The Water and the Wild Page 14

  “They’re getting closer,” Adelaide panted. “They’re surrounding us!”

  Suddenly, Fife whipped around in front of them. Lottie tripped into Adelaide as they all came skidding to a halt.

  “Why are you stopping?” Adelaide shrieked. “Fife, why are you stopping?!”

  Fife was not just stopped; he was smirking, as though their run through the wood had been nothing but a race that he had won.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You can all calm down. We’re here.”

  Lottie looked around. They were standing in a grove dense with yew trees. That is, the trees looked like yews, but of the most peculiar sort. Their branches did not sprawl out veinlike, as Lottie would expect any normal tree to do. Instead, they curled inward upon themselves in splintery spirals. Their bark and their leaves were pure white.

  “We’re here,” Fife repeated, “in Wisp Territory. Honestly, Ada, don’t you know a wisp when you hear one?”

  Adelaide turned raspberry red. “Of course I don’t. I’ve never been cavorting around with wisps!”

  “I don’t see anything,” said Lottie. The wood looked just as empty now as it had been before they had run.

  “They don’t reveal themselves unless provoked,” said Oliver, “or without a proper plea.”

  “No fear there,” said Fife. “I’ve got us covered.”

  Fife closed his eyes and held his arms out, palms upward. Then, just as he was opening his mouth, he seemed to remember something. His eyes fluttered back open.

  “Lottie,” he said quietly, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to mention to anyone here that you’re a Fiske.”

  Lottie nodded. She hadn’t been planning on it. Fife nodded back, then closed his eyes again and resumed his reverent posture.

  “We lost, weary travelers,” Fife began in a flat voice like the one Lottie used to recite Latin verses at Kemble School, “implore the aid of the lights of the forest. In the name of the revered Lyre and Silvia Dulcet, patrons of this arbor, do we seek sanctuary. Hear us, oh will o’ the wisps. Et cetera, et cetera, blah, blergh, blooey.”

  Fife drew his arms back in and opened his eyes. The yew trees swayed slowly, almost purposefully. One white branch swayed toward Lottie’s face. She shrank back, waving away a leaf that tickled her nose. Then, to Lottie’s amazement, the branch spoke.

  “Lost?” asked a voice as low as a cello’s.

  Lottie stumbled backward, eyes darting this way and that to find from what part of the branch the voice had come. Then she saw that the branch of the yew had not merely been swaying in the wind; it had been uncurling itself.

  More silvery branches craned and stretched themselves out, all with a tremendous creaking sound. Then lights, small at first as Lottie’s fist, but soon pulsing to the size of crystal balls, appeared in the ghostly trees. They looked like lightbulbs, strung out above the wood like fresh dew would string along a spiderweb. Then the lights grew nearer, and Lottie saw that they really shone from large wooden, swinging globes and that the globes swung in the hands of people—people who had come floating out of the trees.

  Though Lottie wasn’t sure if she could properly call them “people.” Their skin was a sickly white and so tissue-thin that Lottie could see the bulge of colorless veins weaving and webbing through their limbs. On each of their heads rested a thick sprawl of soft black hair that floated gently in the air, as though fanned out in water.

  But the eyes! The eyes were strangest. In the face of each of those dozen-some lantern bearers stared glassy green eyes that reminded Lottie of things she most wanted to forget. At a glimpse into one pair of eyes, she remembered the dread of her first nightmarish sleep without a night-light. The gaze of another reminded her of the disgust she felt at discovering dead spiders in the back of the crawl space at Thirsby Square. Another set of eyes, much closer to Lottie, conjured the memory of her first day at Kemble School, when she’d tried to sit with Pen Bloomfield’s girls at lunch and been laughed away.

  Lottie shook off the creeping feeling from the back of her head in time to realize that the voice she had heard earlier had not come from a tree after all, but from one of the hovering lantern bearers. Now it spoke again.

  “Lost?”

  Six voices echoed the query. “Lost?” they asked in unison.

  The lantern bearers descended until their feet hung just above the stony ground. The sound of splintering wood started again. This time, the yew branches curled inward, not outward, to hide the gaping holes from which the lantern bearers had emerged.

