Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Poppy refused to look at me as she worked the spell.
By now, we’d traveled her way several times and I hated it more than ever. I preferred to go on foot. But there was no time.
Her magic spit us out and I stumbled, throwing my hands out and falling anyway. My gut heaved like it might spill the coffee I’d manage to get down after my sparring session with Mike.
“Shake it off, girl,” Poppy warned, brushing dirt from her cloak. “We don’t have time for you to toss your cookies.”
I gulped down air and slowly recovered. “Thank you for your sympathy.”
“I’m nothing if not concerned.”
Poppy surveyed the landscape, hand on hips and lines creasing between her eyes.
I squinted against slanted sunlight and gulped down air colored by dampness. “How far did we go this time?”
“Halfway across the realm, of course. You’re going to have to learn to get a handle on yourself. The journey is part of the fun.”
“Says the witch in charge of it.”
She snapped her fingers at me. “I need you to focus. We’re not going to get anywhere if we can’t handle Lake Wone. You know who lives here, don’t you? The Encantado.”
Elite Academy had failed me. Outside of a few snippets of information from History class, I knew barely anything about the different races inhabiting Faerie. Geography class had been my best nap time, considering all the extra hours I put in for Raelynn in the castle kitchens.
Why hadn’t we covered races of Faerie in Current Events, or Domestic Politics?
Then again, with King Tywin being a patron to the academy, it’s no wonder he didn’t want any budding Fae to learn about our countrymen and women. Why place any more importance on them?
Not while he was balls deep in his campaign to make the high Fae Seelie court superior to anything else.
I fell into step beside Poppy. “What can you tell me about the Encantado?”
She made her way from the rocky hillock where we’d landed down to the pebbled and muddy shore of the great sea. Gray-green water stretched for miles ahead down to the curve of the horizon. The opposite shore was so far out of sight that I doubted even Poppy’s magic could take us there.
Lake Wone reminded me of the great lakes at home.
“The Encantado are an underwater race inhabiting a realm beneath the surface of the lake. Too far down to see their lights glow at night. There really isn’t much known about them.
Keep to themselves, don’t like people much.
They’ve got crazy monsters there, too, so you’re going to have to be on your best behavior. ” She glanced sideways.
I nodded. “Okay, noted.”
She cut a path through the vegetation, sending several spikes of a long thorned pink flower spiking backward. The thorns snagged in my pants and tugged the fabric out of place.
“You see down there?” Poppy pointed ahead to a sparse but cozy port nestled against a bank of closely pressed evergreen trees. “We’ll stop and see if we can get anyone to spill.”
“What do we want them to spill?” I was falling behind again.
“Anything they’ve got. You want to know what I’ve got on the Encantado?
Not enough to fill a thimble. Outsiders aren’t allowed below the water, so whatever we know about them is what we’ve been told by the merchants who live in the village.
They’re the ones who deal with the traders sent up from the depths.
If there is a mudslide, if it is impacting them, we need more details. ”
This entire situation struck me as wrong. I hadn’t seen evidence of even a hint of the disaster Melia spoke about, but the way the air brushed my skin set my teeth on edge.
My senses screamed for me to pay attention. Nothing about this area was familiar, though. I’d seen the desert city of Areia in my dreams, that vision I stole from Poppy once upon a time. I recognized the castle there and the Dryad leader Lesheno. But this lake?
I had no idea what the Encantado looked like.
I caught up to Poppy as the land leveled out.
Spires and angled rooflines of the port village stretched out from the lakeshore the closer we got, dwarfed by the looming shadow of the mountain at our backs. It cast a palpable energy across the land like the hand of a god waiting to drop and snatch the entire lake back to wherever it came from.
I shivered and hustled toward the steps leading up to the street beyond.
A market place was full of vendors hawking from their stalls, and the air was filled with pungent spices. Yet my stomach growled for an entirely different reason.
Poppy jerked her head. “This way.”
She hiked her hood up over the top of her head, dousing the glow of her silvery blond braid. I did the same and the two of us disappeared into the bedlam of the town on market day.
Buildings blocked the view of the lake the further we walked, but through the narrow alleys between them I caught glimpses of the dock. Several ships were docked at the port, and several more were anchored near there, their sails taken in and furled tightly as if in anticipation of a storm.
