Free Elemental Magic: All-New Tales of the Elemental Masters by Mercedes Lackey

Lodges possessed an officer whose title was Master of the Hunt.
    Any ability that was used could be misused, and the Elemental Gifts were no exception. To use them for personal gain, for power, or to do harm meant one’s power would turn on its possessor. The best one might hope for was for the power to simply vanish. Though that was bad enough, worse was possible, for an Elemental Mage who misused his powers might do untold damage to those around him before finding the death he so ardently courted. And even that was not the worst, for to bring the fact that magic—true magic—was alive in the world today—and was a birthright that could be neither bought nor sold—would be a disaster more terrible than that of the
Garde Imperiale
marching unopposed through the streets of London. And so, what aid the mages rendered their army was small and circumspect, even though Learie suspected that, did the Elemental Masters of Britain all choose to work together, Boney might have been routed utterly between sunrise and sunset.
    And somewhere in all this vast, unfriendly wilderness, someone had decided to do just that.
    He hadn’t been certain at first. Fire was a constant danger to any army. Cooking was done over open fires, drunkenness was common, and the supply trains carried hundreds of barrels of gunpowder, not to mention fodder for the animals. But in the past several months, there’d been a rash of suspicious incidents. Fires in the French camps. The detonation of stores of gunpowder—also French—that had been safely stored. Grass fires that rendered the countryside a blackened and barren landscape in which the French
forrageurs
could find no supplies for their troops.
    Fires that were the work of a Fire Master.
    Each Element had its kinship and its opposite. Fire and Air were natural allies, as were Water and Earth. Fire’s opposite was Water, as Air’s was Earth. Learie couldn’t sense the workings of an Earth Master, while someone working Air was as obvious to him as a brass band marching by. And Fire . . . well . . . he’d never met a Fire Master. But somehow he’d known from the very first that this was what he was hunting.
    He’d been worried enough to risk a minor summoning, but the sylph who came to his call could tell him little beyond confirming his guess that another magician was using his power to overtly influence the tide of battle. It didn’t matter, Learie realized, whether that work aided the British or harmed them. The person responsible must be found.
    And stopped.
    Somehow.
    His father had spoken in passing of Wizard’s Duels, where two mages tried their powers against one another in a Challenge Circle. But when Learie eagerly asked for more information—for dueling had sounded far more interesting than the tedious work of Shielding that Lord Noctorum had drilled him in before permitting him to attend Eton—his father would not be drawn to expand further. When pressed, he said irritably that such things were well out of fashion, and Learie should be grateful they were. Nor had Dr. Shipmeadow been any more forthcoming.
    I just wish,
Learie thought,
that both my tutors had been less interested in curbing my supposedly frivolous nature and more interested in telling me things!
    He left his own lines in the darkest part of the night, slipping past both sentries and picket riders with what he considered unfortunate ease. Dawn found him warmly nestled in a hayrick many miles away.
    He spent the next several days in a fashion similar to his boyhood, when he escaped the schoolroom on every possible occasion to follow his father’s gamekeeper about the estate. That MacGregor was also the wiliest poacher in the county, teaching the master’s young son a thousand ways to set traps and snares (as well as how to tickle trout out of the streams), had been something he’d thought then was unknown to his father. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Surely nothing could take place on his estate that an Earth