Unnatural Issue E-Book

Mercedes Lackey

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Richard Whitestone is an Elemental Earth Master. Blaming himself for the death of his beloved wife in childbirth, he has sworn never to set eyes on his daughter, Suzanne. But when he finally sees her, a dark plan takes shape in his twisted mind-to use his daughter's body to bring back the spirit of his long-dead wife.

Leseprobe

UNNATURAL ISSUE

By Mercedes Lackey and Available from Titan Books

Elemental Masters

The Serpent’s Shadow

The Gates of Sleep

Phoenix and Ashes

The Wizard of London

Reserved for the Cat

Unnatural Issue

Home from the Sea

Steadfast

Blood Red

Collegium Chronicles

Foundation

Intrigues

Changes

Redoubt

Bastion

UNNATURAL ISSUE

ELEMENTAL MASTERS

Mercedes Lackey

TITAN BOOKS

UNNATURAL ISSUE E-book edition ISBN: 9781783293940

Published by Titan Books A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd 144 Southwark Street London SE1 0UP

First edition: May 2014 12345678910

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2011, 2014 by Mercedes Lackey. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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Dedicated to the Wisconsin 14, and the teachers, firefighters, and public service workers of the US.

Contents

Cover

Half Title Page

By Mercedes Lackey

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

Epilogue

About the Author

Prologue

IT was nearly dark, and the spring air was turning cold, but Richard Whitestone did not push his horse to any great haste. The road was good, the horse knew the way, and there would be a moon up soon. He had been far too long in London; he could still taste its poisons, feel them corroding his lungs, infesting his body, and he needed to take every moment he could of this journey to purge himself of them. Most people would not have been suffering as he was; most people would escape London after one of the denser yellow fogs, breathe in the clean air of the countryside, and merely thank Providence that they were out. But of course, he would, he had suffered; he was an Elemental Master of Earth, one who commanded all the powers of the Earth itself and the Elemental creatures that represented those powers. Earth Masters loathed cities; Richard, who was one of the most powerful to live even somewhat close to London, had been nauseated from the moment he entered the tainted zone of the city to the moment he left it. He still felt sick, with the very real sensations of someone who had ingested a sublethal dose of, say, arsenic. Now, finally on his journey home, he was able to heal.

Earth Masters seldom left their country homes, where they tended the land and the things living on it. Nothing could have persuaded him to enter the city except the urgings of the Master of the Council, Lord Alderscroft himself. The man they called the Wizard of London was not someone you disobeyed lightly. And to be fair, Alderscroft did not call an Earth Master into London on a whim.

Even knowing that, Richard had been reluctant, but now he had to admit that Alderscroft had good reason for calling him in. While most Elementals shunned the cities, there were those creatures of the Dark that thrived on the filth and decay that was ever-present there. Normally, when such creatures lurked within a city, it was without doing much (if any) actual damage. They merely lived on what was already there. But the unscrupulous or downright evil Elemental mage could make use of such creatures, and as Alderscroft had discovered, one had set up shop in London.

Paving stones and cement were no impediment to something that could swim through earth; the mage had coerced a handful of hobgoblins to steal for him—which was bad enough—and had, quite by accident, discovered that murder was even more lucrative than theft. The Master of such creatures had to know where the valuables were, after all, in order to direct his creatures to steal them. But for a murder-for-hire? He need only give them the right scent, wait until the house was quiet and all were asleep—and turn his creatures loose. The Master had chosen his victims well and trained his hobgoblins thoroughly. The victims were all men and women, mostly elderly, with heirs impatient to gain their inheritance and not particular about how. It was easy for a gang of goblins to weight a victim down in his or her bed to be smothered. It was possible that the murders would never have been discovered at all, but the policeman who had been the first called to the scene of one of the murders by a hysterical maidservant also happened to be an Elemental mage.

Once one such murder had been brought to the attention of Alderscroft’s Circle, it was not long before the others were uncovered.

Since the miscreant had been an Earth Master, it required another to track and counter him. But because he was commanding hobgoblins, it also took one who was willing and able to confront the Dark Elementals as well as converse with and persuade those of the Light.

The only one near enough to London to fit that description had been Richard, and if the blackguard in question had been engaged only in theft, he would have refused. Patience and persistence would have enabled any other Elemental Master to discover the miscreant in time. Murder, however, was another kettle of fish. Richard could not, in good conscience, allow another to take place.

Nor could he permit hobgoblins that had been taught how to murder to continue to exist. Such creatures thrived on pain and suffering, and having gotten a taste of how easy it was to create it themselves, they would not have gone back to their old ways even if their master was gone.

Tracking the wretch through the filth that was the City had been bad enough. But Richard had been forced to take the mage on nearly single-handed; his own Elementals would not (indeed, could not) come to his aid, and the Elemental Masters of the allied powers of Fire and Water had been of limited help. Of all the Elements, Earth was the most obdurate, and the hardest to subdue or destroy. Fire could be extinguished, Water diverted, but Earth . . . persisted. It had not been an easy fight, and when it was over, Richard had been exhausted and sickened.

Alderscroft had urged him to remain in London to recover, and in the protected and warded confines of the Exeter Club, he would have been able to do so. But he had been away from home more than long enough.

Especially considering that his wife, Rebecca, was heavy with child. It was true that she herself had urged him to go to London, and in letters she had supported him in his decision to stay and fight. But the last thing he wanted was for her to be alone for too long when she was so near her time.

