The Water Witch

by Juliet Dark

  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 retribution 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 farther, 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 determine if Duncan was the incubus?

  There is a way to tell if a witch has been deceived by an incubus. Anytime a witch comes into contact with a warded disguise her own 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 Adelaide is going to notice, my father had said. And my mother had replied, There’s nothing to notice. She’s been warded.

  Had my parents 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 because her powers are not 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 said 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.

  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 the stories were meant to tell me who I really was.

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

  “Yes, I know Ralph, but I’m not trying to create a bond with Duncan …” But 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 note. It explained how a doorkeeper could keep a door open by creating a bond between herself and the door. 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 that 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 gaze 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 handpicked. There were wild roses, daisies, 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 was 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 human. So I don’t have any reason to be jealous, do I?”

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

  “Let me put these in some water,” I said, stepping backward. “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, flames were 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. Our transformations 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 fishhook.”

  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 more quickly than another transformation.”

  I got up to get the books I’d left lying on the coffee table. I could easily have reached them without rising, but I needed to put a little distance between us. I sat back down with the open Wheelock on my lap a good foot away 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 a 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.

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

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

  “Sure,” I said. “I thought we’d do it on the back porch. The wind is blowing from the west—away from the back of the house. We’ll stay dry.”

  I got to my feet, keeping his hand in mine, pulling at it to make him get up. As he got to his feet he pulled me to him and brought his head down to kiss me. His mouth tasted of peat and smoke and wild heather. He tasted like Liam, but there was a bitter taste as well. Like ashes …

  Or maybe that was the taste of our wards burning away.

  “Come on,” I said, pulling away from him. “We’d better get outside before we set something on fire.”

  He followed me through the kitchen out onto the back porch. The wind was blowing away from the house so the porch was dry, but Duncan still held back as I moved to the railing. I concentrated on clearing my mind of everything but the invocation I’d memorized, first calling upon the Basque rain goddess I’d read about in Wheelock.

  Mari, goddess of the rain, I call on you,

  you who reward the just and punish the false,

  you who wield the rain and the wind,

  daughter of earth, wife of thunder.

  Thunder rumbled in the west and the wind lifted up the ends of my hair.

  Let the lock that was locked unlock.

  Let the door that was closed open.

  Let the bird that was snared fly.

  As Wheelock had instructed, I pictured each image as I spoke it: a key turning in a lock, a door opening, a bird flying free. At first I felt nothing, but then a gust of wind blew the rain into my face. It felt deliciously cool on my skin. As it dripped down my neck, I felt as if it was seeping deep into my body.

  As the rain seeps into the parched earth come into me,

  as the stream finds its way to the sea, find your way into me,

  as the drip cracks stone over time, crack the bonds that bind me.

  Something moved deep insi
de, like rusty chains unraveling, unoiled hinges creaking, rock cracking. The rain, carrying my spell with it, was seeping down into the core of my being … into a hollowed-out cave beneath the sea. Undulating light rippled over painted limestone walls. It was the grotto I’d seen in my vision during the circle. Then, quick as the flash of light, I was in the woods, the windswept heath, the labyrinth at Chartres, and then barefoot in the grass surrounded by fireflies. The robed woman towered above me and pulled down the moon. I gasped and the woman spun around, moonlight flashing on the silver blade in her hand. I started to turn and run—as I had before—but then I didn’t.

  The labyrinth exists outside time, Brock had said. I felt its spirals coiling around me now. I held my ground and looked up into …

  My mother’s face.

  I gasped at the sight of her, not out of fear but because she was so beautiful. I had almost forgotten. Black hair framed a white face and pale blue eyes that softened at the sight of me. She knelt in front of me until her face was level with mine and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Callie, what are you doing here? Did you have a bad dream?”

  I remembered this moment. I must have been six or seven. We lived in a house on a college campus somewhere in New England. I’d woken in the night from a nightmare and called for my mother, but no one had come. Lights danced over the wall of my bedroom like a swarm of fireflies. I heard my mother’s voice coming from the backyard and had gone outside to find her, but found instead the frightening woman with the silver knife.

  “You were warding me, weren’t you?”

  Her eyes grew wide and her hand flinched away from my shoulder. I smelled the fear on her—my own mother looked at me as if I were a monster. Tears fell down my face, so many tears it was as if I stood in the rain. “Was that why you warded me? Because you were afraid of me?”