The Gates of Sleep (12 page)

“Aunt Margherita has a little conservatory off her
loom room,” Marina replied, after a moment of thought. “She grows
herbs and things in there—”

“Just the thing; that’s probably her personal
workroom. Go join everyone and tell them I’ll be there in a moment.”
Elizabeth took the left-hand door that went further into the house. After a
moment of hesitation, Marina took the right.

Supper was just being served in the dining room; a shaded
oil lamp above the table shone down on the pristine linen tablecloth, and wisps
of steam arose from the dishes waiting in the center. Thomas and Margherita
were there and already eating, but Uncle Sebastian wasn’t, yet. Marina sat
down and helped herself from a random bowl in front of her; it proved to
contain mashed squash, of which she was inordinately fond. “Elizabeth had
a bowl of water—” she began.

“Ah. She’ll be watering my herbs with it, then,”
her aunt said immediately. “Just the thing.”

“That’s what she said—” Sebastian
came in at just that moment, trailed by Elizabeth, who still had the now empty
bowl.

“I found this prowling in your workroom, dearest,
what would you like me to do with it?” Sebastian said, pulling a laughing
Elizabeth forward by the wrist.

“Invite it to supper, of course, you great beast. I
trust everything went well for the first lesson?” Margherita replied,
with a playful slap at her husband’s hand.

“Zee student, she progresses with alacrity!”
Elizabeth said, in a theatrical, faux-French accent, which garnered a laugh.
She took her place between Margherita and Marina, and spread her napkin in her
lap.

“I’m glad to hear it. I assume that means we
can socialize this evening?” Thomas wanted to know.

“Certainly. All work and no play—speaking of
which, Sebastian, are you going to need the student for work tomorrow?”

Sebastian chewed meditatively on a forkful of rabbit for a
moment, thinking. “I
could
use her. I need more work on the
hands at the moment; hard to get them right without her. And I’d like to
do some sketches for the next projects.
Werther
and the Wife of Bath.”

“Then I absolve you of lessons in the morning, but in
the afternoon, we’ll take up where we left off,” Elizabeth decreed,
and reached for the platter nearest her plate. “Now, what have we here.
Stewed rabbit! Nothing illegal, I hope?”

“Sarah’s hutches, and she brought them up this
morning. Really, Elizabeth, I hope you don’t subscribe to the notion that
everyone
living in the country poaches!” Thomas looked
indignant, and Marina had to smother a laugh, because she knew very well that
Sarah didn’t have rabbit hutches, and that her dear uncle had been
talking to Hobson, who did poach, just that morning, for she’d seen him
out of her bedroom window.

“Now, don’t you try to pull the wool over my
eyes, sirrah!” Elizabeth retorted. “I know the taste of wild bunny
from hutched, and this little coney never saw the inside of a wire enclosure in
his life!”

“I am appalled—” Thomas began.

“And I did not fall off the turnip-cart yesterday!”
Elizabeth shot back.

The two of them wrangled amicably over dinner, until
Margherita managed to interject an inquiry about what Elizabeth’s husband
was up to. That led to a discussion of politics, which held absolutely no
interest for Marina. In fact, as the conversation carried on past dessert and
into the parlor, Marina found it hard to keep her eyes open.

She finally gave up, excused herself, and left politics and
a pleasant fire for the peace and quiet of her equally pleasant room. Jenny had
left a warm brick in the bed and banked the fire; Marina slipped into a flannel
nightgown, brushed and braided her hair, and with the sound of rain on her
window, got into bed. She thought she’d stay awake long enough to read,
but after rereading the same page twice, she realized there wasn’t a
chance she’d get through a chapter. And the moment she blew out her
candle, that was all she knew until morning.

RAINING again, rain drumming on the window of the workroom,
making the air alive with the energy of the storm. Marina had always been fond
of rain, but now it meant so much more than a cozy day indoors, watching the
fat drops splash into puddles. Now it meant a ready source of power, power she
was only just beginning to learn how to use.

