Phoenix and Ashes em-4

by Mercedes Lackey

The second woman turned her masked face in the direction of the orchestra with ever evidence of interest. "I have a hunt ball in the autumn—I wonder if—"

  Eleanor was never to hear what the speaker wondered, for the eddies and swirls around the edge of the area of the dancing carried the speakers away.

  If this had been a fairy tale, the moment that Eleanor had entered the Great Hall, all conversation would have ceased, and every head would have turned her way. The butler would have announced her— which would have been a disaster.

  But this was not a fairy tale, and although she did excite a few admiring or unreadable glances, for the most part, people looked at her, did not recognize her, and dismissed her from their minds within a few moments. While her gown was certainly passable, it was neither so very different nor so very outstanding as to excite interest. She was indeed the only fairy princess, but other girls had wide pink dresses. And the deeper she went into the room, the more obvious it was that she was in an entirely different strata of society than she had ever been before.

  And so were her stepsisters, though they might not yet realize it.

  This was Society, old money, old titles, and though whatever dressmaker Alison went to might be able to counterfeit the look of these garments, there was a subtle difference between these costumes and the ones she had just aided Lauralee and Carolyn into. She suspected that a close examination would prove they did not hold up to the sort of careful scrutiny that maids who tended these clothes would bring to bear. And while ladies' maids did not precisely gossip to their mistresses, they did have subtle ways of making things known.

  Alison and her progeny might be in for a rude awakening if they ever were invited to someone else's country weekend, and she insisted on maintaining the fiction that she, too was a member of their class.

  But in the meantime, Eleanor's costume did not mark her out as anything unusual. She was by no means vivacious enough to attract attention by herself; the real beauties here were identifiable even behind their little domino masks.

  This suited Eleanor very well. Her goal, after all, was to find the Elemental Master, and no one here was likely to make her task any easier by identifying that worthy for her. She only knew that the Master was female, and that only because she herself had seen the woman at work the night that the revenants were dispersed.

  She worked her way towards the wall, and realized with a certain dismay that there was another room behind this one, nearly as large, that had been thrown open to the ball-attendees. This was not going to make her task any easier.

  She resigned herself, with a pang of disappointment, to the realization that she was unlikely to see Reggie after all. The young women substantially outnumbered the young men here, and it was unlikely that he was going to have a single minute free. And her own, much more pressing task must take precedence if she was going to get herself free of her stepmother.

  Somewhere in this swirling chaos of people she had to find the traces of Air magic that would inevitably be hovering about such a Master. And now she was very grateful that her study of magic had required her to understand the other three Elements as well as her own. She might not be able to use Air magic, but she could definitely sniff it out.

  She was nearly at the doorway in the right-hand wall of the Great Hall when she caught the first "scent" of Air magic. Just a hint of blue at the corner of her vision, an unexpected breath of cold, and a touch of sharp, clean scent, like juniper or rosemary. But she was on it like a hound, and followed it into a drawing room.

  This, too, was evidently open to the guests, older ladies and gentlemen who were so engrossed in their card games that they didn't even take any notice of her. She scanned the area for that hint of magic, but her quarry was none of them—then she got another hint of it, through another doorway, which led her into a hall, not so brightly lit. And, quite probably, not supposed to be open to the guests.

  But the Air Master was a friend of the family and according to Sarah, a longterm visitor here, and probably had the run of the place. She would be allowed to go places where ordinary guests at the ball would be unwelcome.

  Better and better. She must be on the right track.

  And the breath of Air Magic was stronger now; she followed the scent down the darkened, shadow-haunted hall, and into—

  —the library.

  Here, for the first time since she had entered these doors, she found herself consumed with envy of the people who lived here. The Great Hall excited her not at all; she could only think of how it dwarfed everyone who set foot in it. That drawing room had been far too rich and opulent for her to feel comfortable in it, and besides that, the furnishings were antique, probably fragile, and without a doubt irreplaceable. But this room, with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with volumes—this, she desired. And in fact, as she took a few hesitant steps into the dimly lit room, she forgot, for a moment, why she was here, in the sudden surge of acquisitive desire.

  "I beg your pardon, miss, but the party is—"

  She started, then froze, at the sound of the familiar drawl, and the exclamation was startled out of her. "Reggie?"

  There was a creak of leather as the figure rose out of the depths of an armchair to her left, and limped towards her. "Eleanor?" came the incredulous reply. "Is that you?"

  She jerked at the ends of the ribbon of her mask, and pulled it off. "Of course it's me! I have an invitation!" she replied, now full of indignation. What? Did he think she was so far beneath him that she shouldn't be here?