Not that he had any great fears for her. She, too, was an Earth mage, and a good one, if not a Master. Earth mages—especially those who never needed to leave their home ground—tended to be robust and healthy individuals. Earth magic was that of fertility and growth, after all. But he had missed her more with every day and longed for her company the way he longed for the good, clean earth under his feet again.

As he passed between the hedgerows, the only sounds were the clopping of his horse’s hooves on the hard road and the occasional lowing of cows and baa-ing of sheep on the other side of those hedges. The homely sounds soothed him, and the presence of the beasts fortified him with their energies.

He and Rebecca belonged to the class known as “country squires.” Although they did not have official titles, the very considerable property called Whitestone Hall as well as the farms Richard owned had been in his family for generations. The estate was as remote as it could possibly be in this part of England, and no substantial changes had been made to it in the last hundred years. Earth magicians were conservative in their needs and solitary in their ways. The Whitestones had been Elemental magicians for longer than they had owned the house and lands; most of them had been of Earth, although an occasional Water or Fire mage had been known to crop up in the line. The soon-to-be-newest addition to the family had already given satisfactory signs that she would follow in her mother and father’s footsteps.

As he rode into the growing darkness, getting farther and farther from anything that the benighted considered “civilization,” Richard felt the land healing him of the damage the goblins had done, and cleansing the poison the city had poured into him. He didn’t want to approach Rebecca still tainted by the filth he had wallowed in for the last week, especially not when she was growing near her time. She was seven months along by his reckoning, and he would not take the risk of inadvertently contaminating her or their unborn child.

It was as lovely a summer evening as anyone could hope for. There was just enough of a faint chill in the air to make Richard glad of his coat, but not so much as to make him shiver. His keen sense of smell picked out the scents of wild roses, clover, and cut hay. A little farther on, he detected water—a slow-running stream by the scent of it. The slow footfalls of his horse’s hooves made him vibrate in sympathy with the earth. It took careful purging to rid himself of the filth without bringing the pollution to his own ground. He had to reduce it to its component parts, be it magical energy or actual, physical poison like the soot in his lungs. Only then was it safe to deposit elsewhere. And even then there were poisons, like lead, that were impossible to break down. He would need a special session to be rid of those, one best carried out in the security of his own workroom. He could summon a dwarf to take the poisons away; dwarves were clever with such things and would make something useful of them. Even a poison could be used for something, in the right hands. It would be beneficial to both himself and the dwarf; this was how an Elemental Master should conduct his magic—without coercion, and with both summoned and summoner coming off the better for the transaction.

But these poisons could be encapsulated and isolated for this moment; cleansing and healing himself as he was doing now would give him the strength to keep such things safely contained.

Even though it was deep dusk when he crossed the invisible boundary that brought him onto his own lands, he felt it. The land recognized him and greeted him as its own.

And then he felt something else.

It struck him like a blow to the heart.

A powerful wrongness. Turmoil. And grief.

Involuntarily, he put spurs to his tired horse, startling the beast into a gallop. With a growing sense of panic, he urged the beast down the old Roman road and then past the wall that marked the lands of Whitestone Hall. His heart pounded with the throbbing of hooves on the road, and fear of a sort he had never experienced before gripped him in an icy clasp.

The horse did not need guiding; it bolted through the open gates as soon as it saw them. The lane was straight and true; they scorched toward the country house, ablaze with candle and lantern light, the doors standing open wide.

He pulled the horse to a stop to see his housekeeper, tears streaking her face, standing in the doorway, pressing messages and shillings into the hands of the stable boy and the gardener’s boy. She burst into more tears at the sight of him, as he flung himself off the horse. “Master Richard! Master Richard! I swear, sir, we did what we could, but town is so far away, she started with no warning, before her time, and she tore before the midwife could get here, and the doctor was away—” She continued babbling as he pushed past her and sprinted for the room that should have been his sanctuary.

He knew, he knew what he would find as he ran up the stairs to the best bedroom. He felt it, a sudden emptiness in his heart, a wound that would never heal. He threw open the bedroom door—

He had expected to find a welter of bloody sheets, pain and chaos. He found only clean, calm death.

With a heart gone cold, he approached the ancient canopied bed in which so many generations of Whitestones had been born, loved, and died.

The curtains had been pulled aside, the sheets and coverlet stripped away and replaced. There was no sign here of the struggle that had claimed his wife, of the terrible pain she must have endured. A single candle on the stand beside the bed cast its soft light on the beloved face, the broad brow, the tender eyes, now closed, that had once been startlingly blue. The high, sculptured cheekbones worthy of the attention of the finest artist were pale as the marble bust of Athena in the parlor; the lips that had been full and pink as the roses she loved were now white. Someone had smoothed Rebecca’s long, black hair and parted it neatly, spreading it out on the pillow. Her long, slender hands were folded over her breast. He touched one; it was already cool and growing colder.

He heard footsteps behind him: the housekeeper, wringing her hands, her voice hoarse with grief and weeping.

“How long has she—” he asked. He could not finish the sentence.

“Three hours, sir. She started afore her time; we tried to hold it back but something went wrong. The midwife was here, but she couldn’t do anything. She tore, somehow inside, all of a sudden. I sent the boy for the doctor, but he was out, and by the time he got here—” She broke into a fresh bout of weeping. “She was gone. All he could do was save the wee one.”

“What?” He turned on the woman; what she saw in his face must have terrified her, for she shrank back as if he had threatened to strike her.

