The Gates of Sleep

“But Elizabeth, if you dressed me in those, mightn’t they think I’m—fast?” Marina said, in tones of desperation. “After all, aren’t some Suffragists proponents of Free Love?”

“Not in those clothes, they won’t,” Elizabeth responded, still laughing. “Uncorseted, buttoned up to the neck, with more fabric in a single leg of those contraptions than in two trumpet-skirts?”

“I hate to say this, but those Bloomer fashions are hideous,” Margherita admitted, as Thomas and Sebastian entered, listened to the topic of conversation for a moment, and exchanged a thoroughly masculine look of bafflement. “I know that they are sensible and practical, but do they have to be so ugly?”

Elizabeth shook her head ruefully. “Frankly, no, I don’t think so. Well, look at those lovely gowns you make for yourself and Mari! Really, I’m envious of your skill, and if I could find a seamstress to copy them, I would. Those are practical and handsome.”

Mari looked a little surprised. “Are they really?” she asked. “They aren’t fashionable—”

“They aren’t the fashions you see in the society sketches, true,” Margherita agreed, and sighed, exchanging a look with Elizabeth. “I don’t like most of the fashions that PBs wear. I couldn’t breathe, much less work in them, and they’re so tightly fitted I can’t imagine how a lady gets through an hour without splitting a seam.”

“Oh, society!” Elizabeth laughed, after a moment. “PBs and debutantes don’t live in the real world, much less our world! Can you imagine for a single moment the Jersey Lily summoning Elementals to her? Or one of those belles at Margherita’s loom?”

The mere thought was so absurd, of course, that Marina laughed; Margherita smiled, and Sebastian and Thomas looked ridiculously relieved. “Speaking of summoning Elementals—” began Thomas.

“Not over supper!” all three of them exclaimed, and laughed, and turned the conversation to something more entertaining for all five of them.

Marina woke with a start, her heart racing. What had startled her awake?

She listened, heard nothing, and pulled back the covers. Feeling both foolish and groggy, she went to her window to look outside. The clouds were returning, scudding across the face of the full moon, passing shadows across the ground. As the shadows passed, the pale, watery light slicked the bare branches of the tree beside her window with a glaze of pearl.

There was nothing moving out there.

It must have been a cat. Or an owl. But why would a cat or an owl have awakened her? It hadn’t been a sound that made her heart pound—it was a feeling. Marina was troubled, uneasy, and she didn’t know why. She couldn’t sleep, yet her mind wouldn’t clear, either; she felt as if there was something out there in the darkness looking for her. This was nothing as concrete as a premonition; just a sense that there was something very wrong, something hostile, aimed at her, but nothing more concrete than that.

There was no logical reason for the feeling. It had been a lovely evening, Uncle Thomas had consented to read aloud to them, something he very rarely did, although he had a wonderful reading voice. Then she herself had brought her musical instruments down and played, while the other four danced in the parlor, with Sarah and Jenny as a cheerful audience. She had come up to bed in a pleasant and mellow mood, thinking only of what she planned to try tomorrow with Elizabeth in the workroom.

But the sudden fear that had awakened her, the unease that kept her awake, wasn’t going away.

She listened carefully to the sounds of the house. There was nothing from next door, where Elizabeth was. And nothing from the bedrooms down the hall, either. Whatever was disturbing her, it was nothing that any of the others sensed.

Perhaps their shields are a little too good…

After all, shields obscured as well as protected.

Now that was an uncomfortable thought.

And yet, there still was nothing concrete out there, nothing she could put a finger on. She thought about getting a glass of water and summoning an Undine, but—

But if there is something looking for me, that’s the surest way to tell it where I am.

But the unease only grew, and she began to wonder if there was any possibility she could get downstairs into the workroom—which would at least have the primary shields on it—when something else occurred to her.

She didn’t have to summon anything, at least, not of her Element. She had Allies; she had always known about the interest of the Sylphs and other Air Elementals, but Elizabeth had taught her that they had a special connection to her, how to ask them for small favors. And a call to one of them would not betray her presence.

The thought was parent to the deed; she opened the window, and whistled a few bars of “Elf Call” softly out into the night. It didn’t have to be that tune, according to Elizabeth; it could be anything. Whistling was the way that the Finns, who seemed to have Air Mastery in the national blood, had traditionally called their Elemental creatures, so it worked particularly well for one who was only an Ally. It was nothing that an Air Elemental could take offense at. After all, any within hearing distance could always choose to ignore a mere whistle, even one with Power behind it.

There was a movement out of the corner of her eye, a momentary distortion, like a heat shimmer, in the air when she turned to look in that direction.

Then, as she concentrated on the Sight, the heat shimmer became a Sylph.

It did look rather like one of the ethereal creatures in a children’s book—a gossamer-pale dress over a thin wraith of a body, and the transparent insect wings, too small to hold her up in the air, even at a hover; pointed face, silver hair surmounted by a wreath of ivy, eyes far too big for the thin little visage.

She looked, in fact, like one of the child-women ballet dancers often sketched in the newspapers. Except that no ballet dancer ever hovered in midair, and no matter how thin a ballet dancer was, you couldn’t see the tree behind her through her body.

“Little sister,” the Sylph, “I know why you call.”

Marina had often heard the expression, “It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.” Now she understood it.

“There is danger, little sister,” the Sylph said urgently. “Great danger. She is moving, and her eye turns toward you. It is this that you sense.”

“She? Who is she?” Marina asked, urgently.

“Beware! Be wary!” was all the Sylph would say.

Then she was gone, leaving Marina not at all comforted, and with more questions and next to no answers.

Chapter Six

A LUSTILY crowing rooster woke Marina with a start, and she opened her eyes to brilliant sun shining past the curtains at her window. She sat straight up in bed, blinking.

The last she remembered was lying in bed, trying to decipher what the Sylph had said. It had seemed so urgent at the time, but now, with a rooster bellowing to the dawn, the urgency faded. She threw off the blankets, slipped out of bed, ran to the window and pulled the curtain aside.

The window was closed and latched, and although she did recall closing and latching it when she went to bed, she didn’t remember doing so after summoning the Sylph. She thought she’d left it open; she’d been in such a state of confusion and anxiety that she’d gone straight to her bed from the window.

Had she summoned a Sylph? Or had it all been a particularly vivid dream? Other than the window being shut, and that was problematical, there was nothing to prove her fears of last night had been real or imagined.

Except that last night there were clouds crossing the moon and a steady wind— and today there’s barely a breath of breeze and not a cloud in the sky. Could the weather have changed that drastically in a few hours? She didn’t think so, particularly not here, where winter was basically rain interrupted by clouds.

She opened the window, and closed it again quickly—it was also cold out there! It couldn’t be much above freezing, and she didn’t recall it being that cold last night. Surely it would have been colder last night than it was now!

That seemed to settle it—she must have dreamed the whole thing.