Phoenix and Ashes

Sarah only nodded.

I'll do it because I have to. There's no going back now.

26

August 7,1917

Longacre Park, Warwickshire

ON JULY THE 30TH, THE British had begun a major offensive at Ypres; like most of Britain, Reggie only got wind that something was afoot when the "regrets" began to come in. And he hadn't thought much of it at first, until today.

Today the post was full of them.

One or two officers canceling would have been a fluke—all of them at once meant a big push. When even the band canceled by the morning post (momentarily throwing his mother into a state of despair until Lady Virginia came to the rescue, promising a small orchestra made up entirely of women), he had known that there was something truly major going on.

He and his old college chums Steve and Geoff had a sort of unwritten code; by the afternoon post, when both of them sent brief notes referring to Caesar's campaigns in Gaul along with their apologies, he had all the information he needed. And far more than he wanted.

The Brigadier and his mother had tried to keep it from him, of course, but by late afternoon it had been in all the papers. He'd managed to keep himself together long enough to send a hasty telegram to Michael Dolbeare to recruit more RFC cadets to make up the difference, pledging to cover their train fare if need be, which considerably calmed his mother down about the holes in her guest list. That had been going through the motions, actually, because if he had thought about it, he might have lost his temper with her. How could she be in such a state over a mere absence of male guests, when across the Channel all hell was breaking loose? Bad enough that other people were being so callous, but this was his own mother.

And he'd been all right until just before dinner, until it hit him, until it really sank in. Then the shakes had started.

He kept himself together until he managed to reach the safe haven of his rooms. He even managed to pull his own curtains closed, and shut and lock the door. Then the fear got hold of him by the throat and shook him like a dog, sending him to his knees, making him crawl into the darkest corner of the room, where he shivered and wept and choked back moans of terror. He couldn't even put two ideas together into a whole; he didn't even know what he was afraid of. He only knew that this vast, insensate, and ravenous beast that was the war was loose, and it was going to devour the entire world and there was nothing he could do to stop it. ...

He had vaguely heard someone pacing outside his rooms, rattling the knob once or twice, but they left him alone, for which he was both grateful and felt betrayed at the same time. Grateful, because he could not bear anyone seeing him like this. Betrayed, because they were leaving him alone with this fear, this mind-killing, soul-shriveling fear—

And all he could do was huddle, and shake, as wave after wave of the terror engulfed him, then ebbed, only to return.

How long he was in there, he couldn't have told; only that some time after darkness fell, there was the sound of a key in the lock, and the unmistakable presence in the room of Lady Virginia.

She closed the door behind her; he heard the scratch of a match, and smelled the sharp sulfur as she lit candles.

"Reggie," she said, quite as calmly as if he was not huddled in a ball in the corner. "I am not Doctor Maya, but I am very old, and I have seen a very great deal in my time. And if you can manage to bring yourself here, I may be able to offer you some little comfort. I should come down there on the floor next to you, but my bones are not so young that they permit any such thing anymore."

Somehow, he managed to crawl out of that corner. Somehow he managed to get to her, and put his head on her knee like a spaniel, and croak out a few words. He wasn't even sure what he was saying, only that he was giving some shape to the fear that was devouring him alive.

"I cannot tell you that it will be all right, Reggie," she said gravely. "Because we both know that it will not. But if the Brigadier is correct, and I believe he is, then the enemy is as battle-weary and worn as we, and he has no flood of energetic Americans coming at last to help. It will not end soon—but it will end."

And she offered silence at the right moment, and a few more words of her own at the right moment, and slowly, he stopped shaking, the fear lost its grip on him, and the fog lifted from his mind until he could think again.

Only then did she call his man in, and he took his drugs and went into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

And they did not come for him in the night; he sensed no malign presence on the other side of his barrier of slumber, nor did he hear evil mutterings nor feel the suffocating weight on him of the darker creatures of Earth, trying to smother him in his sleep. It might have been the drugs, it might have been his new defenses, it might all have been due to Lady Virginia.

When he struggled up out of sleep late the next morning, it was with no sense of victory, though, and not even anything he could call hope. It was, if anything, a feeling that he might actually live through the despair. He still wasn't entirely sure he wanted to, but he felt as if he would, regardless of his current preferences.

It was the Brigadier who was with him the next time the fit took him, later that afternoon. They were outside, on the terrace, and his knees just gave out. The Brigadier got him to a seat, saying nothing, although he could not have missed how hard Reggie was shaking, nor the blank, dry-mouthed stare Reggie knew he must have. And the good old man stayed with him as he closed his eyes and fought the fear as best he could—which was about as effective as trying to fight the sea.

After the first wave ebbed a little, the Brigadier cleared his throat apologetically, and began talking, sounding a bit self-conscious, but determined, nevertheless.

He didn't actually talk to Reggie. Instead, he rambled on about commonplace things. He'd been down to Broom and met some of "the lads" at the Broom pub, and they were good fellows, to be sure. He thought there might be something in the manner of work he could put in the way of one or two of them that were at loose ends. It was a fine little village, and he'd also been to the estate village of Arrow, which was a credit to him and his mother. The estate manager wanted him to know that the crops were looking very good this year, and that someone wanted to bring in another gasworks, like the one that supplied Longacre and Broom, but this time on manor property. Filthy things, gasworks, but there was plenty of coal near here and that would mean there could be gas piped in to the village of Arrow as well, which might be worth the mess. Perhaps one of the clever RFC fellows could find a way to make a gasworks less filthy. "We have gas laid on," the Brigadier rumbled, "At my bungalow. Deuced convenient for cook. Thinking about electricity; they electrified my club in London last year, and it's better than gas. You ought to consider having the telephone brought up here, Reggie. Good for your mother; keep her connected to the rest of us. Have to go forward, my boy, can't live in the past, and if you try and stick in one spot the future will run over the top of you."

Not a word about the war, not a word about how he looked, and under the paralysis of fear that made his guts go to water, he knew he must look hellish. Not one word of reproach, though the poor old man must surely wonder—

Or perhaps not. Lady Virginia had said he'd been to the Front itself, to the hospitals where men were brought in, filthy, screaming, their wounds crawling with maggots, their minds as shattered as their bodies. Maybe he did understand.

But it was the commonplaces that were anchoring him, little by little, back in the simple present. The count of new calves, the state of the orchards, thoughts of gasworks and electricity, the talk down at the Broom.

It dragged him back out of the pit, though he could not have said how or why. It let him get his breath back, let him unclench his fists and his jaw, let him sit in the wake of what proved to be the last wave of fear and turned his shaking into the mere trembling of exhaustion. And when he was finally able to think again, let him turn back to the Brigadier with eyes that held sanity again.

The old man paused in his rambling; gave him a long, hard look, and sighed. "Ah. There you are. Her ladyship said you might get taken like that."

"Yes," Reggie said. "Thank you, sir." Only three words, but he put a world of gratitude in them, and the Brigadier flushed a little, and coughed self-deprecatingly.

"Think I can leave you now?" he asked.

Reggie nodded. "Work to do, sir; you reminded me of it yourself, just now."

The Brigadier nodded with evident relief. "Work! There's the ticket!" he said, with a shade too much enthusiasm, so much so that Reggie felt sorry for him. "You concentrate on work, my boy, it's the best thing for you. Keep your mind set on solid things." The Brigadier's determinedly cheerful expression made Reggie attempt a feeble smile of his own.

At least he doesn't think I'm feigning or malingering, he thought, as the Brigadier retired to the house. That meant a great deal—more, in fact, than he had expected. The Brigadier did not think less of him because he was shellshocked. That helped.

Enough that he did muster enough strength to get to his own feet again, and go in search of his estate manager. Maybe the Brigadier was right after all. Maybe keeping himself occupied would work. It wasn't as if there wasn't a lot to be done. Guests would be arriving in two days.

There was only one way to find out.

August 11, 1917

Broom, Warwickshire

Poor Howse's hair was coming down from its careful arrangement on the top of her head; bits of it were straggling down in front of her ears, and her face was red and damp with exertion. She looked as if she was going to wilt at any moment, and Eleanor felt ready to scream.

Between the two of them, Lauralee and Carolyn could have used a dozen maids to get them into their costumes, instead of only two. Lauralee, in her Madame Pompadour garb, had petticoats and panniers, underskirts and overskirts, a corset that pushed her breasts up until they looked like a pair of hard little apples, and a bodice cut so low that they were threatening to pop out at any moment. Alison had taken one look at that particular part of the display and ordered that a fichu of lace be inserted and tacked in place to prevent a disaster— which meant more work, as Lauralee fidgeted and shrieked every time she thought a needle was passing too close to her skin. And when all that was taken care of, came the white, powdered wig, the patches to be pasted on, and all the rest of it.

Carolyn's guise of Empress Josephine looked deceptively simple, and at least it didn't require a winch to pull the lacings of her corset tight, but the requisite hairstyle with its Grecian-inspired diadem and tiny, tight-curled ringlets done up in imitation of ancient statues had Howse nearly in despair. She had two burns on her hands from the curling tongs already, and there had been one accident that had caused Carolyn to slap the hapless maid, and which had left the bedroom reeking of scorched hair. Fortunately only the very ends had been scorched; Howse had been able to trim out the ruined bit to Carolyn's satisfaction.

Alison had elected to wear the strangest costume of all, so far as Eleanor was concerned—and it gave her the most peculiar and uneasy feeling when she saw it. Alison's costume was a hooded, black velvet gown, something like a monk's robe, but lined in scarlet satin. There was something embroidered on it in black silk—not a discernable pattern, more like symbols of some sort, but the black-on-black of the silk made it nearly impossible to tell what it was. Around her waist she wore a very odd belt, for all the world like a hangman's rope, but made of silk. A floor-length, black veil, edged in jet beads, went over everything, and an odd tiara of stars held the veil in place.

When Howse asked, timidly, who Alison was portraying, Alison had just smiled, and said, lightly, "The Queen of the Night, of course. From Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. I doubt anyone else will think of it, and there's value in novelty."

At least the costume didn't require any special wigs or hairstyles, nor did it require a full hour to put on. Even if she did look like Lady Death. . . .

Though it did make Eleanor wonder, was this Alison's ritual robe? Some people liked to wear such things, although they weren't necessary, and didn't contribute any to the efficacy of a spell, unless the wearer had put spells or protections into the robes before she put them on.

If so, Eleanor could hardly imagine the cheek to wear such a thing to a fancy-dress ball.

When the three of them finally sailed out the door, it was a distinct relief. They were motored away by Alison's escort, Warrick Locke, who himself was costumed as some sort of wizard. When they were safely in the automobile, Howse closed the door behind them.

"I have a headache," she declared, staring at Eleanor. "I am going to wait in Madame's room."

Eleanor shrugged. "I think that would be a good idea," she said, in a neutral voice. "They won't be back for hours, and you'll need to be ready when they return."

She, of course, knew exactly what Howse was going to do. She was going to nap on Alison's bed—much more comfortable than her own. Since this was exactly what Eleanor wanted her to do, she simply waited until she couldn't hear any more movement overhead, then went to the kitchen and knelt beside the hearthstone.

The flames of the fire flared up as she breathed the first words of her spell, and a half dozen Salamanders burst out of the heart of the fire to slither up her arms and entwine themselves around her neck.

Slowly, carefully, Eleanor insinuated herself into the complex weave of the binding spell. With a word here, and a tweak there, she stretched it, rearranged it, suggested to it that its territory was not merely this house and grounds, but the entire county. She felt the spell respond, sluggishly, but by no means as slowly as it had the first time she had done this. Make this your boundary until midnight, she suggested to it.

With a shake, like a reluctant dog, the spell grumbled, stretched, and settled into its new configurations. With a final word to hold the new shape in place, she came out of her half-trance, and got to her feet with a feeling of distinct triumph. A spell, properly speaking, was a process and not a thing—but the ones that Alison had set on her certainly felt like things—things with lives of their own, and rudimentary personalities. Unpleasant personalities, but that was only to be expected.

She cocked an ear to the rooms overhead, and heard nothing. Eagerness took over, and unwilling to wait another moment, she slipped the latch of the kitchen door and closed it behind herself, then flew out of the garden gate and down the street to Sarah's cottage.

Other than a couple of men entering the Broom pub, there wasn't anyone else about. However much excitement the ball had generated in the Robinson household, for the rest of the village this were no differences between tonight and any other Saturday. Which was just as well, since the last thing she wanted was a lot of coming and going that might disturb Miss Howse's slumber.

Feeling excitement and anticipation rising in her and threatening to boil over, she ran for all she was worth. She had not dared, until this moment, truly to believe that she was going to be able to do this. So many things in her life had been taken or thwarted that she had been afraid to put too much hope into this moment—

—this moment when she would live, for a few hours, the life she should have had. When she would be herself, Miss Eleanor Robinson, not Ellie the maid-of-all-work, with nothing to look forward to but a lifetime of drudgery in the house that should have been hers.

She managed to control herself when she reached Sarah's door, enough so that she paused, caught her breath, and after a preliminary tap and the expected response of "Come!" she opened the door quite demurely.

Only to gasp with shock, surprise, and delight at the vision that met her widening eyes.

"Like it, do you?" Sarah asked, a twinkle in her eyes and a pardonably smug expression on her face. "Not a bad job, if I do say so myself. And I do!"

Arrayed on an improvised dressmaker's-form made of a broomstick and a stuffed sack, was every little girl's dream of a fairy dress, the sort of thing that bedazzled young eyes believe in when they see the Fairy Princess at the Christmas pantomine. Only this gown was real, and not cheap muslin and machine-lace.

It had been a sort of ivory the last time Eleanor saw it—now it was a soft rose pink. "How did you change the color?" she stammered.

Sarah rubbed the side of her nose, and looked suitably smug. "Do you know, there's an old spell in my grimoire that does just that? Temporary, of course, but temporary is all you need, and after I took some thought about it, it seemed to me that a fairy princess was a better costume choice than Princess Victoria. The wings I made; you know what I always tell you—it's easier to change what's there than make new. I expect there won't be another fairy princess in the lot; those girls have forgotten magic by now, and think they're too old for fairies. You'll look nothing like yourself."

Little bouquets of rosebuds ornamented the skirt, here and there, and a garland of them ran from the right shoulder to the left hip. A pair of tiny, pink gauze wings sprang from the shoulders in the back. Waiting on the table was a wreath of rosebuds to wear in her hair, and a pair of pink silk opera gloves to cover her work-roughened hands. The left, of course, had only three fingers.

"What am I going to do for shoes?" she asked, suddenly, aware that her clumsy and well-worn walking shoes would ruin the entire effect of this exquisite gown. "And stockings—"

"Ah, that's where a little more magic and illusion come in," Sarah replied, with a sly wink. "Strip to your shift, my girl. I have some work to do yet."

Sarah was as good as her word. A handful of rose-petals pressed against each shoe, a breath of magic and a muttered charm—and the square-toed, worn brown leather was magically transmuted to a pair of the most delicate silk slippers Eleanor had ever seen, with pink stockings that matched the gown taking the place of the much-darned cotton stockings she had been wearing. She couldn't see any flaw in the illusion, though if she closed her eyes she knew very well she was still wearing her old stockings and shoes. Which was not at all a bad thing; they might be worn nearly to bits, but they were comfortable, which was more than could be said of most fashionable shoes.

