“If you would be so kind, I would greatly appreciate your help, Sarah,” Elizabeth replied with all sincerity, though her eyes were twinkling. Marina knew why; her feigned errand had gotten an unexpected touch of veracity.
“Pleased to, ma’am,” Sarah replied, and turned back to her cooking with a flush of pleasure.
But Marina knew that the “little workroom” was the one room in the house used for serious and involved Magical work. Margherita had put compulsions upon the door that worked better than any orders forbidding Jenny or Sarah—or anyone else who was not a magician—from entering. That was a special ability of the Earth-Master, to create compulsions that worked even on those without a hint of magic in their souls. Oh, others could do it, but the trick came most easily to Earth Masters.
Each compulsion was gently tailored to the individual. For Jenny, the moment she touched the door, she would be under the impression that she had just cleaned the room and was leaving. Sarah, on the other hand, would suddenly think that there must be something on the stove or in the oven that needed tending. Visitors would believe that the door was locked, even though it wasn’t, and would promptly forget about the room the moment they turned away.
“That will be fine, Elizabeth. Would you like Marina to help you?” Margherita replied casually.
“I certainly would! You know me—completely hopeless when it comes to organization!” Elizabeth laughed, and the conversation went on to other things, leaving Marina tingling with excitement and anticipation.
Elizabeth lingered over her tea until Marina finished her breakfast, then nodded at her as she rose. Marina jumped to her feet, and followed the older woman out of the kitchen and down to the workroom. As an Elemental Master herself, Elizabeth was not affected by the compulsions on the door, and opened it without a pause, beckoning to Marina to follow.
According to Uncle Thomas, many Elemental Masters preferred to have a religious cast to their magical workrooms; they often had an altar and religious icons such as crucifixes, statues of ancient gods or goddesses, censers for incense, and other religious paraphernalia. But since this room was shared by three—counting Marina, four—magicians, all of whom had their own very definite ideas about their magic, the compromise had been reached of leaving it bare. Uncle Thomas had installed cupboards with shutters to close them on all of the walls, and whatever each person felt was absolutely necessary to his or her working lived in the cupboards until needed. There were two benches pushed up against one wall, and a small table (which could presumably serve as an altar) against another. Although the room did not have a fireplace of its own, the back wall of the library fireplace radiated quite enough warmth for the small space.
And it had only one small window, ivy-covered and high. Marina would have had to stand on tiptoe to see through it. So it would be fairly difficult for anyone to spy on whatever was going on in here.
The floor was of slate, like the rest of the ground floor of the farmhouse; the panels of the shutters were of wood with grain that suggested far-off landscapes and distant hills. Between the panels, Uncle Thomas had carved the graceful trunks of trees that never grew in any living forest. The two benches were also Uncle Thomas’ work, as was the table.
“Close the door, dear,” Elizabeth said, and pulled one of the benches out further into the room while Marina did as she asked. “Now, come sit down, please.”
Obediently, Marina did so.
“One of the great advantages of using a permanent workroom is that the basic shields are already in place, and one needn’t bother with putting them up,” Elizabeth said with satisfaction. “I know that you’ve been taught perfectly well in all the basics, so I shan’t bother going over them again. Nor am I going to put you through a viva voce exam on the subject.”
Oh! Well that’s a relief! Marina had been expecting something of the sort, and was very pleased to discover she was going to escape it.
“No,” Elizabeth continued, “What you need first from me is the understanding of how you access the energy of your own element.”
“Shouldn’t we be outside for that?” Marina asked curiously. “Near the stream or something?”
But Elizabeth shook her head. “Nothing of the sort. Water is all around you; in the ground beneath your feet, in the air—good heavens, especially in the air around here!” She laughed, and Marina giggled nervously. “You would be hard pressed to isolate yourself from a single element; even in the heart of the driest desert on earth there is water somewhere, if only in your own body. Each element has a sphere in which it can dominate, but none can be eliminated. Now, I assume you know how to recognize the energy of Water?”
Marina nodded.
“Good. Then call upon your inner eye, and watch what I do.”
Marina clasped her hands in her lap and let fall the guard she usually kept on that sense that Thomas called Sight, but which was so much more than merely seeing beyond the material world. And the moment she did so, she was aware that the room was alive with energies.
The golds and browns of Earth Magic and the reds of Fire invested the shields around them, forming an ever-changing tapestry of moving color, scent, taste, and sensation. Earth magic had a special scent to Marina, of soil freshly-turned by the plow; its taste, rich and smooth, vanilla-flavored cream. And it seemed to wrap her in warm fur. Whereas Fire tasted of cinnamon, smelled of smoke, and felt like the sun on her skin just before she was about to be sunburned.
Water, though, smelled exactly like the air the moment before it was about to rain, mingled with new-mown hay; it tasted of all the waters of the world, faintly sweet and cool, and it felt exactly like chilled silk sliding across her bare arms. In color it was every shade of green there had ever been, from the tender, yellow-green of unfolding leaves, to the deep black-green of ancient pines in a thunderstorm. This was what she saw now, investing the very air of the room, condensing out of it like fog, or like her breath on a frosty morning, or a cloud blooming overhead in the sky. Tender threads, tiny tendrils of it, coalescing out of nowhere, each one a different shade of green; they sprang up and flowed toward Elizabeth, joining thread to thread to make cords, streams, all of them flowing to her and into her, and she began to glow with the growing power she had gathered into herself.
“Oh, my!” Marina breathed. But she wasn’t going to just sit there and admire—Elizabeth had said to watch what the older woman was doing, and she set herself to finding out just how Elizabeth was doing this.
It took some time of studying and puzzling before she figured it out.
The clue was in what Elizabeth had said earlier, that the energy was everywhere. It was, and it could be coaxed into a more coherent form by application of the energies of her own mind, the ones that Uncle Thomas had already taught her how to use.
“You see?” Elizabeth said softly, and she nodded. “Good.” Abruptly the older woman stopped gathering in the energies and looked at her pupil expectantly. “Now you try it.”
Knowing how it was done and doing it herself were two different things… akin to the difference between knowing how to ride a horse and actually staying on its back. But this was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it?
Be careful what you ask for, she reminded herself ruefully, and set to work.
And work it certainly was. Elizabeth made it look so effortless, but compared with dipping energy out of the aura of a free-flowing stream, a spring, or a deep well, it was anything but effortless.
Exhausting was more like it. It took a peculiar combination of relaxation and concentration that was infernally hard to master, and by the time she had managed to coax the first tentative tendrils of power out of the aether, she was limp with fatigue.