The Gates of Sleep

What—

Brownie snorted into her hair, startling her. She snapped her mouth shut before he could notice her reaction.

Good gad—an Earth Master! Here! Why had Alanna never mentioned that the doctor was an Earth Master?

Because she didn’t know?

Had her parents ever even met Dr. Pike face-to-face? She didn’t recall a mention of such a meeting, if they had. But surely they would have noticed another Earth Master practicing his magics practically on their doorstep!

Maybe not. Those shields were good ones, as good as anything Elizabeth Hastings was able to create. Maybe better; they were like thin shells of steel, refined, impeccably crafted. So well-crafted, in fact, that she hadn’t actually seen them at first.

I’m not sure I’d have seen him raising power if I wasn’t used to seeing Earth Masters at work.

And Alanna seldom left Oakhurst, except on errands to the poor of the village. It wasn’t likely she’d have encountered Dr. Pike on one of those.

She heard more horses approaching, as the girl responded to the healing power of the Earth energies Doctor Pike poured into her by sighing—then relaxing, and showing the first evidences of calming.

Another cart, this one slightly larger and drawn by a pair of shaggy Dartmoor ponies, stopped just behind Dr. Pike’s; and three people, two men and a woman, carefully got out.

They were perfectly ordinary, and what was more, they didn’t seem to notice anything different about Dr. Pike as they approached him. If they had been mages themselves, they would have waited for him to dismiss the energies he had raised before reaching for the girl—which they did, and Marina had to stifle a call of warning.

“Wait a moment,” he cautioned, just before their fingertips touched the outermost shield. “Let me get her a bit calmer first.”

Let me take this down before you do me an injury, you mean, Doctor. But he was as quick to disperse the unused power as he had been to raise it in the first place, and within moments, his shields had contracted down to become one with his very skin.

Oooh, that’s a neat trick! I wonder how he does it?

“Here, Ellen, look who’s come to take you back home,” he said, carefully putting two fingers under her chin, and turning the girl’s face toward the attendants.

Once again, although Marina would have expected her to react with fear, the girl Ellen smiled with relief and actually reached out for the hands of one of the men and the woman. More than that—she spoke. Real words, and not animal keening or moans.

“Oh, Diccon, Eleanor—I’m sorry—I’ve had one of my fits again, haven’t I?” There was sense in her eyes, and although her hands trembled, her words indicated that whatever had turned her into a mindless, fear-filled creature had passed for the moment.

“Yes, Miss Ellen,” the man said, sorrowfully. “I’m afraid you did.

And we was stupid enough to have left you alone with the door unlocked.”

Her tremulous laugh sounded like it was a short step from a sob. “Well, don’t do that again! I’m not to be trusted, remember?”

But Doctor Pike patted her shoulder, and said admonishingly, “It isn’t you that we don’t trust, child. It’s the demons in your mind.”

Ellen only shook her head, and allowed herself to be bundled into blankets and a lap robe in the cart and carried off.

Doctor Pike watched them go, then turned to Marina.

“That poor child is one of my charity patients,” he said, and his voice took on a tinge of repressed anger. “Her cousin brought her here—the poor thing worked in a pottery factory as a painter, and she’d been systematically poisoned by the people who make their wealth off the labor and deaths of girls just like her!”

For a moment, she wondered why he was telling her this—did he know about Arachne and her manufactories?

But how could he? The villagers didn’t know; they all thought, when they thought at all, that Arachne must own something like a woolen mill. Surely Dr. Pike had no idea that she had heard about the dangers of the potteries from the other side of the argument.

And I’d believe the doctor a hundred times over before I’d believe Madam.

The doctor continued, the angry words spilling from him as if they had been long pent up, and only now had been able to find release. “They use lead-glazes and lead-paints—the glaze powder hangs in clouds of dust in the air, it gets into their food, they breathe it in, they carry it home with them on their clothing. And it kills them—but oh, cruelly, Miss Roeswood, cruelly! Because before it kills them, it makes them beautiful—you saw her complexion, the fine and delicate figure she has! The paintresses have a reputation for beauty, and they’ve no lack of suitors—” He laughed, but there was no humor in the laugh. “Or, shall we say, men with money willing to spend it on a pretty girl. They might not be able to afford an opera dancer, or a music hall performer, but they can afford a paintress, who will be at least as pretty, and cost far less to feed, since the lead destroys their appetite.”

She shook her head, sickened. Yes, she knew something of this—because her Uncle Sebastian had warned her about the danger of eating some of his paints, when she was a child. And there were certain of them, the whites in particular, that he was absolutely fanatical about cleaning off his hands and face before he went to eat.

Yes, she believed Dr. Pike.

His voice dropped, and a dull despair crept into it. “Then it destroys everything else; first the feeling in their hands and feet, then their control over their limbs, then their minds. And there is nothing I can do about it once it has reached that stage.”

No, he can’t heal what has gone wrong when the poison is still at work inside the poor thing! But—what if it was flushed out? Can Water magic combined with Earth do what Earth alone cannot? She felt resolve come over her like armor.

“Perhaps you cannot,” she said, making up her mind on the instant. “But—perhaps together, you and I can.”

With that, she raised her own shields, filled them for just a moment with the swirling green energies of water. Then she sketched a recognition-sigil that Elizabeth had taught her in the air between them, where it hung for an instant, glowing, before fading out.

And now it was his turn to stare at her with loose jaw and astonished eyes.

Chapter Thirteen

MARINA moved back to Brownie and pulled the reins out of the hedge where she’d tossed them. A small hail of bits of twig and snow came down with them. She took her time in looping the reins around her hand and turning back to face the doctor.

He bowed—just a slight bow, but there was a world of respect in it. She was very glad for a cold breeze that sprang up, for it cooled her hot cheeks.

“It seems I must reintroduce myself,” he said, then smiled. His smile reached and warmed his eyes. “Andrew Pike, Elemental Master of Earth.”

She sketched a curtsy. “Marina Roeswood, Elemental Mage of Water,” she replied, feeling oddly shy.

Now he looked puzzled. “Not Master? Excuse me, Miss Roeswood, but the power is certainly within you to claim that distinction. And forgive my asking this, but as one mage to another, we must know the strengths of each other.”

“The strength? Perhaps. But not, I fear, the practice,” she admitted, dropping her eyes for a moment, and scuffing the toe of her riding boot in the snow. “I only began learning the magics peculiar to my Element a few months ago, and then—” She looked back up. “Doctor Pike, this is the first time since I was taken from the place that I considered my home that I have been able to even think about magic without a sense of—well, nervousness. I can’t think why, but there is something about my aunt that puts me on my guard where magic is concerned. I thought it was only that I didn’t know her, and I am chary of practicing my powers around those who are strangers to me, but now I am not so sure.”