“Wait.” Rufus wiggled a finger beside our backpacks, then stepped aside to join Georgie out of the splash zone. “Waterproofing. I figured it couldn’t hurt.” He cleared his throat and waved us on, and Joey plunged feet-first into the dark water.
I gave them one last look and felt my throat clench. “Tell Hel I love her, okay?” I said, and jumped before my doubts could get the best of me.
I sank like a stone.
Swimming lessons had never been a priority in the silo, possibly due to the fact that we were living in the middle of a pasture and hadn’t installed a pool. I suffered through the swimming unit in first grade—our gym teacher had almost drowned in a lake as a boy, and he strove to impress upon us that water was a foe to be conquered, not our friend—but I wasn’t going to win any awards for style. I could dog-paddle with the best of them and execute a convincing dead man’s float, but anything beyond that turned into an uncoordinated mess of flailing arms and legs and quick breaths that occasionally led to choking on inhaled water. In other words, I could save myself well enough to pass gym, but it wasn’t pretty.
But this wasn’t the overly chlorinated concrete pool with its faded lane lines and reliable heater. This water was icy and black, shocking in its coldness, and I almost gasped before I remembered that I couldn’t breathe the stuff around me. Sputtering, chest burning, I continued to sink, weighted by my gear and my clothing. I looked about frantically for the surface, but the water was ink in all directions, and I panicked, sure I was going to drown.
Just then, I spotted a green light high above me, waving back and forth like a beacon, and my tennis shoes hit soft mud. Calling upon whatever strength I had, I pushed myself off the bottom and struggled for the light, hoping I’d reach the surface before my air gave out. But the light remained stubbornly small, and the thrust that had propelled me toward it began to slow with the drag of the water. I floundered, grabbing for anything solid, but felt only water and weeds around me. Kicking and clawing, I fought the need to breathe and closed my eyes, willing myself higher even as I knew I didn’t have the strength…
…and something grabbed my wrist and yanked.
The night wind on my wet face was the single best sensation I’ve ever felt, and I sucked in a huge gulp of air before falling into a violent fit of coughing. I choked myself trying to expel the water from my lungs, and by the time I could breathe again—painfully, but at least I was breathing—I realized that the hand on my wrist had become an arm around my chest, towing me to shore. I gave in and floated, too exhausted to fight. A moment later, the back of my head hit something firm, and the arm hauled me onto the grass.
“Still with me?” Joey panted.
I lay there on top of my sodden backpack, shaking with cold and adrenaline, but nodded and croaked, “Thanks, man.”
“Worst gate ever.” He shucked off his bag and rose, holding his glow stick like a flashlight as he turned in a slow circle. “Does any of this look familiar to you?”
Reluctantly, I unstrapped my bag and squelched to my feet. We were standing on the bank of a large pond, which lay in a little clearing surrounded by thick woods. If there was a path through the trees, I couldn’t see it. The moonlight we’d enjoyed in Glastonbury was gone, the unpredictable stars were next to useless, and the raw magic drifting around me was as helpful as an after-image. “Nope,” I muttered.
But as I continued to scan our surroundings, something seemed to pull me in one direction, and I stopped to give the scenery a second glance. There was nothing different about the woods on the other side of the pond, nothing to set them off from the ring of trees around us, but still…
“I think we go that way,” I said.
“Yeah?” Joey peered through the darkness, but quickly shrugged and stuck his light back in his pocket. “We’ll see about it in the morning. First things first—we’ve got to get dry.”
At least Rufus’s waterproofing enchantment held. Mercifully, the insides of our bags were untouched, even after our submersion, and we were able to towel off and find a change of clothes before striking off in search of kindling. Within half an hour, we’d gotten a respectable fire going. Our tents were of the pop-up variety—Rufus really had done his best—and following Joey’s lead, I draped my wet things on top to let them drip overnight. There was nothing to be done for my shoes but keep them close to the fire and hope for the best, and his duster was going to be damp for days, but at least we were warmer.
