Home From The Sea: The Elemental Masters, Book Seven (34 page)

“You were wonderful!” Sarah said, grinning. “I never would have thought of the aunts.”

“It was logical. It seems we come from a numerous family,” Nan observed. “A couple of spare aunts wouldn’t come amiss in a crisis like that.”

“They’d be entirely handy.” Sarah yawned hugely. “All right, I am in favor of a little reading in bed and then sleep. Tomorrow should be… even more interesting.”

Nan snorted. “Tomorrow we find out if we’re as persuasive with the stubbornest girl I ever saw who wasn’t me.” And her face clouded a little. “You know, we are going to have to tell her the truth.”

Neville fluttered up onto Nan’s shoulder and rubbed his beak against her cheek. She reached up to scratch his neck.

“She’ll be angry, but she has sense,” Sarah pointed out. “As long as we can get her to listen to us, I think it will be all right.”

“Yes, well.” Nan got her book and dropped ungracefully into her now-favorite chair. “It’s the getting her to listen part that I am worried about.”

Mari could tell just from how Nan and Sarah walked that they had a lot to tell her. And she knew they had been gone off to Criccieth
twice in the last week, the latest time being just yesterday. So she wasn’t entirely sure what to expect…

Idwal watched them approach with his head tilted to the side, but said nothing.

Nan was the first to speak, taking a deep breath. “I think we need to be somewhere that we are all sitting down,” she said, looking both determined and a little apprehensive. “Where we won’t be watched.”

Mari nodded towards the cottage. “We’ll still be watched, probably, though he won’t be able to
see
us,” she said with undisguised contempt. “You know, ’tis the first time I ever regret that there’s not more trouble in Clogwyn. If there was, at least yon fool would have something to do besides lie on his belly under a gorse bush and snoop.”

Nan snorted, but was happy to follow Mari into the cottage. When they were all seated around the fireplace, Mari looked at her expectantly.

“We… haven’t been entirely honest with you, Mari,” Nan said, rubbing her thumb nervously over her forefinger. “You see, we were sent here. To find you.”

It was a little difficult to grasp, even for herself, how Mari felt as Nan outlined the entire story. How the Master of this—White Lodge—had found out there was a new Water Master, and sent Nan and Sarah to look for him. How they’d found Mari, and Idwal, and been ordered to investigate further. How the Puck himself had gotten involved. How they’d worked out how to approach her. “And we really
are
your friends, truly!” Sarah said, pleadingly. “If we weren’t, we’d have told Lord A we couldn’t do this any more and gone home. We want to help you, and we think we’ve worked out how.”

Truth to tell, at first she was so very angry she couldn’t speak, which was why she’d let them rattle on rather than getting up and giving them more than just a piece of her mind. The idea that a lot of foreign rich men off in London could sit in judgment on her and her life when they didn’t know
her
, didn’t know
here
, and didn’t
know the first thing about the Selch or the Bargain or anything else—

But it was that very anger that turned on itself. Because, when you thought about it, a bunch of rich foreign men in London were
always
sitting in judgment on the Welsh. That was why the constable was here in the first place, and he was making a lot of people angry and unhappy with his meddling and prying. At least this particular lot of men had had the good sense to leave things up to Nan and Sarah, who were not at all meddling, who had treated her like she was a sister, almost, and who, if they had lied to her, had done so to protect her.

So by the time that Sarah got to the part about them wanting to stay over-winter and help, the anger had burned out. Because, really, there were only two things that
mattered.
She loved Idwal, and her da, and she needed a way to have both without causing more trouble. You couldn’t rightly say that Nan and Sarah had used her in any way. Nor had they manipulated her. Nor had they entrapped her. And as soon as they possibly could be, they were honest with her. If that didn’t mean they really were friends… well, then Mari didn’t know what she
could
call a friend.

She also knew that if Nan and Sarah had the friendship of the Land-Ward, they were very special indeed. And they had pled her case with a very powerful lord, more powerful than just his title indicated, if he was the Master of the Masters. Why, who knew what he would have done if these two had not come here on his errand?