With that transformation complete, the dressing began, though it didn't take more than a fraction of the time it had taken to dress her stepsisters. Petticoats and gown went on over her old underclothing; Sarah re-attached the garland of roses, and then, with practiced fingers, put up her hair and pinned the wreath to it. She pulled on the gloves—and it was done.

"Well! If I were a little girl or a young man, I would be half in love with you!" Sarah exclaimed, as she shed her skirt and apron to don a pair of antique breeches and a rusty woolen uniform coat. She brushed her hands over herself from the top of her head to the soles of her feet, and Eleanor felt another breath of power flit by her—

And in Sarah's place was a solemn faced, gray-haired man, in rose-red livery sporting more braid and gold buttons than any general could boast. "There's your invitation," said Sarah's voice, coming from the man's mouth—a distinctly disorienting proposition. "He" pointed at the mantelpiece, where the precious envelope was held securely between two jam-jars full of water and rosebuds. "You get that invitation, take a look in the mirror in the corner there to make sure I haven't forgotten anything, while I get your 'carriage,' milady. And don't forget. Midnight is as late as you can go, because that's the longest I can hold the illusions."

A careful check of as much of herself as she could see in Sarah's tiny mirror that hung over her washstand seemed to indicate that Sarah had been her usual efficient self. There was nothing to strike a false note, and Eleanor began to feel quite shivery with anticipation when she heard the sound of a horse's hooves and a low whistle just outside Sarah's door. She seized the invitation and hurried outside.

She hesitated a moment at the door itself, since she was wider than the doorway now, but the wide skirt wasn't as difficult to maneuver as she had feared it would be. She got through without even catching the lace on her flounces.

And there, to her absolutely astonished gaze, was the sort of open carriage that—according to the pictures she had seen—the King used on state occasions, only a bit smaller. In the light coming from the two little lamps on either side of the driver's box, she could tell that it was rose-red in color, with gilded ornamentation. "Sarah" sat on the driver's box, and expertly handled the reins of the snow-white horse that was harnessed to this confection by rose-red and gilded traces.

"It's an old pony-cart and plow-horse I borrowed from a friend," "Sarah" said, laughing at Eleanor's expression. "Be careful getting in; it's nowhere near as padded as it looks to be."

She was careful getting in, feeling the old, worn wood under the glove on her hand where her eyes told her there was bright gilding and slick paint. The lines of the carriage conformed to the shape of the old pony-cart beneath the illusion—she knew from her studies that the less a magician had to create, the better an illusion was, and here was the proof of that.

"Sarah" chirruped to the horse, who moved out with brisk dignity. Eleanor kept her hands tightly folded in her lap with her hands atop the precious invitation. She wished it weren't dark. She really felt like a fairy princess. She wished that she could see, and yes, be seen. In this guise, she would be like a sort of pantomime character herself, and it would have been a great deal of fun to act that way.

But no one came out of or went into the pub or the inn as they passed, and no little face peered down out of a bedroom window to gape in surprise. Probably Sarah was using a little more magic to make sure no one saw them—understandable, if disappointing.

What would I have thought as a little girl, if I had looked out a window and seen a fairy princess passing by in her carriage? I'd have believed in fairies so firmly that nothing could have dissuaded me. Perhaps, then, it was just as well—because little girls now were facing the loss of fathers, brothers, uncles, and were in dire need of magic that she could not supply. To send one looking for a fairy to conjure back her lost papa or brother would have been intolerably cruel.

The horse broke into a trot once they were out of the village; where an old horse got that kind of energy, Eleanor couldn't guess. More magic? Or was the old fellow just feeling frisky in the cool of the evening? Whichever it was, the carriage rattled merrily down the road to Longacre Park, and in a much shorter time than Eleanor would have guessed, it turned in through the huge wrought-iron gates and rolled onto a smooth graveled driveway.

The manor loomed up at the top of a shallow rise ahead of them, all lit up for the grand occasion, with lanterns set out along the staircase to light the way up. Eleanor felt her stomach clench as she gazed up at the enormous structure, feeling suddenly altogether out of her class. How on earth did the Fenyxes keep that enormous barn of a building up? Did they have an army of servants? Was all of that truly just to support two people, Reggie and his mother?

You have every right to be here, she told herself sternly, as the carriage drew nearer and nearer to the broad double staircases leading down to the drive, each one curving down from the side. You have an invitation, and what's more, you have more right to be here than Alison and her brats.

By repeating this to herself, over and over, by the time they reached the bottom of the staircases, she had some of her composure back.

Or at least, the illusion of composure.

There was a liveried footman—or foot-boy would probably be more accurate—waiting beneath the twin lamps at the foot of the stairs. He didn't even blink when Sarah brought the carriage to a halt, even though most guests were arriving by motorcar. He simply waited while Sarah got down, opened the carriage door, and handed her out; then he took Eleanor's hand and directed her to the bottom of the stairs, as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life.

Well, given how entire families in Broom and Arrow tended to go into service and stay in service to the Fenyx household, perhaps he had. But the fact that he was so very young told her something else— no matter how sheltered the great house was from the real world, the real world could still affect it profoundly. Longacre Park was as subject to compulsory conscription as any other place in this country. Reggie might have been the first to go to the war, but it seemed that every other able-bodied man here had followed.

Sarah drove the carriage away before the illusion could waver at all, leaving Eleanor alone on the paved landing at the bottom of the stairs. She looked up, uncertain as to what she should do. She seemed to be the only person arriving alone, which made her feel very self-conscious. The big doors at the top were both flung open wide. There was another man in livery at the top, and an older gentlemen in a black swallow-tail coat and stiff white shirt. Another footman, and the butler, she expected.

All right. It's now or never. Escorted or not, I have an invitation, and I belong.

She put on her pink silk domino mask, tying the ribbons behind her head, then carefully picked up the sides of her gown, and began the long climb towards those huge doors, and whatever fate held for her inside them.

27

August 11, 1917

Longacre Park, 'Warwickshire

SHE HANDED OVER HER INVITATION to the butler, who inspected it, and to her relief, merely nodded. She had been afraid he would announce her, and if Alison was anywhere within hearing distance. . . .

Instead, she stepped into—well, she wasn't entirely sure what to call this room. There could easily have been a second floor to this room, and there wasn't. The ceiling was somewhere up a full two stories—easily forty feet. It was surely another forty feet wide and twice that in length. There were enough candles burning in candelabra all around the walls to have supplied an entire chandler's shop, supplementing the gaslights.

There was only one name that suited this space—the Great Hall.

And it was full. In one corner, a small orchestra composed entirely of black-gowned women (most of them not young) played what sounded suspiciously like ragtime. Four years ago, either circumstance would have caused a scandal. But as Eleanor eased herself into the room, she overheard, almost immediately, the end of a conversation.

". . . and even the band called up, my dear! So fortunate that Lady Virginia was here!"

"They seem a bit—modern," came the doubtful reply.

The first speaker laughed. "But of course they're modern! They're Virginia's pet suffragette band! But if I had to choose between holding a ball with a suffragette orchestra or holding one with a gramophone, I know which one I would take! At least when one engages women, there is no danger of seeing them called over to France!"

The second woman turned her masked face in the direction of the orchestra with ever evidence of interest. "I have a hunt ball in the autumn—I wonder if—"

Eleanor was never to hear what the speaker wondered, for the eddies and swirls around the edge of the area of the dancing carried the speakers away.

If this had been a fairy tale, the moment that Eleanor had entered the Great Hall, all conversation would have ceased, and every head would have turned her way. The butler would have announced her— which would have been a disaster.

But this was not a fairy tale, and although she did excite a few admiring or unreadable glances, for the most part, people looked at her, did not recognize her, and dismissed her from their minds within a few moments. While her gown was certainly passable, it was neither so very different nor so very outstanding as to excite interest. She was indeed the only fairy princess, but other girls had wide pink dresses. And the deeper she went into the room, the more obvious it was that she was in an entirely different strata of society than she had ever been before.

And so were her stepsisters, though they might not yet realize it.

This was Society, old money, old titles, and though whatever dressmaker Alison went to might be able to counterfeit the look of these garments, there was a subtle difference between these costumes and the ones she had just aided Lauralee and Carolyn into. She suspected that a close examination would prove they did not hold up to the sort of careful scrutiny that maids who tended these clothes would bring to bear. And while ladies' maids did not precisely gossip to their mistresses, they did have subtle ways of making things known.

Alison and her progeny might be in for a rude awakening if they ever were invited to someone else's country weekend, and she insisted on maintaining the fiction that she, too was a member of their class.

But in the meantime, Eleanor's costume did not mark her out as anything unusual. She was by no means vivacious enough to attract attention by herself; the real beauties here were identifiable even behind their little domino masks.

This suited Eleanor very well. Her goal, after all, was to find the Elemental Master, and no one here was likely to make her task any easier by identifying that worthy for her. She only knew that the Master was female, and that only because she herself had seen the woman at work the night that the revenants were dispersed.

She worked her way towards the wall, and realized with a certain dismay that there was another room behind this one, nearly as large, that had been thrown open to the ball-attendees. This was not going to make her task any easier.

She resigned herself, with a pang of disappointment, to the realization that she was unlikely to see Reggie after all. The young women substantially outnumbered the young men here, and it was unlikely that he was going to have a single minute free. And her own, much more pressing task must take precedence if she was going to get herself free of her stepmother.

Somewhere in this swirling chaos of people she had to find the traces of Air magic that would inevitably be hovering about such a Master. And now she was very grateful that her study of magic had required her to understand the other three Elements as well as her own. She might not be able to use Air magic, but she could definitely sniff it out.

She was nearly at the doorway in the right-hand wall of the Great Hall when she caught the first "scent" of Air magic. Just a hint of blue at the corner of her vision, an unexpected breath of cold, and a touch of sharp, clean scent, like juniper or rosemary. But she was on it like a hound, and followed it into a drawing room.

This, too, was evidently open to the guests, older ladies and gentlemen who were so engrossed in their card games that they didn't even take any notice of her. She scanned the area for that hint of magic, but her quarry was none of them—then she got another hint of it, through another doorway, which led her into a hall, not so brightly lit. And, quite probably, not supposed to be open to the guests.

But the Air Master was a friend of the family and according to Sarah, a longterm visitor here, and probably had the run of the place. She would be allowed to go places where ordinary guests at the ball would be unwelcome.

Better and better. She must be on the right track.

And the breath of Air Magic was stronger now; she followed the scent down the darkened, shadow-haunted hall, and into—

—the library.

Here, for the first time since she had entered these doors, she found herself consumed with envy of the people who lived here. The Great Hall excited her not at all; she could only think of how it dwarfed everyone who set foot in it. That drawing room had been far too rich and opulent for her to feel comfortable in it, and besides that, the furnishings were antique, probably fragile, and without a doubt irreplaceable. But this room, with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with volumes—this, she desired. And in fact, as she took a few hesitant steps into the dimly lit room, she forgot, for a moment, why she was here, in the sudden surge of acquisitive desire.

"I beg your pardon, miss, but the party is—"

She started, then froze, at the sound of the familiar drawl, and the exclamation was startled out of her. "Reggie?"

There was a creak of leather as the figure rose out of the depths of an armchair to her left, and limped towards her. "Eleanor?" came the incredulous reply. "Is that you?"

She jerked at the ends of the ribbon of her mask, and pulled it off. "Of course it's me! I have an invitation!" she replied, now full of indignation. What? Did he think she was so far beneath him that she shouldn't be here?

"Of course you do; I addressed it myself," was his answer, as he limped out of the shadows with both hands outstretched. While most of the young men here were in their uniforms, he was not. He had donned a costume for the occasion; with a feeling of shock, she recognized the Magician from the Tarot deck, but the colors were blue, silver and white rather than red, white and gold. "I waited in the reception line for what seemed like hours, but you never came, and I thought—your stepmother—"

"She doesn't know I'm here," Eleanor said, her growing anger erased by the surge of irrational joy she felt at his words. "She'd have stopped me if she'd known I was coming." She felt the coercion of Alison's spells suddenly uncoil, sealing her lips over anything else she might have said.

"I thought it was something like that," was Reggie's only reply, as he took both her hands in his and gazed down into her eyes. "Look, let's not talk about your dreadful stepmother, nor your conniving stepsisters, nor anything else unpleasant. Mater has put on a first-rate show, so let's enjoy it together." He smiled at her, with something of the charm of the old Reggie. "So long as I'm with a girl, even if Mater doesn't know who she is, she'll leave me alone. If she does, so will everyone else, and it has not yet become the fashion, thank the good Lord, for ladies to cut in on men while dancing. Do you dance?"

She was so caught in those earnest eyes that all she could do was stammer, "I—haven't, not for—a long time—"

"Good, because my knee is a torture. We'll go revolve a little for form's sake, then—how about the garden? Capability Brown, you know, and all lit up with fairy-lanterns for the occasion. Appropriate for a fairy princess."

She hardly knew what to say. This was the sort of thing out of her wildest dreams, the ones she knew better than to believe in.

He's just using me as a defense against the girls like Carolyn and Lauralee— cautioned a bitter voice from her head.

But her heart replied, Then why is he looking at me like that? Because those pale eyes were warm with an emotion she did not yet dare to believe in, and he looked very much as if he would like to do more than simply look at her.

And sheer instinct made her nod, which evidently was answer enough for him. He took the domino from her nerveless hands, tied it back on, and tucked her right hand into the crook of his arm. "Let's go brave the throng."

This time, when they passed through the drawing room, the play stopped. Head turned in their direction, and as they crossed into the Great Hall, she sensed the whispers begin behind them.

And as if this had suddenly turned into a fairy tale, as they walked into the Great Hall, they were surrounded by a zone of silence, and all eyes turned towards them. Reggie ignored it; she felt her cheeks flushing, but held her head high, and tried to walk with dignity. He led her to the exact center of the room, as the musicians in the corner brought their current number to a swift conclusion. Once there, he swung her to face him, and the next thing she knew, she was turning in his arms around the floor to the strains of a waltz.

Ravaged knee or not, he was light on his feet. Not a brilliant dancer, but a competent one, and the gown she was wearing was practically made for waltzing in. With a heady feeling of euphoria, she surrendered to the moment and let him guide her three times around the floor while the musicians kept the tempo a little slower than usual. After all, wasn't this the sort of thing she had dreamed of doing? It felt like a dream. It had all the perfect unreality of a dream.

The musicians must have had a fine sense of just how long Reggie could dance; about the time she felt his steps faltering slightly, they brought the waltz to a close with a flourish.

Under cover of the polite applause to the orchestra, he bent and whispered, "If that's enough for you, would you like to see the gardens?"

All she could do was nod; once again, as the orchestra began a new piece, he tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow and escorted her out of the Great Hall, into the room behind it—she got a glimpse of a long table set with huge arrangements of flowers and punch-bowls— and then out onto a terrace.

The view down into the gardens was breathtaking, but he didn't give her much chance to look at it. He drew her down the stairs into the gardens themselves, which had, as he had told her, been lit up with fairy-lanterns. The wave of perfume that washed over her told her that the roses for which Longacre was famous were in full bloom. He took her down one of the paths to a stone bench—still within sight of the terrace, but not a straight line-of-sight. She carefully arranged her skirt, and gingerly took a seat. With a sigh of relief, he sat beside her.

