Water Witch

by Carol Goodman

  “Yes,” Diana said, her eyes flickering toward Soheila. “It’s the essential substance of magic. Used correctly, it mends broken bones, cures disease, and prolongs life. It can also lend great magical power.”

  “But always at a price,” Soheila said. “If a human uses too much, it can deplete their life force rather than prolonging it. Witches have died of overdoses.”

  “Why doesn’t Ann Chase use it to cure her arthritis?” I asked. “Or to slow her aging?”

  Soheila and Diana looked at each other uneasily. “Ann has a daughter who has medical problems,” Soheila answered at last. “What Aelvesgold she acquires she uses it for her. We all give her what we can, but there’s not enough for her to use for herself and for her daughter.”

  “And she can only handle so much of it, so she chooses to channel all she gets into her daughter.”

  “Couldn’t someone else channel it for her?” I asked. “Like you just did to fix her hand?”

  “That only works once or twice on the same person. We’re not sure why. There’s a limit to how much of it a human can absorb.”

  “Like a vitamin deficiency,” I said thinking about what Liam had told me about how the undines could no longer absorb Aelvesgold after they had been in Faerie too long.

  Soheila tilted her head, thoughtful. “Exactly.”

  “We’d better get back in,” Diana said, looking impatient. “I don’t want the circle overtaxing Liz. She was up all last night talking to members of the governing board of IMP.”

  “Did she get a feel for how they’ll vote?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t good. One of the three fey members on the board has resigned and the remaining two couldn’t be reached. Delbert Winters, a wizard at Harvard who wrote a paper last year on the science of magic that debunked the idea that the fey taught magic to witches, is in favor of closing the door. Then she spent half the night talking to Eleanor Belknap, a witch at Vassar, who’s gotten it into her head that the open door to Faerie has contributed to global warming. A ridiculous notion, but Eleanor and Liz have been friends for years and Liz felt she had to hear her out. It took a lot out of her and she’s still recovering from her illness last winter …” She blushed and looked away from me, embarrassed at the reminder of yet another problem I had caused. It had been the liderc I let in through the door who had made Liz sick.

  “Go on and check on Liz,” I said, getting into my car. But then as they turned to go, I thought of something else. “If the door to Faerie closes, does that mean …?”

  “No more Aelvesgold,” Soheila said, putting her arm around Diana’s shoulder, which I could see was trembling. She didn’t have to add that, if there were no more Aelvesgold in this world, witches who had used it to augment their lifespan would suddenly age and die.

  CHAPTER NINE

  WELL, I REALLY messed that up, I thought as I drove out of the Olsens’ driveway. How could I have so lost myself that I hurt Ann? But that’s what had happened: that first rush of power had felt like a flame rushing through my veins burning a path to those strange images of caves and stone circles and that mysterious figure holding the curved knife. That last image had felt somehow … intimate. And terrifying. I shuddered, tasting fear in my mouth. I forced my mind away from the moment, back to the sunlit country road in front of me, the old stone bridge and the sign announcing the Undine …

  “Shit!” I swore, turning into the same driveway for the second time today. I had been so busy reliving the circle that I’d gone back the wrong way again.

  I wrenched the gear stick into reverse and backed directly into a pothole. I could hear the undercarriage of my less-than-a-year-old Fit grating against gravel as I maneuvered out of the pothole. I looked warily toward the house, sure the sound would have aroused the owner, but the house kept still in its enchanted silence. I looked back over my shoulder … and was blinded by a flash of gold sunlight just as I’d been last time …

  Only last time the sun had been on the east side of the house, whereas now it was low over the west side. What, then, was causing that flash of light? I tried staring directly into the glare but I couldn’t see anything. Oddly, I found that I didn’t mind staring into that blinding light. In fact, the longer I looked into it the more reluctant I was to drive away. The trill of moving water and the wind chimes beckoned me to stay. I tore my eyes away and looked back at the house. Still quiet. Even the smoke had vanished. Maybe I’d imagined it before and the cabin really was abandoned.

