Steadfast (22 page)

And yet she wasn’t frightened, because she understood that this was a consequence
of handling all the energy all this morning. Somehow she had been accumulating some
of it. So all she needed to do now was . . . let it go.

She did, and “watched” it wisp away from her, trailing off like the silk ribbon she
danced with in a wind.

And that was when the salamanders reappeared, four of them this time, eagerly leaping
to take bites of the power she was letting loose. Eating it!

Well, if they wanted to eat it—she used the tools that Jack had been teaching her
to control the stream, shape it and slow it down, making a little pool of the Fire-energy
so that they could gather around it and lap it up like cats. The more they drank,
the brighter they got, until, by the time she was feeling comfortable in her skin
again, they were as bright as red-hot coals.

They turned eyes on her that brimmed with gratitude—then they were gone, and she turned
on her side and drifted into a nap of true sleep.

It didn’t last long, but it refreshed her tremendously. When she woke perhaps a half
an hour later, and took the rug and pillow back into the house, Jack and Lionel were
just rousing from their own rest, and looking ready to resume the lessons.

Before they could suggest a start, however, she sat down with them and described what
she had felt and done. She couldn’t help but notice while she did so, that Lionel
kept fanning himself with a palm-leaf fan, but Jack appeared—and she felt—perfectly
comfortable.

Lionel listened attentively, but shook his head when she looked to him for an answer
or approval. “Air magic doesn’t work that way,” he said. “It’s the hardest to hold
of the four. It sounds to me as if you did the right thing—Jack?”

Jack took a moment in replying, his eyes thoughtful.

“Not what I would have done, but my father always said that if it works right, you
can feel it,” Jack replied at last, and rewarded her with another of his slow smiles.
“Clearly, this felt right to you. So I would say, well done, Miss Kate. I think it
was right of you to feed the salamanders with the Fire Magic, too. It shows you are
generous, and it shows you can be depended upon to give without asking anything in
return. It will make them more generous with you, and more likely to trust you.”

“Do as you would be done by,” Lionel suggested. “It’s important for the Elemental
creatures to be able to trust us. Us trusting them—well, you have know which can be
trusted, first—but with Fire, that’s generally pretty obvious.”

Jack made a face. “The only bad ones I’ve ever seen were the ones that were under
the control of a bad magician. But then I don’t think that Fire Elementals that had
gone to the bad would go after a trained Fire Magician. You don’t attack what’s strongest
against you, you attack the weak.”

Lionel nodded sagely; Katie bit her lip a little. So that was what they did? Go after
the weak? Children . . . she thought of how as a child she had simply delighted in
the pretty things around her that she now knew were Elementals. She would have been
easy prey.
Is that what happens, sometimes, when children sicken and die for no reason anyone
can think of?

But Lionel didn’t elaborate, and neither did Jack. “Let’s see what happens when you
continue to work with the Fire Magic, Kate,” Lionel said. “Jack will know if you are
dangerously overburdening yourself, and we can stop and you can let it drain off from
you before we go on.”

So, back to work they went. Now the men both taught her how to take that Fire energy,
shape it further, and make it into a kind of shell that would both hide her from another
magician and protect her from attack. They told her to imagine blowing a bubble out
of it, then think of the bubble as becoming as hard as iron, and it worked! Jack even
did some light “attacks” on it, and mostly it held! It was exciting to learn—and it
was like dancing all three of her dances back-to-back, twice. By the time she had
mastered it, she was ready to drop.

And she must have looked it, for Lionel ordered a halt.

“That’s enough for one day,” he declared. “Jack will help you practice these things
for the rest of the week. You know how it is, you need to be sure of your first tools
before you can move on to the more complicated actions. So before we go further, I
want you to have mastered these things.”

“Yes, Lionel,” she said obediently, well aware, from her dancing, that she was just
at the stage where she had worked out the steps, but she hadn’t gotten them sure in
her memory, nor was she doing them at anything like full speed.