We had a clear sky. No hint of a storm, past or future. Where had the mudslide come from? Where was the damage?
Poppy stopped in front of a stall with a pyramid of fish stacked to the left and a large butcher block at the center. The merchant brought a cleaver down, and the severed head of a fish with scales the color of fog dropped to the street.
“Looks like a good haul,” she said, indicating the pile of fish with her pointy chin.
Ripe perfume of stale fish and guts formed a cloud around the booth.
The merchant blinked one good eye at us, his skin stretched taut by sun and weather and the tips of his dark brown ears poking out through his hat.
“You blind?” he barked at Poppy. “This isn’t good. This is less than half what we normally pull from the lake.”
“Coulda fooled me.” She matched his gruffness. “Looks like you’re the one profiting off the good weather while the rest of the hawkers aren’t having the luck you are. I saw the line you drew.”
We’d arrived at the perfect moment, if that were the case. A crowd surged around us but I didn’t remember any of them coming from the fish vendor.
I shut my mouth and let Poppy take the lead. This gave me the perfect opportunity to scope out our surroundings.
“You’re right. I’m one of the lucky ones. The storms we’ve had finally cleared the other day, but the mountain—”
The man broke off and grabbed another slender silver fish from the pyramid. His cleaver thudded heavily against wood again, sending a second head bouncing toward the cobblestones.
“You going to finish that statement or do I have to purchase something?”
Poppy reached into the pocket of her cloak as she spoke and drew out three coins. Dropping them on the counter did the trick. They quickly disappeared under the weather-ravaged hand of the fisherman.
“Now tell me about the mountain.”
“Damn thing cleaved in two. Never seen anything like it. One minute it’s whole, and the next—crack! Half the hillside gone.”
“A storm can’t break a mountain,” I blurted out.
His gaze narrowed on me and I quickly looked away. “Never seen a storm like that, either. Half the hillside slid right into the lake, mud like you wouldn’t believe.”
The news struck with the potency of a cattle prod.
Even Poppy straightened and disguised the motion by reaching her arms over her head for a stretch. “So you say. I’ve never heard of anything like that happening before.”
The mudslide must be on the opposite side of the port, farther from where we’d landed.
“Never has.” The fisherman and Poppy were locked in a battle of who could be the most bitter without their expression changing. “Like I said. Bad storms out of the blue. Things are strange now.”
“And the Encantado? I can’t imagine they’re faring very well with a mudslide cutting into their territory,” she pressed.
He cleared his throat, a gruff, wet harrumph. “We haven’t seen ’em. No one has come into town in weeks. Not sure where they’ve disappeared to, but they took the fish, too.”
“Not even to trade?”
The fisherman straightened with a wet sigh and set his knife aside, gripping the edges of his stall. “Look, lady, I’m not the one to give you answers. Already told you enough to cover your generous donation.”
“Pleasure doing business.”
Poppy knew as well as I did that the more we pried, the less likely lips were to loosen. Besides, we already had the info we’d come here for.
She turned abruptly and exited the market with a swoosh of her cape. I drew in deeper breaths the further we got from the port town, away from the gut-churning stench of fish.
“Do you really think the storms were bad enough to cleave an entire mountain in half?” I asked.
She shook her head. “The way things are going, we can’t afford to be surprised anymore. Your friend’s connections brought us here for a reason, so the mudslide had to cause significant damage for the Encantado.”
I hated this. With all my heart and soul, I hated having to track down the repercussions of what I’d done, find the people I’d hurt.
My footsteps thudded, clunky and plodding, the longer we walked. The lakeshore curved away from the fishing village, the shoreline rolling and tangled as twine. We lost sight of the port. Then at a sharp bend, the mountain swam into view.
What was left of it.
Half the hillside hadn’t fallen like the fisherman claimed. Yet a large portion of stone and dirt was missing. Holes perforated the rock face and it dripped toward the water like melted candle wax, extending the shoreline too far out into the water to mark its end.
Poppy stopped with her lips rounded in an O of surprise. “This isn’t good.”
The scene of the mudslide looked like a bad horror movie.
Wet gunk covered the entirety of the lake on this end, the surface of the water swampy.
Sharp protrusions of broken trees jutted out from the mud like snapped toothpicks.
