The Water and the Wild (26 page)

“They were Dulcet the Great's idea,” Oliver said excitedly, “when the Southerlies invaded the wood during the Liberation. Using the webbings, Northerly allies could look out and attack from above, same as the wisps. They say that Dulcet spent thirteen nights straight sewing the webs all by hand. In fact, there's a fragment of a poem that tells about how his needle—”

“Ollie,” Fife said. “Not the time, mate.”

“I did promise that I would give you safe passage,” said Silvia. “Walking aloft on the webbings, you'll be clear out of any danger of the Barghest or Southerly Guard, right up until you reach the borders of the Southerly Court.”

“But how do we walk on
webs
?” asked Lottie.

“They're enchanted, fretful child,” said Silvia, turning up her snub nose. “You'll be perfectly safe on them. The only thing that could possibly undo that enchantment would be for you to follow a swamp flame off your
path, and I trust that none of your band would be foolish enough to do that. Now! Kisses all around, and be on your way. What a sweet sadness parting can be!”

“Oh, positively saccharine,” muttered Fife.

Silvia observed her son for a half moment. She stooped, ran one spindly finger down the swoop of his nose, then drew him into her arms and pressed a kiss into his hair. When Silvia backed away, hand raised in farewell, Lottie thought she saw a solitary tear glint on one of her long lashes. Of course, it could have just been Lottie's imagination, or the shadow play of the moon and the swaying birch branches.

“You
do
know what sort of danger you're placing yourself in?” Silvia said, turning to Lottie. “If the king got his hands on you, I fear you'd come to a nasty end.”

“I—I'll be careful,” said Lottie.

“Goodbye, Your Seamstress,” said Oliver. “Thank you for your kindness.”

Oliver bowed, Adelaide curtsied, and Lottie forgot what she was supposed to do and ended up making an awkward curtsy-flop-trip. Fife did nothing but turn on Mr. Ingle's lantern, hold it high, and float off, up the steady incline of the webbings over the river.

“Well,” he said, “are we heading south or what? We're burning moonlight.”

Oliver and Adelaide, like Lottie, remained still. They were all eyeing the webbings with distrust.

“Oh, c'mon,” said Fife. “You heard her: it's completely safe.”

“That's easy for you to say!” said Adelaide. “You're
floating
.”

“Well, I can't help that. You want me to hold your hand or something?”

Adelaide's eyes burned. “
No
.”

Still, she did not move. Oliver's eyes had turned a grainy brown, like cinnamon. He was uttering something under his breath—poetry, Lottie guessed.

Lottie made the mistake of looking up through a wide gap in the silken webs, which climbed foot after foot into the air, high above the dark wood. It was a long way to fall. Lottie shifted her sneakers back from the riverbank. Eliot's sneakers.
Eliot
. He couldn't get any better if she didn't move forward.

Lottie stepped out. She placed one sneaker on the web, then the other. It was that easy. Just as Silvia had promised, the web held. Lottie did not even need to balance herself.
She stood upright with perfect ease, as though she were merely taking a stroll in Skelderidge Park back home.

“Told you,” Fife said. “Now come on, the rest of you. Are we going to the Southerly Court or not?”

Lottie turned back to tell Silvia something. What, exactly, Lottie wasn't sure of, even as she turned. Perhaps a “thank you” for the enchantment and the safe conduct, or an apology for not being able to do anything for the Seamstress' plagued people, or maybe just a simple goodbye. But Lottie did not end up saying a thing. The Seamstress of the wisps was gone.

The strands hummed with wind as the quartet walked along the webbings, over the River Lissome. Fife swooped ahead to lead the way, the light of the lantern bobbing and darting along with him. He kept well ahead of the others, his expression creased in lines that Lottie now knew meant that Fife was in no mood to talk.