"I was horribly afraid I had offended you past forgiveness," were the first words out of his mouth. "I never meant to. When you didn't come back—"

"You went to the meadow?" she interrupted, hit again by one of those surges of irrational pleasure.

He nodded. "As soon as I could. And you didn't come back, so I thought you were angry with me."

"I couldn't—" that was all she could manage before Alison's coercions clamed down on her.

"Because you had work to do—I hoped that was all it was, but I was afraid I had been a boor." He sighed. "I am neither fish nor fowl, Eleanor. On the one hand, I was raised by my parents and the nannies they chose for me, who are of the opinion that education beyond reading, writing, and a little figuring is bad for females. On the other, I am heavily influenced by my godmother, who is an unrepentant suffragist, and by what I learned myself at Oxford. Sometimes, when I am not thinking, things escape from me that are parrotings of Mater, and I am always sorry when they do. I plead forgiveness. I never meant to slight the intelligence of women, and least of all yours."

She took off her domino and looked up at him gravely. "As long as you promise to remember that," she said. "And I hope—"

How do I warn him about Alison and the girls? She couldn't say anything directly, but—

"I hope you're also remember that intelligence is a weapon of sorts, and it isn't always used to good ends, and that signifies for women just as well as men. Maybe more," she added, thoughtfully, "Since women don't have a great many weapons at their disposal, and they are inclined to use the ones they have with skill and precision."

He blinked for a moment, as if taken aback by her words, then nodded. "Ah. I think I know what you are hinting at. The charming Alison Robinson and her two lovely daughters." His mouth tightened. "Eleanor, what hold have they over you? I cannot believe that they can come up here to tea and tennis on a daily basis in gowns of the latest mode while you clearly are working at manual labor and kept as shabbily as a tweenie in a miser's house, unless they have some power over you!"

Oh, how she wanted to tell him! She fought the constraints of the spell, but all she could manage to get out, through gritted teeth, was, "She's my guardian. I have no rights, and no say in my life."

"Until you come of age, and that can't be long," he replied, his eyes icy for a moment. "And then—you can depend on me, Eleanor. You can."

She felt her hands starting to tremble, and she clasped them together to hide it. He reached over and took her hands.

"Eleanor," he said, as she stiffened. "I would like to be more than just your friend. A great deal more."

She went hot, then cold, then hot again. "You don't mean that," she said, half begging, half accusing. "You can't mean that. I don't fit in with all this—" she took her hands out of his and waved vaguely at the manor behind her. "and I don't fit in with 'your people!' Can't you see that?" She shook her head violently. "You and I—it's impossible, surely you understand!"

He made a little sound of mingled amusement and disgust. "There is one thing that Mad Ross is right about. All this is going to change in the next few years, Eleanor, and change drastically, and most of those people back there haven't a clue. This war is putting an end to their world as they know it, though it was starting to crumble around the edges before that." He sniffed. "A bloodline isn't worth much if you can't keep the roof over your head patched. And I can name you a dozen men in my circle, men who are contemporaries of my father, who've married chorus beauties, actresses, their children's governesses—even their housekeepers! There will be more of that—and there will be women who had no men in their families survive this war, who will marry policemen, gardeners, tradesmen—or never marry or remarry at all. And as for the people my age—" he shook his head. "We've seen too much. We've learned too much, and most of it was bitter. I've been thinking about this a very great deal, ever since that big push at Ypres started." He took a very deep breath. "I came to the conclusion that if Mater was going to insist that I do my family duty, it was going to be on my terms, with a woman I could respect, with intelligence; someone who could talk with me."

Her hands were sweating. Nervously, to save her silk gloves, she pulled them off.

He recaptured her hands. "These hands, no matter what they work at, are not all of you, Eleanor—not even most of what you are. You are intelligent, kind, forgiving—I could go on for the next half hour and still not come to the end of your good points. No, perhaps you don't 'fit in' with all of that behind me. But 'all that' is going to have to change if it is going to survive at all in the coming years. I am going to have to change. I don't see any reason why that change shouldn't come in a way that accommodates you, and your own changes."

Now she was shaking. But it wasn't only because of what he was saying. No, for no reason that she could understand, Alison's coercions were lightening around her.

And so were the spells binding her to the hearth-stone.

This had come without real warning. Granted, she had spent too long searching for the Air Master, and now they were pulling on her insistently, but she couldn't understand why she hadn't had some sign before this.

She felt them, like a corset laced too tight, squeezing off breath, and making it hard to think. Soon, they would become uncomfortable.

Then painful. Then maddening—

"I won't ask you for any kind of a decision now, Eleanor," he was saying, as she felt her hands growing cold. "But I would like you to consider the possibility of seeing me as more than your friend. I would like to know that there is a chance for me in your future."

She wanted to pay attention to his words, but she couldn't. She felt the spells closing in on her. It was becoming hard to breathe; the tugging at her mind and body were growing intolerable. And she couldn't help herself. She began to shake, and she pulled her hands out of his and sprang to her feet in a single convulsive movement.

"Eleanor!" he exclaimed, as she whirled to face him, hoping he could see something of her inner struggle in her expression. "Eleanor, what's wrong? Please, I haven't offended you again—"

She shook her head, frantically, and wrapped her own hands around her throat, trying to force some last words out of it before she had to run—

But the words that came were not the ones she had expected.

"Reggie—" she heard herself gasping "—I love you!"

And then, she turned, and ran, leaving him calling after her. She couldn't even understand what he was saying at that point, the spells were tightening on her so painfully. He had no hope of catching her, lame as he was, of course. Sarah would be waiting—

—but she could not stop for Sarah.

No, she could not stop for anything.

All she could do was run, for as long as she was running in the right direction the bands of pain around her body, around her mind, would ease just enough to allow her to continue running. But if she stopped, even for a moment. . . .

She did not take the road. The road was too long. She fled headlong and heedless through the grounds, across the long, empty lawn, and into the "wilderness" which was no wilderness at all, of course, only a carefully cultivated illusion of one. She couldn't think; not clearly anyway. Only fragments of thought lanced across the all-encompassing demand of Alison's spells.

Why was this happening?

She stumbled across a bridle-path that went in the right direction, and turned down it; her rose-wreath and garland were gone, and her hair was down all one side. Her sides ached, but the coercions were not letting up. A branch tangled with her skirt and she yanked it free without missing a step.

How had the coercions suddenly snapped into place?

There was a low stone wall in the way; she scrambled over it, and found herself in a meadow full of sheep that scattered before her, bleating indignation. She kept going; at least here there was enough light to see—

Why were the coercions so strong, suddenly?

Another low, stone wall; she left more of her gown on one of the stones. Dimly, she recognized the top of the Round Meadow where she had met Reggie so often, the upper end, where she normally couldn't go. At least she knew the way from here.

If the pain in her side and her head would let her. Her world narrowed to the pain and the next step, each step bringing her closer to The Arrows, closer to the end of the pain. The end of the pain—

Run!

Her breath rasped in her lungs, sending sharp, icy stabs into her chest. Her vision blurred and darkened; she felt branches lashing at her as she passed. But all she could think of was that she must, must get to The Arrows.

Run!

She felt hard, bare dirt and hard-packed gravel under her feet. She was in the road to Broom. She didn't remember getting over the fence.

Run, run, run!

She stumbled into the side of one of the houses on High Street; caught herself, pushed herself off, and kept running.

There was Sarah's cottage, just ahead. Then past.

She tripped and fell, bruising hands and knees at the corner; shoved herself up and kept running. Here was the Broom Tavern.

Almost there—

She stumbled again and fell into the fence around the garden of the Arrows. She caught herself, and ran the last few yards completely blind, shoving open the garden gate, and falling inside, down onto the path, as the gate swung shut again behind her.

And the pain stopped.

The mental pain, anyway.

As she lay on the ground, gasping for breath in great, aching lungfuls, she discovered an entirely new source of very physical pain. Her palms and knees burned, her side felt as if someone had stuck a knife in her, and whenever she moved, she could feel deep scratches and bruises everywhere. And all she could do was to lie there and try to get her breath back, because she couldn't move in her current state if her life depended on it.

But she could think, at least—though not coherently. Whole thoughts, rather than fragments, but they came to her in no particular order as she lay on her back with her eyes closed, gasping.

Freed from the coercions, her mind raced. I have to get cleaned up and changed. Alison and the girls will be coming home. I can't look like this—maybe I can disguise some of the scratches and bruises with kitchen ash. At least they won't be expecting me to still be awake.

Sarah would, she hoped, surely know when the coercions had suddenly tightened around her, and would take the cart and horse back to its owners. Surely she wouldn't sit there all night.

Another thought, a bleak one this time. I failed. I didn't find the Air Master—

Why had there been that breath of Air Magic around Reggie?

Oh heavens—what did I say to Reggie? Did I really tell him I loved him? How could I have done that? What on earth possessed me? I don't—

But there the thought came to an abrupt halt, because she could not, in all truth, have finished it with "I don't love him," because it wasn't true.

What was he saying to me? It had all gotten jumbled up in the coercions, in the headlong flight across the countryside. She couldn't remember any of it clearly.

Except she knew very well he hadn't said that he loved her.

But had he implied it? He'd asked if he could be more than a friend to her, she remembered that much.

The pain in her side ebbed a little, and with a groan, she pushed herself up off the ground. Her hands were tough, and little more than bruised, but her knees—well, her stockings were surely ruined, and the way they stuck to her knees argued for a bleeding scrape there.

I need to start a fire. The Salamanders can help heal this enough that it doesn't look fresh. I should sleep in the kitchen. . . .

In fact, she had a good idea that she was going to have to sleep in the kitchen whether she wanted to or not. She didn't think she could get up the stairs right now.

It was just a good thing that there was still some clean clothing, laundered and dried just yesterday, that was still waiting downstairs to be taken to her room. Everything that wasn't connected to the ball had been given short shrift in the last few days, and her own business had been last on the list of things to be done.

She got herself to her feet, and stumbled into the kitchen, shoving open the door with an effort. The fire leapt up to answer her unspoken call, and she put another log on it while she stripped off the rags that were all that was left of that wonderful gown, and, with intense regret, threw them on the fire. There was no point in leaving any evidence for anyone to find.

She drew a basin of water from the kitchen pump and cleaned off the dirt and the dried blood with soap and a wet towel. Both her knees were a mess, and there were scratches all over her body. She could hide her knees, but not the scratches on her face and arms.

Something had to be done about that.

When the fire was burning brightly, she called a swarm of Salamanders to wreath around her injuries. They'd only have burned someone who wasn't a Fire magician, and they couldn't heal things up completely, but what they could do was minimize the appearance of the scrapes and deep scratches, so that they looked days, rather than hours old.

Finally, she put on the clean clothing, spread out the pallet-bed, and fell onto it. She felt as if she wanted to weep. All that work—and for nothing! All she had done was to allow herself to be distracted by Reggie and betrayed by her emotions. She hadn't found the Air Master. She was no nearer to freeing herself than she had been this morning.

As for Reggie—if he dared to come looking for her here—Alison would want to know why, and then—

Unbidden, the image of the Wheel of Fortune card rose in her mind. A few hours ago, she had been up, up, up—now the Wheel had turned, and she had tumbled down, down, down—

The Wheel would turn again. She had to believe that. She had to.

Exhaustion, mental and physical overcame her while she was trying to convince herself of that, and she slept.

Only to be jolted awake by the impact of a delicately pointed toe on her own sore ribs.

She started out of sleep, and looked up, dumbly, to find that Alison, her daughters, and the odious Warrick Locke were all gazing down at her with expressions on their faces that made her heart turn to stone. And a scrap of lace and a single rosebud dangled from Alison's fingertips.

"Take care of her," Alison said to Locke, before Eleanor could say a word.

And before she could move, he had swooped down on her like a hawk on a mouse, a rag in one hand that he clamped over her nose and mouth. There was a sickly-sweet smell—

—and then, nothing.

28

August 12, 1917

Broom, Warwickshire

ALISON LOOKED DOWN AT THE unconscious and much-battered form of her stepdaughter, sprawled on top of the heap of ragged blankets that was her bed, and seethed with rage that she carefully kept from her expression. There was no point in letting everyone know how close she was to unleashing that rage. In fact, she was quite sure that it was her control, and not her 'anger, that frightened Locke. "I am very glad you were clever enough to see past her costume at the ball, Lauralee," she said, keeping her voice level. "And gladder still that you kept her from seeing you. She very nearly undid everything we have accomplished so far. Who could have guessed that idiot boy would have been attracted to her?"

Carolyn pouted. "What I want to know is, where did she get that dress?" Her expression, as well as her voice, was raw with envy. That would have been moderately interesting under other circumstances, as her mother would never have guessed she had a passion for pink, lace, and rosebuds. It was an exceedingly misplaced concern, given the situation.

"Light the lamp, Carolyn," was all Alison said. She was not entirely in charity with her younger daughter at the moment. Carolyn continued to pout, but did as she was ordered.

"And how did she get in the door?" Lauralee added, her own voice hard with the same anger her mother was feeling.

"More to the point, how did she get out the door—this door?" Alison retorted, gesturing at the exit from the kitchen. "There are explanations for the rest—she could have found the dress in the attic, for instance, and she could have told the butler that she was with us in order to get into the ball. Didn't you say Reggie had asked about her, Carolyn?"

Carolyn blinked, as if the question caught her by surprise. "Well,"

she admitted reluctantly, "yes, but—"

"So she could easily have been on the guest list, and all she had to do was claim she misplaced her invitation. But how did she manipulate my coercive spells?" Alison glared down at the wretched girl. "That's what I want to know!"

"You have been concentrating on Reggie," Warrick Locke reminded her. "And you've been quite careful about working magic anywhere around Lady Virginia since her ladyship arrived. Between the two, your coercive spells may have weakened. It's just a very good thing for all of us that Lauralee spotted her, and that the rest of us were at the ball too."

"If you hadn't had Warrick along, he wouldn't have been able to shield Lady Virginia from sensing magic," Lauralee reminded her mother. "So you were able to redouble your coercions and force her back here. She didn't fight that, so possibly, as Mr. Locke says, it's only that your binding spells were weakening over time because you haven't been renewing them."

"Or possibly the girl is coming into her powers." Alison gritted her teeth. That was the one possibility that simply hadn't occurred to her up until this moment. And it was the one possibility that made her the angriest. "If that's the case, then there's no time to waste. We'll have to take her out to the nearest mine, the one closest to the Hoar Stones, and dump her there now instead of later. If she is becoming a Fire mage—her powers won't do her any good in there. Not underground, and not when my creatures are finished with her."

Oh, the miserable chit! She was forcing everything—and ruining what she hadn't forced!

"Alison," Locke said, warningly, pulling out his watch, and showing the face to her, "It's nearly five in the morning. We can't take her now. Someone will see us."

For one moment, Alison deeply regretted her rise in social status, because it would have been very relieving of her frustrations to curse like a fishwife right now. Locke was right, of course; none of the motors had anywhere to hide a bundled-up body, and the sun would be up by the time they got everything packed up and into the automobiles. It would have to wait until dark.

