Read Online Steadfast by Mercedes Lackey - Free Book Online Page B

was quite fine with him, and which Jack would enjoy.
    The two of them moved to the back of the house and the little dining room attached
     directly to the kitchen, where the domes gleamed in the center of the table. With
     a faint sigh, Jack sat down immediately; Lionel whisked off the domes to reveal what
     lay beneath. As he had suspected: ham, some cold sliced tongue, some rather lovely
     cheese, onions, pickles of various sorts, radishes, some lettuces, and a fresh, round
     loaf of bread.
    “That looks heavenly,” said Jack with approval. Knowing what his friend and fellow
     magician liked, Lionel was already making him up a sort of plowman’s lunch without
     being asked, even as Jack passed him plates and cutlery from the stack waiting on
     his side of the table.
    There was beer as well, but that was in a little barrel on the sidebar. Lionel pulled
     them each a pint before he sat down himself.
    “All right then,” Lionel said firmly, before taking his first bite. “Time for you
     to be talking, my lad.”
    “Not much to say,” Jack replied, picking up a piece of Gloucestershire, eyeing it
     for a moment, then eating it. “The girl turned up with one of your sylphs flitting
     about her, so at first I thought she might be Air, but then one of my salamanders
     flashed out and attached himself to her, so I knew she was Fire. Unawakened, of course,
     but if a salamander’s taken to her, the power is there. She had a scrap of paper with
     your advertisement on it and asked if the job was still open. I told her yes, gave
     her a ticket to the show so she’d stop here, and told her to come back when it was
     over. Then I went to let you know.”
    He paused and dabbed some mustard on the ham, folded it in bread, and ate that while
     Lionel pondered. Lionel remembered the sylph making off with a similar scrap of advertisement;
     had
she
been responsible for the girl turning up?
    More than likely—probably. Unlike a Master, an Elemental Magician couldn’t actually
     command Elementals to do something, and half the time, when he
requested
something of them, they ignored the request. But Lionel had always gotten along well
     with his sylphs, and knowing he was truly in desperate need of a proper assistant,
     it looked as if they had finally decided to assist him.
    “She’s Traveler, or Gypsy, or I’ll eat my hat,” Jack continued, the lamplight making
     gold out of the few silver threads in his hair. “Not that there’s anything wrong with
     that. Plenty of magic in Traveler blood, and no sylph or salamander would take to
     her like they have if she was bad.” He ate a hard-boiled egg while he thought. “Did
     she seem . . . nervy to you, though?”
    Lionel knew that as an Air mage he was not as sensitive to emotions as Fire or Earth
     would have been. “I couldn’t tell,” he said truthfully. He thought a little more.
     “It did seem . . . I got the impulse to act rather like her old dad, just to keep
     her soothed, if that makes any sense.”
    Jack nodded, and ran his finger around the inside of his collar, loosening it a little.
     “I’ve never known nor heard of a Traveler or a Gypsy to leave the caravans of their
     kin unless they were running from something. And this is a girl, alone. It does point
     to her running away.”
    “She’s not just any girl—” Lionel pointed out, then took a pull of his pint, and tapped
     the wood of the table to emphasize his words. “This is a trained acrobat, a trained
     dancer—trained enough she likely had a good job somewhere. In fact, I know it; that
     rehearsal dress of hers looked like a costume, it was used, and used often and hard.
     Could it be
that
she’s running from?”
    “Circus, maybe,” Jack mulled. “Circus uses dancers around the horses—around the elephant,
     if they’ve got one—and in the parade and chorus numbers. Dancers always double as
     something else. And she does acrobat tricks.” He turned his beer glass in little