The Water Witch (27 page)

There was one in particular that my father and mother
both loved to tell me. It was called “Tam Lin” and it came, my father always clarified, not from a fairy tale but from an old Scottish ballad. Which was the same as a fairy tale, my mother always added.

A girl named Jennet was forbidden to go to a ruined castle in the woods—Carterhaugh, the haunt of ghosts and boggles and the “good neighbors” who weren’t good at all. But despite the warnings Jennet goes to Carterhaugh, because the castle once belonged to her people and she is determined to reclaim it. When she plucks a rose from the ruins, a young man appears, a handsome prince in green velvet and plaid. He tells her he is Tam Lin, the laird of the castle, kidnapped by the fairy queen to live eternally in the Ever-Fair where no one ages or dies. But on All Hallow’s Eve, when he rides with the fey, they will sacrifice him as their tithe to hell. The only one who can save him is his own true human love, who must wait by the holy well and pull him from his horse as he rides by. Then she must hold on to him, no matter what shape he takes, until he is human again. This Jennet does, holding on to him while he becomes a snake, a lion, and then a burning brand—all the while keeping faith that what she holds in her arms is her own true love.

“Because,” my mother said at the end of the story, “sometimes love requires a leap of faith.” She would smile at my father then, and he’d press her hand to his lips, as courteously as any prince in any fairy tale, and I would feel encircled by love.

After my parents died, I imagined that the prince in the story himself would come and tell me the tale—only it wasn’t imagined. My prince and the incubus were one and the same. I brought him into the world by a leap of faith, just as Jennet saved her prince.

But I wasn’t a child anymore and love meant looking
squarely in your lover’s eyes and seeing past illusions. I couldn’t shut my eyes and pretend I didn’t know what I knew. If Duncan turned into a beast in my arms, I would have to hold on until he was human again.

I went into the kitchen and gathered the supplies I needed for the spell to uncover a warded disguise. I brought them back into the library and found Ralph sitting on top of Wheelock, riffling through the pages. “You have got to cut this out,” I told him, taking the book away from him. “Some of these books are old …” I stopped when I noticed the page Ralph had turned to in the section on correlative spells. He was tapping his little paw on the sentence I had read last night.
The most powerful—and dangerous—form of correlative magic is when a witch creates a bond between herself and the object or person she wishes to control
.*

“Yes, I know Ralph, but I’m not trying to create a bond with Duncan …” But then I noticed the footnote. I looked down to the bottom of the page and read the footnote, my eyes widening and my heart pounding as I read the tiny print.

“Ralph!” I cried, patting the mouse on his head. “You’re a genius! This might just be the answer.” He preened under my praise and I reread the note. It explained how a doorkeeper could keep a door open by creating a bond between herself and the door. At the end of the footnote was a magical icon, shaped like an open doorway, that promised to disclose the spell. Before I could press it the doorbell rang. I quickly bookmarked the page and went to answer it.

Before opening the door I looked up at the fanlight. With no sun shining through it the stained-glass face was dim and opaque, like that of a dead person. As if I’d already killed Liam with my plans.

I opened the door, braced for reproach and recriminations. Instead I got flowers. Duncan stood on the porch, dripping
from the rain, holding a bouquet of wildflowers. His gaze slid down the length of my body, practically carving the curve of my hips with his eyes.

“Whoa!” He whistled appreciatively. “That dress!” He bent to kiss me on the cheek. At the touch of his lips, I felt the gold tattoo beneath my skin flare into life, but whether with desire or to ward him off, I couldn’t tell. I stepped back and took the bouquet, which looked handpicked. There were wild roses, daisies, black-eyed Susans, and Queen Anne’s lace. Fat raindrops clung to their petals. Looking up, I saw that rain clung to Duncan’s hair and eyelashes. He’d walked through the rain to pick flowers for me.

I lifted my hand to brush the rain from his hair, determined to see if touching him aroused desire in me, but he caught my hand in his and turned it in the sun so that the emerald ring cast a spray of green sparks across the foyer floor.