“Watch carefully,” Elizabeth said—as she
had so many times during the lessons. But then she added, “Of all the
things that you can do with the magical energy you gather, this may be the most
important. Everything depends on it.”

Marina was hardly going to be
less
attentive, but
those words put just a fraction of a tingle of warning down her spine.

Because Elizabeth was right, of course. This was the most
important thing she could learn to do—because now that she could gather
in Water energies almost without thinking, and summon Elementals to the most
unlikely places, she was going to learn the shields peculiar to a Water Master.

The basic shields, those walls of pure thought that she
placed around her mind and soul, were not enough, she had already learned that
much this summer. They couldn’t even contain her thoughts away from
anyone else of the same affinity—or her Elementals—when she was
thinking hard, or her emotions were involved. How could she expect them to
defend her if something really did decide to test them?

So she watched Elizabeth with every particle of
concentration she had, her brow furrowed with intent, her hands clasped tightly
in her lap. The workroom seemed very quiet, the sound of the rain on the window
unnaturally loud.

She had watched Thomas build the shields of an Earth Master
and had dutifully tried to copy them, but with no success. He had built up
layer upon layer of heavy, ponderous shields, patiently, like building a series
of brick walls; somehow she could not manage to construct even a single layer,
and had felt defeated and frustrated.

And now, watching Elizabeth, she knew why she had
failed—

Elizabeth had taught her how to bring in power from the
very air, then had shown her how to touch, then handle, the stronger currents
that tended to follow the courses of the waters of the physical world. For
instance, there was a water source, an artesian well that was in turn fed from
a deep spring, from which the farmhouse pumps got their water. It actually was
right underneath Blackbird Cottage; it was also a wellspring of the energies
they both used, and Elizabeth tapped into it now.

Marina watched the power fountain up in answer to Elizabeth’s
call and waited, her breath catching in her throat, to see how Elizabeth could
possibly turn the fluid and mutable energies of Water into the solid and
immutable shields that Uncle Thomas had shown her. What did she do? Freeze
them, somehow? But how could you do
that?

Green and sparkling, leaping and swirling, the energies
flowed up and around Elizabeth until they met, above, below, surrounding her in
a sphere of perpetually moving force. Marina felt them brushing against the
edge of her senses, tasted sweet spring water on the tip of her tongue, and breathed
in the scent of more than the rain outside. From within the swirling sphere,
Elizabeth summoned yet another upwelling of power, and built a second dancing
sphere within the first. And a third within the second.

Layer upon ever-changing layer, she built, and Marina
waited for the energies to solidify into
walls.

Until suddenly it dawned on her that they weren’t
going to solidify; that these were what the shields of a Water Master looked
like. Not walls, but something the exact opposite of walls; something that did
not absorb attacks, but deflected them, spinning them away—or yielded
only to return, renewed.

Perhaps eventually a shield would be ablated away, but that
was why all shields were built in layers. Destroy one, and you were only
confronted by another, still strong, still intact.

But no wonder I couldn’t make the power do what I
wanted it to
do! Marina thought with elation.
It couldn’t! You
can’t make water into bricks, you can only make it do what is in its
nature to do!

She clasped her hands unconsciously under her chin, and her
beaming smile must have told Elizabeth that she had seen and understood,
because Elizabeth returned that smile, and with a gentle gesture of dismissal,
allowed the energies to swirl back whence they had come. In mere moments, she
stood unprotected again, her hands spread.

“You see?” she asked. “I use a much
simpler version most of the time, and obviously I don’t need to bother
with shields at all when I’m within the protections of my house or this
one.”

“Oh yes, I do see!” Marina cried. “Please,
may I try now?”

“You may, but remember—just as with all else I
have taught you, it will be much more difficult than it looked the first
time—and indeed, for many of the subsequent trials,” Elizabeth
cautioned. “Take your time, and don’t be discouraged.”

“I won’t,” Marina promised, and took a
deep breath, calmed her elation, and reached for the deep-flowing energies as
Elizabeth had taught her.

“You look exhausted, Mari,” her Uncle Sebastian
observed, clearly startled, as she paused with one hand on the doorframe of his
studio to steady herself.

