Phoenix and Ashes

'And I'll wager you've never been burned in your life,' Sarah replied triumphantly. 'Have you?'

'Only—' Eleanor began, then stopped. She had been going to say, 'only when Carolyn cauterized my finger,' but then she realized that she had not actually been burned, not even then. The bleeding had been stopped, and the wound sealed, but no more, and it hadn't been a burn that had caused her so much pain, it had been the wound itself and the fever that followed. '—ah, I haven't,' she admitted, watching the Salamander weave around her outstretched fingers.

'What—what does all this mean?' she asked at last.

'That I need to begin teaching you what I can, and there is no time like the present. Unless you had something planned?' Sarah tilted her head to the side. 'A garden party, perhaps?'

That brought a smile to Eleanor's face, and a rueful shrug. 'So long as my stepmother isn't here—'

'We must take advantage of that. Let your friend go back to his fire and we'll begin.'

By nightfall, Eleanor knew a hundred times more about magic than she had before Sarah knocked on the door. She knew about casting circles of protection and containment, a little about summoning, and something about the Elementals of her own Element, although the only one she had seen as yet was the little Salamander, the weakest of the lot. And she was far more tired than she would have thought likely. It wasn't as if she'd been working, after all, just sitting and walking about the kitchen, nothing more.

'It takes it out of you,' Sarah said solemnly, as the two of them worked on a little supper in the evening gloom. 'And you're lucky that woman is of another Element, or she'd know when you were working, as she'd be able to cut you off from your power. As it is, she's strong enough to bind you and command you.'

By this point, Eleanor had gotten well past the suspension of disbelief and was at the point where she would have accepted the presence of an invisible second moon in the sky if Sarah had insisted it was there. Part of this was due to fatigue, but most of it was simply that she had taken in so many strange things that her mind was simply fogging over.

'Why am I so tired?' she asked, setting down plates on the kitchen table, while Sarah ladled soup into bowls and cut slices of bread for both of them.

'Because the power you've been using to cast circles and all has to come from you yourself, lovey,' Sarah replied.

Eleanor frowned, and rubbed her temple with the back of her wrist. 'But I thought magic just was— magic!'

'Something out of nothing, you mean?' Sarah laughed. 'Not likely, my girl. The only time you get power at no cost to you is when your Elementals grant it to you, or you take it from someone else. And I'll give you a guess where your stepmother gets much of hers from.'

Eleanor sat down in her chair. 'She'll be back in a day or two—and what will I do then?' she asked. 'How am I going to see you, or keep learning?' It was a good question; what would she do? She was kept busy from dawn to dark and then some; how could she ever get time to continue learning and practicing?

'Does she lock the doors?' Sarah asked. 'You'll wait until the house is asleep, and then you'll draw the glyph and bend her spell and come to me for an hour or two.' She smiled slyly. 'You do the cooking, don't you? Well, one advantage of being a mere Witch is that I don't rely on power to do everything. I'll give you some things to put in their food that will send them to bed early on the nights you're to come, and keep them there a-snoring, and they'll be nothing the wiser!'

Eleanor blinked. 'Is that safe?' she asked, dubiously. 'I mean, what if they—taste it, or something?'

'They won't. And I'll have a charm on it to make sure they eat enough of it to do what I want.' Sarah seemed quite confident that she could do exactly what she claimed. Eleanor wasn't nearly as confident—but then, she didn't have anything to lose by trying, either. 'Now, you eat,' Sarah continued, 'so you get your energy back, and we'll practice those shields and wards again.'

Eleanor sighed, and applied herself to her food. She wanted to protest; she hadn't had a moment to herself all day. When she hadn't been learning the 'shields and wards' that Sarah thought were so important, and which didn't seem very much like magic to her, she'd been taking in the laundry, putting it away, and tidying up. She had been so looking forward to another afternoon in the library—but the promise that she might be able to break herself free of Alison's magic was so tempting that she hadn't so much as whispered a complaint.

As if she had heard all those thoughts, Sarah looked up from her dinner and smiled at her. 'I know it's hard, my dear,' she said, in a kindly voice. 'Cruel hard on you, it is. But I'm having to teach you the hard way, to bring up the protections and take them down without leaving a trace for your wretched stepmother to find. Until you can do that, you daren't even try to work magic here, for she will know, and that will be no good thing at all.'

Eleanor shuddered at the idea of her stepmother discovering such a thing.