CHAPTER 30
Ibraced myself for the frigid cold, the struggle for oxygen, the infectious cut of swirling debris, or the snap of my bones crushed into the rocky banks.
The water could trap me in the underground labyrinth of tunnels like a rabbit’s warren, carved into the stone by powerful currents.
Tunnels I shouldn’t know existed, but I did know. I knew this place.
This place.
I should be struggling for breath. The icy water still dragged me through the stream, still soaked through me, but I didn’t feel the need to breathe.
I opened my eyes.
I was floating down a river in a boat the size of a gondola. My head spun as I took in the world around me, all cast in shades of blue and green. The web-patterned reflections of tropical water flickered over the world around me as if I were at the bottom of the ocean.
Yet I was in a boat on the river, and on the banks of that river were houses, shops, buildings, cobbled together like a coral reef. A whole sunken city.
A shadow in my periphery made me snap my head around, but if the wraith had followed me down here, I couldn’t see it. I didn’t know where “here” was, but that question mattered less than another.
Kessian. Where was he?
I searched the banks, the windows of the houses, the gardens, and jolted when I recognized one of the buildings—Witches and Stitches. It was sandwiched between two stately homes rather than a pizza chain and a betting shop, but I could see Ella and Rhia through the window.
I prepared to jump out of the gondola and ask them for help or if they’d seen Kessian. The river was too broad for me to make the leap without falling in, so I’d have to swim. Just then, something moved in the water.
Next to my gondola, floating face up, was Kessian.
He looked asleep. Worse, he looked funerary, with his hands crossed on his chest, clutching his cane, his hair floating in a veil around him.
I seized him by the arms and tried to pull him out. The water burned my hands with cold like needles. The moment I pulled Kessian’s face above the surface, he gasped awake, dragging in air as if he’d been suffocating. As if that water was different from the water I was already in.
I helped him up into the gondola. It tipped precariously as I dragged him by his belt over the rest of the way. In the bottom of the little boat, he coughed and caught his breath, staring shakily up at me, then around us.
“Tal? What happened? Where are we?”
“I don’t know. It looks like we’re still in the strid. Were you—? When you were in the water, were you asleep?”
“I don’t think so. I felt—” He shuddered. “Nothing. I felt nothing, remembered nothing, until you woke me. It was like I was dead.”
My stomach dropped. When I’d touched the water, it felt cold enough to catch your death, though swirling with magic and life. Pulling Kessian from it felt just like pulling Amelia out of the wraith.
He looked out at the town square sprawling across the riverbank, full of houses, shops, and buildings from Shearwater. “This better not be the afterlife.” He turned his gaze on me, miserably apologetic. “I tried to resist the wraith. I really did. It wouldn’t even let me speak to warn you off.”
“It’s not like I’d have listened.”
“Still. You’re here because of me.”
“I could say the same to you. This mess has always been mine to deal with, and for nine years, I didn’t. We’re here now. I’d rather be here than up there, wondering what happened to you.”
“How did the wraith escape?”
My mood darkened. “Somebody must have sabotaged the sigil. I’d guess it was Warwick, though I don’t know how he’d have found it.”
Kessian shivered, looking around at the strange underwater world. “Well, we’re here now. Wherever here is.”
“Now we need to find a way out.”
The boat rounded a bend in the river, willow leaves trailing like a leafy curtain. Ahead, a pontoon came into view with a ghostly figure stood at the end, facing us.
My heart drummed. The figure glowed blue, semitransparent and vaguely humanoid the way a half-assembled mannequin or a ventriloquist’s puppet was.
Its face changed like a television flicking through channels.
Now a youthful woman with dark, narrow eyes.
Now a portly maid with her hair styled in ringlets the way they’d only done six centuries ago.
Now an old man with a wrinkled face like tree bark.
On and on it went, cycling through faces, overlapping one another like an overexposed photograph.
Briefly, I thought I saw Kessian’s face, but then it was gone amongst the sea of others.
Kessian said, “What is that?”
I didn’t know, but our boat was headed straight for the pontoon. We could either let it dock or jump into the river. Given the half-death it had put Kessian under, the latter wasn’t an option.
Our boat glided smoothly into the pontoon, bumping against the rubber tires on its flank.
We shied away, crowding ourselves into the back of the boat.
The spectral figure stepped aboard at the bow.
It moved smoothly and silently. The boat didn’t rock an inch before peeling back from the pontoon and continuing its journey, the prow carving a path through the winding river.
