by Jean Lee
“Not a gang, then.” Charlotte’s nose catches no ash, but once she moves upwind of Cairine and closes her eyes, she detects the faint hit of something foul, but not death. Almost like a bathroom that hasn’t been aired out all day. Eyes open again, Charlotte spots the trail of shaking branches following the beach.
“Steady yourself.” Cairine falls onto her front legs, works up a growl—
Out bursts Poppy, leaves and twigs stuck to her like she’s fallen through a tree. “Charlotte Charlotte CHARLOTTE!” she squeals as she plows Charlotte down into the sand. “You’re alive with legs and arms and even a head that’s so great!”
Cairine rolls her eyes and plops back down, her front paws batting water this way and that. Mainly into Charlotte’s hair.
“Y-yeah, I got’em.” Charlotte coughs up a cloud of sand and waves it away. How does a mouse-girl weigh enough knock the wind out of someone? “Off, will ya?” Charlotte twists, struggles to push Poppy off. Nuthin’ doin’.
“I got sooo lonely,” Poppy swoons backward, complete with hand on the forehead. The sun sets all the grains of sand aglitter, especially on Poppy’s face. “Peat dumped me only a little way away and said he had to go do something suuuper-duuuper secret, and I couldn’t come even though I promised I’d be good and not say anything but heee said I was too loud and too little to do any secret stuff and I am not. Too. LITTLE!” She crosses her legs on Charlotte’s chest and leans forward. “Am I really too loud?”
Charlotte grabs her by the collar. “Yes.” She sends the kid into a somersault that lands her at the edge of the lake’s reach.
Not that this breaks Poppy’s concentration. “I mean I whisper super good, just like this,” she says, not whispering in any way whatsoever, “but I wanna make sure you know what I’m whispering so I AAAAH!”
A sudden geyser of water, and Captain leaps through the air, alight with magic as she somersaults and lands with a ground-cracking thud next to Poppy. One fin’s got enough strength to hold the kid face-down as the other holds a coil of green rope for netting.
For one blessed moment, the kid is quiet.
Suppose if Captain had landed with her knee on the kid’s back she’d have split Poppy like a pretzel stick. Charlotte rests an arm on one knee and waves with the other. “Hi, Captain.”
“Trouble enjoys finding you, I see.” The mermaid studies Poppy’s height. “I think I’ve enough for a transport bubble. Maybe.”
Poppy unleashes a burst of energy, forcing Captain to use both fins to keep the kid from flailing free. “EEEEEE CHARLOTTE SAVE ME SAVE ME DON’T LET THE MEAN SMELLY FISH GET ME!”
Captain’s mouth curls. “Are all your monsters this screechy?”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Her throat will make for an excellent study, once opened.”
“I don’t wanna be an excellent study!” Poppy evolves from panicked screaming to pathetic wailing. “I don’t wanna be not talking. I don’t WANNA!”
Charlotte feels Cairine poke her back, hears the slight gruff…but Poppy is just, so, annoying… “Oh Captain, my Captain,” Charlotte adds a pronounced sigh. “I’m afraid Poppy’s not one for cutting. Not this time, anyway.”
“Not THIS time?” Poppy’s tiny mouth suddenly looks a lot nastier when her teeth are bared—damn, this kid IS rabid sometimes. “NOT THIS TIME?!”
Water drops transform into little prisms in the sun as they outline Captain’s face and human-like torso. “Hmph. Pity, this one’s got all her parts.”
Poppy glares through her eyebrows and sticks out her tongue. When Captain releases her, she straightens up to squeak nasty sounds in Mawdre.
Captain harrumphs again. “Spiteful thing.”
Charlotte nods. If only Poppy didn’t always act like some preschool brat. “You okay now?” she asks Poppy, or Cairine. More like both.
Cairine finally stops grumbling like a volcano and rests her head on her front paws.
Poppy’s gone very meek. Eyes round as half-dollars with pupils small as gnats, their violet hues weak in daylight. “Can’t I stay here with you?” She completes the question with a lip-pout.
A tiny flick of water hits Charlotte’s calf. “That would not be wise, little one,” Cairine’s voice is low, solid, unshakeable. “We mean to counter Orna as soon as we regain our strength. It would be far better for you to hide until it is over.”
Poppy freezes in her sulk. “Th-the She-Bear talks!”