“The baby, sir. The lady was gone, but he was able to save the baby. Your daughter. She’s small, but—she’s alive, and he thinks like to stay so.” The candle flickered, casting moving shadows, like the ugly little hobgoblins he had so lately fought. “You can see her now, sir. Cook’s daughter had her own wee one two months ago, and she’s nursing her now—”

Rage filled him. How dared that creature, that parasite that had sucked the life out of his Rebecca, still be alive when she was not? How dared Heaven punish him by taking the one person on Earth he loved more than life itself and leave behind this . . . thing, this unformed nothing, this unwelcome stranger?

His vision darkened, and he felt anger coursing through him, as if his veins were filled with burning ash instead of blood. The anger was a relief; it pushed aside his terrible guilt, the certainty that if he had been here—he could have saved her. He was an Earth Master, a healer. If he had been here—if he had just pushed his horse to get him home—if he had never gone at all—

But no. He was not the guilty one. He had gone to do his duty, and it was not his fault—no, no, none of this was his fault. No, it was this interloper that had murdered his beloved.

“I do not wish to see that—thing,” he snarled. “Do what you want with it. Let it die. It killed Rebecca, and I never want to set eyes on it. Never! Do you understand me? Never!”

The housekeeper shrank back until her back was against the wall. “But, sir—she’s your—” She bit back what she was going to say. “Yes, sir,” she said instead, and made her escape.

Richard Whitestone sank down beside the body of the only woman he had ever, or would ever, love, and wept.

1

Susanne Whitestone was as full of contentment as it was possible for her to be. And how not? It was a perfect spring dawn on a day full of magic and life. The air was soft as thistledown, vibrating with birdsong, fragrant with flowers. She hummed as she walked through the dewy grass, never minding that it was soaking into the hem of her muslin frock. The dress would dry soon enough, and the dew on her bare feet felt heavenly.

An Earth magician cherished these things. The dew on one’s feet, the tender grass beneath them, the scent of everything green and burgeoning, the power radiating from the soil itself on this Beltane morning . . . these things were life itself. As she walked, she unconsciously cataloged every scent, analyzing it for “rightness,” looking for anything that might tell her of a problem. She was the keeper and custodian of this spot of ground, and she took her responsibilities with absolute seriousness. She had been the keeper of the Whitestone lands since she was—ten, she thought. Ever since she had met Robin—

She really didn’t want to go back to the Manor, actually. Although she could make the land all around it grow and thrive, there was nothing she could do to heal the Manor. It was the bitter and blighted wound at the center of these lands, so damaged that the land itself had formed a thick protection of power about it, to keep it from poisoning the rest, exactly as a body would create a cyst around a foreign object lodged inside it.

Beltane—or as it was called among most folk here, May Day—was Susanne’s favorite day of the year. Christmas was never celebrated at Whitestone Manor, at least, not within the Manor walls, and the Winter Solstice it coincided with merely marked for her another day when the earth still slumbered. Midsummer was the day when all the promise was fulfilled; it marked the moment when “growing” turned to “ripening”—joyous, to be sure, but Susanne preferred this day and all the potential of the season of promise. And while she dutifully celebrated the rites of autumn, they were still sad for her, despite the welcome of Harvest Home, because now the earth would drop back into its winter slumber, and she would be spending most of her time inside the haunted walls of her father’s house.

Well, what was the harm in lingering in the meadow, anyway? For a moment, she tasted the sourness of resentment, then the bitterness of irony. After all, she wasn’t a servant, even though she did a servant’s labor. She got no wages, no “new suit of clothes” twice a year—nothing but the clothing she could make with her own two hands, the food she ate, and the little room she had to sleep in. She worked as hard as any of the others and got far less.

The resentment ebbed, and so did the bitterness. Things could be so much worse than they were now—her father could have ordered her sent to an orphanage, for instance. Not one infant in ten survived to the age of five in an orphanage. And from there, she’d have gone to a factory—

She shuddered at the thought.

Well, surely she had earned a little holiday.

She knew very well the others would not begrudge it. Although they had no idea what it was she really did for the Whitestone lands—or at least did not know it consciously—somewhere deep inside, their instincts surely told them. Never once, when she had been about her duties and not sharing their work, had she come back to anything other than a welcome and knowing smiles.

So instead of going back to the Manor, she made her way into the Home Wood, a tangle of wild that dated back at least as far as the Norman Conquest, and probably farther. Maybe this was no part of her duties, but a moment here left her more rested than a night of sleep.

There was a little spring-fed pond at the heart of the wood, and that was where she headed. It was the place she felt most at home, even in winter. Today, as she settled down on the grass beside the water, it felt as if the place were folding her in its arms, and the sweet power that rose all about her was like breathing, bathing in, the very soul of the land. The faint breeze left feather-touches on her skin and was like honey-water in her mouth. The birds made better music than any musician she had ever heard. The grass was softer than her bed, and all the muted colors around her, from the little mayflowers at the edge of the pool to the thousands of colors of green of grass and leaves, blended together into a harmonious whole.

This was what made it all worthwhile, all the loneliness, all the sour days spent within walls that sometimes felt as if they hated her.

She had never seen her father. She was twenty years old and had never seen her father, who spent all his time mewed up on the second floor and never came down, never allowed anyone up but Agatha, the housekeeper. From the time she could understand anything, she had been made to understand that he never wanted to see her. She would have grown up as wild and ignorant as a stray cur if it had not been for the collusion of the entire household of servants.

