Phoenix and Ashes

power of the Earth Master, since they are bound to earth for—well, for whatever reason. They are the unquiet dead, who never took the step through the door of the afterlife. Some Earth Masters spend their entire lives going about freeing such things and sending them on their way through the door they have been avoiding.'

'Why?' Lauralee asked.

'Because some Earth Masters are idiots,' she said, surprising a giggle out of both of the girls. 'It makes about as much sense to me as going out to be a missionary. Both careers are fraught with hardship and difficulty, and ultimately in both cases you are dealing with creatures who have little or no interest in what you are trying to tell them.'

'But you—you told them what they wanted to hear?' Lauralee hazarded.

Alison smiled. Well, it looked as if at least one of the girls had inherited some of her intelligence. 'That is how you bind them to your target instead of their own,' she explained. 'After all, most of the time the target of their hatred is as dead as they are, and generally has more sense than to linger. You tell them how your target represents everything they hate. Then you give them enough power to do what they want, and turn them loose.'

'Can they break through the protections on Longacre?' Carolyn wanted to know.

'Some might. But even if they don't they are powerful enough to force Reggie to see them, awake or asleep.' She sighed with content. This had truly been a job well done. 'We'll let them torment him for a while, and use up all that extra power I gave them. Then you'll move in.'

'But how will we banish ghosts?' Carolyn cried. 'We can't even make a simple love-charm work on him!'

'Ah—'Alison laid a finger aside her nose and nodded. 'There's the beauty of it. Once they use up that extra power I gave them, the geas I put on them will start to fade, and they'll lose the ability to make him see them. And as the geas fades, they'll forget why they're haunting Reggie and start to drift back to their old homes. You won't have to do anything, yet Reggie will think that it's you.'

They both stared at her, looking awestruck. They hadn't given her that particular look since they were tiny children, and she had amused them by catching a faun and making it dance.

And as she heard the chattering of the motor in the far distance and chivvied the girls into cleaning up the site and heading back down the path to the road, it occurred to her that this evening might represent a triumph in more ways than one.

Not only had she gained supremacy over an army of the dead, she had once more gained the upper hand, most decisively, over her own children. They would be long in forgetting this.

And that was—a good thing.

15

April 30-May 1, 1917

Longacre Park, Warwickshire

REGGIE HAD COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN—until his mother reminded him of it over dinner—that the next day was May Day, the day of the school treat at Longacre and the school prize day. Well, why should he remember? The day of the school treat and prize day had always been June first, not May Day when he had been growing up.

But the war had changed this, as it had so many other things. School ended early now, so that children could help with the farm work their fathers and brothers were not here to attend to. The country, and more importantly, the army, needed to be fed; farm work came before schoolwork. And the traditional May Day festivities were not nearly so festive as they had been. There would be no church fair, or at least, not the sort that delighted children— the half-gypsy traveling fair folk with their swinging chairs and carousels, their booths of cheap gimcrackery and games like coconut shy and pitch-toss were not traveling any more. In fact, most of them were off in the trenches themselves, and the old men, children, and women that were left simply could not cope by themselves. With sugar and other things being rationed now, there would be no stalls featuring the forbidden foods that one was only allowed to eat at a fair. The church fair would be a very sad and much diminished version of its former self. Someone would probably set up a hoop-la game and a coconut shy, but the prizes would not be the glittery fairy dolls and wildly colored crockery of the past—no, they would be home-made rag-babies and whatever someone had found in the attic that hadn't made it onto the white elephant table. There would not be a greased-pig race, not with pigs being war resources. There would be no egg-and-spoon race for the same reason. Oh, there could have been a race using rocks or plaster eggs, or potatoes, but it wouldn't have been as much fun without the hazard of breaking the egg. No one left in Broom was nimble enough to climb the greased pole, so that had been canceled as well. There would be no Morris dancers, who by tradition were all men. No procession through the town of the hobby-horse, green man, Robin and Maid Marian— once again, tradition decreed these May Day heroes must be men. There would be a maypole, but only girls really took pleasure in the dance around it.