  Then came a sound that Lottie had not expected: laughter. Sudden and sharp, it drew a tingling down her arms as the sound swelled louder and louder, so loud that she raised her hands to her ears. Adelaide looked just as petrified as Lottie felt. Oliver was shifting nervously from foot to foot. Only Fife seemed at ease. In fact, he looked irritated, like he had just heard the punch line of a worn-out joke. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the wisps’ laughing stopped.

  “Oh, look,” said one of the lantern bearers. “The love child has returned.”

  Fife lifted his chin, green eyes hard with something that looked like pride. Lottie was fairly certain that Fife had just been insulted.

  “I’m here to see her, Cynbel,” said Fife, directing his words to the brightest of the globes.

  “What do you say to that, wisps?” said the will o’ the wisp called Cynbel, his voice cool and emotionless. “Is he wanted? Would she want to see him?”

  The creature closest to Lottie, the one who had spoken first, drifted over to Fife. “It depends on what he’s here for,” said the glacial voice. “Well, halfling? What are you here for?”

  Fife batted the wisp away with an angry swat. He turned his attention back to Cynbel.

  “We need safe conduct through this wood on our way to the Southerly Court. We’re being tracked by the Barghest.”

  “What?” cried one of the wisps. “The Barghest have not been in this wood since before the Plague.”

  “Well, they’re back,” Fife said through gritted teeth. “We’re also being hunted by the Southerly Guard. My mother, Seamstress of the wisps, swore an oath that she’d honor any request I presented when I returned to this wood. Well, I’ve returned, and I’m presenting a request.”

  “That is true enough,” said Cynbel. “Though we decide if you get that chance.”

  At that moment, the first full rays of dawn peeked through the leaves, revealing clearly the faces of the wisps. Lottie felt her cheeks grow hot. They were each of them uncomfortably handsome . . . and strangely familiar. Their skin was paler, black hair longer, jaws sharper, but Lottie could find, in the oddest nooks of their noses and cheekbones and cool smiles, traces of Fife. Without warning, the lead wisp shifted his gaze from Fife to Lottie. Her hot cheeks grew hotter.

  “Who are your guests?” he asked.

  “That’s of no concern to you.” Fife stepped in front of Lottie. “Now, stop dawdling and take me to my mother. She wouldn’t be pleased to know how long you’ve already withheld the hospitality of your court to her only son.”

  “You realize, of course,” said Cynbel, “that your mother never need know that you and your friends ever visited. Did you ever think on that, halfling? My fellow guards and I earn our keep by making stragglers like you disappear.”

  Then the will o’ the wisps let out a collective laugh that, like the one before it, made Lottie feel as if someone had rammed a knitting needle down her ear. At last, Cynbel’s mouth sealed up into a simper.

  “Only a jest, sweet thing,” he said, patting Fife on the head like he might a puppy. “No need to look so wild in the face. We will take you to your precious mommy. Only follow our lights.”

  Cynbel drifted back toward his six ghostly companions, and they all raised their swinging globes above their heads.

  “Into the wood!” Cynbel cried.

  The band of will o’ the wisps led them onward.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Under
Quarantine

  MORNING LIGHT did no good in this part of the wood. The farther onward that the wisps led Lottie and the others, the thicker the leaves crowded above, swallowing dawn and shading their route through the white yew wood. The wisps’ lantern light shone on dozens upon dozens more yew trees that lined the path. Each tree was as strange as the next, branches curled in ghost-white whorls. Their trunks were scaly and twisted, and their needle-leaves shot spine-like from the smaller branches. Occasionally, a mournful creak echoed through the forest, and a new branch would begin to uncoil. Lottie didn’t wait to see what would emerge from the trees. Seven will o’ the wisps were quite enough to deal with at once.

  Lottie began to notice wooden signs that hung from the yews and swung in the cold breeze. CARPENWISP read one sign. GLAZIERWISP read another, and from its smaller branches, in place of needly leaves, shards of blue and green glass hung like Christmas ornaments. At the roots of a yew marked SMITHWISP lay an abandoned anvil and fire pit. In fact, now that Lottie looked closer, she realized that each of the dozen shops that she passed was abandoned. There was no movement within or without them, and the paint peeled and flaked from the signs as though long unattended. Soon the shop signs disappeared altogether, and the white yews grew even thicker and more twisted along the path.

