The Water Thief

by Jane Kindred

  “That’s all right, Morris, you have it yourself.” His effort to appear perfectly fit was hampered somewhat by his need to hold the rail to keep himself steady. But Morris was nothing if not professional, and if the master said he was fine to walk about, then he was fine.

  Macsen made his way to the kitchen, nodding to the staff, who gaped at him as he went, and hobbled down the steps to the cellar and on to the tunnels beneath. He wasn’t up to hiking all the way out to his usual entrance. And when he was done with what he was about to do, there would be little point in trying to keep his access to these places secret.

  Emrys had tried to instill in him the necessary ruthlessness required of a great ruler, admonishing him never to be hesitant in his actions, never to do anything halfway. Macsen was finally going to take the old man’s advice. All or nothing. It might be the last thing he ever did, but if it was, he intended to go out with a bang.

  He made his way to the crypt, half-afraid he’d find it as he’d found the subcellar, emptied out and its contents hidden away with no sign of where they’d gone. But there they were as before: a thousand glittering vessels that held the power to move Cantre’r Gwaelod’s heaven and earth. He might not be able to stop Emrys finding Sebastian, but he could stop him realizing his dream of profiting from Sebastian’s years of unwitting enslavement to him.

  Macsen took a deep breath, as if channeling Sebastian’s power. All or nothing.

  He’d taken a poker from beside the woodstove in the kitchen as he’d passed through, and he raised it now in his arms. He had to close his eyes before he could do it. No hesitation. Against the screaming protest of every muscle and bone in his body, he swung with all his might and swept through the first tier of vials, sending them shattering across the crypt. As he opened his eyes, he saw the remnants of the vials’ contents scattering in the light like iridescent dust motes, a blue mist glittering in the air. Everything in him rebelled at destroying such precious objects, but he couldn’t stop now.

  He brought the poker down across another tier, and another, sending the bottles in every direction. A slight ozone scent began to permeate the room as he continued, Sebastian’s magic drifting away into the atmosphere. The air felt electrified. Macsen steeled himself to ignore it, to ignore the longing for Sebastian he had no right to feel. This was his formal parting with Sebastian, irrevocable and final. And right. He could not afford to be sentimental, or to delude himself into believing that saving just a few vials—just a memento—wouldn’t hurt.

  Macsen didn’t stop until he’d shattered every one.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Hunched over with my hands buried in the muddy sand, I retched bitter salt water onto the deserted beach. I felt like a drowned rat tossed and battered in the wake of a massive ship on which I’d stowed away. If what August said was true and my magic was so powerful here, I clearly didn’t know how to use it. I’d called up the wave, but it had bested me. It hardly seemed powerful to be at the mercy of a force such as the ocean itself. Once called, it was no more in my control than it would have been in anyone else’s. All I seemed to be able to do with my “power” over the element was to make things harder for myself.

  August had disappeared in the surf, one moment blinking at me through the water as we drifted apart, eyes full of regret, and the next, swept away in the surging undertow. I’d swallowed seawater, panicking, reaching out for her, and then tumbling with the wave I’d conjured, and tossed up onto the beach like kelp. As I lifted my head and blinked against the brine stinging my eyes, one thing was clear. August was not on this beach with me.

  She couldn’t have drowned. We Swifts could not drown. I scanned the waves and the shore, but there was no sign of her. Like a parting shot, the next surge of the tide deposited her pistol beside me in the foamy detritus it left behind.

  Exhausted, I lay my head on the sand and closed my eyes just for a second, and when I opened them again, the shadows of the hills above had grown long on the beach, and a cool fog was sighing over me. What had stirred me was the sound of an engine.

  I raised my head, listening as the engine ceased and a pair of automobile doors closed on the road above. Could August have driven away while I dozed and returned with someone? Perhaps her Dafydd. I lay back again. If she’d brought Dafydd to kill me because she couldn’t do it herself, what was the point of fighting it? If I hadn’t convinced her to let me live, it meant I was alone in the world—this world as well as my own. I had no one, not August, and certainly not Macsen. Was I supposed to go on the run from my own sister and try to survive by myself in a realm where I could barely be understood, let alone understand anyone else?

