And she kept saying “It’s all right!” and “I don’t care!” and things of that nature, and they probably would have gone on forever in that vein if Mrs. Waring hadn’t interrupted them with a sharp “Hist.”

  All eight heads—Elena’s included—turned her way.

  “You ain’t going to stay this way long, I reckon,” she said calmly, the fact that they were naked not bothering her in the least.

  “No, madam,” Ben said contritely. “About an hour, one hour at midnight.”

  “Then we had best make the most of it,” she replied briskly, and proceeded to question them closely. Finally, she nodded. “I do believe that it wasn’t that—female—that turned you. I believe that she set her mari-morgans to drown you, and that made your mother’s blood in you save you by turning you.”

  The boys all nodded slowly, almost as one. “It was horrid!” Gus blurted, and looked about to cry.

  “That I do not doubt,” Mrs. Waring agreed. “It was because you don’t have feathercloaks, I’ll be bound. But at least you are all alive.”

  “So you don’t think she turned us?” that was Arthur. “Huh.”

  “No, but I do think she bespelled you to keep you as swans,” Mrs. Waring supplied, as the sylphs all looked on with wide eyes. “And because the cruelty is the point for her, she gives you all an hour at midnight to be lads again. So that forces you to look for someplace you can hide when that happens. And that means you spend half of your day eating, and half of your day trying to find that shelter and get into it. That gives you no time at all to try and figure out how to get help.”

  “Oh, how I hate her,” Emil said bitterly.

  “Well, now,” Mrs. Waring said. “You’re where you can get help now. This is more of a witchy thing than what a mage does . . . I reckon it will have to be me that studies it. Meanwhile, you can stay here, with your sister. You’ll be safe. You can come in the cottage at night to sleep so when you change, you’ll be fine.”

  “Mrs. Waring,” said Ben, solemnly and with a hint of a tear in his eyes, “you are magnificent.”

  “Bosh,” she replied, waving the compliment away. “Now make the most of your time, because there probably isn’t much of it left.”

  Everyone was emotionally exhausted by the time that her brothers transformed back to swans. Elena was already physically exhausted, and all she could think about by that time was how much she wanted to sleep.

  Mrs. Waring must have understood that, since she reassured Elena that she could get home easily enough, that the donkey knew his way in the dark, and that she would be fine. Before Elena could protest, she had already let herself out of the cottage, and her brothers had arranged themselves in a comforting circle around the bed on the floor.

  So she joined them, and fell deeply and completely asleep, surrounded by peace, the warmth of their bodies, and the sound of their breathing.

  • • •

  “My lord, Mrs. Waring would like to speak to you,” said the butler to Stephen as he sipped his morning tea on the terrace before getting to work with the estate manager. Being away at Oxford for so many months meant he was very behind on everything regarding the non-magical matters of the estate and it was going to take him several days to catch up. Of course, he could have left everything in the hands of his manager and his mother, but that felt far too much like shirking his duties. After all, his father had always said that a good caretaker served his people and their needs, and only after these things were addressed could he think of himself.

  Still . . . Mrs. Waring seldom came up from the kitchen, and when she did, it was generally to talk to his mother. This must be something important.

  “Have her come out, please, Harris,” he said. “I’ll be happy to see her.”

  Mrs. Waring ventured out of the door onto the stone terrace, and Stephen could tell in an instant that she was both contrite and a little worried. Hmm. I wonder if this has anything to do with the sylphs saying they were sworn to secrecy about something. . . .

  “My lord,” said the old woman, “I have a bit of some good news, and a bit of something to confess. And they’re tangled up together.”

  Intriguing! he thought, and motioned to the chair across from him for her to sit down. She shook her head, but he was insistent. “Mrs. Waring, you are on your feet from sunup to sundown. Even the church permits sitting during confession!”

  She blushed a little, but sat. “I’ll get to the good news first. That little gel you’ve been fretting about. Would her name be Elena Whitstone?”

  He felt as if he had been hit with a bucket of cold water. “Yes! Yes, it is!” he exclaimed. “How did you know?”

  “Because I’ve put her up in the gamekeeper’s cottage. Her and all her brothers. They’re swans—I mean to say, her brothers are swans.” She clasped her hands tightly in her lap, her voice and expression anxious. “I did it without asking, because I thought I might need to get her under the ward right quick. I swore the sylphs to secrecy until I could tell you myself.”

  Thunderstruck. This is what being thunderstruck feels like. “Start from the beginning, please, Mrs. Waring,” he said, carefully. “And please, leave nothing out.”

  Mrs. Waring, schooled and trained in the art of doing everything in the right order, would have made an excellent storyteller. By the time she was done, Stephen was certain that he now knew all there was to know about the immediate situation. He had set his cup aside when she began, and by now it was cold.

  “Well,” he said when she had finished. “You did everything right, Mrs. Waring. Including swearing the sylphs to secrecy. If I had known, I probably would have blundered in there and frightened her into running again. Now the question is, what can we do? She’s certainly safe where she is, under the Endicott ward, but this Serafina Valdestine, her stepmother—” He shook his head. “This is appalling. She must be brought to justice. I shall have to convene the White Lodge here, but the girl must be a witness, and we need to convince her to do so, rather than coercing her. She must do this of her own free will. And we must find a way to restore her brothers as well.” He rubbed his temple, trying very hard to think as his father would have thought. His father had had decades of experience in handling such things. Stephen had only been a witness and an occasional participant in an occasional conclave and a Hunt or two.

