Phoenix and Ashes (7 page)

“Reggie,
I’m an
Earth Master
. The ground in France and Belgium is
saturated
with blood,” she said, with a thin veneer of calm over her words.
“I
know
what that attracts. There are monsters in the earth of
France, Reggie, and they are fattening and thriving on that slaughter—and
when that shell hit that bunker, they had a tidbit of the sort they could only
crave and dream about in their power. Air and Earth are natural enemies, and
they had
you
in their territory, in their grasp, to do with what they
wanted.” His vision began to film over as panic rose in his chest; he
clutched her hands, as though clutching a lifeline, as she put into words what
he could not. “They had you, Reggie, their greatest enemy, a Master of Air
and
a Master of the Light, helpless, on
their
ground.”
He couldn’t see, now, as all the memories came flooding back. He heard
his breath rasping in his throat, his heart pounding, and could not move for
the fear. Dimly, through the roaring in his ears, he heard her ask the question
he did not want to answer.

“What
did they do to you, Reggie? What did they do?”

Maya
Scott sat with her husband in a place in the Exeter Club where—before her
marriage to Peter Scott—no woman had ever been before. It was a lovely
day outside, still; the windows stood wide open to the warm air, and the sun
streamed down onto old Persian rugs, caressed brown leather upholstery, and
touched the contents of brandy bottles with gold.

“So,”
said the Lord Alderscroft, often called the Old Lion—older now than when
she had first met him, and aged by more than years. “You’ve seen
the boy.”

She
nodded.

Lord
Alderscroft sat like the King on his throne, in his wingback chair in his own
sitting room in his private suite on the top floor of the Exeter Club, and
raised a heavy eyebrow at Maya. “Your report, please, Doctor
Scott?”

Maya
never sat here without feeling a distant sense of triumph. It had been her
doing that had broken down the last three barriers of the White Lodge housed
here in the Exeter Club—of gender, lineage, and race. She would have
failed the Edwardian tests on all three counts; female, common, and of mixed
Indian and British blood. But King Edward was gone, and King George was on the
throne, and after the defeat of her aunt, there was not a man on the Council
who felt capable of objecting to her presence. And truth to tell, they
needed
her. They had needed her before the war. She was one of a handful of Earth
Masters who could bear to live and work in the heart of a great city.

Now
they needed her—and the other women they had admitted to the White
Lodge—more than ever. The war had been no easier on the ranks of the
Elemental Masters than it was on the common man.

Today,
however, triumph was not even in the agenda. “He’s in wretched
shape, my lord,” she said slowly. “It is not helping that so many
physicians and most officers, all of whom should know better, are convinced
that shellshock is just another name for malingering. Even as
he
,
himself, acknowledges that he is not well, there is the subconscious conviction
that if he only had an ounce more willpower, he would get over it and back to
the fight. I can tell him differently until I turn as blue as Rama; until he
believes it in his heart, he will continue to berate himself even as he
suffers.”

Lord
Alderscroft—who, not that long ago, would have agreed with those
physicians and officers—sighed heavily. He knew better now. All Elemental
Masters knew better; the war was hellish, but it was worse on the minds and
nerves of Elemental Masters. The truth was, most of the Masters that had gone
into the trenches,
if
they survived the senseless, mindless way in
which the War Department threw away their lives, were there for less than six
months before their minds broke. “So he is in no fit state, as Doctor
Boyes reports, with a ripe case of shell-shock as well as physical injuries.
And as if that were not enough, then there is what he faced, in the
earth.”

She
shook her head, and swallowed, as her husband closed his hand over hers. She
had closed herself off as much as she had dared, but as a Healer and a
physician, she had needed to know something of what he had experienced.

She
had been ready for it, and of course, it had come at second hand, but it had
been too horrific for anyone to really understand without sharing it.

