The Gates of Sleep (13 page)

“Proper shielding is hard, poppet.” He
grimaced, and ran his fingers through his hair, leaving a set of ocher streaks
to go with the vermilion ones already there. “Really, it uses everything
you’ve ever learned about magic. Once you learn personal shields, then
you have to learn how to expand them to fit your work space or your home, how
to make them permanent, and how to disguise them inside the common shields you
already know.
Then
you have to learn how to make them seem to
disappear altogether, so that you look perfectly ordinary to anyone who might
look at you with the Sight.”

She’d had no idea, and for a moment, the mere thought
of all the work that still lay ahead of her made her heart quail with dismay.

Her uncle seemed to sense that, and put a supporting arm
around her shoulders. “You can do it, Mari. If
I
could, you
certainly can.”

She leaned her head against him for a moment of comfort,
then managed a laugh. “Oh, Uncle Sebastian, you just said you were
quick
at learning magic!”

“I was. I was also lazy.” He gave her a quick
squeeze and let her go. “Why don’t you hop upstairs and change for
supper? You’re probably hungry as well as tired, and you’ll feel
better once you’ve eaten.”

“You’re probably right,” she agreed, and
dropped a kiss on his cheek. “I love you, Uncle Sebastian.”

“I love you too, poppet,” he said, as she left
him among his paints and canvases. “Never forget that.”

As if I ever would!

The rains of October had given way to the cold of November,
and then to the deeps of December. It didn’t rain nearly as often, but
the skies still remained gray and overcast most of the time. Every morning the
ground was coated with a thick cover of hoarfrost, and the windows bore
delicate, fernlike traceries of frost on the inside.

Marina had finally progressed to the point where she could
bring up and maintain a single shield, and was just able to bring up a second
one inside the first, though she could not yet manage to juggle the complicated
structures for very long.

It was far easier to build the common shields and disguise
her special shield within them—and for some reason she had mastered the
ability to camouflage the common shields as the random and chaotic patterns of
a perfectly normal person almost immediately. Why that should be, she couldn’t
begin to imagine, but it seemed to make her guardians happy.

In spite of the fact that she no longer had formal
schooling, she was working harder, and she had less leisure, than ever before.
During the best hours of daylight, she posed for Sebastian; the morning and
late afternoon and sometimes even the evening belonged to Elizabeth Hastings.
There were no rest days for her, and she found herself almost looking forward
to the second week of December, when Elizabeth would leave them for Christmas,
and not return until after Boxing Day.
Almost,
but she enjoyed
Elizabeth’s company so much…

But the work was so hard. It wasn’t just physical
work, either, it involved everything: mind, body, spirit—

And now she wasn’t just sitting there when she posed
for Uncle Sebastian, she was practicing those shields; not the full and strong
ones that she practiced in the work-room, but wispy little things that were
easier to bring up.

Yet Elizabeth was working just as hard, and for no personal
gain that Marina could see. When Marina was posing, Elizabeth would either be
down at the village making good her pretense of collecting folk ballads, or in
the workroom doing—

—well, Marina wasn’t quite sure what she was
doing. It obviously had
something
to do with magic, but she couldn’t
tell what it could be.

She was tempted, more than once, to cry halt to all of
this. She was so tired that she fell asleep without being able to read in bed
as she liked to do for an hour or so at bedtime, and she hadn’t a single
moment to herself when all was said and done. But there was some palpable
tension in her guardians that made her hesitate whenever she considered asking
for a respite. They weren’t saying anything, but for some reason, she
sensed that they were extremely anxious about her progress, and she couldn’t
bear to increase their anxiety with any delay.

It was, after all, a small enough price to pay for
their
peace of mind. After all the years that they had given to her, it was something
of a blessing that she could finally give something back to them.

The faun tapped his hoof on the floor, and shook his shaggy
head. “
I am sorry, Lady. It is a Gordian Knot, and there is no sword
or Alexander to cut it.”
His slanted eyes—normally full of
mischief in a faun—held regret, and his mobile, hairy ears drooped a
little. Margherita had an extraordinarily good relationship with the fauns;
normally around a woman they were ill-mannered and lewd, but they called her
Lady, and seemed to consider her as a sort of mother-figure.

