The Gates of Sleep

Margherita had judged it unwise to take the chance. Marina was sweet-natured, but there was a stubborn streak to her, and not even a promise would keep her from doing something she really wanted to. Marina had a very agile mind, and a positively lawyerlike ability to find a way, however tangled and convoluted the path might be, of getting around any promises she’d made if she truly wanted something. That was a Water characteristic—the ability to go wherever the will drove. Perhaps they had done her no favors by keeping her in ignorance, but at least they had done her no harm.

Other than the harm of separating mother from child.

It hadn’t been Marina that had suffered, though; Margherita would pledge her soul on that. The happy, carefree child had grown into a remarkable young woman, and if she had not had all the advantages her parents’ relative wealth could have bought her, she had obtained other advantages that money probably could not have purchased. Freedom, for one thing; she’d learned her letters and reckoning from Margherita, and all the other graces that young ladies were supposed to require, and a great deal more. From Thomas, who had a scholarly turn, she’d learned Latin and Greek as well as the French she got from Margherita—and from Sebastian, Italian. She learned German on her own. When she was little, they’d given her formal lessons, but when she turned fourteen, they let her choose her own subjects for the most part, though she’d still had plenty of studying to do. This year was the first time they’d let her follow her own inclinations; there was no telling what she’d choose to do when she passed that fateful eighteenth birthday and her parents collected her. Thomas hoped that she would go to Oxford, to the women’s college there, even though women were not actually given degrees.

Meanwhile, she had the run of the library, and devoured books in all five languages besides her native English. Winter-long, there wasn’t a great deal to do besides work and read, for the long winter rains kept all of them indoors. Margherita reflected that she would have to keep an eye on Sebastian and his demands for Mari’s time as his model; it had already occurred to him that by next summer he would lose her, and he was painting at a furious rate. Mari was being very good-natured about all the posing, but Margherita knew from her own experience that it was hard work, and that Sebastian was singularly indifferent to the needs of his models when a painting- frenzy was on him.

Thomas reached for the teapot and let out his breath in a sigh. “Eight months,” he said, and there was no indication in his voice that the sigh was one of relief. Margherita nodded.

They had always known that this last year, Marina’s seventeenth, would be the hardest. Even if Arachne was not aware that her curse now had a limitation on it, she would still be trying to bring it to fruition in order to achieve that self-imposed deadline. The older Marina got, the stronger she would be in her powers, and the better able to defend herself. Nor could Arachne count on Marina remaining alone; although the help that her friends could give her was, by the very nature of the magic that they wielded, somewhat limited, that did not apply to true lovers, especially if they happened to be of complementary Elements. In a case like that the powers joined, magnifying each other, and it would be very difficult for a single Power to overwhelm them. The older Marina was, the more likely it became that she would fall in love, and Magic being what it was, it was a foregone conclusion that it would be with another Elemental magician.

Arachne would want to prevent that at all costs, for her curse would rebound on its caster if it was broken, and heaven only knew what would happen then.

So this seventeenth year of Marina’s life would be the most dangerous for her, and her guardians were doing everything in their power to keep her out of the public eye.

Not her image—that was harmless enough. She didn’t look strikingly like either of her parents; the resemblance had to be hunted for. She had Hugh’s dark hair, a sable near to black, but it was wavy rather than straight as his was, or as curly as her mother’s. In fact, virtually everything about her was a melding of the two; her face between round and oblong, her mouth neither the tiny rosebud of her mother’s, nor as wide as her father’s. She was tall, much taller than her mother. And her eyes—well, they were nothing like either parent’s. Hugh’s were gray, Alanna’s a cornflower blue. Marina’s were enormous and blue-violet, a color so striking that everyone who saw her for the first time was arrested by the intensity of it. There had been no hint of that color when she’d been a baby, and as far as anyone knew, there had never been eyes of that color in either family.

So Sebastian had been using her as a model all this past year, both because she was a wonderful subject and to keep her busy and out of the village as much as possible. And if because of that his pictures took on a certain sameness, well, that particular trait hadn’t hurt Rossetti’s popularity, nor any of the other Pre-Raphaelites who had favorite models.

In fact, the only negative aspect to using Marina as a model had so far been as amusing as it was negative— that certain would-be patrons had assumed that the model’s virtue was negotiable. After the first shock—the Blackbird Cottage household was known in the artistic community more as a model for semi-stodgy propriety than otherwise—Sebastian had rather enjoyed disabusing those “gentlemen” of that notion. If going cold and saying in a deathly voice, “Are you referring to my niece?” was not a sufficient hint, then turning on a feigned version of a Fire Master’s wrath certainly was. No one ever faced a Fire Master in his full powers without quailing, whether or not they had magic themselves, and even theatrical anger was nearly as intimidating as the real thing.

And Sebastian being Sebastian, he usually got, not only an apology, but an increase in his commission out of the encounter. He’d only lost one patron out of all of the years that he’d been using Marina, and it was one he’d had very little taste for in the first place. “I told him to go elsewhere for his damned ‘Leda,’ if he wanted the model as well as the painting,” was what he’d growled to Margherita when he’d returned from his interview in London. “I wanted to knock him down—”

“But you didn’t, of course,” she’d said, knowing from his attitude that, of course, he hadn’t.

“No. Damn his eyes. He’s too influential; I’m no fool, my love, I kept my insults behind my teeth and managed a cunning imitation of sanctimonious prig without a sensual bone in my body. But I wanted to send his damned teeth down his throat for what he hinted at.” Sebastian’s aura had pulsed a sullen red.

“Serve the blackguard right,” Margherita returned. Sebastian had smiled at last, and kissed her, and she had known that, as always, his temper had burned itself out quickly.

But common perceptions were a boon to Marina’s safety; Arachne would never dream that Marina Roeswood would be posing for paintings like a common—well—artist’s model. The term was only a more polite version of something else.

For that matter, if Alanna had any notion that Sebastian’s lovely model was her own daughter, she would probably faint. It was just as well that the question had never come up. The prim miniatures that Sebastian sent every Christmas showed a proper young lady with her hair up, a high-collared blouse, and a cameo at her throat, not the languid odalisques or daring dancers Sebastian had been painting in that style the French were calling Art Nouveau.

“Once harvest’s over and winter’s begun,” Sebastian said through a mouthful of deviled ham, “it will be easier to keep the little baggage indoors.”

“Unless she decides it’s time you made good on your promise to take her to London,” Thomas pointed out.

“So what if she does?” Sebastian countered. “London’s as good or better a place to hide her than here! How many Elemental magicians are there in London? Trying to find her would be like trying to find one particular pigeon in Trafalgar Square! If she wants a trip to the galleries and the British Museum, I’ll take her. I’m more concerned that she doesn’t get the notion in her head to go to Scotland and meet up with the Selkies.”

Thomas winced. “Don’t even think about that, or she might pick the idea up,” he cautioned, and sucked on his lower lip. “We’ve got a problem, though. We can’t teach her any more. She needs a real Water Master now, and I think she’s beginning to realize that. She’s restless; she’s bored with the exercises I’ve set her. She might not give a hang about the Roeswood name, fortune, or estate, but she’s going to become increasingly unhappy when she realizes she needs more teaching in her Power and we can’t give it to her.”

Sebastian and Margherita exchanged a long look of consternation; they hadn’t thought of that. Of all the precautions they had taken, all the things they had thought they would have to provide for, Marina’s tutoring in magic had not been factored into the equation.

“Is she going to be that powerful?” Sebastian asked, dumbfounded.

“What if I told you that every time she goes out to the orchard she’s reading poetry to Undines?” Thomas asked.