“Nice work,” he said.
Adelaide poked him hard in the side. “Shut up, you imbecile. Can’t you see that she’s shaken up?”
“Well, who wouldn’t be?” said Fife. “She just took down the whole Southerly Court!”
Adelaide and Fife continued to argue in loud whispers, but Lottie wasn’t listening. She had not made a move to get up. She remained still on the floor as the elevator continued on its gentler ascent. Mr. Wilfer knelt by her side.
“How are you feeling, Lottie?” he asked. “May I?”
Gingerly, Mr. Wilfer touched the place where Grissom had kicked Lottie in her side. Lottie watched him quietly as he pressed his fingertips up and down her ribs. A strange look crossed Mr. Wilfer’s face.
“That doesn’t hurt?”
Lottie shook her head. “No. It feels fine now.”
“A kick like that should’ve fractured the bone,” said Mr. Wilfer. “I don’t understand it. Excepting your headache, you’re in perfect condition.”
Lottie blinked at Mr. Wilfer in surprise. “How do you know about my headache?”
Mr. Wilfer removed his hand from Lottie’s side, and she suddenly understood.
“That’s your keen, isn’t it?” she said. “You touch people, and you know what’s wrong with them.”
“Right with them, too,” Mr. Wilfer said. “Anything physical there is to know, good or bad, I know from a touch of my hands. I didn’t become the land’s finest healer by sheer force of will. A good healer must have an equally good keen.”
“Mr. Wilfer?” Lottie whispered. “Why didn’t you tell me that first night about being a Fiske? Or that I was the final ingredient to the Otherwise Incurable? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Mr. Wilfer raised a brow. “For the same reason I instructed Adelaide and Oliver that, should I be taken captive and should they run into trouble—two things I feared were very likely—they could never give you up. I told them that, if they had to bargain for their lives, they must use the Otherwise Incurable.”
Lottie frowned at Mr. Wilfer, then at Oliver, whose eyes were a light, timid violet. “You mean, you told them to give up the medicine?”
“When Adelaide and Fife and I first talked to Mr. Ingle at the inn,” said Oliver, “he told us we’d have to make a bargain with the king. It was either you or the medicine, and we weren’t about to turn you in. We weren’t trying to betray you, Lottie. We were just trying to keep you safe.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” said Fife, “but should we be concerned that this tree of ours is noisier than usual?”
Lottie stopped to listen. Fife was right: there was a terrible screeching noise coming from above their heads, and it was getting louder and louder and louder until the very floor began to shake from the sound of it.
Then the screeching stopped. The tree splintered open, and Lottie, who was leaning against the wall there, fell out, backside first, into a damp clump of grass. She was outside, it was nighttime, and it was raining. Electric streetlights buzzed over her head, and she could hear a television blaring from a nearby house. She was in her world, in New Kemble, and she was sitting in the back garden of the Barmy Badger.
“That doesn’t make sense, though,” said Lottie. “There isn’t an apple tree in Eliot’s backyard.”
The others filed out of the tree, much more elegantly than Lottie had done, and the tree whorled shut behind them. Rather than remain upright, the tree trunk shrunk, growing smaller and smaller still, falling closer toward the earth until it disappeared into a patch of shrubbery.
“Look!” cried Adelaide. She pushed back the shrubbery and pointed. “It’s just a seedling.”
“That would explain those fantastic noises on the way up, then,” said Fife. “Those were small roots to shoot through.”
Lottie and the others crowded around Adelaide. Just as she had said, the smallest sapling of an apple tree had emerged from the Barmy Badger’s unkempt garden.
“It’s from the day that Eliot and I ate apples on the rooftop,” Lottie said in wonder. “I warned him that he might accidentally plant a tree!”
Lottie glanced up at Eliot’s window now, half expecting the light to be on, or even Eliot to be looking out of ye ol’ porthole. But the window was dark. A rush of fear seared through Lottie, then grief. She had no cure. She might even be too late to watch Eliot die.
She stumbled up the back steps of the Barmy Badger and rapped hard on the door. Rain was soaking everyone’s clothes. Fife’s normally static-shot hair was wetted to his face, and Adelaide’s teeth were chattering.
The back door swung open, and Mr. Walsch poked his white-tufted face out. When he saw Lottie, his mouth went round.
“My dear child,” he croaked. “We’ve been so worried!”
“Mr. Walsch!” cried Lottie. “Is Eliot all right?”
The old man shook his head. “He’s in a very bad way. Very bad. Took a turn for the worse last night. This whole business of you being gone came as quite a shock. We had no idea where . . .”
