The Gates of Sleep

pushing his way through thick muck, and his sister darted around him. She bent over the cradle. Alanna tried to reach out and snatch her baby away, but she could no more have moved than have flown.

“Well, well,” Arachne said, a hint of mockery in her voice. “A pleasant child. But so fragile. Nothing like my boy…”

As Alanna watched in horror, Arachne reached out with a single, extended finger, supple and white and tipped with a long fingernail painted with bloodred enamel. She reached for Marina’s forehead, as all of the godparents had. The darkness shivered, gathered itself around her, and crept down the extended arm. “You really should enjoy this pretty child—while you have her. You never know about children.” Her eyes glinted in the gloom, a hint of red flickering in the back of them. The ominous finger neared Marina’s forehead. “They can survive so many hazards, growing up. Then one day—say, on the eighteenth birthday—”

The finger touched.

“Death,” Arachne whispered.

Like an animate oil slick, the shadow gathered itself, flowed down Arachne’s arm, and enveloped Marina in a shadow-shroud.

Lightning struck the lawn outside the window, and thunder crashed like a thousand cannon. Alanna screamed; the baby woke, and wailed.

With a peal of laughter, Arachne whirled away from the cradle. In a few strides she was out the door and gone, escaped before any could detain her.

Now the paralysis holding all of them broke.

Alanna snatched her child out of the cradle and held the howling infant to her chest, sobbing. As lightning crashed and thunder rolled, as the baby keened, all of her godparents descended on them both.

“I don’t know how she did this,” Elizabeth said at last, frowning. “I’ve never seen magic like this. It doesn’t correspond to any Element—if I were superstitious—”

Alanna pressed her lips tightly together, and fought down another sob. “If you were superstitious—what?” she demanded.

Elizabeth sighed. “I’d say it was a curse. Meant to take effect between now and Marina’s eighteenth birthday. But I can’t tell how.”

“Neither can I,” Roderick said grimly. “Though it’s a damned good job I gave her the Gift I did. She got some protection, anyway. This—well, call it a curse, my old granddad would have—with the help of the Sylphs, this curse is drained, countered for now—else it might have killed her in her cradle. But how someone with no magic of her own managed to do this—” He shrugged.

“The curse is countered—” Alanna didn’t like the way he had phrased that. “It’s not gone?”

Roderick looked helpless, and not comfortable with feeling that way. “Well—no.”

Elizabeth stepped forward before the hysterical cry of anguish building in her heart burst out of Alanna’s throat. “Then it’s a good thing that I have not yet given my Gift.”

She took the baby from Alanna’s arms; Alanna resisted for a moment, before reluctantly letting the baby go. She watched, tears welling in her eyes, hand pressed to her mouth, as Elizabeth studied the red, pinched, tear- streaked face of her baby.

“This—abomination—is too deeply rooted. I cannot rid her of it,” Elizabeth said, and Alanna moaned, and started to turn away into her husband’s shoulder.

“Wait!” Elizabeth said, forestalling her. “I said I couldn’t rid her of it. I didn’t say I couldn’t change it. Water —water can go everywhere. No magic wrought can keep me out.”

Shaking with hope and fear, Alanna turned back. She watched, Hugh’s arms around her, as Elizabeth gathered her power around her like the skirts of her flowing gown. The green, living energy spun around her, sparkling with life; she murmured something under her breath.

Then, exactly like water pouring into a cavity, the power spun down into the baby’s tiny body. Marina seemed too small to contain all of it, and yet it flowed into her until it had utterly vanished without a trace.

The darkness that had overshadowed her face slowly lifted. The baby’s eyes opened; she heaved a sigh, and for the first time since Arachne had touched her, she smiled, tentatively. Alanna burst into tears and gathered her baby to her breast. Hugh’s arms surrounded her with comfort and warmth.

Elizabeth spoke firmly, pitching her voice to carry over Alanna’s weeping.

“I did not—I could not—remove this curse. What I have done is to change it. As it stood, it had no limit; it could have been invoked at any time. Now, if it does not fall upon her by her eighteenth birthday, it will rebound upon the caster.”

Alanna gulped down her sobs and looked up quickly at her friend. Elizabeth’s mouth was pursed in a sour smile. “Injudicious of Arachne to mention a date; curses are tricky things, and if you don’t hedge them in carefully, they find ways of breaking out—or leaving holes. And injudicious of her to come in person; now, if it is awakened at all, she will have to awaken it in person, and I have buried it deeply. It will not be easy, and will require a great deal of close contact.”

“But—” Alanna felt her throat closing again, and Elizabeth held up her hand.

“I have not finished. I further modified this curse; should Arachne manage to awaken it, Marina will not die.” Elizabeth sighed, wearily. “But there, my knowledge fails me. I told you that curses are difficult; this one took the power and twisted it away from me. I can only tell you that the curse will not kill outright. I cannot tell you what it will do…”

Alanna watched a hundred dire thoughts pass behind Elizabeth’s eyes. There were so many things that were worse than death—and many that were only a little better. What if the curse struck Mari blind, or deaf, or mindless? What if it made a cripple of her?

Then Elizabeth gathered herself and nodded briskly. “Never mind. We must see that it does not come to that. Alanna, we must hide her.”

“Hide her?” Hugh said, from behind her. “By my faith, Elizabeth, that is no bad notion! Like—like the infant Arthur, we can send her away where Arachne can’t find her!”

“Take her?” Alanna clutched the infant closer, her voice rising. “You’d take her away from me?”

“Alanna, we can’t hide her if you go with her,” Hugh pointed out, his own arms tightening around her. “But where? That’s the question.”

Hot tears spilled from Alanna’s eyes, as the others discussed her baby’s fate, heedless of her breaking heart. They were taking her away, her Marina, her little Mari—

She heard them in a haze of grief, as if from a great distance, as her friends, her husband, decided among them to send Marina away, away, off with Sebastian and Thomas and Margherita, practically into the wilds of Cornwall. It was Hugh’s allusion to Arthur that had decided them. Arachne knew nothing of them; if she had known of Hugh’s childhood schoolmates, she hadn’t recognized the playfellows that had been in the artists of now.

Elizabeth tried to comfort her. “It’s only until she’s of age, darling,” her friend said, patting her shoulders as the tears flowed and she shook with sobs. “When she’s eighteen, she’ll come back to you!”

Eighteen years. An eternity. An age, in which she would never see Marina’s first step, hear her first word, see her grow…

Alanna wept. Wept as they bundled Marina up in a baby-basket and carried her away, leaving behind the little dresses that Alanna had embroidered during the months of her confinement, the toys, even the cradle. She wept as her friends smuggled the child into their cart, as if she was nothing more than a few apples or a bottle of cider.

She wept as they drove away, her husband’s arms around her, her best friend standing at her side. She wept and would not be consoled; for she had lost her heart, and something told her she would never see her child again.

Chapter One

BIRDS twittered in the rose bushes outside the old-fashioned diamond-paned windows. The windows, swung open on their ancient iron hinges, let in sunshine, a floating dandelion seed and a breath of mown grass, even if Marina wasn’t in position to see the view into the farmyard. The sunshine gilded an oblong on the worn wooden floor. Behind her, somewhere out in the yard, chickens clucked and muttered, and two of Aunt Margherita’s cats had a half-minute spat. Marina’s arm was starting to go numb.

The unenlightened might think that posing as an artist’s model was easy, because “all” one had to do was sit, stand, or recline in one position. The unenlightened ought to try it some time, she thought. It took the same sort of simultaneous concentration and relaxation that magic did—concentration, to make