Mercedes Lackey - The Gates of Sleep

“The one thing we didn’t take into account was that she might become so desperate as you neared your eighteenth birthday that she would move against us,” Hugh continued, with a smoldering look that told Marina that he was angry at himself. “ I became complacent, I suppose. She hadn’t acted against us, so she wouldn’t—that was a stupid assumption to make. And believe me, there was a will, naming Margherita and Sebastian as your legal guardians. I don’t know what happened to it, but there was one.”

“Madam must have had it stolen,” Marina said, thinking out loud. “She had a whole gaggle of lawyers come and fetch me; perhaps one of those extracted it.” She began to feel a smoldering anger herself—not the unproductive rage, but a calculating anger, and one that, if she could get herself free, boded ill for Madam. “She’s laid this out like a campaign from the beginning! Probably from the moment she discovered that—that cesspit at her first pottery!”

“Cesspit?” they both asked together, and that occasioned yet another explanation.

“My first guess must have been the right one,” Marina said, broodingly. “That must be why she went to the pottery a few days ago—it wasn’t to deal with an emergency, it was to drink in the vile power that she used on me!”

“We never could understand where she got her magic,” Hugh replied, looking sick. “And it was there all along, if only we’d thought to look for it.”

“What could you have done if you’d found it?” Marina countered swiftly. “Confront her? What use would that have been? There is nothing there to link her with it directly—and other than the curse, nothing that anyone could have said against her. She could claim she didn’t mean it, if you confronted her, if you set that Circle of Masters in London on her. She could say it was all an accident. And it still wouldn’t have solved my problem. All that would have happened is that she would have found some way to make you look—well—demented.” She pursed her lips, as memory of a particular interview with Madam surfaced. “In fact, she tried very hard to make me think that you were unbalanced, mother. That you were seeing things—only she didn’t know that I knew very well what those stories you told me in your letters were about. She thought that I was ordinary, with no magic at all, so the tales of fauns and brownies would sound absolutely mad.” She shook her head. “Not that it matters,” she finished, bleakly. “Not now. I could have all the magic of a fully trained Water Master, and it still wouldn’t do me any good in here.”

“But there may be some hope!” Alanna exclaimed. “Your friends—that doctor and his staff—they were the ones that Arachne called! You’re in Briareley as a patient on Arachne’s own orders, and they’ve brought Sebastian and Margherita, Thomas and Elizabeth to help!”

She stared at them. This news was such a shock that she felt physically stunned. And never mind that she didn’t have a way to be physically anything right now. “What?” she said, stupidly.

“Wait a moment.” Hugh winked out—just like a spark extinguishing—then winked back in again. “My dear, it’s better than we knew when we first came to you! They have a plan—but it’s one that you have to follow, too,” Hugh told her. “They’re going to do something to either force Arachne to break this containment, or force her inside it as well. In either case, you will have to be the one to win your own freedom from her.”

He had no sooner finished this astonishing statement than something rocked the orb and its contents—it felt as Marina would have imagined an earthquake would feel. It sent feelings of disequilibrium all through her, quite as if her sense of balance stopped working, then started up again. She didn’t have insides that could go to water, but that was what it felt like.

“And that will be it, I think —” Hugh stated, as another such impulse rocked Marina and the little worldlet. A third—a fourth—if Marina had been in her own body, she knew she would have been sick into one of the dying bushes. Instead, she just felt as if she would like to be sick.

“She’s coming!” Alanna gasped—and the two spirits winked out. With no more warning than that, Marina steeled herself. But she made herself a pledge as well. No matter what the outcome—she was not going to remain here. Whether she came out of here to return to her physical body or not, she was not going to remain.

Chapter Twenty-Two

THE moment after Hugh and Alanna vanished, there was a fifth convulsion, worse than all the previous ones combined. It shocked her mind; shocked it out of all thought save only that of self-awareness, and only the thinnest edge of that.

For a brief moment, everything around Marina flickered and vanished into a universal gray haze, shot through with black-green lightning. She was, for that instant, nothing more than a shining spark on the end of a long, thin silver cord, floating unanchored in that haze, desperately trying to evade those lightning-lances. Something—a black comet, ringed with that foul light, shot past her before she had time to do more than recognize that it was there.

Then it was all back; the withered garden, the ring of brambles, she herself, standing uncertainly at the edge of the circle of brown-edged grass. But there was an addition to the garden. Marina was not alone.

Standing opposite Marina, with her back to the wall of thorns, stood Madam Arachne.

She was scarcely recognizable. Over Arachne’s once-impassive face flitted a parade of expressions—rage, surprise, hate—and one that Marina almost didn’t recognize, for it seemed so foreign to Madam’s entire image.

Confusion.

Quite as if Madam did not recognize where she was, and had no idea how she had gotten here.

But the expression, if Marina actually recognized it for what it was, vanished in moments, and the usual marble-statue stillness dropped over her face like a mask.

Marina held herself silent and still, but behind the mask that she tried to clamp over her own features, her mind was racing and her heart in her mouth. Instinctively, she felt that there was something very important about that moment of nothingness that she had just passed through. And if only she could grasp it, she would have the key she needed.

And now she wanted more than just to escape—for she had realized as she watched her parents together that she wanted to return to someone. Dr. Andrew Pike, to be precise. She must have fallen in love with him without realizing it; perhaps she hadn’t recognized it until she saw her parents together.

And she knew, deep in her heart, that he wasn’t just sitting back and letting her old friends and guardians try to save her. He was in there fighting for her, himself, and it wasn’t just because he was a physician.

I have to survive to get back to him, first, she reminded herself tensely.

“Well,” Madam said dryly. “Isn’t this—interesting.”

Marina held her peace, but she felt wound up as tightly as a clock-spring, ready to shatter at a word.

Madam looked carefully around herself, taking her time gazing at what little there was to see. Then, experimentally, she pointed a long finger at a stunted and inoffensive bush.

Black-green lightning lanced from the tip of that finger and incinerated the half-dead bit of shrubbery—eerily doing so without a sound, except for a hiss and a soft puff as the bush burst into flame.

Madam stared at her finger, then at the little fountain of fire, smoke, and ash, and slowly, coldly, began to smile. When she turned that smile on Marina, Marina’s blood turned to ice.