The Water and the Wild Read online

  “It’s nice enough,” she told Oliver, “but I still don’t know where we are.”

  “You really don’t recognize it? It is your own backyard.”

  Lottie looked out again, then back to Oliver.

  “No, it’s not. I live in New Kemble, on Kemble Isle. That”—she swept her arm out toward the lights and trees—“is not New Kemble.”

  “Myself unseen,” said Oliver, “I see in white defined, far off the homes of men.”

  Lottie frowned. “Was that poetry again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it didn’t make sense,” Lottie informed him. “Don’t you think I know what my own home looks like? If this is New Kemble, where is St. George’s Church? Where is the old bell tower? You can see those things from any street in New Kemble, and that’s a fact. Even if it weren’t, there’s definitely not a whole forest growing in the middle of the city.”

  “Well,” Oliver said in a very rational tone of voice, “it’s not my fault that your people are worse landscapers. Or that you cut down all of your trees.”

  Lottie let out a squawk of exasperation. “Why are you and Adelaide talking like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “With yours and ours and ups and downs? I just want to know where I am!”

  “You’re in New Albion,” Oliver said. “It’s your city, only in our world. I don’t know how else to explain it to you.”

  Lottie narrowed her eyes at the boy named Oliver. Nothing he said made sense, so of course this all still had to be a dream. Lottie left the terrace and plopped back down on the settee inside. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and poked herself in the ribs, hard, in an attempt to wake herself up.

  “What are you doing?”

  Lottie’s eyelids fluttered open. Oliver had followed her back inside.

  She stared at him. “Nothing,” she said, and she stared some more.

  Despite the bruises splotching it, Oliver’s face was a nice one, framed by curly hair the shade of bronze. Lottie was sure that if Oliver attended Kemble School, he’d be a prime topic of swooning and giggling for Pen Bloomfield and her crowd. Lottie noticed that the boy’s eyes had changed color again, this time to a pinked shade like fresh salmon. Lottie noticed, too, that Oliver was standing quite far from her, like she was about to sneeze and he didn’t want to get covered in the snot. Perhaps, she thought miserably, Mrs. Yates was right about first impressions, and now Oliver is afraid I’ll pull another face on him.

  “So, how’d you hurt your arm?” she asked at last, pointing to his bandaged elbow.

  “Same as anyone does,” said Oliver, but he was looking at Quincy Francis Eugene Wilfer, not her. “I had an accident.”

  “Oh, did you?” An urge was bubbling up Lottie’s throat, threatening to pop loose. Suddenly, it did. “And were any flying squirrels involved in your accident?”

  Oliver was quiet for a moment.

  “What makes you say that?” he asked.

  “I was there at the pub,” said Lottie, “when you and your friend—Flute, or something—came into the break room. You were all bloody. I know it had to be you, so don’t deny it.”

  Oliver’s eyes had gone bright blue again. “So you’re the one who went running out of the coats.”

  Lottie nodded.

  “Father didn’t say you’d be so nosy,” Oliver muttered, and this would have hurt Lottie’s feelings, except that she thought she saw Oliver smiling when he said it.

  Suddenly, the wooden doors by the settee flew open, and Adelaide came leaping out.

  “Lottie, you can—oh! Hello. Sweet Oberon, what happened to your arm?”

  Oliver shrugged.

  But Adelaide wasn’t waiting for an answer. She had turned her attention right back to Lottie. “Father will see you now.”

  Lottie cast a glance at the portrait of Quincy Francis Eugene Wilfer. Was the letter-writer going to be like that? Pompous and ugly and intimidating?

  “He,” faltered Lottie, “is a good person, isn’t he?”

  “Ugh,” groaned Adelaide. “Stop asking so many questions.”

  “Be nice, Adelaide,” said Oliver. “She’s just naturally nosy.”

  He was smiling.

  “Go on, go on,” insisted Adelaide, pushing Lottie toward the double doors. “Of course he’s nice, he’s my father. He’ll answer your questions. He might even ask you some, too. After all, he’s curious about you.”

  “We all are,” Oliver said.

