Riverlilly

by William Young

  Chapter the Seventeenth,

  The Last Day,

  In which ice is spun into a silver stream.

  I. Echo from the Mist

  Lilies spilled over the sides of the boat. When Jai woke up he blew the flowers away from his face with a snort. Astray poked his head above the surface and wrapped himself around Ceder’s shoulders with his tail curled under her nose—she woke up sneezing a moment later, then fixed her attention on Jai. He shifted uncomfortably under her steady gaze.

  “What are you looking at?” he finally asked her.

  “You’re getting tan,” she said. “You were so pale the first morning.”

  “Oh,” said Jai, not sure if this was a good or a bad thing to a girl.

  “Your eyes don’t look so squinted all the time, either. You must finally be getting used to the sun. You spent the whole first morning looking like you ate a sour worm in your apple!” She pinched her eyes shut narrowly, mimicking him.

  Jai splashed her with a wave of lilies and before he knew it they were both throwing the flowers all around and laughing like children without a care in the world.

  “That looks like fun,” said the Dangler.

  Jai and Ceder stopped immediately. They had assumed the fisherman was asleep, if not forgotten him altogether for a fleeting moment. He was sitting in the same lumpy posture as overnight. His fishing pole was in his hand, the line trailing into the water, but he seemed unaware that he was holding it.

  “Good morning,” said Ceder. “You fishermen are early risers, aren’t you?”

  “The sun has to set before it can rise,” said the Dangler.

  “Sometimes I think you don’t sleep at all,” Ceder said half-jokingly, watching to see how he responded.

  As she had not posed a question, he did not respond at all.

  “Why did everything fall apart last night?” asked Jai. “Did you do that? Remember how we talked about giving us a little warning?”

  “The Soridwood began to fall the instant the El fish took my bait.”

  “The same type of fish from the first hole we found?” asked Ceder. “You caught another one?”

  “See for yourself.” He nodded to Jai’s satchel.

  Ceder took out the enchanted eggs and handed one to Jai.

  “No, one at a time,” said the Dangler.

  Ceder grabbed the egg back from Jai. She raised it to her eye.

  “No, no, two at a time,” corrected the fisherman, shaking his head.

  She lifted both eggs at once, holding the cracked openings to her face like the eyes of an inside-out mask and… a sea of calm silver held her gaze, a paradise seen through holes in a wall between worlds. She froze—this was a face she was looking into; she was peering through ancient eyes into a secret place, into someone’s own spirit, a strange sight she felt so near the verge of understanding, a horizon she could almost reach out and touch.

  Jai was sure a spell had taken hold of her. After trying to talk her out of her trance, he grabbed her wrists and lowered the enchanted eggs from her face.

  Ceder stared ahead as though she was seeing the river and the boat and Jai in a dream.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  She shook her head in disbelief. “You have to see for yourself.”

  Jai looked at her cock-eyed. “After you just got hypnotized like a spring chicken? I don’t think so.”

  “Jai,” she held the eggs up to him, “trust me.”

  He took a deep breath and slowly raised the blue eggs to his eyes, resolving to drop them at the first sign of trouble. That was the last thing he remembered.

  Where am I? The water was pure silver, the sky frozen twilight. Ceder lay beside him, or some ghost of her, some ageless spirit hiding behind a porcelain face. She smelled of rainy flowers. He gazed at the stars in the water. Where the water is silver, everything in the sea is free. These were not his own thoughts. He had no thoughts. He had no body. He was looking through another’s eyes. He knew that he could reshape the world with but a blink, if he chose, to erase worlds and create worlds at his will. He looked at the girl. What was her name again? Something short. Short and lovely. Lilly? No! Where had that come from? Where was he?

  Ceder wrestled Jai’s arms down. “It’s my turn,” she said. He held the eggs out of her reach, struggling to regain his senses after being snapped out of the peculiar fantasy. Surely just a fantasy.

  “Put them away,” snapped the fisherman, “and give me the bag. The Sight of Silver will steal your hearts if you look too long, if you have not already.”

  “What the spell was that?” asked Jai.

  “What did you see?” asked the Dangler.

  Jai tried to put it to words but ended up only shaking his head, still lost in the recollection.

  “What are the El fish?” Ceder asked as she tucked the eggs inside Jai’s satchel and handed it to the Dangler.

  “Identical,” said the fisherman as he draped the satchel around his neck like an apron.

  Ceder scowled.

  “Have you looked inside?” Jai asked him. “It’s like seeing a whole new world.”

  “One at a time is all I can manage,” said the Dangler, “and the experience lacks depth.”