"How do you want to keep her unconscious?" Locke continued, now looking nervous. "I hate to advise against more chloroform, because it is dangerous, and there's an equal chance that I'd kill her or she'd come out of it—and you don't want her dead, that will do you no good at all—"

"I have something," Alison interrupted him. "It's a bit more precise."

She went upstairs to her room, and came back down with the morphia kit in both hands. It amused her slightly to see Locke's eyes bulge a little when he realized what it was. She readied the needle, pleased that she had learned to do all of this a long time ago. One of the few benefits of caring for the aged. . . .

"You surprise me," Locke said, finally, as she pulled a measured dose of the fluid into the chamber. "This is not something I would have expected you to possess." The look of shock still on his face made her raise an eyebrow.

"Don't be an idiot, Warrick," Lauralee snapped. "Mother's not an addict. She just believes in being prepared. She got that from our doctor in London ages ago. She told him it was because Eleanor had fits."

"And I pay him well enough to be incurious," Alison said, kneeling down at the girl's side, turning her arm over, and probing for a vein. "He noted it in his records as being for Eleanor, and it cost me a pretty penny, too. But you never know when you're going to need to keep someone quiet." She injected the fluid, and stood up. "There. That should keep her for quite some time. And it has the added benefit that, if she is coming into her powers, it will throw her right out of her body for a while, which should thoroughly disorient her."

She waved at Locke, who was just standing there, gaping at her. "Take the little wretch and bundle her out of sight somewhere."

"Where?" he asked, and she turned a furious face towards him.

"I don't care] You know this house well enough to find some place! I don't want anyone coming in here and stumbling over her, that's all!" She suppressed the urge to stamp her foot. Did she have to think of everything?

"The wash-house?" suggested Lauralee sweetly. "No one would look in there, and it will be handy for taking her out to the autos when we leave tonight."

They all looked to Alison, who nodded. Carolyn, she noted, was looking more and more calf-like. Stupid and sulky. Well, it was clear which of her daughters was the more useful.

Alison watched, lips pressed tightly together, as Locke picked up the girl, heaved her over his shoulder, and followed Lauralee out the kitchen door and into the dark and shadowy yard. There was a creak as the wash-house door opened, a soft thud, and the creak of the door again. Then a rattle as Lauralee shot home the bolt, locking Eleanor in. Wise little Lauralee, who was also taking no chances.

Lauralee led the way back in through the kitchen door, yawning, and in spite of the tension, Alison found herself yawning as well. "Mother, I am shattered—"

"We all are," Alison said, cutting her off, grimly. "This has been a less than successful night, and we are going to have to act quickly and resolutely to minimize the damage. We can't do that without sleep. She will keep. Warrick, you can take one of the spare bedrooms; at this point, with as much as we have at stake, I am willing to risk a little gossip."

Lauralee nodded, looking relieved. Carolyn walked up the first few stairs, and her sister followed, more slowly, burdened as she was by her elaborate costume.

"I did come to the ball with you," Locke pointed out meekly. "And it would only be hospitable to offer a place for me for the night, after such a late return."

"Do you think Reggie will come looking for her here?" Lauralee asked suddenly, turning back to look down at them with an expression of worry.

What with everything else that was going wrong—probably. "He might," Alison replied. "And we need to be prepared for that." She thought about it for a moment. "Our best bet may be to try and convince him that the girl he met was not Eleanor, but—Lauralee."

"Lauralee!" Carolyn exclaimed angrily, jealousy sharpening her tone. "Why Lauralee?"

"She's the nearest in size, he didn't set eyes on her once all evening, and the difference in hair-color can be explained with a wig," Alison replied, consigning Carolyn's hopes to the dustbin without a twinge. "Whereas you, dear, he danced with twice, so he knows very well that you weren't in the fairy princess costume. He can't possibly have known who Eleanor is; when would he ever have met her? It might work, and if it does, we'll have saved the situation. You can explain running away somehow. I leave it up to you to think of something."

"I will," Lauralee promised, and she turned to go back up the stairs. Her sister led the way, bristling and pouting at the same time.

"That one's going to be trouble," Locke warned. "She's going to let jealousy of her sister take precedence over everything else."

Alison sniffed. "She's the least of my worries. She'll behave herself now because this situation will fall to pieces if we don't all work together. And she'll behave herself later—because she knows what will happen if she doesn't."

"Oh?" Locke replied, looking skeptical.

She dropped the mask she habitually wore and let him see the true Alison Robinson, just for a moment. He shrank back, as she reinforced the revelation with her next words.

"I only need one daughter," she said, icily. "And I periodically remind them of that." She smiled as he nodded, trembling, and all but scrambled up the stairs to a guest room.

August 12, 1917

Elsewhere

At one moment, Eleanor had been surrounded by the last people on earth she wanted to see. She had started to get up, but Warrick Locke had pounced on her with a rag in one hand. He had covered her nose and mouth with it; she had been forced to breathe through it, tasting a sickly-sweet, unbearably thick aroma, and the next thing she knew she had been thrust into blackness. She seemed to fall forever, then there was a kind of electric jolt—

Now, she was here. The Tarot-world, with its flat, blue sky and its flat, green lawns. But this was a part of it she had never seen before.

She stood inside a square of grass that was surrounded by hedges whose tops were well above her head. It all looked very measured and regular; too regular to be real.

"Where am I?" she said aloud, though she really only thought she was talking to herself.

But she wasn't alone. She heard something behind her, and turned. "You are in the center of a maze," said the Hermit, pushing back his cowl and setting his lantern down. He frowned, but at the hedges, not at her, his bushy gray brows knitting together. "You are in great danger; this is merely a reflection in this world of another reality that surrounds you."

At the moment, she didn't care what the maze was for. "I know I don't belong here," she said urgently. "And I know I'm in danger—but I didn't come here by myself, and I don't know how to get out! Is there any way you can help me?"

He looked directly into her eyes, and she saw a personality there— something she had not ever really seen with any of the other Tarot cards. "The Perfect Fool asks the unasked questions—" he said aloud. Then he changed.

He became—Fire. Fire incarnate. A sexless creature of insubstantial flame, gazing at her with penetrating blue eyes, eyes the color of a hot gas flame. His voice remained the same, however.

"I think we can dispense with this, child," he said, and with a casual gesture, the maze, the flat blue sky, the flat green earth, were all gone. In their place—a world of fire, fire which not only did not burn her, but which, when it touched her, felt like a cool caress. "You are not a Master, not yet—I am not compelled to obey you, nor required by mutual bargain."

She shook her head. "I know that," she replied, swallowing. "And I know I'll be studying all my life to really understand my powers. I was foolish to think I could Master all the cards in a few days, but—but I think I could have gotten enough to have broken free of Alison."

"You are in great danger," the Fire Elemental repeated. "And the maze we were in is nothing to the maze that holds you tight in tangles of magic."

"Yes I am," she agreed, shivering. "I don't think I can escape from this by myself. I need help. Will you, can you help me?"

"That depends," the Elemental said, measuringly. "You must show by your intelligence that you deserve help."

Fire—most difficult of the Elements. Dangerous to try and control. More dangerous to lie to. But win its loyalty—

"I have to break the coercions," she said flatly. "And I have to break free of here, and get back to the real world again."

But the Elemental simply regarded her gravely. Finally, "Or—?" he prompted.

Fire is the hardest to hold, most difficult to understand, likeliest to rebel, and is impressed only by—intellect. This Elemental was showing remarkable patience by those standards. She pummeled her brain. What could she do to get out of the coercions? If she broke them, Alison would know. She'd already tried stretching them. What else was there? If she looked around herself a certain way, she could actually see them here, tangling around her in a rat's nest of bindings like—

She blinked, and looked again. Like—a—maze—just as he told me.

She took a deep breath. She couldn't solve the thing in the "real" world, but—here?

"What happens if I thread my way out of the coercions?" she asked the Fire Elemental.

He grinned broadly, and nodded, the flames that were his hair brightening. "Then her spells will no longer hold you, and yet, they will not be broken. So she will not be aware that her spells no longer hold you. But do you think you can solve this?"

"I have to," she replied grimly. "I'll see if wall-following will do it. It might take longer, but it's the surest."

She focused her concentration until the tangles of the spells that confined her became clear, concentrated further, willing the tangles to take on the tangible form of walls and passageways.

The magician imposes his will, his way of seeing on the Plane of Magic, and the Plane reflects what he wills. She couldn't will herself out of this, because the mind and will that had set the spells was stronger than she was. But she could force it to take on a semblance of something she could deal with.

She found herself at the heart of another maze. She didn't like the look of the walls that surrounded her, either; they were dark and repellent and she didn't want to touch them, but wall-following meant keeping one hand on either the left or the right-hand wall and following it, no matter what, and after a moment of thought, she put her hand on the left-hand wall, and stepped into the shadowy, intimidating darkness of the maze itself.

The Fire Elemental came with her, which surprised her a little, though it was heartening to have company. She hadn't expected it, and since he brought light with him, this meant she could actually see where she was going.

That was an advantage. Seeing the walls that made up the maze clearly was not an advantage.

They felt like something alive—but not pleasant. Faintly warm, pulsing, a touch slimy. But worse than the feel was the look; a suggestion effaces there, and not nice faces, either. She didn't ask if the walls were alive; that was fairly obvious. "Can they feel?" she asked instead.

"Oh yes," came the reply; grim, and with a dangerous edge to it.

"Are they in pain?" she continued. Not that she wanted to know— except that she did.

"Oh, yes," softly, yet somehow grimmer still.

She made another two turnings; the faces in the walls were set in frozen expressions of despair. "Can I free them?" she asked. Not that she wanted to, but—

But nothing should suffer if it doesn't have to.

The Fire Elemental stopped, looking at her with an expression of utter astonishment. "Why would you desire to do that?" he asked.

"Because if I can, I should," she replied, knowing that this was the right answer. Not the most expedient, and perhaps not the wisest, but the right answer. "This—this is wrong. If I can make it right, then it's my duty to. I have power, and power begets responsibility."

And the walls began to murmur.

She shivered at the sound, which carried something of the tone of those revenants in it. But the Fire Elemental straightened, and spread his arms wide, the little flamelets that danced over him rising from his outstretched limbs. "Hear, my lesser brothers of Earth? Do you hear this child of Flame? You are in thrall to a Dark Master of Earth. She is not bound to you; she has no responsibility to you, and yet—she would free you."

A single, enormous face formed on the wall immediately in front of her. The eyes were closed and remained closed; she was just as glad. She had the feeling that if those eyes opened and looked at her, she'd be sick with fear.

It wasn't an ugly or deformed face; in fact the features were quite regular. But there was something about it that made her wish she wasn't looking at it. Something dark and cruel, something that loved pain, and was bargaining with her only because it had no choice.

"We hear," said the chorus of voices, which now came from the single face, although the lips didn't move. "Why?"

"Because," the Fire Elemental replied, with pride welling in every word, "she is better than your mistress."

The face in the wall did not react one way or another to this statement.

"How can I free you?" she asked, her voice trembling, yet determined.

"Break her defenses, and you will free us," came the reply, in a low and ugly rumble. "Swear that you will!"

Be very careful what you promise] came the thought. This is the Elemental world, and words have more weight here than in the real world. If she promised—and failed—there would be a different sort of price to pay, and there was no telling what that price would be, only that it could be very expensive.

And you do not want to owe an unknown penalty to a negative Elemental.

"I promise I will try," she said instead. "If you will give me the key to this place that holds me."

The face became very still for a moment, as if all of the creatures speaking through it were consulting with one another. Then it spoke again. "Follow the Tree," it said, "The counter-Tree. The Tree of Death."

And it faded back into the wall again, but Eleanor knew exactly what it meant—it was a riddle, probably given to her in that form because she had not promised to do anything but try, but not a very clever one. She was to trace the opposite path of the Tree of Life; fortunately, the Tree of Life happened to be one of the major Tarot layouts as well as the key to the Kabala, or she wouldn't have known what the face in the wall meant. Mentally she retraced her steps from the center of the maze, and realized with relief that she would only have to go back and change her last turning.

"Why are you here with me?" she asked, as she set out on the new pattern, greatly relieved that she was no longer going to have to touch those walls.

"Because, although I cannot help you directly, I have a function I can perform for you," he said, and tilted his head to the side, expectantly.

A function he can perform for me— Abruptly, she realized that he already had.

"You—you are an intermediary!" she exclaimed, stopping dead in her tracks. "You can negotiate with the other Elements!"

He nodded, gravely. "That is my function. And if you can make your way from this place—"

"I will," she replied, fiercely. "And when I do—I have some ideas."

A faint smile flickered over the being's face. "I rather thought as much," he said, and gestured. "Lead on."

She did; and something else occurred to her as she followed the path of the anti-Tree.

Alison had made a very grave mistake, by throwing her into this place, this state. She probably thought that she was imprisoning Eleanor further, and it must have been that Alison had drugged her. The opiates had a long history of being used to access occult states, which was why people who had no business being in such a state used them as "easy" ways to attain knowledge. Maybe Alison had assumed being drugged was going to make her easier to handle, and that would have been true, if she had not been learning discipline and control all this time, and if she had not already been traveling in the Tarot realm. And Alison was accustomed to thinking only in terms of commanding and coercing the creatures of her Element; it must not have even crossed her mind that Eleanor might find allies—or at least, something willing to bargain with her—here.

Alison would have done better to have bound and gagged her. If Eleanor got her way, Alison would live to regret that error.

But first, she still had to escape from the spell-maze, before Alison delivered her physical body to whatever fate the Earth Master had in mind.

August 12,1917

Longacre Park, Warwickshire

By the time Reggie reacted to Eleanor's flight, it was too late. She was out of sight before he could get to his feet, and in the end, all he could find of her was the gloves she had left on the bench beside him.

He could not hope to find her, not now. He had no idea where she had run to—and even if he left the ball and went straight to The Arrows, what was he to do there? Force his way inside? Demand that they produce her? If her stepmother had gone to such lengths to hide her, there was no reason on earth why she should conjure the girl up simply because he demanded it.

Slowly and cautiously, Reg. The first one over the barricades is the first one shot.

With light and music and laughter spilling out of the doors and windows above him, he returned to the garden bench to try and make some sense of what had just happened. One moment, she had been talking with him, perfectly sensibly—the next, she was fleeing as if pursued by demons. And yet, it couldn't have been what he said that sent her running away, could it?

Hadn't she managed to choke out that she loved him before she ran?

Surely her stepmother's hold over her could not control her here, in the privacy of Longacre's gardens—

Unless—

He shook his head at the thought. No, surely not. Surely it was not possible that Alison Robinson was a magician.

Was it?

He was completely unwilling to drop his barricades now. If Alison Robinson was a magician—heaven alone only knew what she had set in motion to try and ensnare him for one of her daughters. There might be a spell just waiting for a break in his defenses.

By the time he found Lady Virginia just paying her farewells to her cronies as the guests began to depart, and got her to come down into the garden with him, the traces of—yes—magic were almost too faint for her to read. All she could say for certain was that both Earth magic of the darker sort and Fire magic had left a hint of "scent" behind.

"Back inside, please," his godmother said when she'd finished. "It's altogether too damp and chilly for my bones. Let's adjourn to the library; there should still be a fire there."

Somewhat reluctantly, he agreed. He still wanted to go tearing after Eleanor, but he knew that would be the wrong thing to do. He had no plan of action, and to go into this without a plan was asking for trouble.

