The Gates of Sleep

thorns. When had they gotten there? How had they gotten there? Had they come in response to her desperate plea for help?

She had no trouble recognizing them, not when she had looked at their portraits every day of her life for as long as she could remember.

“Mother?” she faltered. “Father?”

With no way to measure time, not even by getting tired and sleepy, Marina could not have told how long it took the—others—to convince her that they were not figments of her imagination, not something sent by Madam to torment her, and were, indeed, her mother and father. Well, their spirits. They were entirely certain that the “accident” that had drowned them was Madam’s doing; that made sense, considering everything that had followed. And if Madam had sent a couple of phantasms to torment her, would she have put those words in their mouths? Probably not.

Perhaps what finally convinced her was when, after a long and intensely antagonistic session of cross- questioning on her part, Alanna Roeswood—or Alanna’s ghost, since that was what the spirit was—looked mournfully at her daughter and gave the impression of heaving an enormously rueful sigh.

“After nearly fifteen years of rather formal letters, I really should not have expected you to fling yourself into my loving arms, should I the spirit said, wearing an expression of deep chagrin. “It’s not as if I wasn’t warned.”

Marina held her peace, and her breath—well, she had lately discovered that she didn’t actually breathe so she couldn’t really hold her breath, but that was the general effect. Perhaps being dead gave one a broader perspective and made one more accepting of things.

Especially things that one couldn’t change. Like one’s daughter, who had grown up with a mind and will of her own, and who considered her birth mother to be the next thing to a stranger.

“You aren’t at all as I pictured you, are you?” the spirit continued, but now there was a bit of pride mingled with the chagrin. “Nothing like I imagined.”

Marina couldn’t help but feel guilt at those sad words. Not that it was her fault that her parents had treasured an image of her that was nothing like the reality. “Oh, Mother—” she sighed. “I’m sorry.” She couldn’t bring herself to say anything more, but Alanna unexpectedly smiled.

“Don’t be.” Both of her parents studied her for a moment, as she throttled down a new emotion—

Lightning emotional changes seemed to be coming thick and fast, here. Perhaps it was that there was no reason, here and now, for any pretense. And no room for it. Polite pretense was only getting in the way.

This new emotion was resentment, and after another long moment of exchanged glances, it burst out.

“Why did you just—throw me away?” she cried, seventeen years of pain distilled in that single sentence. “What was wrong with me? Didn’t you want me? Was I in the way?” That last was something that had only just occurred to her, as she saw the way the two spirits stood together. Never had she seen two people so nearly and literally one, and she felt horrible. Had she been an intrusion on this perfect one-ness? It was only too easy to picture how they would have resented her presence.

But the bewilderment on both their faces gave the lie to that notion. “Throw you away?” Hugh said, aghast. “Dear child—don’t you know what we were trying to prevent—what we were trying to save you from? Didn’t anyone ever tell you?”

It was short in the telling, the more so since the curse that Madam had so effectively placed on Marina as an infant was what had patently thrown her here now. She listened in appalled fascination—it would have been an amazing tale, if it had just happened to someone else.

And why? Why did Arachne hate her brother and his wife so much that she declared war on a harmless infant? For that matter, what on earth could Hugh Roeswood have done to anger her —besides merely existing? Hugh had only been a child when Arachne left home to marry her unsuitable suitor.

“So we sent you away, where we hoped Arachne would never find you, and left her only ourselves to aim at,” Hugh finished. “We hoped—well, we hoped all manner of things. We hoped that she wouldn’t find you, and that the curse would backfire on her when it reached its term without being called up again. We hoped that you would become a good enough Master to defend yourself. We hoped someone would find a way to take the damned thing off you!”

“But why send me away and never come even to see me?” she asked softly, plaintively. “Why never, ever come in person?”

“Haven’t you ever seen nesting birds leading hunters away from their little ones?” Alanna asked wistfully. “We couldn’t lead Arachne away, but it was the same idea. We never sent you away because we didn’t love you—we sent you because we loved you so much. And of all the people we could send you to—Margherita was the only choice. We knew that she would love you as if you were her own.”

The pain in her voice recalled the tone of all those letters, hundreds of them, all of them yearning after the daughter Alanna was afraid to put into jeopardy. Marina felt, suddenly, deeply ashamed of her outburst.

“The one thing we didn’t take into account was that she might become so desperate as you neared your eighteenth birthday that she would move against us,” Hugh continued, with a smoldering look that told Marina that he was angry at himself. “I became complacent, I suppose. She hadn’t acted against us, so she wouldn’t—that was a stupid assumption to make. And believe me, there was a will, naming Margherita and Sebastian as your legal guardians. I don’t know what happened to it, but there was one.”

“Madam must have had it stolen,” Marina said, thinking out loud. “She had a whole gaggle of lawyers come and fetch me; perhaps one of those extracted it.” She began to feel a smoldering anger herself—not the unproductive rage, but a calculating anger, and one that, if she could get herself free, boded ill for Madam. “She’s laid this out like a campaign from the beginning! Probably from the moment she discovered that—that cesspit at her first pottery!”

“Cesspit?” they both asked together, and that occasioned yet another explanation.

“My first guess must have been the right one,” Marina said, broodingly. “That must be why she went to the pottery a few days ago—it wasn’t to deal with an emergency, it was to drink in the vile power that she used on me!”

“We never could understand where she got her magic,” Hugh replied, looking sick. “And it was there all along, if only we’d thought to look for it.”

“What could you have done if you’d found it?” Marina countered swiftly. “Confront her? What use would that have been? There is nothing there to link her with it directly—and other than the curse, nothing that anyone could have said against her. She could claim she didn’t mean it, if you confronted her, if you set that Circle of Masters in London on her. She could say it was all an accident. And it still wouldn’t have solved my problem. All that would have happened is that she would have found some way to make you look—well—demented.” She pursed her lips, as memory of a particular interview with Madam surfaced. “In fact, she tried very hard to make me think that you were unbalanced, mother. That you were seeing things—only she didn’t know that I knew very well what those stories you told me in your letters were about. She thought that I was ordinary, with no magic at all, so the tales of fauns and brownies would sound absolutely mad.” She shook her head. “Not that it matters,” she finished, bleakly. “Not now. I could have all the magic of a fully trained Water Master, and it still wouldn’t do me any good in here.”

“But there may be some hope!” Alanna exclaimed. “Your friends—that doctor and his staff—they were the ones that Arachne called! You’re in Briareley as a patient on Arachne’s own orders, and they’ve brought Sebastian and Margherita, Thomas and Elizabeth to help!”

She stared at them. This news was such a shock that she felt physically stunned. And never mind that she didn’t have a way to be physically anything right now. “What?” she said, stupidly.

“Wait a moment.” Hugh winked out—just like a spark extinguishing—then winked back in again. “My dear, it’s better than we knew when we first came to you! They have a plan—but it’s one that you have to follow, too,” Hugh told her. “They’re going to do something to either force Arachne to break this containment, or force her inside it as well. In either case, you will have to be the one to win your own freedom from her.”

He had no sooner finished this astonishing statement than something rocked the