Home From the Sea: An Elemental Masters Novel

by Mercedes Lackey

  Well, that just made Nan the more determined to learn to swim. “Then we’ll do what we did in Africa,” she said firmly.

  “Well, if you’ve done with the talk of teaching land-folk to swim, do you suppose something could be done about that hamper?” Trefor was always hungry—and all the Selch were eager for the foodstuffs Nan and Sarah brought down from Gower Cottage. Which, Nan supposed, only made sense. There were not a lot of chickens in the sea… nor bake-ovens (though Mari could, and did, make fine pies and bread). Nor were there strawberries, or cows, and fizzy lemonade was a complete unknown. Even Mari hadn’t had fizzy lemonade before the girls brought down bottles to share, and now she looked forward to the luncheon as much as the Selch did.

  Now, Mari could have fed the Selch too, just as well as the girls did if not better… but Mari was the keeper of the household money, and Nan had the shrewd notion that Mari didn’t care to expend a single precious penny on her visitors, nor did she see any reason to feed four perpetually hungry young men who could very easily go jump in the sea and hunt their own dinners. But if Nan and Sarah wished to share, that was another thing altogether.

  Not that Nan and Sarah came the worse out of it. The hamper always came back up with some sort of sea-delicacy in it.

  And there’s worse things than fresh kippered herring for breakfast, Nan thought to herself with a little smug content. Or lovely salmon!

  She was keeping a careful eye on Rhodri, mindful of what Sarah had told her, and she wasn’t at all sure Sarah was wrong. The handsome fellow did seem to pay her more attention than he did Mari. His eyes did seem to linger on her longer than was strictly necessary.

  Then again, it was probably no more than curiosity. The women he knew were all country Welsh or his own kind. She must seem as exotic to him as a lioness.

  And possibly just as dangerous!

  “Today, you will learn to touch on, and use, Air and Earth magic,” Idwal said, calmly, as if he was saying “Today we will bake bread.”

  Mari stared at him. “That’s daft!” she exclaimed. “How can—”

  “Because every Master can make use of the magic of her allied Elements,” Idwal replied, interrupting her. “That is part of what makes her a Master. You will not be able to use them well, no better than a simple Elemental Magician at best, but you will be able to use them. And it is important that you learn.”

  By now, she knew that when Idwal made statements like that, he was waiting for her to reason out the why for herself. So she thought about it.

  “I might be some place someday where there are no Water Elementals about,” she said, finally. “So I’d have to use what I’ve got.”

  He nodded. “Or an enemy who is a Dark Master of Water has cut you off. There is this: those who are Dark Masters almost never know the magic of more than their own Element.”

  Again, he waited for her to reason out the why.

  “Because they work by coercion, and they’ve got their hands full dealing with the Elementals they can control from their own Element,” she declared. That one was easy. “If they started mucking about with Elements they aren’t strong in, they’re likely to get themselves into trouble.”

  “And then?”

  “And then…” she thought about this, hard, because he hadn’t actually encouraged her even to think about Dark Masters until now. “Their own Elementals would revolt as soon as they sensed there was trouble?”

  Idwal smiled. She felt warm all over. “And they would rend him in pieces. Another good reason why we do not coerce. It does tend to engender hard feelings.” His eyes twinkled, and she giggled.

  They had left Nan and Sarah and the Selch boys on the shore, where the boys were going to teach the girls to swim. Nan and Sarah had brought with them the prettiest underthings Mari had ever seen to use as swimming costumes. “Combinations,” the girls called them, something like a chemise with legs to it, made of lovely snow-white, soft linen, thick enough not to do anything revealing when wetted down, but with such pretty embroidery and lace! Compared to her own plain chemise and drawers… Mari’s heart had immediately yearned after the garments, and she’d had to quite wrench her mind back to where it should be, on her lessons.