“With good advice. Seriously, Poppy,” Charlotte kneels for a little eye-to-eye emphasis. “You’ve got to hide for a while. I didn’t see any cats at the Blair Farm. Why not just hang out in the barn for a while, or in the field across the street? I’m sure there’s plenty of field mice nearby, if you look.”
Poppy shuffles her feet, scratches the back of one leg with the foot of the other. “Think so?”
“Know so. We want you safe.”
“Even you?” she asks Charlotte’s toes.
“Of course me. Me and Arlen and Ember and everyone. Okay?”
With a sniffle, Poppy nods and wraps her arms around Charlotte’s neck. At first it’s cute, kind of even sweet. “And I can come back tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.” Charlotte pats Poppy nicely on the back before shifting her off, but the kid’s arms have tightened just enough that Charlotte’s head is stuck. Poppy’s got this buzzing sound in her throat too, and she still won’t let go of Charlotte’s neck. The buzzing bounces in Charlotte’s ears. Bloody disorienting. “Wow, kid, you’ve got some major muscles. Ack, kid, choking me, let go—”
“Oh!” Poppy hops backwards, waves, hops again. “Okay. Barn. Tomorrow. Stuff. Yes. Okay!” One more hop through a cloud of dust and bits of fur, and there is Poppy the mouse, vocal as ever, but at least on a tinier scale.
When she vanishes in the southern tree-line, Captain speaks. “Are all young Velidevour like that?”
Charlotte scritches and scratches the sand out of hair, shirt, and satchel. “I hope not.”
“Charlie.”
The name sucks the air clean out of Charlotte’s mouth. Her lungs shrivel, her mind bleached like bones in the desert—
Someone stands out in the middle of the Wild Grasses. Pale arms hang perfectly still against a sparkly shirt. The breeze plays with red hair too bright to mistake. It carries the scent of bus and berries to Charlotte’s nose and stings her eyes to tears. A pink bubble inflates out of the mouth. Baby blues shine like search lights.
Pop. “I’m still waiting for you, Charlie.” Pop.
The Voice rushes to the bellows within Charlotte, brings air and feeling back to her lungs. One, two, don’t let Orna get to you.
Charlotte heaves a breath as deep as she can. Her legs don’t want to move; she can’t move, but she will move. She forces one foot forward, then another, commands her back to straighten, and she screams, “I know who you really are!” She chews the unsaid words “you bitch!” like gristle, wishing desperately to spit them out at The Lady wearing her sister’s shape like some Halloween costume. But even the shape of Anna forces the hateful speech to stick between Charlotte’s teeth. “Go back to your hole!”
At least now Charlotte’s not the only one who sees it. Cairine slides one of her paws in front of Charlotte, while Captain gives herself legs to walk into the shallows. Her fins silently feel out the green rope, measuring its length. “I haven’t enough to reach.”
“Don’t,” Cairine commands one and all.
Charlotte sinks her fingers so deeply into Cairine’s fur that she’s got to be scratching flesh, but she doesn’t care. She needs to hold something she knows is real, something that’s not pretending to be a scrap of Charlotte’s old life.
“You should have died in the Pits, Charlie. She’s got something a lot worse planned for you now.”
“‘She’?” It is just a tiny word, but its reference jabs the Voice in Charlotte’s heart good’n’hard.
Baby Blues grin like some damn playground secret.
“Don’t fuck with me, Orna.” Charlotte’s walking before she knows it, wading into the Wild Grasses away from Cairine’s calls to return, arms swaying fists, teeth clenched, “You’re the one never leaving this land alive, I swear!”
The berry and bubble gum stink to Charlotte’s nose now, all its pungent sour sweetness driving its way up into her sinuses and stinging behind her eyes.
More and more red hair blows over the Baby Blues, more hair than Anna ever had, and it grows longer, longer. She’s engulfed in hair like some Ginger-fied Cousin It.
Charlotte’s almost close enough to grab a lock and yank it off. “Take my sister off!” She lunges forward—
But Cairine’s teeth close upon Charlotte’s shirt, her nose a sharp chill on Charlotte’s neck. Cairine pulls Charlotte back as a bubble pops under all that impossible hair. A new voice grinds under Anna’s punctuated soprano:
“Let us not rush. I am still owed a sweetheart.”