  I put the car into park and turned off the ignition. Without the noise of the engine the rush of water filled the air – a soothing sound that could lull a person to sleep. And yet I felt wide awake. The light from the water had woken me up, much as the energy I’d felt during the circle had.

  I got out of the car, closing the door as quietly as I could, and walked down to the water, following a stone staircase that had been set into the steep bank. The riverside had been shored up by beautiful stonewalls. Crystals and round river stones were set in between square blocks of granite. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make the river accessible from the house, but judging from the layers of moss and wildflowers growing in between the rocks, the work had been done a long time ago. Unlike the house, though, which was suffering signs of decay and neglect, the stone walls and steps were lovingly – if eccentrically – maintained. Pots of fragrant herbs lined the steps and small clay figures and candles sat in niches inside the walls. At the bottom of the steps was a rustic bench made of twisted birch branches. I ran my hand along the wood, which had been polished to the smoothness of bone, until my fingers grazed something carved into the seatback – a pair of initials intertwined in a heart: L & Q. The initials were nearly as smooth as the rest of the wood, worn down by someone’s touch.

  I looked away from the bench toward the stream. The flash of gold was still there, a bright spot under the water refracted a hundred times into gold waves by the current. Staring into it I experienced the warmth I’d felt lying under the willow tree with Liam in Faerie, the release I’d felt when the circle had joined hands and the gold light had moved through us. Both were moments when I’d been exposed to Aelvesgold, and Soheila had said that they sometimes found traces of Aelvesgold in the Undine.

  Well there was only one way to find out. I took off my sandals and waded into the stream. It was cold, but given the heat of the day not unpleasantly so. The bottom was covered with wide, mossy stones. Not, thankfully, gooey mud. I inched forward carefully, exploring the surface of the rocky bottom with my toes, trying not to think about snakes. The current wrapped around my ankles, then my calves, like silk scarves seductively pulling me into the deeper water.

  I stood now a foot or so from the source of the gold light. It was so strong that I couldn’t make out its source, but I was sure now that it was Aelvesgold. The circle needed Aelvesgold to cure Brock … I needed it to gain enough power to keep the door open. And, after all, it was my fault the circle had wasted their last reserve of the stuff.

  I took another step forward … and noticed that the water was warmer. Looking down I saw that I was standing in a small pool of amber water. I wriggled my toes, which had gone a little numb in the cold water, and felt the warm current moving up my legs, spreading a delicious sensation of well-being throughout my body. It was like getting a foot massage while drinking a champagne cocktail. I squatted down, not caring that the water soaked the hem of my dress, and reached my hand into the core of the gold light. For all I knew I might have been sticking my hand into a bear trap, but I no longer cared. The light was tingling in my veins, fizzing my nerve endings, and massaging the pleasure centers in my brain. I hadn’t felt this good since I’d made love to Liam under the willow tree in Faerie. Maybe if I could grab whatever was making this light, I wouldn’t miss that quite so much.

  My fingers wrapped around something round and hard. It was half sunken in the mud, but I pulled it out with a satisfying plock. I dimly recalled Liz saying that Aelvesgold could be danger
ous to handle, but I couldn’t stop myself. Lifting the stone out of the water, I cradled it in the palm of my hand. It fit perfectly. Like an egg in a nest. It was, in fact, egg-shaped and golden – like the proverbial golden goose egg – and glowed as if it was on fire. It didn’t hurt me.

  Because you were meant to have it.

  The voice in my head didn’t sound entirely like my own. But I agreed with it completely. I was meant to possess this stone. I started to slip it into my pocket … and heard the click of metal behind me.

  “That’s not yours to take,” a low, gravelly voice growled. “Stand up slowly and hand her over.”

  I stood up as slowly as I could, gripping the stone hard in my fist. I had images of throwing it at my assailant and then grabbing the stone back and running. The person behind me was wrong. The stone was mine to take.

  But the person behind me had a gun, as I surmised from the cold metal rod pressing between my shoulder blades.

