Phoenix and Ashes by Mercedes Lackey Page B

Council
who felt capable of objecting to her presence. And truth to tell, they
needed
her. They had needed her before the war. She was one of a handful of Earth
Masters who could bear to live and work in the heart of a great city.
    Now
they needed her—and the other women they had admitted to the White
Lodge—more than ever. The war had been no easier on the ranks of the
Elemental Masters than it was on the common man.
    Today,
however, triumph was not even in the agenda. “He’s in wretched
shape, my lord,” she said slowly. “It is not helping that so many
physicians and most officers, all of whom should know better, are convinced
that shellshock is just another name for malingering. Even as
he
,
himself, acknowledges that he is not well, there is the subconscious conviction
that if he only had an ounce more willpower, he would get over it and back to
the fight. I can tell him differently until I turn as blue as Rama; until he
believes it in his heart, he will continue to berate himself even as he
suffers.”
    Lord
Alderscroft—who, not that long ago, would have agreed with those
physicians and officers—sighed heavily. He knew better now. All Elemental
Masters knew better; the war was hellish, but it was worse on the minds and
nerves of Elemental Masters. The truth was, most of the Masters that had gone
into the trenches,
if
they survived the senseless, mindless way in
which the War Department threw away their lives, were there for less than six
months before their minds broke. “So he is in no fit state, as Doctor
Boyes reports, with a ripe case of shell-shock as well as physical injuries.
And as if that were not enough, then there is what he faced, in the
earth.”
    She
shook her head, and swallowed, as her husband closed his hand over hers. She
had closed herself off as much as she had dared, but as a Healer and a
physician, she had needed to know something of what he had experienced.
    She
had been ready for it, and of course, it had come at second hand, but it had
been too horrific for anyone to really understand without sharing it.
    She
gave Peter a faint smile of thanks. “You do not wish to know the details,
my lord. Horrors. That is enough, I think. The inimical forces of all four
Elements can terrify, but I think that those of Earth are most particularly apt
at destroying the mind with fear. They swarmed him and tormented him from the
moment the earth was shattered around him to the moment that the rescue party
broke through and got him out. The records say he was more dead than alive. I
am not at all surprised. What I am surprised at is that he has a mind left at
all, much less a rational one.”
    “Well,”
Alderscroft rumbled, his face creased and re-creased with lines of care,
“We humans have taught them about torment and horror all too well, have
we not?” He sighed again.
    “Do
not lay too much upon the shoulders of mere mortals, my lord,” Maya
replied, grimly. “Recall that it is Healing that is in the Gift of the
Earth Mages and Elementals. The converse is harm, and it is naturally true of
the dark side of that Element.” She thought with pity of the poor fellow,
who she last recalled seeing as a bright young Oxford scholar, utterly
shattered and weeping his heart out, bent over her knees. It was a state she
had wanted to bring him to—for without that initial purging, he could not
even begin to heal—but it had been painful for her to do so, and only the
fact that she had done it before, to others, even made it possible for
her
to carry it through. But she was a surgeon, and surgeons became hardened to
necessity after a time. You could not cleanse a wound without releasing the
infection. You could not heal the mind without letting some of the pressure
off. “The larger consequence for
us
, my lord, is that he has cut
himself off from any use of his powers.”
    Lord
Alderscroft closed his eyes. “I feared as much. And we cannot afford
that. Too many of us are