Steadfast (19 page)

“Cor! That looked even better than in rehearsal!” the Breeches Girl said in admiration.
“How’d you get them little lights to run up and down the dress? I know you ain’t got
any spangles on it, so it wasn’t that—”

Thinking quickly, Katie replied, “It’s the silk, it reflects light ever so. Mrs. Littleton
is brilliant.”

That was all the young woman needed. She nodded wisely. “Ain’t every music hall this
size has a wardrobe mistress, much less one as good as she is.”

Katie nodded, and the young woman gave her a kiss of congratulations, then ran off
for her own dressing room. But before Katie could follow, Lionel grabbed her elbow.

“Once you’ve changed, meet me and Jack in my workroom,” he whispered urgently. “We
need to talk about what just happened onstage.”

10

K
ATIE would really rather have gone straight to her dressing room, given herself a
good wash, and had a bit of a laydown on her little sofa. Perhaps she could ask one
of the other girls to bring back some cucumber sandwiches from a tea shop, but if
not, she had some bread and butter and a bottle of lemonade. As exhilarating as her
first star turn had been, it had also been exhausting. But she knew from Lionel’s
tone that whatever it was that he needed to discuss, it needed to be talked over
now,
and she had the feeling it had to do with the “lights” the Breeches Girl had seen
running up and down her costume.

She
hadn’t noticed any such thing, but then again, she had been rather busy, and the
billowing folds of the gown had rather effectively obscured her vision a great deal
of the time. With the scarlet and gold lights from the magic lanterns playing on the
fabric, it had been very like being inside a furnace.

She took great care cleaning off her makeup; if she wasn’t going to get the chance
for a wash between shows, she wanted to be as clean as she could.

And she hoped that they would remember that she only had so long before she would
have to get her costume back on for the evening show.

When she made her way down the spiral stairs into the ground floor, Mrs. Littleton’s
room was quite dark, but Lionel’s workshop was heavily illuminated. She ventured in
to find Lionel waiting with open lemonade bottles and some newspaper-wrapped parcels.

“I didn’t think you’d mind some fish and chips,” he said gesturing. “I sent one of
the lads for them.”

Well, ordinarily it wasn’t what she would have preferred; it was hideously hot on
stage, and she had just put on the most difficult performance of her life. But it
was much cooler down in this room, and she discovered she was starving. She sat down
with Lionel and proceeded to devour hot fried fish and chips with all the enthusiasm
of any of the pleasure-seekers on the Boardwalk.

“Jack will join us after he has gotten someone to watch the door for an hour or so,”
Lionel said, after taking a long pull from his bottle. “He is the expert on Fire magic,
not I. But, this is why we urgently needed to speak with you. I presume that you didn’t
notice anything . . . odd . . . during that last dance?”

“I didn’t,” she admitted, “But the Breeches Girl—ah, I think her name is Victoria
Sanderston?—she said there were little lights running through it. I told her it was
the special fabric.”

“Swift thinking. Yes, there were. I believe, although I do not know for certain, that
those were Fire sprites. I have personally never seen them, only heard them described.”
He frowned. “This is what is troubling. They came by themselves. You aren’t a Master,
and yet they came by themselves.”

She paused with a chip halfway to her mouth. “Is this bad?”

“Well . . .” he shrugged. “I don’t know, you see. Jack might. The problem is that
you are Fire, and Fire creatures are notoriously emotional. The Elementals, I mean,
not necessarily you, personally. They respond strongly to the emotions of Elemental
mages—and more than that I don’t know. That is why we are waiting for Jack.”

Many hungry days had taught her there was no point in letting worry cause her to waste
good food. She finished eating the chip and reached for another.

Jack arrived sooner than she had expected, and sat down and reached hungrily for the
third packet of fish and chips without saying anything. Lionel simply forestalled
any need to ask questions by describing what he had seen during the Fire Dance.