Cook’s daughter had nursed her, along with her own little girl. Once she had been weaned, they all undertook to raise her. Old Mary, the cook, taught her how to read, with patience and great labor, out of her recipe books and old newspapers and the Bible, and then taught her to cook as well. Mathew, the stableman, taught her figures. Patience and Prudence, the housemaids, taught her to clean and mend, and Prudence taught her to sew, using the things they brought down out of the attic—everything from old gowns to old linens—as material, so that she could at least keep herself decently clothed. Nigel, the cowman, and Mathew taught her how to take care of animals as well as simple physicking. No one had to teach her how to heal; that had come as naturally as breathing.

She knew, from reading the papers that arrived with the weekly marketing, that this was not the sort of upbringing that a girl of her social status should have experienced. She should have had a proper nursemaid, then a governess to teach her things like embroidery and music and drawing—and then she should have gone to a respectable boarding school with other girls of her class. At sixteen she should have “come out” and been presented to the local version of society. Not presented at court, of course, and not the great London balls that filled the social columns of those papers, but country dances and house parties, teas and gatherings. She should have been going to all manner of entertainments and seeing young men. In fact, by this time she should have been engaged or even married.

But only the people here in the village even knew that she existed—and she existed in a very awkward social position indeed. Her own father had repudiated her, and she worked like any servant, yet she was of a higher class than any of them. It wasn’t only the magic that set her apart from them.

She honestly didn’t really care about missing the gowns and parties. From the time she had been able to toddle out into the meadow beyond the sad, sere Manor garden and had met Robin, she had known what she was meant to do, and it wasn’t attend a proper school, wear fashionable clothing, and go to the appropriate parties until she found or was found by “the right man.”

This was what she had been born to do. To be the caretaker of the land. To guard it, and guide it, and see that its hurts were healed. How could she have lived the life of someone who was “the squire’s daughter” and still been able to do that?

And moments like this were her reward, when she could lean back and feel that all was right, sense that the May Day magics she had performed, together with the Old Religion rites furtively practiced by a small but devoted coven and the May Day country traditions openly practiced by everyone else, had done, or would do, their job. Together she and the people who lived here had bound up the land in that magic, had ensured that the power that fueled it was clean and pure. She knew bone-deep and blood-deep that what she and they had done would keep the land and the power safe and fertile for another growing and harvesting season.

How could even an extravagant London Season or the most enchanting ball ever held even begin to compare with that?

The last shadow of resentment faded, the last of the bitterness soothed by birdsong and the soft sighing of a breeze in the leaves.

Once she was settled in place, quiet as the grass, other creatures emerged, slowly, shyly. Some were perfectly “natural” creatures, of the sort that no one living in the country would be surprised to see. A doe and fawn faded out of the underbrush to drink at the pool, and a dog-fox did the same, watching her with his sly eyes to make sure she wasn’t hiding a gun beneath her skirts. There had not been a hunt on Whitestone lands for decades, and as a consequence, the folk hereabouts considered foxes to be fair game in any season. The rabbits and a hare waited until he was gone before making their appearance, as did the cock-pheasant, who was no native of England but whose kind had been here so long he might as well have been.

But after them came the things that only those with her sort of sight—or Sight—could see.

The faintest of splashes warned her with its peculiar notes that the undines were poking their heads above the water to see if she was alone. Someone without the gift to see them would think they were fish, or frogs, but she tilted her head to the side and spied bright green eyes crowned with a tangle of weedy hair peeking up above the waterline.

“It’s safe enough,” she called softly; even though they didn’t answer to her, she was an ally they knew and recognized, and they went back to the playing she had interrupted when she arrived. It was hard for them to tell one human from another at a distance unless that human was a Water mage; caution made them hide when anyone came near.

There was nothing of caution in the little fellow that came bounding into the clearing and flung himself into her lap to have his head and little nubs of horn scratched. The faun could tell where she was at any time—he was Earth, as she was—but she was around other humans so often that he rarely showed himself. “And what have you been at, naughty one?” she asked him, as she picked leaves and bits of twig out of his curly hair. Fauns were bawdy little fellows, but they knew better than to display that around her. She had ways of making her displeasure known that lasted long past the fun of shocking her.

“Stealing,” he said artlessly. “Maddie at Stone Cottage be lighter of a scone!” He licked his lips, and his goat-eyes twinkled.

“Then be sure you give her luck,” she admonished. “Or at least bring her a maying.”

“Eh, all right,” he agreed. “ ’Tis no odds. Robin, he blessed her cow for it.”

“Well, good. But that was Robin’s doing, and none of yours. Maddie might need that scone, and if you take without giving back, she might stop leaving bowls of milk at the stoop.” Maddie Cowel of Stone Cottage was one of those who still Believed—as well she should—and kept to the old ways. Once a week, a bowl of milk left out on her doorstep bought the loyalty of the “Pharisees” as she called the Elementals. Or at least kept their mischief to a minimum. No one hereabouts called them Fairies or Fae or Elves or anything of the sort; naming them brought you to their attention, and that might not be good. No, for the folk in cottages it was “Good Folk” or “Pharisees” or even just “Them Lot,” with a sideways look out of the corner of your eye, if you were extremely cautious.

The faun pouted, but he finally nodded. “I knows a squirrel-hoard with no squirrel for it, since yon dog-fox got luck on his side this winter past.”

