their mercy. Revenants are
not subject to the same laws as Elementals, as you should well know, and if
they had been able to break through to you, they would have shredded your mind
at the least, and possibly worse than that.”

That
took him completely by surprise. “Revenants? But—”

What
could he possibly have done to arouse revenants? And here? There hadn’t
been a haunt anywhere near Longacre for generations!

But—“haunted”
described exactly how he had been feeling for the last month or so.

Revenants!
The mere thought made him dizzy. No, revenants were
not
subject to the
same laws as Elementals. They could even make themselves seen and felt by ordinary
mortals. Really powerful ones could kill.

“Smith
and I encountered them clawing at the shields around the grounds last night as
we came in,” Lady Virginia continued ruthlessly. “We dispelled them
of course. But
if you
had been properly doing your job instead of
relying on your late father’s defenses—which are eroding, may I
add—you would have known they were there and done something about them
weeks ago.”

“But—”
His head was whirling at this point.

“But
me no buts. I will accept no excuses. Think, will you?” she demanded.
“There are surely at least a handful of sensitives down in that village
of yours, if not a real practitioner. What if one of
them
had been
caught by the revenants instead of Smith and me?”

“I’ll
build better shields,” he said grimly, getting his metaphorical feet
under him again. “I’ll put myself behind magical walls too thick
for anything to sense me or find me, and I won’t attract any more
trouble—”

“Reginald
David Alexander Tiberius Fenyx, you have
tried
that, and it
did
not work
!” Lady Virginia exploded, losing her temper as she had
seldom ever done in his presence. He shrank back involuntarily, as she slapped
the table three times with an open palm, emphasizing her last three words.
“By the Archangel Raphael, I swear, if your father was alive to hear
this, he would—well, I don’t know what he would
do
, but I
know what he would
be
, and that is bitterly disappointed! I expect the
idiots in the War Office to fail to learn from their mistakes, but I thought
better of you!”

“But—”
he protested feebly.

“You
were behind shields—your own and your father’s—and those
revenants still found you! And I cannot for the life of me imagine what
you
could have done that would attract the attention of a renegade Druid, a couple
of Roman-British louts in armor, an assortment of Regency highwaymen, and a
spread of nasty cutthroats stretching back to hide-wearing henge-builders! Now
what about that makes you suspicious?” She stared at him, demanding that
he think.

And
he did, though he didn’t want to admit what he was thinking. “They
were sent?”

She
sniffed. “Better. I was beginning to wonder if you had left some of your
wits back there on the Front. Yes, they were sent. I do not know by whom, or
why, but they were certainly carefully called up, invoked, bound, and sent.
Probably Beltane Night, which would account for your disturbed sleep since
then. And with them dispelled, which their master will most certainly know, the
next things that are purposed to attack you will be stronger.”

He
just stared at her numbly. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine why
anyone would set revenants on him.

“It
doesn’t actually matter who did this, or why,” Lady Virginia
continued. “The point is that renouncing magic is not going to make this
person go away. I don’t believe that whoever this is has any plans to
leave you alone until you are dead or mad.”

Her
eyes glittered at him; he hadn’t truly understood how
hard
she
could be when she felt the need. At that moment, it came home to him that she
had been an Air Master—a
combative
magician, on a Front of her
own—for most of her life. She was as mentally tough as any soldier, if
not more so. She might not have been a part of the Council, but he knew quite
well that she was part of some other White Lodge, and had been just as active
as any of Alderscroft’s Masters.

Perhaps
the only difference between her and those now in the trenches was that her
experience of combat had not left her disillusioned and bitter.

“Nor
are you my primary concern at this moment,” she said, stabbing her finger
down at the tablecloth for emphasis. “You
might
be able to
protect yourself behind your shields and your walls. But what about others?
What about the sensitives down in your village? Can they? When whoever this is
levels barrage after barrage of magical attacks against you, who do you think
is going to pay the price as those attacks reflect off your defenses?”