Home From The Sea: The Elemental Masters, Book Seven by Mercedes Lackey Page B

though.”
    “Hmm. Looking into things… like Sherlock Holmes?” Nan hazarded. “Only looking for magic and the occult?”
    “I think that was more-or-less what he was hinting at.” Sarah toyed with the end of her braid. “I should think we’d need some skills or something, to blend in, though.”
    Nan sucked on her lower lip, thoughtfully. “Maybe not as much as you think. After all, it’s unlikely he’d ask us to investigate… oh… a haunted office. We wouldn’t need to be secretaries. We can easily fit in with Memsa’b’s class, we could pass as governesses for a little while, I think I can probably get back my street ways—though it would probably be safer to disguise myself as a young man—and neither of us are afraid of working with our hands, so we could slip in below-stairs among servants at need.…”
    Sarah clasped both her hands on her knees and looked intrigued. “When you put it that way—”
    “About the only thing we can’t pass as is country folk. But if it is possible to be… oh… romantical lady poets or something, we could probably tramp about the countryside with impunity long enough to find out what Lord A wants found out.” Nan found herself warming to this idea the more she talked about it.
    “But do you think he’d have enough work for us?” Sarah asked, doubtfully.
    “There’s only one way to find out,” Nan countered, and grinned when Neville quorked and flapped his wings.
    “Ask! Ask!”
the raven said, with great enthusiasm.
    “There, you see?” Nan spread her hands wide. “Even the birds like it.”

    Mari went to bed anxious. Tomorrow would be her birthday, and not just any birthday, but her eighteenth. As if that wasn’t enough, she had learned from experience that as her birthday went, so the rest of the year seemed to go. The year it had stormed on her birthday was the year there were so many storms that Daffyd Prothero had been almost the only fisherman to reliably bring in catches.That year had been good from a financial point of view, and that had been the year that many silver pennies went into the jar under the hearthstone, but it had been a nerve-wracking one for Mari, and more somberly, they’d attended three funerals of drowned fishermen that year. There had also been several wrecks, and bodies had even washed up in front of the cottage.
    On the other hand, the year that the day had not only been bright and clear but as warm as summer had been an unseasonably mild one, with just enough gentle rain for the garden.
    She had another reason to be uneasy as she went to bed. As the day had neared, her father had been acting strangely. She caught him staring at her with an odd, apprehensive expression on his face, many times. But whenever she tried to ask him anything that wasn’t a commonplace, he swiftly changed the subject. Maddening.
    And somewhat alarming.
    And there was the third thing. What would the coming year be like, if the day was marked by one or more of the Tylwyth Teg folk turning up? She shuddered to think.
    When she rose at dawn, at least one fear was assuaged. The morning was bright and clear, with no signs of storm. Daffyd had somehow managed to smuggle a posy of violets into the house and it was sitting in a teacup at her place at table when she came down from the loft to make breakfast. He managed to do this every year, and every year it made her smile. Her presents were laid out there too; extravagant ones that made her eyes go round—a tortoise-shell brush and comb and a matching hand-mirror so she wouldn’t have to use a bit of broken mirror propped against the wall. Two tortoise-shell hair-combs to put her hair up like a lady. And a string of beautiful blue glass beads, not the round cast ones, but the polished, faceted beads that sparkled like gemstones in the light.
    Her da was nowhere to be seen—but she knew where he was. On her birthday,
he
did the work of bringing the water from the stream, and a moment after she picked