  As they sailed on, the children thought about the vision they had seen in the enchanted eggs and wondered why the Dangler would not look into both at once and witness the mysterious beauty. When Jai and Ceder caught each other’s eyes, they blushed and looked away.

  The fisherman disrupted the children’s daze with a quiet whistle, then he nodded to alert them to two dark forms following the boat, one in the river, one in the sky. An enormous fish was coming up strong from behind; above, silhouetted by the sun, a gigantic bird of prey—a roc, Jai thought—was diving at the boat with its wings tucked back like a falling star, its beak as sharp as a cutlass.

  The Dangler was jerked to his feet as the beastly fish bit his line and swam under the boat. He stumbled forward, trying to lock the reel as he tripped over the middle bench. His line stretched taut, yanking him all the way into the prow where he might have been pulled out the front like a rag doll if Jai and Ceder had not grabbed onto his boots at the last second and held him back.

  The fish jumped out of the river. Ceder gasped—it was bigger than the boat, barrel-chested, and had a long beard of crusty shellfish and clams that clattered like symbols when the river kraken hit the water again at full speed.

  “It’s going to drag us straight under!” Ceder shouted.

  The Dangler cackled like a madman, unconcerned that he might be pulled out of the boat, but bodily opposed to letting go of his pole.

  “He’s nuts!” yelled Jai. “I think he’d actually thank us if we just let him go.”

  The bearded fish jumped into the air again and then dove swiftly at a deep angle. The boat dipped down. Cold water sprayed up on both sides as the prow cut through the water like a harpoon. Jai looked back over his shoulder—the roc was closing in fast on the boat, a blur under the bright sun. In a moment of morbid curiosity Jai wondered whether it would be more painful being eaten by a giant bird or a giant fish. Such is life, he heard himself think, and life is such.

  “Let go!” Ceder shouted to the fisherman.

  Jai heard her with a start and let go. The Dangler flew forward out of the boat. Ceder lunged, caught him around both ankles, and flew out of the boat in sequence. Jai grabbed Ceder’s feet and braced his own legs under the bench. At the head of their tightly linked line the unstoppable fish dove deeper and deeper until the boat was pulled entirely underwater, just out of the reach of the roc’s outstretched talons—the last thing Jai saw was that the great bird’s feathers were a familiar shade of violet.

  Jai felt the lilies instantly swept clear of the boat as icy water gushed in. He clamped his eyes and his mouth shut reflexively, but the river swirled up his unplugged nose and when he gagged for air he swallowed more rushing water. We’re going to die, just like that?

  They traveled
down for more than a minute before the boat leveled out and passed through a wall of cold mist. When he opened his eyes and found he could breathe again Jai considered seriously whether they were, in fact, quite possibly all dead. The boat floated along a subterranean river which, to his imagination, would serve as a fitting passage to the underworld.

  Following their chaotic descent underground Ceder found herself upside-down in the back of the boat. She quickly scrambled upright and brushed herself off. Astray had already resumed his preferred position in the prow, keeping lookout. The glowing petals around his neck gave the dark river an otherworldly ambience and highlighted a cluster of lilies in the water that had been swept below the earth alongside the boat and now seemed too timid to venture off on their own. I know how they feel, Ceder said to herself.

  The Dangler lay in a heap in the hull, making no move to adjust himself. The bearded fish was gone. It had torn the elemental line off the fisherman’s pole.

  Jai noticed the necklace of lilies that Ceder had made him was gone, too. “You realize you almost got us all killed?” he asked the Dangler crossly.

  “Actually, Jai, this might be a good thing,” said Ceder. “We’re not on the river anymore. When we get out of here we can go ashore anywhere we want, instead of just drifting along all the time in the boat without a say in the matter. We’ll never have to see Sorid’s tower again! We’ll never even go near it!”

  Jai slowly conceded a smile. “Sounds good to me. No one ever said we had to stay on the river until we died.”

  The Dangler laughed at them derisively. “Do not count your eggs before they hatch.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, you bizarre lunatic?” Jai asked at once, with a touch more anger than he intended. He did just nearly kill us all!

  The fisherman laughed again, a cold rattle in the dark. “Some problems have a way of multiplying when you least expect them to.”

  The darkness faded in favor of a silver mist swimming over the river. Phantom fish darted through the mist like fair-weathered faeries, in and out, here and gone. “Aren’t you going to try to catch one?” asked Ceder, smiling brightly, hopefully, but the Dangler did not reply—indeed, he seemed not to know what to do with himself as the boat drifted through the mist. He fidgeted in his seat like a child told to sit still. He took the compass out repeatedly and held it over his head, then tucked it back into his pocket with a disappointed sigh, only to check it again seconds later, as if the haywire needle might begin working properly at any moment. When his fishing pole caught in the riverbank, the children at first thought it an accident born of restlessness, but, using the anchored tool to haul himself to his feet, the Dangler carefully climbed out of the boat. For the first time that day the children saw his back.