“But I’m back!” Lottie said, hugging Mr. Walsch. “I’m back now, and I’ve got to see him.”
Mr. Walsch seemed distracted. He was peering over Lottie’s head at the strangers standing in his doorway.
“Oh,” said Lottie. “These are my friends, Mr. Walsch. May they come in?”
Mr. Walsch nodded feebly. Oliver, Fife, Adelaide, and Mr. Wilfer all huddled inside, looking every bit as dazed as Mr. Walsch had been to discover a crowd on his back doorstep after shop hours.
“Is he awake?” Lottie asked, but she ran up the stairs without stopping for an answer.
Lottie flung herself into Eliot’s room. He was lying in bed, eyes shut and covers rumpled. His glasses were set aside on the nightstand, and his shaggy hair was damp about the forehead. Notepads, pencils, tissues, and scrap pieces of paper littered Eliot’s narrow bed, and the faint smell of paint still hung in the room.
Lottie had imagined this scene more than once since she had run through the burning gardens of Iris Gate, stumbled through Wandlebury Wood, dropped into a wisp yew, sat on a chair made of Northerly vines, and faced down the Southerly King. Still, now that the moment had come, it was far sweeter and far more painful than Lottie had thought it would be. She took Eliot’s sweat-clammed hand in hers.
“Eliot,” she whispered. “I’ve come back.”
A floorboard creaked behind Lottie. Mr. Wilfer stood at her side.
“I’ll fix tea, shall I?” Mr. Walsch offered from the doorway. He cast one befuddled glance at a sleeping Eliot, then Mr. Wilfer, then Lottie, and then shut the door on the three of them.
“I’ve ruined everything,” Lottie whispered. “It doesn’t matter if the Otherwise Incurable had one ingredient missing or a hundred. All of it’s gone for good.” She glanced up, foggy-eyed. “I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell me that I was the ingredient all along. I could’ve given you some of my skin the moment we met. I could’ve brought the medicine back to Eliot that night, and he’d be cured.”
“No,” Mr. Wilfer said softly. “He wouldn’t be.”
Lottie sniffed. “What?”
Mr. Wilfer let out a long, weary sigh. “There’s no such thing as a cure for the incurable, Lottie,” he said. “The Otherwise Incurable was a fake. I was sorry to deceive you, but all my art could not cure the king. The Otherwise Incurable was simply a way to delay my execution.”
“But—” Lottie stared at Mr. Wilfer in disbelief.
“I knew he would kill me when he found out I had failed. I also knew that he would stop at nothing to find and kill you. The House of Fiske may not have ruled our world for ages, but your name still made you a dangerous threat to his throne. That is why I made up the last ingredient in my notebook. That is why I handed it over to Grissom when he arrested me. I let the king believe that the final ingredient for his cure was something that only you could give him, and only while you were alive. That way, if he somehow got ahold of you and not the Otherwise
Incurable, he would have you locked up—not fifthed.”
“You lied to the others, too,” Lottie said. “You told them that the Otherwise Incurable was real.”
“My only intent,” said Mr. Wilfer, “was to keep you safe.”
Lottie felt lightheaded. She gripped the side of Eliot’s bed to keep her thoughts intact. All this time, she had worked and traveled and fought for something that had never even existed.
“Why didn’t you tell me that to begin with?” Lottie was still whispering for the sole reason of not waking Eliot, but anger clattered fiercely in her chest. “Why did you drag me away from Eliot when he needed me most and send me running all over the Isle?”
“There were, if you remember, extenuating circumstances,” said Mr. Wilfer. “Small matters involving your personal safety and attempted kidnapping and a medicine that the Southerly King wanted very badly. Would it have done you or Eliot any good if I’d allowed Grissom to steal you away?”
The anger clattered more loudly within Lottie. She knew that the answer to Mr. Wilfer’s question was no, but she did not dare give him the satisfaction of saying it out loud.
“I took a risk,” said Mr. Wilfer. “Perhaps it was poor timing, perhaps poor judgment on my part, but I did what I thought best at the time. I wish I were a better healer than I am, Lottie. I wish I could save your friend’s life. You have been so brave in the attempt to do so. I know that goodbyes are not easy, but—”
“Stop,” Lottie said, choking on a sob. “Stop it. I don’t want to say goodbye to Eliot. I can’t.”
Lottie shrugged Mr. Wilfer’s hand off her shoulder. How dare he? Fury was making her eyes tear and her heart pound in her chest. Her lungs were constricting, her throat burning as though a bottle of vinegar had been emptied into it. It was a bad spell for certain.
