Page 80 of The Water Witch (Fairwick Chronicles 2)

Lura sat back on her heels and looked around the glade. “This is where I first met Quincy,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

She parted the ferns growing around the boulder and disclosed a heart carved into the rock with intertwined initials—QandL—in the same design as the one carved into the bench at Lura’s house. “We met here every day that summer. It’s where he asked me to marry him.”

“It’s a beautiful spot,” I said, admiring once again the spill of water from basin to basin, the wild irises fringing each pool, and the yellow water lilies floating on their surfaces. Weeping willow branches fell in a curtain over one of the pools. It looked like the spot in Faerie where I’d made love to Liam. My own eyes filled with tears at the memory and my heart with an unbearable sense of loss. Liam was really and truly gone. I was glad he hadn’t come back as Duncan, but the fact remained he hadn’t come back at all. It was time to let Liam go once and for all.

As I splashed cold water on my face to wash away the tears, I felt one more coil of the wards dissolve and the beat of my heart, slow and steady. I repeated the words of the spell thatbound me to the door.“Quam cor mea aperit, tam ianua aperit.”I could feel my heart beating up against the last cold link of the wards. They were almost all gone. I reached into the water again and met a pair of dark brown eyes. I froze, looking into a man’s face. I sat back on my heels and looked over at Lura. She was also washing her face in the water. With each splash, her skin looked smoother and firmer. She trickled a handful of water over her head and her gray hair turned to gold.

I looked back at the face in the water. Quincy Morris was trapped below the surface studying me. But I wasn’t who he was looking for. I reached into my pocket and found the stone I’d stuck in there earlier. The fairy stone, as my father had called it when he gave it to me. It was white with a hole in the middle. I slipped it over my ring finger and, holding my hand above the water, said, simply, “Open.”

Nothing happened. The power inside me writhed, trying to break free, but it still was held in place by the last of the wards. Then I recalled the Aelvestone in my pocket. I took it out and held it over the water. Concentric circles appeared on the surface.

I dropped the stone in the water. The circles spun in a spiral, tunneling deep into the pool, opening up a funnel. Then a head broke the surface and a man rose up from the water. Hearing the disturbance of water, Lura looked up…and gasped.

“Quincy?” she said, all the years since she’d seen her lover falling away from her face like water rolling off a stone.

The dark-haired man—the same one I’d seen on the shores of Faerie—walked toward her, his face radiant. “Lura!” he cried, falling to his knees beside her and gathering her into his arms. “I came here on the morning of our wedding day to pick flowers for you and I fell into the pool. I woke up in astrange place. I’ve been trying ever since to get back to you.” He held her at arms’ length and looked into her face. “I was afraid it would have been too long. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed, but it must not have been any time at all. You look just the same.”

Lura caught her breath and covered her mouth with her hand, then she looked at me, eyes wide. The enchantment of the spring water would end soon. I guessed that it wasn’t vanity that made Lura fear the transformation, but the pain it would cause Quincy to know how long he’d really been away.

“You can both go back to Faerie,” I said. “The passage is still open.” I pointed to the still-swirling water.

Lura and Quincy looked at each other. “I probably wouldn’t know how to live in this world anymore,” he said. “Would you mind?”

“No,” Lura said, “I wouldn’t mind at all. There’s nothing to keep me here, only…” She touched the bag beside her and looked at me.

“I’ll put them in the water,” I told her, “and watch after them.” I recalled that they wouldn’t hatch for one hundred years. “As long as I can, and then I’ll find someone else to watch them.”

Lura gave me a beatific smile of gratitude. She had been beautiful. Shewasbeautiful. She stood and held her hand out to Quincy. He took her hand and stood beside her. They looked as they might have on their wedding day. There were even flowers in Lura’s hair. The yarrow she’d stuck behind her ear had grown into a wreath. And he was wearing a tartan mantle of the same plaid as the shirt he’d worn eighty years ago—the same plaid that Lura had been wearing for eighty years in his memory.

They each said “I love you,” then stepped, hand in hand, into the spiral circle and vanished into the water.

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