Margherita sighed, and dismissed the little goat-footed
faun with her thanks. He bowed to her, sinking down on his heels, then
continued sinking, sinking, into the stone floor of the workroom, until he was
gone. She looked to Elizabeth, who shrugged, and spread her hands wide.

“I had no better luck than you,” her friend
said, grimacing. “The curse is still there, and I can neither remove it
nor change it further. What about Sebastian?”

“In this case, a Fire Master is no use to us.”
Margherita rested both her elbows on the workroom table and propped her chin on
her hands. “It’s the inimical Element, remember? His Elementals
refuse to touch her for fear of angering their opposite numbers in Water. If he
pushes his own powers much further trying to get rid of that horrible curse, he
could hurt her.”

Elizabeth massaged her own temples, unwonted lines of
weariness creasing her forehead. Margherita had the distinct feeling that she
herself looked no better. “I wish we had an Air power here. I
wish
Roderick were still alive. Or that I could get any interest out of Alderscroft.”
The expression on her face suggested that she would like very much to give the
latter gentleman a piece of her mind.

“We’re small potatoes to the like of Lord
Alderscroft,” Margherita said with some bitterness.
“He
only bothers with things that threaten the whole of Britain, not merely the
life of one girl.”

Elizabeth’s jaw tightened. “Pray do not remind
me,” she said shortly. “I plan to have a word or two in person with
Lord Alderscroft over the holidays. Not that I think it will change his mind
but at least it will relieve my feelings on the subject. Still—”
Her expression lightened a little. “—the curse hasn’t
re-awakened, either. The—relative—still hasn’t made any
moves, magically
or
otherwise. And even if she actually traced where
Marina is and sent someone to find her instead of coming in person, at this
time of year, any stranger to the village would be as obvious as a pig in a
parlor.”

Margherita nodded. “That’s true enough,”
she agreed, once again taking comfort in their surroundings; not a great city
like Bath or Plymouth, where strangers were coming and going as often as one’s
long-time neighbors, but a tiny place where nothing was secret.

Strangers did come to the village, but unless they were
taking the rare permanent position as a servant that wasn’t immediately
filled by a local, they rarely stayed. Temporary harvest help arrived and left
again; travelers in the summer and spring, sometimes; people on walking tours,
for instance. Peddlers came through, of course, and the booth-owners and
amusement-operators for the fairs. But that was only in the warm
seasons—not in winter.
Never
in winter, and rarely, once the
cold set in, during the fall.

The moment a stranger entered their village at this time of
year, people would take note and the gossip would begin. If the stranger
stayed, well—he’d have to find a room somewhere. The pub wasn’t
an inn; he’d have to find someone willing to let a room to him—not
likely, that. In summer, the gypsies and tramping sorts could camp on the
common, but he could hardly do that now.

To have any plausible reason to stay, he’d have to
find a job somewhere nearby. According to Sarah, there were
no
positions available in the village or the surrounding farms, or even the two
great houses. Of course, if Arachne sent a spy, she might arrange an “accident”
to create a position for her hireling, but that itself would cause talk.

People talked a great deal about anything or anyone new in
a village this small. And old Sarah, bless her, heard everything, and would
faithfully repeat everything she heard to the people she considered as friends
as well as employers.

“There are many advantages to being in a small
village,” Elizabeth observed, with a faint smile. “Even though we
have the disadvantage of being gentry, and people don’t talk as freely to
us as they would to someone like you.”

“Oh, the villagers don’t talk to us directly,”
Margherita admitted. “We’re newcomers—why, we haven’t a
single ancestor buried in the churchyard! But Sarah tells us everything, and
everyone talks to her.”

