by Lucia Ashta
Not just because of us, but for everyone else, for all their future victims. If we allowed them to continue on as they were, they’d keep hurting others. It was a guarantee. There was no hope of them having a change of heart. People who did the kinds of things they did had learned to ignore their consciences, if they attempted to voice any complaint at all.
Grand-mère persisted. “But you could die, and then what would happen to your handsome fiancé? Or your little sister, who needs guidance and protection? What of them?”
“I’m doing this for them. Because if Count Washur wants to collect my soul, my power, then what are the odds that he’d stop with me? If magic activated within me without anyone ever teaching me anything, then Gertrude might have it too.”
“I believe it’s likely,” Mordecai said.
“Then the Count will want to take her too. And after her, he’ll want someone else. And Mirvela won’t stop stealing people’s life force either, because if she does, she dies. If Mirvela and the Count change their ways, they die, and they aren’t the kind of people who’d allow that. Haven’t they already proven that?”
“There’s little point arguing it, I think. What you say is true and we all know it. Ariadne, she’s old enough to make the choice.” He reached for her hand. “I wish there were another way, really, I do. But it’s just too important that we rid the world of this darkness, and I see no other way to do it.”
He slid a hand along her arm. “And I think if you’re honest with yourself, you don’t either. We need Clara. We need all three of us. If all of us here weren’t too terrified to lose anyone else we care for, we’d admit to the truth of it: we need every one of us. We need every single advantage we can possibly get. We need the magic performed through spells that has centuries of experience and knowledge behind it, and we also need Clara’s fresh intuitive magic. We need all of it.”
He looked toward the never-ending openness of the sea. “And most of all, we need a miracle.”
That we did. Good thing I was in the believing mood.
Chapter 8
Even though I knew in which direction we should travel, our progress was slow. Despite the fact that I urged the five-petal knot to continue glowing to provide a light source, it dimmed once I retreated from my immediate connection with it. The light wasn’t enough to dispel the inky darkness around us.
Mordecai cast spells that pushed small flames out from the palms of his hands. I wondered how he managed to maintain them when the water that surrounded us must be trying to extinguish them. Water and fire preserved a careful balance. They coexisted, as all the elements did, but part of that coexistence was that water could overpower fire, and fire could burn off water.
I imagined it took a lot of energy to fight against the natural disposition of the elements, and when I looked at Mordecai, I decided I was right. His face was strained, his usual spark of enthusiasm for life and magic absent. He was straining to maintain the flames in our environment, and they did little to highlight the way.
The water was simply too much and we were too deep for any kind of light to penetrate from above.
“You’ll exhaust yourself,” Grand-mère said to him. “Those flames aren’t doing enough to light our way, anyway. Preserve your energy. We’ll need every bit of strength we can hold onto.”
“How will we see the way?” he asked, but he’d already begun to retract the flames.
“Darling, does that glow of your chest tire you?” Grand-mère asked me.
“No,” I said. “I’m not doing much to maintain it. It’s not me, it’s the five-petal knot within me.”
“Then we’ll continue with this small light as we can.”
“And what of our ability to breathe underwater?” I asked. “Will that end?” I still didn’t understand how I was doing it. It felt natural. I wasn’t doing anything conscious to prolong my ability.
“Our spells should hold, I hope. Although, Mordecai, might you reinforce mine, now that Clara brought it up? I’m not particularly skilled at this kind of magic.”
“Of course I will.” Mordecai stopped swimming and we drew into a circle around him. “How are you doing it, Clara?” he asked. “Has Marcelo taught you how to do it?”
He interpreted the look on my face correctly. “Ah. So you did this on your own too.”
“I suppose so.”
“And do you know how you’re doing it?”
“Not really,” I said and averted my eyes from Grand-mère’s wide-eyed look of shock.
“What?” Grand-mère said. “How can you do magic without knowing how? That’s not possible.”
