The Goblins of Bellwater

by Molly Ringle

  Everything here was magic. This was her path, so there must be a way.

  She gripped the ring and walked forward until she waded into the shallows. She paused, ankle deep. These weren’t waterproof boots; none of her current clothes were designed for being submerged. As she hesitated and took stock, she realized the water wasn’t getting through her boots. She bent over to look; the water was pulling back from her feet, surrounding her ankles as if a bubble of air held it there. “Huh,” she said. She waded another step deeper, and another. The water was up to her knees now, and still it didn’t actually touch her. It surrounded her on all sides, but hovered behind an invisible wall that moved along with her.

  “Right, so.” She continued forward until the water was around her chest, then paused, looked back at the beach longingly, and faced forward again. A black expanse of saltwater gleamed at eye level, stretching far out to the mainland. “Brave.” She took a deep breath and walked forward.

  She closed her eyes when the water level rose above her face, holding her breath with the next step. But air continued to surround her head. Tonight it was warmer under here than in the snowy weather on land. Her squelching footsteps bounced and echoed within her bubble, like the sounds of water slapping beneath marina boards. Everything smelled of saltwater and seaweed. But she could breathe. She was dry, if clammy, and she could breathe.

  She opened her eyes. Green-black water curved around her in a giant wall, like an aquarium. It had closed over her head, smearing a transparent ripple between Livy and the free air. She drew in a breath to make sure she still could, and looked at her path. The blue glowing bottom-feeders rested in their two lines, some of them temporarily exposed to the air by her bubble. One of the sea stars lazily moved an arm, curling it out with extreme slowness as if searching for a clam to snack on while it was lying here.

  She kept forward—or rather, downward, for the path sloped steeply. These fjords were carved deep, as she knew well from her studies of the local environment. Now she saw what no one except divers ever saw in person: the sea floor of Puget Sound, the deep sections never exposed by low tide. It was one mucky, slippery place.

  The beach pebbles and rocks at the high end soon gave way to sticky mud that she sank into up to her ankles with each step. She learned to step on rocks or shells wherever possible to avoid getting mired down. But after descending for a couple of minutes, the path became a mess of seaweed, or sea grass, or algae, or kelp, or some mix of all of those. It came in various colors—hard to tell with only bioluminescent animals to light the way, but it seemed to be brown, red, purple, and off-white in addition to green. Slipping in the knee-deep layer of slime, Livy struggled to keep her balance with every step. The lightweight glowing sea stars and sand dollars rested easily on top of it, but her full-sized human weight kept sinking until she resigned herself to crawling this path too. Even on hands and knees, she slid as she progressed, and plunged to her chin often.

  The steep pitch of the path wasn’t helping. She was still going down, so she couldn’t have even hit the halfway mark yet. The air in her bubble was dank and chilly, her breath making humid clouds. She worried she would use up all the oxygen before getting to the other side. The fae wouldn’t let that happen, would they?

  Above and around her, through the magical aquarium wall, everything was black. She rarely spared a glance at her surroundings, finding it too scary to dwell on how she was crawling along the bottom of Puget Sound in the middle of the night. But a glimmer of something light-colored caught her eye, and she paused a moment to look aside at a bank of white sea anemones, hundreds of them covering a patch of the slope, their wispy tentacles waving in the current.

  She could see them more clearly than she expected, and as she continued downward, she realized other glowing things dwelled here beyond just the creatures forming her path. Whether it was because she was in the fae domain or whether bioluminescence was common down here in the ordinary world too, she wasn’t sure, but she began to catch glimpses of more things emitting light. A squid darted past, no longer than her forearm, its whole body outlined in blue-white sparkles. A sea slug with long wide spikes like water-lily petals rested on the sea-floor and glowed softly in pink. A school of skinny fish zoomed around her bubble, separating into two groups as they passed and then reuniting, each fish wearing a glowing green-blue stripe down its belly. Something reddish-orange undulated next to her, which turned out to be a large octopus, lit up by the ping-pong-ball-sized glowing jellies drifting around it. Livy shuddered and hurried past. She remembered anecdotes about the wiliness of octopuses, and could too easily imagine it reaching a tentacle in to wrap around her ankle and tug her off the path into a quick drowning.