“Watchdogs without ever knowing it—and
something you-know-who would never think of. Although I must admit that I never
thought of it either, when we decided you should take Marina with you.”
Elizabeth tactfully did not mention the third reason—that she had already
known that Margherita couldn’t conceive, following a terrible bout with
measles a year or two before Marina was born.

Taking care of Marina had filled a void that Margherita had
not even known was within her until the baby had been in her arms.

“Well, Sebastian should be finished for the day by
now,” she said, shaking off her somber mood. “And both of them are
probably starving.”

“Marina will be, anyway. I worked her particularly
hard today,” Elizabeth said, with a look that Margherita recognized very
well. The pride of a teacher in a student who excelled past expectation.
Margherita knew it well, because her face wore that look often enough. “She’s
doing very well; she’s quick, and willing, and intelligent. I wish every
student of mine had that particular combination of traits.”

They cleaned up the workroom after themselves; Margherita
found it easier to summon Elementals when she had the help of incense, salt,
and other paraphernalia. All this had to be packed back up and put away in one
of the cupboards. Only then did they dismiss the shields that hid their work
from the outside world and leave the workroom.

Those shields were so very necessary. Elizabeth had not
exaggerated when she had warned Sebastian that any great exercise of her powers
would shout to the world that a Magus Major had come to stay in this tiny
little backwater village. Thomas—well, he was indeed an Earth Master, but
his magic came out in the skill of his hands and his marvelous craftsmanship.
It seemed that wood and stone and clay obeyed his will and formed themselves
before he ever set tool to them. His power was so contained within himself that
it never showed; he had never really needed to shield himself.

Sebastian seldom
used
his power as a Fire Master;
it was ill-suited to his life as a painter. In fact, in all the time that
Marina had been with them, he hadn’t (at least to Margherita’s
knowledge) worked a greater magic more than a half a dozen times. When he
had
summoned Elementals or used great amounts of power, it had been in attempts to
rid Marina of the curse that burdened her.

As for Margherita—though she had used magic more
often and more openly than either of the men, it hadn’t even been in
exercise of the healing magics that came so naturally to Earth Masters. No,
hers had been kitchen witchery, the magic of hearth and home, more often than
not. And again, when she had invoked greater power, it had generally been for
Marina’s sake.

There had been magic openly at work in this little corner
of Devon, but it had all been minor. Elizabeth had been very wise to be
cautious. There was no point in hiding Marina all this time, only to give her
presence away in the last year of her danger.

They left the workroom arm-in-arm, and encountered Marina
fresh from a hot bath, cheeks glowing, hair damp, enveloped in one of the warm,
weighty winter gowns that Margherita had made for her, a caftan of soft olive wool
that Margherita had shamelessly copied from a Worth original, with a sleeveless
overgown of the same fabric, lined in cream-colored linen, and embroidered with
twining forest-green kelp and blue-green fish with fantastically trailing fins.

“Oh, I do like this frock, Mari!” Elizabeth
exclaimed involuntarily. “Imagine it in emerald satin! Your embroidery
design, of course, Margherita?”

“Yes, but Marina did at least half of the embroidery,”
Margherita hastened to point out. “Probably more. She’s as good
with a needle as I am.”

“I enjoyed it,” Marina said, blushing a little.
“But Elizabeth, I thought the suit you arrived in was just stunning.”

“Hmm. It is one of my favorites, though I can’t
say that I’m altogether fond of those trumpet-skirts,” Elizabeth
replied. “Your gown is a great deal more sensible. And comfortable. But
there it is; fashion never
does
have a great deal to do with sense or
comfort, now, does it?”

“And I suppose I’d look a complete guy,
trotting around the orchard in a trumpet-skirt with a mermaid-tail train,”
Marina admitted ruefully.

“Believe me, my dear, you would; fashion is not made
for orchards. And you’d probably break your neck into the bargain.”
They were the first to reach the dinner table after all, and took their places
at it, clustering at one end so that they could continue the conversation.

“But a suit like yours is perfectly comfortable in
town, isn’t it?” Marina asked, with a wistful expression. “I
mean, if I went into London—”