She smiled; it was a tired smile, but a real one, and he
looked a little more reassured. “I
am,
Uncle—but I’m
not at all unhappy about being exhausted.”

“Elizabeth put you through a steeplechase, did she?”
Her uncle grinned. “She told me she was going to give you
shield-techniques today. And your progress?”

Marina didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she took
her place on the rumpled, unmade pallet on the posing-stand that stood in for
the bed in young Werther’s garret room. With great care, she arranged
herself half on, half off the bed, taking great care to put her head and
outflung arms within the chalk marks on the floor. Even when her uncle set her
the reclining pose she had not-so-jokingly requested, he couldn’t make it
a simple one!

Sebastian came over to her and tweaked and arranged the
folds of her jacket and shirt to his liking, then checked the disordered
bedclothes and put the empty “poison” bottle beside her outflung
right hand.

“I haven’t made much yet,” she admitted,
as Sebastian picked up palette and brush and went to work. “But then, I
don’t at first. I think that was why Elizabeth started me on other things
first, instead of going from energies straight to shielding—so I’d
know how difficult the specific Elemental magics are, and wouldn’t be
disappointed when I didn’t master shields immediately.”

“I think you’re probably right.”
Sebastian sounded as if he wasn’t listening to her, but she knew from
past experience that he heard every word and was paying close attention. It
wasn’t his
mind
that was painting so feverishly, or so he often
told her. His eye and his hand were practically connected when he worked, and
the less interference from the thinking part of him that there was, the better
and truer the painting.

She hardly noticed the ubiquitous scent of linseed oil and
paint in here anymore—except, as now, when a particularly strong waft of
it drifted over to her and she had to fight to keep from wrinkling her nose in
distaste.

“At any rate,” she sighed, “I haven’t
managed much, yet. But I will. It’s awfully tiring, though—I have
to use everything I have to I control the energies I’m calling up. Should
I have my eyes open, or closed?”

“It will be less tiring with practice,” Sebastian
promised. “Open eyes, please. You’re not supposed to be quite dead
yet.”

“Am I going to get better?” she teased, staring
up at the beams and boards of the ceiling. It felt very good to be lying down,
even if it was in this odd position. Uncle Sebastian had found a small,
flattish cushion that didn’t show under her hair for her to rest her head
on, and for once, this was a position where nothing had gone numb—or at
least, it hadn’t the last time she’d taken this pose.

“No, as you know very well, minx, since you
translated Werther’s story for me. But I want the lady who buys this
painting to fantasize that
she
might save him,” Sebastian
replied, and that was the last she got out of him, as the rain finally cleared
off and the clouds thinned. In fact, he didn’t say a word until the light
of the setting sun pierced the many leaded panes of the studio window, and he
sighed and stuck his brush behind his ear.

“All right, my wench—that’s enough for
today. You can get up now.”

She did so—slowly. Nothing was numb, but after three
hours of posing, broken only briefly by two breaks to get up and walk around,
she was stiff. At least the posing-platform was wood rather than the flagstones
of the floor, and Werther’s clothing, a shabby boy’s suit, was
comfortably warm.

“Don’t be discouraged in these shielding
lessons of yours, even though it’s likely to take longer than you think,
poppet,” Sebastian said, taking up the conversation where it had left
off—a disconcerting habit of his, but one that Marina was used to. “Where’s
my brush?”

“In your hair,” she answered promptly. “How
long do you think it’s going to take?”

“Ah—” he reached up and retrieved the
brush, and began to clean it carefully. “I suspect you won’t have
mastered shields before Elizabeth has to go home for the Christmas holidays
with her family.”

She couldn’t help it; her dismay must have shown on
her face, as he shrugged sympathetically and pulled the brush from behind his
ear. “It took
me
at least that long,” he admitted. “And
I was reckoned to be quick at learning magic.”

“Oh.” She couldn’t help but feel a pang
of disappointment, but she decided she might as well put a brave face on it. “I
had no idea,” she admitted, squaring her shoulders and trying to look as
if she was prepared for that much work.