The Gates of Sleep

in an equable mood by the time he reached the last crossing and made the turn that would take him to the gates. Pansy sensed the change in his mood and slowed to a walk.

He stopped being angry, and allowed himself to laugh at the foolishness of even bothering to be angry at the arrogant young jackanapes. Why should one overbearing idiot with delusions of grandeur get his temper aroused? No reason, of course. What was he to Reggie, or Reggie to him? Nothing.

So those are the neighbors. The girl was all right. No, that was being ungenerous. The girl was fine. Look at how she had stopped and managed to soothe Ellen—and she’d practically volunteered herself and her magic to help him with her.

Earth and Water… the problem I’ve had is that if I could get that damned poison confined in lumps, I could get it out of her. And I could heal some, at least, of the damage. But I can’t suck it out of her blood, and that’s the problem. But a Water Master can actually purify liquid— and blood is a liquid.

The girl—Marina. Must put the name to her—had said she wasn’t a Master. Yes, but she was the one who’d said she could help. So she must be able to do that, at least, and for his purposes it didn’t matter if she thought she was a Master, so long as she had mastered the aspect of her Element that would let her clean out the poison. She had the power to do whatever she needed to; that much was very clear. Perhaps it was the will that was lacking to make her a Master; she certainly hadn’t stood up to that arrogant blockhead who’d turned up to claim her. With a touch on the reins, he guided the gig between the huge stone pillars at the head of the drive, past the open wrought—iron gates. Pansy’s head bobbed as they came up the long graveled drive. The jolting of the gig ended as soon as the wheels touched the drive—hundreds of years of graveling and rolling went a long way toward making a stretch of driveway as flat and hard as a paved street in London. He looked up and caught sight of the house through the leafless trees.

House? What a totally inadequate word for the place. It was an amazing pile of a building, parts of it going all the way back to Henry the Third, and it was no wonder that its former owner had let it go so cheaply. If it hadn’t been for magic, he would never have been able to make the place habitable. But it was amazing what a troupe of Brownies could and would pull off, given the reason to.

Odd little beggars, Brownies. Lady Almsley claimed they must be Hindu or Buddhist, the way they worked like the very devil for anyone who really, truly deserved the help, and were off like a shot if you tried to do something to thank them. “Building up good karma, or dogma, or whatever it is,” Lady Almsley said in her usual charming and deceptively muddle-headed manner. “I get rather confused with all those mystical things—but it just quite ruins it for them, steals all of it away, if you pay them for what they do, or even try to thank them.”

Of course, they couldn’t abide Cold Iron, not the tiniest particle of it, and he’d had to remove every nail and iron hinge in the place before they could move in to work. Thank God most of the place was good Devon stone, and the woodwork had mostly been put together the old-fashioned way, with wooden pegs instead of nails. Even so, he’d spent all of his time moving one room ahead of the busy little beggars, pulling nails and whatnot, and hoping what he took out didn’t mean parts of his new acquisition were about to come tumbling down on his head.

Hearing what it was he was going to do with it though—that had pretty much insured that every Brownie not otherwise occupied on the whole island of Logres turned up to help. One month; that was all it had taken for the Brownies to do their work. One single month. Two months of preparation by him just to give them a place to start, and the one month keeping barely ahead of them. He never would have believed it, if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

He suspected that they had had help as well; Brownies weren’t noted for forge-work, and every bit of ironmongery had been replaced with beautifully crafted bronze and copper. They didn’t do stonework so far as he knew, but every bit of stone was as good or better than new, now. All the wet rot and dry rot—gone. Woodwork, floors, ceilings, roof, all repaired. Every draft, hole and crack, stopped. Chimneys cleaned and mended. Stone and brickwork retucked (and who had done that? Gnomes? Dwarves? Surely not Kobolds— though not all Kobolds were evil-minded and ill-tempered). Slates replaced, stones made whole, vermin vanished. He’d asked one of the fauns how they did it, he’d gotten an odd explanation.

“They remind the house of how it was, when it was new.” Though how one “reminded” a house of anything, much less how that could get it repaired, he could not even begin to imagine. Sometimes the best thing that an Elemental Master could do was to bargain with the Elementals themselves, then step back and allow them to determine how something was accomplished.

All right, none of it was major repair, it was all just little things that would quickly have required major repair if they’d gone on. The problem was, with a mismatched barn like this one, there were a great many of those little things; probably why the original owner hadn’t done anything about them. When the money got tight, it was always the little bits of repair that got put off and forgotten. Tiny leaks in the roof that never gave any trouble became gaping holes, missing slates let in hordes of starlings and daws, cracks widened, wood rotted—then gave way.

Thank heavens I was able to step in before the trickle of small problems turned into a flood of disaster.

He could never have paid to have it all done in the normal way, no one could have. Not even one of those American millionaires who seemed to have pots and pots of money to throw about. It hadn’t been just his doing; every Earth Master he knew had called in favors, once word had gotten around of what he was up to. Bless ‘em, for they’re all going to be doing their own housekeeping for the next ten years, doubtless.

For that was what Brownies usually did; household repair was just part of that. Mind, only the most adamantly Luddite of the Earth Masters still had Brownies about—people who lived in remote cottages built in the Middle Ages, genuine Scottish crofters, folk on Lewis and Skye and the hundred tiny islands of the coast. Folk who cooked with copper and bronze pots and implements, and kept—at most—a single steel knife in the house, shielded by layers of silk. Now they would be doing their own cleaning and mending for a time.

And by the time their Brownies returned, they’d probably had gotten used to having Cold Iron about, and all the conveniences and improvements that Cold Iron meant, and the Brownies would never come back to their homes. The price, perhaps, of progress?

Makes one wonder. I cannot even imagine doing without Cold Iron, steel. Well, think of all the screws and nails, the hinges and bits and bobs that are absolutely integral to the building alone! Let alone iron grates in the fireplaces, the stove and implements in the kitchen all the ironmongery in the furniture! It was only this one time, for this one reason, that I was able to. And very nearly not even then. It had been an exhausting three months, and one he hadn’t been entirely certain he would survive.

Already there was so much Cold Iron back in the place that the creatures who were most sensitive couldn’t come within fifty miles. Small wonder few people saw the Oldest Ones anymore, the ones the Celts had called the Sidhe; there was no place “safe” for them on the material plane anywhere near humans.

He drove Pansy around to the stables—ridiculous thing, room for twenty horses and five or six carriages in the carriage house—driving her into the cobblestone courtyard in the center of the carriage house to unharness her, getting her to back up into the gig’s bay so he wouldn’t have to push it into shelter by hand. Another advantage to being an Earth Master, his ability to communicate with animals.

With the gig’s shafts resting on the stone floor of the carriage-bay, he gathered up the long reins so that Pansy wouldn’t trip on them and walked her to her stall in the stables. He supposed it was ridiculous for the chief physician—and owner!—of the sanitarium to be unharnessing and grooming his own horse but—well, there it was, Diccon was still in the manor, probably looking after some other chore that needed a strong back, and he wasn’t going to let Pansy stand about in harness, cold and hungry, just because he was “too good” to do a little manual labor.

And Pansy was a grateful little beast. So grateful that she cheered him completely out of any lingering annoyance with that arrogant Reggie Chamberten.

But how had a girl like that gotten engaged to someone like him? They were, or seemed to be, totally incompatible personalities. Unless it was financial need on her part, or on her familys. Stranger things had happened. Just because one owned a manor, that didn’t mean one was secure in the bank. Look what had happened to Briareley.

He went in through the kitchen entrance—a good, big kitchen, and thanks to the Brownies, all he’d had to do