  “What?” said Lottie. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  But Adelaide only shooed at her impatiently. Lottie, reasoning that this was certainly not the strangest thing to have happened to her tonight, walked past the doors. They closed behind her with the faintest of clicks.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Otherwise Incurable

  LOTTIE FOUND HERSELF in what looked a lot like the abandoned laboratory of a mad scientist. The ceilings were high here, but there was not a window in sight. The floors were caked with so much dust that Eliot’s green sneakers made an impressive poof! with each step that Lottie took. Hundreds of vials of all shapes—squares and ovals and diamonds and wonky pyramids—lined shelves running so high up the walls that Lottie could not see an end to them. There were even more colors in the vials’ insides than there were shapes on the outside.

  Maybe it was just the dust getting to Lottie’s brain, but it seemed to her that each of those colors had a very personal feeling, all to itself, and that each of those feelings was obvious at a glance: the sapphire blues were wistful and those were not just blacks, but mournful blacks, and those the most content of violets. Beakers, candles, and other strange contraptions lay on the two long, brass-clawed tables that lined the room. This place looked nothing like the rich, spotless foyer outside, but it was just as overwhelming.

  As fascinating as the laboratory was, Lottie was still looking for the letter-writer. The trouble was that there was no letter-writer in sight.

  “Hello?” called Lottie, her voice bouncing back in distorted echoes.

  She tucked her hands into the pockets of her tweed coat and walked carefully onward. Then she heard a trickling sound, followed by a long hiss. A scent, strong and chemical, wafted past her, stinging the edges of her nose. Just as she was about to call again, she saw something move by one of the tables. She hurried toward the movement.

  “Ex-excuse me?” she called.

  The figure stopped moving. Then it began to grow larger, and Lottie realized that this was because the figure was a man who had been stooped over a fizzing beaker and was only now straightening up to face her. The man lifted a pair of large, silver-rimmed goggles from his eyes and set them atop his head. He took a long look at Lottie. Lottie took a long look back at him.

  The man’s face was grooved, stubbly, and tired. The hair around his ears was thin, and his eyes were squinty. He dropped his goggles back on his face and squinted harder at Lottie through them. Then he removed the gloves from his hands.

  “Moritasgus Horatio Wilfer,” said the man. “It’s a pleasure.”

  His voice shook, but he smiled. That was a relief. He was nervous, and he was nice. Nothing at all like a Quincy Francis Eugene Wilfer.

  “And you are, I presume,” Mr. Wilfer continued, “Miss Charlotte Grace Fiske.”

  “Lottie,” she corrected, shaking his hand. “My name’s Lottie, and I’ve got to get that cure for my best friend.”

  Mr. Wilfer let go of her hand. “My! You don’t lose a minute, do you?”

  He shook his head and laughed. It was the sort of laugh that Lottie heard adults make every so often, to themselves, as though they were in on a private joke from their past. Lottie didn’t like it; that laugh always made her feel left out.

  “Lottie Fiske,” Mr. Wilfer said, turning back to his place at the table and setting aside some jars. “You’re very grown up. More than I was expecting.”

  “I’m not grown at all,” said Lottie. “Mrs. Yates’ friends say I look too youn
g for my age.”

  Mr. Wilfer laughed the same laugh again. Lottie grimaced.

  “Excuse me,” said the man, checking himself and wiping his hands on an apron tied around his waist. “I’ve forgotten my manners. Would you be so good as to join me in my study?”

  He led Lottie farther into the room, past more rows of vials, beakers, and strange instruments. At the end of the laboratory was another set of double doors. Mr. Wilfer flung them open, onto a snug, tidy room as different from the laboratory as the laboratory had been from the foyer before it.

  It was dim inside the study, but a fire was crackling in the fireplace, and its light waltzed on the rug beneath Lottie’s feet. The ceiling was shorter here, and sloped, producing a cozy effect. Mr. Wilfer motioned for Lottie to take a seat, as he took his own chair behind a mahogany desk. Lottie’s chair sagged dangerously, and as soon as she was stuck in its velvet cushion, she began to panic about whether she would ever get unstuck again.

  Just before her, on Mr. Wilfer’s desk, was a silver abacus strung with beads that looked like fresh-cut flower buds. Next to the abacus sat a massive leather-bound book that looked too thick to be a dictionary, yet too thin to be a proper encyclopedia.