  I closed my eyes, listening to the plodding footsteps in the reedy sand as August and Dafydd marched over the dunes above, waiting for them to arrive on the beach and finish me. Calling the waves had exhausted me to my core, as if using the magic not only conjured up tremendous energy but drained bits of my soul—if there were such a thing—as if my own life force were transferred to the waves. Let them come. Let them do it. It had seemed very important a few minutes before—or hours, whatever time had passed while I’d been lying here—that I live. Now I was too tired to care.

  The footsteps stopped as they came out of the dune grass onto the beach at last, and someone spoke.

  “What did I tell you?” The voice wasn’t one I’d expected to hear, and it was not a welcome one.

  I scrambled to my feet and stared up at Cousin Emrys as he appeared at the top of the dune. Emrys, here in Wales, and he’d brought “friends”. His friends were dressed in uniforms that looked too much like the coats of the orderlies at All Fates to be a coincidence.

  “Like a homing beacon, this stuff. Always seeks its own source.” Emrys raised his arm, holding up a vial that glowed a pale, glittering aquamarine in the golden light of the setting sun. Emrys leveled his gaze at me with the sort of dark smile that always managed to be more menacing than another man’s angry scowl. “There’s our runaway now.” He nodded to the uniformed men beside him. “Restrain him by any means necessary.”

  His words jolted me into action, and I turned to flee, summoning the power of the ocean with my breath, but before I got halfway to the answering tide, something stinging and hot caught me in the thigh. I stumbled and fell on my knees, fumbling for the thing sticking out of my leg. With a sharp cry, I pulled it out and held it up: a dart of some kind.

  A sudden wave of nausea overcame me, sweat beading on my forehead, and my face flushing with heat. I tried to focus on the dart, struggling against the thickness in my head and the churning in my gut to comprehend what it meant.

  I was barely able to respond when one of the white-coated men grabbed my arms from behind. “Au’st.” My voice came out in a slur.

  “He’s worse off than I feared. Thought we’d cured him of that delusion.”

  I couldn’t see the face of the man who’d spoken, because my eyes wouldn’t stay open. I tried to object. It was no delusion. August had been here. August was the Priestess of Mererid.

  Someone lifted me, and the world swam. And then I relaxed into the gentle motion of the carriage that was taking me home.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Macsen

  He knew the moment Emrys had returned. A furious bellow came from the depths of the castle as Emrys charged up the stairs from the cellar. In the drawing room, Macsen stood and straightened his clothes, ready to face Lord Pryce as the earl of Cantre’r Gwaelod. He wasn’t quite prepared to find him wielding the kitchen poker.

  Emrys charged him with blood in his eyes, swinging the poker too fast for Macsen to react. The heavy iron of the handle cracked against the bones of Macsen’s calf, and he went down in a white-hot blaze of agony.

  “You miserable whoreson bastard cur!” Each word of the sentence was punctuated with a strike of the poker until Morris and the cook managed to wrest it from Emrys’s hand. Macsen tried to move hi
s leg and let out a scream before the room mercifully faded to a blur of white.

  * * * * *

  Time passed in a haze of pain and laudanum. Morris drifted in and out of Macsen’s awareness—helping Macsen sit up to take his medicine, feeding him, bringing his bedpan. He hadn’t needed the assistance of a valet for much other than fetching the right cufflinks since the early days of his life as Sebastian Swift, when Emrys had put him through rigorous training in deportment and etiquette. Now he was dependent on the man for everything. Perhaps the best thing Morris did for him during these innumerable hours was to keep Emrys out.

  Macsen had been asked repeatedly if he wished to bring charges against his “cousin” for the attack, but there seemed little point. If Emrys were banished from Llys Mawr, the first thing he would do was expose Macsen as a fraud. It was what he’d always held over him: play the game, or lose everything. A week ago—or was it a month?—Macsen might not have cared. Those brief days in Aberystwyth seemed like a dream. Sebastian had been right. Macsen should never have left. The moment he had, every bit of grooming that had made him what he’d been when Sebastian first reappeared at Llys Mawr had returned to him. In Aberystwyth, he’d been able to pretend he could be a different sort of man.

