Phoenix and Ashes

like a monk, the sort that wore simple, hooded robes. He wasn't, of course. He was something altogether different, with no more than a nodding acquaintance with Christianity.

Eleanor had expected someone hard and ascetic, and possibly unfriendly. Instead, she looked up into the face of a man who looked down on her with kind, warm eyes. He looked like a grandfatherly wizard, and was the most real of all of the Tarot creatures she had yet met.

'And now,' said the Hermit, 'You come to me. Do you know me yet?'

Eleanor shook her head; oh she knew what he was, and even what he represented, but to know him, understand him as deeply as that simple question implied—no, she did not know him yet. She knew only enough to know that this was someone who had spent all his life looking for wisdom, and had learned to distill things down to their simplest, who would, unlike Gaffer Clark, use the fewest words possible to cut to the heart of something.

It was night here in the world of the Tarot cards, and the Hermit held the lantern that was the only source of light for as far as she could see. It was that lantern that had led her to him.

In fact, tonight, for the very first time since she had begun this quest through the Major Arcana, she had not passed through the stages she had already been tested in. That had come as something of a shock. She had gone to bed early, since Alison and the girls were at Longacre Park—again—and she was bone-weary with all the work they had put her through. They went through as many clothing-changes in a day as Lady Devlin did now, and it wasn't Howse who picked up the discarded items, laundered them, hung them to dry, starched and ironed them. Oh no—it was Eleanor, up and down the stairs three times a day, with extra demand on her because the tennis dress discarded in the afternoon would be wanted in the morning.

Alison was getting very familiar with Lady Devlin, and Eleanor didn't think it was all name-dropping. There was something going on up there at the big great house, somehow Alison had managed to worm her way into Lady Devlin's regard.

Eleanor was trying very hard not to care. After all, Alison's machinations were giving her the freedom to gain in knowledge and control of her magic and her Element. Her hands and body might be busy, but her mind was free to think, to reason, to analyze every tiny bit of information she got from the alchemy books and her mother's notes. And when the others weren't about, she could practice some of the smaller magics, sharpening her skills. Fire magic was quite good for keeping the iron hot, for instance. And if her hands weren't nearly as smooth and lovely as her stepsisters', the Salamanders had healed the cracked skin, shrunk the joints, made the nails stronger and neater.

Besides, as Sarah had said, more than once, 'The manor's the manor and the village is the village, and the less we have to do with each other the better.' There was no point in even thinking about Reginald Fenyx and his mother. The gulf between them was just too wide to bridge.

But if there was one thing that all this delving through the paths of the cards was teaching her, it was to look inside herself and be honest about what was there.

Never mind that her little passion for Reginald Fenyx hadn't the chance of a rose in midwinter. It was certainly there. It didn't take having her mind slip off on a daydream of what he'd looked like asleep in the meadow to tell her that. And how not, really, when you came down to it? He was handsome, he was a war hero, and he was vulnerable; put the three traits together, and how could any girl not fall a little in love with him? And he had been kind to her—carelessly kind, but kind, nevertheless. Never mind that he had most likely forgotten her entirely by now. Between his own concerns and the round of entertainments his mother was contriving, he probably hadn't given her a single thought in weeks.

Which was just as well. It allowed her to have her secret passion without embarrassing herself. There was safety in distance.

If grown women can be in love with some actor on the London stage, she told herself, helplessly, I can be in love with Reggie Fenyx, surely. Where's the harm? So long as I don't delude myself into thinking he'd ever look twice at me in public.

Some of that was going through her mind before she went to sleep tonight, knowing that if she dreamed, she would be facing the Hermit, the embodiment of 'know thyself.' She was afraid, to tell the truth, not of the card- creature himself, but of failing to pass whatever tests he set her. The more she thought about the Hermit, the less confident she was; how could she even begin to meet him mind-to-mind?

She really didn't think she was ready for this card—surely he should have come at the end of the Major Arcana, not barely halfway through! Surely the end of the journey that began with the Fool should end with the Hermit.

She had hoped to gain a bit more courage by passing through all the stages she had won through before facing the Hermit—but instead, when she 'woke' in the Tarot realm, she woke to darkness, a darkness broken only by a single pinpoint of light in the distance, a light that she stumblingly made her way towards.

'I don't know you,' she said, slowly, admitting her ignorance. 'I mean, I know you are the Hermit, but—but that's not just some misanthropic old man in a desert. I don't know really know what you are.'

'I am an eternal seeker,' the Hermit said, and smiled. 'I am Merlin, Taliesin, Apollonius of Tyanna, I am anyone who has ever sought for wisdom knowing that it is the search that is important and, not the end. Because —?'

'Because—there never will be an end because you never actually find wisdom?' she hazarded, feeling as if she was groping in the dark without the benefit of the Hermit's lantern. 'Because if you think you've found it, you