“I have heard of this Master in Londinium,” Idwal mused. “Oh, not his name, but that he had organized many of the Masters of Logres, and drew them to work together. The Selkies have to do with some of his people. They say he is a good, if somewhat…” he tilted his head to the side. “Somewhat limited man.”

Nan blinked. “What does that mean?” she asked.

“That he… he limits his thinking. That to his mind, the important and powerful must always be men of his sort.” Idwal pointed a finger at Nan, who was staring at him. “And you, little maiden, know precisely what I mean by that.”

Nan was surprised into a laugh. “Yes. Yes I do,” she said, without an explanation.

Well, this Master in London didn’t really concern Mari at the moment. What did concern her was the situation sitting here at her hearth. So she took a good, long, deep breath. She reminded herself to look at
all
sides of the thing, and it was no more than a moment’s worth of thought to tell her that her friends were truly her friends, and they were not happy with having had to deceive her for so long.

“All right then,” she said. “I believe you. So now what does this Lord of yours mean to do about me and Idwal?”

The relief Nan and Sarah felt was obvious in the sighs they heaved and the way the tension just ran out of their bodies. Even their birds reflected it, going from slicked-down and wary, to fluffed, with wings relaxed.

“I suspect he’s not entirely
happy
about this, but since it’s not something that anyone is going to change, he wants to make sure nothing interferes with you two,” Sarah said earnestly. “He understands about the Bargain. I think he’s wary about an Elemental creature being the teacher of an Elemental Master, and I think if he dared, he’d offer you another teacher—”

“Wait,” Mari commanded, holding up a hand. She turned to Idwal. “Is that a good idea?”

He pondered the question. “Eventually, yes,” he said, finally. “I know only the oldest of the teachings. There could very well be much that a teacher who is not from an isolated Selch clan living beyond the sea you know could teach you. But I should like to wait until I know you are firm in your understanding.”

Nan nodded. “Fair enough.”

“And,” Idwal added, “Since there will be a wedding and a bedding, there will soon be wee ones to consider and work around about.”

Mari felt herself blushing a little, and hoped it didn’t show. “Well, and there’s another problem,” she said instead. “Here we have that constable looking for trouble. And here we have a strange
man coming to live with the Protheros, and no one knows him, nor where he’s from. I thought, before there was a constable and when I just wanted to get it all over with, we could make the man a sailor, but… well we still
could
, but where would I have met a sailor? And the constable will be wanting to make questions.” She almost felt like crying now. “What should we do? Should we be running away? But where would we go?” She couldn’t imagine, given his attitude, that Gethin would welcome her among the Selch even though now she had a skin of her own.

Ah but… maybe this great lord would give us a little place of our own, away from constables and all, where we wouldn’t have to explain ourselves to anyone
… For a moment, she lost herself in the dream. But then she brought herself down to earth again. Why should this man do anything of the sort for her? No—and besides, she’d be away from her da, never to see him again. No, that was not a good plan.

“About that… we think we have a plan,” Sarah said, and opened up the sketchbook she had brought with her. “How would you care to be as reluctant a bride as you were when your father told you of the bargain?”

Mari’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, cautiously.

“We think that old snoop is never going to believe in you being happy to marry someone who has just popped up out of nowhere, so far as he knows,” Nan explained. “But what if you
aren’t
happy and it was an arranged marriage? Say… a distant cousin? Someone your father promised you to, and you’re just now finding out?”

“We can pick somewhere remote enough for him to be from that the snoop won’t be able to discover you don’t have a cousin,” Sarah elaborated. “You can be angry you’re being forced into this.” She looked at Nan. “We can steal a page from Jane Austen, and the cousin gets the cottage when her father dies,” she pointed out.

Nan laughed. Mari frowned. “I don’t know what you mean,” she pointed out again.