No, goodbyes were not easy. Saying goodbye to Eliot would be the hardest thing imaginable. Lottie closed her eyes, tears rolling down her cheeks, and remembered Oliver dancing the Sempiternal.
Not supposed to be easy . . .
Lottie hunched against the pain. Sometimes it seemed that this pain was the only constant in her life. The bad spell after Grissom’s kick, the bad spell when the Barghest attacked, the bad spell in the pub, after—the familiar pain welled within her, hot and piercing. It was sharp, and sharper still. It was . . . keen.
Lottie straightened suddenly.
She grabbed Eliot’s hand in hers and shut her eyes. For once, just once, she let the bad spell have its way, constricting her chest in a twisted knot past bearing.
And then the pain was there but not there. It was a deep river inside her, but she was balanced above it, as though on a weightless web. The tightening sensation shifted out of her chest and burned its way down Lottie’s arms, cooling as it sank down into her fingertips, and vanished altogether into Eliot’s soft palm.
The bad spell had passed. Eliot stirred awake.
“. . . Lottie?”
“Eliot!” Lottie threw her arms around his neck. “Eliot, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Eliot blinked blearily at Lottie. His chapped lips broke into a smile.
“What,” he coughed, “are you talking about? I figured we’d already made up by the time you slammed the front door.”
Lottie grinned back as tears trickled down her cheeks and over her lips.
“I had a dream about you,” said Eliot. “Two, in fact.”
“I did, too.”
“Hey.” Eliot reached out to stop one of Lottie’s tears with his thumb. “What’s this about? I’m feeling a lot better, you know.”
This time, Lottie knew with a surging hope that Eliot wasn’t lying. He was even looking better. She ventured a glance up at Mr. Wilfer.
“What—what just happened?”
“I can hardly say how,” whispered Mr. Wilfer, “but something very wonderful.”
Gently, Mr. Wilfer touched Eliot at the elbow. Then, as though shocked by electricity, he pulled back his hand. His face was full of awe.
“Hello there,” Eliot said brightly, nodding to Mr. Wilfer and reaching for his glasses. Then, turning to Lottie, he whispered, “Who is this?”
Lottie looked at Mr. Wilfer and then back at Eliot. Where did she begin?
“This, Eliot,” said Lottie, “is the letter-writer.”
Epilogue
A GREEN APPLE TREE no longer grew in the heart of Thirsby Square. The neighbors decided that the tree must’ve been struck by lightning during that fearsome thunderstorm at the end of September—the very night, if they remembered correctly, on which Lottie Fiske had disappeared.
No one, not even Pen Bloomfield and the gossips at Kemble School, knew why or where Lottie Fiske had gone, but Mrs. Yates found a letter in her mailbox a week after Lottie’s disappearance. The letter came in an envelope with no return address, and its message was simple:
This is better. —L
Quotations in order of appearance
P. 64 “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, / And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;” (John Donne, “The Good-Morrow”)
P. 66 “Myself unseen, I see in white defined, / Far off the homes of men,” (Robert Frost, “The Vantage Point”)
P. 125 “From what I’ve tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire.” (Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”)
P. 131 “Others, I am not the first, / Have willed more mischief than they durst: If in the breathless night I too / Shiver now, ’tis nothing new.” (A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad)
P. 184 “As I ponder’d in silence, / Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long, / A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect,” (Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass)
P. 225 “One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man, / Of moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages can.” (William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”)
P. 227 “Can I see another’s woe, / And not be in sorrow too? / Can I see another’s grief, / And not seek for kind relief?” (William Blake, “On Another’s Sorrow”)
P. 263 “There is a magic made by melody: / A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool / Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep” (Elizabeth Bishop, “I Am in Need of Music”)
P. 294 “We are called—we must go. / Laid low, very low, / In the dark we must lie.” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “All Things Will Die”)
P. 315 “We are not prepared / For silence so sudden and so soon; / The day is too hot, too bright, too still, / Too ever, the dead remains too nothing.” (W. H. Auden, “Nones”)
P. 328 “But bid the strain be wild and deep, / Nor let thy notes of joy be first:” (George Gordon, Lord Byron, “My Soul Is Dark”)
P. 336 “I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:” (William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 30”)
P. 399 “I have done one braver thing / Than all the Worthies did,” (John Donne, “The Undertaking”)
K. E. ORMSBEE lives in Lexington, Kentucky. She lived in lots of equally fascinating cities before then, from Austin to Birmingham to London to Seville. She grew up with a secret garden in her backyard and a spaceship in her basement. This is her first book.
The Water and the Wild Page 26