  Birds did not chirp here. Nothing stirred or darted from brush to bush. A stink that Lottie had first thought had come from a burst toadstool by the path did not go away after she had passed by it. Instead, the stench grew stronger, so strong that her eyes stung and her tongue swelled with a heavy, salty taste.

  “What is this place?” she whispered to Fife.

  He looked sullenly back at her. “It’s where I come from.”

  “One impulse,” Oliver murmured, “from a vernal wood may teach you more of man, of moral evil and of good, than all the sages can.”

  “That’s rot, Ollie,” said Fife.

  “No, this smell is,” said Adelaide, whose words sounded thin through her daintily pinched nose.

  Up ahead, a bronze archway stretched over the path. It was thick, sturdy, and ugly. It seemed so out of place in the wood that Lottie almost laughed, but the urge caught in her throat when she came close enough to read the words inscribed on the archway:

  YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A TERRITORY DEEMED CONDEMNED AND QUARANTINED.

  BY ORDER OF HIS SUPREMACY, KING OF THE SOUTHERLY COURT, ALL WISPS EXHIBITING SYMPTOMS OF THE PLAGUE ARE HEREBY RESTRICTED TO THE PERIMETERS OF THE WISP TERRITORY. ANY WISP, INFECTED OR OTHERWISE, TO SET FOOT IN THE SOUTHERLY COURT OR ANY DISTRICT UNDER SOUTHERLY DOMINION WILL BE DULY APPREHENDED AND PUNISHED.

  “If it’s under quarantine,” Lottie whispered, “then doesn’t that mean we could get sick?”

  “Of course not,” said Adelaide. “Ollie and I are properly inoculated against wisp strains every year. And you and Fife are immune to the Plague. All halflings are.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Now you do.” Adelaide grabbed Lottie’s hand and jerked her past the quarantine notice. “Just don’t mention the Plague here, and whatever you do, don’t look around.”

  Lottie, however, could not help but look. With an increase in that putrid smell came an increase in noise: ragged coughing, muffled moans, and shrieks that hurt Lottie’s ears even more than the wisps’ laughing had. The sounds came from the air, from the trees, from deep in the wood. Lottie saw lanky figures huddled into yew roots. Their green eyes had hollows around them, their black hair was flat around their faces, and their skin had gone oily and sallow. A few of them raised their spindly arms toward Lottie in a silent plea that she could not understand. Braver ones called down from the trees.

  “Southerly scum!” one shouted, causing Adelaide to jump and nearly yank Lottie’s shoulder clear out of its socket.

  “Scum!” repeated several other voices, hoarse and discordant.

  “Down with the Southerly houses!” cawed one.

  “Down with all Southerlies!”

  “Down with the Southerly King, the Great Enslaver!”

  “The Mighty Coward!”

  Adelaide buried her head into the crook of Lottie’s neck.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” she whimpered. “They’re just too awful. Do you hear them? How can they say such dreadful things?”

  Lottie winced. Adelaide’s fingernails were biting into her bandaged wrist.

  “What do they mean?” Lottie asked Oliver.

  Oliver shook his head. “Can I see another’s woe, and not be in sorrow too? Can I see another’s grief, and not seek for kind relief?”

  Lottie groaned. “Oh, would you stop quoting!”

  She realized only too late that the words had come out as a shout. The shout echoed, and the cries of the plagued wisps stopped. The lantern bearers turned around, all eyes fixed on Lottie as though they expected an apology. Lottie stared up at them defiantly. She wasn’t about to apologize. But as she stared harder into Cynbel’s eyes, Lottie remembered with sudden vividness the time she’d had to explain to an enraged Mrs. Yates that she had smashed her prized potted gardenia with a soccer ball. It was a paralyzing memory that forced Lottie, at last, to lower her gaze.

  “Fine,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout.”

  “Very good,” said Cynbel. “Not another peep from any of you.”

