Mercedes Lackey - The Gates of Sleep

“No,” Elizabeth continued, “What you need first from me is the understanding of how you access the energy of your own element.”

“Shouldn’t we be outside for that?” Marina asked curiously. “Near the stream or something?”

But Elizabeth shook her head. “Nothing of the sort. Water is all around you; in the ground beneath your feet, in the air—good heavens, especially in the air around here!” She laughed, and Marina giggled nervously. “You would be hard pressed to isolate yourself from a single element; even in the heart of the driest desert on earth there is water somewhere, if only in your own body. Each element has a sphere in which it can dominate, but none can be eliminated. Now, I assume you know how to recognize the energy of Water?”

Marina nodded.

“Good. Then call upon your inner eye, and watch what I do.”

Marina clasped her hands in her lap and let fall the guard she usually kept on that sense that Thomas called Sight, but which was so much more than merely seeing beyond the material world. And the moment she did so, she was aware that the room was alive with energies.

The golds and browns of Earth Magic and the reds of Fire invested the shields around them, forming an ever-changing tapestry of moving color, scent, taste, and sensation. Earth magic had a special scent to Marina, of soil freshly-turned by the plow; its taste, rich and smooth, vanilla-flavored cream. And it seemed to wrap her in warm fur. Whereas Fire tasted of cinnamon, smelled of smoke, and felt like the sun on her skin just before she was about to be sunburned.

Water, though, smelled exactly like the air the moment before it was about to rain, mingled with new-mown hay; it tasted of all the waters of the world, faintly sweet and cool, and it felt exactly like chilled silk sliding across her bare arms. In color it was every shade of green there had ever been, from the tender, yellow-green of unfolding leaves, to the deep black-green of ancient pines in a thunderstorm. This was what she saw now, investing the very air of the room, condensing out of it like fog, or like her breath on a frosty morning, or a cloud blooming overhead in the sky. Tender threads, tiny tendrils of it, coalescing out of nowhere, each one a different shade of green; they sprang up and flowed toward Elizabeth, joining thread to thread to make cords, streams, all of them flowing to her and into her, and she began to glow with the growing power she had gathered into herself.

“Oh, my!” Marina breathed. But she wasn’t going to just sit there and admire—Elizabeth had said to watch what the older woman was doing, and she set herself to finding out just how Elizabeth was doing this.

It took some time of studying and puzzling before she figured it out.

The clue was in what Elizabeth had said earlier, that the energy was everywhere. It was, and it could be coaxed into a more coherent form by application of the energies of her own mind, the ones that Uncle Thomas had already taught her how to use.

“You see?” Elizabeth said softly, and she nodded. “Good.” Abruptly the older woman stopped gathering in the energies and looked at her pupil expectantly. “Now you try it.”

Knowing how it was done and doing it herself were two different things… akin to the difference between knowing how to ride a horse and actually staying on its back. But this was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it?

Be careful what you ask for, she reminded herself ruefully, and set to work.

And work it certainly was. Elizabeth made it look so effortless, but compared with dipping energy out of the aura of a free-flowing stream, a spring, or a deep well, it was anything but effortless.

Exhausting was more like it. It took a peculiar combination of relaxation and concentration that was infernally hard to master, and by the time she had managed to coax the first tentative tendrils of power out of the aether, she was limp with fatigue.

“That will do for now,” Elizabeth said, and she let the burgeoning streamlets go with no little relief. “Luncheon, I think; then a little rest for both of us, perhaps an hour or so, and we’ll start again.”

So soon? she thought with concealed dismay. Uncle Thomas had never made her work for this long! But it couldn’t be helped; if that was what Elizabeth wanted, then there was probably a reason for it.

“I want you to have a firm grasp on this technique today,” Elizabeth said, as she got up and offered Marina her hand to aid her to her feet. Marina took the offered help; her knees felt so shaky she wasn’t certain she could have stood up without it. “If we left things at the point where they are now, by tomorrow it would all have to be done over again. We have to make a pathway in your mind and spirit that rest or sleep can’t erase. Then you can take a longer respite.”

Marina sighed, and followed her out; her stomach gave a discreet growl, reminding her not only that she had used a great deal of physical energy, but that she would feel better about resuming once she wasn’t so ravenous.

Aunt Margherita seemed to have anticipated how hungry she would be, for the main course of luncheon was a hearty stew that must have been cooking since breakfast or before. With fresh bread slathered with butter and Margherita’s damson preserves, and cup after cup of strong tea, Marina felt better by the moment. Sarah, Margherita and Elizabeth chattered away like a trio of old gossips on wash-day, while Marina ate until she couldn’t eat any more, feeling completely hollow after all her exertion.

Finally, when she’d finished the last bit of the treacle tart Sarah had given her for dessert, Elizabeth turned away from her conversation with the others. “Have you any lessons or other work you need to do this afternoon?” she asked, but somehow managed not to make it sound as if she was asking a child the question.

“Work, actually. German,” she replied, with a lifting of her spirits. “Die Leiden des jungen Werther, I’m translating it for Uncle Sebastian; he thinks he might want to paint something from it.”

“Oh good heavens, Sturm und Drang, is it?” she laughed. “Obsessed poets and suicide! Oh well, I suppose Sebastian knows what is likely to sell!”

“Sebastian knows very well, thank you,” her uncle called from the doorway. “Beautiful young dead men sell very well to wealthy ladies with less-than-ideal marriages of convenience. It gives them something to sigh and weep over, and since the young men are safely dead, their husbands can’t feel jealous over even a painted rival.”

Marina didn’t miss the cynical lift of his brow, and suspected he had a particular client in mind.

Evidently, Elizabeth Hastings hadn’t missed that cue either. “Well,” she said dryly, “If the real world does not move them, they might as well be parted from some of that wealth in exchange for a fantasy, so that others can make better use of their money than they can.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Sebastian said, and with the chameleon-like change of mood that Marina knew so well, beamed upon Sarah as he accepted a bowl of stew from her hands. “Sarah, you are just as divine as Miss Bernhardt! In a different sphere, of course—”

“Tch! The things you say! I doubt Divine Sarah’d thank ye for that!” their own Sarah replied with a twinkle, and turned back to her stove.

“I’ll come fetch you from your room in an hour or so,” Elizabeth said to Marina, who took that as her cue to escape for some badly needed rest.

Translating Werther was not what she would have called “work,” even though Uncle Sebastian said it was. She had taught herself German from books; she couldn’t speak it, but she read it fluently enough. German seemed useful, given all of the medieval poems and epics that the Germans had produced that could give Uncle Sebastian subjects for his paintings, and so she had undertaken it when she was twelve.