  “Lord Swift?”

  Macsen opened his eyes. “The laudanum?” he asked hopefully, automatically.

  But Morris gave him a rather pitying smile as he shook his head before announcing, “Lord Pryce is asking for an audience. I’ve told him he’s not welcome in this wing, but…” The valet’s cheeks reddened. “He bade me to remind you ‘how very different his lordship suddenly looked at the age of thirteen, and would the master prefer that he and all his staff were flogged and hanged in the village square for perpetrating a grand fraud?’” Morris coughed. “That’s a direct quote, sir.”

  Macsen sighed and nodded as the valet helped to prop him up against a bulwark of pillows. “Send him in. I’ll see him privately.”

  “Very good, sir.” Morris’s normally restrained expression couldn’t hide the fact that this was in fact not very good, but he did as he was told.

  “And Morris?” Macsen smiled wanly as the older man turned back at the door to his bedchamber. “Perhaps it would be best if you stayed within hearing distance.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Emrys declined the seat he was offered as he was ushered in, choosing instead to stand at the foot of Macsen’s bed. The pristine riding jacket and boots said he was on his way out.

  The corner of his mouth twitched. “You look like hell, boy.”

  “Do I?” Macsen drank the tincture Morris had left for him after all. “I can’t think why.”

  “You and I, Sebastian, have never seen eye to eye.” He spoke the name deliberately. “Which is why I’ve decided it would be best if I focused on my business venture elsewhere without your investment.”

  “Your business venture?” Macsen blinked at him.

  “Despite your childish tantrum, I have other stores of my elixir, which I intend to put to a more productive use than restoring Cantre’r Gwaelod to its former glory. I’ve decided such an extravagance would be a waste. I already have buyers for my product, as well as a way to transport the product. I came by to inform you that I’ll be away indefinitely.” He approximated a polite smile, though it clearly seemed an effort to be civil. “I trust you can manage Llys Mawr and Cantre’r Gwaelod on your own.”

  Macsen sat up sharply and nearly passed out from the stabbing pain that radiated upward from the splinted leg. “Cantre’r Gwaelod?” he managed through gritted teeth after he’d steadied himself. “What do you mean? Where are you going?”

  “Where do you think, boy?” Emrys couldn’t keep the sneer out of his voice. “I’m poised to be the source of the only cure for cancer, dementia and any number of palsies, to which the citizens of the upper realms fall prey in alarming numbers.”

  “You mean you’ll sell our water to the highest bidder.” Macsen’s tone was equally derisive.

  “I mean I will sell it to any individual in the upper realms who can afford my price. Free enterprise, Lord Swift. It’s what modern civilization is built upon.” Emrys turned to go without further ado.

  “And what of Sebastian?” Macsen demanded, not caring if Morris heard him say the name in the outer room. “What’s to become of him?”

  Emrys turned back as he opened the door. “Oh, didn’t I mention? I meant to lead with it. My agents went to collect him, but he resisted violently. He’s dead.” He stepped through and closed the door behind him without looking back.

  Macsen sank into the pillows with an involuntary groan as if he’d been stabbed in the gut. His lungs hurt, and he couldn’t breathe. At his core, Sebastian had been everything he’d truly ever wanted or needed. Like a fool, he’d let Sebastian slip away—or slipped away from him—telling himself he wasn’t worthy of Sebastian’s trust and love. Both of which he’d actually proved to be true by his own actions. But that didn’t lessen the bruising ache deep inside him that was not the result of any beating or break he’d suffered—except that of his heart.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “We went over this yesterday,” said the man patiently. “There is no Macsen Pryce—or Macsen Finch—whatever name you’ve given him today. There is no sunken realm called Cantre’r Gwaelod. It’s a myth you read as a boy. Your sister August drowned when you were thirteen. She is not a magical fairy princess guarding a magical well.”

