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  The Fire Rose

  ( Elemental Masters - 1 )

  Mercedes Lackey

  Rosalind Hawkins is a medieval scholar from a fine family in Chicago, unfortunately, her professor father has speculated away the family money and died, leaving young Rosalind with no fortune and no future. Desolate with grief, forced to cut her education short, she agrees to go West to take a job as a governess to a wealthy man in San Francisco.

  Jason Cameron, her new employer, is a man with a problem: An Adept and Alchemist, Master of the Element of Fire, he had attempted the old French werewolf transformation, and got stuck in mid-transformation. Trapped halfway between wolf and man, over the centuries he has been slowly losing his humanity, and with it his ability to discover a cure for his condition.

  The Fire Rose

  Mercedes Lackey

  Prologue

  Golden as sunlight, white-hot, the Salamander danced and twisted sinuously above a plate sculpted of Mexican obsidian, ebony glass born in the heart of a volcano and shaped into a form created exactly to receive the magic of a creature who bathed in the fires of the volcano with delight. It swayed and postured to a music only it could hear, the only source of light in the otherwise stygian darkness of the room. At times a manikin of light, at times in the shape of the mundane salamander that bore the same name, this was the eyes and ears of the mage who had conjured it. He was a Firemaster, and all creatures of the element of flame answered to him. They brought him the news of the world now closed to him; what better source of information could he have? Where fire was, there they lurked; candle-flame, or gaslight, coal-fire or stoked box of a steam-boiler, burning hearth or burning forest-all held his informants, any of which could impart their observations to him. What one saw, all saw; speak to one and you spoke to all of them, for such was their nature.

  Their patience was endless, but his, being mortal, was not. At length, he tired of watching it dance, and determined to set it upon its task. He summoned the creature from the dish with a thought; obedient to his will, it hovered above a pristine sheet of cream-laid vellum. This was special paper, and more exclusive than it seemed, pressed with his own watermark and not that of the maker.

  He spoke out of the darkness of his velvet-covered, wingback chair, his voice rising from the shadow like the voice of the dragon Fafnir from its cave. He was Fafnir; like the giant, now utterly transformed to something no one who knew the former self would ever recognize.

  Time to construct his letter, while the Salamander and all its kin considered his requirements. "Dear Sir," he said, and the Salamander danced above the vellum, burning the characters into it, in elegant calligraphy. "I write to you because I am in need of a special tutor for my-"

  He paused to consider the apocryphal child of his imagination. A son? A lonely, crippled waif, isolated from the laughter and play of his peers? No, make it two children. If the crippled boy was not bait enough for his quarry, an intelligent, inquisitive girl would be.

  "-my children. Both are gifted intellectually beyond their years; my son is an invalid, crippled by the disease that claimed his mother, and my daughter the victim of prejudice that holds her sex inferior to that of the male. Neither is likely to obtain the education their ability demands in a conventional setting."

  He weighed the words carefully, and found them satisfactory. Appropriately tempting, and playing to the "enlightened" and "modem" male who would be the mentor of the kind of tutor he sought. He wanted a woman, not a man; a male scholar with the skills he required would be able to find ready employment no matter where he was, but a woman had fewer options. In fact, a female scholar without independent means had no options if she was not supported by a wealthy father or indulgent husband. A female had no rights; under the laws of this and most other states, she was chattel, the property of parents or husband. She could take no employment except that of teacher, seamstress, nurse, or domestic help; no trades were open to her, and only menial factory work. There were some few female doctors, some few scientists, but no scholars of the arts, liberal or otherwise, who were not supported in their field by money or males. He wanted someone with no options; this would make her more obedient to his will.

  "My needs are peculiar, reflecting the interests of my children. This tutor must be accomplished in ancient Latin, classical Greek, medieval French and German, and the Latin of medieval scholars. A familiarity with ancient Egyptian or Celtic languages would be an unanticipated bonus."

  The Salamander writhed, suddenly, and opened surprisingly blue eyes to stare at its master. It opened its lipless mouth, and a thin, reedy voice emerged.

  "We have narrowed the field to five candidates," it said. "One in Chicago, one in Harvard, three in New York. The one in Chicago is the only one with a smattering of ancient tongues and some knowledge of hieroglyphs. The others are skilled only in the European languages you required; less qualified, but-"

  "But?" he asked. "More attractive," the Salamander hissed, its mouth open in a silent laugh.

  He snorted. At one point he would have been swayed by a fairer face; now that was hardly to the point. "Have they relatives?" he asked it.

  "The one in Chicago is recently orphaned, one of those in New York was raised by a guardian who cares nothing for her, and her trust fund has been mismanaged as she will shortly learn. Those that do have families, have been repudiated for their unwomanly ways," the Salamander told him. "They are suffragettes, proponents of rights for women, and no longer welcome in their parents' homes."

  Tempting. But relatives and parents had been known to change their minds in the past, and welcome the prodigal back into the familial fold.

  "Show me the one in Chicago," he demanded. She seemed to be the best candidate thus far. The Salamander left the vellum page and returned to its obsidian dish, where it began to spin.