  Idwal had taken her quite a distance from the beach, and now they were sitting in a little sheltered grove in a pocket valley between two low hills—absolutely invisible from the road or the sea. Although he was as lean and dark as the other Selch, he had the most interesting eyes, eyes that changed color with his mood. Right now they were a blue-gray, but she had seen them go almost silver, and all the way to storm-cloud black.

  “Now, the easiest way to learn to use the magic of other Elements is to layer the energies into your shielding,” he was telling her. “It also makes your shields that much more effective. You must layer it, because you can never actually mix the magics. Put earth and water in a jar and shake them together; no matter how hard you shake, the earth separates from the water once you stop agitating the jar. Send water into the air as mist and eventually it will condense and turn back into water. So today you will learn how to make layers. On another day, I will teach you how to braid the magics together. Begin by making a simple Water shield of one layer.”

  At this point that was second nature. She enclosed them both in a bubble of green iridescence.

  “Now… I brought you here because there is a good source of earth magic at this spot. Can you see it?” he asked.

  She unfocused her eyes a moment, and tried to look for something other than the familiar green of water-magic. Was it—

  —no—

  —or—

  —not that either—

  Ah! When she finally saw it, she saw it all at once, a golden glow that was part of a broad band of energy, like a beam of sunlight laid on the ground, running north to south. They were sitting right on top of it.

  “It’s gold,” she said. “And we’re sitting on it!”

  “So we are. It is what is called a ley-line, and this sort of power is quite strong. It should be relatively easy for you to use it, but take care. I do not want you to disturb the flow.” He reached down to the earth and gently teased up a little strand of golden light. “Like this. And when you have some, make a second shield of it, inside your first one.”

  It seemed very heavy to her; reluctant to move out of its path—it felt like heavy grain, or a live fish in her hands. She tried holding on to it tightly, but that only made it slip away faster.

  She knew better now than to let herself get frustrated. Instead, she sat and thought. Well, if trying to hold onto it makes it wiggle away, then what I should do is try and pick it up gently.

  She tried again, and this time, the power came up, still a little reluctantly, to her hand.

  Once she had it, she found she could treat it more or less like the energy of Water. She made a bubble of it, and expanded the bubble to fit just inside her bubble of Water. To her great relief, when she released it, it stayed where it was.

  “Well done.” Idwal smiled on her, and she warmed all over again. “Now make another of Water, then another of Earth, until you have three of Earth and four of Water. Always begin and end with Water; it is your strongest Element, and it will help shape the others.”

  She followed his orders; it was easier to build the Earth shield the second and third time. When she was finished, she just had to stop and look at her creation for a while. It was prettier than anything she had ever made before. Prettier than anything she had ever seen before, except perhaps a rainbow.

  “Do you think you could make a shield of only Earth energy?” he asked.

  “Probably… but it wouldn’t be as stable,” she answered, as she studied her construction. “I’d have to keep correcting it. This way, the Water shields do that for me.”

  “Very well put.” He put an approving hand over hers. Quick as a thought, she turned her hand over and held his.

  Startled, he froze for a moment, then briefly tried to pull his hand away—
>
  Then stopped.

  “Mari,” he said, slowly and carefully. “I should like to know what you mean by this.”

  Using everything she had learned from him, she hardened the shields, then made them so strong that nothing magical would be able to see or hear what went on inside them. “Mabon is gone,” she told him, lifting her chin and staring into his eyes—which had gone dark—with a note of defiance. “Rhodri fancies the other girls more than me. Siarl never wanted a wife in the first place, but he’s here out of loyalty to Gethin. Trefor—I don’t know, he is trying, but it feels as if his heart isn’t in the courting. Why are you still here, Idwal? You’ve fulfilled the letter of what I asked for. You could have gone a week, two weeks ago. Yet now you are teaching me more than Water Mastery. Why are you here?”

  He looked down at her, gravely, but with just a hint of hope in his expression. “I am here, because I cannot bear to be anywhere else,” he said. “I thought… perhaps… you might be inclined kindly towards me, for all that I am an old man.”