  "Of course you do; I addressed it myself," was his answer, as he limped out of the shadows with both hands outstretched. While most of the young men here were in their uniforms, he was not. He had donned a costume for the occasion; with a feeling of shock, she recognized the Magician from the Tarot deck, but the colors were blue, silver and white rather than red, white and gold. "I waited in the reception line for what seemed like hours, but you never came, and I thought—your stepmother—"

  "She doesn't know I'm here," Eleanor said, her growing anger erased by the surge of irrational joy she felt at his words. "She'd have stopped me if she'd known I was coming." She felt the coercion of Alison's spells suddenly uncoil, sealing her lips over anything else she might have said.

  "I thought it was something like that," was Reggie's only reply, as he took both her hands in his and gazed down into her eyes. "Look, let's not talk about your dreadful stepmother, nor your conniving stepsisters, nor anything else unpleasant. Mater has put on a first-rate show, so let's enjoy it together." He smiled at her, with something of the charm of the old Reggie. "So long as I'm with a girl, even if Mater doesn't know who she is, she'll leave me alone. If she does, so will everyone else, and it has not yet become the fashion, thank the good Lord, for ladies to cut in on men while dancing. Do you dance?"

  She was so caught in those earnest eyes that all she could do was stammer, "I—haven't, not for—a long time—"

  "Good, because my knee is a torture. We'll go revolve a little for form's sake, then—how about the garden? Capability Brown, you know, and all lit up with fairy-lanterns for the occasion. Appropriate for a fairy princess."

  She hardly knew what to say. This was the sort of thing out of her wildest dreams, the ones she knew better than to believe in.

  He's just using me as a defense against the girls like Carolyn and Lauralee— cautioned a bitter voice from her head.

  But her heart replied, Then why is he looking at me like that? Because those pale eyes were warm with an emotion she did not yet dare to believe in, and he looked very much as if he would like to do more than simply look at her.

  And sheer instinct made her nod, which evidently was answer enough for him. He took the domino from her nerveless hands, tied it back on, and tucked her right hand into the crook of his arm. "Let's go brave the throng."

  This time, when they passed through the drawing room, the play stopped. Head turned in their direction, and as they crossed into the Great Hall, she sensed the
whispers begin behind them.

  And as if this had suddenly turned into a fairy tale, as they walked into the Great Hall, they were surrounded by a zone of silence, and all eyes turned towards them. Reggie ignored it; she felt her cheeks flushing, but held her head high, and tried to walk with dignity. He led her to the exact center of the room, as the musicians in the corner brought their current number to a swift conclusion. Once there, he swung her to face him, and the next thing she knew, she was turning in his arms around the floor to the strains of a waltz.

  Ravaged knee or not, he was light on his feet. Not a brilliant dancer, but a competent one, and the gown she was wearing was practically made for waltzing in. With a heady feeling of euphoria, she surrendered to the moment and let him guide her three times around the floor while the musicians kept the tempo a little slower than usual. After all, wasn't this the sort of thing she had dreamed of doing? It felt like a dream. It had all the perfect unreality of a dream.

  The musicians must have had a fine sense of just how long Reggie could dance; about the time she felt his steps faltering slightly, they brought the waltz to a close with a flourish.

  Under cover of the polite applause to the orchestra, he bent and whispered, "If that's enough for you, would you like to see the gardens?"

  All she could do was nod; once again, as the orchestra began a new piece, he tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow and escorted her out of the Great Hall, into the room behind it—she got a glimpse of a long table set with huge arrangements of flowers and punch-bowls— and then out onto a terrace.

  The view down into the gardens was breathtaking, but he didn't give her much chance to look at it. He drew her down the stairs into the gardens themselves, which had, as he had told her, been lit up with fairy-lanterns. The wave of perfume that washed over her told her that the roses for which Longacre was famous were in full bloom. He took her down one of the paths to a stone bench—still within sight of the terrace, but not a straight line-of-sight. She carefully arranged her skirt, and gingerly took a seat. With a sigh of relief, he sat beside her.

  "I was horribly afraid I had offended you past forgiveness," were the first words out of his mouth. "I never meant to. When you didn't come back—"

  "You went to the meadow?" she interrupted, hit again by one of those surges of irrational pleasure.

  He nodded. "As soon as I could. And you didn't come back, so I thought you were angry with me."

  "I couldn't—" that was all she could manage before Alison's coercions clamed down on her.

  "Because you had work to do—I hoped that was all it was, but I was afraid I had been a boor." He sighed. "I am neither fish nor fowl, Eleanor. On the one hand, I was raised by my parents and the nannies they chose for me, who are of the opinion that education beyond reading, writing, and a little figuring is bad for females. On the other, I am heavily influenced by my godmother, who is an unrepentant suffragist, and by what I learned myself at Oxford. Sometimes, when I am not thinking, things escape from me that are parrotings of Mater, and I am always sorry when they do. I plead forgiveness. I never meant to slight the intelligence of women, and least of all yours."