“A gift from Liam?” he asked, tilting one eyebrow up. “I have to confess that I’m jealous.”

“Oh,” I said, looking down at the flowers and wondering why he would be jealous if he was the incubus. “I didn’t mean to make you jealous. Liam wasn’t really … 
real
. At least he was almost real. If I’d loved him …”

“Yes!”
Duncan said, stepping closer. “That’s what I realized today. You didn’t love Liam or he’d have become human. So I don’t have any reason to be jealous, do I?”

As he stepped over the threshold I felt the gold coils in my blood flare.

“Let me put these in some water,” I said, stepping backward. “You can make yourself a drink in the library. There’s some scotch on the sideboard and there’s a fire laid if you want to light it.”

I turned away and walked through the library to the kitchen, feeling his gaze on my back. In the kitchen I ran cold
water over my hands while I filled up a vase and then arranged the flowers with shaking hands.

When I came into the library, flames were crackling in the fireplace and he was pouring himself a glass of scotch from the crystal decanter I had set up on the sideboard.

“More of Liam’s stock?” he asked, holding the glass up to me. I hadn’t turned on any lights, so I couldn’t quite make out his expression in the flickering firelight, but I heard the edge in his voice.

“Sorry,” I said, lifting my own glass from the coffee table. “I guess I developed a taste for the stuff. This is the last of it, though. I thought we’d finish it together.”

His teeth flashed in the firelight. “Good, I like the idea of finishing it.” He held his glass up to me. “Here’s to new beginnings.”

We clicked glasses. I took a big gulp, but he swirled the gold liquid around in his glass and sniffed it.

“Checking for water witches?” I asked.

“Just savoring the aroma,” he replied. He smiled and a dimple appeared on his right cheek. Liam had had one on his left. I almost stopped his hand as he lifted the glass to his lips and took a long drink.

“Ah …” he said, “that tastes like a good beginning.”

I took another sip of my scotch and sat down on the couch. “That’s what I want,” I said. “A new beginning. Our transformations haven’t released my wards. In fact, they seem more volatile.”

“That sometimes happens when wards are breaking down,” he said. “Some wards are so ingeniously placed that they contain a fail-safe device. When you try to disarm them, they dig themselves deeper into their host. Taking them out can be like removing a barbed fishhook.”

I winced at the image. “All the more reason to get them out
quickly,” I said. “I think I’ve found something that will work more quickly than another transformation.”

I got up to get the books I’d left lying on the coffee table. I could easily have reached them without rising, but I needed to put a little distance between us. I sat back down with the open Wheelock on my lap a good foot away from him, but he moved closer to see the page I’d bookmarked.

“Ah, the skeleton key spell,” he said, reaching across me to turn the page. “I had thought of that one, but it’s not very precise and it needs a vehicle to deliver it.”

“I thought I’d ask the rain,” I said.

“Ask the rain?”

“Yes, I read here …” I handed him another book that was already open to the place I wanted. “… that a witch should never try to command the elements, but there’s an incantation for asking an element to carry a spell. I thought I’d ask the rain to become a skeleton key to unlock my wards. And then I’ll ask the wind to blow them away.” I didn’t add that I planned to use the skeleton key I invoked to unlock his disguise wards.

He leaned closer and narrowed his eyes at me, their blue burning like gas flames. I could smell under the peaty aroma of the scotch his own scent, a mixture of pine and musk that reminded me of how he’d looked as a stag. But his eyes reminded me of the owl’s. “Will you ask the earth to move next, Cailleach McFay? You’re getting almost too powerful for me to keep up with.”

“I doubt that,” I replied. “Do you think it will work?”

“I think you don’t really need me to tell you that it will work,” he said. A burst of light from the fireplace as a log tumbled flashed in his eyes, reflecting glassily as if they were brimming with tears. He looked away and took a long gulp of scotch.

I reached for his hand, steeling myself for the lash of my wards. They
did
feel a bit like fishhooks. “I’d like you to stand by me when I do it.”

