Mercedes Lackey: The Gates of Sleep

The trouble was, there was no water here; not so much as a puddle. And search though she might, she could find no well-springs of Water energy, nor the slightest sign of the least and lowliest of Water Elementals. Small wonder the vegetation was dying or dead.

So all that remained was—thought, and whatever magic she held in her own stores. Which was not much.

And I was appallingly bad at sending my thoughts out without the help of magic. On the other hand, what choice did she have? Perhaps I can use the cord, somehow.

She concentrated on a single, simple message, a plea for help, trying first to reach Margherita, then Sebastian, then Elizabeth, then, for lack of anyone else, Andrew Pike. Last of all, she sent out a general plea for help, from anyone, or anything. She tried until she felt faint with the effort, tried until there were little sparks in front of her eyes and she felt she had to lie down again. But if there was any result from all of her effort, there was no sign of it.

There was no change in the walls holding her imprisoned, no sense of anyone answering her in her own mind. The only change might have been in the cord—was it a little more tenuous than before? A crushing weight of depression settled over her. She gave herself over to tears and despair again, curling up on her side in the grass and weeping—but not the torrent of sobs that had consumed her before. She hid her face in her hands and wept without sobbing, a trickle of weary tears that she couldn’t seem to stop, and didn’t really try. What was the use? There was nothing that she could do—nothing! There was no magical power here that she could use to try and break herself free, nothing of her own resources gave her strength enough, and she was as strong now as she was ever going to be. As her body weakened—and it would—the energy coming to her down that silver cord would also weaken. Until one day—

She would die. And then what would happen? Was it possible that she would be trapped here forever? Would she continue to exist as a sad, mad ghost here, hemmed in by thorns, driven insane by the isolation?

“Oh, my dearest—she cannot hold you then, at least —”

The sound of the strange female voice shocked her as if she’d been struck with a bolt of lightning. Marina started up, shoving herself up into a sitting position with both hands, although the unreal grass had a peculiarly insubstantial feeling against her palms.

A man and a woman—or rather, the transparent images of a man and a woman—stood at the edge of the thorns. When had they gotten there? How had they gotten there? Had they come in response to her desperate plea for help?

She had no trouble recognizing them, not when she had looked at their portraits every day of her life for as long as she could remember.

“Mother?” she faltered. “Father?”

With no way to measure time, not even by getting tired and sleepy, Marina could not have told how long it took the—others—to convince her that they were not figments of her imagination, not something sent by Madam to torment her, and were, indeed, her mother and father. Well, their spirits. They were entirely certain that the “accident” that had drowned them was Madam’s doing; that made sense, considering everything that had followed. And if Madam had sent a couple of phantasms to torment her, would she have put those words in their mouths? Probably not.

Perhaps what finally convinced her was when, after a long and intensely antagonistic session of cross-questioning on her part, Alanna Roeswood—or Alanna’s ghost, since that was what the spirit was—looked mournfully at her daughter and gave the impression of heaving an enormously rueful sigh.

“After nearly fifteen years of rather formal letters, I really should not have expected you to fling yourself into my loving arms, should I the spirit said, wearing an expression of deep chagrin. “It’s not as if I wasn’t warned.”

Marina held her peace, and her breath—well, she had lately discovered that she didn’t actually breathe so she couldn’t really hold her breath, but that was the general effect. Perhaps being dead gave one a broader perspective and made one more accepting of things.

Especially things that one couldn’t change. Like one’s daughter, who had grown up with a mind and will of her own, and who considered her birth mother to be the next thing to a stranger.

“You aren’t at all as I pictured you, are you?” the spirit continued, but now there was a bit of pride mingled with the chagrin. “Nothing like I imagined.”

Marina couldn’t help but feel guilt at those sad words. Not that it was her fault that her parents had treasured an image of her that was nothing like the reality. “Oh, Mother—” she sighed. “I’m sorry.” She couldn’t bring herself to say anything more, but Alanna unexpectedly smiled.

“Don’t be.” Both of her parents studied her for a moment, as she throttled down a new emotion—

Lightning emotional changes seemed to be coming thick and fast, here. Perhaps it was that there was no reason, here and now, for any pretense. And no room for it. Polite pretense was only getting in the way.

This new emotion was resentment, and after another long moment of exchanged glances, it burst out.

“Why did you just—throw me away?” she cried, seventeen years of pain distilled in that single sentence. “What was wrong with me? Didn’t you want me? Was I in the way?” That last was something that had only just occurred to her, as she saw the way the two spirits stood together. Never had she seen two people so nearly and literally one, and she felt horrible. Had she been an intrusion on this perfect one-ness? It was only too easy to picture how they would have resented her presence.

But the bewilderment on both their faces gave the lie to that notion. “Throw you away?” Hugh said, aghast. “Dear child—don’t you know what we were trying to prevent—what we were trying to save you from? Didn’t anyone ever tell you?”

It was short in the telling, the more so since the curse that Madam had so effectively placed on Marina as an infant was what had patently thrown her here now. She listened in appalled fascination—it would have been an amazing tale, if it had just happened to someone else.

And why? Why did Arachne hate her brother and his wife so much that she declared war on a harmless infant? For that matter, what on earth could Hugh Roeswood have done to anger her—besides merely existing? Hugh had only been a child when Arachne left home to marry her unsuitable suitor.

“So we sent you away, where we hoped Arachne would never find you, and left her only ourselves to aim at,” Hugh finished. “We hoped—well, we hoped all manner of things. We hoped that she wouldn’t find you, and that the curse would backfire on her when it reached its term without being called up again. We hoped that you would become a good enough Master to defend yourself. We hoped someone would find a way to take the damned thing off you!”

“But why send me away and never come even to see me?” she asked softly, plaintively. “Why never, ever come in person?”

“Haven’t you ever seen nesting birds leading hunters away from their little ones?” Alanna asked wistfully. “We couldn’t lead Arachne away, but it was the same idea. We never sent you away because we didn’t love you—we sent you because we loved you so much. And of all the people we could send you to—Margherita was the only choice. We knew that she would love you as if you were her own.”

The pain in her voice recalled the tone of all those letters, hundreds of them, all of them yearning after the daughter Alanna was afraid to put into jeopardy. Marina felt, suddenly, deeply ashamed of her outburst.