The figure stared at us from its flickering, ever-changing face. We stared back, quietly terrified and wary.
Kessian said, “Hello?”
“Greetings to the Keeper and his companion,” answered the figure in a hundred voices all speaking at once.
“Creepy,” Kessian whispered.
“It addressed you as the Keeper, though. Maybe you should ask it about this place?”
Kessian cleared his throat. “Do you know where we are?”
“You sail the waters of Shearwater’s Bloodstream,” it answered. “These rivers are its veins, the water its blood. They chart a course through time.”
The Bloodstream. It had only been an ominous word found in the trace spell Emery placed on our dreams. He’d said that we needed to come here if we wanted to fix the poisoned strid.
Kessian said, “O … kay, but how did we get here? The wraith dragged us into the strid, and now we’re here.”
“You have slipped into the gap between life and death. If you do not find your way back to the former, then you will fall to the latter.”
Those words had the same effect as plunging into the icy waters. “How do we find our way back?”
“That is why I am here. To show you.”
“And who are you?”
“The Keepers.”
Kessian said, “The Keepers? Plural? So … all of them?”
“Yes. The Keepers.” It dragged in a long breath, rasping in its chorus of many voices. “We stood vigil over the wild magic of old, a vanguard against the destruction wrought by people with no love in their hearts for nature. Or no love in their hearts at all.”
“Not done a stellar job,” I muttered. “If you’ve been watching over it, why not drown someone like Warwick instead of my dad and Laurelie?”
“That is why you are here. To discover the source of the poison and the antidote.”
“Why us?” Kessian said.
“All the answers you’ll find here.”
“But you won’t tell us?”
“We do not know. We are memories from Keepers past, present, and future, but our memories are fallible, like dreams, and the future is not fixed. We will only know the whole truth behind Shearwater’s malady when you do.”
I searched the banks of the river, remembering the flicker of shadow I’d seen. “Can the wraith find us here?”
“Yes.”
“How do we stop it? What does it want?”
“To go home.”
“Isn’t the strid its home?”
The Keepers paused, as if having to think hard on an answer. In the end, they answered with a question. “What is a home?”
It only took a moment to see the difficulty in answering, because a home was less one singular thing than it was a collection of nouns.
Home could be the house you lived in, but not all houses were homes.
It could mean people—your family, a lover—but these, too, could change or leave or cast you aside.
Home could be the city you lived in, or the country, but on such a grand scale, how could we narrow it down to find the wraith’s true home?
From his expression, Kessian had drawn the same frustrating conclusion. He said, “How are we supposed to help the wraith go back home if we don’t even know who or what it is?”
“That, too, is what you must discover.”
As the Keeper spoke, our boat rounded another bend in the river. An all-too-familiar house loomed out of the willows.
37 Culpepper Avenue had always felt like a house with history. It had once been a place fragrant with the smells of Sunday roasts and itching with the ticking of clocks. Over the years the place had sagged under the weight of Grandad’s obsession.
In the ethereal reflections of the timestream, the house had taken on all its different aspects. Like the Keepers, its face seemed both welcoming and forbidding.
Our boat sidled up to the bank, bending reeds until we’d nearly run aground in the shallow muck. The Keepers waved their hand, and a gangway composed of the same blueish spectral material as the Keepers themselves appeared.
I crossed it, turning to help Kessian out. “How’s your leg?”
“I sort of hoped, since our bodies are floating off in the strid somewhere, that I’d be free of the aches and pains, but no.” He took my hand and stepped out with me. “At least the … Bloodstream had the decency to magic my cane here along with me.”
The Keepers said, “From here, you will find many paths to different times, different trials. You must pass them all if you are to find your own way home.”
The Keepers placed a pocket watch in Kessian’s hands.
It was identical to the one Amelia had found for us in Grandad’s study, except that its image flickered between polished silver and tarnished rust. Kessian flicked it open to reveal the time set to midnight, the second hand ticking forward and back without making any progress.
The Keepers said, “This is a place fit only for spirits and dreamers. While your bodies soak in the strid’s blood, your spirits sail this stream, where time flows both ways.
You must complete your task before the hour hand reaches midnight, or time will flow against you, and both your bodies will perish in the deep. Just as those who’ve come before you.”
We both looked at the pocket watch, the second hand frozen, tapping the twelve over and over. My heart kept time with it.
The Keepers disembarked on their boat and said, “Farewell, and good luck.”
The second hand ticked forward. One, two, three.
We had twelve hours.