Lottie had thought that walking on webs would be a slow, arduous process of watching her every step, edging along gaps in the threading and constantly balancing and rebalancing. Instead, Lottie felt the enchantment of the
webbings working on her feet; her shoes shifted and slid of their own accord, a shoot of web always firmly under her steps as she followed the webbings up a sloping incline, from just above the river water to high up in the trees. The only real difficulty turned out to be that Lottie tended to forget she was quite so high up, and each time she accidentally looked down, a sickening swash of vertigo swam up her throat.

Lottie tried to distract her thoughts, but they kept circling back to the memory of how Silvia Dulcet had looked at her, back at the glass pergola. How could someone as important as the Seamstress of the wisps really think Lottie could be a ruler? That she could take the place of a king? Lottie, of course, knew that was a ridiculous idea. She had enough trouble making good grades at Kemble School, and Mrs. Yates had told Lottie that she wasn't even responsible enough to own a hamster. There wasn't a chance she could run a whole island full of sprites and will o' the wisps and quarrels and plagues. That might be true, but the rumor was still out there, and the king still wanted her dead because of it. Lottie thought she might just agree with the Seamstress of the wisps. How stupid these sprites really could be.

They traveled along the webbings for full hours, mostly in silence. Lottie walked alone, just behind Fife's guiding light. She glanced back once and saw an ashen-faced Adelaide holding Oliver's elbow.

“It's going to be all right,” Oliver whispered, and he placed a careful kiss on his sister's temple.

Adelaide, Lottie noticed, was having trouble breathing. She inhaled in short, raspy retches.

“What if we're too late?” Adelaide wheezed at last. “We've wasted so much time. King Starkling could have already held his trial. Father could already be—”

“No,” said Oliver, his eyes a determined indigo. “We'll get there in time.”

The webbings had begun to dip so that now the four were no longer walking above the trees on either side of the river but alongside them. Here, birches mingled with thickly twisted pines. The grass grew green, short, and jagged, and then it disappeared completely under a siege of watery ground.

Now black reeds edged the bank of the River Lissome, and gnarled, moss-covered conifers emerged from its waters. The river was slowly broadening, turning into swamp. The webbings, which until now had stretched
as wide as the river, stretched wider still to accommodate the breadth of the darkening waters. It was a quiet swamp; there were no buzzing bugs or bellowing bullfrogs. It did not smell putrid here, as it had back in the quarantined Wisp Territory. In fact, it smelled pleasant—so pleasant that Lottie thought she ought to stop walking altogether, close her eyes, and breathe the air in. Not for too long . . .

“None of that,” said Fife, shaking Lottie's arm. “That's what they'd like you to do.”

“Who?”

“Them.”

Fife pointed ahead, and for a moment Lottie saw nothing but dark, rippling water. Then a green flame trembled into focus. Then another, over there! And another! There were dozens flitting this way and that, all along the edge of the swamp.

Adelaide breathed harder. “Where are we? Are those—are those flames? Fife Dulcet, where
are
we?”

“Sweetwater.”

“WHAT?”

“Look, I didn't tell you we'd be passing through before because I knew you'd freak out.”

“Well, of course I'm freaking out!” shouted Adelaide. “Sweetwater is the most dangerous place in all of Wisp Territory! Even the wisps are afraid of it!”

“Yeah, well, the wisps are a bunch of spineless dolts,” Fife said. “Don't be such a priss, Ada. We've got to go through the swamp. It's the only way to the Southerly Court.”

“I don't want to,” whispered Adelaide.

“Then go home.”

“Stop it, Fife,” Oliver said, his voice unusually hard. “Don't take it out on her.”

Fife licked his lips and crossed his arms. Oliver turned to Adelaide.

“Fife knows this territory better than the rest of us,” he said. “If going through Sweetwater is the only way, then we'll just have to. That's my vote. What do you think, Lottie?”

“How is Lottie supposed to know?” Adelaide cried before Lottie so much as opened her mouth. “She doesn't know all the horrible stories about the swamp. She doesn't know the danger!”