She
gave Peter a faint smile of thanks. “You do not wish to know the details,
my lord. Horrors. That is enough, I think. The inimical forces of all four
Elements can terrify, but I think that those of Earth are most particularly apt
at destroying the mind with fear. They swarmed him and tormented him from the
moment the earth was shattered around him to the moment that the rescue party
broke through and got him out. The records say he was more dead than alive. I
am not at all surprised. What I am surprised at is that he has a mind left at
all, much less a rational one.”

“Well,”
Alderscroft rumbled, his face creased and re-creased with lines of care,
“We humans have taught them about torment and horror all too well, have
we not?” He sighed again.

“Do
not lay too much upon the shoulders of mere mortals, my lord,” Maya
replied, grimly. “Recall that it is Healing that is in the Gift of the
Earth Mages and Elementals. The converse is harm, and it is naturally true of
the dark side of that Element.” She thought with pity of the poor fellow,
who she last recalled seeing as a bright young Oxford scholar, utterly
shattered and weeping his heart out, bent over her knees. It was a state she
had wanted to bring him to—for without that initial purging, he could not
even begin to heal—but it had been painful for her to do so, and only the
fact that she had done it before, to others, even made it possible for
her
to carry it through. But she was a surgeon, and surgeons became hardened to
necessity after a time. You could not cleanse a wound without releasing the
infection. You could not heal the mind without letting some of the pressure
off. “The larger consequence for
us
, my lord, is that he has cut
himself off from any use of his powers.”

Lord
Alderscroft closed his eyes. “I feared as much. And we cannot afford
that. Too many of us are gone—”

“Nevertheless,
he has closed off his mind to his power,” she replied. “And it is
of no use trying to get him to open it now. He tells me that the things that
attacked him destroyed his Gifts, and he believes it with every iota of his
being.”

“And
that isn’t true?” A second figure stepped away from the shadows
beside the fireplace; another nobleman, Peter Almsley, lean and blond,
nervously highbred, and the Scotts’ best friend. He was in a uniform, but
he was on some sort of special duty with the War Department that kept him off
the Front. She suspected that special duty was coordinating the magical defense
of the realm. Certainly Alderscroft wasn’t young enough anymore to do so.

She
closed her eyes for a moment. Even if Fenyx never flew again,
he
could
be put to doing what Almsley was doing—with more effectiveness. The Air
Elementals actually controlled winds and weather to some extent, and if an Air
Master could see to the
physical
defenses of the country—

She
did not shudder, she had endured worse than bombardment by Zepps and Hun
aeroplanes, but—it was hard, hard, to hear the drone of those motors in the
sky, in the dark, and look up helplessly at the ceiling and wait for the first
explosions and wonder if you were sitting on the target, or if you would be
able to scramble away to somewhere safer when you knew where the bombs were
falling. And if the latter—who, of your friends,
was
sitting on
the target. If Reggie could be persuaded—

She
shook her head. “There is nothing wrong at all with his Gifts,” she
said, decidedly. “But I think that, in those dreadful two days
underground, he understood instinctively that his very power was what attracted
the Earth creatures to him, and that if he closed that power off, they would
cease to torment him. At some level deeper than thought—Doctor Freud
would have called it the
id
—in the most basic of his instincts,
he walled that part of himself away. And now he truly does not believe it
exists anymore.”

“So
you can get him back—” Alderscroft began, eagerly, looking
optimistic for the first time this interview began.

But
she shook her head emphatically. “Not I. This is too complicated a case
for me. Doctor Andrew Pike in Devon is the man you need—”

But
Almsley groaned. “Not a chance of a look-in there, Maya. Not now, not
ever
.
It’s one thing to unburden his weary soul to you, my heart—but if
you call in the good Doctor Pike, or worse, send the boy to him, our Reggie
will have to admit that he’s gone balmy, and that he can never do.”

Maya
looked from Almsley to Alderscroft and back again, and felt like stamping her
feet with frustration at what she read there. Men! Why did they have to be so
stubborn
about such things?

“Maya,
think,” her husband said, quietly. “If he’s sick with guilt
over the idea that he’s malingering, what do you think the mere sight of
Andrew Pike at his bedside do to his feelings about himself?”

