The Gates of Sleep (5 page)

They did grant full acknowledgement of the mastery of the
talents they could understand. They thought Aunt Margherita’s weaving and
embroidery absolutely enchanting, and regarded her lace with awe. If they didn’t
understand why anyone would pay what they did for Uncle Sebastian’s “daubs,”
they recognized the skill and admired his repainted sign for the village pub,
which was, almost inevitably, called “The Red Lion.” And then there
was Uncle Thomas. There wasn’t a man for miles around who didn’t
know about Thomas’ cabinet-making skills, and admire them.

Marina’s room was a veritable showplace of those
skills. In fact, it was a showplace of all three of her guardians’
skills. Uncle Thomas had built and carved all of the furniture, from the little
footstool to the enormous canopy bed. Aunt Margherita was responsible for the
embroidered hangings of the bed, the curtains at the windows, the cushions in
the window seat, all of them covered with fantastic vines and garlands and
flowers. Uncle Sebastian had plastered the walls with his own hands, and
decorated them with wonderful frescos.

He had nobly refrained from painting his beloved medieval
tales—instead, he’d given her woods filled with gentle mythological
creatures and Elementals. Undines frolicked in a waterfall, a Salamander coiled
lazily in a campfire for a pair of young Fauns with mischievous eyes, a Unicorn
rested its horn in the lap of a maiden that bore more than a passing
resemblance to Marina herself. The room had grown as she had; from a cradle and
a panel of vines to the wonder that it was now. The number of hours that had
gone into its creation was mind-boggling, and even now that she was grown, she
could come into the room to find that Uncle Sebastian had touched up fading
colors, or Aunt Margherita had added a cushion. It was the visible and constant
reminder of how much they cared for her.

No one could possibly love her as much as her aunt and
uncles did, and never mind that the titles of Aunt and Uncle were mere
courtesy. She had never questioned that; had never needed to. There was only
one question that had never been properly answered, so far as she was concerned.

If my parents love me so much, why did they send me
away—and why have they never tried to be with me again?

That there was a secret about all this she had known from
the time she had begun to question the way things were. She had never directly
questioned her parents, however—something about the tone of her mother’s
letters suggested that her mother’s psyche was a fragile one, and a
confrontation would lead to irreparable harm. The last thing she wanted to do
was to upset a woman as sweet natured and gentle as those letters revealed her
to be!

And somehow, I think that she is so very fragile
emotionally
because
of the reason she had to send me away.

She sighed. If that was indeed the case, it was no use
asking one of her beloved guardians. They wouldn’t even have to lie to
her—Uncle Sebastian would give her a
look
that suggested that if
she was clever, she would find out for herself. And as for the other two, well,
the look of reproach that Aunt Margherita could (and would) bend upon her would
make her feel about as low as a worm. And Uncle Thomas would become suddenly as
deaf as one of his carved bedposts. It really wasn’t fair; the chief
characteristic of a Water Master was supposed to be
fluidity.
She
should
have been able to insinuate her will past any of their defenses!

“And perhaps one day you will be able to
—when
you
are a Master,”
giggled a voice that bubbled with the
chuckling of sweet water over stones.

She turned to glare at the Undine who tossed her
river-weed-twined hair and with an insolent flip of her tail, stared right back
at her.

“You shouldn’t be reading other people’s
thoughts,” Marina told her. “It isn’t polite.”

“You shouldn’t be shouting them to the
world at large,”
the Undine retorted.
“A tadpole has more
shields than you”

Marina started, guiltily, when she realized that the Undine
was right. Never mind that there wasn’t real
need
for shields;
she knew very well that she was supposed to be keeping them up at all times.
They had to be automatic—otherwise, when she really did need them, she
might not be able to raise them in time. There were unfriendly
Elementals—some downright hostile to humans. And there were unfriendly
Masters as well.

“I beg your pardon,” she said with immediate
contrition to the Undine, who laughed, flipped her tail again, and dove under
the surface to vanish into the waters.

She spent several moments putting up those shields
properly, and another vowing not to let them drop again. What had she been
thinking? If Uncle Sebastian had caught her without her shields, he’d
have verbally flayed her alive!