“Half for you and half for Maddie,” Susanne agreed, and with his horns nicely scratched and his shaggy head free of bits of detritus, he leaped out of her lap and bounded off to see to it.

A laugh from behind her made her turn, and she smiled brightly up at the young male who was—barring the servants at the Manor—her oldest friend in all the world. “So, you manage my subjects as well as I,” said Robin, known as “Keeper,” since he had never given a last name, his green eyes sparkling with good humor. “Perhaps I should have a holiday of my own and leave you to tend them!”

“Don’t you dare!” she exclaimed, and patted the mossy bank next to her. “Come and tell me the news.”

Now, any eyes, whether Sighted or not, could see Robin—or would see a handsome young man, chestnut-haired, green-eyed, and wearing the common rough linen smock and trousers that farm folk about here had worn for over a century, with the addition of a long leather vest and belt and boots suitable for tramping through forest and what appeared to be a shotgun slung casually over one arm. Robin was commonly supposed to be the Whitestone Manor gamekeeper. Certainly all the servants believed that he was, as did all the farmers and laborers for miles around. He never denied it, and if he looked the other way at a few rabbit snares or a bit of grouse poaching or unauthorized fishing, well, most sensible gamekeepers did that. If your gamekeeper was a stickler about enforcing poaching laws, it was an undeclared war all around. If everyone was sensible about things, everyone got along, and game was managed much better. It was well understood that since Master Richard didn’t come out of his house, ever, much less take an interest in hunting or fishing his own property, there was no harm in taking what he would have, so long as hares and rabbits, grouse and pheasant, and trout in their seasons appeared occasionally at the kitchen door. And so long as when Robin came around with a warning that this or that sort of game needed some resting, you didn’t set snares or drop a line in the places he warned you off of.

The fact that none of the servants had ever seen Robin himself appear at the Manor, not even to collect the yearly wages he should have been getting, never seemed to occur to any of them.

Although what certainly did persist in the minds of one and all was that Robin, known to have been Susanne’s playfellow for years, had grown into as fine a young man as she was a young woman, and that one of these days they would certainly get themselves married. The Gamekeeper—like a few other servants—held the same peculiar status that Susanne did. Gamekeepers were considered not quite gentry but a good bit above a mere servant. As such, well, so far as the Whitestone servants were concerned, there was no harm in such a match.

This was useful for Susanne, as Robin was a fellow known to have a hard fist and a strong right arm and the will to use both at need. This kept anyone else from “making advances,” which was exactly as Susanne preferred it. Not that she considered herself above the other young men she saw from time to time, but it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to find someone suitable who was another mage of any sort around here. For all their unconscious connection with the land and the things in it, most of the folk hereabouts were as thick as a brick when it came to magic. And those few that weren’t, well, most of them were already paired up, and the rest were too old or too young for her.

And she could not imagine marrying someone who was not a mage. It would just be too difficult to try to explain the inexplicable to him, and as for hiding what she did . . . her head swam at the very notion. Perhaps, if she married a monied fellow—but a simple country lad? “You can’t keep secrets in a cottage” was the old saying, and a true one.

So it was very convenient for people to assume that she and Robin were stepping out together. Even if the notion was so absurd as to send them both into gales of laughter in private. A Daughter of Eve? Wed to a High Lord of the Fae? Hilarious.

For Robin was not Robin Keeper. He was Robin Goodfellow, the Great Puck himself, as old as Old England, and a true Force of Nature.

“The coven did good work last night,” he said, dangling his arm into the water and tickling an unwary fish into a trance. “There’s trouble in the Big World, though.”

By this, he meant trouble outside the boundaries of England, not just outside of Whitestone Manor. She frowned. “I know very little about that . . .” she said, hesitantly. The papers that found their way to the Manor were inclined to sensationalize things like anarchist attacks and bombings, then gloat about how civilized Britain would never suffer from any such nonsense. Politics on the Continent was all a confused muddle to her, and wars and conflicts farther away than that were less real than fairy tales. At least in her world, fairy tales had some basis in reality, and the creatures in them were things she saw daily. She had never seen a Zulu or a Hindu or an Arab or even a German. There were some folk who turned up for the fairs that were alleged to be French and Italian, and there were always Gypsies coming through, but for the rest? If you told her that Russians had two heads, so long as you believed it yourself, she would be inclined to take your word for it.

“Lots of little pothers that are going to explode into something big and ugly,” Robin replied, pulling his arm out of the water. “People here think they shan’t be involved, but they will be; matters are too tangled up for them not to be. And the Dark Powers have their hand in it all, as well, which will make it all the worse.”

“How bad? How much worse?” she asked, hesitantly.

Robin shook his head. “Can’t tell. Can’t say. Bad, for certain sure.” He hesitated then added, “All the signs and warnings say this will be a to-do that changes everything.”

She looked about her, at her serene and beautiful sanctuary, and shivered. What could be so bad that it would come to affect things here?

“I’ll do what I can, but I’ve all of England to look after,” Robin told her, solemnly. “And what’s coming, well, the best we can all do is keep our little plots of land healthy and safe. Naught to be done about the foolishness of man in the wider world.”

Then he laughed and plucked a bit of mayflower from the verge, tossing it to an undine to put in her hair. “But ’tis not here yet, and’tis nothing to be done to keep it from coming, so let’s us dance a roundelay while we can.”

