The River Witch

by Helena Rookwood

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A short distance away, Lysander watched the girl racing along the towpath. Her short dark hair whipped out behind her, her arms flailed as she hurried along the path, and her cheeks were red with the effort of running as quickly as she could. Not an experienced runner, then.

  Suddenly, as if drawn by something, the girl slowed and then drew to a stop. Lysander watched as she faltered and then streaked off the towpath towards the university ruins. Lysander wasn't sure why – but then he wasn't certain that even the girl herself knew exactly what she was doing, either. Her movements had been erratic over the past few days, the result of acting out of panic rather than habit. This, Lysander did understand. He was panicking a fair amount himself.

  Over the past few days, Lysander's mission had quickly descended into chaos. It had all started that night, he thought nervously, when the moon had been full and blinding, and he had felt his whole body screaming at him that something momentous had happened. He hadn't known what exactly it was, but it had made him anxious enough that he thought he should check on the girl to make sure that she was okay. No – to make sure that she hadn't escaped. Lysander had hurriedly packed up his tent, stowed it somewhere hidden, and raced straight to where the girl and her grandmother lived. Praying that there was enough cover to get close to the house in spite of the dazzling moonlight, and knowing that in all honesty there wasn't, Lysander had risked everything by stealing right up to the girl's window and peering inside. But she hadn't been there.

  Lysander's heart had dropped. Had she found out, somehow, that he was hunting her? Lysander dreaded to think what would happen if he lost her. It would mean the end of his career in the Iron City, at the very least.

  But then the pounding of wild, panicked footsteps had thundered up behind him. Lysander had dropped to the floor, and watched as the girl tore back up to the house. She was shaking, her eyes were wild, and Lysander didn't think she'd seen him, even though he must have been in clear view. Perhaps she had felt it too – the tremor that had jolted him from his sleep – and it had disturbed her as much as it had disturbed him.

  The girl had raced straight back into the house and through to her room. From beneath the windowsill, Lysander listened as she paced around her room, stripping off and then collapsing onto her bed. He waited for the sigh of sleep, but he heard nothing. And yet there was still no sound of any movement around the room. He had risked a glance into her room to confirm that she had gone back to sleep and that Lysander could leave her there until morning – but to his horror, she had still been wide awake, sat up in bed. He had dropped straight back to the floor, and fortunately the girl must have missed spotting him for a second time that night, for she didn't cry out or come to look out of the window – but it had been close. Closer than Lysander cared for.

  Had she seen something, he wondered? The cause of whatever it was that he had felt? She looked frightened enough. Cursing again that there was nowhere he could safely watch the house from, Lysander had reluctantly retreated, back to where he had stashed his tent. He would move it closer to the village, he resolved, which might incur a greater risk of discovery, but which would let him keep a closer eye on the girl. He hadn't expected to need to watch her around the clock, but things were rapidly getting more complicated.

  By the time Lysander had returned to the village, though, things had got worse. There was clearly something going on judging by the total lack of boats out onto the water. And so Lysander had taken a risk again, slipping right in amongst the houses to hear what was going on. He was going to have to do something soon, he thought crankily as he slipped around the side of a building near the moorings, before one too many risks was taken and the mission failed. He couldn't afford for this to fail.

  And then Lysander had seen the water serpent.

  He froze in his tracks, a pounding starting in his ears as he tried to take in what he was seeing. The fisherfolk were striding around, whispering to one another, casting frightened glances to where the serpent lay vast and bloodied on the riverbank... a woman covered in its blood sat nearby. How on earth had she managed to kill it?

  Lysander suddenly spotted the girl being hauled up and away from the river, the man with her gesturing to the serpent. Keen to hear what they were saying, he muttered a very old word softly under his breath. Suddenly the noise around him was amplified. Lysander could hear everything; the scurrying of insects beneath his feet, the lap of the water against the boats, the flap and scream of the gulls circling above, the pat of human footsteps pacing around the moorings, and all the whisperings of the gathered villagers. It was overwhelming, and it took Lysander a moment to adjust to so much noise. This was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the best way to listen in on a conversation, especially when he wouldn't recognise the voices he was keenest to listen to. It was difficult to isolate the conversation you wanted to hear amongst the babble, and it made it impossible to know if anyone was sneaking up on you. But there was no way for Lysander to get closer to the girl, and so he made sure that he was hidden, and then listened carefully.

  Fortunately, while the majority of the fisherfolk were muttering to one another in hushed tones, the villagers talking to the girl were speaking more urgently to her, not bothering to lower their voices, and their anxious tones stood out even among the cacophony of noise that Lysander could hear now. They were asking her if she knew what the creature was. Tab, they called her, and Lysander was touched to learn the girl's name. Then he stiffened. The fisherfolk had mentioned the girl's mother – the stories she had told about these kinds of creatures. Without a doubt, then, this girl – Tabitha – was Madeleine's daughter.

  But still, this didn't explain everything. A water serpent might well have been the subject of one of Madeleine's stories, but that didn't explain how it could be here, in reality, washed up on the shore like this... Lysander shook his head. It just couldn't be possible that this was really happening.