  As it rotated, turning faster and faster with each passing second, it became a glowing globe of yellow-white light. A true picture formed in the heart of the globe, in the way that a false picture formed in the heart of a Spiritualist's "crystal ball." The latter was generally accomplished through the use of mirrors and other chicanery The former was the result of true Magick.

  When he saw the girl at last, he nearly laughed aloud at the Salamander's simplistic notion of beauty. Granted, the girl was clad in the plainest of gowns, of the sort that a respectable housekeeper might wear. He recognized it readily enough, from a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog left in his office a few years ago by a menial.

  Ladies' Wash Suit, two dollars and twenty five cents. Three years out-of-mode, and worn shabby.

  She wore wire-rimmed glasses, and she used no artifice to enhance her features. In all these things, she was utterly unlike the expensive members of the silk-clad demimonde whose pleasures he had once enjoyed. But the soft cheek needed no rouge or rice-powder; the lambent blue eyes were in no way disguised by the thick lenses. That slender figure required no over-corseting to tame it to a fashionable shape, and the warm golden-brown of her hair was due to no touch of chemicals to achieve that mellow hue of sun-ripened wheat.

  "She is orphaned?" he asked.

  The Salamander danced its agreement. "Recently," it told him. "she is the most qualified of them all, scholastically speaking."

  "And possessed of no-inconvenient-family ties," he mused, watching the vision as it moved in the Salamander's fire. He frowned a little at that, for her movements were not as graceful as he would have liked, being hesitant and halting. That scarcely mattered, for he was not hiring her for an ability to dance.

  From the look of her clothing, she had fallen on hard times-unless, of course, she was a natural ascetic, or was donating all of her resources to the Suffrage Movement. Either was possible; if the latte
r was an impediment to her accepting employment, the Salamander would have rejected her as a candidate.

  "We will apply to her-or rather to her mentor," he decided, and gave the Salamander the signal to resume its place above the half-written letter. "I am willing to pay handsomely for the services of any male or female with such qualifications, to compensate for the great distance he or she must travel. The tutor will be installed in my own household, drawing a wage of twenty dollars a week as well as full room and board, and a liberal allowance for travel, entertainment, and books. San Francisco affords many pleasures for those of discriminating taste; this year shall even see the glorious Caruso performing at our Opera." Clothing he would have supplied to her, having it waiting for her if she consented to come; easier to supply the appropriate garments than to hope the girl had any kind of taste at all. He would not have a frump in his house; any female entering these doors must not disgrace the interior. While his home might not rival Leland Stanford's on the outside, the interior was enough to excite the envy of the richest "nob" on "Nob Hill." There would be no cotton-duck gowns from a mail-order catalog trailing over the fine inlay work of his floors, no coarse dark cottons displayed against his velvets and damask satins.

  "I hope you will have a student that can match my requirements," he concluded without haste. "Your scholarship is renowned even to the wilds of the west and the golden hills of San Francisco, and I cannot imagine that any pupil of yours would disgrace the master. To that end, I am enclosing a rail ticket for the prospective tutor" it was not a first-class ticket for a parlor car; such might excite suspicion. A ticket for the common carriage would be sufficient, and a journey by rail would be safe enough, even for a woman alone. "I am looking forward to hearing from you as soon as may be."

  "The usual closing?" the Salamander asked delicately. He nodded, and it finished, burning his name into the vellum with a flourish. It continued to hover above the paper, as the paper itself folded without a hand touching it, and slipped itself and a railway pass into a matching envelope. The Salamander sealed it with a single "hand" pressed into the wax, then burned the address into the obverse of the envelope.

  "Take it to Professor Cathcart's office and leave it there," he instructed, and the Salamander bowed. "If she does not take this bait, we will have to devise something else."

  "She would be a fool not to take it," the Salamander replied, surprising him a little with its retort. "She has no other place to go."

  "Women are not always logical," he reminded the creature. "We were best to assume that the initial attempt will be balked at, and contrive another."

  The Salamander simply shook its head, as if it could not understand the folly of mortals, and it and the sealed letter vanished into thin air, leaving the Firemaster alone in the darkness.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  Rosalind Hawkins answered the door with her entire being in a knot of anxiety; expecting yet another aggressive creditor, she schooled her face into a calm she did not feel. Outside, the dreary, drizzling day was giving way to another dreary night. The home that had once been her sanctuary was now under siege-and no longer hers.

  How long must I bear this? How long can I bear this?

  "I'm sorry," she began as the heavy oak door swung wide, "But if you have a claim, you will have to apply to Mr. Grumwelt of Grumwelt, Jenkins and-"

  But the figure outside the door was no hostile stranger. "Do I need to apply to a solicitor to visit, now, Rose?" asked the short, slender, grey-haired man on the front porch in surprise. She started, and began to laugh with relief at seeing a friendly face for the first time since the funeral, her emotions making her briefly giddy-and she hoped she did not sound hysterical. "Of course not, Professor Cathcart!" she exclaimed, "It's just that I've had Papa's creditors at the door all day, and I've gotten into rather a habit of-" She stopped at the sight of the Professor's confusion. "Oh, never mind, please come in! I'm afraid I cannot offer you any refreshment," she added, ruefully, "but the grocer came with a seizure notice and a policeman and carted away everything edible in the house before breakfast."