“My dear Ariadne,” Mordecai said, “I think you’ll soon discover that your granddaughter has a very different sense from the rest of us of what’s possible and what isn’t.”
For once, Grand-mère was speechless, which suited Mordecai just fine. He set to mumbling and circling his arms around her silhouette, his arms surprisingly firm for a man who’d lived more than three centuries. Mordecai had called me extraordinary more than once, but now he was who embodied the extraordinary in his own way. He’d mastered thaumaturgy and extended his life, without hurting others. I still needed to find out how he did it.
However little I’d learned about magic and spells, I knew better than to interrupt a wizard while he was casting. When he finished, Grand-mère was in the middle of a faint, nearly transparent bubble. But he wasn’t, and I wondered if he’d done more than strengthen her ability to breathe underwater. There was something to the way he looked at her that surpassed camaraderie.
Anything else I might have considered vanished beneath the weight of the sense of sudden urgency that traveled through the water like a shock wave.
We had to hurry. I just didn’t understand why.
Chapter 9
“Slow down, Clara!” Grand-mère said. “I can’t see a thing.”
I couldn’t see either, but we were at the bottom of the ocean, where there weren’t all that many things to swim into that wouldn’t try to move out of your way first. “We can’t slow down. We need to go faster.”
“But why, cherie? I know we’re in a hurry to face Mirvela and Washur before they wake in the castle to discover us gone, but we aren’t in this big of a hurry.”
Mordecai swam closer to me. “She’s right. We’ll be exhausted from all this swimming by the time we get there. We can’t take anyone on like this. We’ll need to rest.”
“Then we can rest once we get there,” I said, “once we make sure no one’s being hurt.”
“Let’s rest now so we don’t risk being spotted when we’re tired.” Even underwater, Mordecai sounded out of breath.
“You can stay behind and catch up later if you want, but I have to keep going.”
“Why?” Grand-mère’s voice sounded far behind.
“I don’t know why, I just feel like we have to get there. Right now.”
Even without a clear reason for needing to swim at the speed of desperation, Mordecai and Grand-mère trusted my sense enough to continue to follow quietly—or maybe it wasn’t acquiescence and that they needed all their focus and energy to keep up with me. Either way, we swam as if we were running from the two dark sorcerers who wanted to kill us and not toward them.
Halfway to the trench I wondered if my companions had begun to experience that odd sensation of urgency that I had because their labored breathing settled. Magicians, even those that used spells to access the elements, understood the importance of intuition. Listening to those subtle nudgings could separate the good magicians from the great.
But when I looked over my shoulder at Mordecai, he grinned. “I’m using magic, child. I’m riding a water current that’s pulling me along. I can’t keep up with you. I think you must still have some of the conditioning you must’ve had in place when you were in the merworld.”
I didn’t miss being a prisoner of Mirvela’s merworld, but I did miss my mertail. It did make swimming superbly efficient. I might not be struggling
as much as the older magicians, but maintaining this speed for long was intense. My arm and leg muscles burned from use, my lungs strained even though I wasn’t sure what I was breathing anymore—air or water, and my focus was intent on making just one more stroke, and then the one after it, and the next.
If Mordecai could ride a water current, then I wanted to as well. “Can I get a ride?”
“Of course, child.” Even in the dim glow of my chest, I could make out the twinkle in his eyes. To have practiced magic for more than three centuries and still be this excited by it was a wonderful gift—especially when we progressed toward our possible death.
I swung my arms backward and he caught my forearm when I moved it forward for another stroke. He held on, and soon I discovered that I was moving forward just as quickly but without any effort. Now this is the way to use magic. I hadn’t yet mastered the way to use my magic in predictable and practical ways. It seemed that my magic was big and wild.
“What about Grand-mère?” I asked.
“Ariadne’s fine.” He didn’t even turn to look for her.
“But…” I swiveled in the current trying to look for her, but the water pulled my hair across my face each time.