“There isn't any danger,” said Fife, “if you pass through the right way.”

“Oh, and I suppose that being half wisp makes you a qualified guide?” Adelaide grabbed Lottie's hand. “Don't let him take us there. That's where all of the
bad
wisps go.”

Lottie flustered under the stares of the others. “Is it really that bad?” she asked. “It's just a swamp, isn't it?”

“Well, no,” admitted Fife. “The swamp's filled with oblivion. You know,
pure oblivion,
not from concentrate.”

“It'd help,” said Lottie, “if I knew what oblivion was.”

“It's dangerous stuff,” said Fife. “Gets to your brain, turns you batty.”

“HA!” Adelaide pointed at Fife in triumph. “You just admitted it. It
is
dangerous!”

“Like this entire trip of ours has been a walk in the park,” said Fife, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, I'm not suggesting we take a skinny-dip in the swamp. We walk the safe route. We're fine if we stick to the center of the webbings, away from the banks.”

Lottie considered all of this for a long minute.

“I vote yes,” she decided.

Adelaide's face contorted, gaping and livid.

“I'm
sorry,
” Lottie told her, “but it sounds like Fife knows what he's talking about. What's important now is getting to Mr. Wilfer as soon as possible, isn't it?”

“Don't bring my father into this!” said Adelaide. “Fine, go on, then. Right down to Sweetwater, to our pretty deaths, just so Fife can show off!”

“I'm not showing—”

“Quiet, all of you!”

It was the first time that Lottie had ever heard Oliver shout. The forest fell silent.

“We voted,” said Oliver. “Three to one. That's how we decided this, and that's what we're going to do. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Fife.

Lottie looked warily over at Adelaide. “Agreed,” she said.

“Have it your way,” mumbled Adelaide. “But don't blame me when you're choking in oblivion, half dead, your body stripped from your soul. No, no! On our merry way!”

Fife had stopped paying attention to Adelaide and instead pulled Spool from his pocket. He ducked his lips against the yellow kingfisher's back and whispered a single, indiscernible word. The genga fluttered from Fife's hand and straight into the swampy blackness beyond.

“I'm sending Spool ahead of us, in case we run into trouble,” said Fife.

“Good idea,” said Oliver, reaching into his own pocket.

Keats emerged, a blinding flurry of white feathers, and swooped toward the swamp, following Spool into the darkness. A flash of lavender followed him, trilling a shrill song—Adelaide's genga, Lila.

Lottie drew Trouble out of her pocket. He looked particularly small and still in her hand, and Lottie realized that he was sleeping. She poked lightly at his back.

“Um, Trouble?”

Trouble opened one eye. He gave a short, unhappy tweet.

“Come on, Trouble,” Lottie whispered. “Don't you want to go with the others?”

Trouble closed his eye. He ducked his head and went right on sleeping.

“Are you
ignoring
me?”

She looked up and saw that Adelaide was suppressing laughter.

“It's okay,” said Oliver. “You're still learning.”

“What am I doing wrong?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” said Oliver. “Trouble just seems to be—um—”

“Badly behaved,” said Adelaide. She sounded smug.

Lottie felt her cheeks go red. She slipped Trouble back into her pocket.

“Now listen up, ladies and gent,” said Fife, “'cause this is important: the key to getting through the swamp is to keep your mind focused, steady, and tuned to one thing. It doesn't matter what. Could be a phrase, or an image—but just one thing. Simple. If your mind starts to muddle up, just remember that one thing and keep walking straight. That's how you get through the swamp.”

“Have you done this before, Fife?” asked Lottie.

“Uh.” Fife licked his lower lip. “No.”

“We're going to die,” Adelaide said.

“We are
not
going to die!” Fife snapped. “Just keep your mind focused. The deeper we go into the swamp, the more of those flames there'll be. They can't touch you as long as you walk straight. They're not allowed past the swamp banks.”