Neither of us could give an approximation of the time more precise than “somewhere between dusk and dawn,” but my stomach, still stuck in Florida, insisted that we were past due for dinner. Joey decided to risk the pond water—“I’ve yet to get sick off anything in Faerie,” he explained as he set it to boil—and before long, we had passable stew from a couple of rehydrated pouches. We ate in silence, listening to the crackling and snapping of unseen things moving in the trees, then washed up and turned in.
Zipped into my tent, wrapped in a surprisingly soft bag, I willed sleep to come even as I dreaded the morning.
I don’t know how long I slept, but my back was stiff and the sun was filtering low through the forest when I poked my head out to see how bad the situation was in the light of day. The fire had almost burned itself out in the night, and Joey crouched beside the remains, stirring the gray ashes with a stick until the embers began to flare. “Going to get more wood,” he said, his voice a creaking bass with the hour. “Start the coffee, okay?”
Wearing my sleeping bag like a cape, I dug the necessary tools out of my backpack and started measuring out coffee grounds. When I headed to the pond for water, the grass was cold and damp against my bare feet, and the pond had become crystalline blue, a softly-tinted window onto the weeds rising out of the muck deep below. It wasn’t so much a pond as a small lake, I mused, tracing the path of a darting fish below the placid surface, but if it had a name, I was in the dark about it.
Something larger moved among the weeds, and I squatted on the shore for a better look. I wish I hadn’t: the light wasn’t strong yet, but it clearly showed the inhuman thing that swam out and looked up at me. I caught my breath and tried to back away, forgetting my position, and fell over my heels in my hurry to escape. Joey caught me crab-walking away from the lake at top speed when he returned with an armful of dead branches, and he dropped them and ran to my side. “What’s wrong?” he yelled.
I paused in my escape and looked up at him, panting with the shock. “Something’s in there.”
“In where?”
“Lake,” I managed, pointing at my track through the dewy grass. “In there.”
He drew his sword and strode to the bank, then gazed into the water as I picked myself up and tried to regain a semblance of my shattered dignity. “Kind of looks like an old woman?” he called.
“Uh-huh.”
“Green? Long hair?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” I mumbled, brushing the grass and dirt off my palms.
He grunted and sheathed his blade. “Well, hope you didn’t want a bath, but as long as we stay out of the water, she shouldn’t bother us.” He picked up the pot I’d dropped, filled it, and headed for the fire. “Got the coffee together?”
Blushing in shame at my freak-out, I passed him the grounds and started tending the fire. “You’ve seen that before?”
“Yup.” He fitted the pot into its tripod and stood to crack his spine. “Ran into a couple the last time I was out in the bush. Library had a book with some notes on them, too—really,” he said, giving me a good look, “it’s not coming to get you. Chill, Aid.”
“But what—”
“Ever heard of Jenny Greenteeth?”
“Well, yeah, but that’s just a folktale…” I shut up as Joey’s head swiveled back and forth. “Seriously?”
“Why are you surprised?” He gave the coffee a stir and sniffed appreciatively. “One of them must have slipped across at some point, so presto, cultural memory. Anyway, the person who wrote the notes on th
em just called them ‘green ladies.’ Wasn’t too detailed, but he made it pretty clear that they stay submerged.” He ducked into his tent and returned with a mug, then stood by the fire impatiently until the coffee boiled. “Of course,” he continued as he poured his breakfast, “they are carnivorous, so we’ll just keep—”
A splash interrupted Joey’s reassurances, followed quickly by a second as a pair of green hands clawed at the bank. The creature’s head followed an instant later—humanoid, but with overlarge eyes, frilled gills below the ears, and skin the color of a ripened lime. Its mouth opened too widely, revealing sharp brown teeth, as it began to pull itself from the water.
“Goddamn it,” Joey muttered, putting his mug down, “that’s it. If we survive this, I’m updating the field guide.”
“There’s a field guide?” I asked, scrambling for my tent.
“There damn well will be!” Before I had time to grab my sword, Joey’s was flashing, and the thing half out of the lake shrieked on contact. He only slapped it with the flat—he hadn’t cut it—but the red stripes bubbling off the green lady’s back made it plain that the things were native to the realm.
