Mercedes Lackey - The Gates of Sleep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And besides, it was time for tea.

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

For now, at any rate.

Chapter Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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