Unnatural Issue Page 2

  An Earth magician cherished these things. The dew on one’s feet, the tender grass beneath them, the scent of everything green and burgeoning, the power radiating from the soil itself on this Beltane morning . . . these things were life itself. As she walked, she unconsciously cataloged every scent, analyzing it for “rightness,” looking for anything that might tell her of a problem. She was the keeper and custodian of this spot of ground, and she took her responsibilities with absolute seriousness. She had been the keeper of the Whitestone lands since she was—ten, she thought. Ever since she had met Robin—

  She really didn’t want to go back to the Manor, actually. Although she could make the land all around it grow and thrive, there was nothing she could do to heal the Manor. It was the bitter and blighted wound at the center of these lands, so damaged that the land itself had formed a thick protection of power about it, to keep it from poisoning the rest, exactly as a body would create a cyst around a foreign object lodged inside it.

  Beltane—or as it was called among most folk here, May Day—was Susanne’s favorite day of the year. Christmas was never celebrated at Whitestone Manor, at least, not within the Manor walls, and the Winter Solstice it coincided with merely marked for her another day when the earth still slumbered. Midsummer was the day when all the promise was fulfilled; it marked the moment when “growing” turned to “ripening”—joyous, to be sure, but Susanne preferred this day and all the potential of the season of promise. And while she dutifully celebrated the rites of autumn, they were still sad for her, despite the welcome of Harvest Home, because now the earth would drop back into its winter slumber, and she would be spending most of her time inside the haunted walls of her father’s house.

  Well, what was the harm in lingering in the meadow, anyway? For a moment, she tasted the sourness of resentment, then the bitterness of irony. After all, she wasn’t a servant, even though she did a servant’s labor. She got no wages, no “new suit of clothes” twice a year—nothing but the clothing she could make with her own two hands, the food she ate, and the little room she had to sleep in. She worked as hard as any of the others and got far less.

  The resentment ebbed, and so did the bitterness. Things could be so much worse than they were now—her father could have ordered her sent to an orphanage, for instance. Not one infant in ten survived to the age of five in an orphanage. And from there, she’d have gone to a factory—

  She shuddered at the thought.

  Well, surely she had earned a little holiday.

  She knew very well the others would not begrudge it. Although they had no idea what it was she really did for the Whitestone lands—or at least did not know it consciously—somewhere deep inside, their instincts surely told them. Never once, when she had been about her duties and not sharing their work, had she come back to anything other than a welcome and knowing smiles.

  So instead of going back to the Manor, she made her way into the Home Wood, a tangle of wild that dated back at least as far as the Norman Conquest, and probably farther. Maybe this was no part of her duties, but a moment here left her more rested than a night of sleep.

  There was a little spring-fed pond at the heart of the wood, and that was where she headed. It was the place she felt most at home, even in winter. Today, as she settled down on the grass beside the water, it felt as if the place were folding her in its arms, and the sweet power that rose all about her was like breathing, bathing in, the very soul of the land. The faint breeze left feather-touches on her skin and was like honey-water in her mouth. The birds made better music than any musician she had ever heard. The grass was softer than her bed, and all the muted colors around her, from the little mayflowers at the edge of the pool to the thousands of colors of green of grass and leaves, blended together into a harmonious whole.

  This was what made it all worthwhile, all the loneliness, all the sour days spent within walls that sometimes felt as if they hated her.

  She had never seen her father. She was twenty years old and had never seen her father, who spent all his time mewed up on the second floor and never came down, never allowed anyone up but Agatha, the housekeeper. From the time she could understand anything, she had been made to understand that he never wanted to see her. She would have grown up as wild and ignorant as a stray cur if it had not been for the collusion of the entire household of servants.

  Cook’s daughter had nursed her, along with her own little girl. Once she had been weaned, they all undertook to raise her. Old Mary, the cook, taught her how to read, with patience and great labor, out of her recipe books and old newspapers and the Bible, and then taught her to cook as well. Mathew, the stableman, taught her figures. Patience and Prudence, the housemaids, taught her to clean and mend, and Prudence taught her to sew, using the things they brought down out of the attic—everything from old gowns to old linens—as material, so that she could at least keep herself decently clothed. Nigel, the cowman, and Mathew taught her how to take care of animals as well as simple physicking. No one had to teach her how to heal; that had come as naturally as breathing.

  She knew, from reading the papers that arrived with the weekly marketing, that this was not the sort of upbringing that a girl of her social status should have experienced. She should have had a proper nursemaid, then a governess to teach her things like embroidery and music and drawing—and then she should have gone to a respectable boarding school with other girls of her class. At sixteen she should have “come out” and been presented to the local version of society. Not presented at court, of course, and not the great London balls that filled the social columns of those papers, but country dances and house parties, teas and gatherings. She should have been going to all manner of entertainments and seeing young men. In fact, by this time she should have been engaged or even married.

  But only the people here in the village even knew that she existed—and she existed in a very awkward social position indeed. Her own father had repudiated her, and she worked like any servant, yet she was of a higher class than any of them. It wasn’t only the magic that set her apart from them.

