The Water and the Wild

by Katie Elise Ormsbee

  “Stay back,” Lottie whispered. “Stay away.”

  The flames did not listen. They loomed closer. Lottie’s eyelids were itchy and her nose stopped up. Then her feet began to grow cold and heavy. Something wet was creeping up her legs. Lottie felt herself slipping out of the bindings of the web and into the the river. It was warm, so warm, and she was tired, so tired. The sweet smell grew stronger.

  The last thing that she remembered was the sound of her own name.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Roote and Crag

  “LOTTIE!”

  Lottie’s eyes snapped open. She coughed a warm, sweet liquid from her throat.

  “She’s all right,” said a shrill voice. “Fife, get over here!”

  Lottie heard herself say, “Riddle larks and crackers?”

  She tensed, staring up at Adelaide’s face in alarm. What she had meant to say was “Where are Fife and Oliver?”

  She did not have to wonder for long. The boys came into view, one behind each of Adelaide’s shoulders.

  “All hail the conquering heroine!” cried Fife.

  Lottie moaned and shifted, and for a moment she panicked. She was still caught in a web, just as she had been before she had passed out. But there were no green flames here, no heady scents. The air smelled blank and crisp.

  “The oblivion’s just addled her brain,” Fife said, pressing a hand to Lottie’s forehead. “It’ll wear off in a little while. If we hadn’t lost the satchel back there, we could’ve given her some food to help soak it out of her system.”

  They had lost the satchel? Lottie sputtered out some of the remaining sweet taste from her mouth.

  “Where’s the Otherwise Incurable?” she tried to ask, which came out instead as “Whippersnapper on the fourth, why can’t you, please?”

  Fife snickered. Adelaide slapped him on the shoulder.

  “This is your fault, you idiot,” she said. “I told you we shouldn’t have gone through the swamp.”

  “We voted on it,” Oliver reminded Adelaide.

  “And we’re alive aren’t we?” said Fife. “No thanks to you, Miss Priss. It was my genga that chirped us to safety. If anyone’s to blame, it’s you. You didn’t focus on your one thing. You ran off like a scared little—”

  “I wasn’t scared! I was—I was confused.” Adelaide held up the scarf-wrapped vial of Otherwise Incurable in her hand. Lottie sighed in relief. Eliot’s medicine was safe.

  “We all were,” said Fife, “but at least Lottie had the decency to be brave.”

  “I thought she was trying to steal it,” Adelaide whispered.

  “Oberon,” groaned Fife. “You’re so paranoid. Lottie’s not a thief.”

  I’m right here, Lottie thought miserably. It seemed that just because she couldn’t speak properly, no one thought she could hear, either.

  Except for Oliver. He sat by Lottie’s side with an intent look in his green eyes. Lottie half smiled at him. He half smiled back, glanced at the bickering Fife and Adelaide, and rolled his eyes. He shrugged as though to say, “What can you do?”

  She pushed herself up to a sitting position and looked around. They were under the cover of pine trees, and beneath them the swamp water had cleared and narrowed back into the placid River Lissome.

  “We’re out of the Sweetwater,” she said. “We’re safe.”

  And this time, to Lottie’s great relief, those were exactly the words that came out of her mouth.

  Fife and Adelaide stopped, mid bicker, and stared at her.

  “Yes,” said Oliver. “We’re past the swamp. The safe part, I’m not so sure about.”

  Oliver’s teeth chattered a bit. His bandaged arm was exposed, and Lottie could see gooseflesh puckering up his elbow.

  “Where’s your jacket?” she said.

  “We used it to dry you off,” said Oliver. “Those flames had dragged you halfway into the water by the time we pulled you out.”

  “Oh.” Lottie looked down at her chilled legs and soggy sneakers.

  “Close shave, that,” said Fife, sticking his tongue out at her. “You very nearly got sucked up. Just think! If we had gotten to you a moment later, some wisp murderer could be inhabiting your body this very second. Wouldn’t that be the weirdest thing? Creepy, too. No one would expect some nice-looking girl to be a bloodthirsty murderer.”