  It all seemed so—surreal. Below him stretched the peaceful lawn full of placid sheep, stretching down to the woods where birds sang, faint and far away. And there, in a cottage in his woods, was the victim of abuse both magical and physical, with her seven more victims of attempted murder and magical abuse—

  And this Serafina has gone undetected for so long . . . we’ll have to handle this with care or she will escape, and probably do something terrible to Elena and her brothers as she does.

  “You have her confidence, Mrs. Waring,” he said, finally, thinking out loud. “As you say, she and her brothers are safe in the cottage. What do you need?”

  “Permission to keep bringing them what they need to live there,” the old woman told him, her tension melted away. Why had she been so tense? Oh, because she was afraid I’d go blundering out there and ruin everything.

  “You have it, of course,” he said. “I’ll give orders to the staff that you are to have full control over the situation. Mrs. Landrace may have ideas about supplies other than foodstuffs. What else do you need?”

  She hesitated. “I’ve yet to suss out that spell that binds the swan boys, but I will say this, it was crafted by an expert. I’ll need time. And I’m thinking maybe she needs some training in her Element.”

  “I can ask a zephyr. Actually, I can make a request for a willing one. Such things have generally been answered in the past,” he promised. “Is there anything else?”

  The old woman smiled, a smile of complete satisfaction. “No, my lord. Not at the moment.”

  “Well, if there is, you come to me. I hate the thought that such a terrible creature as this Serafina is still free to do her damage, but we cannot move until everything is ready or I fear . . . terrible consequences.” He frowned, his headache getting worse. “She could fill the lungs of those come to take her with water. She could pull all the water out of our bodies. She could wait until we are coming for her and ambush us on a bridge.”

  “Don’t dwell on it, my lord,” she said kindly. “Take it one step at a time, like a recipe, and it’ll all come right in the end.”

  He licked his lips, and nodded. “I am sure you are right, Mrs. Waring,” he said, attempting to project a confidence he in no way felt. She made an abbreviated curtsy and left by the terrace door.

  He went looking for Harris and found him in the butler’s pantry. “Mrs. Waring has a visitor in need in the gamekeeper’s cottage, with my approval,” he said, and gave Harris the briefest explanation he could. “Make sure the staff know, and that Mrs. Waring has everything she needs. And alert the staff to watch for strangers, and Elementals that might be acting oddly—”

  “Ah, your father’s usual protocol, my lord?” the butler asked smoothly.

  Stephen felt some of his tension leave him. “Yes, exactly,” he agreed. Of course Father had a protocol. And of course Harris knows it. Harris was a very strong Fire mage, nearly a Master, and had been the old Lord Endicott’s right hand man on Hunts for as long as Stephen could remember—actually, longer than that.

  “If I may recommend, I shall remind the staff to be on the watch for strangers outside the ward, and to be on the alert for anything or anyone that seems out of place. We know that this woman is Water, but she may have nefarious allies in any of the Elements.” Harris exuded the confidence that Stephen sorely lacked at this moment, and Stephen envied it—but was exceptionally grateful for it.

  “You are a wonder, Harris,” he said warmly.

  Harris gave a slight smile. “One tries, my lord. One is flattered when that is appreciated. I shall go gather the staff for a meeting, my lord. You may leave this in my hands.”

  Stephan was entirely out of the mood to work with the estate manager now—and at any rate, that worthy would be in the meeting that Harris was calling. Instead he went to his working room, an austere place with a central plinth, the main diagrams most Air Masters needed embedded in the floor, and blank walls painted blue. He had a second workspace, out in the gardens, but right now he didn’t want the distraction of breezes and birdsong.

  He set up his personal wards and protections with a thought, reached high into the heavens, and gathered his power until he could not hold any more. With another thought, he released it into the Endicott ward, the protective dome that covered the entire estate. Some Masters preferred something more subtle, something that would spring up only at need and the Master’s command, something that did not scream in a thousand esoteric voices, “A Master lives here!”

  But that had never been the Endicott way.

  When he had finished, he dispersed his personal protections and leaned against the plinth. You didn’t have to do that, you know, he told himself.

  Yes, but . . . it makes me feel effective.

  He was cursed, after all, with a very good imagination. He could imagine all sorts of ways in which this woman could strike before any of them realized that she knew that they knew all about her. Poison the water. Dry it up. Flood the entire area. Probably a dozen things he couldn’t even think of.

  He felt the presence of his mother behind him.

  “You are stronger, and wiser than you think,” she said quietly, as he turned. “And you have something this terrible woman does not have.”

  “And what is that?” he asked, taking comfort in the confidence in him that she showed.

  “You have an army of willing allies,” she pointed out. “She has, at most, one, and they do not trust each other. She will not tolerate anyone stronger than she is, and she will abuse anyone weaker. Given the chance, they will turn on her or abandon her.”

