Phoenix and Ashes em-4

by Mercedes Lackey

  And that was all. Eleanor felt—

  Disappointed. Horribly, dreadfully disappointed. Where were the tender sentiments, the assurances that she had been loved and cherished, and that wherever her mother was, she still loved her daughter? Where were the gentle words of encouragement from beyond the grave? This might just as well have been a note from one of the tutors at Oxford, for all the warmth that was in it.

  She held the note in hands that shook, and felt like a little girl on what she dreamed was Christmas morning who awakens to find that it is not the glorious holiday, but just another day. She had always thought, always assumed, that if she ever, ever found something for her from her long-lost mother, it would be full of messages of love and devotion. This—this was more like the old Roman matron's cry to her son departing for the wars: "Return with your shield, or on it." Where was the love in that?

  Maybe she didn't care about me after all. Maybe all she thought of me was that I was someone to follow in her footsteps.

  She felt bereft, as if something had been taken from her. And as she sat there, the copybook still unopened, two huge tears gathered in her stinging eyes, overflowed, and burned their way down her cheeks.

  "Ah, here you are]" Sarah exclaimed from the parlor door. "What on earth are you doing in here?"

  She turned, and Sarah started a little. "And why on earth are you crying?" the witch exclaimed, looking astonished. "What's happened?" Eleanor sniffed back more tears, and held out the note and the unopened book. "I—went up to the attic," she said, around the enormous and painful lump in her throat that threatened to choke her. "And I found these."

  Sarah made quick work of the note, her eyes widening and her face taking on an expression of astonished pleasure. "Good heavens, girl, don't you realize what this is? It's what I can't teach you] This is wonderful! Why are you weeping like that?"

  "She didn't—she didn't—" Eleanor began to sob; she couldn't help it. The tears just started and wouldn't stop. "She never says she loved me—"

  "Oh, my dear—" Suddenly Sarah softened all over, in a way that Eleanor had never seen her do before. She sat down on the chair next to Eleanor, and took Eleanor into her arms. Unresisting, Eleanor sagged against her. "You silly little goose," she said fondly, holding Eleanor against her shoulder, and wiping away Eleanor's tears with the corner of her apron. "Of course she didn't. Why should she? She never expected you to read that note! She always thought she would be there, teaching you herself! Can't you read how self-conscious her words are? How stiff?"

  "Yes, but—" Eleanor began.

  "Well, there you are, she was just being what I would have called silly-cautious, and she knew I would have made fun of her if I'd known she was writing that." Sarah stroked her hair, her voice full of such unshakeable conviction that Eleanor could not disbelieve. "She told you every single day, several times a day, how much she loved you, first thing on waking and last thing at night. I heard her. She showed you hundreds of times more in a day. Why should she tell you in a note, when she thought she would always be here to keep telling and showing you?"

  Eleanor managed to control her sobbing, and Sarah's words penetrated her grief somewhat. "But—why didn't she think—"

  "Now, silly child, look at that note, why don't you?" Sarah said, half fondly, half scolding, giving Eleanor's shoulders a little shake. "In her best copper-plate handwriting, and phrased as formally and stiff as an invitation to Lady Devlin to tea! Your mother was a simple village girl, child! She loved to read, but writing things? For her, when you wrote something, it was formal, stiff, and important! Well, except when you were writing down recipes. I don't think she ever wrote a letter in her life, not even to me, her best friend! Your father might have written her a love-letter or two, but she certainly didn't write any back! Do you understand what I'm saying? She could no more have written anything sentimental than—than commanded an Undine!"

  The words penetrated the fog of her distress—and more than that, they made sense, perfect sense. Slowly the grief faded. "So she—"

  "Yes, you green-goose, she loved you more than her own life," Sarah scolded. "She loved you enough to spend hours writing down everything she knew about Fire Mastery! And this from a woman who, I know for a certain fact, would rather have scrubbed out the wash-house on hands and knees than pick up a pen." Put like that—

  Eleanor freed herself from Sarah's motherly embrace, smiled wanly at her, and wiped her eyes with her own apron-corner. "I suppose I am being silly."

  Sarah shook her head, fondly. "No, you were being perfectly natural. If you go on weeping, though, you will be acting in a very silly and selfish manner. Have you looked at the book yet?" Eleanor shook her head.

  "Then it can wait until you've had some supper." As practical as ever, Sarah drew her out into the kitchen where they put together mushrooms and eggs and wild herbs that Sarah had brought with her, along with careful gleanings from Alison's stores. Only when both of them were finished, the dishes and pans washed and put up, and everything tidy again, did Sarah go out to the parlor and return with the book and the lamp.

  "Let's have a good look at this, shall we?" she said, conversationally.

  An hour later, and Sarah was sitting there shaking her head, while Eleanor's head ached from trying to understand what was written in the pages of that copybook.

  "Now I know I never want to be a Master," Sarah said decisively. "I like things plain! Plain as plain! I like earth to be Earth and not—" she waved her hand helplessly, "Not Erda and Epona and gnomes and fertility and not wrapped up in symbols and fables!" She frowned. "I like things to be one thing and not like one of those silly dolls you open up and find another, and another, and another."