  I turned around, expecting some hillbilly he-man in hunting camo, but found instead a woman the size of a fourth-grader with a face like a shriveled apple and a rifle more than half her size held in crabbed and trembling hands.

  “I was only taking a stone,” I said, in the slow, gentle tones I’d use to calm a nervous animal.

  “Thief! Trespasser!” she snapped back. “Hand her over, I say.” She nudged my hand – still curled around the stone – with her rifle. The rifle shook like a leaf in the wind. In fact, all eighty or so pounds of the frail, elderly woman were shaking like aspen leaves. One good shove …

  What was I thinking? She was an old woman and she was right. I was trespassing and the stone – no matter how much it felt like it belonged to me – actually didn’t.

  I held out my arm, the stone heavy in my hand, and started to step toward her so that she wouldn’t have to move closer to me. I didn’t like the idea of her tripping and shooting me by accident. Only when I stepped forward my foot landed on a slick surface below the water. My balance wavered, my arms pin-wheeled in the air, and then the sky was wheeling above me. My last thought was that I really ought to use my arms to brace my fall, but that would mean letting go of the stone, and I wasn’t willing to do that.

  When I came to, I was lying on damp green moss, looking up into a kaleidoscope of waving lights. Bright flashes of light darted over my head. Fish, I thought, strangely bright tropical fish for an inland river. I must be in Faerie.

  But then my vision cleared and I noticed that the bright flashing lights were pieces of tin and glass hanging from strings. The damp green moss was an ancient settee, which smelled like cat pee. I tried to sit up and my head began to pound. I touched the back of my head and found a hard knot the size and shape of a goose egg …

  Or of the Aelvesgold stone.

  “It’s here,” a voice said. “You held onto it when you went down. Damned thing would have gotten you drowned if I hadn’t dragged you out of the river. That’s what it does to you, the Aelvesgold. You only had it in your hand a minute and you’d have been willing to crack your head open and drown in the river rather than let it go. Here, put this on your fool head.”

  She handed me a piece of flannel wrapped around a chunk of ice. I placed it gingerly against the bump and looked at the woman. She sat in a rocking chair in front of a woodstove, limned in murky light that turned her silver hair greenish gold. In the shadowy light, her face looked younger than it had outside. She was wearing a red wool cardigan appliquéd with snowmen over a plaid flannel shirt over red long johns and a long wool skirt. A heavy outfit for a summer day, but then old people were often cold. Plastic sheeting was taped over most of the windows to keep out drafts and a fire was roaring in the woodstove. The room itself looked like it was melting. Long strips of wallpaper hung from the walls revealing multiple layers of floral patterns, plaster was curling off the ceiling, and the wide plank floorboards were buckled and wavy. There was a scrabbling noise coming from the ceiling, which I suspected might be mice.

  “You dragged me out of the water?” I asked.

  “Couldn’t let you drown, even if you were trying to steal my Aelvestone.”

  Aelvestone. I liked the sound of that. I looked around the room for it.

  There was no shortage of stones. Piled on every surface were smooth, rounded river stones, along with pieces of polished driftwood and other flotsam and jetsam that I imagined the old woman had salvaged from the river: shards of broken glass that had been worn milky by their tumble over the rocks, bits of rusted metal twisted by the currents, and enough broken china to make a tea service for twelve. But no Aelvestone.

  “I have her safe, or safe as can be. The Aelvesgold works its way with folks – different ways with different folks – but never for good. Most regular folk don’t see it.” She leaned forward in her rocker and squinted at me. Her face did look younger than it had before. “But you ain’t regular folk, are you?”

  “I have a feeling neither are you,” I replied, wincing at the sharp pain in my head as I tried to sit up straighter. “My name’s Cailleach McFay. I work at the college. And you are …?”

  “You mean you don’t know?” She started to laugh but the laugh turned into a hacking cough. She spit into a cloudy looking Mason jar and wiped her mouth on the cuff of her flannel shirt. “You must be new to the town not to have heard the story of Lura Trask.”

