Page 61 of The Water Witch (Fairwick Chronicles 2)

TWENTY-THREE

As I sat in the library sipping scotch and waiting for Duncan’s arrival, watching the sky darken and the rain begin again, I concluded it came down to a choice between illusion and reality.

When I was a teenager living in my grandmother’s cold, formal apartment, she chastised me for still reading fairy tales. “You’re trying to escape reality,” she told me. The therapist I saw said I was trying to regain the world of my childhood—the world in which my parents still lived. She was closer to the truth but not entirely on target. It wasn’t the world of my parents I was trying to recapture; it was myself. All those tales about children lost in the woods, princesses forced to live under the dominion of evil stepmothers, mothers watching over their children as trees or animals, princes charmed into beasts or frogs…were all stories about seeing through illusion into the truth. Perhaps my parents had told me these stories so I would know how to survive in a world in which they were absent, or the stories were meant to tell me who I really was.

There was one in particular that my father and motherboth loved to tell me. It was called “Tam Lin” and it came, my father always clarified, not from a fairy tale but from an old Scottish ballad. Which was the same as a fairy tale, my mother always added.

A girl named Jennet was forbidden to go to a ruined castle in the woods—Carterhaugh, the haunt of ghosts and boggles and the “good neighbors” who weren’t good at all. But despite the warnings Jennet goes to Carterhaugh, because the castle once belonged to her people and she is determined to reclaim it. When she plucks a rose from the ruins, a young man appears, a handsome prince in green velvet and plaid. He tells her he is Tam Lin, the laird of the castle, kidnapped by the fairy queen to live eternally in the Ever-Fair where no one ages or dies. But on All Hallow’s Eve, when he rides with the fey, they will sacrifice him as their tithe to hell. The only one who can save him is his own true human love, who must wait by the holy well and pull him from his horse as he rides by. Then she must hold on to him, no matter what shape he takes, until he is human again. This Jennet does, holding on to him while he becomes a snake, a lion, and then a burning brand—all the while keeping faith that what she holds in her arms is her own true love.

“Because,” my mother said at the end of the story, “sometimes love requires a leap of faith.” She would smile at my father then, and he’d press her hand to his lips, as courteously as any prince in any fairy tale, and I would feel encircled by love.

After my parents died, I imagined that the prince in the story himself would come and tell me the tale—only it wasn’t imagined. My prince and the incubus were one and the same. I brought him into the world by a leap of faith, just as Jennet saved her prince.

But I wasn’t a child anymore and love meant lookingsquarely in your lover’s eyes and seeing past illusions. I couldn’t shut my eyes and pretend I didn’t know what I knew. If Duncan turned into a beast in my arms, I would have to hold on until he was human again.

I went into the kitchen and gathered the supplies I needed for the spell to uncover a warded disguise. I brought them back into the library and found Ralph sitting on top of Wheelock, riffling through the pages. “You have got to cut this out,” I told him, taking the book away from him. “Some of these books are old…” I stopped when I noticed the page Ralph had turned to in the section on correlative spells. He was tapping his little paw on the sentence I had read last night.The most powerful—and dangerous—form of correlative magic is when a witch creates a bond between herself and the object or person she wishes to control.*

“Yes, I know Ralph, but I’m not trying to create a bond with Duncan…” But then I noticed the footnote. I looked down to the bottom of the page and read the footnote, my eyes widening and my heart pounding as I read the tiny print.

“Ralph!” I cried, patting the mouse on his head. “You’re a genius! This might just be the answer.” He preened under my praise and I reread the note. It explained how a doorkeeper could keep a door open by creating a bond between herself and the door. At the end of the footnote was a magical icon, shaped like an open doorway, that promised to disclose the spell. Before I could press it the doorbell rang. I quickly bookmarked the page and went to answer it.

Before opening the door I looked up at the fanlight. With no sun shining through it the stained-glass face was dim and opaque, like that of a dead person. As if I’d already killed Liam with my plans.

I opened the door, braced for reproach and recriminations. Instead I got flowers. Duncan stood on the porch, drippingfrom the rain, holding a bouquet of wildflowers. His gaze slid down the length of my body, practically carving the curve of my hips with his eyes.

“Whoa!” He whistled appreciatively. “That dress!” He bent to kiss me on the cheek. At the touch of his lips, I felt the gold tattoo beneath my skin flare into life, but whether with desire or to ward him off, I couldn’t tell. I stepped back and took the bouquet, which looked handpicked. There were wild roses, daisies, black-eyed Susans, and Queen Anne’s lace. Fat raindrops clung to their petals. Looking up, I saw that rain clung to Duncan’s hair and eyelashes. He’d walked through the rain to pick flowers for me.

I lifted my hand to brush the rain from his hair, determined to see if touching him aroused desire in me, but he caught my hand in his and turned it in the sun so that the emerald ring cast a spray of green sparks across the foyer floor.

“A gift from Liam?” he asked, tilting one eyebrow up. “I have to confess that I’m jealous.”

“Oh,” I said, looking down at the flowers and wondering why he would be jealous if he was the incubus. “I didn’t mean to make you jealous. Liam wasn’t really…real. At least he was almost real. If I’d loved him…”

“Yes!”Duncan said, stepping closer. “That’s what I realized today. You didn’t love Liam or he’d have become human. So I don’t have any reason to be jealous, do I?”

As he stepped over the threshold I felt the gold coils in my blood flare.

“Let me put these in some water,” I said, stepping backward. “You can make yourself a drink in the library. There’s some scotch on the sideboard and there’s a fire laid if you want to light it.”

I turned away and walked through the library to the kitchen, feeling his gaze on my back. In the kitchen I ran coldwater over my hands while I filled up a vase and then arranged the flowers with shaking hands.

When I came into the library, flames were crackling in the fireplace and he was pouring himself a glass of scotch from the crystal decanter I had set up on the sideboard.

“More of Liam’s stock?” he asked, holding the glass up to me. I hadn’t turned on any lights, so I couldn’t quite make out his expression in the flickering firelight, but I heard the edge in his voice.

“Sorry,” I said, lifting my own glass from the coffee table. “I guess I developed a taste for the stuff. This is the last of it, though. I thought we’d finish it together.”

His teeth flashed in the firelight. “Good, I like the idea of finishing it.” He held his glass up to me. “Here’s to new beginnings.”

We clicked glasses. I took a big gulp, but he swirled the gold liquid around in his glass and sniffed it.

“Checking for water witches?” I asked.

“Just savoring the aroma,” he replied. He smiled and a dimple appeared on his right cheek. Liam had had one on his left. I almost stopped his hand as he lifted the glass to his lips and took a long drink.

“Ah…” he said, “that tastes like a good beginning.”

I took another sip of my scotch and sat down on the couch. “That’s what I want,” I said. “A new beginning. Our transformations haven’t released my wards. In fact, they seem more volatile.”

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