  Eleanor blinked, her eyes sore, and rubbed both temples with the tips of her fingers. "It's going to take me a long time," she admitted. "I can—it's like reaching for something on the top shelf that I can't see. I can barely touch it, make out the edge of it, but I know it's there, and if I can just reach a little further, I know I can grasp it—"

  "Well, if that's what your mother mastered, all I can say is that I had no idea." Sarah looked forlorn. "She seemed so—ordinary."

  "It was all inside her," Eleanor mused, shutting the book with a feeling that if she looked too much longer at those words they would start dancing about in her mind. "I wonder where she learned it all? She doesn't say. She must have found some great Master to learn from, but who?"

  Sarah sat back in her chair and reached for her teacup. "Now that is a good question. I don't know who the Masters are, for the most part. They like to keep it that way, so people don't have a chance to let things slip. Other Masters know, of course, but that's all within their own circle." She frowned. "And another thing; the Masters in that circle are almost always men. Hmm. . . ."

  "You think she must have found a lady Master of Fire? A secret one?" Eleanor asked eagerly.

  "Or one found her. There is that old saying that when the student is ready, a teacher will find her." Sarah nodded. "And there's no telling who it would have been; she was from Stratford-on-Avon, so it wouldn't be anyone I could point a finger at. Stratford's always produced its share of odd ones and wizards, and it's not so much of a city that a Master would feel uncomfortable there. Not like London or Glasgow or Manchester." She licked her lips. "The more I think on it, the more that makes sense. I remember her telling me that the magic ran in her family, but deep; her grandsire was a Master, but not her father. Huh. Maybe 'twas her grandsire found her the Fire Master."

  "Well, whoever it was, he or she was like a university don," Eleanor replied ruefully. "This—this is—oh!"

  An idea had suddenly occurred to her, and she sat up straight. "What? What?" Sarah asked sharply.

  "I just realized that I recognize this!" she said "From the medieval history I was studying for the examinations to get into Oxford. This is alchemy—alchemy and medieval mysticism! The 'how many angels can dance on the head of a pin' sort of thing! Maybe it was some sort
of don she was studying with—"

  "Well, it's like no way that I was taught or even heard of, but if it works well enough for you, that is what counts." Sarah stood up to go, and hesitated. "Do you think that book should stay here?"

  "No," Eleanor told her instantly. "I want to take no chances that she might find it. I was going to ask you to take it with you and keep it. Besides, if what mother learned is based on alchemy and that sort of thing, there are books in the library here that can help me, that have been here all along. If Alison sees me studying one of those, she'll just assume I'm in desperate want of something to read."

  Sarah gathered up the old book and tucked it under her shawl. "I think that's wise, very wise. Well, my day began before dawn, so if Alison doesn't come back, I will see you on the morrow."

  "Thank you, Sarah," Eleanor said, getting to her feet and letting her mentor out the kitchen door. "Thank you very much."

  She should have been tired, but somehow she wasn't, and she decided to go to the library with the lamp and see if she couldn't find the books she thought that she remembered.

  There were a lot of odd books in this room, things that certainly hadn't matched with any of her father's interests, and that up until now, she hadn't associated with her mother, either. Old things, that didn't even have titles imprinted on the spines, much less an author's name. But sure enough, when she took them down, she found that there were several on Natural Philosophy and Alchemie, Ye Historic and Practice of Alchemie, and that when she looked inside the front cover, there was a name in crabbed and faded handwriting utterly unlike her mother's, and a date—the earliest she found was 1845, and the oldest, 1880. The first name was clear enough—"Valeria," which did sound like a woman—but the second was indecipherable.

  So I'll probably never know if these were Mother's books given to her by her teacher, or things picked up at a jumble sale. Still, they might prove useful, if her mother's teaching was based on creaky old mysticism, and not the practical approach that Sarah preferred.

  She rearranged the rest of the books to keep it from looking as if she had taken anything. No use in alerting Alison or the girls to the fact that she was reading all of the books on alchemy. If they found her reading one, they'd assume it was a fluke.

  You know, in all of the time they've been here, and the things they've let slip about their own magic, I don't think they've ever said anything that sounded like the things in mother's workbook. I don't think they were taught the same son of way she was. Well, that was all to the good.

  She took the books up to her room and after some thought, distributed them around the room in ways that made it look as if she was doing anything but reading them. One went under the too-short leg of a wobbly dresser, one could be placed to hold open the shutter—the rest she placed here and there, anywhere that looked as if she didn't care what happened to them, as if a brick or a stone could have served the same function. That way, if anyone noticed that they were all about alchemy she could say that she had taken the books she thought no one would ever want to read.

  She lit a bedside candle, changed into her night-dress, climbed into bed, and settled in for a read.

  Within a few paragraphs, she knew that her hunch was right. Her mother's workbook had paragraphs that were very like a condensed form of what she found here.