Sensible of course, even if she didn’t much like it. But Susanne was used to not liking a great deal of her life, and she was accustomed to coping with it all.

“I suppose we’ll have a better notion of what to do when it gets here,” she said philosophically.

“We won’t be alone,” he reminded her. “There’s the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, and mortals have a powerful will to bend things when needs must.”

“So you keep telling me!” she teased, tossing a bit of mayflower at him herself. He caught it deftly and grinned, showing his kinship to the little faun in that grin.

“Ah, well, it’s naught I had to teach you about,” he replied, sticking the flower behind his ear. “Oh, I mind you, no more than six summers old, running off out of that blighted garden and into my wood and calling me. Me! Oldest thing in Old England! Such a will you have!” He shook his head. “And a good thing for you that you do, or the power in you would have driven you mad by now.”

“And a good thing for me that it was you that I called,” she replied. “It could have been—well—anything.”

“Hmm-hmm!” he agreed, and turned his attention to the fish again. “Except for your will, again. ’Twas a good playmate you wanted, and with the single-minded will of a wee child behind it, it would be nothing else you got.”

She wondered about that. Was it true? There was no telling, with Robin. Certainly when she had felt the power coming up through her bare feet, power she had only ever tasted in little, little sips before, and she had stood there in the wood and demanded that a playfellow come at last, that had been all and everything she wanted in the world. Cook’s daughter and the infant she’d nursed alongside of Susanne had gone back to her husband’s little farm as soon as Susanne was weaned, and she hadn’t seen a child of her own age at the Manor since. The maids had limited time for play, Cook had none at all, the gardener had left in disgust when nothing would thrive and had taken the boy that helped with him, leaving only the stableman and his boy, who were just as busy as the maids. Housekeeper lamented that the Manor had fallen on such sorry times, so many rooms closed up, staff reduced to next to nothing, but with Master Richard going nowhere and seeing no one, there was no reason to have more than they did. The accounting was all done by Master Richard’s solicitor in the village; he turned up once a fortnight to disburse funds and paid out wages every quarter. No one came to the Manor anymore to pay their rents, and all the Manor farmland was tended by tenants who were too far away for Susanne to play with their children.

She had been lonely, she had been frustrated, and she had a very strong will. Naturally, she had taken matters into her own hands. She had gotten as far as the green space beyond the blighted gardens once and had felt a strange sensation through her feet, as if everything around her were connected to her and responding to her. She had gotten called back before she could explore that sensation, but on that special day, she knew she would not be looked for all afternoon, for it was spring cleaning. So she took an apple and bread and cheese in her pockets, waited until no one was watching her, and walked quite calmly out of the gardens to the green trees she could see. There she had demanded, wordlessly, but firmly, that someone come to keep her company. Someone nice. Someone who knew things. Someone who could explain these wonderful new sensations she was having.

She got Robin, who was quite as surprised as she was.

Suiting his form to hers, he had appeared as a child rather than an adult. She had intrigued him no end—and the Fae were always attracted to mortal children.

“I was tempted to steal you away, you know,” he said, finally leaving the fish alone and rolling over on his back to stare at the sky. “You with a father that didn’t want you, and all that power in you—you were exactly the sort of mortal child that most calls to us.”

“I know that now; I didn’t know that then.” She began plaiting grass stems into a slender braid. “I’d have likely gone with you.”

Robin sighed. “I couldn’t. Your land needed you. I could feel it calling you. But with all that power—it was too dangerous to leave you untrained, and your fool of a father wasting his life in blaming you for what was none of your doing—you’d have been left to the first mortal Mage to see you for what you were.”

“It might have been one of the Gypsies,” she pointed out. “That would have been no bad thing.”

“Except they’d have stolen you too, and this is the land that needs you.” He sighed again. “Alas for me, there was naught for it but to train you myself. Bother responsibility!”

She pulled a face at him. “Oh, and such a burden I was too!”

“Dreadful,” he agreed. She laughed.

Then they fell silent; she, considering what he had said about troubling times coming, and he—well, who knew what one of the Fae thought? It could have been nothing more important than how to pull a little mischief off, or deep sobering thoughts about keeping England safe. Or, he might not have been thinking at all.

There was no doubt that she could not have had a finer or stricter teacher. She had been given such a thorough education in the ways and means, the dos and don’ts of Earth mastery, that she very much doubted there was a mortal Master who could find fault with anything she did.

She wondered if her father even realized that the only reason why he had not attracted dangerous Elementals to the neighborhood and to himself was because she had aided the land in walling off the Manor and the gardens that he had poisoned, encysting it in the same way that an oyster or clam would cover something that irritated it in nacre. Robin himself had begun the process, and she had added to it, layer on layer, whenever she had the energy to spare.

Within the Manor boundaries, she had worked to protect every member of the household as best she could. The task was made a bit easier by the fact that her father was not actively trying to harm anything, and the blight about the house was merely the natural reflection of the blighted and embittered spirit of the Earth Master himself, not an actual curse or active poisoning.

“It’s going to be war,” Robin said soberly, out of the blue. “Not just a little war, neither. There’s a lot of mortal nastiness afoot, beyond and above that. Wicked weapons, things that should not be allowed. It will come to touch everyone before it’s over.”

A chill came over her. He must have been Foreseeing, sitting there. “What must I do?” she asked at last.