The sun was westering now. Not that it was really possible to tell that from this
house so much—just that everything was shadowed, and the air here was fractionally
cooler as the house moved completely into the protection of the shadows of those around
it. The birds in the backyard woke up and got a bit livelier, splashing about in the
birdbath. “I,” Lionel then proclaimed, “am going to my library to see if there is
anything in my books about Fire Magic. It’s mostly tomes about Air, but one never
knows.”

Lionel got to his feet and retreated into the depths of his house, making scarcely
a sound—Katie had noticed before this that he walked so lightly it was easy for him
to slip up on a person even when he wasn’t trying to be secretive. She had no idea
where his library could be; so far all she had seen of the house were the garden room,
the drawing room, the dining room and the hall. She marveled a little at one person
having all this space to himself—after living in a caravan with two other people most
of her life, even her little room in the boarding house felt huge. What did one person
do with all this room?

Well, collect things in it, obviously. Like books. . . .

But his leaving left her alone with Jack . . .

There was silence between them, and she wondered what he was going to say. She didn’t
think she was misreading him. He found her interesting, and not in a sisterly way.
And . . . he was so completely unlike Dick, that sort of regard didn’t bother her.
In fact . . . in fact she liked it. And she rather thought she’d like to have more
of it. He fidgeted in his chair. Finally, he spoke. “Miss Kate—”

She interrupted him. “You were calling me just plain ‘Kate.’ I’d rather you did that,
or Katie.” She smiled encouragingly at him. “After all, I thought we were at least
friends.” She hoped she wasn’t being too forward. Traveler girls didn’t flirt about
with boys; a boy might fancy her, but he’d never come to her directly, he’d go his
Da, then the two Das would get together and maybe a wedding would be arranged. That
was why she hadn’t really fought what Andy Ball wanted for her—he was the nearest
thing to a father she had at that point, and what other choice did she have, unprotected
by family, and more importantly, her real father? She could have lost her good name
without even
doing
anything, and then what would become of her?

Country girls weren’t like that—to Travelers, anyone who wasn’t a Traveler was “country”
or sometimes “house folk.” Country girls flirted with boys; she’d seen them, partly
envious and partly aghast, until after being in the circus she had more or less gotten
used to how country people were, and how some of them didn’t seem to care about their
good names. So maybe he was used to that? If anything, the music hall, the chorus
girls, and even some of the acts were more casual about going together than the circus
folks.

But she didn’t want casual; she wanted something better. How did you manage that?

He had the most peculiar expression on his face, but it wasn’t negative—it was as
if a thousand thoughts were going through his head at once, and he was rapidly making
up his mind about something.

“Katie, I have something to confess to you,” he said, after a long pause, a pause
during which her heart began to pound, fearing he was going to say something that
would dry up all her budding hopes. “Miss Peggy told Lionel all about your . . . situation . . .
after you asked her advice. After all, you didn’t ask her to keep it secret, and she
thought we should know about it. We’d been putting our heads together, trying to work
out how to get you more work and more money, when this Russian dancer affair dropped
in everyone’s lap.”

Now it was her turn to have a thousand thoughts rushing through her mind. She was
a little—only a little—angry at Miss Peggy for running off to Lionel. But Jack was
right, she
hadn’t
sworn Miss Peggy to secrecy. Lionel was her employer, and Miss Peggy might well have
thought he had every right to know. Especially if by some horrific chance Dick actually
turned up. . . .

The mere idea made her throat grow tight and her heart pound harder than before.

“We never said a thing about it to Charlie nor anyone else,” Jack was going on. “In
a way, it’s a good thing we’re all in theater. We’ve got . . . more flexible ideas
than people with settled lives.” Whatever he read in her face seemed to encourage
him, and he reached out and patted her hand lightly. “I don’t think you were wrong
for marrying someone you didn’t even know, and I don’t think you’re wrong for trying
to free yourself from him. There’s more to blame with that circus owner who rushed
you into marrying his strongman, and you still in shock and grief, than there is to
you. And you’re a smart young woman to have run off, smarter still to go somewhere
the circus won’t. And then, you worked out you needed to get a divorce, who to ask
about it, and you’ve gone about getting there in the most sensible way possible. I
really don’t know how you’ve managed to keep your head through all the things you’ve
gone through. I don’t know many people who would have. Most would just throw their
hands in the air and wait for God or someone to rescue them.”