The Earth—well, dark magic of some sort—he had expected. But who was the Fire? The only mages here were Air—

Unless—Eleanor?

When he spoke his thoughts aloud, incredulously, Lady Virginia only shrugged, as she extended her toes towards the library fire. "Magicians are always more vulnerable to magic than other folk," she pointed out. "If the girl is an Elemental Mage, then her stepmother would have an easier time of it in trying to control her. The hardest creature to affect by magic is someone who has none of it at all."

He fidgeted with the cane he had taken from the stand near the door, and longed to be able to pace as he used to at times like these. To think of poor Eleanor, down there, in that repellent woman's hands—

She looked at him sharply. "Reginald," she said, very slowly, "Are you in love with this girl?"

He would have thought it was obvious to a far less astute person than his godmother, but he replied, "Yes. Yes, I am."

"Your mother won't like it," Lady Virginia cautioned. "She's common."

"So are the Americans that keep marrying into the peerage," he snapped, feeling an entirely irrational surge of irritation. "And so are the other two girls, and Mater would have no trouble at all throwing me to one of them!"

"Ah, but the Americans have fortunes—large fortunes," his godmother retorted. "Even if the girl inherited, and there's no guarantee of that, she's prosperous, but no heiress. And Alison Robinson is in Burke's, so presumably so are her daughters."

"Is she?" he replied. "Someone with the name she's claiming is, but anyone can claim to be a member of a family one is never going to encounter. And I didn't find any mention of Carolyn, Lauralee, or either of Alison's marriages in Burke's, if she is who she claims to be."

"She was vetted by Alderscroft—" Lady Virginia began, and before she could continue, her jaw tightened. "Alderscroft, who would swear his second-best hunter was a member of the peerage if he thought it would serve the cause. I begin to smell a rat, Reginald. Alderscroft may have used her before, and certainly knows she lives in Broom, so he might have told her to keep an eye on you, without bothering to tell me about it, may I add. But it is as certain as the sun rising in the east that she decided to aggrandize herself as soon as she saw the situation. I knew there was something about that woman that I did not like."

"I may very well discover more you won't like before I'm through," Reggie said grimly.

"It wouldn't surprise me." Lady Virginia reached out and took his hand. "Please promise me that you will not go tearing down there this instant in your motor."

"I would like to—but I feel that would be a very bad notion," he replied with feeling. "I will go down there tomorrow. I might actually catch the girl myself, in which case, I will bundle her up here and put her in your hands. If there are coercions on her—you can deal with them."

"Against a creature like Alison Robinson? I should think so," his godmother told him, in a tone that would have been arrogant in anyone but a mage of her ability. "I'll open up your father's workroom and prepare it. Heaven knows I've used it often enough in the past. On our home ground, Reginald, it would take an army of mages to defeat us."

"If I can't find her immediately, I'll have to try subterfuge. And fortunately, I have an excuse." He smiled thinly. "I have these. And I will be looking for the girl who fits them."

He held up the pink silk gloves. Lady Virginia raised an eyebrow.

"Forgive my skepticism, Reginald, but virtually any girl whose hands aren't completely ruined could fit into a pair of silk gloves—"

"Oh, no. Not these," he retorted, and spread out the fingers of the left-hand glove. The three fingers.

Lady Virginia blinked. "Ah," she said. "Well, that puts a different complexion on things, doesn't it? Rather like Anne Boleyn's set of five."

"Rather like." He folded the gloves carefully and tucked them inside his tunic. "I'd like very much to see either Carolyn or Lauralee fit that glove."

"Hmm." Lady Virginia stared into the fire. "Be careful what you wish for. If the girls are like the mother, they might find a way, at whatever cost."

29

August 12, 1917

Elsewhere

THESE WALLS—THEY REPRESENT SOMETHING. It wasn't just spells that Alison put to tie me to the hearth, was it?" she asked her companion, when the silence within the maze became unbearable.

"No; she has actually tied minor Elementals into the spells so that she did not have to renew them so often," the Fire creature replied. "This is why the maze appears to be a living thing. It actually is; more than one."

"Ugh." She shuddered, and glanced at the walls around them. Colored a sad brown, suggestions of faces continued to come and go. "Is that as nasty as I think it is?"

"Surely." The Fire creature regarded her soberly. "As certainly as you have been imprisoned by them, they have been imprisoned by Alison. They may be creatures of darkness, but they have spent the years as the bars of your cage."

The more she learned about Alison, the more she wanted to be free of her. If ever there was someone evil—

I am not really "here," she reminded herself. This is like the Tarot world; my body is—well, wherever Alison put it. Perhaps the cellar. I must escape the maze and then—then wake up from whatever she did to me.

But she had to wonder, what would happen to the "real" Eleanor, if her—call it "spirit-self—was hurt?

Her mother's notebooks hadn't covered that possibility.

And what would happen if she didn't get back to herself in a few hours? How long could her untenanted body sleep before life began to fade?

So strange—her body here felt real, felt solid, solid enough that her insides twisted with tension when she realized that she might be fighting against time as well as Alison.

She didn't really expect to be able to leave the maze unopposed. Just because she had managed to strike some kind of bargain with the maze itself, it did not follow that there were not more elemental Earth creatures here to block her passage. Probably they would try to intimidate her first, though.

Above her—vague darkness. They walked on a surface that was very like dead grass, and the only light here came from her companion. If ever there was a place of stagnation, this was it. The air was dry and acrid, with a faint scent of corruption. And the maze walls did not get any better the deeper she went.

And just as she had expected, once they were, by her accounting, roughly halfway through, she sensed something up ahead of her. When she turned the corner—there it was.

She might have mistaken it for a Brownie if she hadn't known better. It looked like exactly like a child's picture-book illustration of a Brownie in a red cap—but it was the cap that gave it away.

This was a Redcap, a vicious little gnome with an insatiable appetite for murder. It soaked its cap in the blood of its victims; hence the name. There was no point in even trying to negotiate with something like this; it was completely evil and absolutely treacherous.

And if she had not been studying all four Elements instead of just her own, she would never have known that.

She felt her eyes narrow as she stepped threateningly towards the Redcap. There was power welling up in her; she felt it rising inside, and she knew that if she had to strike at this thing, the power would answer her. There were only two ways to deal with a Redcap; make it run or destroy it. Turning your back on it would be fatal.

"Hello, daughter of Adam," the Recap said, wheedlingly, looking up at her with an entreating gaze. "I am lost, trapped here, like you. Won't you help me find the way out of this maze?"

"I think not, Redcap," she replied, before the Fire elemental could warn her. "I think you know the way out already. Don't you?"

The Redcap's face underwent a frightening transformation. Its eyes turned red, with a greenish glow to the pupils; it hunched over, hands fumbling at its belt for the knife it probably had hidden there, and it snarled, showing sharp, pointed teeth.

"Look out!" the Fire creature called, but she was already calling up fire herself, in the shape of her Salamanders. They appeared out of nowhere, as large as bloodhounds and fierce as lions, two of them, planting themselves between her and the Redcap, hissing.

The Redcap leapt back with a curse. It shook its fist at her, and ran off into the depths of the maze. Since it wasn't going the way she planned, she kept the Salamanders from chasing it.

When it was gone, they fawned around her like affectionate cats, rubbing up against her and butting their heads into her hands. The Fire creature regarded them with amusement.

"Under other circumstances," it said, "I would say that you have a remarkable way with animals. I am glad that you have won their loyalty."

"So am I," she replied fervently. "Should I keep them with us?"

"Definitely. I have no idea what might lie ahead of us, except that I cannot imagine that there will not be more trouble."

She just nodded. She doubted very much that the next obstacle they encountered would be so obliging as to run away.

August 12, 1917

Longacre Park, Warwickshire

Reggie didn't sleep very much—but then, he hadn't expected to. And he had flown and fought on less rest than he'd gotten last night. He had gone over his plan so many times it was engraved in his mind—

Not that he really expected to find the Robinsons following his plan. No, he would just have to keep his wits about him and try to find a way to get to Eleanor. Once they were together, he didn't think that even Alison would try to oppose him taking her out.

She could summon a constable, he supposed—but he doubted that the Broom constable, old as he was, would do more than make a token effort to stop him. And once Eleanor was freed from whatever holds Alison had placed on her, the shoe would almost certainly be on the other foot. He suspected that she had some ugly tales to tell.

It was very hard, though, to have to rise, breakfast as usual—and wait. Wait, because if he went down at any time before, say, noon—no one would let him in. Certainly Eleanor was not permitted to answer the door. She hadn't before, when he'd called, and that was probably to keep her from being recognized by a visitor, or from blurting out a plea for help. If he arrived too early, no one would be awake, and he could hardly pound on the door and bellow at them to let him in. Not unless he wanted to tip his hand.

No, above all, he didn't want anyone to know what he was up to until it was too late to do anything about it.

The Robinsons had left about three—so they would not be receiving visitors until noon at the earliest. So he would have to wait.

Except—if he was going to go into a confrontation with an Earth Master, his simple barricades were not going to suffice.

So after breakfast, with a feeling of fear that would have paralyzed him had he not been eaten alive with worry for Eleanor, he took a certain back staircase that his mother was not even aware existed, up to a room on the same floor as the servants' quarters. Except that this room connected with no other chamber in the house, and the door to the staircase was carved with sigils that would allow only an Elemental Master to see it.

It took a terrible effort for him to take each step upwards—because each step brought him nearer to the moment when he must give up his defenses and accept the power back into his hands—and with that power, open himself to attack. He was sweating by the time he reached the landing.

It was his father's old workroom, a corner room with tall windows on two sides, lined with books and cabinets for supplies on the other two, and with a floor of white marble inlaid with a magic circle in silver. And Lady Virginia was already there.

She was dressed for the occasion, in a loose, sky-blue robe of silk, with her ice-white hair in a single plait down her back. Curiously enough, this made her look younger, rather than older.

"I thought you might turn up," she said, as he closed the door to the staircase behind him. "So I didn't put up the wards yet."

He shivered, involuntarily. "If you had any idea how frightened I am—" Then he steeled himself, before the panic could rise up and choke him. "But I don't have a choice, do I?"

"Not if Alison Robinson is a Master—and all of the preliminary work I have done tells me she is," Lady Virginia replied grimly. "I believe—though I am not yet sure—that she is the one responsible for that plague of revenants outside your father's old shields. I can't imagine why she would set them on you, but I'm not very good at deciphering the plans of individuals with the kind of twisted soul capable of summoning something like that up in the first place."

Reggie nodded. Then he spoke the hardest words he had ever said in his life. "Tell me what to do, Godmother," he begged. "Help me, please. I need my powers back, and we don't have a great deal of time before I face her."

"Then I will need to force your shields open," she replied, jaw set. "And it won't be easy on you."

He bowed his head, with the feeling that he was baring his neck to the axe. "I never thought it would," he said, with miserable determination.

August 12, 1917

Elsewhere

The end of the maze was very near, and Eleanor had routed a good half-dozen nasty creatures that had tried to ambush her on the way. The worst had been the Night-mare; at least, so far. A truly dreadful black thing it was with far too many legs, all of them ending in talons rather than hooves, and long, white fangs. The Salamanders had not been able to attack it, and it had come charging straight at her—

And she had found herself with a flaming sword in her hands. She had no more idea of how to use it than how to fly—but slashing wildly at the Night-mare had made it shy sideways to avoid the attack, aborting its charge. It had stared at her with evil red eyes for a moment, then, like the Redcap, it had retreated into the depths of the maze.

"Interesting," her companion said, as she let the sword go, only to have it vanish into thin air the moment she loosed her hold on the hilt. "It appears that however Alison is controlling or coercing these creatures, it is not enough to make them face any sort of serious opposition. I believe she has completely underestimated you."

"I hope sol" Eleanor replied, as her Salamanders pressed up against her legs, one on either side of her.

Now she was one turn away from the exit to the maze, or so she thought. When she rounded this last corner, she should be free of the spells that bound her to the hearth of The Arrows.

But of course, Alison was not likely to let her go without a fight.

She turned the corner, and found herself facing every creature she had encountered thus far, and some new ones, all lined up across the exit-point to the maze.

August 12, 1917

Longacre Park, Warwickshire

Reggie emerged from the workroom feeling—unnerved. Unsettled? No, far too mild a word. Severely rattled, and definitely drained. Those hard-built barricades were gone, but he had yet to test the strength of his powers as an Air Master, because he did not want to alert Alison to the fact that those powers were back, and neither did Lady Virginia. Psychologically—

He was a wreck, for he had, in the space of a few hours, lived through and endured the sharp-focused memory of his ordeal after being shot down. The difference was, this time he had his godmother to guide him through it. This time, he had come out the other side still sane. Or at least, relatively so. But his nerves were raw, and fear surged and ebbed unexpectedly, making him wonder just how much control he could keep.

But they had run out of time. It was midafternoon by the time Lady Virginia allowed him to go, and some instinct warned him that Alison Robinson was going to do whatever she had planned for Eleanor very soon. He had to get down there now—or, he suspected, he would lose her forever.

His auto was waiting for him at the door, as he had requested before he went up to the workroom. He thanked heaven that she wasn't a temperamental beast; in fact, she might have been sensitive to his urgency, for she fired up at the first spark, all cylinders roaring like uncaged lions.

He threw the auto down the drive at a reckless pace, and kept it up right to the outskirts of Broom—but the moment he was within sight of the place, he throttled the racing engine down, and proceeded at what seemed to his raw nerves to be a crawl. This was not just to avoid knocking people down, it was because things had to seem normal. If Alison suspected anything, she could, and probably would, refuse him entrance.

It made him want to scream with impatience as he dawdled down the main street, smiling tightly, and waving at some of his cronies from the pub. Only one thought kept him steady; Alison did not know how much Eleanor had said to him. Nor did she know they already knew each other. So there should be no real reason in her mind to suspect how much Reggie already knew or guessed. She should not have felt the need to rush into a solution to the problem of Eleanor's escape.

Or so he hoped and prayed. There had been one good sign, anyway—Lady Virginia had been assiduously monitoring the area for signs of powerful magic ever since last night, and there had been nothing.

At long last he pulled up to the edge of the street beside The Arrows. He parked the beast right there, took out his cane, and limped to the front doorway to ring the bell.

It was answered by Carolyn, who looked startled and confused the moment she set eyes on him.

"Reggie!" she exclaimed, pushing a lock of hair out of her eyes. "What a delightful surprise! We didn't expect you—"

"I know," he said, stretching his mouth in what he hoped was a genuine-looking smile. "But I had to come down here today. I know how clever you all are, and how you know just about everyone for miles around, and I was hoping you girls could help me solve a mystery."

"But—of course, please come in, I can't think what I'm doing, leaving you standing in the door like this." She laughed; was it his imagination, or did it ring false? "We're sending formal thank-you letters, of course, but since you are here, I must tell you that your ball was wonderful; I don't know when I've had a better time!"

"Actually, that's why I'm here," he said, seizing the opportunity with both hands as he stepped into the parlor at her direction. The Arrows was at least as old as the Broom; real, genuine Tudor construction. The place betrayed its age, with blackened beams, white-plaster walls, and very low ceilings that made him want to duck his head. "You see, I encountered someone at the ball, but she left before I got a chance to find out who she was, and I hoped you could help me with that."

