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really did need them, she
might not be able to raise them in time. There were unfriendly
Elementals—some downright hostile to humans. And there were unfriendly
Masters as well.
    “I beg your pardon,” she said with immediate
contrition to the Undine, who laughed, flipped her tail again, and dove under
the surface to vanish into the waters.
    She spent several moments putting up those shields
properly, and another vowing not to let them drop again. What had she been
thinking? If Uncle Sebastian had caught her without her shields, he’d
have verbally flayed her alive!
    Well, he hadn’t. And what he didn’t know,
wouldn’t hurt him.
    And besides, it was time for tea.
    Checking again to make sure those shields were intact, she
picked up her basket, rose to her feet, and ran back up the path to the
farmhouse, leaving behind insolent Undines and uncomfortable questions.
    For now, at any rate.
     

Chapter Two
    SEBASTIAN had paint in his hair, as usual; Margherita
forbore to point it out to him. He’d see it himself the next time he
glanced in a mirror, and her comments about his appearance only made him testy
and led to growling complaints that she was fussing at him. Besides, he looked
rather—endearing—with paint in his hair. It was one more reminder
of the impetuous artist who had proposed to her with a brush behind one ear and
paint all over his hands.
    At least these days he generally got the paint off his
hands before he ate!
    Instead, she passed the plate of deviled ham sandwiches to
him, and said, “Well, they’re off to Italy. They caught the boat
across the Channel yesterday, if the letter was accurate.”
    No need to say
who,
Alanna and Hugh Roeswood,
unable to bear their empty house in the winter, had fled to Italy as soon as
their harvest was over that first disastrous year, and had repeated the trip
every year after. It was a habit now, Margherita suspected; Earth Masters
tended to get into comfortable ruts. The Roeswoods always took the same Tuscan
villa, and Alanna was able to pass the time in a garden that was living through
the winter instead of stark and dormant. As an Earth Master herself, Margherita
suspected that it helped her cope with her grief. By now, the earth there knew
them as well as the earth of Oakhurst did.
    Sebastian helped himself to sandwiches, and nodded. He
seldom read Alanna’s letters; Margherita suspected they were too
emotional for him. Like all Fire Masters, his emotions were volatile and easily
aroused. And Alanna’s letters could arouse emotion in a stone.
    As Margherita had suspected he would, he shifted the
subject to one more comfortable. “I’ll be glad when winter truly
comes for us. With all the harvesters moving in and out, it fair drives me mad
trying to keep track of the strangers in the village.”
    Strangers—the unspoken danger was always there, that
Marina’s
real
aunt had finally found out where she was, that one
of those strangers was her spy.
    Never mind that Marina was known as “Marina Tarrant”
and everyone thought she was Sebastian’s niece. Never mind that they
managed to preserve that false identity to literally everyone in the world
except her real parents and that handful of guests at the ill-fated gathering
after the christening. Such a transparent ruse would never fool Arachne, if the
woman had any idea where to look for the child. The single thing keeping Marina
safe was that Thomas, Sebastian, and Margherita were the Roeswoods’
social inferiors, and it would probably never enter Arachne’s head to
look for her brother’s child in the custody of middle-class bohemians.
She had, in fact, looked right past them when she had made her dramatic
entrance; perhaps she had thought they had been invited only because they were
part of something like the great Magic Circle in London. Perhaps she had even
thought they were mere entertainers, musicians for the gathering. It had been
clear then that to her, they might as well not exist.
    And why