He looked down at our interlocked hands, the coils beneath our skin lashing at each other like warring snakes. “Of course,” he said, draining his glass, “but if you don’t mind I’d like to stay out of the rain. I think I’m coming down with a cold.”

“Sure,” I said. “I thought we’d do it on the back porch. The wind is blowing from the west—away from the back of the house. We’ll stay dry.”

I got to my feet, keeping his hand in mine, pulling at it to make him get up. As he got to his feet he pulled me to him and brought his head down to kiss me. His mouth tasted of peat and smoke and wild heather. He tasted like Liam, but there was a bitter taste as well. Like ashes …

Or maybe that was the taste of our wards burning away.

“Come on,” I said, pulling away from him. “We’d better get outside before we set something on fire.”

He followed me through the kitchen out onto the back porch. The wind was blowing away from the house so the porch was dry, but Duncan still held back as I moved to the railing. I concentrated on clearing my mind of everything but the invocation I’d memorized, first calling upon the Basque rain goddess I’d read about in Wheelock.

Thunder rumbled in the west and the wind lifted up the ends of my hair.

As Wheelock had instructed, I pictured each image as I spoke it: a key turning in a lock, a door opening, a bird flying free. At first I felt nothing, but then a gust of wind blew the rain into my face. It felt deliciously cool on my skin. As it dripped down my neck, I felt as if it was seeping deep into my body.

Something moved deep inside, like rusty chains unraveling, unoiled hinges creaking, rock cracking. The rain, carrying my spell with it, was seeping down into the core of my being … into a hollowed-out cave beneath the sea. Undulating light rippled over painted limestone walls. It was the grotto I’d seen in my vision during the circle. Then, quick as the flash of light, I was in the woods, the windswept heath, the labyrinth at Chartres, and then barefoot in the grass surrounded by fireflies. The robed woman towered above me and pulled down the moon. I gasped and the woman spun around, moonlight flashing on the silver blade in her hand. I started to turn and run—as I had before—but then I didn’t.

The labyrinth exists outside time
, Brock had said. I felt its spirals coiling around me now. I held my ground and looked up into …

My mother’s face.

I gasped at the sight of her, not out of fear but because she was so beautiful. I had almost forgotten. Black hair framed a white face and pale blue eyes that softened at the sight of me. She knelt in front of me until her face was level with mine and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Callie, what are you doing here? Did you have a bad dream?”

I remembered this moment. I must have been six or seven. We lived in a house on a college campus somewhere in New England. I’d woken in the night from a nightmare and called for my mother, but no one had come. Lights danced over the wall of my bedroom like a swarm of fireflies. I heard my mother’s voice coming from the backyard and had gone outside to find her, but found instead the frightening woman with the silver knife.

“You were warding me, weren’t you?”

Her eyes grew wide and her hand flinched away from my shoulder. I smelled the fear on her—my own mother looked at me as if I were a monster. Tears fell down my face, so many tears it was as if I stood in the rain. “Was that why you warded me? Because you were afraid of me?”

“Oh, my sweet baby, no!” she cried out, quicker to reassure me than to wonder what stranger had possessed her little girl, but then I saw the understanding dawn in her face.

“You’re Callie grown up, aren’t you?” she asked. A tear slid down her face. “You
will
grow up then.”

“Yes,” I said, “but you …”

I couldn’t finish. Couldn’t tell her that she wouldn’t be there to watch me.

She shook her head and placed a finger over my mouth. “It’s okay. Don’t tell me. As long as you’re okay …” She looked at the glowing spiral. It had begun to spin. “But you aren’t, are you? You’re trapped here where I set the wards on you. Oh my darling, I’m so sorry. I only did it to protect you.”

“From what?”

“From your grandmother discovering your power. The Grove would have used you …” My mother’s eyes skittered away from me toward the perimeter of the circle.

“Used me for what?” I cried, my voice high and whiny as any six-year-old crying for her mother’s attention.