"Me?" Carolyn turned towards him as he took a seat beside the fire, and he was sure he was not mistaken; there was a flush of guilt on her cheeks. He felt his gut tighten. "How could I help?"

"Indeed, as eager as we are to assist you in any way, Reggie, I don't know what we could do in this case," said Alison Robinson, gliding into the room, soundlessly. He didn't jump, but she had startled him, moving so quietly. There was something altogether snakelike about the way she moved. If he'd had hackles, they'd have been up. "There were dozens of young women at your ball, and all of them were masked for most of the evening."

"Ah," he said brightly. "But I think you might know this girl, and she has one very distinctive characteristic. You see, she wore these gloves—"

He held out the pink silk gloves to Alison, who examined them with a faint frown on her face. Right until the moment when she realized that the left-hand glove had only three fingers.

Then, she started, and paled for a moment, and he felt his heart leap in triumph. So, they were up to something! And they hadn't known Eleanor had left anything of herself behind.

"Actually, I believe you are correct," she said, recovering quickly and turning a bland face towards him, "I do know something about the girl who wore this glove. If you'll wait a moment—"

"I would wait a year if you could bring her to me," Reggie replied, his heartbeat quickening with nervous tension. Should he not have presented the gloves to Alison? Now she knew something was up, but did she guess how much he knew about Eleanor? Or rather—how little? She can't be going to bring Eleanor. There's some trickery going on here.

But before he could think of anything else to say, Alison had carried the gloves away with her and Carolyn was babbling at him about the delights of the ball.

He tried, unsuccessfully, to get her onto any other subject, or at least to slow down the torrent of words. To no avail; it was clear that she was babbling out of sheer panic now, and nothing he said was going to penetrate the wall of fear she had around her. He sat on the edge of his seat, alive with tension, trying to listen past Carolyn's wall of words to what was going on in the next rooms. Was there the creak of a door, something slamming, a muffled exclamation? Was there the sound of a struggle?

"Here we are!" Alison said brightly, making him jump. "Here is your mysterious girl, Reggie—I am afraid that my Lauralee was playing a bit of a prank on you, pretending to be a stranger to you. Girlish high spirits and all—" She smiled thinly. "Of course, she didn't want to spoil the joke by allowing you to guess who she was, so she tells me she ran away from you in the garden."

Sure enough, behind Alison came Lauralee—but a very pale Lauralee, with her teeth clenched, though she tried to feign that she was completely normal. And she was wearing both gloves.

He stood as they both entered the room. "Lauralee!" he said, immediately on his guard, but hoping he wasn't showing it. "How could I not have recognized you?"

"I wore a wig," she said, her voice strained, her mouth stretched in something that looked nothing like a smile. "And I took care to disguise my voice." As he neared her, he saw that her pupils were very large, and heard a faint slur to her words, as if she was drugged.

Yes, there was no trickery; she wore the gloves. But he knew very well that the last time he had seen her, she had owned the usual number of fingers. Which must mean—

The thought made him sick. The girl must be mad. Or her mother. Or both.

Probably both.

He might have spared a moment to pity her, if such an act had not simply shown him that she was as ruthless as her mother. And fear of what they might be doing to Eleanor made him act in a way he probably wouldn't have, otherwise. He reached out and seized both her hands before she could prevent it, and gave the left one a squeeze.

She nearly fainted. And seeping blood stained the side of the glove, where she must have only now cut off the little finger of her left hand. He looked up at Alison's face, and saw that it was suffused with rage.

He had them. "I think—" he began—

And pain and blackness descended on him from behind.

August 12, 1917

Broom, Warwickshire

"Well, Carolyn, you have redeemed yourself in my eyes," Alison said, as Reggie crumpled to the floor. Carolyn stared first at him, then at her mother, wide-eyed, the poker she had used to hit him with still clutched in her nerveless fingers. "Oh, don't look at me like that, you haven't the strength to kill him! You have merely rendered him unconscious. Go and get my kit. I fear we will have two bundles to smuggle out after dark, not one."

She turned to Lauralee, who had reeled against the wall, whimpering with pain, cradling her injured left hand in her right. "I warned you to be sure that you had cauterized the wound properly and that the laudanum had taken effect before you came out of the kitchen!"

"I couldn't help it. He squeezed my hand, Mother," Lauralee replied, her voice faint and full of agony. "He broke open the wound—"

"So he knew all along. He came here looking for Eleanor, and he knew it was Eleanor behind the mask. This is worse than I thought." She stood rigid, rooted in thought, arms crossed over her chest, tapping one finger against her forearm. "That's it; the only hope we have is to take him to the Hoar Stones and make him forget her."

Lauralee blinked up at her mother through tears of pain. "Can you do that?"

"Well, I can make him forget a great deal, and her with it," Alison admitted. "I can erase, in general, every memory he has had since he came home. Then when he wakes, it will be up to you to convince him that he proposed marriage to you last night in the garden, and that he has been in love with you all along."

Carolyn, who had not yet moved, put the poker aside. "But won't that be a problem with his mother?" she faltered. "She wants him to marry within the peerage. That's what everyone was saying last night. And how do we explain that he was injured and his loss of memory?"

Alison shrugged. "We'll say we found him wandering and brought him back. It isn't as if there haven't been rumors about the steadiness of his mind." She frowned. This was getting more complicated by the moment, and dangerous, too. "We'll have to be quick, though. If he doesn't come back by morning—"

"His motorcar is here," Lauralee pointed out. "People will know that. By now, everyone in the village knows that."

Alison gave vent to her feelings with a curse. Carolyn flinched. "Then one of us—me, I suppose—will have to drive our auto, and one of us will have to drive his."

"I'll drive it," Warrick Locke said from the stairs. "Here's your kit, Alison. It was still on the hall table." He handed her the morphia kit and looked down at the prone form of Reggie Fenyx with a lifted brow. "I hope you didn't damage him, Carolyn. Things could be cursed difficult if you have."

"So what if she did?" Alison retorted, filling a syringe and kneeling beside her victim. "It will make my job easier. Bloody hell. I hate complications—"

"Then let's plan this very carefully," Locke said, grimly, "Because this isn't just 'complications,' Alison. You've physically assaulted a man, and not just any man, but a peer, and not just any peer, but a genuine hero of the war. If he remembers what he came for, and what happened to him, the law is going to come into it, and I very much doubt I can get you out of it."

She turned to stare at him as she removed the needle from the vein in Reggie's arm. "You assume I haven't been in this position before."

"If you have, that was in London. In a part of London where people know better than to be curious," he said, coldly. "And you must have dealt with someone who was a nonentity. This is a tiny village, where everyone knows everyone else's business. And this is Captain Reginald Fenyx, baron. Have a care, Alison. This is dangerous."

She took a deep breath and held it to prevent herself from snapping at him. He was right. She needed his help.

The trouble was, it was going to cost her. Men like Warrick Locke could wait decades for an opportunity to get their hooks set in a target—and once they did, it was impossible to shake them off.

"So what do you suggest?" she asked, with feigned meekness.

"After dark, I pull Reggie's motor around to the old stable. You bundle him up in a blanket and bring him out; I'll put him in the passenger's side and wear his coat, goggles and cap myself. Don't try to hide him, I want people to see that there is someone with the driver, though not who. I'll take him straight to the Hoar Stones, leave him there, and drive his motor back along the route you'll be coming, where I'll abandon it in a ditch." Locke's eyes glittered as he spoke; there was no mistake, he enjoyed the part he was now playing, and he was going to get his pound of flesh out of it. "You'll bring the girl along and pick me up. We'll all go back to the Hoar Stones, drop the girl down the mineshaft either before you do your work with Reggie, or afterwards, depending on how things work out. You will work your spell on his memories while I damage his clothing to make it look like he was in an accident. Everyone around here knows how he likes to drive like a demon. That will explain the crack on the head and the amnesia afterwards."

She had to admit, it was a brilliant plan. "Do we leave him with the motor?" she asked, reluctantly. She really didn't want him out of her sight, but—

"Yes, but we'll drive to that coaching-inn we stayed at, and one of us will go rushing in there to report the accident," Locke replied. "While people are milling about, we'll slip away, and there will be no connection between us and his condition. And as for Eleanor, she figures into the plan, too. We'll leave Eleanor's old coat, and perhaps a bundle of belongings in his auto, and once he's identified, no doubt someone will come around to ask why he was here. We'll say we never saw him, then identify the coat and the clothing. That will give us the excuse to send a search-party back in that area to look for her, once you're sure she's gone quite mad! Everyone will assume she eloped with him, or he persuaded her to go away with him, and without a doubt, everyone will assume the worst of her."

She ground her teeth, but smiled at him. Damn the man. It was a good plan, making the best possible use of all of the disasters that fate had thrown at them. "It will work," she conceded.

"It will do more than merely work," Locke said, raising his chin arrogantly. "It's the way to guarantee that one of your girls marries the boy. Don't you see? If Lady Devlin thinks that he and Eleanor were off together, unchaperoned, perhaps on their way to a wedding at the worst, or a clandestine liaison at the best, she'll be terrified that you will demand he marry Eleanor! Bad enough to tie her precious boy to a commoner, but one who's gone mad? And if instead, he's fixated on Lauralee and you give your consent, she'll be so relieved that you aren't making a fuss about the stepdaughter that you'll have no trouble getting her to agree to the wedding herself. She thinks you're gentry—poor, but blue blood. By the time she finds out differently, it will be too late. Especially if you hasten the wedding on the grounds of scandal, the war, or both."

He was right, curse him. Well, of course he was right. He was used to thinking in terms of blackmail. She hadn't much practice in that particular "art." She had always dealt with her enemies in much more direct ways—and with those from whom she wanted favors, by means much more arcane.

"What about me?" Carolyn mewed plaintively. "If Reggie's going to marry Lauralee, what about me?"

At that moment, Alison caught a glimpse of something avid in Locke's eyes, and knew what he was going to demand as his payment for all of this. After all, she would now control the Robinson fortune outright, once she was appointed guardian to a madwoman. Carolyn would stand to inherit all that; Lauralee wouldn't need it once she was Lady Devlin. Carolyn was pretty, soon to be wealthy, none-too-clever, and just as ruthless as Locke. She was a good match for him, by his way of thinking. He would not have to hide things from her, and she would be just as eager to cover up irregularities as he was.

"Oh, you'll have your wedding, too, Carolyn," she replied, with a little nod to Locke. "Just as splendid as Lauralee's. I'll see to that."

And she would see to it that the girl found Locke acceptable, too. After all, it was a great deal easier to put a death-curse on a man whose wife would do anything her mother said.

Because the clever Warrick Locke was getting too clever. And Alison Robinson had not gotten where she was now by allowing anyone to have a hold over her.

30

August 12, 1917

Elsewhere

ELEANOR STARED AT THE SMALL army of Earth Elementals facing them, and put one hand on the back of a Salamander to steady herself. There was no way that she could battle all of them—they'd overwhelm her by sheer numbers. Was it possible that she could call for more help?

Well, what do I lose by trying! She didn't close her eyes, but she did turn her focus inward, calling up from memory the glyphs and sigils that would bring one of the Great Elementals, many of whom had been worshipped as gods. At this point, she didn't particularly care which one, either; the only thing that she did stipulate in her mind was that she really didn't want to fight, not even these things—

As she traced the last sigil in her mind, the whole diagram suddenly flared in the air between her and the Earth creatures, hanging there like a fantastical fireworks display.

And beside her, she heard a swift intake of breath.

Her companion began to grow. His nimbus of flame flared out, engulfing her—but she felt nothing but a cool breeze on her skin, and smelled nothing but the faint scent of cinnamon and clove. He sprouted wings, too, and his head became bird-like—no, hawk-like— and when he stopped growing, at roughly twelve feet tall, she recognized him. Or at least, what he represented.

Horus, the Egyptian god of the rising sun, the son of Osiris and Isis.

She stared at him. Of all creatures, the least likely—

Or perhaps not. She had been working through a Tarot pack which employed many symbols out of ancient Egypt. Horus was as likely as any other, given that influence.

The Earth creatures stared at him as well, dumbfounded, as the flaming sigils faded away. He looked down at them, then turned his head to stare at Eleanor, wings flaring.

"Do you still want to negotiate with them?" came his mild voice. "I think you're in a better position now."

The Salamanders romped about his ankles as she looked up at him. "I'd rather not hurt anyone," she said, though a bit doubtfully. "If I can help it, that is."

"That's wise, here," he conceded. "There's no point in making more enemies than you have to. They have long memories, and hold grudges forever."

He turned to the Earth creatures. "Let us pass," he said, his voice taking on trumpet-like tones. "We would rather not harm you, but we will fight to escape if we must. You do not wish to fight us."

There was uneasy stirring from the line of Earth creatures, but no one moved. Finally the Redcap spoke up, sullenly.

"All right for you to say, but what about us? What happens when the Earth Master discovers you've slipped the trap? She'll have us then, for certain-sure!"

Horus clacked his beak impatiently. "And if we break her protections first? She'll be yours, then."

There were startled looks, then the creatures began talking urgently among themselves. Eleanor couldn't even begin to recognize what they all were; a good half of them hadn't been in any of her reading yet. They all looked like things out of nightmare. Including, of course, the Night-mare.

Horus waited patiently until the murmuring stopped, but if he had expected a direct answer, he didn't get one. Instead, the assembled creatures merely faded away into the shadows and the depths of the maze, leaving the path open.

Eleanor looked up at her protector, and he down at her. "That is as direct an answer as you will ever have from the likes of them," Horus said. "The way is open, for now—until they change their minds."

That was all she needed. She ran forward, out of the maze and into—

—darkness—

She realized, after a moment of light-headed giddiness that at least part of the darkness was because there was a blanket over her head. It was stifling, and she could hardly think, because she felt so—so intoxicated—

That's—because—I am— Alison had drugged her, as she had suspected, and there was still plenty of the stuff in her veins. She jounced along, lying on her side, two sets of feet poking into her, and the roar of an automobile engine near at hand. It was hard, so hard to think—even the fear that sat cold and primal in the pit of her soul was sluggish.

And her companion was gone, now that she was in the real world again. There was no one to advise her.

She fought her way through the glue that clogged her mind. Fire. Burning. She was outside Alison's spells, and in control of her own powers now. There must be something Fire could do!

Can—can I burn this stuff—out of me?

There had been some hints of that in her mother's notes, of a kind of healing that Fire Masters could do, that literally burned out disease and poison. This drug was poison in and of itself.

What did she have to lose? Alison was taking her away somewhere, and it was just lucky she'd broken free of the spell, because otherwise she'd be feeling the compulsions right now.

And at that thought, she felt a cold certainty steal over her, and with it, the fear woke out of its sluggish sleep to seize her heart. Alison knew that. So Alison was planning on it. Why?

She had to clear this poison out of her veins so she could think clearly!

She had only one thing to try. If she waited for the drug to wear off, it might be too late. She had to burn it out before Alison expected it to wear off. Because Alison certainly had Locke with her still, and perhaps Locke's brutish manservant, and there was no way she could escape them all.

Once again, she turned within, concentrating on another sigil, this time a simple one; just as well, because it kept slipping away from her as she felt herself floating away.