  The girl returned home, and Lysander had followed. He needed to keep a closer eye on her while he tried to work out what was going on, no matter how much of a risk it was. If she saw him... well, he hadn't wanted to cut her throat before making sure that she really did possess the stone, but if it came to it, Lysander would just have to do it. He settled on the roof of a neighbour's house in the end, lying quite flat. The girl hadn't emerged again that day, but Lysander was well-trained, and so although he was hungry, and a swarm of gulls insisted on swooping low over him every so often, he had remained in the vantage point he needed to watch the house.

  Lysander kept watch right through the day and into the night, only to wake the next morning and realise that the girl had vanished again. He groaned and rolled over onto his back. Why was she so difficult to keep track of? But before Lysander had much time to worry about where Tabitha had got to, a commotion from the village made him sit bolt upright and look back downriver. He couldn't see much from here, but even without needing to say the word he had whispered yesterday, Lysander could hear shouts and screams and panicked voices coming from roughly the direction of the moorings. An echo of the strange sense of change he had felt just a few nights before rippled through him and Lysander suddenly felt very queasy. For lack of knowing where his quarry had gone to, Lysander nervously made his way down to the moorings. Things had got far worse.

  It was difficult to stay out of sight with so many people rushing about in a blind panic. The smell of salt and mud which hung about the place had intensified, and the ground was wet with river water. Lysander frowned. There shouldn't have been any flooding without any recent rain. And it made the ground so slippery underfoot that it was difficult to move quickly and remain undetected. More than once, Lysander was almost caught out by someone rushing past him to the houses farther inland. He inched slowly closer to the moorings, occasionally flinching at the sound of another crash or shout, until he drew close to where the houses opened up to the stretch of riverbank which ran down to the moorings. There, Lysander froze.<
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  The bank was lined with a guard of fisherfolk, clutching at stone knives and oars and whatever other small defences they had managed to rummage together. They cowered together, determined to hold band together against the nightmare they were facing. They stank of sweat and desperation, and Lysander didn't blame them. Emerging from the water was an assemblage of faery creatures far worse than the water serpent...

  Without thinking twice about helping any of the villagers facing the creatures, Lysander bolted back towards the house. He should never have left; who knew where Tabitha and her grandmother were now if they were already aware that the creatures were here. What if they had already fled the village? Or been caught unawares on the river? No longer worried about whether he was spotted or not, Lysander raced back to the house as quickly as he could manage. This all had to end today; things were getting seriously out of hand.

  Lysander slid to a breathless halt near the house just in time to spot the girl and her grandmother staggering up from the river a little way ahead of him. Lysander hung back. The girl was slick with mud from head to toe, her hair was soaked and matted, and her entire body was shaking. Her grandmother was supporting her with a grim strength Lysander had not expected of her, forcing her granddaughter swiftly back to the house.

  Lysander had wearily clambered back up onto the neighbouring roof, but the girl and her grandmother had barely been inside the house for any time at all before reemerging again. The girl had been cleaned up, and was wearing clothes clearly intended for travel. He watched as they said their goodbyes, and then to his surprise the grandmother marched stoutly down towards the moorings, not bothering to arm herself with anything at all. He looked back to where the girl had been moments before – but she had already gone, flying up the towpath away from the village. Lysander had fled after her, at a distance, until she had veered away from the path and made for the university. He sunk down behind a tangle of bushes, and for the first time felt at a total loss for what to do.

  All Lysander could think was that this couldn't possibly be happening. Although the very purpose of the Iron City was to prepare a defence in case of the return of the fae, Lysander had never really thought that the day might come when they did return. It had always been some vague future possibility, a threat that would never manifest itself; the Iron Court was about preparation, not action. Lysander had never really given much thought to what would happen if the fae actually did return. Was it happening everywhere? Or had he inadvertently stumbled right into the beginning of it all? And what did all this mean for what he was supposed to be doing here? Was his sole objective still to find out if the girl possessed the stone?

  Lysander rubbed his temples, desperately trying to organise his thoughts. Warily, he allowed himself to consider that he actually didn't really want to harm this girl. Tabitha. He didn't think she was part of some plot. And she did look so like Madeleine... Lysander thought guiltily of what she would say if she knew that he had been sent here. He still had no idea whether Tabitha even possessed the hagstone.

  So he sat at the edge of the path, and deliberated, his thoughts jumping all over the place. Should he confront the girl now? Go back to the house and search for any sign that the stone was or had been there? Or did the appearance of the fae change everything?

  It was hard to think straight, Lysander thought, when you were very afraid. And loathe though he was to admit it, Lysander was terrified. He felt utterly unprepared for this, and every carefully honed instinct in his body was screaming at him to get away from whatever was happening in this village, to leave as fast as he possibly could and not stop until he was somewhere very far away.

  Everything had just spiralled so quickly.

  Lysander shot one last look towards the library. The girl didn't look as though she could do any harm, really. Not when he thought about the creatures he had just seen.

  Getting slowly to his feet and dusting himself down, Lysander came to a decision. He would return to the Iron Court and tell them what had happened here – without the hagstone.