  There was a severed black hand sinking its thorny claws into the nape of the Dangler’s neck—the three gnarled fingers had the same volcanic, crusted skin as the dark hand the children had seen fall into the river by the first hole in the water, then again more recently scuttling along the riverbed in the Soridwood. That hand had lost its middle finger in a battle with the butterfly; the hand in the fisherman’s spine had all three long claws in tact. As Jai and Ceder looked on in horror, the dark hand flexed and squeezed, causing the Dangler to spasm rigidly. “I knew I missed one,” the fisherman said dryly.

  The black claw flexed again and the Dangler jolted in pain. Jai stood up at once and held out his hands. “Give me the satchel! We’ll pour the eggs over your back, like you did to the cut-off claw you caught when Why got killed!”

  The fisherman unhanded the boat. Leaning heavily on his pole as a walking staff, he waded through the lilies into the mist. The intransient fish fairies flitted after him in curiosity. “I would not risk pouring the El fish away for all the apples in the world.”

  The pink boat floated smoothly downstream as the Dangler receded into the distance. “Hey,” said Jai, “where are you going?”

  “Stop,” Ceder called after his fading figure, “we’ll come with you!”

  “No,” said the fisherman, an echo from the mist, “I must go alone.”

  This time the children did not follow.

  II. Fixed as Stars

  The ground underneath the Dangler’s feet crunched lightly. There was frost everywhere. He advanced with careless haste, eager for the end. He held the compass in front of his face. The needle spun faster than ever. A soft light filled the mist as it swept itself into a ring around him.

  A statue of pure ice lay before his feet. The statue was a woman without eyes. The fisherman fell to his knees. Her toes were small drops of rain; her ankles slender rivulets; her arms two silent streams; her neck a quiet glen of curvy grace; her elfin face the captivation of every sailor smitten with the open sea; her hair the perfect waterfall. Her beauty was the mist, which filled the air. Where her eyes ought to have been were instead two round recesses in her countenance that were quite as out of place as holes in running water.

  With shaking, failing arms the Dangler held the eggs up as if to crack both at once over a frying pan. The light from the two El fish beamed out and cut through the mist, a pair of fencing searchlights.

  The hand of black bone in the Dangler’s back clenched its claws together, squeezing so hard that a spurt of glowing magma swelled up and shot out of its severed stump. The fisherman arched back in pain, dark water spraying from the wounds in his back. With a quivering effort, he fought to lean forward far enough to pour the contents of the enchanted eggs into the empty eyes of the statue. The clear water flowed into the holes in her face and spilled down her cheeks. The Dangler did not stop pouring until he collapsed, finally wrenched to the ground by the vice grip of the claws in his spine.

  The El fish passed into the eyes of the statue. She blinked once, looking at the fisherman prostrate on the ground next to her. Then she began to melt. As her body lost mass her eyes remained fixed on the Dangler. “Saerin,” she whispered, “you found me.”

  He said her name, “Silver,” and she smiled like the sea on a windy day. The Dangler slid one hand beneath her head. A flash of gold appeared in the dark depression of the fisherman’s left eye, then it jumped to the right eye, back and forth. The silver fish in the woman’s face stared adoringly at the golden sparkle behind the Dangler’s mask as she melted away to her last drop. A strand of her hair was all that remained where she had been—one watery strand, cupped in his hand where he held her head.

  The Dangler raised the enchanted eggs over his hat, drenching himself with endless rain. He rose to his feet and took a lurching step forward, then fell to his stomach, face down, the black claws bleeding him dry.

  “Thank you for the flowers, Saerin,” said a voice behind him, “lilies are my favorite.” Before he could spin around, a cool hand touched his back, stilling him like a bell. He gasped and shuddered as the three long claws slid out of his body.

  The Dangler took a deep breath and turned around. No one was there. The hand of black bone hung suspended in mid-air in a cloud of dense mist. The three dark fingers twitched like a fly stuck in a spider web. The mist thickened until it sparkled like a diamond and the black claws were crunched into dust.

  “Where are you?” asked the fisherman.

  Before him the mist swirled together in the shape of a woman. “Do you still love me,” she whispered in his ear, “though you can never touch me?”

  He raised an arm to her face. His fingers passed through her. The mist reformed. “I loved you when I knew neither your name nor my own,” he said to her. “I am empty without the sea.”

