Chapter 17 #2
I repeat it over and over, like a mantra, as if stopping it will break something—a spell, a link, a tether.
The wind stirs my hair, raises goosebumps on my skin, and yet I keep speaking, softly but fervently, keep stating what I want, feeling more and more desperate, more and more ridiculous the more time passes.
“I wish…”
My heart plunges. It’s not working, I think. It’s not working, it’s not working, she’s not coming—
A little wet tear rolls out of the corner of my eye, and I clamp it more tightly shut.
“I wish to speak with the Lady of the Lake.”
Hum.
I feel it as much as hear it. A light, rolling rumble through the ground beneath me, like a truck passing or the faintest, flickering earthquake.
My eyes open.
A faint glow, at first, like the submerged lights at the bottom of a pool. But all too quickly, it brightens, grows, widens into a massive shimmering white abyss in the middle of lapping black water. The beam fans upward, out of the water, dancing with motes of dust or the spray of mist.
And in the middle: her.
Vivian. The Lady of the Lake.
Her figure blooms into the night air, columnar and tall, glowing like starlight. The gown she wears is flowing quicksilver, her loose hair a slow-drifting vapor. Blank-eyed, pearl-skinned, she is…resplendent.
Before I even realize I’m moving, I’ve gotten to my feet, sand clinging to my shins and skirts whipping around my knees, and I stare, stare like I am being physically pulled toward her—and maybe I am.
I think, for some reason, of the Te Deum, the Latin prayer calling upon the martyrum exercitus—the company of apostles—and how it calls them candidatus: white, but not simply the color white; the quality of brightness, of glory.
That’s what she looks like.
And, with a graceful hand, she beckons for me.
Immediately, instinctively, I whip my gaze over my shoulder. To four black-clad figures and one in white. All watching, none moving.
Go, they seem to say, without speaking.
I go.
I take a step. The water is numbingly cold, the sand beneath it like ice. Another step, and another, until I am up to my ankles, the surface of the lake catching the edge of the dress and seeping into the fabric.
I look ahead, to the Lady.
She beckons again.
Closer.
I suck in a breath, shivering, and step again—because what choice do I have?
I close my eyes as I move, trying not to think about it, as if shutting out the sensory information of what is visible around me will somehow trick my body into enduring a deeper and deeper plunge into a nearly-freezing lake in the middle of a winter night.
Step, step, step. Closer, closer, closer still.
I open my eyes again. Before me, the Lady shimmers over her gleaming plinth of light, closer still, perhaps twenty feet distant.
And behind me—
Behind me, far behind me, is the shore. The five of them.
But—
I look down, down at my feet, at the surface of the lake still just lapping up to my ankles. Feel it cool and wet and liquid and yet firm underneath my weight.
I am walking on water.
Alarmed, panicked, I look up at the Lady again. But she only beckons me again.
Come here.
And I do. As if it is no trouble at all.
I obey like a child: slow, small, tentative-but-even steps across a lake that is fully water, that is rippling as the wind skates across it and splashing from the impact of my feet and still holding me up, somehow, somehow, as I walk.
I screw my eyes shut and then force them open again.
What do you want?
I feel her words more than hear them, a voice that’s inquisitive as much as imperious. And I’m reminded that this is—this was—on some level, at some point, a girl like me.
A student. A scholar.
When I answer, I speak out loud.
“I want…I want to know…” I falter. Stupid, I think. I didn’t even think to formulate a good question. A gust of wind billows the front of my dress, and I shiver.
What do you want?
“I want to fix this place.” The words rush out of me. “I want to know what we—I—have to do.” My chin judders—my teeth are chattering. “Can you tell us how?”
The Lady waits. The night air glitters.
I may answer, she replies at last. If you answer a question for me.
I find my voice. “Yes.” I speak into the hollow of the night. “Yes, anything.”
A quest. A riddle. Of course. Of course.
You can do this, Gwenna. Come on.. I will myself to flip into gear, to rally whatever vault of knowledge I can sift through, with the fervent hope that now, at last, hopefully, all that reading and study and practice has trained me up enough to be quick-thinking when it counts.
To be valiant and clever when the test, at last, arrives.
For a moment, nothing comes. And I dare, I dare to look up at her, at the moon-bright surface of her face, the blank lenses of her eyes, the long hair flowing in the windless ether.
The Lady looks back. At me. Through me.
My question for you is this, she says. Who do you think you are?
The words take me aback.
“I…” I swallow. “What?”
Did you not hear me? Her voice—that soundless voice—reverberates in what feels like the center of my skull. Who do you think you are?
Now her words hit me, hurt me, right in the chest. I shake my head, wordless, water stinging the corner of my eyes—from wind, from tears, I’m not sure.
“I’m…I’m…”
Because that question, of all questions…
That is a question with no right answer, isn’t it?
I lurch. Sideways, violently, my right leg plunging into icy water up to my knee.
Who do you think you are? the Lady’s voice resounds. Who do you think you are?
“I don’t—” I gasp as my left leg drops, too, the water burning cold against my skin. I’m sinking. “I’m just—”
It’s too late.
The water gives way, and I plunge.
Cold. Cold. Cold. It is so cold, such a sharp and vicious cold that it seems to strip the skin from my body, to grate steel wire over every nerve and push oxygen from every cell. To crush.
I think nothing, see nothing. I am only heavy, dark, downward. Lost. Gone.
And then, just as sudden, warmth. Of a kind. A burning, prickling, rasping feeling at my fingers and toes, crawling up limbs towards the vital center of me, like my blood is crystallizing drop by drop until at last my heart will be frozen still.
Oh, but it’s pleasant. Startlingly easy. If my eyes were open, I’ve now let them close. If my body was struggling, I let it rest.
How long will it take to die? I wonder idly. Then: Maybe this is what needs to happen.
Force. A grip at my waist, pulling upward, the rest of me following like a doll.
Then frigid air slashing my face, needling my nostrils and lips, pouring down to lungs and limbs.
I cough, painful, splutter and splash and suck breath all the way down to my belly as black water and black sky and white stars wheel around me.
“Don’t,” comes a gulping voice. “Stop. Don’t move.”
Water churns around us, but I can only hear it, crashing loud in my ears, because my vision is sloshing and my skin is numb, my body is ice, and it’s only when I feel the soft push of sandy earth beneath me that I realize I have been pulled out. Saved.
“Gwenna!” A voice—voices—I can’t discern. My body curls in on itself automatically even as I force my gaze up, and see—barely—a giant form, jaw juddering, lips blue, hair dripping—Callahan—but then I’m surrounded, arms, hands, fabric flapping.
A coat—black, heavy, the inner satin still warm with body heat. And hands, broad and strong, bracing under my arms so I stand, holding me upright almost painfully hard.
My body fights it, the spasming need to cough contorting my insides and fisting everything out of my lungs.
“Can you walk?” It’s Kai, eyes blazing, keeps his arm firm around my shoulders.
I nod. Suck for breath that doesn’t come. Doesn’t come and doesn’t come and doesn’t come. Then retch cold water and bile and what feels like the fiery lining of my throat.
Then collapse.