  He let out the sigh he had not dared release before Harris and Mrs. Waring. “I hope you are right,” he said.

  She placed her hand on the side of his face, and looked deeply into his eyes. “I know I cannot stop you from trying to think and plan for any contingency, but let me give you a new thing to consider before you wear yourself out going over and over the same ground.”

  His headache receded a little. “What would that be?” he asked, intrigued.

  “We know who she is and where she is, and she knows nothing of us,” his mother pointed out. “We make that our weapon by disguising what we are, and even our powers. Ask Harris to lay a layer of Fire on the Endicott ward so that it looks as if the Master here is Fire and not Air. I am certain you can think of much more than that.”

  And in fact, his mind was abuzz already. He kissed her cheek. “You are as clever as you are beautiful,” he told her. “I’ll be in my study.”

  Her smile warmed him all the way there.

  16

  ELENA and her brothers spent three not-unhappy days alone at the cottage. She contrived to make them each a sort of singlet out of the female clothing she’d brought so that when they changed to human, they weren’t naked. During the day, when they were in swan form, her brothers floated on the pond, grazed on waterweed or grass, or watched from the door while she got rid of the remains of the straw mattress in the fireplace a handful at a time. At night they all came into the cottage and dozed, herself included, until midnight. Then she made proper cheese-on-toast for all of them, while they told her what had happened to them. The first night . . . well, the first night they relived their trauma, almost. They all huddled near the fire, the two eldest trying to be stoic, the others not even pretending that three years had meant nothing to how they felt.

  Felix blurted out everything as soon as they all changed. “Elena, it was horrid! Horrid! I don’t know about the others, but I . . . I felt hands pulling me under when the ice broke. Then I felt—well, I really cannot describe what it felt like to change, but suddenly the hands let me go and I thrashed my way out of the water onto the ice, and I wasn’t cold, but nothing felt right, and my mind just stopped thinking.” The others nodded almost as one, Ben and Arthur blank-faced, the rest visibly holding back fear or tears. “I remember Stepmother threatening to kill us, and all I could feel was the worst terror. It just took me over completely. And somehow I was in the air. I don’t know how. It was as if my body knew how to do this thing, and I just let it. We just—flew. I think Arthur was in the lead, and we followed him?”

  “Me,” Ben corrected, expressionlessly. “We flew until we were exhausted and I finally landed us when I saw a flock of swans on the river. I hoped they would accept us, and they did, so for the first day we watched them and figured out how and what to eat, and the first night we all slept together with them. What else could we do? It was tolerable.”

  “But what happened when you changed at midnight?” she asked.

  “We didn’t,” David told her. “We were all on the water. We thought—I thought, anyway—we’d all be swans forever. We did what the other swans did, and they slept on the river, so, so did we. We couldn’t talk to each other, so that was all we could do. The closest thing to talking was a kind of squeal, and pointing with our heads. The first time we changed back, weeks later, we weren’t on the water; the wild swans were all feeding in an empty grain field, picking out fallen grain, and we had followed them. There was a threshing barn nearby and I called to the others and led them in there, thinking there might be better scavenging in it. There was, and there were heaps of wheat-straw, which seemed to me warmer than sleeping on the river, so I stayed and so did the rest.” He bit his lip. “And then the change happened. It felt like being turned inside out, at least to me. But that wasn’t the worst, because obviously we were naked. It was frightening to find ourselves human and naked and freezing cold.”

  “I think Stepmother probably put that change into her spell so we’d drown, freeze to death, or get ourselves in trouble,” added his twin. “I think Mama’s blood kept us swans on the river, so at least we didn’t drown.”

  “We huddled together under the straw until we changed back. After that we had to either find someplace we could keep from freezing at night, or spend the night on a lake or pond or near the hard bank where the water was still with the other swans. We had to make sure it was someplace where people wouldn’t see us, too, and you might be surprised how many people are out at midnight.” Ben picked up the thread. “That was our life for the next three years. We mostly slept on the water even in good weather. ’Tis very inconvenient to be naked! And of course the only time we could talk to each other was that single hour at midnight. That made it hard to plan anything. I don’t know why we never saw the sylphs in all that time, but perhaps they did not want to draw attention to us.”

  “Then the sylphs came and obviously wanted us to follow them, so we did, and here we are,” Arthur finished. “We didn’t abandon you, Elena, but when we gathered our courage and went back to Whitstone Manor in August, there was a strange man living there, and no sign of you or Stepmother.” He hung his head, and they all looked ashamed. “I am so very sorry we weren’t brave enough to come back sooner. If we had, we could have lurked about, and followed your carriage to Bath, and perhaps lived on the river and maybe made ourselves known to you.”

  She didn’t say anything at first, except “That’s all right,” because what else could she say? In their place, she would have been frightened to return; swans were rather obvious, not to be mistaken for any other bird, and too big to hide. Serafina might have told all the outdoor staff and the manor farmworkers to kill swans on sight as she had threatened. “I can’t think what else you could have done, truly.”

  For the rest of that hour, they sat next to the fire until the change came, all of them unable to find words to express what to Elena were muddled and tumultuous feelings.