Bubbles of carbon dioxide forced their way free to the surface and popped in the air, releasing a noxious sulfur scent.
“The Encantado race breathes water like fish do,” Poppy explained.
“Gills, you call them in the mortal world. This mud might not look like it’s doing much damage here but it will slowly sap the water of its oxygen, especially combined with the temperature hike.
It spreads too far even now to be an easy fix. ”
Poppy shook her head, her features twisted with disgust, and hiked down to where the shore used to be. Halfway down, her boots sank into putrid mud up to her knees.
With a growl she brought her left leg up, freeing it with a pop like a hiccup, but the right leg remained trapped in the gunk.
“Well, don’t just stand there. Help!” she called over her shoulder.
I carefully grounded myself on the more stable shelf of land and held out my arms, sending a wave of magic toward her. Static electricity snapped and crackled until it solidified overhead.
Poppy reached up, grumbling sailors’ curses under her breath, and gripped hard.
My jaw clenched with effort, but eventually the spell retrieved her from the muck. She landed with a wet plop at my side and kicked the muck aside, her nostrils flaring.
“Long story short, the Encantado will suffocate if we don’t do something,” she finished.
“Then how do we get rid of the mud?”
“I don’t know for sure. Two elements mixed together like this are much harder to eradicate than a single element. This isn’t like taming the storm.”
No, it wasn’t. And days later I still felt the impact of what I’d done in the desert. Now we dealt with water and earth combined, along with the chemicals they produced, those gasses.
If it reeked this badly on the shore, then what was it like beneath the surface? What were the Encantado dealing with, and how close did the tip of the mudslide get to their homes? The lake was huge from this vantage point.
I clung to Poppy, neither of us willing to approach the swamp again. “I drew the storm into my body at Areia. Maybe I can draw the mud into my body too?”
“Think about this carefully, Tavi. You had no clue what you were doing there.”
“I handled it, though. And it saved the Dryads from the flood. It would offer immediate relief for the Encantado if I’m able to do this.”
“It’s not as simple as you’re making it out to be,” she argued.
“What if it’s exactly this simple? You said yourself, normally working to unwind two elements is complicated. But that’s for a regular witch or Fae. Right?”
A whisper of something soft lit along the column of my neck, a brush of her magic despite the way her gaze held no threat.
“I’m not willing to risk you on a whim.”
“We’re running out of time. We don’t really have a choice. We try this, and if it doesn’t work then we consider other possibilities.”
My gut churned at the idea of taking so much mud into myself. Then again, the storm had looked endless too. I hadn’t thought it was possible.
Life was made up of pressure and promises. Time slipped by us. There was never enough of it, never any semblance of peace or a break from responsibilities.
Poppy didn’t stop me as I waded out into the muck, careful to stay in the shallows. Mud threatened to suck me down and I stopped when the sludge came to my waist. If I went under, I’d be trapped.
Drowning wasn’t big on my BINGO list for this month. Been there, done that. Not an experience I cared to repeat.
Poppy’s attention proved a constant heat source on my back, spearing between my shoulder blades. She wouldn’t let anything happen to me.
I closed my eyes, sucking air in through my nostrils. The stench of mud burned and marked itself on my senses. Without waiting for my nerves to kick in, I sent my senses out in a wide net for the edges of the mudslide.
It cut out through the water much further than it appeared on first appraisal. This was entirely different from the wild, untapped power of the storm, but no less alive.
The elements were hungry and heavy. Not as easy to move.
Jaw clenched, fingers outstretched, I reached.
The individual elements of the mudslide were too compact for me to pick apart easily. Poppy was right. It would take too long to break them and reduce them down.
Instead, I sent my magic into the muck at strategic points. Behind my closed eyes, the anchors glowed a dull red. Nerves raw, I unfolded myself to the anchor points and tugged.
The vibration started at my ankles and rang up into my skull. This wasn’t like how it felt with the storm. Not by a long stretch. This energy consumed rather than burned. It solidified, sucking me down with little effort. This was thick control instead of fast chaos.
The bit of give I gained was quickly lost. Perhaps I was doing it wrong. Perhaps instead of trying to bring the mudslide up, I should open up cracks in the lake bed to drain it away. Perhaps—
Mud sucked me into its hungry maw, dragging me beneath the surface, absorbing me into a peaty embrace until it closed overhead.