  When something black and white and gigantic soared over her bubble with a rumbling swoosh, she yelped. The animal turned, a gleam of white in the murk, and glided past again, one eye upon her bubble.

  Ordinarily she’d have been delighted to spot an orca. Orcas didn’t tend to attack humans, she knew, but they ate nearly everything else that swam, and she probably didn’t look like a typical human at the moment. Plus she had forgotten how utterly huge orcas were. This one looked to be the size of a bus, and surely weighed a few tons. If it decided to ram her bubble just for sport, could she count on magic to keep all her air from shattering into a million mini-bubbles and leaving her to drown, or die of the bends when trying to ascend?

  With her attention on the orca, she didn’t heed the path closely enough. Her knee hit an especially slippery patch, and she went sprawling. The steep slope became a slide—she picked up speed, skidding on her front, and grabbed frantically at strands of kelp for something to hang onto. They tore free, or slurped through her gloves like escaping eels. She pulled up a knee to slow herself, making her body pivot. Her foot swung outward—and crossed the line of blue glowing sea stars.

  Instantly water poured down upon her leg, icy cold, its weight slamming her foot into the seaweed floor. With a sob of terror, she yanked her foot back within the confines of the path. The flood stopped; the bubble calmly resealed its wall.

  “Oh my God,” she said aloud with a whimper. She shook from head to soaked foot, and had to spend a moment cowering with her head on her knees until she regained the composure to continue.

  Skye needed her. Grady needed her. Kit was counting on her, and he loved her. And the bottom of the Sound was no place to dawdle.

  She unfolded herself and kept crawling.

  Above, the orca circled and came back for another pass. “Hey, water fae,” Livy said to whoever might be listening. “You’re not going to let this guy hurt me, right?”

  Something gurgled, low-pitched, from out in the depths—a laugh, or an answer. It didn’t sound like a whale, somehow. A moment later, something seal-sized swirled past, then circled back and bobbed upright next to her bubble. A harbor seal, she thought at first: silver with black speckles, and long whiskers on its dog-like face. As she sent it another glance, it gestured with one flipper in a greeting, exactly the way a person might wave.

  Then it spoke. “She is only looking. She wants to tell her pod about you. You are safe on your path.”

  The voice had the contours of a seal’s bark, and the message echoed and sounded muffled, like someone talking to you while your ears were underwater in the bath. Livy glanced in amazement at the creature, who followed alongside as she slid and slogged. “Thank you,” she said.

  The orca kept gliding around overhead, showing up as an occasional flash of white.

  “We don’t mind helping you,” the seal added. “You aren’t like some of the others, who fling their nastiness in our water. You take it out. You think of us.”

  “I try.” Livy decided against telling it that until lately she’d had no idea the fae even existed. She supposed her consideration for regular seals, orcas, fish, and other sea life probably still counted for something. She remembered another strange moment, and glanced at the creature. “My kayak paddle. Did one of you send it
back to me when I dropped it? I thought I saw your…hand. Or flipper. Um.”

  The seal spread its flipper again to display it, and this time Livy noticed it was more like a human hand—albeit a long-fingered, shiny hand webbed between the digits. “My tribemate did. We were near you.”

  “I appreciated it,” she said, still sliding downward in the seaweed, though the slope was becoming less steep. It seemed the path was leveling out at last. “I’m sorry about the other humans. The ones who mess up the water. We’re working on them.”

  “We smash holes in their boats or overturn them with waves when we must.” The seal said it matter-of-factly, which sent a chill through Livy. She recalled that fae-world values were not the same as human ones.

  “So,” she said. “Am I in the middle of the inlet now? The path seems flatter.”

  “Yes, you are at the depths for our small pool.”

  “Good to know.”

  She supposed for a sea creature, a half-mile-wide, hundred-foot-deep stretch of water was a small pool compared to the open ocean.

  “We would like you to destroy the goblins,” the seal added. “They steal our fish sometimes, and fling things in our waters, just as humans do. We drag them under and turn them into water fae when we can catch them, but they are often too fast.”