Ateh. Malkuth. Geteth. She had traced this thing a thousand times; each Name from her mother's notes attached to a particular stroke in the air with finger or wand. But now she traced it in her mind instead of the air, and muzzily tried to hold the image burning there.

It nearly escaped from her three times before she completed it, and tried to put purpose to it. Its intention was to purify. Could it purify her blood?

Only one way to find out. It seemed to flutter in her mind, like a bird, impatient to fly. It, at least, thought it had a purpose.

She set it free, and let go. If it didn't do what she wanted, there wouldn't be a second chance.

August 13, 1917

The Hoar Stones

"What did you do with him?" Alison asked, as Locke made his way up the path to the Hoar Stones behind her, with Eleanor slung over his shoulder like a bag of coal. She was impressed in spite of herself; she was accustomed to seeing Locke leave all of the work to his servant, but it appeared he could manage quite a bit by himself. He'd certainly managed to bring Reggie Fenyx here on his own, and he was carrying Eleanor as if her weight was inconsequential.

"He's in the lee of the rocks, just outside the chamber," Locke replied. "He's still out cold. I thought you'd want to keep the chamber itself clear so you can work."

"Very wise. Leave the girl there as well," Alison said, absentmindedly; they were still a good thirty yards from the Hoar Stones, yet already she could feel its power drawing her. Had the work she'd done here last spring woken some ancient source of magic from a long slumber? Well, if that was so, all the better.

She reached out to the source of the power, greedily, and felt her lips stretching in a grin as it responded to her. Lovely, lovely Earth-born power; whatever purpose the Hoar Stones had been originally meant to serve, over the centuries there had been enough who had used it as a place of sacrifice that the ground here was as blood-soaked as the fields of Flanders. Blood spilled called power, and this sort of power was the kind that answered her hand the best.

She felt like a child in a sweet-shop, told to take what she wanted. Finally, she was going to have it all!

The power filled her, thick and intoxicating, with the hint of corruption she found so irresistible, and she moved into the chamber as if in a trance as Locke dumped Eleanor beside another bundle of blanket and clothing just outside it. It occurred to her then that Locke was probably stronger than he looked; Reggie Fenyx was no small man, and Locke had somehow manhandled him from the motor all the way up here.

Then again—Locke might have managed to rouse Reggie enough to get him to walk. Even unconscious, a clever use of magic could have gotten Reggie to stumble along in Locke's wake or in front of him. And if he damaged himself somewhat, well, so much the better; he'd look like someone who had been staggering about after an accident.

She put them both temporarily from her mind as Locke and the girls joined her in the chamber. This was going to be a difficult piece of work, and she needed to concentrate on it.

Reggie lay quite still as Alison's henchman dumped someone beside him. The last thing he wanted any of them to know was that he was awake and aware and prepared to act—if feeling nauseous and half-crippled counted as being prepared to act. Little did any of them know that he'd been using his pain-medications for so long that he had built up a tolerance for opiates; the air moving around his face when the auto was in motion had served to arouse him, and the drive out into the country had given him long enough to get his brain more-or-less working again. When the man had mumbled some sort of half-learned charm over him, he'd felt the intent of it through the very minimal shields he had put up, and had acted the part of an automaton, staggering up the shadow-shrouded path in the man's wake. Unfortunately, he was without a cane, and the ground was anything but even. He didn't even want to think about the damage he had done to himself, trying to walk; he thought he'd felt something tear loose around his kneecap once. The pain of his knee had burned what was left of the drug out of him altogether, and he must have stumbled and fallen a dozen times. Evidently the man had expected that, because Locke just stopped whenever that happened, waited for Reggie to pick himself up, then led him on.

Reggie had been perfectly ready to fall over where the man pointed. By that time his head was perfectly clear, but it ached so much from what he presumed was a blow, and his knee was in such agony, that by the time he realized that he was alone among these ancient stones, it was too late to do anything about it. He could already hear someone coming up the same path. All he could do was feign unconsciousness and wait to see what happened next.

What happened was that Locke dumped someone else practically on top of him. Someone small, and very warm. Eleanor?

He continued to lie quietly as the sound of the others moved off a little. The way he was positioned, he couldn't see anything anyway; his face was turned towards the megalithic stone, and the other person had been dropped behind him.

But he was sure it was Eleanor. It wasn't just the sense that it was her, or instinct. Logic said that was the likeliest—but why? What was Alison planning?

It was nothing good for either of them, but it was Eleanor he was worried about the most. He represented the means to a very large fortune, as well as a kind of life she clearly aspired to. If she got rid of him, she lost her access to that life; Lady Virginia would see to that. No, it made more sense, far more sense, for her to try and work some bedazzlement on his mind, to make him pliant and willing to marry one of her wretched daughters.

It was Eleanor that he was concerned about. He still didn't know how Eleanor factored into all this—except that she was now clearly an obstacle in the path to Alison's goals. He couldn't dismiss the idea that they meant to murder her—after all, who would notice? No one in Broom even gave her existence a second thought now.

Even more chilling was the thought that Alison might murder Eleanor in order to get the power she needed to control him.

And he was patently in no shape to take them on in a straight-on physical contest. He wasn't even sure he could manage a successful escape. The longer this situation dragged on, the less confident he became. And on top of that, as bad as his physical condition already was, he knew it was rapidly deteriorating. Lying here on the ground was making his muscles stiffen, and there was no point in pretending otherwise, he had a concussion that wasn't getting any better either. His head pounded, and though he tried to think through the pain and the nausea, it was getting harder to put two coherent thoughts together with every passing moment; his mouth was dry, and a slow serpent of fear had begun crawling up his spine, making him feel weak and helpless.

He could sense power rising very near by—Earth power, and even though it only brushed by him in passing, the moment it touched him, he felt panic stifling him. He knew that sort of power—born of blood and death. He had met its like before.

When he had been buried in that trench.

Alison began chanting somewhere on the other side of the stones, her voice echoing strangely, and he sensed the power awakening and answering her call—

He felt a whimper rising in his throat—

And a small, warm hand clamped itself over his mouth.

"Shh," Eleanor breathed in his ear. "It's all right; try not to make a sound. Alison and the rest are busy right now. If we're very careful, we might be able to get away before they realize we're gone."

And go where? he thought wildly, but he knew she was right. Whatever Alison was up to, there was a point she'd be so preoccupied with controlling what she was raising that she should be oblivious to anything but what she was doing.

The only question was, could he even walk, much less run?

It's not as if I have a choice, he reminded himself. It's run—somehow—or lie here and let her do whatever she's going to do.

Even though fear was welling up inside him and making him want nothing more than to curl up where he was and hide inside himself. Trying to huddle inside himself was not an option now. Even if he had felt willing to let them do whatever they wanted to him, what were their plans for Eleanor? If he gave up to the fear, he would be abandoning her.

But the fear had a mind of its own, where he was concerned. Despite his efforts to resist it, and all the work that Lady Virginia had done with him, he felt it taking him over, paralyzing him, flooding his heart with chill, until there was nothing real for him except that fear. His control slipped to the edge of loss, and tremors shook his body.

And then the miracle occurred. Eleanor's hand moved down from his mouth to rest over his heart, and warmth began to spread from it.

Not just physical warmth, either—a psychic warmth that stopped his shaking, and drove the fear back, a wonderfully fierce passion that had no time for creeping terror. It was like magic—

No, it was magic! It was Fire magic, the complement and perfect partner to Air—Fire magic being directed by the sure hand of someone who, if she was not yet a Master, would certainly one day become one!

Before he could wonder where she had suddenly gotten that skill, a set of shields grew up around both of them; slowly, so slowly that at first he thought the perimeter of warming around him was some side-effect of the magic she was working on him. The he realized that she was building shields—not as he would have expected out of a Fire Mage, with a showy rush of upwelling, vibrant power, but slowly, as if beginning from the barest, glowing coals and building a fire by patiently feeding those coals a little air, a little fuel, straw by straw.

By that time he was no longer shaking; though his head still ached and he felt sick, his mind was clear again. Not that he wasn't afraid— and so was she, he sensed it in the rigidity of her body where it lay wedged against his, and the way she was trembling—but fear was no longer paralyzing him.

I need to help her—and it has to be just as subtle, so that we don't alert Alison to what we're doing.

First he needed to help her with those shields. Then—could he call a Sylph and sent it for help? Would one even come so near the poisonous, dark Earth power that Alison was raising?

He had to try; the nearest help was Lady Virginia, and the only way to get word to her was via an Air Elemental.

But it would be the first time he had called one since the crash. Would they even come to him anymore?

He's awake! That was more than Eleanor had hoped for; she hadn't even cared that he was shaking hard enough to rattle both of them. She'd been hearing bits about this "shellshock" business from Sarah, and it didn't surprise her at all that Reggie suffered from it—fine, so he was overwhelmed by fear. Well, she had the counter to fear, the weapon to drive it back. Fear couldn't stand against the fire of passion.

But one thing did surprise her. Before, it had been as if he was surrounded by an impenetrable wall that allowed nothing arcane to get in at him—but which was also opaque to his senses so that he never knew that she was a Fire Mage. Now—now he was open.

Open enough that she responded to his fear completely on instinct. She put her hand over his heart, and willed her power into him.

Fire—

Passion. Courage. Heart. Fire was all of these things and more, but these were the ones that were important now, to shore up his crumbling emotions and give him strength to find his feet again. She sensed it, she knew it; that was all he needed, just a little help—he wanted to fight his own fear, but he was so worn by it that he hadn't the strength. Very well; he should have some of hers.

And when she sensed he was no longer shaking, she went to work building shields around the two of them, starting with the merest trace of power, layering them up slowly, so that—she hoped—Alison wouldn't notice what was happening until it was too late.

It was after the first three or four layers had been constructed that she sensed another power joining hers.

She had never felt Air magic before, but even if her inner sight hadn't shown her the soft blue glow of it, she had no doubt of what it was; there was a lightness to it, the coolness of intellect, and a liveliness. Even as he layered in his own subtle shields, interleaving them with hers, she felt his magic feeding hers, Fire and Air mingling until the blending was far more powerful than the mere sum of both. And at that moment she felt her own courage rise.

She was terribly glad that he had joined her in creating the shields that surrounded them both, because when she finally threw off the blanket they had bundled her in and sat up, trusting that by this time Alison was so deeply involved in her own magics that she wouldn't notice anything else going on, what she saw made her lose her hard-won courage for a moment.

The very stones of this Neolithic monument were glowing a muddy, ugly yellow with Alison's newly raised power. Oh, not glowing to ordinary sight, but to the trained Inner Eye of a magician there was no mistake, none at all. This was an old, old power, and it answered to Alison slowly, but it was answering. And it was as dark a power as Alison could have wished.

She pulled the blanket off Reggie's head and tugged at his shoulder; as he sat up, much more slowly than she had, she didn't have to direct his attention to the stones. He saw it on his own.

He pulled her head towards his face, and put his mouth right up to her ear to whisper, "That's not good."

She nodded.

"We have to get out of here now," he continued, urgently. "Can help me get to my feet?"

She nodded harder.

She got to her feet—slowly, and with a great care for making sure she didn't break a twig or dislodge any rattling stones. But there was one thing that she she knew she had to do if they were going to walk out of here.

She had to find him some sort of support, a stick he could use as a cane. His knee could not possibly be in good shape right now.

Except, of course, that she couldn't actually see in the shadow-shrouded woodlot, in the dark of night, to find any such thing.

All right. I need someone—or something—that can see.

With infinite care, she pushed out the shields on the forest-side of their protections, until they extended well into the undergrowth. Then she called a Salamander.

She stipulated that it was to be a very, very small Salamander, the kind that had first come to her, scarcely bigger than a tiny kitten. Alison hadn't noticed the little creatures when they were under her own roof; with luck, she wouldn't notice one now.

She had no fire for it, and this was far, far too close to inimical power. She wasn't sure any Fire Elemental would answer her here.

But her heart leapt when, without so much as a spark of real fire to feed from—it still camel It wreathed apprehensively around her wrists and through her fingers, every movement of it telling her that it was not happy to be near so much dark power. She soothed it as best she could, and tried to impress on its mind what she needed—a good, stout stick, sound and strong, and not too short.

It hesitated for a moment, regarding her with glowing yellow eyes, then darted off into the brush, coursing back and forth like a beagle on a scent, but staying within the protection of the shields. She knew when it had found what she had asked for by the way that it darted out of the brush towards her, then back in again. It wasn't going to talk to her, not here. Wise. Alison might well hear such a thing.

She followed it, treading very carefully, never putting her full weight on her foot until she knew there was nothing beneath it to make a sound that would betray them. For the first time, she was glad of her worn shoes; the soles were so thin she could easily feel what was under her feet. Pushing carefully through the undergrowth, she found the Salamander running up and down the length of the stick, which was a bit longer than the canes Reggie normally used—more like a quarterstaff. Well, that was not such a bad thing. It might make a better weapon at need, and the longer it was, the less likely it would be that Reggie would need to lean on her.

She dismissed the Salamander with her thanks—it was clearly growing terrified at the feel of the terrible Earth power outside the shields, and she didn't blame it. With infinite care, she pulled the stick out from the undergrowth, little by little, until, with a sigh of relief, she got it free.

She turned around with it in her grip in time to see something wispy, sinuous, and pale blue streaking away from Reggie's hands. She hadn't gotten a good enough look at it to tell what it was, but she hoped he was sending for help. She tiptoed back to him and handed him the stick. With a look of relief, he took it gladly and used it to get himself—with her help—to his feet. "Now which way?" he whispered.

She shook her head. "I don't know!" she whispered back. "I never saw anything!"

She might not have been unconscious when she was brought here, but she had been bundled in a blanket. Truth to tell, she hadn't a clue which direction to go in.

Reggie clung to the rough staff Eleanor had found for him and tried to think. Had the path into this place been between those two flat stones he was facing now, or—

"Mother!" shrieked a young female voice behind him. "They're awake! They're trying to sneak away!"

Too late.

A soundless explosion of sickly yellow light impacted against their shields; he felt Eleanor react just in time to strengthen them, and a second later, he was reinforcing her. Fire magic was better for shields anyway; you couldn't wear away at Fire shields, the Fire just ate everything you threw at it. Even nasty stuff of the sort that Alison was throwing at them now; Fire just purified it, then consumed it. You could smother them, drown them, or blast through them if you were powerful enough, but you needed either to be extremely powerful in the first place, or to make an all-or-nothing commitment to the attack to do so, and Alison hadn't yet made that kind of attack.

Following directly on her attack came Alison herself, her face a mask of fury, with her solicitor Warrick Locke right beside her. He seemed to be unarmed, but she had a wicked-looking knife in one hand—a ritual blade, maybe, but it was also a real weapon, and he and Eleanor were unarmed. He gripped his stick like a quarterstaff, but he knew that he wouldn't be of much help with his leg ready to give out at any moment.

Real fire, physical fire, suddenly sprang up in a circle around them, following the line of the shields and setting fire to the undergrowth. It was a waist-high perimeter of flame that kept Alison and her minions from getting at her victims physically.

Reggie couldn't do exactly the same thing—but he could call a storm-wind, to lash at their adversaries with the branches of trees and bushes—and he did. Carolyn shrieked with indignation, and Warrick Locke ducked.