“Not to worry, my darling.” Grand-mère’s voice came from somewhere up ahead of us, up off to the right. “I’m doing well now.”
I could hear the smile in her voice, and I whipped my head this way and that trying to locate it, but I couldn’t. The glow of my chest didn’t extend that far ahead.
Without the faint light the five-petal knot emitted, how was she advancing? It didn’t make sense. Hadn’t she been the one who was hesitant to travel without light to guide the way?
But soon the water current picked up and forced me to concentrate on staying next to Mordecai so I wouldn’t slip from the stream. The water rushed across my body in a dizzying caress. The speed at which we moved was overwhelming, but once I fully released all sense of control, I began to enjoy it—really enjoy it. Could I do this by connecting to the water element? I imagined I could, I imagined I could do thousands of things that hadn’t even occurred to me yet.
I smiled, a big, broad one that might’ve brightened the water around us if it hadn’t been so saturated by darkness. I enjoyed the ease with which we traveled and the smoothness of the water across my bare body until Grand-mère called out, “Where now?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “it depends on where we are.”
“I’m at the edge of what might be a trench. I can’t tell how far down it goes, just that it’s deep.”
The water current Mordecai and I rode didn’t slow and we passed Grand-mère. I whipped my head around while the five-petal knot at my chest illuminated her. She rode something, but we sped past her and I couldn’t make out what in the faint glow. Over my shoulder, I said, “Over the trench, then over a small mountain. The mervillage is on the other side.”
I expected her response to arrive from far behind us, but her voice came from nearly next to us, barely warbled by the water it traveled through. “All right. I’ll wait for you before I reach the summit of the mountain. We should stop there to figure out our next step before we reveal our presence.”
She’d wait for us? What was she riding? Was it another water current that traveled faster than Mordecai’s? If it was, I had no idea how she was staying in it. I was working to push away nausea from the speed we were traveling at and I’d loosened my iron grip on Mordecai, counting on him to hold me alongside him. I didn’t understand how he was riding the water current without being tumbled from it either, but then, I understood so little of his magic. Perhaps there was a way to tangibly connect to the water element that I wasn’t aware of.
When I connected to any of the elements, I felt like I was mostly just along for a wild and crazy ride, where I was a guest to their great power as they unleashed it. I was there by luck, not on purpose.
Impossibly, we seemed to speed up more, and then I barely managed one thought. Well at least we don’t have to worry about any of the others catching up to us before we can face Mirvela and Washur. My thoughts couldn’t even catch up with how fast we were going.
Until a large dark mass loomed immediately ahead of us. I hardly had time to squeak out one alarmed “Mordecai” before he yanked me out of the current by the arm.
He released my arm and I slowly sank to the ocean bottom, from which I hoped never to have to move. The world swirled in darkness, made worse by the cloud of sand I’d unleashed as I plummeted down. I closed my eyes then opened them and realized it didn’t make much of a difference. There was water and darkness—lots of it. The glow of the five-petal knot had receded within my chest again, where I knew it still glowed, just not in a way that was outwardly visible.
I pulled my eyes shut and kept them that way. Instead of looking, I listened. Deep beneath land level the silence was deafening; it pressed in on you as if it were alive.
“I thought we were in some big hurry. Why are you resting now?” Grand-mère said.
“I’m waiting for my world to stop spinning,” I said, noticing my words sounded a bit slurred.
“And how long will that take?”
“I don’t know. With how I feel now, it might never stop spinning.”
“Then maybe you’ll just have to get up anyway,” Mordecai said. “The mervillage you mentioned must be just beyond this peak. We should at least study it right away. If you sensed this much urgency, we shouldn’t wait. Remember, they might have Anna or Carlton down there with them. The sooner we get to them, the better.”
“All right,” I groaned. Of course, they were right. I’d been the one urging us to arrive as quickly as possible. I moved my elbows beneath me and pushed up, the first of several gradual steps I intended on getting me to a seated position. “How will we even see what’s going on in the mervillage without getting so close to it that they’ll discover us? I imagine that the merpeople can see better under the water than we can.”