  She honestly didn’t really care about missing the gowns and parties. From the time she had been able to toddle out into the meadow beyond the sad, sere Manor garden and had met Robin, she had known what she was meant to do, and it wasn’t attend a proper school, wear fashionable clothing, and go to the appropriate parties until she found or was found by “the right man.”

  This was what she had been born to do. To be the caretaker of the land. To guard it, and guide it, and see that its hurts were healed. How could she have lived the life of someone who was “the squire’s daughter” and still been able to do that?

  And moments like this were her reward, when she could lean back and feel that all was right, sense that the May Day magics she had performed, together with the Old Religion rites furtively practiced by a small but devoted coven and the May Day country traditions openly practiced by everyone else, had done, or would do, their job. Together she and the people who lived here had bound up the land in that magic, had ensured that the power that fueled it was clean and pure. She knew bone-deep and blood-deep that what she and they had done would keep the land and the power safe and fertile for another growing and harvesting season.

  How could even an extravagant London Season or the most enchanting ball ever held even begin to compare with that?

  The last shadow of resentment faded, the last of the bitterness soothed by birdsong and the soft sighing of a breeze in the leaves.

  Once she was settled in place, quiet as the grass, other creatures emerged, slowly, shyly. Some were perfectly “natural” creatures, of the sort that no one living in the country would be surprised to see. A doe and fawn faded out of the underbrush to drink at the pool, and a dog-fox did the same, watching her with his sly eyes to make sure she wasn’t hiding a gun beneath her skirts. There had not been a hunt on Whitestone lands for decades, and as a consequence, the folk hereabouts considered foxes to be fair game in any
season. The rabbits and a hare waited until he was gone before making their appearance, as did the cock-pheasant, who was no native of England but whose kind had been here so long he might as well have been.

  But after them came the things that only those with her sort of sight—or Sight—could see.

  The faintest of splashes warned her with its peculiar notes that the undines were poking their heads above the water to see if she was alone. Someone without the gift to see them would think they were fish, or frogs, but she tilted her head to the side and spied bright green eyes crowned with a tangle of weedy hair peeking up above the waterline.

  “It’s safe enough,” she called softly; even though they didn’t answer to her, she was an ally they knew and recognized, and they went back to the playing she had interrupted when she arrived. It was hard for them to tell one human from another at a distance unless that human was a Water mage; caution made them hide when anyone came near.

  There was nothing of caution in the little fellow that came bounding into the clearing and flung himself into her lap to have his head and little nubs of horn scratched. The faun could tell where she was at any time—he was Earth, as she was—but she was around other humans so often that he rarely showed himself. “And what have you been at, naughty one?” she asked him, as she picked leaves and bits of twig out of his curly hair. Fauns were bawdy little fellows, but they knew better than to display that around her. She had ways of making her displeasure known that lasted long past the fun of shocking her.

  “Stealing,” he said artlessly. “Maddie at Stone Cottage be lighter of a scone!” He licked his lips, and his goat-eyes twinkled.

  “Then be sure you give her luck,” she admonished. “Or at least bring her a maying.”

  “Eh, all right,” he agreed. “ ’Tis no odds. Robin, he blessed her cow for it.”

  “Well, good. But that was Robin’s doing, and none of yours. Maddie might need that scone, and if you take without giving back, she might stop leaving bowls of milk at the stoop.” Maddie Cowel of Stone Cottage was one of those who still Believed—as well she should—and kept to the old ways. Once a week, a bowl of milk left out on her doorstep bought the loyalty of the “Pharisees” as she called the Elementals. Or at least kept their mischief to a minimum. No one hereabouts called them Fairies or Fae or Elves or anything of the sort; naming them brought you to their attention, and that might not be good. No, for the folk in cottages it was “Good Folk” or “Pharisees” or even just “Them Lot,” with a sideways look out of the corner of your eye, if you were extremely cautious.

  The faun pouted, but he finally nodded. “I knows a squirrel-hoard with no squirrel for it, since yon dog-fox got luck on his side this winter past.”

  “Half for you and half for Maddie,” Susanne agreed, and with his horns nicely scratched and his shaggy head free of bits of detritus, he leaped out of her lap and bounded off to see to it.

  A laugh from behind her made her turn, and she smiled brightly up at the young male who was—barring the servants at the Manor—her oldest friend in all the world. “So, you manage my subjects as well as I,” said Robin, known as “Keeper,” since he had never given a last name, his green eyes sparkling with good humor. “Perhaps I should have a holiday of my own and leave you to tend them!”

  “Don’t you dare!” she exclaimed, and patted the mossy bank next to her. “Come and tell me the news.”