  She would have opted not to get in the middle of an otherwordly war, but apparently such was her lot tonight. She sank up to her shoulders in muck again, and pulled herself free. “I’ll do my best.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  SKYE SAT ON MOSSY DECK BOARDS IN THE TREETOP VILLAGE, HER ARMS SPREAD TO THE SIDES AND HELD BY TWO goblins. She didn’t mind. She felt pleasantly dazed. Around her, the tribe played music and raced about gathering food for the party, their scampering feet shaking the boards and making the lightbulbs and lanterns and jars of glowing beetles swing in the branches overhead.

  Grady had followed her, as Redring predicted. He sat next to her, similarly immobilized, almost close enough to touch, but she didn’t have the energy to reach out. No need. Soon they’d be transformed, and free to scamper about like all the others.

  A commotion drew her attention, loud screeching and yipping from the ladders leading up to the decks.

  “Look who came to see us!” A goblin flung a man onto the boards, chained-up and gagged.

  Skye recognized him, though it took her foggy brain a moment. Kit, the liaison. He brought gold to the tribe, though he didn’t want to. An ally, but a troublesome one. Also former kin to Grady, and close to Livy, and he had tried to help Skye somehow…but it hurt to think of all that, a hurt that was thankfully dying away. She welcomed its demise.

  “Such good timing.” Redring crawled into view on three limbs, holding aloft a large wooden bowl with the other hand. “He can witness their transformation.”

  “And if he misbehaves?” The goblin called Slide, with a battered dead iPhone chained around his neck, hulked over Kit with twitching fingers.

  “Then he falls tragically off the treehouse and we claim a new liaison. Our liaisons do die young. It’s as if they don’t like serving us.”

  The tribe screeched with laughter.

  “Wonder who it’ll be,” someone called.

  Redring poked Grady’s leg. “Not this one. We get him instead, thanks to our new lady.”

  Most of the tribe cheered, but Slide grunted and curled his lip into a sneer as he raked his gaze across Skye and Grady. “He might still come to harm. He doesn’t deserve to be her mate.”

  Disgust shivered through that fading human kernel of Skye’s mind, and Grady twitched in his bonds, likely feeling it too. Flattery was what Skye felt now more strongly. She might not desire Slide and might have to claw at him to keep him away, but to be desired and fought over meant status.

  “Shut up, Slide,” Redring said. “Be patient. It is not as though we keep to one mate for long. You’ll have your turn, as will we all.” She ran her twiggy hand down Grady’s leg, which made him twitch again, but his gaze followed Redring attentively.

  “Rrggh!” Kit writhed on the boards, fury contorting his face as he watched, but he didn’t manage to work his arms or mouth free. Slide kicked him in the midsection, and he started gasping as if the wind had been knocked out of him.

  A tiny chord of protest struck within Skye, and Grady tensed up for a second. Then Redring stepped close to them, her body blocking Skye’s view of Kit. She held up the bowl. Her presence soothed Skye, and the contents of the bowl fascinated her: round red fruits, possibly cherries or grapes or even small apples, glistening and sticky as if stewed a long time in spices and sugar. Exactly the kind of food Skye had detested for the last several weeks, but now she couldn’t imagine why. The warm, syrupy smell curling off the fruits made her salivate.

  Redring raised her voice. “My tribemates!” The music cut off, except for one low ongoing note that changed gradually as it rumbled along, like a bullfrog’s voice perpetuated. The goblins crowded near to watch. “We have waited so long for our lovely new sister. She is feisty. She resisted us a good while.” Redring ran a scratchy finger down Skye’s cheek. “She even defied us in her choice of mate—but in doing so, brought us a new member!” She transferred her caress to Grady’s jaw. He stared glassily at her. “How we have enjoyed watching your matings in our woods, young ones.”

  All the goblins whistled, whooped with laughter, and made mocking grunts. That sliver of humanity within Skye coiled tight in humiliation and outrage, but it had been sequestered away where it barely affected her anymore.