Well, he hadn’t. And what he didn’t know,
wouldn’t hurt him.

And besides, it was time for tea.

Checking again to make sure those shields were intact, she
picked up her basket, rose to her feet, and ran back up the path to the
farmhouse, leaving behind insolent Undines and uncomfortable questions.

For now, at any rate.

SEBASTIAN had paint in his hair, as usual; Margherita
forbore to point it out to him. He’d see it himself the next time he
glanced in a mirror, and her comments about his appearance only made him testy
and led to growling complaints that she was fussing at him. Besides, he looked
rather—endearing—with paint in his hair. It was one more reminder
of the impetuous artist who had proposed to her with a brush behind one ear and
paint all over his hands.

At least these days he generally got the paint off his
hands before he ate!

Instead, she passed the plate of deviled ham sandwiches to
him, and said, “Well, they’re off to Italy. They caught the boat
across the Channel yesterday, if the letter was accurate.”

No need to say
who,
Alanna and Hugh Roeswood,
unable to bear their empty house in the winter, had fled to Italy as soon as
their harvest was over that first disastrous year, and had repeated the trip
every year after. It was a habit now, Margherita suspected; Earth Masters
tended to get into comfortable ruts. The Roeswoods always took the same Tuscan
villa, and Alanna was able to pass the time in a garden that was living through
the winter instead of stark and dormant. As an Earth Master herself, Margherita
suspected that it helped her cope with her grief. By now, the earth there knew
them as well as the earth of Oakhurst did.

Sebastian helped himself to sandwiches, and nodded. He
seldom read Alanna’s letters; Margherita suspected they were too
emotional for him. Like all Fire Masters, his emotions were volatile and easily
aroused. And Alanna’s letters could arouse emotion in a stone.

As Margherita had suspected he would, he shifted the
subject to one more comfortable. “I’ll be glad when winter truly
comes for us. With all the harvesters moving in and out, it fair drives me mad
trying to keep track of the strangers in the village.”

Strangers—the unspoken danger was always there, that
Marina’s
real
aunt had finally found out where she was, that one
of those strangers was her spy.

Never mind that Marina was known as “Marina Tarrant”
and everyone thought she was Sebastian’s niece. Never mind that they
managed to preserve that false identity to literally everyone in the world
except her real parents and that handful of guests at the ill-fated gathering
after the christening. Such a transparent ruse would never fool Arachne, if the
woman had any idea where to look for the child. The single thing keeping Marina
safe was that Thomas, Sebastian, and Margherita were the Roeswoods’
social inferiors, and it would probably never enter Arachne’s head to
look for her brother’s child in the custody of middle-class bohemians.
She had, in fact, looked right past them when she had made her dramatic
entrance; perhaps she had thought they had been invited only because they were
part of something like the great Magic Circle in London. Perhaps she had even
thought they were mere entertainers, musicians for the gathering. It had been
clear then that to her, they might as well not exist.

And why should they come to her notice then? Their parents
had been the equivalent of Roeswood servants; Sebastian was hardly known
outside of the small circle of patrons who prized his talent. As for Thomas, he
was a mere cabinetmaker; he worked with his hands, and was not even the social
equivalent of a farmer who owned his own land. That was their safety then, and
now. But they had always known they could not rely on it.

The danger was unspoken because they never, ever said
Arachne’s name aloud and tried not even to think it. Arachne’s
curse lay dormant, but who knew what would happen if her name was spoken aloud
in Marina’s presence? Names had power, and even if that sleeping curse did
not awaken, saying Arachne’s name still might draw her attention to this
obscure little corner of Devon. Whether Arachne’s magic was her own or
borrowed, it still followed no rules of Elemental power that Margherita
recognized, and there was no telling what she could and could not do.

That was why they had kept the reason for Marina’s
exile a secret from her all these years, and up until she was old enough to
keep her own counsel, had even kept her real name from her. If she knew about
the curse, about her real aunt—she might try to break the curse herself,
she might try to find Arachne and persuade her to take it off, she might even
dare, in adolescent hubris, to challenge her aunt.

