The Gates of Sleep by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online Page A

a
painting-frenzy was on him.
    Thomas reached for the teapot and let out his breath in a
sigh. “Eight months,” he said, and there was no indication in his
voice that the sigh was one of relief. Margherita nodded.
    They had always known that this last year, Marina’s
seventeenth, would be the hardest. Even if Arachne was not aware that her curse
now had a limitation on it, she would still be trying to bring it to fruition
in order to achieve that self-imposed deadline. The older Marina got, the
stronger she would be in her powers, and the better able to defend herself. Nor
could Arachne count on Marina remaining alone; although the help that her
friends could give her was, by the very nature of the magic that they wielded,
somewhat limited, that did
not
apply to true lovers, especially if
they happened to be of complementary Elements. In a case like that the powers
joined, magnifying each other, and it would be very difficult for a single
Power to overwhelm them. The older Marina was, the more likely it became that
she would fall in love, and Magic being what it was, it was a foregone conclusion
that it would be with another Elemental magician.
    Arachne would want to prevent
that
at all costs,
for her curse would rebound on its caster if it was broken, and heaven only
knew what would happen then.
    So this seventeenth year of Marina’s life would be
the most dangerous for her, and her guardians were doing everything in their
power to keep her out of the public eye.
    Not her
image
—that was harmless enough. She
didn’t look strikingly like either of her parents; the resemblance had to
be hunted for. She had Hugh’s dark hair, a sable near to black, but it
was wavy rather than straight as his was, or as curly as her mother’s. In
fact, virtually everything about her was a melding of the two; her face between
round and oblong, her mouth neither the tiny rosebud of her mother’s, nor
as wide as her father’s. She was tall, much taller than her mother. And
her eyes—well, they were nothing like either parent’s. Hugh’s
were gray, Alanna’s a cornflower blue. Marina’s were enormous and
blue-violet, a color so striking that everyone who saw her for the first time
was arrested by the intensity of it. There had been no hint of that color when
she’d been a baby, and as far as anyone knew, there had never been eyes
of that color in either family.
    So Sebastian had been using her as a model all this past
year, both because she was a wonderful subject and to keep her busy and out of
the village as much as possible. And if because of that his pictures took on a
certain sameness, well, that particular trait hadn’t hurt Rossetti’s
popularity, nor any of the other Pre-Raphaelites who had favorite models.
    In fact, the only negative aspect to using Marina as a
model had so far been as amusing as it was negative—that certain would-be
patrons had assumed that the model’s virtue was negotiable. After the
first shock—the Blackbird Cottage household was known in the artistic
community more as a model for semi-stodgy propriety than
otherwise—Sebastian had rather enjoyed disabusing those “gentlemen”
of that notion. If going cold and saying in a deathly voice, “Are you
referring to
my niece?”
was not a sufficient hint, then turning
on a feigned version of a Fire Master’s wrath certainly was. No one ever
faced a Fire Master in his full powers without quailing, whether or not they
had magic themselves, and even theatrical anger was nearly as intimidating as
the real thing.
    And Sebastian being Sebastian, he usually got, not only an
apology, but an increase in his commission out of the encounter. He’d
only lost one patron out of all of the years that he’d been using Marina,
and it was one he’d had very little taste for in the first place. “I
told him to go elsewhere for his damned ‘Leda,’ if he wanted the
model as well as the painting,” was what he’d growled to Margherita
when he’d returned from