“Warn the Coveners. Be vague, though, tell ’em to scry it out for themselves. They’ll be more like to believe it that way. I’ll do what I can to help them see true.” He sighed. “And this is why so many of the Fae have cut themselves off from the mortal world. ’Tisn’t just the Cold Iron, ’tis what you lot insist on doing to yourselves and the good earth.”

“But you stay . . .”

“I’m the Oldest Old Thing,” he replied. “So long as there is a spot of Old England where a leaf can grow, I’ll bide.” He quirked an eyebrow at her. “It will take more than a mortal war to drive me out.”

She took comfort in that.

“As for you, missy, you’d best be off. They’ll be needing you in the kitchen.” He made a shooing motion with one hand without getting off the ground.

“So they will.” Though the kitchen was the last place she wanted to be on a day like this, she had better get back before the servants started to think less than kindly of her. She got up reluctantly, brushed off her skirts, and made her way through the wood and back to the Manor.

From a distance, it still looked handsome. The building was made of a mellow stone, and signs of neglect were few. You couldn’t tell how many windows were close-curtained or shuttered, and from here, you couldn’t tell how rank and neglected the immediate grounds were, how the fountains were dry and full of leaves, the little statues covered in half-dead ivy.

She wished she could feel sorry for her father—but how could she pity a man who hated her for no good reason, who had responded to loss with bitterness, who neglected lands that had depended on the power of the Whitestones for centuries?

She shook her head and sighed. Well, no matter. If he wouldn’t do his duty, then she would. At least there would be one Whitestone keeping faith.

As she approached the house, a movement at one of the second-story windows caught her eye. Something stirred the curtains in one of the windows.

Someone was watching her.

She felt another of those strange chills running up her spine.

Ducking her head, she decided to abandon dignity and run, picking up her skirts in both hands. She didn’t stop until she was around the corner and out of sight of those windows.

Who could it have been? She wasn’t sure which of those rooms her father claimed as his own; the whole of the second floor was forbidden to her. In fact, the only room she was allowed to go into above the ground floor was the attic. Even her bedroom was what had once been what Cook called a stillroom, where the lady of the house would have made her own herbal and floral concoctions. It was just big enough for her narrow bed, though a plenitude of shelves gave her more storage than she could ever possibly use.

She tried to convince herself that the chill was just another of those shivers of premonition that Robin had started with his warning, but . . .

But it had felt as if whoever had been watching her was not someone who had her best interests in mind.

So, all things considered, it probably had been her father. Not that he would know who she was, which was probably a very good thing.

He probably just thought she was one of the servants, the tenants, or a relative of one of the servants. And since he seemed to hate the entire world, well, small wonder if she felt a chill. He was still an Earth Master, and he still had command of Earth Magic. It would have been a greater surprise if she hadn’t felt a chill.

She passed through the hedge around what would have been the kitchen garden if anything could have been induced to grow there, and entered the kitchen door. The kitchen was a very old room; from reading the papers and the occasional magazine that came into the house, Susanne was vaguely aware that there were all manner of innovations that most houses of this size and wealth had instituted long ago. Patent ranges, for instance, and plumbed water, or at least water from a roof-cistern. This kitchen was substantially unchanged from when the Manor had first been built. Water was brought in buckets from the pump in the yard. It was heated in kettles over the fireplace. Meat was roasted on a spit in the same fireplace or baked in one of the ovens on either side of the fireplace. In fact, nearly all the cooking was done at the fireplace or in the ovens. Cook often said grimly that it was a good thing that Master was this far out in the country, because here there were still people who knew that sort of cookery. “Mark my words,” she would then add, “when I’m gone, he’ll find nobody willing or able to! Then what will he do? I ask you!”

And everyone would look at her. Because they knew what would happen. It would have to be Susanne who took over Cook’s duties if no one else could be found.

If things had been “right” at Whitestone Manor, the kitchen would have been bustling with activity right now. There would have been the master and mistress, several children, the upper servants like governesses and tutors, and perhaps some guests to be tended to. All of them would be wanting breakfast, of course, and a proper country breakfast at that, none of your tea and toast nonsense. And there would have been a full staff of house servants to be fed as well, either before or after the gentry were cared for.

The kitchen was at least big enough to handle that sort of burden, hopelessly antiquated as it was. So the handful of people in it now scarcely took up more than a corner of it.

Old Mary, the cook, looked up first, and beckoned her over with a smile. There was a plate waiting for her with that proper country breakfast on it. The rest were halfway through their own meal, which meant her father’s food had already been taken up to him.

Last night Cook had baked a fine couple of egg pies, which they were all tucking into, with plenty of ham on the side. The Manor might be blighted, but the Manor farm was as right as Susanne could make it, and there was no lack of food on the Manor table. Cook had flung open all the windows and had that look about her that told Susanne she was contemplating spring cleaning. Not today, of course. There were May Day festivities down in the village, and everyone would be wanting to go.

“I’ll deal with the milk,” she offered, before anyone could look wistful and ask. “I’ve had my little holiday already.”

Patience and Prudence—who did literally every chore in the house—both lit up at that. Old Mary smiled. “Well, I’ve ham and cold pickle and cheese, and that’ll do for Master’s nuncheon, and I’ll just put a few trifles in the oven, and those will do for supper. I’ll take Master’s nuncheon up afore I go, and Agatha can take up his supper when she comes back.”

Agatha, the housekeeper, nodded and added, “If you girls can tidy up the kitchen afore you go down to village, I reckon the house won’t be the worse for not being dusted and swept for one day.”

