I turned and followed the young man into the trees. He guided me to the center of the island, to the base of the Madonna tree where a fire burned and my sister rested, wearing only her nightgown. Her feet and legs were flecked with dried mud.
“Laura!”
She lifted her head, eyes widening at the sight of me.
“Lizzie! Oh Lizzie, how wonderful, how wonderful! Come, you must come.”
Laura drew me into her arms, and I saw then that she was clothed in a silver gown, one that sparkled like the young man’s scales. When I looked for him, I found him across a grand ballroom, dressed in midnight blue from head to toe. He nodded at me, then twirled away with a woman in his arms. It was Dellaphina, liquid and gold, running into his silver and blue as they danced to a high-blowing flute. Dellaphina kicked up her feet and the world was awash in golden warmth.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Laura asked me. “Look!”
Allegra had come to the party, her dark hair writhing with spiders. Her gown was ebony, her lips scarlet, and no one touched her as she crossed their paths. She walked to the water and sank into it. A string of ghosts trailed behind her, gray and thin like clouds, some wrapped in foggy cloaks. Among them, I recognized Uncle Eugene, handsome as autumn apples. He raised his hand to me, and I to him. Tears blurred my vision.
“Thank you, thank you—” I said, knowing then what he meant to me, and that I could never put it into proper words. He meant what Laura meant to me, and Mother and Father and Granny. And even Winnie. Even her. We were each pieces of the other, incomplete without the other.
Eugene passed with Allegra and the other ghosts into the water, and I felt the hollow ring of my heart. I knew what Father felt, to lose his brother; knew what it would be to lose Laura.
“Oh, Lizzie, look out!”
Laura laughed as a man swept me into his arms. My feet came away from the ground and the world blurred, a confused painting of half-real dancers. I tried to free myself but could not, so I relaxed in the man’s arms and felt my father’s embrace. I breathed deeply and smelled the tang of his pipe and felt the world slip out from under me. Everything else could wait.
But it was Laura’s face that stood out clearly as we danced; Laura’s face that was sharp and real when everything else was indistinct. When I focused on my sister, I found myself able to leave the man’s arms, to cross to her side and keep the whirling dance to my back.
“Lizzie? Dance with me?”
“You need to eat. Granny sent these,” I said and opened the packet of pocket pies. “Here.”
We ate the pies, and Granny’s crust flaked over us like snow. We ate every bit, Laura’s blackberry and mine cherry, and licked our fingers clean. By the time we had finished, the dancers had vanished, like a wonderful dream.
I covered Laura’s fire over with dirt and made certain every bit of it was out before we left. Laura didn’t laugh at the idea of me rowing here on my own; she didn’t say much of anything as we left the island.
The sun was lower in the sky — had an entire day almost passed? I imagined Mirabel’s wide fir-eyes watching us as we went and pulled the oars with all my strength to leave this place behind.
At the neighbor’s dock, Winnie hauled both of us out of the boat. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying, her clothing soaking wet, a coil of water lily vines caught in the collar of her shirt. Winnie hugged even me, blubbering apologies and something about ghosts. Had she seen her own while she waited?
The three of us were a mess when we came into the house, wet clothing, muddy feet. Granny said nothing, just handed us towels and told us to get cleaned up. My father caught me by the arm and held me back when Winnie and Laura went giggling into the bathroom.
“I told you not to go out there,” he said, but his voice wasn’t angry.
“I had to go.”
Father understood this in a way no one else in the house could have. I knew then that he was still my father; no matter what the war had done to him, he was still a vital piece of me. He smoothed my damp hair behind my ears and kissed my nose.
In my bedroom, I stripped out of my clothes and pulled a dressing gown on. Where the curtain hung askew, I could see a sliver of the lake. Ripples too large to be from a fish moved through the water, and I held my breath.
A young man in his silver scales jumped in the air, twisted in the sunlight. He spread his hands into the air, reaching for something I could not see—
— the edge of the dock warm and velveteen under my own questing fingers—
When I looked again, he was gone. Quick and bright. I hoped Mirabel had seen.
E. CATHERINE TOBLER lives and writes in Colorado — strange how that works out. Among other places, her fiction has appeared in SCI FICTION, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. For more, visit www.ecatherine.com.
Island Lake is a real place. My grandparents live there, and I spent countless summers fishing and swimming its waters. My cousins and I used to float in inner tubes to the island in the lake, and as we went, strange things would slither past our legs under the dark water.
Sometimes they were water lilies; other times, who knows? Was it more than just fish nibbling at our toes? This lake watered my writer’s brain from an early age. This story is one result.
THE PUMA’S DAUGHTER
Tanith Lee
1: THE BRIDE
Since he was eight years old, Matthew Seaton understood he was betrothed to a girl up in the hills. As a child it hadn’t bothered him. After all, among the Farming Families, these early hand-fastings were quite usual. His own elder brother, Chanter, had wed at eighteen the young woman selected for him when Chanter and she were only four and five.
Even at twelve, Matt didn’t worry so much. He had never seen his proposed wife, nor she him — which was quite normal too. She had a strange name, he knew that, and was one year younger than he.
Then, when he was thirteen, Matt did become a little more interested. Wanted to know a little more. Think of her, maybe, just now and then. “She has long gold hair,” his mother told him, “hangs down to her knees when she unbraids it.” Which sounded good. “She’s strong,” his father said. “She can ride and fish and cook, and use a gun as handily as you can, it seems.” Matt doubted this, but he accepted it. Up there, certainly, in the savage forested hills that lay at the feet of the great blue mountains, skills with firearms were needed. “Can she read?” he had asked, however. He could, and he liked his books. “I’ve been told,” said Veniah Seaton, “she can do almost anything, and finely.”
It wasn’t until the evening of his fourteenth birthday that Matt began to hear other things about his bride.
Other things that had nothing to do with skills and virtues, and were not fine at all.
Matt was seventeen when he rode up to Sure Hold, now his brother’s house, wanting to talk to Chanter.
They sat with the coffeepot before a blazing winter hearth. No snow had come yet, but in a week or so it would. Snow always closed off the outer world for five or six months of each year, and Chanter’s farm and land were part of that outer world now, so far as Veniah’s farm was concerned. This was the last visit, then, that Matt could make before spring. And his wedding.