  They trudged on. Lottie ventured a look at Oliver. Here was the boy who had saved her from certain death in Skelderidge Park, and Lottie had yelled at him for quoting what, under other circumstances, would’ve been a pretty bit of poetry. What had gotten into her? The same thing, she supposed, that had gotten into her two nights ago at the Barmy Badger.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated, this time for only Oliver to hear. “Really.”

  Oliver just nodded.

  “Please, oh please, show mercy on a child!” cried a strangled voice from above.

  A wisp in the branches clutched a pale baby to her chest. The child coughed and cried and coughed again. A hollow-eyed boy, no older than Lottie, stared down at her from another branch. She unwillingly thought of Eliot.

  Adelaide tugged Lottie on. “I told you not to look, remember? Their eyes can trigger memories. Good memories or terrible ones. They use their eyes to manipulate you. The Plague is all very sad, of course it is, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  As they pressed on, the yews began to thin again, and the path grew broader. The shouts from the trees eventually died down into an uneasy quiet. In time, Lottie saw no more stares from the branches or hands stretched up from the ground. In fact, the sickly looking wisps had dwindled away altogether, and, to Lottie’s great relief, so had the putrid smell.

  “Where’ve they all gone?” Lottie asked.

  “They have been cleared out,” announced Cynbel. “None of the plagued are allowed into royal territory.”

  Lottie looked around. This was different territory. The yews were taller here. Underfoot, grass had replaced the stone path. The grass, like the yews, was pure white, and it reached as high as Lottie’s knees. The wood remained frighteningly silent. Birds still did not chirp, and all Lottie could hear was the creak of the wisps’ lanterns and the swish of grass against her legs.

  When their guides finally floated to a stop, it was at the threshold of a great pergola. Columns stretched ahead in two long rows, and above, beams crisscrossed in a thick latticework, so tightly woven that only the smallest chinks of sunlight shone through to the floor below. All of it, the entire pergola, was made of clear, shining glass.

  Lottie gaped at the sight. She took a step toward it.

  “Watch out!” cried Oliver.

  But it was too late. Lottie’s leg was thigh-deep in warm water. She was standing in a narrow river. Its current tugged Lottie’s feet over the slippery stones below, and she flailed her arms, trying to regain her balance.

  Then she was lifted up, floating. Fife’s arms were around her middle.

  “This is no time to take a dip, L
ottie Fiske,” he scolded, lowering her to solid ground.

  Lottie reddened tremendously. She even forgot to tell Fife thank you.

  It was as though the river had appeared from nowhere. It was silent and slow, and so clear that Lottie could see straight through to its white stone riverbed.

  “It’s the River Lissome,” Adelaide whispered. “It looks so different here than it does back home.”

  “That,” said Fife, “is ’cause it hasn’t been tapped and tampered with by Southerly authorities.”

  “What’s the River Lissome?” Lottie asked, shaking out her soggy sneaker.

  “It’s the river that runs all through Albion Isle,” said Oliver. “It starts in the Northerly Wolds and leads straight to the Southerly Court.”

  “Oh!” Lottie’s eyes lit with understanding. “I think you mean Kemble River.”

  “Is that what the humans call it, then?” said Fife. “How fantastically original.”

  “That’s how we get a lot of our energy in New Kemble,” Lottie said. “We’ve dammed most of the river up.”

  Fife made a face like he’d just eaten a pouch full of jacks. “Suit yourselves.”

  The will o’ the wisps had paid no mind to their guests’ conversation. Half of them had disappeared altogether into the dim wood. Another two had floated into the great glass pergola itself. Only Cynbel remained beside them. He wore a bored expression and made no effort to add a wise word or two about the nature of the River Lissome. The two wisps who had gone inside the glass pergola now reappeared. Each whispered something into either ear of Cynbel, and then they too floated off into the wood.

  “Well,” Fife said, “what did they say?”

  “The Seamstress has already retired to bed,” said Cynbel. “You and your company will have to wait for an audience when she awakes this dusk.”

  Fife made a honking noise. “Can’t you just wake her up?” he demanded. “Titania’s sake, I’m her son!”

  Cynbel folded his arms severely. “And she is our Seamstress. No subject of hers would dare disrupt her dreaming.”