Agatha and Mary were as alike as sisters, of the same sort as most of the farmwives hereabouts. Mathew could have been their brother, and the two maids could have been the children of any of them. The people in this part of the world tended to be brown, round-faced, and cheerful, like a collection of sparrows. Susanne could not have stood out more among them had she been one of the Good Folk. She looked like one of those raven-haired china-dolls that little girls got for Christmas if they were very, very good: hair as black as midnight shadows, vivid blue eyes, healthy pink-and-white complexion—and she towered over all of them but Mathew by at least three inches. Maybe it was that difference that made them just accept whatever she said as being true, (like not needing a holiday) even if it probably wasn’t. “Eh, that’s just our Susanne,” she’d heard them say more than once. So once again, when she volunteered to stay at home and work, when everyone else was having a day of fun at the village, it didn’t seem to occur to any of them that she was making a sacrifice. Or she wasn’t even one of the servants!

For one moment, she had to bite her lip to hide her resentment. But she managed to swallow it down successfully after a bit of a struggle, while the two girls, sixteen and seventeen respectively, whispered and giggled and planned what they would do, what young men they would flirt with, what amusements they would have, and whether either of them had a chance at being made May Queen.

Mathew finished his breakfast and went off to hitch the pony to the cart. The two girls, to their credit, made quick work of the breakfast things and then, in a burst of generosity, made sure that everything for the rest of the meals that could be done in advance, was. Within the hour, the Manor was all but empty, except for Nigel bringing the milk to the dairy, and once he had made his delivery, he, too was gone.

Leaving Susanne in the kitchen . . . with that dark and brooding Presence looming invisibly over her from somewhere upstairs.

With another shiver, she hurried to the dairy. Maybe the hard work of churning would drive that shadow out of her mind.

2

Richard Whitestone had eaten the breakfast brought to him by his housekeeper without tasting it—really, she could have fed him sawdust for all these years and he never would have noticed. In the first year after Rebecca’s death he had scarcely eaten at all, and the only time he had left these rooms had been to attend her funeral. Since that time, he had taken no pleasure in anything, least of all food. He ate it if he noticed it there, and otherwise left it for the housekeeper to take away.

His life had withered, and his spirit contracted into a hard, cold thing, as infertile as a lump of stone. As he had grown bitter, twisted, and blighted, so everything he could see from his windows had grown. That gave him a grim sort of satisfaction, seeing the land itself as stark and withered as his heart.

In his soul he had hoped that this neglect of his own body would make it fail him, but his body had been too stubborn and refused to die. Two years, three? He lost count of the days as he lay for hours with his face to the wall, roused only by the housekeeper’s insistence that he eat. He lost track of the seasons, noting only dully the presence or absence of a fire in his fireplace. At some point, however, it became apparent that his body was not going to oblige him. That was when he took on a semblance of living again. He ate—if not regularly, then at least once a day. He changed his clothing when the housekeeper laid out new. He even bathed now and again, hacked off his hair and beard with shears when it annoyed him, cut his nails the same way. Finally he had taken refuge in the only thing that gave him even a particle of release—not pleasure, for he still took no pleasure in anything—but the release of study and concentration.

Books were somewhat of an escape. Not fiction, though. There were enough lies in the world without adding fiction to them. He found his studies in the magical library that had been amassed by generations of Whitestones. He had scarcely looked at these books during his training; Earth Masters tended to be less than scholarly, more inclined to hands-on practicality. There had always been an Earth Master here, but the Whitestones, at least according to family tradition, had spawned all manner of other magicians, and some, like Air and Water, tended to be bookish. And, of course, once the books were in the house, the Earth tendency to “keep and hold” took over, and they were never even lent out to friends, who were perfectly welcome to come as guests to study but were not permitted to take so much as a child’s book away.

It was a massive library, rivaled only by the one at Exeter House. There were books that dated all the way back to the time of Henry VII and some for which he could find no date—things written in the careful script of someone trained to copy ancient manuscripts or in the crabbed and peculiar handwriting of some unknown mage’s personal grammarie.

Ah, the grammaries . . . the word was actually a corruption of “grimoire,” a book of spells and incantations personally collected by an individual magician. The witches called such things both a “grammary,” and a “Book of Shadows,” but a true grimoire could be a perilous thing indeed, full of notes, speculation, and experimentation. Peril appealed to him now. Puzzling out the strange handwriting and odd abbreviations involved him and made him forget his pain for a little while; these books required endless hours of study, learning the peculiar quirks of the author’s hand, puzzling them out word by word and transcribing them into bound notebooks to be left with the original. There were entire shelves full of such blank books, created by some past squire of Whitestone and left there for the use of successive generations. Well, he might as well use them; there would be no more Whitestones at the Manor. He was the last. And for a time, he had thought that this library would be his only legacy; Alderscroft would never permit the home of a Master who died without a proper heir to be left for strangers to paw over. He’d helped Alderscroft himself, twice, in such circumstances. A special delegation would go to the home and make sure there was nothing in it to cause trouble later. Libraries would be stripped of dangerous volumes and harmless ones left in their place, Working Rooms either sealed off completely or made to look like ordinary storerooms. Then any unique books would go to the library at Exeter House, while duplicates became the property of whoever in the party wished to take them. Some of the books here had come by that route.

So when he died, another delegation from the White Lodge would come, take the books away, and leave common things behind.

They’d take the grammaries and the transcriptions. Maybe they would find something of use in them.