The Gates of Sleep Read Online Free PDF

air, fragrant with curing hay. Deep in the heart of the orchard was
her favorite place; where the stream that cut through the heart of the trees
dropped abruptly by four feet, forming a lovely little waterfall that was a
favorite of the lesser Water Elementals of the area. The bank beside it,
carpeted with fern and sweet grass, with mosses growing in the shadows, was
where Marina liked to sit and read, or watch the Water Elementals play about in
the falling water, and those of Air sporting in the branches.
    They looked like—whatever they chose to look like.
The ones here in her tiny stream were of a size to fit the stream, although
their size had nothing to do with their powers. They could have been
illustrations in some expensive children’s book, tiny elfin women and
men, with fish-tails or fins, except that there was a knowing look in their
eyes, and their unadorned bodies were frankly sensual.
    Of course, they weren’t the only Water Elementals she
knew.
    She’d seen River-horses down at the village, where
her little stream joined a much greater one, and water nymphs of more human
size, but the amount of cold iron in and around the water tended to keep them
at bay. She’d been seeing and talking with them for as long as she could
remember.
    She often wondered what the Greater Elementals were like;
she’d never been near a body of water larger than the river that supplied
the village mill with its power. She often pitied poor Sarah and Jenny, who
literally couldn’t see the creatures that had been visible to
her
for all of her life—how terrible, not to be able to see all the strange
creatures that populated the Unseen World!
    Her minor Elementals—Undines, who were about the size
of a half-grown child, though with the undraped bodies of fully mature
women—greeted her arrival with languid waves of a hand or pretended
indifference; she didn’t mind. They were rather like cats, to tell the
truth. If you acted as if you were interested in them, they would ignore you,
but if you in your turn ignored them you were bound to get their attention.
    And there were things that they could not resist.
    In the bottom of her basket was a thin volume of poetry,
part of the reading that Uncle Sebastian had set for her lessons—not
Christina Rossetti, as might have been assumed, but the sonnets of John Donne.
She put her back against the bank in the sun, and with her book in one hand and
a sandwich in the other, she immersed herself in verse, reading it aloud to the
fascinated Undines who propped their heads on the edge of the stream to listen.
    When the Undines tired of listening to poetry and swam off
on their own business, Marina filled her basket with ripe apples—the last
of the season, left to ripen slowly on the trees after the main harvest. But it
wasn’t teatime by any stretch of the imagination, and she really wasn’t
ready to go back to the house.
    She left the basket with her book atop it next to the
stream, and strolled about the orchard, tending to a magical chore of her own.
    This was something she had been doing since she was old
enough to understand that it needed doing: making sure each and every tree was
getting exactly the amount of water it needed. She did this once a month or so
during the growing season; it was the part of Earth Magic to see to the health
of the trees, which her aunt did with gusto, but Margherita could do nothing to
supply the trees with water.
    She had done a great deal of work over the years here with
her own Elemental Power. The stream flowed pure and sweet without any need for
her help now, though that had not always been the case; when she had first come
into her powers a number of hidden or half-hidden pieces of trash had left the
waters less than pristine. The worst had been old lead pipes that Uncle Thomas
thought might date all the way back to Roman times, lying beneath a covering of
rank weed, slowly leaching their poison into the water. Uncle Thomas had gotten
Hired John to