  She took off her domino and looked up at him gravely. "As long as you promise to remember that," she said. "And I hope—"

  How do I warn him about Alison and the girls? She couldn't say anything directly, but—

  "I hope you're also remember that intelligence is a weapon of sorts, and it isn't always used to good ends, and that signifies for women just as well as men. Maybe more," she added, thoughtfully, "Since women don't have a great many weapons at their disposal, and they are inclined to use the ones they have with skill and precision."

  He blinked for a moment, as if taken aback by her words, then nodded. "Ah. I think I know what you are hinting at. The charming Alison Robinson and her two lovely daughters." His mouth tightened. "Eleanor, what hold have they over you? I cannot believe that they can come up here to tea and tennis on a daily basis in gowns of the latest mode while you clearly are working at manual labor and kept as shabbily as a tweenie in a miser's house, unless they have some power over you!"

  Oh, how she wanted to tell him! She fought the constraints of the spell, but all she could manage to get out, through gritted teeth, was, "She's my guardian. I have no rights, and no say in my life."

  "Until you come of age, and that can't be long," he replied, his eyes icy for a moment. "And then—you can depend on me, Eleanor. You can."

  She felt her hands starting to tremble, and she clasped them together to hide it. He reached over and took her hands.

  "Eleanor," he said, as she stiffened. "I would like to be more than just your friend. A great deal more."

  She went hot, then cold, then hot again. "You don't mean that," she said, half begging, half accusing. "You can't mean that. I don't fit in with all this—" she took her hands out of his and waved vaguely at the manor behind her. "and I don't fit in with 'your people!' Can't you see that?" She shook her head violently. "You and I—it's impossible, surely you understand!"

  He made a little sound of mingled amusement and disgust. "There is one thing that Mad Ross is right about. All this is going to change in the next few years, Eleanor, and change drastically, and most of those people back there haven't a clue. This war is putting an end to their world as they know it, though it was starting to crumble around the edges before that." He sniffed. "A bloodline isn't worth much if you can't keep the roof over your head patched. And I can name you a dozen men in my circle, men who are contemporaries of my father, who've married chorus beauties, actresses, their children's governesses—even their housekeepers! There will be more of that—and there will be women who had no men in their families survive this war, who will marry policemen, gardeners, tradesmen—or never marry or remarry at all. And as for the people my age—" he shook his head. "We've seen too much. We've learned too much, and most of it was bitter. I've been thinking about this a very great deal, ever since that big push at Ypres started." He took a very deep breath. "I came to the conclusion that if Mater was going to insist that I do my family duty, it was going to be on my terms, with a woman I could respect, with intelligence; someone who could talk with me."

  Her hands were sweating. Nervously, to save her silk gloves, she pulled them off.

  He recaptured her hands. "These hands, no matter what they work at, are not all of you, Eleanor—not even most of what you are. You are intelligent, kind, forgiving—I could go on for the next half hour and still not come to the end of your good points. No, perhaps you don't 'fit in' with all of that behind me. But 'all that' is going to have to change if it is going to survive at all in the coming years. I am going to have to change. I don't see any reason why that change shouldn't come in a way that accommodates you, and your own changes."

  Now she was shaking. But it wasn't only because of what he was saying. No, for no reason that she could understand, Alison's coercions were lightening around her.

  And so were the spells binding her to the hearth-stone.

  This had come without real warning. Granted, she had spent too long searching for the Air Master, and now they were pulling on her insistently, but she couldn't understand why she hadn't had some sign before this.

  She felt them, like a corset laced too tight, squeezing off breath, and making it hard to think. Soon, they would become uncomfortable.

  Then painful. Then maddening—

  "I won't ask you for any kind of a decision now, Eleanor," he was saying, as she felt her hands growing cold. "But I would like you to consider the possibility of seeing me as more than your friend. I would like to know that there is a chance for me in your future."

  She wanted to pay attention to his words, but she couldn't. She felt the spells closing in on her. It was becoming hard to breathe; the tugging at her mind and body were growing intolerable. And she couldn't help herself. She began to shake, and she pulled her hands out of his and sprang to her feet in a single convulsive movement.
/>   "Eleanor!" he exclaimed, as she whirled to face him, hoping he could see something of her inner struggle in her expression. "Eleanor, what's wrong? Please, I haven't offended you again—"

  She shook her head, frantically, and wrapped her own hands around her throat, trying to force some last words out of it before she had to run—

  But the words that came were not the ones she had expected.

  "Reggie—" she heard herself gasping "—I love you!"

  And then, she turned, and ran, leaving him calling after her. She couldn't even understand what he was saying at that point, the spells were tightening on her so painfully. He had no hope of catching her, lame as he was, of course. Sarah would be waiting—

  —but she could not stop for Sarah.

  No, she could not stop for anything.

  All she could do was run, for as long as she was running in the right direction the bands of pain around her body, around her mind, would ease just enough to allow her to continue running. But if she stopped, even for a moment. . . .