Phoenix and Ashes

It must be a tradesman. Or someone about a bill. It couldn't be a delivery; Alison was punctilious about canceling all deliveries when she expected to be gone. The old cook had been quite incensed about that—'As if we're of no account and can live on bacon and tinned peas while she swans about London!'—but she had even done so back when the house was full of servants.

Not that I would mind if there had been a mistake! A delivery of baked goods would be jam on top of the cream. . . .

The knocking came again. Whoever was there wasn't going away. She got to her feet, and slowly opened the door.

There was a woman there—perhaps Alison's age, or a little older, but she was nothing like Alison. Her graying brown hair was done up in a knot at the back of her head from which little wisps were straying. Friendly, amber-brown eyes gazed warmly at Eleanor, though the focus suggested that the gaze was a trifle short-sighted. Her round face had both plenty of little lines and very pink cheeks. She was dressed quite plainly, in a heavy woolen skirt and smock, with an apron, rather like a local farmer's wife, complete with woolen shawl wrapped around herself. She smiled at Eleanor, who found herself smiling back.

'Hello, my dear,' the woman said, in a soothing, low voice that tickled the back of Eleanor's mind with a sensation of familiarity. 'I'm Sarah Chase.'

Sarah Chase! Eleanor knew that name, though she had never actually met the woman. Sarah Chase was supposed—at least by the children of Broom—to be a witch!

Not a bad witch, though—she didn't live in a cobwebby old hut at the edge of the forest, she lived right in the middle of Broom itself, in a tidy little Tudor cottage literally sandwiched in between two larger buildings. On the right was the Swan pub, and on the left, the village shop. Any children bold enough to stand on the threshold of the door and try to peer into the heavily curtained windows never were able to see anything, and the extremely public situation meant that their mothers usually heard about the adventure and they got a tongue-lashing about rude behavior and nosy-parkers. No one in Eleanor's circle of friends had ever seen Sarah Chase, in fact—

But here she was, standing on the threshold, a covered basket in one hand, the other outstretched a little towards Eleanor.

'Well, dear,' the woman prompted gently. 'Aren't you going to ask your godmother inside?'

Godmother?

Her mind was still taking that in, as her mouth said, without any thought on her part, 'Come in, Godmother.' And the village witch stepped across the threshold and entered the kitchen like a beam of sunshine.

For the third time in her life, Eleanor's life turned upside down.

She sat, in something of a daze, on a stool beside the kitchen fire, where her prosaic soup-pot full of beans and the end of the ham simmered, and listened to impossible things.

Things which she never would have believed—if her finger wasn't buried beneath the hearth-stone.

Sarah looked perfectly comfortable in the sunny kitchen with its blackened beams and whitewashed walls. Eleanor never even thought to invite her into the parlor. But then, these were not particularly discussions for the parlor.

Eleanor was hearing, for the first time, that the woman her father had thought he had married was no more than a fraction of what she actually was.

'... so your father never knew, of course,' Sarah concluded. 'Never knew that your mother was a Fire Master, or that we were such friends, she and I, never even knew such a thing as magic existed at all.' Her cheeks went pinker, and she gave Eleanor an apologetic little shrug. 'That's the way of it, usually, when one of Us marries one of Them, Them as has no magic. We generally keep it to ourselves, for more often than not it does no good and a great deal of harm to try and make them understand. The ones with minds stuck in the world they can see are usually made very unhappy by such things. Either they think they have gone mad, or they think their spouse has, and in either case it only ends in tears and tragedy.' She nodded wisely. 'Like the Fenyxes. Him and his father, they have the magic—or Lord Devlin did before he died, but Lady Devlin, she's got no more idea than a bird.'

Eleanor gaped at her. This was somehow harder to believe than that her own mother had magic. The Fenyx family? Were what Sarah called Elemental Masters?

Sarah went right on, not noticing Eleanor's state of shock—or else, determined to get out everything she needed to say without interruption. 'So we met here, of a night, or of an afternoon, over cups of tea as two old friends from such a small place often do, and your father would look in on us and laugh and ask us if we were setting the world aright, and of course, we never told him that we were—in small ways, of course, but small ways have the habit of adding up.'

'You were—setting the world aright?' Eleanor repeated, and shook her head. 'But how—'