Mercedes Lackey - The Gates of Sleep

The Gates of Sleep

Elemental Masters Book 3

Mercedes Lackey

Prologue

ALANNA Roeswood entered the parlor with her baby Marina in her arms, and reflected contentedly that she loved this room better than any other chamber in Oakhurst Manor. Afternoon sunlight streamed in through the bay windows, and a sultry breeze carried with it the scent of roses from the garden. The parlor glowed with warm colors; reds and rich browns, the gold of ripening wheat. There were six visitors, standing or sitting, talking quietly to one another, dressed for an afternoon tea; three in the flamboyant, medievally inspired garb that marked them as artists. These three were talking to her husband Hugh; they looked as if they properly belonged in a fantastic painting, not Alanna’s cozy parlor. The remaining three were outwardly ordinary; one lady was in an up-to-the-mode tea gown that proclaimed wealth and rank, one man (very much a countrified gentleman) wore a suit with a faintly old-fashioned air about it, and the last was a young woman with ancient eyes whose flowing emerald gown, trimmed in heavy Venice lace like the foam on a wave, was of no discernible mode. They smiled at Alanna as she passed them, and nodded greetings.

Alanna placed her infant carefully in a hand-carved cradle, and seated herself in a chair beside it. One by one, the artists came to greet her, bent over the cradle, whispered something to the sleepy infant, touched her with a gentle finger, and withdrew to resume their conversations.

The artists could have been from the same family. In fact, they were from two. Sebastian Tarrant, he of the leonine red-brown locks and generous moustache, was the husband of dark-haired sweet-faced Margherita; the clean-shaven, craggy fellow who looked to be her brother by his coloring was exactly that. All three were Hugh Roeswood’s childhood playmates, and Alanna’s as well. The rest were also bound to their hosts by ties of long standing. It was, to all outward appearances, just a gathering of a few very special friends, a private celebration of that happiest of events, a birth and christening.

Alanna Roeswood wore a loose artistic tea gown of a delicate mauve, very like the one that enveloped Margherita in amber folds. It should have been, since Margherita’s own hands had made both. She sat near the hearth, a Madonna-like smile on her lips, brooding over the sensuously curved lines of newborn Marina’s hand-carved walnut cradle. The cradle was a gift from one of her godparents, and there wasn’t another like it in all of the world; it was, in fact, a masterpiece of decorative art. The frothy lace of Marina’s christening gown overflowed the side, a spill of winter white against the rich, satiny brown of the lovingly carved wood. Glancing over at Sebastian, the eldest of the artists, Alanna suppressed a larger smile; by the way he kept glancing at the baby, his fingers were itching to sketch the scene. She wondered just what medieval tale he was fitting the tableau into in his mind’s eye. The birth of Rhiannon of the Birds, perhaps. Sebastian Tarrant had been mining the Welsh and Irish mythos for subjects for some time now, with the usual artistic disregard for whether the actual people who had inspired the characters of those pre-Christian tales would have even remotely resembled his paintings. The romance and tragedy suited the sensibilities of those who had made the work of Dante Rossetti and the rest of the Pre-Raphaelites popular. Sebastian was not precisely one of that brotherhood, in no small part because he rarely came to London and rarely exhibited his work. Alanna wasn’t entirely clear just how he managed to sell his work; it might have been through a gallery, or more likely, by word of mouth. Certainly once anyone actually saw one of his paintings, it generally sold itself. Take the rich colors of a Rossetti, add the sinuosity of line of a Burne-Jones, and lay as a foundation beneath it all the lively spirit of a Millais, and you had Sebastian. Adaptor of many styles, imitator of none; that was Sebastian.

His brother-in-law, mild-eyed Thomas Buford, was the carver of Marina’s cradle and a maker of every sort of furniture, following the Aesthetic edict that things of utility should also be beautiful. He had a modest clientele of his own, as did his sister, Margherita (Sebastian’s wife) who was as skilled with needle and tapestry-shuttle as her husband was with brush and pen. The three of them lived and worked together in an apparent harmony quite surprising to those who would have expected the usual tempestuous goings-on of the more famous (or infamous) Pre-Raphaelites of London. They lived in an enormous old vine-covered farmhouse—which Sebastian claimed had once been a medieval manor house that was home to one of King Arthur’s knights—just over the border in Cornwall.

This trio had been Alanna’s (and her husband Hugh’s) friends for most of their lives, from their first meeting as children in Hugh’s nursery, sharing his lessons with his tutors.

The remaining three, however disparate their ages and social statures—well, it had only been natural for them all to become friends as adolescents and young adults first out in adult society.

And that was because they were all part of something much larger than an artistic circle or social circle.

They were all Elemental Masters; magicians by any other name. Each of them commanded, to a greater or lesser extent, the magic of a specific element: Earth, Air, Fire, or Water, and they practiced their Magics together and separately for the benefit and protection of their land and the people around them. There was a greater Circle of Masters based in London, but Hugh and Alanna had never taken part in any of its works. They met mostly with the double-handful of Masters who confined their workings to goals of smaller scope, here in the heart of Devon.

Marina stirred in her nest of soft lace, but did not wake; Alanna gazed down at her with an upswelling of passionate adoration. She was a lovely baby, and that was not just the opinion of her doting parents.

Hugh and Alanna were Earth Masters; their affinity with that Element was the reason why they seldom left their own land and property. Like most Earth Masters, they felt most comfortable when they were closest to a home deep in the countryside, far from the brick-and-stone of the great cities. Margherita was also an Earth Master; her brother Thomas shared her affinity, and this was why they had shared Hugh’s tutors.

For the magic, in most cases, passed easily from parent to child in Hugh’s family, and there was a long tradition in the Roeswood history of beginning training in the exercise of power along with more common lessons. So tutors, and sometimes even a child’s first nurse, were also Mages.

Hugh’s sister Arachne, already an adult, was long gone from the household, never seen, seldom heard from, by the time he was ready for formal schooling. Magic had skipped her, or so it appeared, and Hugh had once ventured the opinion that this seemed to have made her bitter and distant. She had married a tradesman, a manufacturer of pottery, and for some reason never imparted to Hugh, this had caused a rift in the already-strained relationship with her parents.

Be that as it may, Hugh’s parents did not want him to spend a lonely childhood being schooled in isolation from other children his age—and lo! there were the Tarrants, the Bufords, and Alanna’s family, all friends of the Roeswoods, all Elemental Mages of their own circle, all living within a day’s ride of Oakhurst, and all with children near the same age. The addition of their friends’ children to the Roeswood household seemed only natural, especially since it was not wise to send a child with Elemental power to a normal public school—doubly so as a boarder. Such children saw things—the Elemental creatures of their affinities—and often forgot to keep a curb on their tongues. And such children attracted those Elemental creatures, which were, if not watched by an adult mage, inclined to play mischief in the material world. “Poltergeists” was the popular name for these creatures, and sometimes even the poor children who had attracted them in the first place had no idea what was going on about them. Worst of all, the child with Elemental power could attract something other than benign or mischievous Elemental creatures. Terrible things had happened in the past, and the least of them was when the child in question had been attacked. Worse, far worse had come when the child had been lured, seduced, and turned to evil himself…