Phoenix and Ashes

He snorted. "They're not exactly thick on the ground," was all he said. He tried not to think of Peter Scott with raw envy. Curse the man—he had the perfect partner, a woman who was an Elemental Master, brilliant, self-sufficient, and a stunning, exotic beauty.

Not that Mater wouldn't drop dead on the spot if I brought home a half-breed Hindu.

She was the one woman he had ever met who could actually understand, really and truly, what the war did to a man, did to his soul. Maybe that was the biggest problem with the girls of his set. They didn't, and couldn't. None of them had volunteered as nurses or VAD girls in France or Belgium. None of them had the least idea of the things that lay inside his mind; none of them would ever want to know. They preferred to think of the war the way those first volunteers had, as a chance for glory, and if one must die, to die nobly. They didn't know and couldn't understand that there was nothing noble or glorious about those churned-over fields, the dead zones of mud and razor-wire. And if he tried to tell them, they would turn away in horror.

Doctor Maya knew, and didn't flinch from it. But how many like her were there?

"It has been my experience, limited though it is, that if you are really determined in that direction, the partner will find you when you are both ready," she said gravely. "But I am sure that makes me sound like some sort of mystic, so I will keep my opinions to myself. Just keep an open mind as you promised—and open eyes as well."

She retreated to the house, leaving him staring down at the garden, wondering bitterly if anyone who hadn't experienced the Front could ever understand what it did to someone inside.

We look, act, and talk like our old selves, but we've been damaged, each and every one of us, he thought. We're scarred inside. Like rosebuds with canker-worms at their hearts. We look the same, but even if we live, we'll never blossom. And there is nothing that will change that. Nothing at all.

24

July 15, 1917

Broom, Warwickshire

SUNSHINE AND FRESH AIR FLOODED the kitchen, and The Arrows was very peaceful without the Robinsons and Howse present. So peaceful, that Eleanor wondered what it would be like to live here like this forever—if somehow, the Robinsons would just never return.

"I've thought and I've reasoned, and I've looked," Sarah said aloud, startling Eleanor as she concentrated on a particularly obtuse paragraph about the Hanged Man card. "And much as I hate to admit that I'm wrong—well, I'm wrong."

Eleanor blinked, and stared at her mentor. Sarah was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the kitchen, staring down at a pile of stones with markings on them. Rune-stones, she called them, and she used them not only to try and give her some direction for the future, but to try and learn what was going on around her that might be hidden from her. If, for instance, someone was sick enough that he needed to see the medical doctor and not just depend on her herbal remedies. There were many country folk who still were suspicious of the doctor and veterinarian, and sometimes it took Sarah a deal of convincing to get them to go to either gentleman.

"Wrong about what?" Eleanor asked. It took a lot to get Sarah to admit she was wrong about anything. She was dreadfully stubborn that way.

Then again, she had every right to be.

"I've always said that the big house and the village haven't got much of anything to say to each other," Sarah replied sourly, still staring down at her stones. "Still, I knew it was an Air Master that chased off the revenants; I knew it couldn't be a local witch, no matter how powerful, when you told me about it, and I was right. It turns out she's a guest up there at Longacre, though, and it seems that she's staying the summer. And that changes everything."

"An Air Master?" Eleanor said, catching her breath. Oh, granted, it wasn't her Element, but any Master could help her—

More to the point, unlike, say, a constable or any other authority figure, any Elemental Master would know she was telling the truth about Alison and what Alison had done to her. She wouldn't have to try and convince an Elemental Master that she wasn't mad because she was talking about magic.