Mercedes Lackey - The Gates of Sleep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am appalled—” Thomas began.

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

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

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

Chapter Five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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