Phoenix and Ashes

'Someone I can talk to, about anything,' he said, finally. 'Someone who has the brains not only to understand what I'm talking about, but to hold up her side of the conversation. When you have the wherewithal to buy as much beauty as you want, it isn't as important. Mind, I'm not saying that I don't like a girl to be pretty, but—' He shrugged helplessly. 'Never mind. It's hardly relevant.'

'Surely at some point,' Lady Virginia began, 'you must have encountered—'

It was time to put an end to this, so he put up the one argument he knew there would be no getting around. 'My lady, there's another condition, and it's one I cannot tell Mater. I watched how father struggled to keep Mater ignorant of his Elemental work, the difficulties and even heartache it caused for both of them, and I decided a long time ago that I won't marry anyone who isn't an Elemental Master in her own right. I must have someone I don't have to keep that sort of secret from, and how likely is that?'

There. That will silence her. He actually had sworn that—before the war—so he wasn't lying. Not that he ever expected to take up the wand of an Air Master again. Merely dropping some of his shields had been shudderingly difficult; he could not even think about working real magic again without bringing on an attack of panic.

Lady Virginia looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. 'Perhaps more likely than you think.'

He snorted. 'They're not exactly thick on the ground,' was all he said. He tried not to think of Peter Scott with raw envy. Curse the man—he had the perfect partner, a woman who was an Elemental Master, brilliant, self- sufficient, and a stunning, exotic beauty.

Not that Mater wouldn't drop dead on the spot if I brought home a half-breed Hindu.

She was the one woman he had ever met who could actually understand, really and truly, what the war did to a man, did to his soul. Maybe that was the biggest problem with the girls of his set. They didn't, and couldn't. None of them had volunteered as nurses or VAD girls in France or Belgium. None of them had the least idea of the things that lay inside his mind; none of them would ever want to know. They preferred to think of the war the way those first volunteers had, as a chance for glory, and if one must die, to die nobly. They didn't know and couldn't understand that there was nothing noble or glorious about those churned-over fields, the dead zones of mud and razor-wire. And if he tried to tell them, they would turn away in horror.

Doctor Maya knew, and didn't flinch from it. But how many like her were there?

'It has been my experience, limited though it is, that if you are really determined in that direction, the partner will find you when you are both ready,' she said gravely. 'But I am sure that makes me sound like some sort of mystic, so I will keep my opinions to myself. Just keep an open mind as you promised—and open eyes as well.'

She retreated to the house, leaving him staring down at the garden, wondering bitterly if anyone who hadn't experienced the Front could ever understand what it did to someone inside.

We look, act, and talk like our old selves, but we've been damaged, each and every one of us, he thought. We're scarred inside. Like rosebuds with canker-worms at their hearts. We look the same, but even if we live, we'll never blossom. And there is nothing that will change that. Nothing at all.

24

July 15, 1917

Broom, Warwickshire

SUNSHINE AND FRESH AIR FLOODED the kitchen, and The Arrows was very peaceful without the Robinsons and Howse present. So peaceful, that Eleanor wondered what it would be like to live here like this forever—if somehow, the Robinsons would just never return.

'I've thought and I've reasoned, and I've looked,' Sarah said aloud, startling Eleanor as she concentrated on a particularly obtuse paragraph about the Hanged Man card. 'And much as I hate to admit that I'm wrong—well, I'm wrong.'

Eleanor blinked, and stared at her mentor. Sarah was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the kitchen, staring down at a pile of stones with markings on them. Rune-stones, she called them, and she used them not only to try and give her some direction for the future, but to try and learn what was going on around her that might be hidden from her. If, for instance, someone was sick enough that he needed to see the medical doctor and not just depend on her herbal remedies. There were many country folk who still were suspicious of the doctor and veterinarian, and sometimes it took Sarah a deal of convincing to get them to go to either gentleman.

'Wrong about what?' Eleanor asked. It took a lot to get Sarah to admit she was wrong about