  “I didn’t say she was a fairy princess.” I stared at the wall. “I said it was a fairy well. She’s an ordinary human being, just as I am.”

  “Except that you both have power over water, is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Show me.” The doctor pushed a glass of water across the table toward me. “Make this water rise out of the glass. Is that how it works?”

  I stared at the glass. I felt nothing at all, no spark. I’d tried to call up the magic several times since I’d woken in my cell, but nothing ever happened. If I’d had the magic once, it had left me. I could no longer be sure of anything. This place resembled All Fates, but it was modern and sterile, like much of this world. If I was to believe my doctor, there was no All Fates. Only here, where I’d been since August’s death nearly a decade ago.

  Why I told him all these things I believed, I wasn’t sure. If he was an agent of Emrys’s, I’d given August away. But Emrys was never mentioned, and I never saw him. According to Dr. Perry, he was another aspect of my delusion, people I’d created in my imagined world to explain my sickness and pain at the drowning I’d witnessed. He didn’t try to convince me I’d killed August myself. It was the trauma of her death that had made me ill, and my memories of being locked up, accused of her murder, were the result of “survivor’s guilt”. The fact that I recognized the place around me as not being in Cantre’r Gwaelod, as not being All Fates, was a sign I was getting better at long last. Now I had only to come further out of my delusion and accept that August was gone, lost in an accident long ago, and I had been here in Cardiff ever since.

  I almost wanted to believe it. Everything I remembered sounded absurd—August visiting me as a ghost; breaking me out of All Fates so I could take her place and claim my inheritance in the guise of a woman; falling in with thieves; finding I’d been kept hidden for the purpose of harvesting a magical essence that I breathed in water and which gave me control over the element—it all sounded like nonsense. All of it…except Macsen.

  “What do you think he represented?”

  I blinked at Dr. Perry. “Who?” I’d forgotten we were still in session. Had I spoken aloud?

  “This cousin you imagine took over your life. Is he an alternate version of you? One who is… How did you describe him?” The doctor looked at his notes. “‘Hard and beautiful with an edge of cruelty to him.’ One who withstood abuse as a child to later become s
trong and powerful—the lord of his manor. Did someone hurt you when you were a boy?”

  “Me?” My brow wrinkled with annoyance. “I told you, my cousin Emrys—my father’s cousin—he’s Macsen’s father, and he treated him like dirt for being born on the wrong side of the blanket.”

  The doctor nodded thoughtfully and made a note. “That’s an interesting, if archaic phrase: ‘the wrong side of the blanket’. You’ve talked about your sexual awakening, fearing your desires were unnatural. That sounds a bit like the wrong side of a blanket, doesn’t it? And then you manufactured a relationship with this other version of yourself, one who was dominant—the masculine aspect to counter the outward physicality you believe to be too feminine. So much so that you put yourself in your sister’s place.”

  “No. Macsen is real. He hated me for being born to privilege. Because I was a bit of a spoiled brat as a youth. But his feelings changed.”

  “Hated you in your feminine aspect. You said he threw a rock at August when you were children. And so you put yourself in this feminine aspect as a kind of punishment, while at the same time living out your desire to be a ‘normal’ man, as you put it.”

  “No. That’s not it. That’s not right.”

  Dr. Perry closed his notebook and clicked away the tip of his pen. “I think that’s enough for today, Sebastian. Getting close to the truth seems to agitate you. We’ll increase your meds and see if we can’t tackle this a little more calmly at our next meeting.”

  “No, please. You have to listen to me.”

  The doctor had gone to the door and waved for the orderlies. I leapt from my chair and grabbed at his arm before he could leave me. I had to explain to him that Macsen was real. But the orderlies had arrived, bursting through the door and tackling me to the ground, one of them injecting me with sedatives. I hated the loss of control that always followed, the disappearing into blankness. Too much like the “water therapy” at All Fates and those sessions with Emrys where I’d imagined him drowning me in my bed.