“Git!” he bellowed, aiming a kick at the creature’s forehead, and the screeching thing slipped back into the water as quickly as it had appeared. Joey stood on the shore as it sunk into the deeps, then wiped his blade on the grass, leaving a streak of black residue behind it. “Got a towel handy?” he asked with remarkable nonchalance. “I don’t like putting this up wet.”
I passed him my drying towel from the night before and watched him clean his weapon. “So…want to take that coffee to go?”
Joey looked out over the placid lake, sniffed, and nodded. “Yeah, that might be for the best. We pack in shifts.”
Twenty minutes or so later, we’d thrown on our damp clothes and stuffed our gear into our backpacks. Given the fact that I was able to zip my bag, in light of my subpar packing skills, I was beginning to suspect that Rufus’s creations operated along the same lines as a good old-fashioned Bag of Holding. While I tightened my shoulder straps, Joey doused the fire with his coffee pot. He tried to be subtle about it, but I caught him giving the lake a long, hard look before he scooped out more water.
When the site was clear, I turned in place until I felt the same tug I’d noticed the night before from the opposite side of the lake. “That way?” I suggested, gesturing to the trees, but Joey shook his head.
“Mountains,” he said, pointing in the other direction. “If I can get a little height, I might be able to figure out where we are.”
My gut protested, but Joey was the one with the wilderness experience in Faerie, even if much of that experience had been from the air. And so I followed him into the woods behind our dead campfire, trying to gauge our direction from the rising sun. As far as I could tell, the mountains lay ahead to the northeast, but our path meandered as necessary. There was no trail, and so we sidestepped felled trees, circled a series of tiny green lakes, and wove around suspiciously marshy ground. The day warmed with the rising sun, and though my coat and shoes nearly dried, I felt myself sweating under my clothes and the heavy pack.
Around noon—or what passed for noon that particular day, given the variable day lengths in Faerie—we stopped in a sapling-dotted clearing for lunch. The place seemed safe enough, quiet but for a pair of competing birds that had claimed trees on opposite sides, and Joey and I sat on our bags to break into the jerky. “Forest fire?” he guessed, examining the area. “Lightning struck a tree, it burned its neighbors, and the hole’s closing up?”
I began to agree with him, but I’d seen storms—even rain—so infrequently in Faerie as to make the scenario unlikely. I was puzzling this over when a truck-sized patch of grass to our right shifted upward ever so slightly, and something that looked suspiciously like an overgrown tarantula leg slipped out.
As I watched, frozen with my jerky halfway to my mouth, another little hillock to the left of the first started to twitch.
“Trapdoor,” I muttered.
Joey, chewing contemplatively, glanced my way and said, “Huh?” around a mouthful of meat.
“Don’t move.”
“What—”
“Don’t. Move.”
His breath caught as he noticed what I was staring at, and he whispered, “Silk. See it?”
Once I was looking for it, I did. Crisscrossing the meadow were trip lines of nearly invisible silk, each disappearing into the grass—and presumably, into the burrow of a spider. “Two ahead of me,” I whispered back.
Joey slowly turned to look over his shoulder. “Three behind us. I see legs.”
“We run?”
“May have to hack our way through,” he replied, followed by an exasperated huff. “Why did it have to be giant spiders?”
I carefully eased myself off my bag and back to my feet, then checked for the bronze sword at my hip. “You’re arachnophobic?”
“Not particularly,” he said, moving in slow synchronicity with me. “But there’s always a fucking giant spider. Every story, every quest—giant spider. I was really hoping to avoid them.”
“You said it yourself,” I muttered as I slid my pack on. “If it’s in every story, there’s got to be a reason for the cultural memory, right?”
The nearest spider poked another three legs and its head out, and Joey grabbed his bag. “You know, we can talk about shared folklore later, okay? Ready?”