  “I will never grow tired of hearing you say that. Oozing charm, my old Saerin.”

  The Dangler stared at her, utterly confused. “We have met before?”

  She threw her head back and laughed. It was a quiet sound. “I believe that is why I love you so much: reliable as any river ever was. And far more handsome.”

  The Dangler turned his hands up helplessly. “Who are you? Who am I?”

>   “Waves and mist are not so different, after all. You and I, we are very much the same.”

  “Please,” his voice cracked, “what are you saying?”

  “We have had this conversation a thousand times a thousand times and more. Will you ever remember?”

  He shook his head with regret. “I would give all my gold for a memory of you.”

  She stared at him, her body drifting apart then coming together, all but her eyes, which were as fixed as stars in the sky. “Do you remember kissing me at the wishing well?”

  The Dangler furrowed his brow, trying to summon any memory of such a thing.

  “Do you remember waving goodbye to me in the rain?”

  He hung his head. The depth of sorrow under her words was more than he could bear.

  “How can you forget me,” she pleaded, “and say you love me still?”

  “I have no answer,” he said, “but that I love you.”

  She dropped her face into her hands. Tears formed in her silver eyes and fell through her wraithlike hands to the ground.

  “Tell me,” said the Dangler, “if we have been through this before, what happens next?”

  “I tell you each and every time: you leave. You wave goodbye to me in the rain. You kiss me at the wishing well. A loyal Dwor fish brings you down the Secret Stream, and you wake me up. Then you leave again. Over and over, you leave, from the Dawn of Time to Dusk of the Last Day.”

  “But… I have seen no wishing well.”

  “In the forest, Saerin. Think!”

  He rubbed his chin. “Are you a ghost of one I loved?”

  “I am the one you love. I am the Spirit of the Sea. I am all the water you have ever touched and beheld, every fountain, pool, and drop of rain; all these are my domain. Soon this mist will float away, and I with it, but while it is here I am as real as you or any fish.”

  “I have just come from the river, and… and before that I have been alone in a lagoon for longer than I can remember. Where were you then?”

  “Saerin, did you not see with your own eyes? It was no illusion that I lay frozen at your feet, here, and have been so for all but a thousand years.”

  “But why? How came this to be so?”

  “I cannot remember when or how I froze any more than a woman knows when she is passing into a dream.” The mist that formed her body began to drift away.

  “A thousand years,” he repeated. “Are you truly so ancient?”

  “The sea is deep, my love, but how deep is the water? The river runs fast, my love, but what is the speed of the water? I may sleep in a body of ice for a thousand years, but I can no sooner put an age to my essence than you can tell me what water would look like without the seafloor to support it, the current to move it, or the wind and the sun to tease it into vapor and ice.”

  She was little more than a face in the mist, now. The Dangler bowed his head. “Please, not so soon. Stay with me. Were you made of mist or magic, I should love you no less.”

  “I cannot remain here after the mist fades. The nature of water is to go where it may, even in places fish cannot follow. That is all I can do.”

  “Then we can be together when I return to the river?”

  She shook her head, throwing off mist like smoke in the wind. “When you leave, you will find the river afflicted with the fingerprints of a demon. There, I cannot flow freely.”

  “But I will find you after that?”

  “Only here. Only now. And in another thousand years.”

  “In any pool or brook I might see you!”

  “Were it all so simple!” cried the face in the mist.

  “I will change our fate!” he swore to her.

  “Ever do you promise me,” said the Spirit of the Sea, “and I will look for you to try. But I fear what happens before will have happened again, and I will be frozen long ere you find me. My heart will break and all the waveglass in the world will fall into puddles of my tears.”

  “How can this be?” the Dangler asked desperately. “Time flows like a river. It does not turn in a circle.”

  “Time is a wave as well as a wheel,” she said. “We are like two passengers in a boat, buoyed up and down by the motion of the sea, never going anywhere but that the world spins underneath us.”

  “Impossible!” said the fisherman. “Impossible that I could ever forget this, forget you, or these words, this story!”

  “Impossible,” she mouthed at the same moment as the Dangler said the word a third time. She winked at him. “Whether every spoken syllable is the same each time around—who can say? It does not matter if the boat is pink, only that it need not sink.”

  “The boy and girl!” the Dangler exclaimed, having forgotten all about Jai and Ceder. “They can change all of this, then, by what they do?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Boys and girls cannot do anything at all but hold hands and enjoy the ride.”

  “How did this all begin?” he pleaded. “How will it all end?”

