Mercedes Lackey - The Gates of Sleep

“That would be a great help, dearest,” Margherita replied, continuing to slice bread for luncheon. “Would you prefer cress or cucumber?”

“Cress, please. And deviled ham, if there is any.”

“Why a Water-child should have such an appetite for a Fire food, I cannot fathom,” Margherita replied, with a laugh. “I have deviled ham, of course; Sebastian would drive me out of the house if I didn’t.”

Margherita did not do all of the cooking, not even with Marina’s help; she did luncheon most days, and tea, and often made special supper dishes with her own hands, but for the plain cooking and other kitchen work there was old Sarah, competent and practical. Sarah wasn’t the only servant; for the housecleaning and maid—of—all—work they had young Jenny, and for the twice-yearly spring and fall house cleaning, more help from Jenny’s sisters. A man, unsurprisingly named John, came over from the neighboring farm twice a week (except during harvest) to do the yard-work and anything the uncles couldn’t do. There wasn’t much of that; Thomas was handy with just about any tool, and Sebastian, when he wasn’t in the throes of a creative frenzy, was willing to pitch in on just about any task.

Marina stirred up the scone dough, rolled it out, cut the rounds with a biscuit cutter and arrayed them in a baking pan and slipped them into the oven. By the time they were ready, Margherita had finished making sandwiches with brown and white bread, and had stacked them on a plate.

Sarah and Jenny appeared exactly when they were wanted to help set up the table in the dining room for luncheon: more of Margherita’s Earth magic at work to call them silently from their other tasks? Not likely. It was probably just that old Sarah had been with the family since the beginning, and young Jenny had been with them nearly as long—she was only “young” relative to Sarah.

After being cooped up all morning in the studio, Marina was in no mood to remain indoors. Rather than sit down at the table with her uncles and aunt, she wrapped some of the sandwiches in a napkin, took a bottle of homemade ginger beer from the pantry, put both in a basket with one of her lesson books, and ran out—at last!—into the sunshine.

She swung the basket as she ran, taking in great breaths of the autumn air, fragrant with curing hay. Deep in the heart of the orchard was her favorite place; where the stream that cut through the heart of the trees dropped abruptly by four feet, forming a lovely little waterfall that was a favorite of the lesser Water Elementals of the area. The bank beside it, carpeted with fern and sweet grass, with mosses growing in the shadows, was where Marina liked to sit and read, or watch the Water Elementals play about in the falling water, and those of Air sporting in the branches.

They looked like—whatever they chose to look like. The ones here in her tiny stream were of a size to fit the stream, although their size had nothing to do with their powers. They could have been illustrations in some expensive children’s book, tiny elfin women and men, with fish-tails or fins, except that there was a knowing look in their eyes, and their unadorned bodies were frankly sensual.

Of course, they weren’t the only Water Elementals she knew.

She’d seen River-horses down at the village, where her little stream joined a much greater one, and water nymphs of more human size, but the amount of cold iron in and around the water tended to keep them at bay. She’d been seeing and talking with them for as long as she could remember.

She often wondered what the Greater Elementals were like; she’d never been near a body of water larger than the river that supplied the village mill with its power. She often pitied poor Sarah and Jenny, who literally couldn’t see the creatures that had been visible to her for all of her life—how terrible, not to be able to see all the strange creatures that populated the Unseen World!

Her minor Elementals—Undines, who were about the size of a half-grown child, though with the undraped bodies of fully mature women—greeted her arrival with languid waves of a hand or pretended indifference; she didn’t mind. They were rather like cats, to tell the truth. If you acted as if you were interested in them, they would ignore you, but if you in your turn ignored them you were bound to get their attention.

And there were things that they could not resist.

In the bottom of her basket was a thin volume of poetry, part of the reading that Uncle Sebastian had set for her lessons—not Christina Rossetti, as might have been assumed, but the sonnets of John Donne. She put her back against the bank in the sun, and with her book in one hand and a sandwich in the other, she immersed herself in verse, reading it aloud to the fascinated Undines who propped their heads on the edge of the stream to listen.

When the Undines tired of listening to poetry and swam off on their own business, Marina filled her basket with ripe apples—the last of the season, left to ripen slowly on the trees after the main harvest. But it wasn’t teatime by any stretch of the imagination, and she really wasn’t ready to go back to the house.

She left the basket with her book atop it next to the stream, and strolled about the orchard, tending to a magical chore of her own.

This was something she had been doing since she was old enough to understand that it needed doing: making sure each and every tree was getting exactly the amount of water it needed. She did this once a month or so during the growing season; it was the part of Earth Magic to see to the health of the trees, which her aunt did with gusto, but Margherita could do nothing to supply the trees with water.

She had done a great deal of work over the years here with her own Elemental Power. The stream flowed pure and sweet without any need for her help now, though that had not always been the case; when she had first come into her powers a number of hidden or half-hidden pieces of trash had left the waters less than pristine. The worst had been old lead pipes that Uncle Thomas thought might date all the way back to Roman times, lying beneath a covering of rank weed, slowly leaching their poison into the water. Uncle Thomas had gotten Hired John to haul them away to an antiquities dealer; that would make certain they weren’t dumped elsewhere. She wished him well as he carted them off, hoping he got a decent price for them; all she cared about was that they were gone.

Still, there was always the possibility that something could get into the stream even now. She followed the stream down to the pond and back, just to be sure that it ran clean and unobstructed, except by things like rocks, which were perfectly natural; then, her brief surge of restlessness assuaged, she sat back down next to her basket. She leaned up against the mossy trunk of a tree and took the latest letter from her parents out of the leaves of her book and unfolded it.

She read it through for the second time—but did so more out of a sense of duty than of affection; in all her life she had never actually seen her parents. The uncles and her aunt were the people who had loved, corrected, and raised her. They had never let her call them anything other than “Uncle” or “Aunt,” but in her mind those titles had come to mean far more than “Mama” and “Papa.”

Mama and Papa weren’t people of flesh and blood. Mama and Papa had never soothed her after a nightmare, fed her when she was ill, taught her and healed her and—yes—loved her. Or at least, if Mama and Papa loved her, it wasn’t with an embrace, a kiss, a strong arm to lean on, a soft shoulder to cry on—it was only words on a piece of paper.

And yet—there were those words, passionate words. And there was guilt on her part. They were her mother and father; that could not be denied. For some reason, she could not be with them, although they assured her fervently in every letter that they longed for her presence. She tried to love them—certainly they had always lavished her with presents, and later when she was old enough to read, with enough letters to fill a trunk—but even though she was intimately familiar with Uncle Sebastian’s art, it was impossible to make the wistful couple in the double portrait in her room come alive.