Red hair spins round, tightens, stretches, into a giant red bubble. It floats above the Wild Grasses and pops to the echoes of girlish laughter.
18
It Grows Beneath
“Are you all right?” Captain’s voice sounds like it’s weaving through an array of glass bottles. She takes a step out of the lake and onto dry sand.
Only once Charlotte insists, “I’m me, it’s okay,” does Cairine let go. Charlotte pushes the heels of her hands into her eyes to un-see what she saw. Of course, she can’t. “Why the hell was Orna talking about herself in third person?”
Cairine lifts her bear-nose to the air, still addled with the Anna-bubble’s odors. “We are returning to you!” she calls to Captain, then whispers, “I do not know.” Even with all that fur, Charlotte can see Cairine’s hulk shivering.
The grass feels stickier than before, smells sweeter than before—fragments of the not-Anna-bubble, no doubt. Cairine growls at the ground. Charlotte doesn’t blame her, with all the bumps and knots they keep tripping on. She’s tempted to try and rip the prairie grass up just to figure out what keeps poking her feet, but the Voice in her heart says otherwise.
Keep walking, the Voice urges, and whatever you do, don’t stop.
Captain holds a fin to her mouth, and her words just barely manage to reach them, “Something breaks the Over-Sky’s horizon!” She whips her rope up into a spinning lasso above her head.
A warm wind hugs Charlotte’s back. Could it be?
Liam’s eagle screech has never sounded so good.
Her shoulders relax to little barks of laughter. Aine’s downright giddy. “He’s got Aine and Arlen!” Charlotte points, grinning. Then dreading. Where’s Dorjan?
The golden eagle soars up, over the sun, and downward in a gliding coast towards the ground. Arlen looks more like a raisin than a man, his body all bruised and lumpy. “Charlotte, can you help?”
Get off the land, the Voice keeps urging, get them all OFF the land.
“Hang on!” Charlotte says as much to the Voice as to Arlen. “Here, Cairine, hold me up.”
Cairine stops to stand on her two feet and lifts Charlotte as high as she can above her head. “Oh, I hope they are not too much injured.”
“Can’t you move to the sands for that?” Captain shouts, but Cairine is too fixed upon Arlen, bloody and torn, and Aine, who can’t hold still for honey. Charlotte is too fixed upon Liam’s ragged feathers and the branches still stuck to his body.
MOVE
“One sec!” Charlotte snaps as Liam pulls back to slow the descent. His flightpath is close enough to Charlotte that she can pluck Aine off Arlen as he and Liam finish coasting onto the beach. “Where’s Dorjan?”
“On his way!” Arlen answers as Liam drops him into a roll in the sand.
MOVE NOW
But Cairine is so thrilled to have her cub back that she can only hug her daughter and lick her with kisses. The smell of their love is strong enough to overpower that gross sweet nonsense from the not-Anna-bubble. Charlotte breathes the love in and feels herself transported through a thunderstorm to a lake with skipping stones, a meadow’s rainbowed glow in the distance.
Is it a coincidence that these are the smells coming to mind? The Voice nudges her heart. Hard. Now get OVER there.
Liam transforms upon the sand. Leaves and twigs cling stubbornly to speckled curls. Mud and blood streak his trousers. Cuts criss-cross his calloused feet.
But it’s still Liam under all that grime. Even the dried mud on his face can’t stop his crooked smile sliding up one cheek. Charlotte smiles back, moved at last to ignore the pokes and pricks that always seem to find her feet beneath the grass.
Liam hails Captain, who has not rested her lasso for one moment. “What is wrong?”
“A young human-looking female transformed into a giant bubble and exploded.” Captain double-blinks, setting a clean sheen to her heavy eyes. “I don’t like Miss Meatbag and the mother bear out of reach in such a camouflaged land. Reminds me of coral eels in a reef.”
“But they’re exposed,” Liam says with a wave at the sky and forest, all too distant to surely matter.
Captain curtly shakes her head. “Not their legs, nor the ground.”
Arlen hears this, too, and his dark eyes widen with how little he can see of Cairine’s body above the Wild Grasses. With as firm yet gentle a voice as he can muster, he calls to his daughter, “Aine, let me have a kiss from Mother, too. Now, please.”
Cairine guides Aine to perch upon her back. “Come, let’s go by Father.”