"Get them!" Alison shouted furiously over the howling wind, as her hair escaped from its pins and whipped in tendrils around her head, like the snakes of a Medusa.

Reggie expected another attack on their shields, and indeed, one came, a dull blow that actually drove the shields back a little. It didn't matter; the Elemental Fire devoured the rest of the attack, and the line of physical fire simply followed the shields, and Locke shook his head, when Alison gestured furiously at him.

And the glow of power faded a bit from the megaliths. He felt his heart leap—either she was losing control of it and it was sliding back into quiescence, or else she was draining it with her attacks. In either case, unless she found another source of power soon, she would be reduced to her own resources—

That was the moment when she seized Warrick Locke's wrist, shouted something incomprehensible—

And Locke screamed in fear and pain, falling to his knees, as he aged fifty years in a handful of seconds. A few seconds more, and Alison dropped his wrist, and the lifeless, withered hulk of what had been a man fell to the side, no longer moving.

Where did she get that? He knew what it was, in theory. Earth Masters healed—and so could harm. They grew—and so knew how to destroy. They could give life—and take it. It was what made them so dangerous when they went to the bad. Shocked to the core, Reggie just stared.

Both her daughters were equally shocked, and as a consequence, didn't react quickly enough when their mother seized both of their wrists. "No!" he shouted—not that he cared for them, and they had certainly been ready to consign him to whatever fate Alison had prepared for him, but no one should die like that—

But Alison was evidently not ready to kill her own flesh and blood. Quite.

Though the creatures she cast aside, first Carolyn, then Lauralee, were never going to attract anyone's attention again, except as objects of pity.

Alison turned towards them again, her eyes glowing with rage and power, her hands crooked into claws. And all around her, the stones were incandescent with terrible power.

She gestured with a crooked finger, and the earth rose in a wave and crushed out the physical fire over half of the periphery of the shields, leaving behind only the shields of Elemental Fire and Air themselves as protection.

Eleanor swallowed down fear and nausea, and tried to think. Their shields weren't going to hold, not for long, since they were feeding off nothing but her own strength. There had to be a way to stop her!

She held onto Reggie's arm, and backed up a step, so that he did the same. A slow, terrible smile stretched Alison's lips in a dreadful mockery of pleasure. She gestured again, and this time it was a horde of those horrible gnome-things that rose up out of the raw earth and flung themselves at the shields.

Eleanor gathered her wits, and called her Salamanders.

Once again, faithful and protective, they came, leaping out of the flames of the dying fires, dashing towards Alison's gnomes.

But they were joined by something Eleanor had never seen before; slender, sinuous things like legless dragons. They didn't seem to have much in the way of attacking ability, but whenever they whipped themselves around a Salamander, the Fire Elemental grew markedly larger or brighter—or both.

The Salamanders reached the line of gnomes, and this time, the gnomes didn't run.

There were more of them than there were Salamanders, and they swarmed the Fire Elementals, threatening to pull them down. But whatever the Salamanders came into contact with burst into flame.

The Salamanders weren't getting off unscathed, however; the gnomes had heavy clubs and spears, and they were perfectly prepared to use them.

Then a dozen of them got through, and Reggie lurched forwards to interpose himself between them and her. Two frantic Salamanders raced towards them, and a Sylph, a delicate, winged creature, suddenly popped into existence, hovering in midair. The Salamanders got one each, and the fairy-like being might have looked delicate, but she accounted for the other four with her bow and arrows.

But not before two of the got to Reggie, and while he was fending one off with his staff, the second ducked under a blow and smashed into Reggie's bad knee with his club.

Reggie toppled over with a choked-off cry of agony, as the winged girl filled the evil creature with three swift arrows in succession.

With a wordless cry of fury, Eleanor reached for more power—in what might have been an unexpected place. Not to the physical fires being extinguished by more gnomes, but down—down past the layer of Earth where Alison's power lay, down past the planet's stony skin, down into the place where the Earth itself gave way to Fire, and the molten rock showed which of the Powers was stronger—

"No!" It was Alison's turn to shout, as she concentrated all of her anger and fury on Eleanor.

The fury began to take shape, rising out of the earth before them.

A Giant.

Not the sort that Jack had met at the top of his beanstalk. That Giant, uncouth as he had been, was a paragon of intelligence and sophistication next to this thing.

It was made of the earth that it rose from. Near-shapeless, it had a blob of rancid clay for a head, with two holes gouged out for eyes, at the bottom of each of which glowed the same, sickly-yellow light as suffused the stones. A misshapen lump defined a nose, and beneath that, was an empty yawn of a mouth. It had no neck to speak of; the head seemed to grow directly from the moss-covered, massive shoulders. And as yet, it had no discernable arms or legs—

That changed in a moment; a club-like arm with undifferentiated mitten-hands reached out, snatched up a battling gnome and Salamander together, and tossed them both into its gaping maw, devouring them both with a single gulp.

It grew a trifle, and reached out for another pair of fighters—

Horrified, Eleanor looked away for a moment—and caught sight of Alison.

Her stepmother was transfixed by the battle; partly because she was pouring everything she had into her creation, and partly in mesmerized pleasure at the carnage.

But she had forgotten something.

She had dropped her additional protections, relying only on her old, unaugmented shields.

And Eleanor now knew how to unweave those—she had used the same key on her shields as she had on the spells binding Eleanor to the hearthstone.

Reggie had struggled to his good knee and was staring in horror at the giant, shaking in every limb, his eyes wide. She grabbed his arm and shook it. He wrenched his gaze away from the giant and looked up at her. His face was so pale he looked like a corpse.

"We have one chancel" she shouted, over the bass growls of the giant. "Help me!"

From somewhere, he dragged up the final dregs of his courage. Life came back into his eyes.

"Her shields!" she cried, "Forget about the giant—drop our shields, then come in, Air and Fire together, and follow my lead—

He nodded; he dropped the staff and she crouched beside him; they clasped hands and let their own shields go.

Alison howled in triumph; the giant echoed it, and wrenched himself up further out of the earth.

Alison's shields flickered as she let the last of her concentration slip from them.

And together, a single melded lance of Fire and Air struck at the weakest point, blasting it away—and the shields unraveled.

Alison faltered, and took a single step back. The loss of her shields confused her for one vital moment.

And the giant turned, wrenching its body completely out of the ground. It stared at her for several long seconds; her eyes widened, as she realized in that instant that she was unprotected—

—and that all around her were creatures she had forced to obey her with whatever weapon came to hand. Creatures who saw her momentarily unprotected.

Like the giant that she had just created out of earth and blood and pain.

She looked up at it with her mouth open. It looked down at her.

And then, it fell upon her, burying her alive in a mound of freshly-turned soil before she could make a sound.

The last of the gnomes swarmed over the mound, burying themselves into the ground where she had been.

And suddenly, there was silence—except for the mindless whimpering of the two creatures that had once been Carolyn and Lauralee.

Reggie sank slowly to the ground, his teeth gritted against the agony of his ruined knee—slowly, only because Eleanor caught him as he fell and eased him down. That took the last of her strength, and all she could do was to hold him as the remaining Salamanders curled around them both, keeping them warm and protected, and wait for dawn, help, or both.

Epilogue

November 25, 1917

Somerville College Oxford University

SOME OF THE GIRLS THOUGHT the little studies in Somerville College were cramped and shabby. Then again, some of the girls were accustomed to the kind of accommodation one found at Longacre Park ... for Eleanor, even if the study had been the size and bleakness of her garret room at The Arrows, it still would have been paradise. A raw November wind rattled the windows, but she had a fine fire going (and before long, someone with less access to wood or a more slender budget for coal would be around to "borrow" a log or two). One of the scouts had managed tea and toast; Eleanor had jam and butter from Sarah by parcel this morning. All was right with the world.

Eleanor poured her visitor another cup of tea with a feeling of unreality. It still seemed an impossibility that she was here, settled in Oxford, a student at last in Somerville College.

"So," asked Doctor Maya, stirring honey from the Longacre hives into her tea in lieu of unobtainable sugar. "How are you enjoying life as a student of literature?"

"It's incredible," Eleanor replied. "I keep thinking I'm going to wake up in my bed in the garret and it will all have been a dream."

"And the studies?" Maya persisted, giving her a penetrating look. "They're going well?"

Eleanor laughed; she knew what Maya was thinking. That Reggie's proximity would be a powerful distraction. Little did she know that he was harder on her than her tutor, and she was harder on herself than both of them put together. "I think my generation is going to be a trial to those who follow us," she told the doctor. "Those of us who are here are determined to prove that we can be as valuable as the ones who left to become VADs or do some other sort of war-work. And when Oxford grants us degrees—which they will—we are going to be among the first in line to demand ours. Compared to what Alison kept me at, this is light duty." She sighed, but it was with content. "And compared to how I've been living at The Arrows, this place is a delight. Reggie keeps us both supplied with wood for the fireplaces from Longacre, and with other things, too. I find I can get a lot of help when I need it in trade for an egg or a jar of honey."

Maya tsked wryly. "You're a regular black-marketeer. I'll have to demand a bribe of some of those eggs to keep quiet, I'm afraid. They can't be had for any price in London."

Eleanor laughed. She was doing a lot of that these days. She didn't remember much past Alison's demise. She'd been drained almost to fainting, and Reggie was unconscious when Lady Virginia appeared like an avenging angel and carried them both off to Longacre. Lady Devlin hadn't known what to think—at first she had, with some bewilderment, tentatively welcomed Eleanor as the hitherto-unknown stepdaughter of her friend Alison Robinson.

Then the situation rapidly unraveled. It had been decided to say nothing about Alison, Warrick Locke, and the girls; the farmer upon whose land the Hoar Stones stood had found the autos, the body of Locke, and the two near-witless sisters. Constables digging in the churned-up earth had turned up the body of Alison, but other than that, no one could make heads or tails of why the four were out there in the first place, nor what had turned two young women into withered hags nor what had destroyed Locke. And, once Peter Almsley intervened on behalf of the War Office, country constables being what they were, it was decided that it was best not to ask too many more questions that couldn't be answered. It was all written up that Locke had murdered Alison and buried her body, and that the shock had prematurely aged her daughters, who had killed Locke in a fit of insanity This was more than scandal, this was sensation, and Eleanor suddenly found herself unwelcome at Longacre Park.

However, she was well on her feet by this time, and The Arrows was hers. Rightfully hers, as she found out when the lawyers came to see her. She didn't even need to lift a finger to do anything to help Carolyn and Lauralee if she chose not—

But she was not hard-hearted enough to throw them onto the state. Since they were clearly not fit to stand trial, they were currently being cared for in an institution for the criminally insane—comfortably, at Eleanor's insistence and expense.

Reggie's knee was shattered past all hope. Eleanor had met Maya when Lady Virginia had insisted that only Maya could or should tend to Reggie's injuries, and she and the doctor had hit it off immediately. Doctor Maya had done her best, but it was clear to her, and to the army surgeon who came to examine him, that he would never fly in combat again. Flying an aeroplane—at least, the current models—required having two good arms and legs.

So he as soon as he had gotten a cast on the leg, he had put in for a transfer to the Oxford branch of the Royal Flying Corps training school. He'd been accepted, of course; with a record like his, they'd have been insane not to accept him. So he was here when Eleanor had enrolled for her first year as a university student, reading literature. Here, there was no Lady Devlin to have to placate, and they could meet as often as they liked, which was generally every day. "You haven't announced an engagement?" Maya asked. Eleanor shook her head, twisting the ring that Reggie had "unofficially" given her. "I want to have finished my studies and passed my vivas, even if they won't give me a degree yet. And by then, maybe Lady Devlin will have come around to the idea of having me as a daughter-in-law."

Maya grimaced. "I'm sorry to hear that she's being an obstruction. Fortunately, that was not a problem in my case."

But Eleanor only shrugged. "She can't help how she was brought up," she pointed out. "And besides . .. we have an ally. Or two, actually."

Maya raised her eyebrows, as Eleanor carefully buttered a piece of toast. "I knew about Lady Virginia; she was fairly obvious, because if nothing else, she would want Reggie to marry another Master. Who else?"

"The Brigadier." She blushed; the old fellow had been amazingly kind to her, and for the life of her, she didn't know why. Maybe it was just because he was fond of Reggie, and Reggie was clearly as blissfully happy in her presence as she was in his. "He's on our side, too. And I think he has—well, a kind of secret weapon. I think he's started to court Lady Devlin, and if he is, she'll find it hard to be against something that he's for." "Really!" Doctor Maya laughed. "Well, the sly old fox! He knew about Devlin being a Master, you know—one of the few people who aren't mages who ever do find out about us. I don't think he ever let Reggie know that he knew, but he's an old crony of Alderscroft, and that's where it all started. And it was partly his doing that Devlin met Reggie's mother in the first place. I don't know the details, but he introduced them at some point."

"Ah," Eleanor replied thoughtfully. "That explains a great deal." She took a sip of her tea. "At any rate, my magical studies are coming along well, too. My tutor thinks that the Tarot approach is a good one, so we're keeping on with it. And Reggie says that's another reason not to rush into a marriage; he says that before we even think about settling down, I need to have a firm control on my powers. Because children with Masters on both sides tend to be precocious when it comes to magic."

She flushed a little; Maya pretended not to notice. "Talking about children already, is he?" she said, nodding. "In that case, I don't think I need to go and interrogate him about his intentions!"

Eleanor flushed deeper. "Oh no, he's sound, definitely sound," she said, laughing and fanning her cheeks. "In fact, he's my best help aside from my official tutor. We have special permission to work at the Bodleian. The Vice-Principal doesn't like it, but since the Principal is another Elemental Master, she doesn't say much, she just glares at us when she sees us in public together." She shrugged. "She means well, and so I don't care. I've only been here for this term, and she has no idea what kind of student I am; she may think I'm here only so I can be near Reggie. As soon as she realizes I'm serious about my studies, she'll probably stop acting like a Mother Superior."

Maya looked at her watch. "Well, I should love to make a longer visit, but I can't if I'm to catch the train. No, don't get up!" she urged, when Eleanor started to rise. "I can find my own way out, and the weather is hideous. You get back to your books. And keep that lad out of trouble. I had to scold him for trying to do too much again."

When Maya was gone, Eleanor settled back in her chair, with Hamlet wedged open in front of her, and a Salamander wrapped around her feet, keeping them warm. If someone had waved a magic wand and given her three wishes, this was exactly where she would have wished to be. The only flaw in life was Lady Devlin's opposition to having a "commoner" as her daughter-in-law—

Which is next to no problem at all, she thought, warming the tea again by asking another Salamander to pop out of the fireplace and wrap himself around the pot. Compared to unweaving Alison's spells.

Besides, she wanted time. She and Reggie had scarcely known each other. Not that she didn't love him! But love was not entirely rational. She was not going to be Lady Devlin all over again, either. This was going to be a marriage of partners.

Whether Reggie entirely understood this yet, or not.

"And," she said aloud, "whether he's comfortable with it or not."

A movement in the fireplace made her glance at it to see two bright blue eyes looking back at her. "Just remember, daughter of Eve," said the Phoenyx who was her chief magical tutor, and evidently a friend of Horus, "If you need a negotiator, you always have one at your disposal."

Eleanor burst into laughter that she could not stop until her irritated neighbor knocked on the wall to make her quiet down.