  Mr. Wilfer harrumphed and lit a pipe that quivered between his lips. The dusky smell of tobacco crept into Lottie’s nostrils, and it reminded her of being much younger, when Mr. Yates had been alive and had smoked a pipe religiously, three times a day. Lottie shook her head of the faint memory and tried her best to sit up straight in her chair.

  “Are you the letter-writer?” she asked.

  “I am.”

  Lottie looked at the rumpled old man uncertainly. This was the source of her birthday presents?

  “Well, then, Mr. Wilfer,” she began, “I’m not sure where this is or how I got here. I only came because Adelaide told me that you have a medicine to make Eliot better.”

  Mr. Wilfer released a puff of smoke. The firelight glinted off his goggles, so Lottie could not tell whether he was looking at her.

  He spoke quietly. “You’ve always had a very firm idea of what you want, Lottie Fiske, ever since your first letter. I trust all of your previous presents arrived in good condition?”

  “Oh!” Lottie whitened. She was, she realized, being exceptionally rude. The letter-writer had given Lottie many presents over the years. “Um, yes. Of course. Thank you very much. They were all nice presents. That is, except for that one book about the fairy queen.”

  Mr. Wilfer raised an eyebrow over his goggles. “You don’t like fairy tales?”

  “Should I?” she asked.

  “It would be helpful if you did,” said Mr. Wilfer, “as I’m a fairy myself. A sprite, to be precise. We sprites and your Earth’s fairies share old blood.”

  Lottie blinked.

  “But you can’t be something magical,” she said sensibly. “You’re a doctor.”

  “I’m a healer, yes,” said Mr. Wilfer, standing up. “And that is, currently, the most important point of our conversation.”

  There was a glass case resting on the study’s mantel-piece, and it was to this case that Mr. Wilfer now directed his attention. He turned his back to Lottie, and she heard the sound of a key opening a lock. Mr. Wilfer returned to the desk and sat down. In one hand, he still held his pipe. The other hand he extended to Lottie. He uncurled his fingers to reveal a squat, square vial in his palm. It was filled with a liquid colored the most anxious of reds.

  Lottie scooted her chair closer. On the vial was a label written in thin, scrawling script: Otherwise Incurable.

  Lottie read the label out loud and looked up. “Does it really work?” she whispered, reaching out. “Does it cure incurable things?”

  Mr. Wilfer retracted the bottle before Lottie could touch it. “I’m afraid the whole matter still requires . . . time.”

  “But,” Lottie said, “Eliot doesn’t have time. He’s only got weeks left!”

  “Medicine,” said Mr. Wilfer, “is like magic. You cannot rush it. You cannot pinch it off and tie it up, clean and neat. You cannot make it behave. This potion”—he tapped the vial—“has become my life’s work, and much as I’ve tried these past months to expedite the process, I am still missing one important ingredient.”

  “What sort of ingredient?” asked Lottie.

  Mr. Wilfer raised a hand. “There are things I still need to explain to you.”

  Lottie did not see what else needed explaining. If one missing ingredient was all that kept Eliot from getting better, nothing else could possibly matter. Then again, Mr. Wilfer was the one with a medicine in his hand. She nodded begrudgingly.

  “What’s this?” she asked, poking her finger against the spine of the massive book on his table. “Does this tell you how to make your medicines?”

  “That?” said Mr. Wilfer. “It does, in fact, tell me how to make one medicine. I have hundreds of notebooks like these.”

  Mr. Wilfer opened the book and pushed it across the table. Lottie wiggled to the edge of her saggy chair to get a better view. It was neither a dictionary nor an encyclopedia.

  “It’s a—scrapbook?”

  Lottie scrunched her nose in distaste. The only people she knew who made and kept scrapbooks were Mrs. Yates and the sneer-lipped ladies who came over for tea.

  “A notebook,” Mr. Wilfer corrected her.