  Lottie, who had been close to tears, now couldn’t stop a smile from surfacing. The idea of one of those green flames possessing her body was a horrible one, but somehow Fife made it sound funny. And he had called her nice-looking.

  “How did we get away from them?” she asked.

  “It was all Ollie, really,” said Fife. “After we pulled you out of the swamp, the oblivion started to get to us, and bad. You’d passed out, I couldn’t think straight, and Adelaide was having a breakdown. But Ollie? He was the hero. I don’t think the oblivion even broke his concentration. You see, that’s what comes from being a poetry-quoting machine: phenomenal powers of focus.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” Oliver said, eyes pink. “I just kept reciting my favorite couplet, that’s all.”

  “Whatever,” Fife said. “Ollie could hear the gengas chirping from the other side of the swamp. So he rounded us all up and led us in the right direction till we were clear of the oblivion and the flames altogether. Now is that one for the books, or what?”

  “Definitely one for the books,” said Lottie, shooting Oliver a smile. “I’d say it’s poem-worthy.”

  Oliver’s cheeks went red. He lowered Mr. Ingle’s lantern to hide his face in the shadows.

  Adelaide had been strangely quiet all this time, and when Lottie looked her way, she quickly turned, eyes downcast.

  “It’s okay, you know,” Lottie told her. “I’m not mad at you for running away. We were all confused back there.”

  Adelaide shrugged and said nothing.

  “Right!” said Fife, clapping his hands. “It’s over, and everyone’s safe. That’s what’s important.” He turned apologetically to Lottie. “I know you’ve had a scare, but do you think you could keep walking?”

  They were losing time, Lottie realized. She did not know how long she had been unconscious, and part of her was afraid to ask. She nodded groggily and tried to shift her knees up.

  She had to think of Eliot. She had to picture his ceiling, covered in fresh-painted stars and swirls. She had to think of the days they spent on the roof of the Barmy Badger.

  “You and I, we understand each other, Lottie Fiske.”

  “We’ve got to—to save Eliot,” Lottie struggled to say, “and Mr. Wilfer. Got to—got to keep going.”

  “All of the above,” Fife encouraged.

  He offered Lottie the support of his shoulder, which she took with a wobbly smile.

  The oblivion may have worn off Lottie’s tongue, but a fuzziness still hung over her mind and she occasionally got the strange urge to shout “Badminton!” The webbings were as stable underfoot as before, and they sprawled under the shelter of pine, over the babbling river.

  Fife stayed back with Lottie, steadying her muddy-minded stumbles until she walked with greater surety. In the lamplight, Lottie saw that Fife had a long, ugly weal running down his cheek.

  “Did you get that from trying to save me?” she asked.

  “What, this beauty?” Fife ran his finger along the red mark. “I consider it an improvement, don’t you?”

  “I’m glad you came after us,” Lottie said quietly.

  “Yeah,” said Fife. “You had me and Ollie pretty freaked out when we found you. And Ada? You should’ve seen her when we pulled you out of the oblivion. She couldn’t make up her mind about whether you were a rotten thief or her savior. She called you both.”

  “She did?”

  “Look,” said Fife. “I know that Adelaide doesn’t act like it, but she was really torn up about what happened back there. She wouldn’t leave your side until you woke up. I think she’s just too embarrassed to admit she was wrong.”
<
br />   Lottie looked ahead at Adelaide’s proud, swiftly striding figure.

  “I think she has a hard time apologizing,” Lottie said.

  “She’s never apologized to me,” Fife said cheerfully.

  “Fife,” Lottie said, “how did you and Oliver get to be friends anyway? It’s kind of hard to imagine how you made friends with any of the Wilfers.”

  “You mean, I seem a little too unrefined for their lot?” Fife snorted. “Sheesh, Lottie, that hurts.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.” Fife sighed. “Well, you saw what it’s like in Wisp Territory. I hated growing up there. The Tailor despised me, of course, and so did all the other wisps. I’d go out of Wisp Territory every day, into the fens and Southerly grounds. One day, I found Oliver wandering around the wood like a Mad Hatter, book of poetry in hand, quoting to the trees.”

