Phoenix and Ashes

"Reggie, I'm an Earth Master. The ground in France and Belgium is saturated with blood," she said, with a thin veneer of calm over her words. "I know what that attracts. There are monsters in the earth of France, Reggie, and they are fattening and thriving on that slaughter—and when that shell hit that bunker, they had a tidbit of the sort they could only crave and dream about in their power. Air and Earth are natural enemies, and they had you in their territory, in their grasp, to do with what they wanted." His vision began to film over as panic rose in his chest; he clutched her hands, as though clutching a lifeline, as she put into words what he could not. "They had you, Reggie, their greatest enemy, a Master of Air and a Master of the Light, helpless, on their ground." He couldn't see, now, as all the memories came flooding back. He heard his breath rasping in his throat, his heart pounding, and could not move for the fear. Dimly, through the roaring in his ears, he heard her ask the question he did not want to answer.

"What did they do to you, Reggie? What did they do?"

Maya Scott sat with her husband in a place in the Exeter Club where—before her marriage to Peter Scott—no woman had ever been before. It was a lovely day outside, still; the windows stood wide open to the warm air, and the sun streamed down onto old Persian rugs, caressed brown leather upholstery, and touched the contents of brandy bottles with gold.

"So," said the Lord Alderscroft, often called the Old Lion—older now than when she had first met him, and aged by more than years. "You've seen the boy."

She nodded.

Lord Alderscroft sat like the King on his throne, in his wingback chair in his own sitting room in his private suite on the top floor of the Exeter Club, and raised a heavy eyebrow at Maya. "Your report, please, Doctor Scott?"

Maya never sat here without feeling a distant sense of triumph. It had been her doing that had broken down the last three barriers of the White Lodge housed here in the Exeter Club—of gender, lineage, and race. She would have failed the Edwardian tests on all three counts; female, common, and of mixed Indian and British blood. But King Edward was gone, and King George was on the throne, and after the defeat of her aunt, there was not a man on the Council who felt capable of objecting to her presence. And truth to tell, they needed her. They had needed her before the war. She was one of a handful of Earth Masters who could bear to live and work in the heart of a great city.

Now they needed her—and the other women they had admitted to the White Lodge—more than ever. The war had been no easier on the ranks of the Elemental Masters than it was on the common man.

Today, however, triumph was not even in the agenda. "He's in wretched shape, my lord," she said slowly. "It is not helping that so many physicians and most officers, all of whom should know better, are convinced that shellshock is just another name for malingering. Even as he, himself, acknowledges that he is not well, there is the subconscious conviction that if he only had an ounce more willpower, he would get over it and back to the fight. I can tell him differently until I turn as blue as Rama; until he believes it in his heart, he will continue to berate himself even as he suffers."

Lord Alderscroft—who, not that long ago, would have agreed with those physicians and officers—sighed heavily. He knew better now. All Elemental Masters knew better; the war was hellish, but it was worse on the minds and nerves of Elemental Masters. The truth was, most of the Masters that had gone into the trenches, if they survived the senseless, mindless way in which the War Department threw away their lives, were there for less than six months before their minds broke. "So he is in no fit state, as Doctor Boyes reports, with a ripe case of shell-shock as well as physical injuries. And as if that were not enough, then there is what he faced, in the earth."

She shook her head, and swallowed, as her husband closed his hand over hers. She had closed herself off as much as she had dared, but as a Healer and a physician, she had needed to know something of what he had experienced.

She had been ready for it, and of course, it had come at second hand, but it had been too horrific for anyone to really understand without sharing it.

She gave Peter a faint smile of thanks. "You do not wish to know the details, my lord. Horrors. That is enough, I think. The inimical forces of all four Elements can terrify, but I think that those of Earth are most particularly apt at destroying the mind with fear. They swarmed him and tormented him from the moment the earth was shattered around him to the moment that the rescue party broke through and got him out. The records say he was more dead than alive. I am not at all surprised. What I am surprised at is that he has a mind left at all, much less a rational one."