  She laughed gently and ran one finger across his cheek, fogging the glass. “My dear Saerin, trying to figure out where the Land of Lin begins is like trying to sail to the end of the world; it has no beginning, no end, and you will always end up right where you began.”

  The Dangler’s face was a mask of disbelief and anguish.

  “If you would witness the truth of my words,” she said, “ask the children what they have named the boat in your absence.”

  “Is there no hope for us?” he begged her. “There must be a way!”

  She faded to a wisp. “There are three wishing wells in the Land of Lin. They are the foundation of our world, bridging sea to sky.” Her eyes twinkled like starlight, silver pinpricks. “I have been there, Saerin. I am the stillness at the bottom of the sea. But I have been to the top of the sky. I have bathed in uncharted constellations.” She smiled but the Dangler could barely see her.

  “They must be beautiful,” he said, “if one could see them so.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do I really say that every time?”

  “You do.”

  He paused. “Well, it is a charming thing to say, is it not?”

  She flung her arms around him, bursting into scattered puffs of mist. Her voice whispered from the last breath of vapor in the air, “If you can find the third wishing well in time, there is hope.”

  The Dangler felt a cold kiss on his lips, but Silver was no longer there.

  III. Pointing to the Sun

  Taking a long count of silence, the fisherman gathered his thoughts and walked back to the river. The pink boat drifted toward him at just the right speed for him to climb aboard with one step.

  “We thought you were dead,” said Jai.

  The Dangler buried his face in his hands.

  “You vanished into the mist hours ago,” said Ceder, “and we’ve been sailing straight as an arrow ever since. How in the world did you get ahead of us?”

  The Dangler did not reply. He leaned over the side of the boat and stared into the water, seeing only his reflection. He put his hand in the river. It was uncommonly hot. He turned to the children suddenly. “What have you named the boat? This boat! Tell me, I beg you, or I may be undone.”

  Jai looked to Ceder, shocked—they only had the idea to name the boat in the last hour while the Dangler was off by himself, lost in the mist. Ceder smiled at the fisherman innocently. “The Riverlilly. Do you like it?”

  “Did you hear me speaking of the stars last night?” the Dangler asked her pointedly. “Tell me the truth! Did you hear me give the names of the stars?”

  “I don’t think so, no,” Ceder stammered, startled by his sudden intensity. “I guess we fell asleep pretty fast. Why do you ask?”

  The Dangler sat back, stiff as his fishing pole. “It seems that I have an old name, as well. Once upon a time I was called Saerin of Silvermourn. Those days come again.”

  The children did not know what to say. “Cliff would absolutely flip out if he heard
this,” Jai whispered to Ceder. “It would blow all those crazy theories of his out of the water!”

  The underground stream—the Secret Stream, so-called—moved at a brisk pace. In a moment they were greeted by the sight of a dazzling waterfall. The stream flowed directly through the cascading falls before mixing with the light of day.

  The Dangler stared darkly at the waterfall and pulled the brim of his hat down. He made no move to guide the boat to safety. Astray hid under the foremost bench and the children crouched and covered their heads as water pounded into the boat like the river itself had been flipped on top of them.

  When they were free of the falls Jai and Ceder eagerly looked east to see what wild new lands awaited them. The river ran true to the base of a mountain and disappeared inside a yawning tunnel. The mountain looked like a pyramid pointing to the sun. On its summit was built a tower as crooked as an old finger, raised high into the sky, casting an early morning shadow over the river, enveloping the boat. Above it all, the moon was slowly creeping in front of the sun, a silhouette like a deep hole in the heart of all heavenly fire.

  A beam of blazing red light speared out of the crooked tower, aimed directly at the boat, and a seething voice rumbled down from the top of the mountain, gaining like an avalanche until it spilled over the river: “Children, I see you.”

  The Year Six Hundred & Sixty-Six,

  No one could say for sure why the fisherman left Coral Wing. On a dark night when the sea was asleep he took his leave of the castle and walked away across the surface of the water as if he had never heard such a feat was impossible. His footfalls left no tracks. When he found himself at the mouth of the river he did not tell the guardian where he was going or whence he came, but the Oldest Fish in the Sea let him pass irregardless out of respect for his elders.

  The river led the fisherman to a raging whirlpool. Inconsolable in his unrelenting melancholy, he leapt into the black hole and was sucked into oblivion.

  He drowned in darkness in infinite space. He had stepped off the moon and was plummeting through limbo—nothing else could fall so far. Down, darker and darker.

  There is hope. There is hope…

  He awoke in a secluded lagoon. He could not remember how he had come to be there. He cast his fishing line and sat back, staring at the water.