Mercedes Lackey - The Gates of Sleep

“Thank you, Peter,” he said heavily, and then hesitated. “There might be things you wouldn’t know to look for—”

“Cook’s second cousin’s your cook,” Peter interrupted, in what appeared to be a non sequitor. “And your cook’s helper’s my Sally’s sister, what’s also her niece. Happen that if someone were to come by the kitchen at teatime, just a friendly visit, mind, and let drop what’s to be looked for, well—the right people would find out to know what to winkle out.”

Good God. Country life… connections and connections, deep and complicated enough to get word to me no matter what. “I may not know anything tomorrow—perhaps not for days,” he warned.

“No matter. There’s always ears in kitchen,” the young man asserted, then seemed to feel that he had said enough, and settled back into silence for the rest of the journey, leaving Andrew to his own thoughts. Thoughts were all he dared pursue at the moment. He didn’t know what had been done, and he didn’t want to try anything magical until Marina was safely inside triple-circles of protection. He certainly didn’t want to try anything with the girl held in a stranger’s arms, a stranger who might or might not be sensitive himself.

All he could do was to monitor her condition, and pray.

Andrew rubbed at gummy eyes and started at a trumpet call.

No. Not a trumpet call. He glanced out of the window behind him, where the black night had lightened to a charcoal gray. Not a trumpet call. A rooster.

It was dawn, heralded by the crowing of the cook’s roosters out in the chicken—yard.

He turned his attention back to his patient, who could too easily be a mannequin of wax. Marina lay now, dressed in a white nightgown, like Snow White in the panto-face pale, hands lying still and cold on the woolen coverlet, in a bed in a private room at the back of Briareley, a room triply shielded, armored with every protection he knew how to devise. And she lay quite without any change from when he had seen her at Oakhurst, silent and unmoving but for the slight lift and fall of her breast. She lived—but there was nothing there, no sense of her, no sense of anything.

No poison was in her veins, no blow to the head had sent her into this state. In fact, he found no injury at all, nothing to account for the way she was now. In desperation, he had even had one of the most sensitive of his child-patients awakened and brought to her, and the boy had told him that there was nothing in her mind—no dreams, no thoughts, nothing. “It’s like she’s just a big doll,” the child had said, his fist jammed against his mouth, shaking, eyes widened in alarm. “It ain’t even like a beast or a bird—it’s just empty —” and he’d burst into tears.

Eleanor had taken the boy away and soothed him to sleep, and Andrew had known that he wouldn’t dare allow any more of his patients to sense what Marina had become. He racked his brain for a clue to his next move, for he had tried every thing that he knew how to do—ritual cleansing, warding, shielding—his medical and medical-magic options were long since exhausted. As the roosters crowed below the window, he sat with his aching head in his hands, pulling sweat-dampened hair back from his temples, and tried to think of anything more he could do. The fauns? Could they help? Would growth-magic awaken her? What if—

Someone knocked on the door, and opened it as he turned his head. It was Eleanor, whose dark-circled eyes spoke of a night as sleepless as his own. “There’s someone to see you, Doctor—” she began.

“Dammit, Eleanor, I told—” he snapped, when a tall and frantic-looking man with paint in his red-brown hair and moustache pushed past her, followed by another, this one dark-haired and tragic-eyed, and a woman who could only have been his sister, eyes red with tears.

“God help us, we came as soon as we could,” the man said, “We’d have telegraphed, but the fauns only found us last night—and they were half-mad with fear. So we came—”

“And we felt what happened,” said the second man, as the woman uttered a heart-broken cry and went to her knees beside Marina. “On the train. Christ have mercy—how could we not have!”

“Fauns?” Andrew said, confused for a moment. “Train—” then it dawned on him. “You’re Marina’s guardians?”

“Damn poor guardians,” the tall man said in tones of despair. “Sebastian Tarrant, my wife Margherita, her brother Thomas Buford. Lady Elizabeth’s on the way; we left word at the station where to go, but half the town already knows Marina’s here, and the other half will by breakfast—oh, and she’ll sense us, too, no doubt.”

“It’s the curse,” the woman said, lifting a tear-stained face. “It’s the curse, right enough. Damn her! Damn her!” and she began to cry. Her brother gathered her to his shoulder, trying to comfort her, and by the look of it, having no success.

“Curse?” Andrew asked, bewildered by the intruders, their sudden spate of words that made no sense—the only sense he had was that these people were the ones he had sought for, Marina’s guardians. “What curse?” There was only one thing he needed, needed as breath, to know. “What’s happened to Marina? I’ve tried everything—”

“Stronger Masters than you have tried everything, and the best they could do was to warp that black magic so that it sent her to sleep instead of killing her,” Sebastian Tarrant said gruffly, and patted him on the shoulder awkwardly. He glanced at the bed, and groaned. “And there’s nothing we can do in the next hour that’s going to make any difference, either.”

Andrew shook his head, and blinked eyes that burned as he squinted at the stranger’s face, trying to winkle out the sense of what he was hearing. A curse… a curse on Marina. But—who—how—why? The man’s eyes shone brightly, as if with tears that he refused to shed. “You look done in, man,” Tarrant continued. “Come show me the kitchen and let’s get some strong tea and food into you. I’ll explain while you eat; you aren’t going to do her any good by falling over.”

Sebastian Tarrant’s will was too strong to be denied; Andrew found himself being carried off to Briareley’s kitchen, where he was fussed over by cook and seated at the trestle table where a half dozen loaves of bread were rising, a mug of hot black tea and a breakfast big enough for three set in front of him. He ate it, untasted, as Sebastian Tarrant narrated a story that—if he had not seen Marina—would have sounded like the veriest fairy tale. A tale of a curse on a baby, an exile to keep her safe, and all the plans undone. A tale of blackest magic, sent from a bitter woman who should have had none—

“And now I’m sorry we didn’t follow her here, and damned to Madam,” Tarrant said, the guilt in his face so overwhelming that Andrew didn’t have the heart to take him to task over it. “But we were afraid that if we showed our faces in the village, Arachne would take her somewhere we couldn’t follow, or worse. At least while she was here, we figured that Arachne hadn’t worked out a way to make her curse active again, and we knew she wouldn’t dare try anything—well—obvious and physical in front of people who’d known and served Hugh and Alanna. And the child didn’t write, so we had to assume that Arachne was keeping too close a watch on her for us to try and contact her that way.” Tarrant rubbed at his own eyes, savagely. “Dear God, how could we have been such cowards, such fools?”

“But—what is this curse?” he asked finally. “How on earth can something like that do what it did?”

“You tell me how someone without the least little bit of magic of her own could create such a thing,” Tarrant countered, wearily, running his hands through his hair and flaking off a few bits of white and yellow paint. “Not a sign, not one sign of the Mastery of any of the Elements on Arachne or her son—so where is the magic coming from? And how are they able to channel it, if they aren’t Masters and aren’t sensitive to it? But it’s there, all right, if you know what to look for, or at least I saw it—the curse-magic is on Marina, like a shield, only lying right under her skin, a poisonous inner skin—a blackish-green fire, and pure evil—”