  “Finally you’ve come to us.” Redring wrapped both hands around the wooden bowl. “We don’t need tedious ceremonies. Let us merely give you our most sacred fruits, and bring you into our tribe. Then the celebrating can truly begin.”

  The goblins cheered. Somewhere beneath it, Skye heard another muffled roar from Kit.

  Her eyes stayed riveted on the stewed fruits. With two long fingers, Redring lifted a red globe from the bowl. A sticky drop plunked off it, and a curl of steam escaped from where it had rested. Redring held it out. Skye opened her mouth and took it.

  As her teeth closed on it, that bit of human righteousness lashed around in horror. Not only was the fruit over-sweetened and mushy, but that bitter metallic tang in the spiced sauce had to be blood. Yet this was how she became one of them, she understood. Maybe it was even Redring’s own blood. This was a great honor. She chewed and swallowed the cherry or crabapple or grape or whatever it was, and beside her, Grady accepted a fruit from Redring’s hand and consumed it too.

  The numbing warmth within Skye’s body brightened to a glow of sparkling life. She stirred, flexing her limbs. Strange pains shot down them, quickly soothed by an iron strength. Her bare feet and arms darkened to the grayish brown of fir bark, and her fingers and toes elongated to digits that could grip, climb, rip, strangle. Her body shrank, but it delighted rather than alarmed her: she was becoming distilled, concentrated to an essence of wild strength. After this, she could change into so many other shapes.

  Her tribemates released her arms. She leaped up, landing in a crouch on her new wiry legs and fingertips, admiring the mobile, tough creature she had become. The T-shirt and shorts hung absurdly loose on her now, and she plucked at the fabric and laughed—a cackle that twirled into the notes of a song. The tribe screeched in celebration. The music bounced into life again, matching her song and lurching the notes around in improvisation.

  Her mate cackled in answer, and she turned to beam at him. He was changed too now, wiry and strong and desirable, his teeth sharp as he grinned at her. He leaped upon her, tackling her against the boards, and she fought back, the two of them tangling and rolling and tearing the ridiculous human clothes off each other.

  Slide growled in frustration. Redring shoved him away. “They may have each other tonight, Slide. You can try for her tomorrow.”

  “And I will scratch out your eyes,” Skye said to Slide, as she clutched her mate close to her. Her voice squeaked and
rasped now, a beautiful sound. “I am not tired of this one yet.” How good it felt to speak whenever she wanted!

  “And I’ll fight you for her,” her mate told Slide, latching his arms around her. “I’ll keep her a long time. You’ll see.”

  Their tribe watched, egging them on with laughs and jests. Her mate set to gnawing at her neck, a rough but delicious sensation. She held onto him with all four limbs. Through the dancing goblin feet she caught a glimpse of the human liaison, still lying bound and gagged on his side, his gaze locked on the pair of them. A tear ran down over his nose, and he closed his eyes. Flowerwatch touched his head gently, then crawled to the railing and peeked over, as if standing guard against intruders.

  None of it mattered to Skye. She hadn’t a care in the world. She rolled with her mate and enjoyed the music and watched the lanterns swing in the cold wind, tiny snowflakes tumbling down through their beams.

  Livy shed actual tears of relief when the underwater path began sloping upward again. “Here I was thinking it was a good idea to stay on the island tonight,” she muttered. “Jesus.”

  A glowing jellyfish bobbed up next to her. It morphed into a gnome-like blob, and opened a gelatinous mouth to speak. “No matter where you started, there would have been a water path. It is built into the magic.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” Fae rules didn’t make sense. She’d been reminding herself of that, with a serious serving of resentment, all through this wet, creepy slog.

  To her best understanding, the goblins had set up their lair such that the only easy way into it was through their own path; and the only other way in, the hard way, was this one: several layers of defenses that had to be opened for you by the other fae, one element at a time. Or maybe that wasn’t the goblins’ plan at all, but it was the only way the locals could help her do it. Or maybe the locals wanted to test her courage: no magic sword or monster to slay, just a scary path to take. At its end, a magic ring to grab hold of, which a monster of sorts happened to be wearing.