She flushed a little at his praise. It wasn’t just the praise, either; it was the
brief touch of his hand on hers, and the fact that
he
was praising her. If this was what country girls got, well, she wanted more of it.
His hand on hers made her all a-tingle, and the look in his eyes made her think all
sorts of things that no Traveler girl should ever think about a man she wasn’t married
to.

Now more words came, faster, as if he was trying to get them all out before he lost
the courage to say them. “Katie, I know you might not want to think of such things
as a fellow talking to you like this, because all you know of men is what that . . .
foul creature did to you. I know this divorce could take a great deal of time. And
I know you aren’t free now to even think about possibly finding someone else. But
when you are . . . I would consider it the greatest honor . . . it would make me awfully
happy . . . if you would consider me . . . letting me . . . pay my attentions to you.”
He flushed deeply. “I mean . . . honorably of course. Pay court to you, is what they’d
say back when I was a boy. If you’d—”

It finally penetrated to her what he was asking, and a startled laugh bubbled up from
inside her. For a moment
he
looked startled, then a touch angry and a great deal embarrassed, but before he could
take it wrong, the words all tumbled out of her, impelled by a rush of feelings she
couldn’t define, but which were exciting, breathtaking, and utterly intoxicating.

And at that moment, she was sure, as sure as she knew anything was sure, that this
was right. Maybe other people would look at the two of them and shake their heads,
but she
knew.
They were meant to be together. They more she thought about it, moment by moment,
the more certain she became.

“That would be
amazing!”
she said. “I—I like you better than any fellow I have ever met, Jack, and the more
I am with you, the better I like you! I wish you would!”

It was not the most elegant way to respond, but his face cleared, and then he smiled.
And he took her hand and kissed it. “Then we can start by becoming the best of friends,”
he replied. Which was an answer she liked, a very great deal—not the least because
it had never even entered Dick’s head to be
friends
with her.

“I would like that, very, very much,” she said softly, and did not withdraw her hand,
which tingled in a most delightful way where he had kissed it. She would have thrown
away her good name a thousand times for this.

Lionel returned to find them holding hands and talking about hundreds of things, flitting
from subject to subject, taking it in turns to speak or listen avidly. For Katie’s
part, she couldn’t hear enough about Jack and his past. She could almost see the farm
he’d grown up on in her head; often there were farmers like that kind enough to let
a Traveler camp on their land for a night or two, or more, if there was something
about the farm that they could do. Katie’s Da was no tinker, and no strong man, but
he didn’t shirk work, and often during hop season, the whole family would camp with
all manner of folks, Travelers, city people, and wandering workers who came for the
harvest, and take part in the hop-picking. From what Jack said, his Da had been the
sort that Travelers could depend on to treat everyone fair, and the sort no Traveler
was allowed to steal from. She was glad Jack’s Da and Ma were still alive so she could
meet them. She hoped his sisters wouldn’t make a problem because she was a Traveler—though
she didn’t mind at all being inside four walls, not like some Travelers who couldn’t
abide it, so perhaps she just wouldn’t say anything, and ask Jack not to.

Already, in the back of her mind, there were vague stirrings of plans. They would
stay at the music hall, of course. Lionel needed them. Charlie needed
her,
at least for as long as this craze for Russian dancers lasted. She knew Jack had
rooms of his own nearby; they would probably be big enough for two, she didn’t take
up much space. By September, she would have enough money for the divorce. Maybe by
the time winter set in things would be quiet enough at the music hall that they could
take a week or two to get married and just be completely together for a bit.