Which was easy to do, since I couldn’t see at all. I moved one hand in front of my face for a second and discovered that I couldn’t see it there at all. “It’s useless. We’ll just have to head straight in there. The glowing at my chest is out, and either way, all it would’ve done is make us easier to spot. It wouldn’t have illuminated far enough ahead to make a difference.”
“We should at least have a peek,” Grand-mère said. “If we see nothing from where we are, then we can move in. I imagine Randolph will be able to get me close enough to the mervillage for me to get a bit of a look if we have to do it that way.”
I pushed all the way to sitting. “Randolph? Who’s Randolph?”
“Why, this handsome fellow I’m riding of course.”
“You’re riding a… fellow?”
“Well, he isn’t really a fellow, but he’s handsome. Can you not see him from there?”
“I can’t see anything.”
“Then come closer, ma cherie. Come meet him.”
I managed to half swim, half wobble over in the direction of Grand-mère’s voice. “Where are you?”
“Here, darling.”
“Wait. Is that glow you?”
“No, it’s Randolph. Follow the light and come see.”
The light was faint, but when it was the only light at all in the total darkness, it was easy to follow.
When I got close enough to make out Randolph’s outlines, and Grand-mère astride him, I froze. I didn’t move an inch.
But the water nudged me toward them, anyway. At least I had the good sense not to scream.
Chapter 10
“Isn’t he wonderful?” Grand-mère asked once I was close enough to see.
I didn’t know what to say. I kept thinking about how Grand-mère had earlier called my fiancé handsome and how she’d used that same word to describe Randolph.
“Look at how wonderfully he’s designed to live in deep water. His large, beautiful eyes, and do you see how he even has his own light that hangs down in fr
ont of his face to guide the way. It’s wonderful. You’re so wonderful, Randolph.” Grand-mère leaned over him and ran her hand along the long lengths of his scaled sides.
I looked to Mordecai for some common sense, but he was absorbed in his own appreciation—and it wasn’t of Randolph, it was of the woman who perched on him, oblivious to her admirer and my wide-eyed, open-mouthed stare. I didn’t mind taking in some water through my mouth; I couldn’t get my mouth to shut.
“He’s…” I was trying to be diplomatic. What could I say that didn’t reveal what I was really thinking, which was along the lines of my grandmother is riding a gigantic, hideous monster. I settled on, “He’s fascinating,” and indeed he was. I’d never seen anything like him, not even within the pages of Norland Manor’s library or the brothers’ seemingly endless tomes on just about everything.
But just about everything didn’t cover this beast among fish—probably all sea life.
Randolph was as wide as Grand-mère was tall, and twice as long. He looked like a very large fish, if a fish could scare a witch nearly speechless. His eyes were indeed large, but they were so large that they consumed most of his face, bulging alarmingly, as if they could pop out at any moment. His mouth gaped open and closed, revealing multiple rows of needle-sharp teeth, all illuminated by what looked like a spare gigantic eyeball hanging from a tentacle-looking arm. The light shone far enough ahead to illuminate anything that might cross Randolph’s immediate path, and enough to send me swimming away in terror—if Grand-mère hadn’t been riding him with as much ease as she rode Humbert.
She’d said her magical abilities were weak except where magical and mythical creatures were concerned, indeed all animals. She’d proven this several times over. Whatever her limitations, she was a remarkable witch, and from the look on Mordecai’s face, he agreed.
While I watched her coo and pet Randolph, a weight I hadn’t realized I was carrying released, allowing me to feel lighter even beneath the weight of all this water. Grand-mère had said that her twin, Gustave, was even better at certain forms of animal magic than she was. If she was this good with beasts like Randolph and Humbert, then Gustave would almost certainly be able to transform Mina the cat back into my little sister.