  Lottie smiled. “You helped him shake a lot of that, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” said Fife, “I guess. But he helped me out, too. We started exploring together. Oliver was fascinated by wisps, and I wanted to know everything there was to know about sprites. Then he introduced me to Mr. Wilfer and Adelaide. We would’ve made it a trio, but Adelaide, well—”

  “She told me,” said Lottie. “Exploring isn’t a refined activity.”

  “Decidedly unrefined,” agreed Fife. “Anyway, when I was born, the Tailor ordered my mother to banish me from the wood. She bargained with him to let me stay until I turned ten—that’s when wisps learn how to float. So on my tenth birthday, I left. Mother promised protection if I ever returned and blah, blah, blah. But I was ready to go.”

  “And you’re going to be Mr. Wilfer’s apprentice, right?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Fife nodded. “But he thinks I’m not ready yet. Wants me to wait a few more years. He says that I don’t understand the ‘great weight’ of the healing profession, et cetera, et cetera.”

  Lottie guessed she could understand that. After all, Mr. Wilfer’s profession had gotten him imprisoned by the Southerly King.

  “I think you’d make a good doctor,” Lottie said. “You always seem to know the right thing to say to make a person feel better.”

  An impish smile notched up Fife’s cheek. “I should hope so. That is my keen, after all.”

  “What? Oliver said your keen had to do with taste. Tasting words, something like that.”

  “It does,” said Fife. “How do you think I know the right words to say? I taste them first.”

  Lottie stared.

  “Think of it this way,” Fife said calmly. “Everything that you and I say is just one big, soupy concoction in the air. Depending on how you feel, the soup tastes different. If you’re having a bad day, it’s bitter. You’ve run into your worst enemy, it’s sour. You’ve fallen in love, it’s sweet! All those emotions leak out in your words. Dramatic examples, but you get the picture.”

  “Um.”

  Fife waved his hands impatiently. “It’s not that I can taste the words themselves, really. More like the moods behind the words.”

  “So,” said Lottie, “you could taste if I was angry, even if I said that I wasn’t?”

  “Mm-hm,” said Fife. “The moment you say a thing, I’ll taste exactly how you feel. Which, if you think of it, would be a lame excuse for a keen by itself. But here’s the better bit, the bit that I’m still sharpening. I call it flavoring. Say I taste someone’s words, and they’re bitter, or off—bad somehow. Well, all I’ve got to do is add my own words, and the mood changes—presto!—just like that. It’s like adding sugar to cake batter or spices to a soup. I can figure out what added ingredients would switch things up.”

  “You mean, you can change anyone’s mood just by saying the right words?”

  “Close enough. It’s still a wishy-washy business. Sometimes I mess up, choose the wrong word, end up throwing off the mood altogether. But I’ve still got three more years to sharpen it, so I’m not too worried.”

  “Wait. Wait!” Lottie stopped in her tracks. “Does that mean you’ve been changing everyone’s moods this whole time?”

  “Does it?” Fife arched a brow.

  “How do I know that you haven’t been flavoring my soup, or whatever?” Lottie demanded. “That you haven’t been saying just the right things to change my mood?”

  “You don’t know, do you?” Fife said, that impish smile still on his face. “That’s the fun of it!”

  Lottie had begun to feel queasy, and she was certain this had nothing to do with the aftereffects of the oblivion.

  “It’s not fun,” she said. “You can’t just go mixing up words and changing people’s feelings. How am I supposed to know if I really like you or if it’s just you adding sugar and spices?”

  “Why? Do you really like me, Lottie Fiske?” Fife’s eyes were shining with amused curiosity.

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “No,” said Fife. “I just knew you’d get all weird when I told you. No one likes having their emotions read. That’s why Ollie makes such a good friend, you know. He’s used to everyone reading his emotions. It’s nothing new to him.”

  “Well, I don’t like it, so—so stop, please.”

  “I can only do that if you stop talking,” Fife pointed out.

  So Lottie did just that; she stopped talking, folded her arms, and walked on. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Fife. Or was it? If only he could just say things straight, with no blurs along the edges. But Fife was a blur: a wisp and a sprite, but neither entirely, bursting with enthusiasm and also with anger. She was in a strange place, Lottie reminded herself, and in strange company, with girls who could hear through six stories and boys who could taste her words.