Aine takes one look at Arlen so near the water and begins to whine.
“It’s all right, Aine,” Arlen calls with subtle steps backward onto damp sand.
The prairie grass stills.
The wind keeps moving.
The ground keeps moving.
Charlotte trips on another sharp something and falls forward into the grass. For a second all is reeds and gritty soil.
“Charlotte?” Liam calls.
Charlotte looks between her fingers. It is not sand she sees.
Ashes.
A serpent-like shaft shoots out of the ground in front of Charlotte’s face. Charlotte scrambles back to see a vine, as thorned and slick as the rest of The Lady’s magic, but this vine ends with an enclosed flower bud the size of Aine if not bigger.
It slowly sways, trailing drops of poisonous oil as it bobs its head.
Charlotte stands stock-still. Cairine’s jaw hangs open as she tries to distance herself away from It, but in doing so loses her path out of the grasses.
It bends towards Charlotte. It vibrates with a growing chorus of hisses, as though its bud houses a swarm of cicadas.
No one breathes. The wind can’t even disturb the folds of the bud, so stuck tight by their oil.
It sniffs. Deep. And quick.
Got no weapon but a fist, Liam you stay the HELL away, dammit what do I do?
A few blades of tall grass bend near Cairine.
Then a few more.
Closer.
A few more.
Closer.
Cairine turns her head slowly, deliberately. She searches Arlen’s face for a plan.
A few more.
Closer.
With the buzz of hidden cicadas.
Arlen mouths: “To Aranina.”
Cairine takes one giant paw and stretches her leg as far as she can for a single step. She steps on something sharp—she can’t stop releasing a small grunt of pain.
The grass stops moving.
By Charlotte, the Hisser’s head peels a single petal down. The entire surface is lined with thorns as small and numerous as shark teeth. The petal waves like a tongue, its tip inches from Charlotte’s nose.
Liam pads his way through the sand, sparks dancing through him and into his blood dagger, senses honed so sharply upon the Hisser near Charlotte he ignores a newly raised line traveling beneath the sand up the beach.
But Arlen and Captain see the line. Captain slips quickly into the water and splashes some
water on herself so quickly her lasso does not lose its spin.
“Cairine, get into the water,” Arlen says with barely a shred of calm.
The sand line picks up speed.
“Water” is all Aine needs to hear to get her screaming.
The Hisser jerks back from Charlotte and towards the bears.
MOVE NOW
Charlotte swings the best right cross of her life. She doesn’t wait to see the Hisser crash into the grasses. She ignores the burning sensation spreading on her fist and vaults over it like a sprinter. She makes for Liam running towards her with his dagger out, Arlen with his hands open, Captain with her net out. “Cairine, you gotta run!”
Cairine growls more than says, “They are all around!”
And they are.
Charlotte’s just one long jump from Liam and the beach when another Hisser bursts up in front of her. A single thorned vine showers black oil from the petals that open: one, two, three, four, five, six. All thorny teeth. All poisoned. Charlotte staggers back before a drop of oil can touch her. Its head weaves back and forth like a python, then shoots forward—
Liam leaps and slides under, running his dagger through the Hisser’s belly. Black oil spurts out, but it does not die, only recoils, re-aiming for Liam. Its head spins as it strikes with the speed of lightning.
Liam is faster.
STOP STARING AT HIM AND RUN the Voice hollers inside her, but Charlotte keeps trying to do both, running and watching Liam dodge, grow his blood sword and thrust, dodge and slay, sending petal after petal into an afterlife of dust.
Charlotte finally staggers onto the beach. “Charlotte, this way!” Captain calls with fin outstretched. Arlen’s out of the water, trying to talk a frantic Mawdre to his daughter, but she’s scurrying on Cairine’s back, sliding into her mother’s face, doing everything but sitting still—
Sand erupts between Charlotte and Captain to reveal another vine with another head, its petals open and hanging like tongues. The cicada buzz is so loud Charlotte can feel her teeth shake. The new Hisser thrusts forward—
Green luminescence spirals out and wraps round Charlotte’s vine. The vine shrivels in the net’s hold. The oil hisses toxic fumes but does not melt the mermaid’s weapon. Captain’s own mouth transforms, and Charlotte sees swirls of light and anger flowing up Captain’s throat. Charlotte dives into the sand and covers her head just in time.