The Gates of Sleep

hint; marble, ice showed more sign of magic than she.

Not possible then—She didn’t know whether to be disappointed or glad. “Mary Anne said you had found something you wished me to see, Madam?” she said instead.

“Not I—although I guessed that it might exist, given who and what the people your parents had sent you to stay with were.” The words were simple enough—but the tone made Marina look up, suspecting—something. What, she didn’t know, but—something. There was something hidden there, under that calculating tone.

But as usual, Madam’s face was quite without any expression other than the faintest of amusement.

“So,” she continued, looking straight into Marina’s eyes, “I asked of some of the older servants, and sent someone who remembered up to the attic to find what I was looking for. And here it is—”

She stepped aside and behind her was something large concealed beneath a dust-sheet. The firelight made moving shadows on the folds, and they seemed to move.

Madam seized a corner of the dust cover and whisked it off in a single motion.

The fire flared up at that moment, fully revealing what had been beneath that dust-sheet. Carved wood— sinuous curves—a shape that at first she did not recognize.

“Oh—” Of all of the things that she might have guessed had she been better able to think, this was not one of them. “A cradle?”

“Your cradle, or so I presume,” Madam said silkily. “Given your name and the undeniable marine themes of the carving. Not to mention that it is clearly of—rather unique design. An odd choice for a cradle, but there is no doubt of the skill of the carver.”

Marina stepped forward, drawn to the bit of furniture by more than mere curiosity. Carved with garlands of seaweed and frolicking mermaids, with little fish and naiads peeking from behind undulating waves, there was only one hand that could have produced this cradle.

Uncle Thomas.

She had seen these very carvings, even to the funny little octopus with wide and melting eyes—here meant to hold a gauzy canopy to shield the occupant of the cradle from stray insects—repeated a hundred times in the furnishings in her room in Blackbird Cottage. All of her homesickness, all of her loneliness, overcame her in a rush of longing that excluded everything else. And she wanted nothing more at this moment than to touch them, to feel the silken wood under her hand. With a catch at her throat and an aching heart to match her aching head, she wanted to feel those familiar curves and take comfort from them.

Madam stepped lightly aside as her hand reached for the little octopus, moving as if it had a life of its own.

A lightning bolt struck just outside the sitting-room windows; she was too enthralled even to wince.

Something bright glinted among the octopus’s tentacles. Something metallic, a spark of wicked blue- white.

She hesitated.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” Madam crooned, suddenly looming behind her. “The wood is just like silk. Here—” she seized Marina’s wrist in an iron grip. “Just feel it.”

Marina didn’t resist; it was as if she had surrendered her will to her longing for this bit of home and everything else was of no importance at all. She watched her hand as if it belonged to someone else, watched as Madam guided it towards the carving, felt the fingers caress the smooth wood.

Felt something stab through the pad of her index finger when it touched that place where something had gleamed in the lightning-flash.

Madam released her wrist, and stepped swiftly back. Marina staggered back a pace.

She cried out—not loudly, for it had been little more than a pinprick. She took another step backward, as Madam moved out of her way.

But then, as she turned her hand to see where she had been hurt, the finger suddenly began to burn—burn with pain, and burn to her innermost eye, burn with that same, poisonous, black-green light as the evil pit beneath Madam’s office!

She tried to scream, but nothing would come out but a strangled whimper—stared at her hand as the stuff spread like oil poured on water, as the burning spread through her veins like the poison it was—stared—as Madam began to laugh.

Burning black, flickering yellow-green, spread over her, under her shields, eating into her, permeating her, as Madam’s triumphant laughter rang in her ears and peals of thunder answered the laughter. She staggered back one step at a time until she stood swaying on the hearthrug, screams stillborn, trapped in her throat, which could only produce a moan. Until a black-green curtain fell between her and the world, and she felt her knees giving way beneath her, and then—nothing.

Reggie stepped out of the shadows and stared at the crumpled form of Marina on the hearthrug. “By Jove, Mater!” he gasped. “You did it! You managed to call up the curse again!”

Arachne smiled with the deepest satisfaction, and prodded at the girl’s outstretched hand with one elegantly clad toe. “I told you that I would, if I could only find the right combination,” she said. “And the right way to get past those shields she had all over her. Not a sign of them from the outside, but layers of them, there were. No wonder she didn’t show any evidence of magic about her.”

“So you knew about those, did you?” Reggie asked, inadvertently betraying that he had known about the shields—and had not told his mother. Arachne hadn’t known, she had intuited their presence, but she hadn’t known. She’d simply decided that they must be there, and had worked to solve the problem of their existence.

So how had he known about them, when nothing she had done had revealed their presence?

“Well, it was obvious, wasn’t it?” she prevaricated. “I decided to take a gamble. It occurred to me that shields would only be against magic, not something physical—and that no one would think to shield her beneath the surface of her skin.”

She watched him with hooded eyes. He frowned, then nodded, understanding dawning in his face. “Of course—the physical vehicle—the exposed nail—delivering the curse past the shield in a way that no one would think of in advance. Brilliant! Just brilliant!”

She made a little sour moue with her lips. “It won’t do for you to forget that, Reggie dear,” she said acidly. “I am far more experienced than you. And very creative.”

Would he take that as the warning it was meant to be?

He stiffened, then took her hand and bowed over it. “Far be it from me to do so,” he replied. But his face was hidden, and she couldn’t see the expression it wore.

Resentment, probably. Perhaps defeat. Temporary defeat, though—

“But surely that wasn’t all,” he continued, rising, showing her only an expression as bland and smooth as Devon cream. “If that was all, why all the rigmarole with the cradle?”

“Because the vehicle had to be something that was within the influence of the curse when I first set it, of course,” she said, with a tone of as you should have figured out for yourself covering every word. “That was why the cradle—and why I had that little octopus-ornament removed. I wanted metal as the vehicle by preference, and the nail holding the octopus in place was perfect. At that point, it was easy to have it reversed and driven up and out to become the vehicle.”

“Brilliant,” Reggie repeated, then frowned, and bent over Marina’s form. “She’s breathing.”

Arachne sighed. “She’s not dead, sadly,” she admitted, meditatively. “The curse was warped, somehow; it sent her into a trance. I did think of that—I have her spirit trapped in a sort of limbo, but that was the best I could do. But she will be dead, soon enough. She can’t eat or drink in that state.”

The solution was simple enough; call the servants, have her taken to her room, allow her to waste away. How long would it take? No more than a few weeks, surely—less than that, perhaps. Reggie’s jaw tightened. “Mater, we have a problem—” he began.

“Nonsense,” she snapped. “What problem could there be?”

“That someone is likely to think that we poisoned her—”

“Then we call a doctor in the morning,” she said dismissively.

“And if we let her waste away, that people will say that we did so deliberately!” he countered angrily. “There will be enquiries—police—even an inquest—”