She might not do any of those things; she
might
be
sensible about it, but Margherita had judged it unwise to take the chance.
Marina was sweet-natured, but there was a stubborn streak to her, and not even
a promise would keep her from doing something she really wanted to. Marina had
a very agile mind, and a positively lawyerlike ability to find a way, however
tangled and convoluted the path might be, of getting around any promises she’d
made if she truly wanted something. That was a Water characteristic—the
ability to go wherever the will drove. Perhaps they had done her no favors by
keeping her in ignorance, but at least they had done her no harm.

Other than the harm of separating mother from child.

It hadn’t been Marina that had suffered, though;
Margherita would pledge her soul on that. The happy, carefree child had grown
into a remarkable young woman, and if she had not had all the advantages her
parents’ relative wealth could have bought her, she had obtained other
advantages that money probably could not have purchased. Freedom, for one
thing; she’d learned her letters and reckoning from Margherita, and all
the other graces that young ladies were supposed to require, and a great deal
more. From Thomas, who had a scholarly turn, she’d learned Latin and
Greek as well as the French she got from Margherita—and from Sebastian,
Italian. She learned German on her own. When she was little, they’d given
her formal lessons, but when she turned fourteen, they let her choose her own
subjects for the most part, though she’d still had plenty of studying to
do. This year was the first time they’d let her follow her own
inclinations; there was no telling what she’d choose to do when she
passed that fateful eighteenth birthday and her parents collected her. Thomas
hoped that she would go to Oxford, to the women’s college there, even
though women were not actually given degrees.

Meanwhile, she had the run of the library, and devoured
books in all five languages besides her native English. Winter-long, there wasn’t
a great deal to do besides work and read, for the long winter rains kept all of
them indoors. Margherita reflected that she would have to keep an eye on
Sebastian and his demands for Mari’s time as his model; it had already
occurred to him that by next summer he would lose her, and he was painting at a
furious rate. Mari was being very good-natured about all the posing, but
Margherita knew from her own experience that it was hard work, and that
Sebastian was singularly indifferent to the needs of his models when a
painting-frenzy was on him.

Thomas reached for the teapot and let out his breath in a
sigh. “Eight months,” he said, and there was no indication in his
voice that the sigh was one of relief. Margherita nodded.

They had always known that this last year, Marina’s
seventeenth, would be the hardest. Even if Arachne was not aware that her curse
now had a limitation on it, she would still be trying to bring it to fruition
in order to achieve that self-imposed deadline. The older Marina got, the
stronger she would be in her powers, and the better able to defend herself. Nor
could Arachne count on Marina remaining alone; although the help that her
friends could give her was, by the very nature of the magic that they wielded,
somewhat limited, that did
not
apply to true lovers, especially if
they happened to be of complementary Elements. In a case like that the powers
joined, magnifying each other, and it would be very difficult for a single
Power to overwhelm them. The older Marina was, the more likely it became that
she would fall in love, and Magic being what it was, it was a foregone conclusion
that it would be with another Elemental magician.

Arachne would want to prevent
that
at all costs,
for her curse would rebound on its caster if it was broken, and heaven only
knew what would happen then.

So this seventeenth year of Marina’s life would be
the most dangerous for her, and her guardians were doing everything in their
power to keep her out of the public eye.

Not her
image
—that was harmless enough. She
didn’t look strikingly like either of her parents; the resemblance had to
be hunted for. She had Hugh’s dark hair, a sable near to black, but it
was wavy rather than straight as his was, or as curly as her mother’s. In
fact, virtually everything about her was a melding of the two; her face between
round and oblong, her mouth neither the tiny rosebud of her mother’s, nor
as wide as her father’s. She was tall, much taller than her mother. And
her eyes—well, they were nothing like either parent’s. Hugh’s
were gray, Alanna’s a cornflower blue. Marina’s were enormous and
blue-violet, a color so striking that everyone who saw her for the first time
was arrested by the intensity of it. There had been no hint of that color when
she’d been a baby, and as far as anyone knew, there had never been eyes
of that color in either family.