Though what it could be—if there was anything—he was hanged if he could imagine!
Well, old man, there is one route to find out what you can about her that you haven’t taken.
Not that he hadn’t thought about it—but magicians as he knew them up in Scotland were odd ducks. Insular, self-protective, and inclined to keep things close to their chests. Those that had formed groups tended to look a little suspiciously on outsiders, and if anyone was an outsider here, it was definitely Dr. Andrew Pike, with Clifton Davies from the Welsh Borders a close second. Still—
They’re sending their sick to me, and mage-born children of ordinary parents when they find them in trouble. So I might not be so much of an outsider that I can’t get information out of these Devonian mages after all. It’d serve me right to discover that the only reason no one’s told me anything is because I didn’t ask.
Fauns would be the best messengers, he reckoned. They weren’t at all troubled by cold weather—didn’t go dormant to sleep until spring like some Earth Elementals. They went everywhere there was a patch of wildwood, and every Earth mage he had ever seen had a patch of wildwood somewhere about. That was one reason why they didn’t much like being in cities, truth to tell. When he got done sending out his messengers, he could get Clifton to send out—oh, Sylphs, he supposed. They were the Air Elementals he was most familiar with, though perhaps there was something else that was more suitable. Then… hmm. Who did he know that he could trade on favors to help him with Water and Fire?
Oh, good Lord—two of the children, of course! Naiads hung about Jamie Cooper like bees around a honey pot, and Craig Newton was always talking to Salamanders in the fire. He couldn’t send messengers from those two Elements, of course; the children didn’t command anything at the moment, and now that he’d gotten them over their fears that they were going mad, his main job was to shield them from the nastier Elementals of their types until they could protect themselves. But he could ask them to ask their Elementals to do the favor, and if the creatures didn’t lose interest or get distracted by something else, they probably would.
But—send out his own Elementals, first, and see where that got him.
The one good and reliable thing about Fauns was that unlike Brownies, they were pitiably easy to bribe with things from the human world. Unfortunately, they were also scatterbrained. But as long as they could lick their lips and taste the honey he’d give them, and as long as their little flasks held the wine he’d offer them, they’d remember, and they’d keep to the job.
After a quick stop in the kitchen for a peg of the vin ordinaire that the departing family had deemed too inferior to take with them or to try and sell, a big cottage-loaf, and a pot of honey, he bundled himself up in his mackintosh and went out into the wet, tying his hood down around his ears.
It was a wild day, one of the “lion” days of March, full of wind and lashings of rain, and he was glad that there hadn’t been two fair days in a row, for weather like this would doom any buds that had been coaxed out before their time. He bent his head to the rain and trudged down to the bottom of the garden, then beyond, into the acres that had once been manicured parkland but had been allowed to fall into neglect. Near the edge of the property he owned was a coppice that had grown up around what had once been a tended grove of Italian cypress, and in the center of that grove was still a marble statue of Pan in one of his milder moods—Pan, the musician, boon companion of Bacchus, not Great God Pan of the wilderness and Panic fear. Even without casting a shield-circle and doing a formal invocation, such a setting was still potent to bring and hold the little fauns (and he sometimes wondered if they were homesick for the warmer winds and cypresses of Italy that they came so readily here).
He shoved his way into the grove, past a couple of gorse bushes grown up like rude boys pressing on the edge of the circle of cypress trees. Something about this spot had suited the cypresses; they had grown tall and thick in this place, and what had once been a circle of graceful, thin, green columns with marble benches at their bases facing the statue that stood at the south-point of the circle, was now a green wall. He edged himself sideways between two of the Italian cypresses, whose dark green, brackenlike branches resisted him for a moment, then yielded.
Then he was within the tiny grove itself, a disk of rank, dead grass, protected from the wind and so marginally warmer than the space outside it. There was Pan, staring down at him with a benign, slightly mischievous grin, holding his syrinx just below his bearded lips. The benches were all toppled, shoved over by the roots and thickening trunks of the cypresses. The marble of the statue was darkened with grime in all the crevices, which had the effect of making it look more like a living creature rather than less. The hair was green with moss, a green which in this light looked black, and the eyes had been cleverly carved so that they seemed to follow whomever walked in front of it.
Here was relative warmth, peace, no Cold Iron, the trees of the Italian peninsula and wilderness. Only two things were lacking to bring the Fauns—food, and drink.
He pulled the cork from the bung-hole of the cask, and dribbled a little on the plinth that Pan stood upon, tore off a bit of bread, dipped it in the honey, and laid it at Pan’s feet. Ideally, he’d have had olive oil as well, but that comestible was a bit difficult to come by in the heart of Devon.
“You could have brought butter,” said a piping voice at his elbow. “We’ve gotten used to butter. Cheese, too, we like cheese.”
“Next time, then I will,” he replied, looking down into the slanted, goatlike golden eyes of the little faun. The shameless little faun, without even a loincloth to cover his privates. Unlike Pan’s—which in the statue were modestly screened by an enormous fig leaf. Fortunately, fauns were not as priapic in nature as the god of whom they were the votaries and earthly representatives.
“It would only get wet,” the Faun pointed out cheerfully. “Have you ever worn a wet leather loincloth? Misery.”
“You have a point,” he admitted. “And I have a favor to ask.”
He sensed more of them all around him, some in hiding, some stealing up behind him. The faun at his elbow sniffed at the wine-smell longingly, his nose twitching. “They don’t make wine here,” he complained. “Only cider. It’s very good cider, really excellent cider, but we’re tired of cider.”
“So this should be very welcome,” he responded, putting the cork back in the bunghole, and carefully placing the cask, bung-end up, on the ground. He added the loaf of bread and the jar of honey beside it. “I’m trying to find anyone who knows the Water Mage up the hill and would be willing to talk to me. The girl-mage, not the man.”
“Not the Christ-man in the village?” This was another faun, who practically quivered with eagerness as his nose filled with the scent of bread and wine.
“No, the young lady who lives in the big house now—”
“We can’t get near,” complained a third, drumming on the ground with one hoof. “They drove us out of the garden and closed the bounds! She made us welcome there, the gentle She with sad eyes, but they drove us out when they came!”
That would have been Madam and her son—small wonder. He’d seen the garden now, manicured to a fare-thee-well, and bristling with wrought-iron ornaments. Madam apparently liked wrought-iron trellises and arbors, lampposts and what not. Taming the wildness and planting iron everywhere would have made the fauns flee as fast as they could.