The spider to my right struck first, and I was suddenly grateful for every bruise Val had given me over the last year. I caught it between the eyes—well, between two of the eyes—on the point of my sword, and it fought back with a rasping hiss. Its fellow retreated, but the trio behind us took the opportunity to move in—and met Joey’s two-handed defense, the sword in his right hand and the nail gun in his left, plucked from its homemade holster. He sliced through one spider and shot the second’s head full of metal as my target shuddered in its death throes. Joey pulled his sword loose and turned, only to find the third spider rearing up on its back four legs like a mutant horse. Before it could slam its fangs into him, I yelled and threw myself against its side, toppling it with the surprise blow. Joey’s sword flicked, and the spider never had a chance to right itself.
We stood together in the clearing, panting, and studied the motionless trapdoors around us. With a grimace, Joey wiped the ichor on his sword against the hairy side of his first kill, grunted at the streaked blade, and nodded to the mountains. “Still hungry?”
I looked around at the four corpses and shook my head.
We rested in shifts that night, one of us keeping the fire high while the other caught a few hours of uneasy sleep. “At least we’re learning,” Joey told me over another dinner of rehydrated stew. I wasn’t hungry, but Joey’s spoon scraped the bottom of his dish over and over again, cleaning up every morsel, while I picked at my own serving. “I’ve never seen anything on giant spiders in the library, so maybe they’re a recent addition,” he continued between bites. “They’re not iron-sensitive—maybe they came over from the Gray Lands.”
“The merrow aren’t iron-sensitive, either,” I reminded him as I stirred potatoes and carrots around.
“True,” he said, and mulled this over for a moment. “But then again, neither are dragons. And since there’s nothing on them—”
“Can we not talk about this right now, please?” I mumbled, casting glances at the forest around us. We hadn’t dared to try our luck with a third clearing, and the space between the trees barely left room for a single tent and the fire.
Sensing the direction of my thoughts, Joey nodded and resumed his attack on his food. “Sure, Aid. Hey, if you’re not going to eat, why don’t you take the first rest? I’ll stand guard until midnight,” he offered, tapping his watch. “Or, you know, something close to midnight.”
I handed him my plate and headed for the tent, where I passed out with my shoes still on. When Joey woke me, I could tell it was later than midnight—a fain
t lightening of the eastern sky promised relief—but I took his post, tended the fire, and made myself coffee to pass the time. I didn’t have to wait alone long. The sun was barely above the horizon when Joey reappeared, puffy-eyed but conscious, and I passed him the coffee without a word.
The ground began to rise as we hiked toward the foothills, and I let my mind wander. We’d left Florida on a Thursday. That meant the day before had been Friday, and today was Saturday…
I realized this nightmare had only begun ten days ago. It felt like half a lifetime.
We reached the base of the nearest mountain around sunset, where we called a halt. There was nothing to be gained by making the ascent in the dark—we hadn’t brought proper climbing gear, and even if we had, I didn’t know what I was doing on the end of a rope. Joey had fallen into exhausted silence after lunch, and once my tent was up and the fire steady, I shoved him toward the sleeping bag. He collapsed without protest, and I sat alone beneath the mockingly unhelpful sky, praying for a boring watch.
I grabbed a few hours of sleep on the flip side of midnight, then roused myself enough to follow Joey up the hill in the red glow of dawn. The going was easier than I’d feared, more grassy slopes than boulder-studded ravines, and Joey’s eagerness to get our bearings seemed to propel him onward ever faster. Around midmorning, he scrambled to the top, gave me a hand up the last rocky face, and looked out over the panorama.
To the east, south, and west, the world spread below us in a carpet of uninterrupted green, a verdant forest seemingly without end. The northern view was blocked by more mountains, gray peaks rising to a bare, saw-toothed skyline. “So…how far do you think we can see?” I asked, straining my eyes for a glimpse of the familiar.
“Maybe ten miles. Maybe a hundred. Depends on the curvature of the realm, and I don’t think anyone’s ever measured it.”
Joey’s voice sounded dull, and I found him staring out at the forest, absently rubbing his blond beard. “And?”
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