Phoenix and Ashes em-4

by Mercedes Lackey

  If Eleanor had dared to look up, she knew they would have seen the hatred and anger blazing in her eyes, so as she fastened hooks and tied lacings, she kept her gaze on her own hands, or on the floor. Alison shooed her back down to the kitchen so that her own maid could see to the girls' hair. Eleanor was glad enough to go.

  And she could scarcely wait for them to get out of the house.

  She sat next to the fire in the kitchen, trembling with anger. The anger actually surprised her a little; it had welled up the moment Alison called her "Ellie."

  That name seemed to embody everything that Alison had done to her. She had never been "Ellie" to her father, or anyone else. Servants were called "Ellie" and "girl."

  And I am a servant in my own house. But the moment I show any signs of rebellion, Alison is going to look for what inspired the rebellion.

  So she busied her hands, waited impatiently for them to go, and tried to remember where she had heard or read anything about revenants.

  Whatever they were, Alison was using them for something, and if Alison was using them, it couldn't be for any good purpose.

  For some reason the word was making her think of ghosts—and she was sure her recollection was of something that Sarah had said, not anything that she had read.

  That would make things difficult, since Sarah was out tonight, doing whatever it was that witches did on the solar and seasonal holidays.

  Finally the three of them left, and once again, the house was still. Eleanor expected to hear the sound of the motorcar starting up, but instead, she heard one approaching The Arrows. And in fact, she didn't think anything at all of this, until it pulled up to the front door and stopped.

  The sound of a car door opening and closing echoed over area, and Eleanor had a sudden vision of Reggie himself come to pick them up.

  But no. No, she realized even as the thought crossed her mind, that it wouldn't be at all proper. Not the "done thing." No, he'd have sent his chauffeur.

  But it made her angrier still that they were getting all this fuss made over them. Would it have hurt Reggie, just once, to have offered her a lift back to the village? After all, he was always coming there himself, to go to the Broom Pub—which was just across the street from The Arrows.

  Of course it wouldn't have inconvenienced him in any way. But she was hardly in his social class, now, was she?

  He would scarcely wish to be seen with the likes of her.

  In the back of her mind, a small voice protested that if Reginald Fenyx were seen giving a ride in his automobile to a young serving girl, people would assume the worst—and that he wasn't being snobbish, he was protecting her reputation.

  But that voice was swiftly drowned in the clamor from the rest of her mind, which bristled with envy of her stepsisters, anger at her own situation, and bitterness.

  She kept her head down and her hands steady in case anyone should look in on her—but no one did. With a soft swish of silk and laughter as light as their gowns, all three of the Robinsons hurried out the door. The sound of two automobile doors slamming echoed in the street, then the chugging of the engine faded away in the distance.

  Eleanor counted to fifty before she got up and went into the library.

  Extravagant as ever, Alison had left a lamp burning there. In the section where Eleanor had found the alchemy books was one she had passed over as irrelevant, a book that purported to describe various supernatural creatures and how to be rid of them. Now she took it out, because she thought she remembered something about revenants in there.

  What she found was a brief, and vague, reference, and she put the book back with a feeling of discontent. Ghosts, but not ghosts; at least that seemed to be the definition. Or else, some were ghosts, actual spirits unwilling or unable to move on, but others were memories, mechanically playing out whatever tragedy had created them She sat there, nibbling on the rough edge of her thumbnail, while she considered her options for learning anything. Sarah was unavailable; as she had been on May Eve, she was off doing something that had to do with being a witch. There was nothing in her alchemy books, and she didn't recall anything from her mother's notebook.

  But what had Sarah said? That she, Eleanor, was getting direct teaching in dreams?

  She was using the Tarot to guide her, after a suggestion in one of the alchemy books, and she was concentrating on the cards whenever she fell asleep, assuming that she would find her way into the Tarot realm. So if she was being taken up by some sort of teacher or teachers, perhaps they were using what she was thinking about as the structure to their lessons.

  Well, what if she went to bed and concentrated on a question instead of the cards? Would she get an answer to it?

  Only one way to find out.

  She went up the stairs to her own room—it was unlikely the girls would come up here to wake her when they returned, since it was less work to get out of their dresses alone than it was to climb the stairs to find her and wake her—or, if Alison was feeling generous, she would send her own maid to help them. Howse would be waiting in Alison's rooms until the Robinsons returned—not that this was any hardship. There was a lounge there, and a stack of the latest magazines. Howse didn't lack for anything, truth to be told.

  Though if more truth were to be told, except for the extra place at dinner, Eleanor scarcely knew Howse was in the house. She hardly spoke at all; she might have been a clockwork for all the notice she took of anything.

