The Water and the Wild (20 page)

“That must be—uncomfortable.”

Adelaide sighed loudly. “I'd like to walk alone now, if it's all the same to you.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Lottie plodded ahead on her own. Trouble swooped down to perch on her shoulder and gave a tired tweet. Lottie curled him up in her hand and tucked him safely back into her pocket. Then she hugged the periwinkle tweed coat closer and buried her nose in its oversized collar.

“I'm coming, Eliot,” she whispered into it. “I'm going to find Mr. Wilfer. We're going to finish the Otherwise Incurable. I promise.”

“Who are you talking to, Lottie?”

Lottie jolted her head out of the coat. Fife was hovering by her side, looking very much amused.

“Um! No one.”

“That was quite a show back there,” Fife said, pushing back a branch for her to pass under, “giving that Barghest orders. I've never seen anything like it.”

“You mean they don't normally act that way?”

“Barghest, take orders? Not a chance. The Barghest are the beastliest things on Albion Isle. They've been allies with the Northerly Court for time out of mind. You run into one of them, it's always bad news. They can catch and kill anyone who displeases the Northerly Court. But what happened back there, it looked like that Barghest wasn't even trying to hurt you.”

“Not trying to hurt me?” Lottie flapped her bandaged hands. “What does this look like?”

“A lot better than the usual, which is dead,” said Fife. “You're still alive. He didn't even use his venom on you.”

“Venom?”

“It's lethal,” Fife said. “Flips your intestines inside out and turns your blood thick, like puree. Just a drop in your veins is enough to do the trick, and in the end, all that's left of you are your nose hairs.”

Lottie squinted in disbelief. “It can't be
that
bad.”

“Yeah, it is,” said Fife, “so just count your blessings. By the way, how're your hands feeling? I can apply some more Piskie Juice next stop.”

“Should you?” Lottie frowned. “They feel fine.”

Fife frowned back. “They shouldn't. Bites like that can take weeks to heal. Not to freak you out or anything, but your hands will smart for a few more days at least.”

“Not to freak
you
out,” said Lottie, “but they're fine. Really. I'm not even trying to be tough.”

Adelaide made a squeaking noise from behind them. Lottie turned in time to see her hands flung up in a shushing gesture.

“I hear something,” she whispered. “Something's coming this way. Coming after us!”

No one said another word. They ran.

Lottie's newfound footing came in handy. She leapt over knotted vines and skirted past tangles of bramble, feet pounding as fast as her heart.

“They're getting closer,” Adelaide panted. “They're surrounding us!”

Suddenly, Fife whipped around in front of them. Lottie tripped into Adelaide as they all came skidding to a halt.

“Why are you stopping?” Adelaide shrieked. “Fife, why are you stopping?!”

Fife was not just stopped; he was smirking, as though their run through the wood had been nothing but a race that he had won.

“It's okay,” he said. “You can all calm down. We're here.”

Lottie looked around. They were standing in a grove dense with yew trees. That is, the trees looked like yews, but of the most peculiar sort. Their branches did not sprawl out veinlike, as Lottie would expect any normal tree to do. Instead, they curled inward upon themselves in splintery spirals. Their bark and their leaves were pure white.

“We're here,” Fife repeated, “in Wisp Territory. Honestly, Ada, don't you know a wisp when you hear one?”

Adelaide turned raspberry red. “Of course I don't. I've never been cavorting around with wisps!”

“I don't see anything,” said Lottie. The wood looked just as empty now as it had been before they had run.

“They don't reveal themselves unless provoked,” said Oliver, “or without a proper plea.”

“No fear there,” said Fife. “I've got us covered.”

Fife closed his eyes and held his arms out, palms upward. Then, just as he was opening his mouth, he seemed to remember something. His eyes fluttered back open.

“Lottie,” he said quietly, “I don't think it's a good idea for you to mention to anyone here that you're a Fiske.”

Lottie nodded. She hadn't been planning on it. Fife nodded back, then closed his eyes again and resumed his reverent posture.

“We lost, weary travelers,” Fife began in a flat voice like the one Lottie used to recite Latin verses at Kemble School, “implore the aid of the lights of the forest. In the name of the revered Lyre and Silvia Dulcet, patrons of this arbor, do we seek sanctuary. Hear us, oh will o' the wisps. Et cetera, et cetera, blah, blergh, blooey.”

Fife drew his arms back in and opened his eyes. The yew trees swayed slowly, almost purposefully. One white branch swayed toward Lottie's face. She shrank back, waving away a leaf that tickled her nose. Then, to Lottie's amazement, the branch spoke.

“Lost?” asked a voice as low as a cello's.

Lottie stumbled backward, eyes darting this way and that to find from what part of the branch the voice had
come. Then she saw that the branch of the yew had not merely been swaying in the wind; it had been
uncurling itself
.

More silvery branches craned and stretched themselves out, all with a tremendous creaking sound. Then lights, small at first as Lottie's fist, but soon pulsing to the size of crystal balls, appeared in the ghostly trees. They looked like lightbulbs, strung out above the wood like fresh dew would string along a spiderweb. Then the lights grew nearer, and Lottie saw that they really shone from large wooden, swinging globes and that the globes swung in the hands of people—people who had come floating out of the trees.

