Water Witch

by Carol Goodman

  I heard my father’s voice crack, and I couldn’t hide anymore, even if it meant going to my grandmother’s.

  “Here I am!” I cried. “I’m not lost …”

  “I’m not lost, I’m not lost …” I woke in the closet, murmuring the words to myself. The Aelvestone lay on the floor by my side. How long had I held it? It had taken me into some kind of fugue state. Into some part of my past … something about hiding in the closet when I was little … and hearing my parents talking about me. My mother saying I had been warded. My parents had known about the wards on me!

  I picked up the stone. It throbbed against my hand like a trapped animal. Like she’s been caged up … My father had sounded scared. As if I might be in danger. Then why hadn’t they done something to remove the wards? I shoved the stone into the suitcase with my winter sweaters.

  In the bathroom I looked longingly at my deep claw foot bathtub, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to surround myself with that much water.

  She’s been warded …I heard my mother’s words again as I stepped into the shower. Strange, I had very few memories from my childhood of my parents beyond the stories they read me at bedtime. That had been the time I loved the best, nestled between them in bed, their voices alternating as they took turns telling stories about fairies, princesses, wizards, and magic …

  She’s been warded …

  It’s like she’s been caged up … like she’s lost …

  My parents’ words seemed to float on the steam that writhed around me. Feeling skittish, I didn’t linger. I toweled off and then put on a rose-scented skin lotion that Liam had liked the scent of and put on a slinky blue jersey dress that Liam had loved. When I put it on – for the first time since he’d left – I could almost feel his hands on me … Catching my eye in the mirror I asked myself what I would do if Duncan were the incubus. Would I let him stay or send him back to Faerie?

  Unable to answer the question, I looked away and slipped the emerald and diamond ring Liam had given me onto my right ring finger. Then I went downstairs and straightened out the library, plumping the couch cushions and picking up several books from the floor that Ralph, who had taken to hiding in the bookcases lately, had knocked over. I picked up Fraser’s Demonology, which had fallen open to a woodcut of a winged creature with nasty claws that made me shudder, and reshelved it. Then I picked up Wheelock’s Spellcraft from the coffee table and turned to the chapter on “Magical Disguises and How to Uncover Them.” It was divided into three sections (Wheelock, and all witches, I was discovering, had a thing for threes): A) Disguises for Self Protection; B) Disguises for Sexual Uses; and C) Wards.

  Wards? I hadn’t realized they could be used as disguises.

  I read on.

  It is this author’s belief that sometimes it may be necessary to hide one’s true identity to survive an attack from an enemy. Therefore the wards of disguise are included here to be used as a means of protection in life threatening situations only. The author disavows responsibility for any other uses. If these terms are agreeable, please depress the author indemnity icon below.

  I flipped the page and saw that the next several pages were blank. Then I flipped back to what Wheelock called the author indemnity icon. It was a tiny picture of a closed book surrounded by a spoked circle. Small print below it explained that by touching the icon I agreed to the terms stipulated below and that I would not hold the author responsible for any mishaps attached to the use of the following wards and spells. There was some even smaller print below that I would have had to get a magnifying glass to read, but I was impatient to find out about these wards of disguise. Pressing the icon was like checking the “Agree to Terms” box on the internet, I figured. Whoever read the full text of those?

  I touched my finger to the icon. The spoked wheel turned, the book shimmered and opened. A stream of text flew out and spilled down the page. Pages flipped so that the text could continue filling up the empty sheets. When the blank section filled, the pages automatically flipped back to the beginning of the section.

  Cool, I thought. Who needs a Kindle?

  Twenty minutes later I understood why Wheelock had protected himself against the retributions of those deceived by these spells. The disguise wards he described could be used to alter a person’s face and body so thoroughly that husbands were unable to recognize wives and mothers didn’t know their own children. They could be used to impersonate another person – Merlin had given Uther Pendragon such a ward to make him assume the shape of Gorlois, Ygraine’s husband, so that he could lie with her and conceive Arthur – and induce emotional states of thralldom. Here Wheelock referred the reader to the section on sex, hinting that disguise wards were often used in sexual role-playing games.

  Ew. In my dream Liam had shown me how to use wards to increase sexual pleasure, but the idea of using the wards to assume other shapes – objects of fantasy and desire – struck me as … well, icky. But I supposed if they were used between consenting adults there was nothing really wrong with it.

  Wheelock was clear, though, that cases in which one witch deceived another into having sex while under the influence of disguise wards constituted rape.