  Now, any eyes, whether Sighted or not, could see Robin—or would see a handsome young man, chestnut-haired, green-eyed, and wearing the common rough linen smock and trousers that farm folk about here had worn for over a century, with the addition of a long leather vest and belt and boots suitable for tramping through forest and what appeared to be a shotgun slung casually over one arm. Robin was commonly supposed to be the Whitestone Manor gamekeeper. Certainly all the servants believed that he was, as did all the farmers and laborers for miles around. He never denied it, and if he looked the other way at a few rabbit snares or a bit of grouse poaching or unauthorized fishing, well, most sensible gamekeepers did that. If your gamekeeper was a stickler about enforcing poaching laws, it was an undeclared war all around. If everyone was sensible about things, everyone got along, and game was managed much better. It was well understood that since Master Richard didn’t come out of his house, ever, much less take an interest in hunting or fishing his own property, there was no harm in taking what he would have, so long as hares and rabbits, grouse and pheasant, and trout in their seasons appeared occasionally at the kitchen door. And so long as when Robin came around with a warning that this or that sort of game needed some resting, you didn’t set snares or drop a line in the places he warned you off of.

  The fact that none of the servants had ever seen Robin himself appear at the Manor, not even to collect the yearly wages he should have been getting, never seemed to occur to any of them.

  Although what certainly did persist in the minds of one and all was that Robin, known to have been Susanne’s playfellow for years, had grown into as fine a young man as she was a young woman, and that one of these days they would certainly get themselves married. The Gamekeeper—like a few other servants—held the same peculiar status that Susanne did. Gamekeepers were considered not quite gentry but a good bit above a mere servant. As such, well, so far as the Whitestone servants were concerned, there was no harm in such a match.

  This was useful for Susanne, as Robin was a fellow known to have a hard fist and a strong right arm and the will to use both at need. This kept anyone else from “making advances,” which was exactly as Susanne preferred it. Not that she considered herself above the other young men she saw from time to time, but it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to find someone suitable who was another mage of any sort around here. For all their unconscious connection with the land and the things in it, most of the folk hereabouts were as thick as a brick when it came to magic. And those few that weren’t, well, most of them were already paired up, and the rest were too old or too young for her.

  And she could not imagine marrying someone who was not a mage. It would just be too difficult to try to explain the inexplicable to him, and as for hiding what she did . . . her head swam at the very notion. Perhaps, if she married a monied fellow—but a simple country lad? “You can’t keep secrets in a cottage” was the old saying, and a true one.

  So it was very convenient for people to assume that she and Robin were stepping out together. Even if the notion was so absurd as to send them both into gales of laughter in private. A Daughter of Eve? Wed to a High Lord of the Fae? Hilarious.

  For Robin was not Robin Keeper. He was Robin Goodfellow, the Great Puck himself, as old as Old England, and a true Force of Nature.

  “The coven did good work last night,” he said, dangling his arm into the water and tickling an unwary fish into a trance. “There’s trouble in the Big World, though.”

  By this, he meant trouble outside the boundaries of England, not just outside of Whitestone Manor. She frowned. “I know very little about that . . .” she said, hesitantly. The papers that found their way to the Manor were inclined to sensationalize things like anarchist attacks and bombings, then gloat about how civilized Britain would never suffer from any such nonsense. Politics on the Continent was all a confused muddle to her, and wars and conflicts farther away than that were less real than fairy tales. At least in her world, fairy tales had some basis in reality, and the creatures in them were things she saw daily. She had never seen a Zulu or a Hindu or an Arab or even a German. There were some folk who turned up for the fairs that were alleged to be French and Italian, and there were always Gypsies coming through, but for the rest? If you told her that Russians had two heads, so long as you believed it yourself, she would be inclined to take your word for it.

  “Lots of little pothers that are going to explode into something big and ugly,” Robin replied, pulling his arm out of the water. “People here think they shan’t be involved, but they will be; matters are too tangl
ed up for them not to be. And the Dark Powers have their hand in it all, as well, which will make it all the worse.”

  “How bad? How much worse?” she asked, hesitantly.

  Robin shook his head. “Can’t tell. Can’t say. Bad, for certain sure.” He hesitated then added, “All the signs and warnings say this will be a to-do that changes everything.”

  She looked about her, at her serene and beautiful sanctuary, and shivered. What could be so bad that it would come to affect things here?

  “I’ll do what I can, but I’ve all of England to look after,” Robin told her, solemnly. “And what’s coming, well, the best we can all do is keep our little plots of land healthy and safe. Naught to be done about the foolishness of man in the wider world.”

  Then he laughed and plucked a bit of mayflower from the verge, tossing it to an undine to put in her hair. “But ’tis not here yet, and’tis nothing to be done to keep it from coming, so let’s us dance a roundelay while we can.”

  Sensible of course, even if she didn’t much like it. But Susanne was used to not liking a great deal of her life, and she was accustomed to coping with it all.

  “I suppose we’ll have a better notion of what to do when it gets here,” she said philosophically.

  “We won’t be alone,” he reminded her. “There’s the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, and mortals have a powerful will to bend things when needs must.”

  “So you keep telling me!” she teased, tossing a bit of mayflower at him herself. He caught it deftly and grinned, showing his kinship to the little faun in that grin.

  “Ah, well, it’s naught I had to teach you about,” he replied, sticking the flower behind his ear. “Oh, I mind you, no more than six summers old, running off out of that blighted garden and into my wood and calling me. Me! Oldest thing in Old England! Such a will you have!” He shook his head. “And a good thing for you that you do, or the power in you would have driven you mad by now.”