  She snorted. “You, an old man? You are younger than my da.”

  “Well… I am older than the boys,” he said, and laughed weakly. “And I am not nearly so comely.”

  “My da is comely,” she said, “And feckless. He is my da, and I love him, but feckless he is, and if he’d not had the Selch magic and the Prothero bargain helping him all this time, we’d be eating crusts and he’d be working on another man’s boat.” She tossed her head. “I’d rather a kind and sensible man than a comely boy.”

  Idwal let out his breath in a long sigh. His expression told her all that she needed to know. “Gethin will not like this,” he said, gravely. “The best thing to do will be to wait for the others to do as Mabon did; give up and go back to the clan or declare some other choice. Then Gethin will come to complain to you that you are driving away those who would court you.”

  She squeezed his hand, and grinned, a smile full of mischief. “Well, and when that happens should you declare to him that to serve the clan, you will take me? Or should I declare to him that since you are all that stayed, I’ll just be forced to take you?”

  He laughed. “A bit of both, I think. I shall declare that I’ll sacrifice my freedom on the altar of the clan, and you will grudgingly accept, on the grounds that I am at least not some trollish old walrus.”

  And with that, he pulled her into his arms. Which was, after all, what she had been hoping for, so she did not even put up a token resistance.

  “Ah, you entrancing little thing,” he said, as he bent his head down to give her a proper kiss—and the first she had ever had from a man that was not her father. “Why do I have the feeling this was what you had planned all along?”

  “Not all along,” she murmured, and then there was no more time for talking.

  12

  BREAKFAST was almost ready. In the garden, the roses were almost spent, and the asters and pansies were in full bloom. Since they kept their time here by the sun and not the clock, they were rising a little later every day, and lighting the candles a little earlier. But it hadn’t quite dawned on either of them how far the summer had progressed until this morning.

  “It can’t be September already!” Sarah exclaimed with dismay, as Nan turned the calendar on the wall to the new month. Or months, actually, it was a Pears Soap calendar that had two months to a page. That might have been why they had managed to ignore the fact that time was passing so quickly; so long as July and August reigned on the wall, they could delude themselves that the summer was endless.

  But September it was, there was no doubt of that. And they were still here, in Wales. “I think,” said Nan carefully, “we’ve been lulling ourselves into an illusion that any day now, Lord Alderscroft would order us back, and we would be saying goodbye to Mari with regret and popping ourselves onto a train.” Nan poured herself a cup of tea, and another for Sarah, then set out the scones and double cream and jam. “It was all very well to spend the summer here, but I think we need Lord A to make some firm decisions,” she said after a moment. “And I think we need to consult with—”

  “Are those scones?” asked Robin, poking his head in the window. Despite the fact that it was the first day of September, the weather was still as warm and pleasant as it had been when they first arrived, and the windows were, as a consequence, wide open. They had gotten used to Robin showing up out of nowhere—usually when there was food about. Nan was glad of it; it was good to be able to discuss Mari with someone besides Sarah, and Puck was always good company, not to mention his occasional, timely intervention. Bearing in mind that the Fair Folk didn’t like to be thanked for help—since thanks implied obligations—she just made sure to be extra generous with whatever of their treats took his fancy.

  Nan shook her head as Grey bobbed and Neville quorked a welcome. “You have the most uncanny ability to be right where you are wanted, when you are wanted,” she said.

  He smirked. Today he was dressed all in moleskin and leather, like something out of a child’s book about Old England. “That shouldn’t surprise you, pretty maid,” he said. “I am what I am. And are those scones?”