  “Most disturbing,” he wrote, “are the cases in which an otherworldly creature uses disguise wards to pretend to be human in order to seduce a human. Such stratagems have been used by nephilim, succubi, incubi …”

  If Duncan were the incubus why would he be using wards to disguise himself? When the incubus had incarnated as Liam, he hadn’t needed wards.

  Reading further, I came upon a possible answer:

  Wards are often employed in order to fool a practiced witch.

  Perhaps the wards were necessary now that I was coming into my power. But how then could I know if Duncan were the incubus?

  There is a way to tell if a witch has been deceived by an incubus. Any time a witch comes into contact with a warded disguise her wards will be activated.

  I thought of how my wards had flared when Duncan touched me. I continued reading, looking desperately for an explanation for how I felt, but finding no resolution of this conflict between desire and repulsion. What was wrong with me?

  One of these times she’s going to notice, my father had said. And my mother had replied, She won’t notice anything because there’s nothing to notice. She’s been warded.

  Was it possible that my parents were the ones who had warded my power in order to hide it from my grandmother?

  I opened Wheelock again and went back to the section on disguise wards. I found what I was looking for in a footnote at the bottom of the last page:

  Wards have also been used to disguise a witch’s power, most often when a witch is young and may not be able to defend herself until her powers are fully developed. If the wards are not removed at adolescence, the young witch may not even recognize her own power. Such a witch, rendered powerless by wards, is sometimes known as a Water Witch.

  I stared at the footnote until the print grew blurry – at first, I thought, because of the tears in my eyes, but then I realized it was because the print was actually fading. Apparently there was a time limit to the magically produced text. As the words vanished I recalled that Duncan had told me there were three definitions of a “water witch” but he’d only told me two of them. Had he deliberately left out the third because he knew it applied to me – that I was a water witch?

  I turned to the section on dissolving wards. There was a way that I could both undo the wards that had been placed on me and the ones Duncan was using to disguise himself. If I loved him, the minute the wards came off, he would become human.

  But if I unmasked my incubus and I did not love him, he would be destroyed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  AS I SAT in the library sipping Scotch and waiting for Duncan’s arrival, watching the sky darken and the rain begin again, I concluded it came down to a choice between illusion and reality.

  When I was a teenager living in my grandmother’s cold,
formal apartment, she chastised me for still reading fairy tales. “You’re trying to escape reality,” she told me. The therapist I saw said I was trying to regain the world of my childhood – the world in which my parents still lived. She was closer to the truth, but not entirely on target. It wasn’t the world of my parents I was trying to recapture, it was myself. All those tales about children lost in the woods, princesses forced to live under the dominion of evil stepmothers, mothers watching over their children as trees or animals, princes charmed into beasts or frogs … were all stories about seeing through illusion into the truth. Perhaps my parents had told me these stories so I would know how to survive in a world in which they were absent, or they were meant to tell me who I really was.

  There was one story 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 Jennet, despite the warnings, 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 young laird of the castle, kidnapped by the fairy queen to live eternally in the Ever-Fair where no one ages or dies. Only on that very night, 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 onto him, no matter what shape he takes, until he is human again. This Jennet does, holding onto him while he becomes a snake, a lion, and then a burning brand – all the while keeping faith that what she held in her arms was 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 story – only it wasn’t imagined. My imagined prince and the incubus were one and the same. I’d brought him into the world by a leap of faith, just as Jennet had 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 would need for the spell to uncover a warded disguise. I brought what I needed back into the library and found Ralph sitting on top of Wheelock rifling 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 was 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.1”

  “Yes, I know, Ralph, but I’m not trying to create a bond with Duncan …” And 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 footnote again. It explained how a doorkeeper could keep a door open by creating a bond between herself and the door itself. 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 the face 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 eyes 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 like it had been handpicked. There were tea roses, sweet pea, 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 were 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 real. So I don’t really have any reason to be jealous, do I?”

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

  “Let me put these in some water,” I said, stepping backwards. “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 the fire was 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. The transformations we’ve done 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 fish hook.”

  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 mor
e quickly than another transformation.”

  I got up to get the books I’d left lying on the coffee table even though I could easily have reached them without rising. I sat back down with the open Wheelock on my lap a few inches 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 the 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 as well.

  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, which were reflecting glassily as if they were brimming with tears. He looked away and took a long gulp of Scotch.

  I reached for his hand, stealing myself for the lash of my wards. They did feel a bit like fish hooks. “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.”