  Mind, these books were altogether too wordy. But she was used to that; the great classic writers tended to be just about as wordy; they were just better at it. The study of alchemy, according to this philosopher, had never been about finding ways to change base metal into gold. That particular transmutation itself was merely a philosophical expression for the evolution and maturation of a human spirit. . . .

  To change one's own self from the heavy, leaden soul who could scarcely lift his eyes to the heavens, much less soar among them, to the winged, pure, and precious intellect that could neither tarnish nor be debased.

  The Philosopher's Stone was not a thing, but a process—as, so the book said, a spell was not really a thing but a process. Spells were the processes by which a magician imposed his or her will on the surrounding universe. The Philosopher's Stone was the process by which the magician transmuted his or herself into a state in which he or she could understand the universe. Maybe even become one with it.

  And if her mother's workbook had been dense with symbolic meanings, this book was overflowing with them. Nothing, it seemed, existed without having double and triple meanings. Not even the most commonplace items. A broom was a broom, and a means of cleansing, the symbol for cleansing, and a symbol of the cleansing power of Air. Even the old gods were merely symbols for other things, powers, emotions, stages on the life-journey.

  But here were the old, familiar friends—Earth, Air, Fire, and Water ... if you knew what to look for, you quickly realized that the man who wrote this book understood Mastery. The book was written in such a way that those who were not magicians could take it as pure philosophy—but for those who were, this book, and probably some of the others, were a guide beyond the practical application of magic into the theory behind it.

  And when you knew the theory and the philosophy, you could create your own pathways and applications.

  Slowly, with much reading and rereading of the same paragraphs, things began to fit into place.

  She had originally intended to concentrate only on her own Element, but it soon became clear that this was a bad idea. Not only were the powers and meanings of all four Elements incestuously intertwined, but after all, Alison was an Earth Master and Reggie an Air Master. To defeat the one and help the other, she had to learn about their Elements, and at that point it made little sense to skip learning about the Antagonistic Element to her own, Water.

  She finally felt her eyelids growing too heavy, and set the book aside, blowing out the candle, phrases from the book still echoing in her mind as she drifted into sleep. She didn't understand them yet— but soon—soon—

  . . . the first step must be into the first Sphere, the Sphere of Imagination, for Intellect must be the servant of Imagination, and not the master. . . .

  Eleanor woke slowly, with the strangest feeling—as if, once she had put the book down last night, she had gone into dreams only to find that in her dreams she was still trying to come to grips with what she had read. Except that in the dream, there was something or someone helping her grasp it.

  And the moment she woke, she realized that she did grasp some of what she'd been reading, and had put it together with what had been in the workbook.

  In fact, that was exactly what she needed to do—start putting things together, since all things were connected, and each had aspects of the rest. The only actual starting place was the intellect, which led into the imagination. After that, the imagination led everywhere.

  She'd been trying to think of all of the Planes of her mother's book—or "Spheres," as the Alchemy book called them—as being separate, and that things somehow passed from one to another. But it wasn't like that at all; everything was layered on top of everything else, and everything coexisted at once. The physical world that everyone saw and lived in was overlaid with all of the magic worlds. The difference between a regular person and a magician was whether or not you could see each layer.

  Which was why those nasty little gnomish things in the meadow had seemed to dig their way into the ground without actually disturbing it; they weren't really digging into the ground, they were moving themselves out of the Plane of the "real world"—which the alchemy book called "Middle Earth," and into one of the lower Planes, probably the Dark Earth Plane, where she couldn't see them anymore. And the Salamanders couldn't follow, both because they weren't creatures of Earth and because they weren't creatures of the Dark Ways. Every Sphere had a corresponding Dark Side, and as a Light Path magician, you didn't want to go there, unless you absolutely had to. Not because you could get hurt, but because you could get seduced and corrupted unless you were very, very careful. You couldn't go there, if you were a Light P
ath Elemental.

  She could have, if she had known how to get her imagination to move her awareness into the Plane of Earth, because humans were uniquely able to move among all the Planes. But she wouldn't have been comfortable there, because it wasn't her Element, either.

  Imagination. That was the key. Whatever she could imagine, if she could do it well enough, and believe in it, she could see.

  Intellect ruled the Middle Earth, which lay between the Spheres of the Light Path and the Spheres of the Dark. It reflected both, though the balance shifted as affairs in the Middle Earth itself shifted, and as the balance of power between the Light Path Spheres and the Dark Path Spheres shifted.

  Those who subscribed only to Intellect could never move beyond the Middle Earth. But those who explored Imagination and Intuition found the way into the other Spheres open to them.

  And once you learned the symbolic logic of those other Spheres, you knew how to manipulate your magic, and how to counter the magic of other Elements than your own. Now, that meant that Eleanor would have a fighting chance of undoing what Alison had done to her, even if she wasn't as strong a magician as Alison. It didn't take a hammer to crack a nut; a little pressure applied at the right place would split it open. What was more, Eleanor had a shrewd hunch that Alison's spells only worked against her on this Plane. Once she learned how to move among the Planes, she could travel them relatively unhindered.