Phoenix and Ashes (11 page)

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—”

“A
little magic here, a little magic there; hers more than mine, you understand,
since I’m but a mere Witch, and she was a Master. But—oh, she would
speak to the Salamanders of a night, and find out whose chimneys were getting
over-choked with soot, and I’d have a word with the owner of the house
by-and-by, and Neil Frandsen would come along and clean it, and there’d
be no chimney fire, do you see?”

Eleanor
blinked again. “Is that the plumber, Mr.Frandsen? The man that cleans
chimneys with a shotgun?”

Sarah
threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, aye! But less often then than he
does now, I’m afraid—he was nimbler when he was young; now he
don’t like to go atop the houses much. But you see what we did? And there
was other things—
never
a house-fire have we had hereabouts once
she came into her powers, nor a barn-fire, and no accidents with fire either.
If a cottager’s baby tumbled
into
a fire, it tumbled right back
out again, with just enough scorching on his smock to make his mama take better
heed. No fires from a coal hopping out; no curtains blowing into candles nor
gas-flames. Sometimes it isn’t so much doing things that’s
important as it is keeping them from happening.” She sighed. “I
remember how she used to put you in your cradle next to the fire, or once you
were old enough, just on a blanket. No worries you’d be burned, of
course—the Salamanders used to frisk and play around you, and you’d
laugh and try to catch them with your little hands. Clear enough it was,
you’d taken after her. And then—she died.”

“She
drowned,” Eleanor whispered, and shuddered. All her life, the one thing
she’d been afraid of was water. Sarah nodded.

“The
enemy Element,” Sarah said sadly. “The Element that hates hers; the
river flooded, you see, and to this day, I don’t know if it was accident
or an enemy. She could have told me, but—well, the river flooded and
washed out the bridge as she was trying to get across to get home to you. Her
allies had no power to save her. And your father, well, he couldn’t bear
to look upon me, who was her close friend, so I stayed away. And you seemed to
be flourishing, and I heard about you going up to university and all, and I
thought, well, well enough, I’ll leave her be, and when she starts to
come into her power, I’ll send to the Fire Masters who’ve people at
Oxford, and they’ll take on the teaching of you. So much more clever than
I, those dons and scholars—”

“But
She
came.” Eleanor’s voice cracked.

“Then
She
came.” Sarah’s voice hardened. “My Element, but
a Master, more powerful than me, and better connected by far. In magic as in
everything else, it’s who you know that gets you places, and what
you’ve got.” Sarah grimaced. “She’s trusted by them as
should know better, but don’t; there’s no help there—yet. I
could no more stand against her than your mother could stand against the flood.
But
you
are coming into
your
powers, and I can set your feet
on the right path, and you can break her, if you grow strong enough. And this
is where I can make a start—”

She
got up out of the chair where she was sitting and walked over to the hearth.
She stared down at the hearthstones for a moment, then bent, and traced a
symbol with her index finger on one. It glowed for a moment, a warm, lovely
golden-amber, before sinking into the stone.

“Blast
her,” Sarah muttered under her breath. “She’s stronger than I
thought.”

“What?”
Eleanor asked.

“It’s
a spell that will answer to Fire as well as Earth; it’s what She did to
bind you here. I know a counter that will work within her spell to free you
from this house and hearth for a few hours at a time, though you won’t be
able to go farther than, say, Longacre,” the witch said.
“You’ll have to learn how to work magic of your own to make her
spell answer to you, how to bend it to your will for a little—we’ll
start you learning Fire magic now, if you’re ready, but definitely before
she comes back.”

“I—Sarah,
I don’t know, this all seems so—” She was going to say,
“impossible to believe,” but at exactly that moment, something
looked at her out of the hearth-fire. She looked back, feeling her eyes widen
as she recognized the fiery-eyed lizard of her dreams.

“Well,
and there you are,” Sarah said, with triumph, following her startled
glance. “Salamander. Sure sign of you coming into your powers, no matter
what
she
’s done.”

“You
can see it too?” she asked incredulously.

“Well,
of course. I can
see
the Elementals, and if they feel like it, they
might help me out, but I can’t command them, not even Earth. I’m
not a Master,” Sarah said; wistfully, Eleanor thought. “But you can
command the ones of Fire; because you’re a Fire Master, you’ll have
their respect, and because of your mother, you already have their loyalty, and
the only way you’d lose that would be to do something they didn’t
like.”

“What
do you mean,
I have their loyalty
?” Eleanor asked incredulously.

“Hold
out your hand,” Sarah replied. “To the fire, I mean. You’ll
see.”

Dubiously
Eleanor did so, and before she could pull away with surprise, that same
something leapt out of the flames and began twining around her hands like a
friendly ferret. It
looked
like a lizard made of flame, and it felt
like sun-warmed silk slithering through her fingers and around her wrists.

“It’s
not burning me—” she gasped, staring at the creature in
fascination.

“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.

“And
you
should
shiver,” Sarah said, noting it. “Do believe me
in that. It would be very, very bad for you. She would bind you in so many
spells that you would scarcely be able to walk without being under compulsion,
and
I
should not be able to do a thing about them. Never forget that
she
is a Master, and until you have Mastery of your own, she can bind you by that
finger beneath the hearthstone to whatever she wills.”

Eleanor
glanced over at the hearth, and shuddered again. “I won’t
forget,” she said, quietly.

“Then
eat,” the witch replied, “And we’ll work tonight until
you’re too tired to carry on.”

And
so they did, though to her credit, Sarah Chase helped with the washing up
before they did. Over and over again, Eleanor spun out the cinnamon-tasting,
warm-red power of the Element of Fire from the crackling blaze on the hearth,
and built it into an arching dome around herself, then sent the power back into
the hearth and erased all traces of the energy from the very air around her.
She wondered now why she had never noticed the power before this, though;
although it was easier to see amid the flames of the real fire, there were
wisps of it everywhere, like the last breath of fog above the grass on a spring
morning, or the trailing bits of smoke above a chimney. There were other colors
of power there too, now that she knew what to look for—a warm amber glow
that was somehow as sweet as honey that seemed to surround Sarah Chase like
sunlight, a hint here or there of a thread of blue or a flicker of green—but
none of them called to her as that scarlet flame did.