  Then again, it was probably that Howse considered Eleanor to be so far beneath her that she would sooner turn desperado than acknowledge Eleanor's presence. If the hierarchy between lower class and upper was rigid, it was even more so among servants. Eleanor had never really understood that until she had been made into a servant herself, but it was the truth. Upper servants spoke to lower only to give orders, and would never even think of socializing with them.

  So it was no great surprise that she heard nothing from Howse as she closed the door of her little garret room. Once settled into bed, she closed her eyes and concentrated. What are revenants, and what has Alison to do with them?

  She could not have told the moment when she slipped from waking into sleeping, but she found herself—strangely enough—walking down the road, heading to the meadow where she met Reggie. It was dark, with hardly any moonlight at all, and yet the whole landscape seemed as bright as day to her.

  It was deserted, of course. Anyone in the farms along here was already in bed. Dawn came early, and with it, the demands of livestock and crops.

  She wasn't so much walking, she quickly discovered, as she was being walked. Her body—if, indeed, this was her body and not the sort of other self she inhabited when she was in the world of the Tarot— moved along of its own volition and under the control of someone other than herself. She didn't fight it; there was no reason to. As near as she could tell, she was going to be given the answer to her question—or why else take her outside the magical protections that Sarah had placed around the village? The revenants could not pass those— therefore, to see them, she must go outside them.

  Finally she came to the boundary of Longacre Park.

  And there, along the fence, she saw—them. The moment she did, she felt a shock of pure terror the like of which she had never felt in all her life. The nasty little creatures that she had driven away in the meadow had frightened her, but not like this. This was pure, atavistic fear, the fear that said to the gut, these things can do worse than kill you.

  She'd have screamed, if her instincts hadn't caught the scream in her throat before it began. They didn't know she was there yet, and there was no reason to do something that would certainly attract their attention!

  Transparent, glowing, there was no mistaking them for living creatures. For one thing, they were in a variety of costumes—but for another, they weren't all whole. At least half of them were missing pieces of themselves; arms, legs, and in at least one case, a head. And most of the rest were rather gruesomely the worse for wear and time. She was ve
ry, very glad that they all had their backs to her; if they faced her, she didn't think she would be able to hold back a scream.

  There were a great many of them, all pressing against some invisible boundary at the edge of Longacre Park lands. The oldest were dressed in some sort of outlandish robes and animal skins; the newest in the uniform of the British infantry.

  All of them wanted in. All of them were consumed with rage.

  Why? she thought irrelevantly. Why them? What could anyone up at Longacre Park have possibly done to anger a Druid? That is, she assumed the ones in the robes were Druids. She couldn't think what else they could be.

  Well, whatever it was, Alison had given their anger a form and a force of will, and now they were ready to press that advantage as far into the "enemy" territory as they could.

  She held quite still, knowing, even if she knew nothing else, that she did not want to attract their attention.

  But she also did not want those things prowling about after dark. Maybe ordinary people couldn't see them and know them to be as dangerous as an unexploded shell, but she could, and did, and she often went out at night. Maybe they couldn't get past the protections that kept the village safe—but maybe they could.

  She wasn't taking any chances.

  I have to get away, and tell Sarah about this as soon as I can. She has to know these things are still out here, and dangerous.

  But before she could make up her mind any further, she heard, faint and muffled, the sound of another motorcar approaching. Eleanor shivered as she realized that the motor was also nearly transparent, and as for driver and passenger, they were utterly, weirdly silent. Were they some other kind of revenant? Or were they something else?

  The motor chugged to a full stop alongside the fence—which, strangely enough, was not transparent. And as the passenger stepped down from the motorcar, she became more real, and more solid, with each step. It was like a vanishing-trick in reverse. As she became more real and solid, she also began to glow—but it was as if she had brought sunlight into the midnight world, not the sort of sickly foxfire that the revenants radiated. Just looking at her made Eleanor feel more confident, and less afraid.

  But the figure that stood there, straight-backed and imperious, was no one that Eleanor recognized.

  She was dressed in the most outlandish costume Eleanor had ever seen outside of a play or a fancy-dress party—quite literally, draped Grecian robes of a brilliant blue. In her graying hair, which had been braided and wrapped around her head in the style favored by Grecian matrons, was a laurel wreath. She had a staff a little taller than she was in one hand, but she didn't lean on it as if she needed its support. She surveyed the scene before her, looking down her nose at the revenants, who were only just now realizing that she was there, and frowned.

  "Provide an anchor, Smith, just in case." The very feminine voice said—sounding as if she was speaking from the bottom of a well. A pale blue ray of light lanced from the man behind the wheel to the old woman.

  Now the revenants were beginning to notice that they were not alone. They turned towards the woman, snarling and sneering, and one or two advanced towards her in a threatening manner.

  She didn't seem to care in the least. In fact, she regarded them with the calm disapproval of someone who has found schoolboys meddling in something they should have known better than to touch. "You," she said sternly, "Have been very naughty, and whoever sent you was naughtier still."

