Page 58 of A Magic Deep & Drowning

Clara spun around to find a stout figure draped in a shawl peering at her through the dim light.

“Helma!”

For the second time in only a few moments, Clara found the balm for her battered heart in the echoing transept of a church. And for the second time, Clara could not get her arms around her old friend fast enough. Helma folded her into her chest, her familiar scent of musky lavender the sweetest thing that Clara had ever smelled.

“What are you doing here?” Clara asked breathless as she pulled away.

“In Amsterdam? I came to visit my sister, and look for work.”

Clara’s cheeks colored, painfully aware that she was the cause of Helma’s position. “But why the church? Why are you not with your sister?”

“Oh, you know the way of it,” Helma said with a little wave. “I don’t like to be underfoot. And you?” Helma was holding Clara at arm’s length, taking in every stain and wrinklein Clara’s dress. “What has happened to you? Where is Mr. Edema?”

The weight of everything Clara would have to impart to Helma came crashing down on her all at once. Her friend knew nothing of not only what had happened in the water, but of the flood and her brief marriage, of the deaths of her family.

She led Helma to a shadowed corner, the tiles cold and slick beneath her bare feet. Pressing her friend down into a seat, she sat next to her, tucking her frozen feet up under herself.

“They are dead, all dead,” Clara told her after taking a long swallow. “There was a flood on my wedding night, and...” A hot lump lodged in her throat. She hadn’t realized it would be so hard to say aloud what she had already experienced.

Helma’s hand flew to her mouth. “I had heard that there was a flood in the north, but I never thought for a moment that it destroyed so much, killed so many. Oh, my poor child! How frightened you must have been!”

Frightened. Yes, she had been frightened, she supposed. The lump finally pushed its way upward and she indulged in the tears that had, until now, been a luxury she had no time for. It seemed years ago that she had stepped out of the carriage a new bride, apprehensive and resigned to her fate. Kind, well-meaning Hendrik, appraising her with hungry eyes. The relief she had felt as soon as she had seen the corpse of her husband, knowing that she would not have to fulfil her wedding night duties. The guilt could kill a person.

Helma’s shoulder was wet from Clara’s flowing tears. After Helma had soothed and shushed her, she waited patiently for Clara to continue.

But for all that Clara could confide in Helma, she could not bring herself to tell her of her time under the water, what had transpired there or what was to come. It was too fantastic,and the jeering faces from the tavern were still fresh in her mind.

But Helma was far more perceptive than Clara had ever given her credit for. “What are you not telling me, sparrow?”

“What do you mean?”

Helma gave her an indulgent look. “You’re covered in bruises. Your hair looks as if you scrubbed it with salt, and you’ve got the look of a drowned cat about you. You may have been a practiced liar when you lived at Wierenslot, but I know you well enough that you might as well be out with whatever it is.”

It was no use trying to pretend that she didn’t know what Helma was talking about. Haltingly, as if she were still trying to make sense of it herself, Clara began to tell her of Maurits and her strange journey into the Water Kingdom. The politics and the history that shaped the world beneath the sea, and that mattered so little to those on land. She told her old nursemaid about the nixies, the basilisks, even Jan and Tryn and all the other Old Ones that were as real as any person in the church with them at that very moment.

Helma listened without interruption. When Clara had finished, she pursed her lips. “I told you there was something wrong with that young man.”

“Helma! I tell you the most fantastic story, and all you can do is gloat about your poor first impression of Maurits?”

“Well, and why shouldn’t I? It seems he’s the one that’s got you into all this mess. He told you lie after lie, and look what he’s done to you,” Helma added with atsk.

“Maybe so, but he isn’t the one that sent the flood, nor is he the one that made that ill-fated bargain all those years ago.” Clara’s cheeks began to burn as she rose to Maurits’s defense, as if she hadn’t had this same argument with herself many times already. Seeing him at the trial had lit something deep in her heart. She could still keenly feel the torture of not beingable to go to him, the pain of seeing him shackled. The guilt of knowing the impossible position she had put him in.

Helma looked as if she wasn’t in strict agreement. Faint light was beginning to glow through the stained glass window, and a novice priest was setting up the first mass of the morning. Soon the transept would be filled with black cloaks and hushed voices as congregants gathered for morning prayers and confession.

“Come,” said Helma, drawing Clara to her feet, “let us find somewhere more private.”

“I don’t understand.”

Clara paced back a few steps in the narrow street and craned her head up to the gabled roof once more, searching for any sign of life from behind the windows. “It was here. There was a little sign above the door with a tulip on it.”

Alida’s studio was gone. The building was there all right, but the sign was gone, and with it, any trace of the artist who once lived there. A knock at the door had confirmed that no one was inside, and through the window Clara could see the kitchen empty of anything besides the bare table and old cabinet bed.

Helma shuffled, pulling her shawl tighter about her. “Well, she isn’t here now, and perhaps it is a blessing. A painter’s apprentice! It’s a good thing your parents—God rest their souls—aren’t here to see their daughter taking on a trade.”

Clara ignored Helma’s muttering. The wish in her pocket was singing to her, and she instinctively wrapped her fingers around the smooth stone. She was tired and hungry. It would be so easy to use her last wish to find Alida. Alida—wherever she was—would see Clara warmed up by a fire and fed. But then what? That only solved her immediate problems, and did nothing to address the lingering danger of a flood. And that was assuming that Alida evenwantedto see her. What if Alidahad thought that Clara was not coming back, and had decided to start with a new apprentice, in a new studio?

“We will go to my sister’s,” Helma said, breaking into her thoughts. “She lives outside the city, and while she doesn’t have much, she’ll set us right.”

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