  The night wore on, the hours drumming out one by one. As the nip of deep night snagged at Lottie’s skin, she began to understand what a tragedy it had been to lose the satchel back in the Sweetwater swamp. Her feet and back begged for the comfort of a blanket, and her stomach groaned for food—even simple bread and cheese.

  No one had spoken a word for a good two hours into the morning when the wood began to change. It was growing lighter, and the webbings were dipping lower. In the dimness, Lottie thought she saw the flash of a bird’s wings just overhead. Then, unmistakably, she heard a low chirp. It wasn’t until a yellow kingfisher had alighted on Lottie’s shoulder that she realized what was happening: the others had released their gengas and were letting them fly free.

  Spool chirped once more in Lottie’s ear and then swooped off to fly a merry circle, like a dance, with white-feathered Keats. Adelaide’s lavender finch, Lila, kept close to her owner, flying at a respectable height and gliding with grace.

  Lottie brushed her fingers against the small, warm bundle of feathers in her pocket. Carefully, she tugged out Trouble and held him aloft in her cupped hands.

  “Well?” she said. “Are you going to ignore me again?”

  Trouble tilted his head at Lottie. He tweeted once. Then, in a great jump, he swooped up above Lottie, flapping his wings in what Lottie knew, though she couldn’t say how she knew, was a very satisfied way.

  They walked on like this for an hour more. Trouble bobbed ahead of Lottie, joining in the merry circle-dance with Spool and Keats and then fluttering back to Lottie, as though afraid she might run off if he strayed too far. The others said nothing, but Lottie caught a glint in Oliver’s blue eyes and a smile on Fife’s and then Adelaide’s lips. Lottie had begun to forget just how hungry she was. She felt warmer, too, though she wasn’t sure if that was due to the rising sun or Trouble’s happy tweets.

  The webs drooped lower still, and soon, stones and grass—brown grass, not wisp white—peeked through the gaps in the webs, then intermingled, and then Lottie was not walking on webs but on hard ground. There were no more webs, just a stony path that flanked the River Lissome.

  “That’s that,” Fife said. “The webs have all run aground, which means we’re out of Wisp Territory. And that means the Southe
rly Court can’t be far off. Half a day at most.”

  Fife gave a low whistle and raised his forefinger in the air. Spool fluttered to a perch there, and Fife tucked him back into his pocket. Oliver and Adelaide, too, collected their gengas and put them away. Lottie squinted up at Trouble, who was still flying in low, wide circles above their heads.

  “Here, Trouble!” she said, cupping her hands up in the air.

  Trouble twittered but made no attempt to descend.

  “Trouble,” Lottie hissed. “Come here.”

  Trouble released a low, whiny note, but after a few more swooping circles, he alighted in Lottie’s hands. As she placed him back into her pocket, she noticed the others watching her. Fife had covered his mouth.

  “What?” she demanded. “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing,” said Fife, though his voice was full of stifled laughter.

  They moved on.

  Lottie had not realized just how accustomed her feet had grown to walking along the webbings until now. The rough path felt foreign and unwelcome against her feet. A breeze blew the collar of Lottie’s tweed coat up against her face and sent her into a round of sneezes. Then a strange thing happened: her sneezes echoed. She looked up.

  Oliver and Adelaide had stopped walking. Fife floated down to ground level. A great stone doorway arched overhead, and that doorway led into a greater, round stone building—or what had once been a building. Lottie squinted up at high stone walls, now crumbling on all sides. The roof of the ancient place had long since disappeared, but some sturdy columns still remained, and thick vines curled out of crevices and underfoot. Its inhabitants may have abandoned this place long ago, but the wood itself had not. Branches of taller trees swayed above, in place of a roof; still others reached their leafy hands through wide chinks in the walls.

  “They’re ruins,” said Lottie.

  “Southerly ruins,” said Fife. “Look! The mark of the Southerly Court, it’s everywhere.”

  Fife pointed to a weathered stone column, where a painted white circle peeked through the ivy. There was another circle like it on the next column over, and on the next, and the next, and through the center of the columned circle the River Lissome flowed on as steadily as ever.