  “Yes they are, and yes, I have clotted cream, and yes, you are invited in, but you must be serious, Robin,” Sarah told him, her tone earnest. “We need some good advice. We just realized that we have been here much longer than we thought we would, very much longer than we had intended to stay, and now… well, Lord Alderscroft has still not said that we should come back. It was all very well to play at holiday-making while it was summer, but…”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “Practically speaking, for one thing, all we have are our summer clothes,” put in Nan. “For another, we don’t know what the winter will be like here—Neville will do well enough, but Grey needs to be warm! We don’t even know how snug this cottage is against winter storms. Even I have heard about winter storms on the coast, and how terrible they are. For all we know, this place is a sieve for drafts. And—”

  “Wait, wait, let me come in!” Puck did so by way of the window, not so much climbing in as leaping in. He took his place at the table, and reached for a scone as Nan got another cup and poured him tea as well. “Firstly, my pretties, the storms are bad here, but the winter itself is mild. And you know I would never let our Grey Girl suffer.” He put out a finger to Grey, who nibbled it in thanks. “Now, I’ve been keeping my eye on things—you know, betwixt the Prothero girl and the Selch—”

  “I thought you had,” Nan said shrewdly. “I’ve got my guess, but honestly, she and they are being mightily secretive about—well—the courting and how it is going. And ordinarily I would say it is none of our business, but Lord Alderscroft has made it our business.”

  Puck nodded, spreading cream, then jam, on his scone. “This is what I think is the situation with the Prothero maid. When all this began, she was reckoning to stretch out her time before she made a decision as long as she possibly could.” He shrugged. “Who could blame her? Out of nowhere she finds herself saddled and bridled with that bargain! She was going for a year, if she could get it; I doubt the Selch Clan Leader would have put up with more than that. And, of course, because she is a practical wee thing, she was making very sure she would not find herself burdened with a lad who’d bully her, or who she misliked.” He wagged his head from side to side a little. “And I know all the arguments, how she could have found herself marrying some fellow she didn’t know because of her father’s say-so, and all that, but a maid has a right to think she has some choice in a lad, if you ask me.” He heaved a great sigh. “But there, I’ve hobnobbed with you mortals for a long time now. We-ell as it happens, now things have got a bit more interesting. Because, and I might be wrong, but I think I’m not, she’s gone and gotten all love-lorn over that teacher of hers. And he over her.”

  “I told you so!” Sarah exclaimed to Nan in glee. Then her face fell. “Oh, but that complicates things, doesn’t it…”

  “Not so much as you might
think,” Puck replied and ate half a scone in a single bite. Grey begged shamelessly at him, and he broke off a little piece and gave it to her. She held it in one foot and ate the cream and jam off first. “The Selch are as mortal as you daughters of Eve. Plenty of ’em have chosen to come home from the sea and live on shore. He’s a clever fellow, and he knows this. Even better, he wouldn’t be a captive, since she’s not likely to hide his skin from him. So he could choose to stay with her, they could still let half their children go to the sea, and all would be well. Better than well, really; they could have an entire tribe of children and be able to feed them all handily, and that would certainly please the Selch. But!”

  “But?” Nan asked, suspiciously. She didn’t care for that word.

  “Welladay, there’s your Elemental Master of the White Lodge to be satisfied by all this. He might not take to having a Water Master bound permanent-like to a half-Elemental, magical creature, no matter how mortal he is. And there’s all your mortal laws and what-all to be dealt with. A lass can’t just up and say ‘oh, I’ve got married,’ and think things will go on smooth in these degenerate days when every man jack has his nose in your business. People will want to know from where he’s jumped up from and all. There’s churchly nonsense that must be done. And writings and recordings. And like as not that snoopy constable will think Idwal’s another malcontent, some sort of organizer from the mines, hiding with them. That’s a pother; it was better in the old days when a man and a maid could jump over a broomstick and hey presto! They were wed.” He ate another scone while they thought about that.

  Nan grimaced. “We talked about that a little. She said when she first told us about the bargain that she was going to say he was a sailor, and they’d been married on a ship, and he would come and go a great deal to make it look like he still was. Then she’d get word he’d drowned, so when he didn’t come back, there’d be no trouble. But that was when she was planning on staying with her Selch for no more time than it took to have two children.”