  A week before, that simple admission would have been unthinkable. Too many unthinkable things had happened since then for her to even think twice about this one.

  Professor Cathcart, Ph.D. and expert in medieval and ancient languages, her mentor at the University of Chicago, widened his colorless eyes with shock. He took off his hat as he entered the door, and stood in the entryway, turning it in his hands nervously, twisting the soft felt. Rosalind closed the door behind him and led him into the parlor. She had all the gaslights on, burning in reckless abandon. After all, why bother to save the gas? The bills were already too great to pay.

  He sat down gingerly on the horsehair sofa-which tomorrow would probably be gracing someone else's parlor. His elongated face was full of concern as well as shock, and he appeared to be groping for words. She felt a stirring of pity for him; after all, what could one say in a case like this?

  He licked his lips, and made an attempt. "I knew that Hawkins was not well off after those speculations of his, but I had no notion that things had come to such dire straits!"

  "Neither did I," Rosalind said simply, as she sat down on the matching chair, groping behind her for the arm of the chair to assist her. "While he was alive, his salary at the University paid the bills, and the extra tutoring he did for those brainless idiots in the Upper One Hundred kept the other creditors at bay. Now-" She turned her palms upward in her lap and examined them, unable to meet his eyes and the pity in them. "Now they descend."

  Professor Cathcart sounded dazed. "He left you nothing, then?"

  "Nothing but a stack of unpaid bills and this house-which has been seized by the creditors," she replied wearily. "They have graciously allowed me to retain my personal possessions-excepting anything of value, like Mama's pearls."

  "They're taking the pearls?" Cathcart was aghast. "Surely not-"

  "Took, the pearls," she corrected, pushing her glasses up on her nose with a cold finger, trying not to remember how she had wept when they'd taken the only inheritance she had from her mother. "Yesterday. And other things-" She gripped the arms of the chair, trying to hold off the memory, the horror, of watching strangers sort through her belongings, looking for anything they might seize as an asset. "The books in Papa's library are already gone, the furniture goes tomorrow, and the house itself whenever Mr. Gramwelt finds a buyer, I suppose. They say I can stay here until then. I could camp out on the floor until the buyer appears, if they'd left me the camping gear-"

  She was saved from hysteria by a wave of faintness that made her sway a little and catch at the arm of the chair to keep from falling. The Professor was instantly out of his seat and at her side, taking her hand and patting it ineffectually. But his words showed a surprising streak of practicality.

  "Child, when did you eat last?" he demanded. She shook her head, unable to remember-and that, in itself, was disturbing. Was she losing her memory? Was she losing her mind? "I haven't had much appetite," she prevaricated.

  He snorted. "Then that is the second order of business; the first is to get you away from here. Go upstairs and pack your things; I'm not leaving you here to be jeered at by tradesmen a moment longer."

  "But-" she protested, knowing his own resources were slender. He cut her off at the single word, showing an unexpected streak of authority.

  "I can certainly afford to put the daughter of my old friend up in a respectable boarding-house for a few days, and take her to dinner too. And as for the rest well, that was what I came here to speak to you about, and that would be best done over dinner, or rather, dessert. Now, don't argue with me, child!" he scolded. "I won't have you staying here! The next thing you know, they'll probably cut off the gas."

  At just that moment, the gaslights flickered and went out, all over the house, leaving them in the grey gloom of the overcast day, the uncertain and haunted hour before sunset. Suddenly, the house seemed full of ghost
s. If nothing else, that decided her.

  "I'll just be a moment," she said, truthfully, since most of her belongings were already packed into a carpetbag and a single trunk, with only a valise waiting to receive the rest. Mr. Grumwelt had watched her with his nasty, beady eyes, like a serpent watching a bird, the entire time she packed; presumably to make sure that she did not pack up something that no longer belonged to her. Fortunately he did not recognize the value of some of the keepsakes she had managed to retain, or he would doubtless have confiscated them as well. He had made it very clear to her that anything she carried away, she did so on his sufferance. The trunk already stood in the hall; she had only to finish packing her valise and carpetbag. "I find myself in the position so many philosophers like Mr. Emerson profess to admire-unburdened by possessions."

  "I'll get a cab," the Professor replied.

  Bergdorf's was not crowded at this time of the early evening; the theater crowd had not yet begun to arrive. Fortunately, the German restaurant had never been one of her father's choices for dining out, or the memories the place evoked would have been too painful to permit her to eat. No, she had no sad ghosts waiting for her here, and Bergdorf's was clearly professor Cathcart's favorite, for the waiters all recognized him and they were shown to a secluded table out of the way of traffic. She wondered what they made of her; too plain to be a member of the demimonde, too shabbily dressed to be a fiancee or a relative. Did they assume she was his housekeeper, being granted a birthday treat?