Defeated,
she could only shake her head.

“Going
‘round the bend is just not the done thing, my heart,” Almsley said
sadly. “It’s what your dotty Uncle Algernon does, not an officer
and a gentleman. Andrew could probably have him right and tight in months, but
that doesn’t matter. If he saw Andrew, he’d be certain that we all
think he’s mad, and if he’s mad, he’s broken and useless, and
worse, he’s a disgrace to the old strawberry leaves and escutcheon. If
he’s gone mad, he might just as well die and avoid embarrassing the
family.”

She
leveled her gaze at Alderscroft. “Then you had better hope he can get
well and work his way through his troubles on his own,” she said, doing
her best to keep accusation out of her tone. “But
I
don’t
think that he will. Not without a powerful incentive to break through that wall
of fear that keeps him away from his power, and I can tell you right now that
duty, honor, and pride are not powerful enough. Duty, honor, and pride
aren’t enough to get him through the shell-shock, much less break through
to his Gifts again. Furthermore—”

Should
she tell them?

She
was a physician; she had to.

“Furthermore,
I consider that without Doctor Pike’s help, there is a real possibility
that he may do away with himself if he can’t manage to get himself through.
Because I am not sure he can live with the pain, the fear, and the conflicts
inside himself as he is now.”

There.
She’d said it.

She
expected them to look shocked, to protest. They didn’t; they only looked
saddened and resigned.

“It
won’t be the first one we’ve lost that way,” Almsley said
softly, revealing the reason for their reaction. He turned to Alderscroft.
“What do you think, send him home on recovery leave?”

Almsley
hadn’t asked her, but she answered anyway. “At least if he is at
home, he will be in familiar surroundings and far away from anything military.
It might help.”

Alderscroft
nodded his massive head, slowly. “Get his grandmother to keep an eye on
him; I think it’s the best we can do. I’ll talk to some people, and
get him leave to recover at home.” He turned back to Maya. “Thank
you, doctor. You have been of immense help; more than you know. I only wish it
were possible to take more of your advice. I promise, we will see to it that
everything that
can
be done, will be. And it will not be for lack
of—flexibility—on our part.”

That
was a dismissal if ever she had heard one, and reluctantly, she allowed her
husband to assist her to her feet and took her leave.

But it did nothing
to end her anger—which was the only way she could keep her own profound
depression at bay.
I hate this bloody, senseless, useless, stupid war
.

March 14, 1917
London

THE ROBINSONS HAD
TAKEN THE first train to London, set themselves up at the Savoy Hotel, and gone
straight out to take care of the most urgent need for all three of
them—new wardrobes. But their visits to the first three fashion
houses—their usual haunts—were less than a success.

“Have
you ever seen such ugly colors?” Carolyn complained (rather too loudly)
to her mother, as she and her sister followed hard on their mother’s
heels out to the pavement in front of the third. “Drab brown, drab olive,
drab navy and drab cream. Khaki, khaki, khaki! And nothing but tweeds and
linens! And for spring and summer! What about silk? What about muslin? Do they
think we’re all Land Girls?”

Her
mother shrugged. “We’ll try another atelier, dear,” she said,
with a glance up the street, looking for a taxi. “Someone who isn’t
trying so hard to be patriotic and dress us all in uniforms.”

“I
don’t see why one has to be plain to be patriotic,” Lauralee
pouted. Her sister sniffed.

“Plain?
Made up like a Guy, more like!” Carolyn exclaimed. “I don’t
want to look like I’m in uniform and I don’t want to look like
a—a suffragette! I want—”

“Leave
it to me, girls; I have some notions,” Alison replied, and spied a free
taxi in the same moment. Taxis were thin on the ground in London now, but
Alison had no intention of subjecting herself to the Underground or the
‘buses. It didn’t take much more than a lifted finger and a spark
of magic to summon it, as it passed by five other people trying to hail it,
including one disgruntled cavalry officer.