Page 79 of The Water Witch (Fairwick Chronicles 2)

TWENTY-NINE

Twenty minutes later, we came downstairs, Lorelei dressed in a green silk gown embroidered with seed pearls that I suspected had been Lura’s wedding dress. I was carrying a canvas bag full of undine eggs. I called Lura in off the porch and told her what we planned to do. A fleeting look of sadness passed over her face when she realized her mother was planning to leave again, but she set her mouth and took the bag from me.

“I’ll bring them to the headwaters,” Lura said.

“That’s near the door to Faerie,” I said. “I’ll walk that far with you.”

“Won’t the Stewarts want to accompany you, seeing as you’re the doorkeeper?”

“I’ll tell them to take Lorelei to the door.”

Lura looked back at her house. The living room floor was under six inches of water. Bits of glass and tin bobbed on the surface. The house groaned and creaked, its timbers cracking under the strain of the water. It didn’t look like it would last till morning, which—I noticed, glancing at the lightening sky in the east—was almost here.

“We have to hurry. I have to be at the door by sunrise.”

Mac and Angus were waiting for us at the edge of the tartan ward. “Lorelei has agreed to go with you,” I told them. “Lura and I are going to walk to the door ourselves.”

“You shouldn’t be alone in the woods right now. We’ve seen strange creatures about.”

“We can take care of ourselves,” Lura said, spitting on the ground.

Angus looked reluctant, but he finally agreed. The other Stewarts had formed a circle around Lorelei. Though a series of hand motions they wove a tartan shawl that they cast over her shoulders. Lorelei adjusted it as she might a mink stole and linked her arm through Angus’s. “Let’s go, boys,” she said, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. She left without a backward glance for her daughter.

“I know,” Lura said as the procession disappeared into the woods. “She’s shallow and flighty, but she’s my mother. I still remember her singing to me when I was small.”

“I think she’s doing the best that she can,” I said. As we took our own path into the woods, I hoped the Stewarts could handle her.

Lura and I followed the Undine into the woods. At first neither of us talked, the rain and the rushing water making it difficult to hear anything we would have said anyway. Then the rain slackened to a drizzle. We walked in slushy silence a while longer, the sound of our boots sucking mud the only noise in the forest.

“Birds are quiet this morning,” Lura commented. “They know something’s wrong.”

A little while later she picked berries from a bush, poppedone in her mouth and handed me one. “Bilberry. Good for night vision.”

I put it in my mouth with some trepidation, but it was delicious—and familiar. I recalled the vision I’d shared with Raspberry of the taste of berries and wondered if Lura had fed them to her sister undines. A bit farther on she plucked a red flower from the ground, handed me the flower, and popped the leaves in her mouth. “Red clover leaves are good for my rheumatism, which’ll be acting up after all this rain.” She continued plucking plants from the trees and ground and telling me what they were and what they were good for.

“Where did you learn so much about plants?” I asked.

“My father spent a lot of time in these woods…His mother was a witch. Here, you’d better take this.” She handed me a white-crowned flower and stuck one behind her ear. “Yarrow,” she explained. “Provides magical protection.”

Now that it was lighter I could see into the woods on either side of us. Creatures lurked within the white mist rising from the wet ground: cloven-footed satyrs, slim boys with antlers branching from their heads, small furry creatures with wide flat tails and long sharp teeth…

“Are those …?”

“Zombie beavers,” Lura said. “They’re coming up with the floodwater. We’d better hurry. They’d like nothing better than to eat these eggs—and us.”

We increased our pace but a hundred-year-old woman can go only so fast, even if she is part undine and part witch. The fat, bristly beavers scurried along the ground with surprising speed, gnashing their teeth and chattering back and forth to one another. Lura was chattering to herself as well. I was afraid she’d come unhinged, and who could blame her? The chattering noise itself was enough to drive one mad, let alonethe sight of those sharp teeth and long claws. I was already terrified when a huge pine tree crashed to the ground inches in front of us.

“Go over it!” Lura screamed, grabbing my arm and scrambling over the huge tree. “They want us to run into the woods.”

Or they wanted us to get tangled in the pine branches. The sleeve of my rain jacket snagged on a branch. I turned to free it and found myself nose to nose with one of the sharp-toothed predators. It snapped at me, its fangs missing my face by a centimeter as I pulled backward, peeling myself out of my jacket and landing on the ground. I scrambled to my feet and found myself next to Lura, trapped in a small square, hemmed in by downed trees. Teeth-gnashing beavers surrounded us.

Lura knelt and picked up two thick branches that had fallen off the trees and handed me one. She muttered a string of indecipherable words and the ends of both sticks burst into flames. She thrust the burning stick into the beavers’ faces. They fell back, chittering. I swept my stick in a wide arc, singeing the whiskers off two of them. Lura muttered another series of strange words and a forked tongue of lightning split the sky and hit one of the beavers. When they saw their fallen comrade, the rest of the beavers scampered into the woods. Lura muttered a few more words and a sudden downpour extinguished our pine torches. “That should be the end of them for a while. They hate fire.”

I helped Lura climb over a tree. She seemed suddenly frail and worn out, as if using magic had drained her. I offered to carry the bag of eggs, but she refused. “They’re my sisters,” she said.

We walked the rest of the way in silence. When I first met Lura, I’d thought she was a sad, pathetic recluse, but seeing her in these woods where she’d spent her entire life, I realized that she’d had a full life. She knew every inch of these woodsand the creatures in it, whether they belonged to this world or Faerie. She’d watched over her sisters as they grew, protecting them against predators and bringing them treats to eat. She might have learned her first magic from her father, but she’d honed her craft in these woods. Looking at Lura and the way she regarded each tree and plant and creature, I saw that she loved the forest.

“Here,” Lura said when we reached a fern-circled clearing. “This is the source of the Undine.” I followed her through the ferns to a large granite boulder and knelt beside her. It was the spring that Soheila, Liz, and Diana had led me to almost a week ago.

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