Unnatural Issue (2 page)

He and Rebecca belonged to the class known as “country squires.” Although they did not have official titles, the very considerable property called Whitestone Hall as well as the farms Richard owned had been in his family for generations. The estate was as remote as it could possibly be in this part of England, and no substantial changes had been made to it in the last hundred years. Earth magicians were conservative in their needs and solitary in their ways. The Whitestones had been Elemental magicians for longer than they had owned the house and lands; most of them had been of Earth, although an occasional Water or Fire mage had been known to crop up in the line. The soon-to-be-newest addition to the family had already given satisfactory signs that she would follow in her mother and father’s footsteps.

As he rode into the growing darkness, getting farther and farther from anything that the benighted considered “civilization,” Richard felt the land healing him of the damage the goblins had done, and cleansing the poison the city had poured into him. He didn’t want to approach Rebecca still tainted by the filth he had wallowed in for the last week, especially not when she was growing near her time. She was seven months along by his reckoning, and he would not take the risk of inadvertently contaminating her or their unborn child.

It was as lovely a summer evening as anyone could hope for. There was just enough of a faint chill in the air to make Richard glad of his coat, but not so much as to make him shiver. His keen sense of smell picked out the scents of wild roses, clover, and cut hay. A little farther on, he detected water—a slow-running stream by the scent of it. The slow footfalls of his horse’s hooves made him vibrate in sympathy with the earth. It took careful purging to rid himself of the filth without bringing the pollution to his own ground. He had to reduce it to its component parts, be it magical energy or actual, physical poison like the soot in his lungs. Only then was it safe to deposit elsewhere. And even then there were poisons, like lead, that were impossible to break down. He would need a special session to be rid of those, one best carried out in the security of his own workroom. He could summon a dwarf to take the poisons away; dwarves were clever with such things and would make something useful of them. Even a poison could be used for something, in the right hands. It would be beneficial to both himself and the dwarf; this was how an Elemental Master should conduct his magic—without coercion, and with both summoned and summoner coming off the better for the transaction.

But these poisons could be encapsulated and isolated for this moment; cleansing and healing himself as he was doing now would give him the strength to keep such things safely contained.

Even though it was deep dusk when he crossed the invisible boundary that brought him onto his own lands, he felt it. The land recognized him and greeted him as its own.

And then he felt something else.

It struck him like a blow to the heart.

A powerful wrongness. Turmoil. And grief.

Involuntarily, he put spurs to his tired horse, startling the beast into a gallop. With a growing sense of panic, he urged the beast down the old Roman road and then past the wall that marked the lands of Whitestone Hall. His heart pounded with the throbbing of hooves on the road, and fear of a sort he had never experienced before gripped him in an icy clasp.

The horse did not need guiding; it bolted through the open gates as soon as it saw them. The lane was straight and true; they scorched toward the country house, ablaze with candle and lantern light, the doors standing open wide.

He pulled the horse to a stop to see his housekeeper, tears streaking her face, standing in the doorway, pressing messages and shillings into the hands of the stable boy and the gardener’s boy. She burst into more tears at the sight of him, as he flung himself off the horse. “Master Richard! Master Richard! I swear, sir, we did what we could, but town is so far away, she started with no warning, before her time, and she tore before the midwife could get here, and the doctor was away—” She continued babbling as he pushed past her and sprinted for the room that should have been his sanctuary.

He knew, he knew what he would find as he ran up the stairs to the best bedroom. He felt it, a sudden emptiness in his heart, a wound that would never heal. He threw open the bedroom door—

He had expected to find a welter of bloody sheets, pain and chaos. He found only clean, calm death.

With a heart gone cold, he approached the ancient canopied bed in which so many generations of Whitestones had been born, loved, and died.

The curtains had been pulled aside, the sheets and coverlet stripped away and replaced. There was no sign here of the struggle that had claimed his wife, of the terrible pain she must have endured. A single candle on the stand beside the bed cast its soft light on the beloved face, the broad brow, the tender eyes, now closed, that had once been startlingly blue. The high, sculptured cheekbones worthy of the attention of the finest artist were pale as the marble bust of Athena in the parlor; the lips that had been full and pink as the roses she loved were now white. Someone had smoothed Rebecca’s long, black hair and parted it neatly, spreading it out on the pillow. Her long, slender hands were folded over her breast. He touched one; it was already cool and growing colder.

He heard footsteps behind him: the housekeeper, wringing her hands, her voice hoarse with grief and weeping.

“How long has she—” he asked. He could not finish the sentence.

“Three hours, sir. She started afore her time; we tried to hold it back but something went wrong. The midwife was here, but she couldn’t do anything. She tore, somehow inside, all of a sudden. I sent the boy for the doctor, but he was out, and by the time he got here—” She broke into a fresh bout of weeping. “She was gone. All he could do was save the wee one.”

“What?” He turned on the woman; what she saw in his face must have terrified her, for she shrank back as if he had threatened to strike her.

“The baby, sir. The lady was gone, but he was able to save the baby. Your daughter. She’s small, but—she’s alive, and he thinks like to stay so.” The candle flickered, casting moving shadows, like the ugly little hobgoblins he had so lately fought. “You can see her now, sir. Cook’s daughter had her own wee one two months ago, and she’s nursing her now—”

Rage filled him. How dared that creature, that parasite that had sucked the life out of his Rebecca, still be alive when she was not? How dared Heaven punish him by taking the one person on Earth he loved more than life itself and leave behind this . . . thing, this unformed nothing, this unwelcome stranger?

His vision darkened, and he felt anger coursing through him, as if his veins were filled with burning ash instead of blood. The anger was a relief; it pushed aside his terrible guilt, the certainty that if he had been here—he could have saved her. He was an Earth Master, a healer. If he had been here—if he had just pushed his horse to get him home—if he had never gone at all—

But no. He was not the guilty one. He had gone to do his duty, and it was not his fault—no, no, none of this was his fault. No, it was this interloper that had murdered his beloved.

“I do not wish to see that—thing,” he snarled. “Do what you want with it. Let it die. It killed Rebecca, and I never want to set eyes on it. Never! Do you understand me? Never!”

The housekeeper shrank back until her back was against the wall. “But, sir—she’s your—” She bit back what she was going to say. “Yes, sir,” she said instead, and made her escape.

Richard Whitestone sank down beside the body of the only woman he had ever, or would ever, love, and wept.

S
USANNE Whitestone was as full of contentment as it was possible for her to be. And how not? It was a perfect spring dawn on a day full of magic and life. The air was soft as thistledown, vibrating with birdsong, fragrant with flowers. She hummed as she walked through the dewy grass, never minding that it was soaking into the hem of her muslin frock. The dress would dry soon enough, and the dew on her bare feet felt heavenly.

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.