Phoenix and Ashes by Mercedes Lackey Page B

felt
like sun-warmed silk slithering through her fingers and around her wrists.
    “It’s
not burning me—” she gasped, staring at the creature in
fascination.
    “And
I’ll wager you’ve never been burned in your life,” Sarah
replied triumphantly. “Have you?”
    “Only—”
Eleanor began, then stopped. She
had
been going to say, “only
when Carolyn cauterized my finger,” but then she realized that she had
not actually been
burned
, not even then. The bleeding had been stopped,
and the wound sealed, but no more, and it hadn’t been a burn that had
caused her so much pain, it had been the wound itself and the fever that
followed. “—ah, I haven’t,” she admitted, watching the
Salamander weave around her outstretched fingers.
    “What—what
does all this mean?” she asked at last.
    “That
I need to begin teaching you what I can, and there is no time like the present.
Unless you had something planned?” Sarah tilted her head to the side.
“A garden party, perhaps?”
    That
brought a smile to Eleanor’s face, and a rueful shrug. “So long as
my stepmother isn’t here—”
    “We
must take advantage of that. Let your friend go back to his fire and
we’ll begin.”
     
    By
nightfall, Eleanor knew a hundred times more about magic than she had before
Sarah knocked on the door. She knew about casting circles of protection and
containment, a little about summoning, and something about the Elementals of
her own Element, although the only one she had seen as yet was the little
Salamander, the weakest of the lot. And she was far more tired than she would
have thought likely. It wasn’t as if she’d been
working
,
after all, just sitting and walking about the kitchen, nothing more.
    “It
takes it out of you,” Sarah said solemnly, as the two of them worked on a
little supper in the evening gloom. “And you’re lucky that woman is
of another Element, or she’d know when you were working, as she’d
be able to cut you off from your power. As it is, she’s strong enough to
bind you and command you.”
    By
this point, Eleanor had gotten well past the suspension of disbelief and was at
the point where she would have accepted the presence of an invisible second
moon in the sky if Sarah had insisted it was there. Part of this was due to
fatigue, but most of it was simply that she had taken in so many strange things
that her mind was simply fogging over.
    “Why
am I so tired?” she asked, setting down plates on the kitchen table,
while Sarah ladled soup into bowls and cut slices of bread for both of them.
    “Because
the power you’ve been using to cast circles and all has to come from you
yourself, lovey,” Sarah replied.
    Eleanor
frowned, and rubbed her temple with the back of her wrist. “But I thought
magic just was—magic!”
    “Something
out of nothing, you mean?” Sarah laughed. “Not likely, my girl. The
only time you get power at no cost to you is when your Elementals grant it to
you, or you take it from someone else. And I’ll give you a guess where
your stepmother gets much of
hers
from.”
    Eleanor
sat down in her chair. “She’ll be back in a day or two—and
what will I do then?” she asked. “How am I going to see you, or
keep learning?” It was a good question; what
would
she do? She
was kept busy from dawn to dark and then some; how could she ever get time to
continue learning and practicing?
    “Does
she lock the doors?” Sarah asked. “You’ll wait until the
house is asleep, and then you’ll draw the glyph and bend her spell and
come to me for an hour or two.” She smiled slyly. “You do the
cooking, don’t you? Well, one advantage of being a mere Witch is that
I
don’t rely on power to do everything. I’ll give you some things to
put in their food that will send them to bed early on the nights you’re
to come, and keep them there a-snoring, and they’ll be nothing the
wiser!”
    Eleanor
blinked. “Is that safe?” she asked, dubiously. “I mean, what
if