  “Trask?” The name was familiar. I searched my brain until I recalled the story Soheila had told me in the woods about the fisherman who had fallen in love with an undine. “Are you Sullivan Trask’s daughter?”

  She made a hoarse noise of consent and spit into the jar again.

  “Then your mother …” Lura gave me a sharp warning look, but I persevered. “Your mother was an undine.”

  Lura scowled. “And what if she were? What’s it to you?”

  “Nothing – it’s just that I didn’t know that undines could have human children.”

  “There’s a lot folks don’t know about undines. Most folk don’t even know they exist …” She looked at me suspiciously. “How do you know about them?”

  “I helped the other undines find the way into Faerie yesterday.”

  She leaned back in her chair and looked out the only window that wasn’t covered with plastic. It gave a glimpse of the river flowing fast and glinting in the late afternoon sunlight. I must have been unconscious for some time.

  “I heard them going,” she said, staring into the fire. “I knew it was the day … and that they had to go …”

  “They were your sisters,” I said, putting together the bloodlines and realizing that if Lura really was the daughter of the undine who had seduced Sullivan Trask then she must be close to a hundred years old. “Of course you’d miss them.”

  She made a harsh noise. “Miss them? Hardly. They kept me up half the nights with their singing. They’d swim down here and tangle my fishing lines and steal my bait. Silly, mindless creatures. Good riddance, I say.”

  She got up and grabbed an iron poker. For a moment I was afraid she was going to hit me with it, but she shoved it in the woodstove instead, stirring up a flurry of sparks that flew into the air and singed the drooping wallpaper. It was a wonder that she hadn’t already burned down the place.

  “Well, you’ll be happy to know then that there might not be anymore undines coming here. The Grove wants to close the door …”

  Lura turned on me, the poker raised menacingly. “They can’t do that! The undines must return to this river to spawn or they’ll die out.”

  “I thought you said they were silly mindless creatures,” I pointed out. “And you were glad to see them gone. Why do you care if there aren’t anymore, especially …”

  “Especially as I’m not going to be around much longer?” She lowered the poker and gave the fire one more angry stab. Sitting back down, she looked into the flames and grew silent. The reflection of the firelight gave her skin the momentary flush of youth and I saw that she’d once been pretty. “I’m not af
raid to die,” she said after a while, “but to think I’m the last of my kind … well, that’s not the way I want to leave this world, even if it hasn’t always been a world that’s been kind to me.”

  I wondered what the world had done to her that she’d chosen to live alone in this decaying house with only her half-human sisters for company. Looking at her, small and worn down as one of the river stones she collected, I felt the weight of all the years she had spent here alone. This house seemed infected with sadness, as if the wallpaper and plaster were peeling under its burden. A small, mean voice inside me sang, “This is what happens to you when you don’t love anyone.”

  “Well, I’m going to try to stop them along with a circle of … friends.”

  “Ha! A circle, eh? You must mean them witches and fairies? They don’t know what they’re doing most days. They come to me sometimes pretending they want my advice when all they really want is my Aelvesgold.”

  “You mean you have more Aelvesgold than that stone?”

  “Why would I tell you?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Hey,” I said, holding up my hands. “I just learned about the stuff. My friends said the only reliable supply of it came from Faerie.”

  Lura snorted and spit in the Mason jar. “Like I said, your friends are ignorant. When an undine lays her eggs she lays an Aelvestone with ’em to keep ’em safe till they hatch. The one you found must’ve been with the undines you brought over to Faerie, so it belonged to my sisters. Why should I share it?”

  “Because we need the Aelvesgold to give us the power to keep the door open,” I said.

  Lura screwed up her face, taking away any remnant of the beauty I’d just glimpsed. She reached her hand into her cardigan pocket and pulled out the Aelvestone. I caught my breath at the sight of it and had to restrain myself from leaping up and grabbing it. She leaned forward and held it up between her thumb and forefinger, as if teasing me with it.

  “If I give you this, how do I know that you’d use it to keep the door open? How do I know you won’t use it to close the door?”