Page 53 of Bound and Tide

“Well, I’m off,” Xander finally said after an awkward moment of silence.

No one else moved, so he attempted to shoo the three toward the stairs from which they’d come.

Red rolled her emerald eyes and maneuvered around him, Maia and even Costa following her out onto the rickety dock.

“What are you doing?”

“We didn’t come all this way to sit out the last leg,” said Red as she slipped off her bag of potions and tossed it into the boat.

“You’ve only come this far because I’ve allowed it, and I’m not allowing—”

“Oh, my gods, shut it,” Maia groaned, hugging the jar of imp minnows as she hopped in behind Red. “Obviously we’re going.”

So Xander did shut it because they were already seated and waiting for him, and it was sort of inevitable, so dedicating much more dialogue to it would purely be for indulgence’s sake.

As Maia and Costa unmoored the canoe, Red passed them vials of something tinged orange. “I’ve only got the two, but they should help you focus,” she said, casting a wary glance at the fog ahead. She could feel it too, then, the pulsing magic that was making Xander sweat in the cold.

How she didn’t feel it all the time around him, he didn’t know, but he could sense it was noxscura waiting for them.

The lake’s mist was thick and arcane but unlike the magic the imps had created back in Bendcrest. This didn’t threaten. In fact, it reached out and beckoned closer, but the direction was confusing. In the back of his head, the voice started up, but none of the words were clear, a garbled, faraway mess. They wouldn’t have been able to navigate without the younger two casting into the water and propelling them in a straight line.

Shit, Xander thought, heartbeat quickening as he took in Red’s steely gaze, I can’t be the only one this anxious. There was a tap at his shoulder, and he looked back to see Costa with his arm out, hand wrapped around something in offering. Oh, dark gods, don’t let the weakest one be my un-fucking-doing.

Xander opened his palm, and Costa dropped a leather cord into it, that errant bit of metal he’d been practicing his magic on during their travels attached. “You’d…like me to check your work?” Xander asked, brow cocked.

Costa shook his head slowly, but Xander brought the flat bit of copper to his face anyway. The markings on it were pristine and delicate, and they were just the same as the ones on Costa’s earring and Maia’s wrist cuff.

“What is this then?” he asked, jaw tight.

“It’s for you,” the boy told him with eyes unblinking, the apprehension there unique. “It’s written in Old Key. It says, see one jackdaw but know there are many. Mom used to say that to remind us we weren’t really ever on our own like how birds…you know, they flock together?”

Xander wrapped his fingers around the valueless bit of metal and the old leather cord, squeezing it like it were pure arcana. I hate this, he wanted to spit and, you’ve wasted your time and skill, as well as advising that, this goes with absolutely none of my outfits, but instead he pocketed it. “I hope you do not mind losing this when it’s buried with me.”

Costa averted his gaze sheepishly with a small shake of his head, focusing back on the water and guiding their boat through the thickening mist with his sister.

Soon they could only see whiteness in every direction, but they continued ahead, the wet chill of the air seeping into their clothes and clinging on. The tightness in Xander’s chest was only made that much worse when the boat thumped against something and slowed.

“The shallows,” Maia said in a whisper, probably the quietest she’d ever been.

At the front of the boat, Red leaned forward and then threw herself back against Xander. From the mist, a figure formed above them, shadowed and looming. Breaths were caught and bodies tensed, but the figure never moved. It was set on a dock that was otherwise covered in a layer of snow, legs hanging over the edge just above the water, a fishing pole in hand, yet the pole was snapped, the end part—the part actually for fishing—completely missing.

The eyes were vacant, but the body swayed lightly like it were alive. Its clothing was tattered and skin worn as if it had spent many years in one spot, a thin layer of ice all over. Xander waved a hand through the air, testing his hold on his water arcana. The mist thickened enough to bump the body, and it swayed harder, a crack in the layer of ice over its limbs. But then it straightened, never glancing their way.

“Odd,” he simply said as the boat passed up the dock’s end, “but at least there’s only the one.”

A look toward the shore where the mist broke proved Xander very wrong. Bodies dotted the narrow, mucky way, but to call them people seemed wholly inaccurate. Each moved a bit, but it was clear from the divots in the earth around them and the state of their clothes and skin that was all they did, season after season. Some cast broken lines into the lake and others gutted long decayed fish with rusted tools, but none acknowledged their approaching boat.

A sourceless sound came up to meet them, a distant knocking that echoed out over the water. The boat parted marshy weeds and bumped into the shore. The four sat, bobbing there, watching. When still no one recognized them, Xander gathered these creatures were even less than no one and remembered what Father Theodore had said about the event.

“Leftover arcana has leeched out into the villagers’ bodies,” Xander explained, stepping out and into the muck on the shore. “Noxscura is always looking for something to take hold of, even the dead.”

He offered a hand to Red who stepped out behind him, her keen gaze shifting from one figure to the next, but still none moved. Carefully, she took the jar of minnows from Maia as she too climbed out, and then there was a splash.

“Damn it, Costa,” Xander grumbled as he reached down and dragged the boy out of the frigid shallows.

“S-sorry,” he stammered, shivering, but even that noise proved their presence had no effect on the figures or on that distant knocking, still echoing from farther away.

The shore was dotted with clumps of snow atop black rocks, only going on about twenty paces until there was a wall of fir-like trees.

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