Jack nodded. “I see your concerns,” he said. “and they’re real.” He turned to Katie.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” he said apologetically. “I know you are already overburdened
with things you must do already, but you and I are going to have to make time for
lessons in magic.”

She sighed. After what Lionel had said, she had been afraid of something like this.

“You see, the problem is that for some reason, you are attracting Fire Elementals
to you to help you without your asking for any to come,” he explained.

“Well, you did say that they won’t always come even if I ask,” she pointed out. “That
is why we have the electric sparker to set off the flash powder in case the salamanders
are bored.”

“But you already asked them,” said Jack, finishing the last of his chips and folding
the paper neatly into a perfect square. “These sprites came without you asking, and
they did exactly as you would have wanted. Now . . . think about this, Miss Kate.
What if someone made you angry? On your own, of course, I am certain you would never
ask a Fire Elemental to attack the person you were angry with. But what if they did
it because they felt your anger? Fire Elementals are emotional and respond to strong
emotion. Many of them don’t think as we understand thinking. You saw how the firebirds
responded when we were in danger from the firework rocket. They simply acted. My fear
is that if you are angered by something . . . some other Fire Elemental will simply
act on your behalf.”

She looked at him quizzically. “What harm could they do?” she asked. “No one can see
them but us. They can barely set off the flashpots . . .”

“They could find a pile of old papers, or a tinder-dry attic, or a heap of oily rags,”
Jack replied, sternly. “And then someone’s house could be on fire.”

She stared at him, stricken.

“But—you said that if I—”

“I said that if you yourself deliberately caused Fire Elementals to harm someone,
the good ones would abandon you,” Jack corrected. “But if it was their decision, out
of anger, and not yours . . .”

She felt numb; some of that must have shown in her face, for Jack’s expression softened.

“This is why I need to give you lessons, so that sort of thing never happens,” he
said. “It
is
something that can be taught. It will just take time.” And now he smiled. “One of
the reasons why I’m the doorman here is that I have an understanding with the Fire
Elementals. You have seen how easy it would be for a fire to start here in the theater.
They will come and tell me if one does.”

Well, she didn’t see that she had any other choice. “When?” she asked with resignation.

“Whenever we can squeeze in a moment. Between the matinee and the evening performance.
On dark days.” Lionel smiled at her with encouragement. “You have been so apt at all
of this that I am certain it will not take long.”

Well, she was glad that he was certain.

Because she was anything but.

•   •   •

Jack went back to his post in a state of bemusement. Normally this sort of thing only
happened to children. Elementals were attracted to the innocent, and innocent, young
mages, who were not yet conditioned by the parents into disbelief in the wondrous
were
very
attractive indeed. So the lesser Elementals were drawn to them; in fact, in the case
of a Fire Mage, salamanders sometimes turned up in the dead of winter to warm their
beds or dance in the fires of their nursery.

Fire sprites though—those were shy. In fact, he had never personally seen any. For
them to not only turn up, but to make themselves visible to ordinary humans, said
something; he just wasn’t sure what it was.

At least Katie wasn’t fighting this. He hoped he would be able to make it enjoyable
for her, as it had been for him as a child.

His father was a Fire mage; his mother a country farmwife. She was a happy and incurious
creature, and he and his father loved her very much. If she even noticed that he and
his father sometimes did odd things together, she must simply have put it down to
the mysterious ways of fathers teaching their sons, and it simply did not concern
her.

His sisters were exactly like her; he wouldn’t call them
stolid,
for they certainly weren’t that. All of them were very much alive to the ordinary
beauties of the farm. They reveled in lambing time, tended the flowers around the
cottage with tender care, and often stood side by side in the doorway, admiring a
particularly wonderful sunset. They just couldn’t see past those things, and didn’t
care to.

Jack wasn’t certain if the way he had been taught was typical for a Fire Mage or not;
it certainly was a method that suited him, and, he hoped, was going to suit Kate.

It relied on patience.