  9

  CHAPTER NINE

  Tabitha had been travelling for days now. And she was exhausted by it.

  Just as her grandmother had told her to do, Tabitha had simply continued to follow the river west, past the library and the university ruins, past the abandoned town upriver which was said to have once been very important, and out into the lush countryside beyond it. She drew some comfort from keeping the river beside her, reminding herself that it must feed into the river she had grown up in whenever she began to feel homesick – which was often. Never mind that the narrow thread it had dwindled to now in no way resembled the wide, flat, marshy landscape she knew at home.

  The land here was all tangled up, she thought, all woodland and thicket and ragged fields. The wading birds had long since vanished from the water, and instead the fields were ragged with crows that cawed irritably at her as she passed them, with kestrels that hovered above while waiting to make their kill. At least the songbirds were the same she thought gloomily, watching two blackbirds hopping in and out of a distant hedgerow. At least there was something that she recognised in this unfamiliar land.

  When was the feeling of adventure supposed to come? Tabitha had read about this in her books – about heroes setting out at the beginning of their adventures, braving the unknown on some great quest. But this looked nothing like she had imagined it to, and felt a thousand times worse than she had ever dreamed it could be. Tabitha hadn't anticipated that it could be so unbearably lonely while on an adventure. Heroes were supposed to have a sidekick, she thought grumpily. But where was hers? She was utterly on her own out here, and who knew how many miles it was to the next settlement where some potential sidekick might be waiting.

  The weather was making her feel worse too. As the autumnal sunshine gave out to drizzle and Tabitha was forced to tramp damply through the fields, she wondered how she had ever enjoyed being in the water at all. She felt as if she hadn't been dry in days. The canvas sheet her grandmother had packed her to sleep under barely kept her dry at all, and certainly didn't leave enough space for her to dry her clothes out while she slept.

  And on top of all of this, Tabitha hadn't realised how tiring walking was. She had walked herself almost to exhaustion over these first few days on the road. She would set out the moment she woke up in the morning, and then didn't stop again until she was physically unable to continue, when she would collapse into troubled sleep, on ground that was too hard, in night air that was growing ever colder. At least the dreams about the knife had stopped, she thought. And it was better this way, she tried to tell herself as she hugged herself tightly in an effort to keep warm. If she allowed herself to pause – to stop and think for a moment, without the ache of her limbs to distract her – she might realise that she had truly left her home and that she had no idea where she was going.

  Tabitha had no idea how she was going to figure out where to go. She hadn't passed a single other soul in the days she'd been walking so far. No wandering folk, as her grandmother had called them, who might be able to point her in the right direction. No stranger out walking from a nearby village. In fact, there had been no sign of any kind of settlement at all. Tabitha wondered whether she would ever find anywhere else to stop, let alone this mysterious Iron City. Wherever it was.

  No matter how hard Tabitha tried to shake off her black mood, she was unhappily discovering that a lack of food and sleep and warmth can do terrible things to the mind. She had been very careful with the supplies her grandmother had packed her, carefully rationing the food she had brought. But perhaps her grandmother hadn't known just how far it might be to the next village, because even with her careful rationing, Tabitha thought that she hadn't more than a week's supplies with her, and she was already anxious about what would happen when she needed to find food for herself. She knew enough about what she could forage from the land – and thanked the earth that she had set out in the harvest season – but she had never
had to live off what she could find before, since they grew plenty of vegetables in the village. And while she might have been able to fish for herself with the line her grandmother had packed, she thought that it was unlikely she'd catch anything at all in the tiny stream the river had dwindled to. How could this be the source of the proud, wide river she knew at home?

  Tabitha slowed to a stop. How had she ever thought she would be able to do this? The despair began creeping in, and Tabitha didn't know how to shift it. She'd never had to before. Maybe she would feel better if she stopped to rest just for a little while, Tabitha thought. Just for a moment, until she could pull herself together. She hadn't liked to stop because of the miserable thoughts that crowded her mind when she did; but now that they were bothering her while she was walking, too, what did she have to lose?

  She looked longingly over at the stream. She had been nervous about going too close to the water again since the incident with the river mermaid, and had avoided getting too close at all as she had continued to wander upriver. But the water had widened out here, and was so shallow that she could see the pebbles and debris on its bed. Nothing could be waiting in that, could it? Nothing big enough to hurt her?

  Tabitha dropped her bag on the ground, and shuffled closer to the river, rubbing her aching shoulders as she went. She hadn't anticipated the pain that came of carrying all of her possessions on her back, either. She longed to sink into the water and let it ease the tension in her muscles, but she still paused at the riverbank, wanting to make absolutely sure that there could be nothing dangerous concealed beneath the surface before she allowed herself to touch it. But the water before her was indeed shallow, and Tabitha could see nothing in it. No river mermaids could possibly swim in this, Tabitha said to herself firmly. Nor even a snake like the one she had seen by the boats. She reached down and tentatively splashed a hand in the water. Nothing happened. She splashed it again, leaving her hand in the cool of the water for a little longer this time, and there was still nothing.