  And with that, she rapped the butt of her staff three times on the ground, and made a gesture as of one scattering a handful of grain.

  And suddenly, Eleanor found herself at the heart of a tempest.

  22

  June 21, 1917

  Broom, Warwickshire

  QUICKER THAN THOUGHT, THE TEMPEST descended. Silent, invisible winds ripped through the countryside, practically picking Eleanor right up off her feet and slamming her into the trunk of a tree, to which she clung for dear life. The winds tore at her hair, sending it whipping around her, hauled at her clothing—but what they did to her was nothing to what they were doing to the revenants.

  The revenants were—literally—being shredded, by the winds that spun cyclone-like in a vortex, with the old woman at their still heart. There was a clean, blue glow about the old woman and her helper now. And though the revenants huddled howling together, trying to hide themselves, nothing they did was any protection against the power that was ripping them apart, as if they were nothing but tissue-paper, and whirling the tiny pieces upwards in a reverse snowfall of glowing bits.

  Eleanor looked up, involuntarily, to see that the bits were being carried up into a bottomless black hole in the sky, rimmed with glowing blue.

  And yet—and there was the strangest thing of all—so far as the trees and the rest of the "real world" was concerned, there were no winds. The leaves rustled only a little; the grasses scarcely moved at all. There was no sound but the keening wail of the revenants themselves.

  The hair went up on the back of Eleanor's neck, even as she clung even tighter to the tree-trunk.

  Or was she clinging to the trunk? There seemed to be two trees there, a kind of faintly luminescent shadow-tree, which was tossing its branches in the tempest, and the "real" tree, which was undisturbed— and her arms were wrapped tightly around the former, not the latter.

  A thin cry of despair arose from the revenants, and if they had been hideous before, now, with half of their substance eaten away by the terrible cyclone, they were horrible to look at. They tried to snatch at the bits of themselves being ripped off and blown away, only to see their fingers, bits of their hands, torn off too. Eleanor felt herself sickening, and couldn't help herself; she couldn't bear the sight any longer. She squeezed her eyes shut, and tried to will herself awake, for surely this was a dream. It must be a dream. She would make it a dream—

  Oh please, let this just be a nightmare, don't let it be real . . .

  And with a start, and a jolting she felt in her heart, she did awaken.

  She was in her own bed, crickets singing outside her window. Her heart pounded so hard she thought the bed might be shaking with the force of it, and she was terribly, terribly cold.

  And a moment later, she began to shiver so violently that the bed did start shaking after all.

  She tried to move, and couldn't, and her shivering grew worse. It was as if the cold itself held her prisoner, in bonds of ice. She had never been so cold; her teeth chattered with it, and her fingers and toes were numb with it, and she wanted a blanket desperately. But before she could make a second attempt to lurch out of bed to get one, something else came to her rescue.

  Flowing out of the brickwork of the chimney came her Salamanders, three of them. They raced across the floor and slithered up into the bed, where one coiled itself against the small of her back, one wrapped itself around her shoulders, and one curled up just at the hollow of her stomach. Warmth spread from them, driving the numbing cold out of her, and after a moment, her shivering stopped and she began to relax.

  As soon as she began to feel warm again, exhaustion hit her, as if she had been working beyond her strength. And when the last of remnants of her fear ebbed away, replaced by a weary lassitude, she gave in to it, and let sleep claim her again.

  This time carefully not thinking of any questions, nor the Tarot. She'd had enough lessons for one night.

  June 22, 1917

  Longacre Park, Warwickshire

  The card party that had begun so tediously had ended last night as a different sort of party altogether. Reggie could not have been more grateful. His aunt's good friend—and his own godmother—Lady Virginia de Marce had turned up, in her own motorcar, with her chauffeur and (though only he and his aunt knew this) arcane assistant Smith in attendance. Smith had efficiently organized the servants and gotten the formidable pile of Lady Virginia's belongings upstairs, while her ladyship tidied herself and returned to take control of the company.

  Her ladyship could not help but
take control of whatever company she was in. She had an air about her of absolute authority, she dressed like a queen, in her own unique style, based roughly on the enormous hats, trumpet-skirts and high-necked gowns of twenty years before, which somehow made her look tunelessly fashionable rather than outdated.

  While every powerful Master that Reggie had ever met tended to exude that aura of authority, Lady Virginia had honed hers into a weapon. When she entered a room, she took charge of it and everyone in it.

  With Smith's help, she had come downstairs again in less than a third of the time it would have taken any other woman, changed miraculously from her duster, goggles, veiled hat and traveling-ensemble to an exquisite gown of mauve lace. Smith, be it said, was also Lady Virginia's lady's maid—because Smith, chauffeur, arcane assistant, was a woman.