“It’s just that there is a book we both like, a book that has the
situation of a young lady being urged to marry a rather odious cousin because he will inherit the house they are living in when their father dies,” Nan said.

A distant cousin, and an arranged marriage. It wasn’t unheard of. And since the Protheros had always kept themselves a bit apart from the rest of the village, no one would really know how out of character that would be for Daffyd to force his daughter into
anything
against her will. Everyone knew inheritance was a tricksy thing, and no one would be surprised to discover that some far-off fellow was claiming the Prothero cottage. Slowly, Mari nodded, then turned to Idwal.
“Can
you be odious?” she asked.

“I can imitate Gethin,” he suggested, with a smile.

She grinned back at him. “That will certainly do!” she agreed. “I believe that is a very good idea!”

“You say that you know Selch clans in Scotland? Could you come from that part of the world?” Sarah prompted, as Mari got up to fill the kettle and make everyone some tea, since this discussion looked to go on for some time.

Idwal considered this. “Are the Orkney Islands remote enough that there would be no easy way to say I was
not
from there?” he asked, finally. “In the days of our bargain, there was much coming and going between the Orkneys and here. Enough so there was even some intermarrying, mostly among the clan-leaders and war-chiefs and Druids and the like. You may have heard of some of this—the war-chief called Lot of Orkney—”

Nan glanced at Sarah, who mouthed the words
King Arthur
at her. So Nan nodded, as Sarah did, though Mari looked a little puzzled. “I think the Orkneys are remote enough,” Sarah agreed. “And isolated enough! Even if Constable Ewynnog gets suspicious, first he’d have to get his superiors to enquire up in Scotland—”

“Which is
not
very likely, as they seem inclined to make him do everything on his own—” put in Nan.

“Then they’d have to find someone in the police service stationed
in
the Orkneys to ask about Idwal—”

“And if my experience of the Scots is anything to go on,” Nan
said with a twinkle, “They’re not terribly likely to be willing to cooperate with some busy-body Englishman. And to them, a Welshman is the same as an Englishman.”

“And then the information has to get back down here, and even if he can’t find anyone who knows you, it doesn’t prove anything.” Sarah accepted the cup of tea from Mari with murmured thanks.

“Why the Orkneys?” Nan asked, accepting her cup in turn. “And thank you, that’s lovely.”

Idwal laughed, and smiled broadly. “Because my clan knows a Selkie clan there, I have actually lived there long enough to describe where I was accurately, I’ve studied with their Master, and I can fair well imitate the accent. ’Tis not unlike the Cymric.” He cleared his throat, and what followed was in English, and a little slower, and a little more sing-song than the Welsh he had been speaking. “We doon speak Gaelic at hoom. Gaelic, ye ken, is mo-ore the west coast; people think because we be in the noorth we speak it as weel, boot up until James, ye ken, what we spook was Norn.”

“Brilliant!”
said Grey, and Neville flapped his wings in agreement. Idwal bowed to the birds.

“I can keep to that from sunup to sundown,” he said, chuckling.

“You’ll only have to do it when others are about,” said Mari happily. “And, I suppose, pretend you don’t speak Cymric at all. I do understand English; I learned it in dame school, though not all that well. I didn’t see any need for it, since it was just me and da most of the time.”

“And knowing you, what you didn’t see a need for, you stubbornly refused to learn,” Idwal replied, gently chiding. Nan got the feeling this related to something that had occurred between them—probably having to do with Mari’s magic studies—that she wasn’t privy to. From the way Mari blushed, she was pretty sure she was right.

“But that’s all to the good now,” Sarah pointed out. “First, she has this unwelcome husband thrust on her, second, he doesn’t even speak her language, and third, he’s not a very nice person. Constable Ewynnog isn’t going to question anything at that point, not
the way he would if this beloved betrothed suddenly pops up out of nowhere.” Then she snorted. “He probably
will
feel very superior, however, and hold forth about the barbarity of arranged marriages to anyone who will listen.”