As part of his training, his father had taught him how to bring wild birds to eat
out of his hand—this was shortly after he had prattled about the things he had seen
dancing in the hearth, his mother had laughed at his childish imagination, and his
father had known that his son had inherited the family talent. It had been winter,
which was the best possible time to make the trick work—and knowing how much mother
loved birds, his father had included her in it as well.

They began by making up a straw-man, dressed in clothing destined for the rag-bag
and draped conspicuously in a cheap, bright-colored shawl that had been given to his
mother, and that she had always disliked as “gaudy.” One hand was outstretched, and
every day they put grain in it. At first, of course, the birds were wary and avoided
the straw man, but gradually their hunger overcame them, and they ventured near, and
began to eat from the hand. This was when Jack’s father took the place of the straw
man. He had an uncanny ability to sit perfectly still, and the birds didn’t notice
the substitution. But the taming was not complete—for the idea was to get
any
of them accepted. So Jack’s father had left off the shawl, but brought back the straw
man. The wariness didn’t last for more than half a day. Then he took the place of
the straw man again, but this time, instead of staying completely still, he began
talking to the birds. They scattered at the first word, of course, but soon came back.

Eventually, all it took was for anyone in the household to come out of the house and
hold out a handful of grain, and the little birds would swarm them the way tame pigeons
in a big city would swarm people with bags of bread-crumbs. Of course, none of them
had ever been to a city, so having wild birds so tame was a wonder and a joy to Jack’s
mother, and then his sisters.

And in the meantime, Jack had learned the patience it was going to take to coax the
Fire Elementals to come out and communicate with him, not just dance for him to see.
As volatile as Fire was—and given father’s patient skill—it took a lot less time than
it had to teach the birds to come.

He had the feeling that Kate had the patience. She certainly had the persistence.
It took a very long time to learn the sorts of acrobatics she could do—time, and the
willingness to put up with pain until muscles were properly stretched and trained.

Until now she had accepted her gift for magic, but she had not
embraced
it. That was what concerned him the most. If she was going to properly control her
ability, and herself, then she would have to do more than come to terms with it. She
would have to find joy in it; without the joy, there would be no true control.

•   •   •

Katie hoped with all her heart that Lionel and Jack were not expecting her to turn
up for some sort of lesson after the evening performance. She went through her dances
in a state of nervous, heightened awareness, and sure enough, she caught sight during
the Fire Dance of tiny sparks dancing along the edges of the fabric, moving too fast
for her to get a good look at them.

The audience was receptive, and enthusiastic, but not wildly so—they didn’t throw
their hats onstage, stand on the tables, or even stand up to applaud. Certainly it
was enough to make Charlie happy, and to count as a success. She was as wrung-out
as an old dishrag, however. This was much, much harder than acting as Lionel’s assistant
and dancing in the chorus. Still if she hadn’t had those “lessons” hanging over her
head, she would have been extremely happy. Not only would Charlie keep her act on
for the summer, he would probably keep her on as a regular, just like Lionel. The
same act would probably do until next summer, and by then, she’d have figured out
how to make a new act out of contortion, the ribbon and the dress.

He’s probably going to make me pay him for the dress out of my salary, though . . .
Well, she couldn’t blame him; it had been shockingly expensive for all those yard
and yards of silk. Enough to make ten regular dancing dresses, for Mrs. Littleton
had underestimated the yardage the first time she had brought it out! And she couldn’t
blame Mrs. Littleton for insisting on being paid for the gown before she allowed it
to be used onstage. In her place, Katie would have done the same, and Katie had noted
a distinct improvement in the Wardrobe Mistress’s attitude since Charlie had paid
her for the thing.

I want a good wash-up at least,
she thought, as she cleaned the makeup from the performance from her face. She thought
longingly of a bathtub full of cool water, and cold fruit soup. Was it so wrong that
all she wanted to do was bask in success, and settle in for a well-earned sleep?