Though Lottie wasn't sure if she could properly call them “people.” Their skin was a sickly white and so tissue-thin that Lottie could see the bulge of colorless veins weaving and webbing through their limbs. On each of their heads rested a thick sprawl of soft black hair that floated gently in the air, as though fanned out in water.

But the eyes! The eyes were strangest. In the face of each of those dozen-some lantern bearers stared glassy green eyes that reminded Lottie of things she most wanted to forget. At a glimpse into one pair of eyes, she remembered
the dread of her first nightmarish sleep without a night-light. The gaze of another reminded her of the disgust she felt at discovering dead spiders in the back of the crawl space at Thirsby Square. Another set of eyes, much closer to Lottie, conjured the memory of her first day at Kemble School, when she'd tried to sit with Pen Bloomfield's girls at lunch and been laughed away.

Lottie shook off the creeping feeling from the back of her head in time to realize that the voice she had heard earlier had not come from a tree after all, but from one of the hovering lantern bearers. Now it spoke again.

“Lost?”

Six voices echoed the query. “Lost?” they asked in unison.

The lantern bearers descended until their feet hung just above the stony ground. The sound of splintering wood started again. This time, the yew branches curled inward, not outward, to hide the gaping holes from which the lantern bearers had emerged.

Then came a sound that Lottie had not expected: laughter. Sudden and sharp, it drew a tingling down her arms as the sound swelled louder and louder, so loud that she raised her hands to her ears. Adelaide looked just as
petrified as Lottie felt. Oliver was shifting nervously from foot to foot. Only Fife seemed at ease. In fact, he looked irritated, like he had just heard the punch line of a worn-out joke. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the wisps' laughing stopped.

“Oh, look,” said one of the lantern bearers. “The love child has returned.”

Fife lifted his chin, green eyes hard with something that looked like pride. Lottie was fairly certain that Fife had just been insulted.

“I'm here to see her, Cynbel,” said Fife, directing his words to the brightest of the globes.

“What do you say to that, wisps?” said the will o' the wisp called Cynbel, his voice cool and emotionless. “Is he wanted? Would she want to see him?”

The creature closest to Lottie, the one who had spoken first, drifted over to Fife. “It depends on what he's here for,” said the glacial voice. “Well, halfling? What are you here for?”

Fife batted the wisp away with an angry swat. He turned his attention back to Cynbel.

“We need safe conduct through this wood on our way to the Southerly Court. We're being tracked by the Barghest.”

“What?” cried one of the wisps. “The Barghest have not been in this wood since before the Plague.”

“Well, they're back,” Fife said through gritted teeth. “We're also being hunted by the Southerly Guard. My mother, Seamstress of the wisps, swore an oath that she'd honor any request I presented when I returned to this wood. Well, I've returned, and I'm presenting a request.”

“That is true enough,” said Cynbel. “Though we decide if you get that chance.”

At that moment, the first full rays of dawn peeked through the leaves, revealing clearly the faces of the wisps. Lottie felt her cheeks grow hot. They were each of them uncomfortably handsome . . . and strangely familiar. Their skin was paler, black hair longer, jaws sharper, but Lottie could find, in the oddest nooks of their noses and cheekbones and cool smiles, traces of Fife. Without warning, the lead wisp shifted his gaze from Fife to Lottie. Her hot cheeks grew hotter.

“Who are your guests?” he asked.

“That's of no concern to you.” Fife stepped in front of Lottie. “Now, stop dawdling and take me to my mother. She wouldn't be pleased to know how long you've already withheld the hospitality of your court to her only son.”

“You realize, of course,” said Cynbel, “that your mother never need know that you and your friends ever visited. Did you ever think on that, halfling? My fellow guards and I earn our keep by making stragglers like you disappear.”

Then the will o' the wisps let out a collective laugh that, like the one before it, made Lottie feel as if someone had rammed a knitting needle down her ear. At last, Cynbel's mouth sealed up into a simper.

“Only a jest, sweet thing,” he said, patting Fife on the head like he might a puppy. “No need to look so wild in the face. We will take you to your precious mommy. Only follow our lights.”

Cynbel drifted back toward his six ghostly companions, and they all raised their swinging globes above their heads.

“Into the wood!” Cynbel cried.

The band of will o' the wisps led them onward.

MORNING LIGHT
did no good in this part of the wood. The farther onward that the wisps led Lottie and the others, the thicker the leaves crowded above, swallowing dawn and shading their route through the white yew wood. The wisps' lantern light shone on dozens upon dozens more yew trees that lined the path. Each tree was as strange as the next, branches curled in ghost-white whorls. Their trunks were scaly and twisted, and their needle-leaves shot spine-like from the smaller branches. Occasionally, a mournful creak echoed through the forest, and a new branch would
begin to uncoil. Lottie didn't wait to see what would emerge from the trees. Seven will o' the wisps were quite enough to deal with at once.

Lottie began to notice wooden signs that hung from the yews and swung in the cold breeze.
CARPENWISP
read one sign.
GLAZIERWISP
read another, and from its smaller branches, in place of needly leaves, shards of blue and green glass hung like Christmas ornaments. At the roots of a yew marked
SMITHWISP
lay an abandoned anvil and fire pit. In fact, now that Lottie looked closer, she realized that each of the dozen shops that she passed was abandoned. There was no movement within or without them, and the paint peeled and flaked from the signs as though long unattended. Soon the shop signs disappeared altogether, and the white yews grew even thicker and more twisted along the path.