  The pages of the book were ragged and uneven with pasted pictures of plant diagrams, an article on cloud condensation, and what looked like a recipe torn from a cookbook. Around the pasted scraps, every spare sliver of paper was covered with thin-edged words and symbols. It looked like two pages full of nonsense. Lottie turned the page. Two more pages full of nonsense. Only these two held a clump of dried flowers and twigs, a poem, and a checked-off checklist.

  Lottie looked up. “What is all of this?”

  “This,” said Mr. Wilfer, “is my best guess for how to concoct a cure for foot blisters. Medicines take years of inquiry and research. Long nights of experimentation, decades of case studies and careful observation—all to compile what you see in a book like this. My notebook for the Otherwise Incurable is nearly twice as thick.”

  “You mean, this is how you’re going to save Eliot? With dried flowers and photographs?” Lottie looked at the book with more scrutiny. “And recipes for lemon chess squares?”

  She chewed her lip anxiously. What had she gotten herself into? Mr. Wilfer wasn’t a real doctor at all. He thought he could heal Eliot with nothing more than a giant, nonsensical scrapbook!

  “Medicines aren’t made like that,” she said at last. “Medicines are made from precise measurements and chemical reactions. It’s a very scientific business.”

  “Is that how they do it where you come from, Lottie?” said Mr. Wilfer. He didn’t look offended, only curious.

  “Yes. Everyone knows that’s what medicines are. Especially doctors.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Wilfer. “But what about your healers?”

  Lottie wavered. “We don’t have those. Not like you. Not that I know of, anyway.”

  Mr. Wilfer looked genuinely surprised. “None? No healers at all in New Kemble?”

  “No healers anywhere,” said Lottie. “Not even on the mainland.”

  Mr. Wilfer spent a full, silence-stuffed minute pondering this information.

  “Well,” he said, “that is sad but believable news. Healers are a rare enough breed here. Only ten of us in all of Albion Isle. Healers are doctors, yes, but we are not so backward as to discount the great uses of intuition, of the art of the soul, of magic.”

  Lottie gulped. “You mean . . . you’re a magician?”

  “Oh, no, that’s quite a different thing. There are no easy recipes or chemical formulas or magic spell books on hand here. Each one of my cures I extract from experience, from music, from poetry, from the wilds of this world, from—ah! I can tell from that face that you don’t believe a word I’m saying.”

  Lottie was thinking of her green apple tree. She was th
inking of her copper box. Magic had been so tidy back home. Each year, she had closed up her wishes in a box and every following year she’d received her reply. Magic stayed in the box. But Mr. Wilfer was talking like magic was—well, was at large.

  “Mr. Wilfer,” Lottie said at last. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I really don’t. But where I come from, you don’t get rid of the flu by . . . scrapbooking.”

  “You would like proof,” said Mr. Wilfer.

  Lottie thought about this. “Do you have any?” she said dubiously.

  “Dear girl! Magic may not be reasonable. It may not be tamable or even reliable. But it does provide plenty of proof.”

  Mr. Wilfer reached into his desk drawer and handed Lottie a vial, thin and fragile, filled to the top with a suspicious-looking gray liquid.

  “That is a cure that took me a year to perfect. I had to capture ten laughs on a rainy day and all the ingredients of eggs Benedict. Then I had to quote a full book of sonnets at it. Go on, try it. It’s for the cut across your forehead.”

  Lottie raised a hand to her eyebrow and found that there was, in fact, a nastily scabbed cut there, which must have come from her bicycle accident. She looked suspiciously at the medicine, and it looked suspiciously gray back at her. She unstoppered the vial, and the prettiest smell of hot omelet drifted out. Lottie raised the vial to her lips, looking all the while at Mr. Wilfer, and took the tiniest of sips. A prickle fizzed across her forehead and a sound like a snap! smacked around the walls of the room. At first, Lottie thought her head had exploded and how stupid she had been to taste a strange potion from a strange man! But her head was still very much intact and in much better shape than it had been a second before. Her cut had healed. Lottie rubbed her finger along her smooth skin and set the vial back down.

  “It worked,” she said.

  “It worked,” said Mr. Wilfer.

  Lottie was still rubbing her forehead. Trees that were elevators, doctors that weren’t human, New Kembles that weren’t New Kembles, and now medicines made from eggs Benedict! It was all a bit much to take after a full day of school.