Racing the Dark (16 page)

With all my love,

Mama

Lana smiled and carefully put the letter in the box where she kept all her correspondence with her parents. She wished that she could have heard her mother when she noticed that mole under her eye, or her father when he threatened to take away the mirror. Her mother wrote as often as she could, but letters were no substitute for their companionship. Lana's life usually stayed busy enough that her homesickness was limited to times like these, when she was alone in her room reading her mother's letters. Though her mother had been kind in saying how mature she looked, Lana knew she had grown less than an inch since they left Okika. Her shoes still fit her perfectly, and the pants of the outfit her mother had bought just before they left were only marginally shorter. Akua said it was possible that the illness had stunted her growth. In any case, she was beginning to accept that she would never get much taller.

Instead of sleeping mats, Akua's house had strange raised beds that were much harder than what she was used to, but she appreciated them in winter. She stretched out on hers and sighed, grateful for the unusual respite in the middle of the day. Akua was out gathering herbs and other ingredients for a medicinal potion she planned to teach Lana this evening. She had told Lana to sweep out the cabin while she was away, but that had not been very time consuming, and she had taken the opportunity to read her mother's letter in private.

Akua's house was old, made of rough pink stone that held in the heat during the cold winters. It was the only residence on this side of the huge lake, and the villagers on the other side never ventured here. Akua said that they were superstitious about her powers and so kept a wide berth. It sometimes made Lana feel strange to go weeks on end without seeing a soul other than the one-armed witch, but usually she enjoyed the solitude. Unlike any of the villagers' homes, Akua's house, old as it was, did have real glass windows. They were thick and warped, however, so you couldn't see through them like those in Okika's wealthiest houses. The old pink house was nestled in a curve of the lake, so that the glassy silver water surrounded it on three sides. In the mornings the mist was sometimes so thick you could hardly see your hand in front of your face, so Akua had tied a rope from the door of the house to the woodpile out back so Lana wouldn't get lost bringing in fuel for the morning fire. By now, however, the morning mist had long since cleared, and it was warm enough that she might be able to go for a quick afternoon swim.

That, by far, was what she loved most about living with Akua. She had missed diving with a nearly physical ache since leaving her island. The water around the docks in Okika, and in all the major towns, in fact, was too murky to see in, let alone swim. But this lake was a treasure: as the big-city merchants had not yet deemed it worthy of commercial purpose, it was still pristine and beautiful. It wasn't quite as nice as diving on her island before the disasters, but she knew it was probably the closest she would ever get again.

Lana didn't bother to put on her sandals before she walked outside. Akua knew she dived, of course, but Lana preferred to do so slightly farther away from the house, when she was hidden by the reeds and could pretend that she was all alone in some magical marshland hidden from any human encroachment. She walked to a more distant part of the lake than usual, since the sun was so warm and the air smelled so dense and heady. The sun, nearly directly overhead, glinted on the glassy surface of the lake and was reflected in muted, mottled green and gray on the water plants. Eventually, she came to a small lagoon, almost entirely enclosed by large, broad-leaved trees. Here, the surface of the water was dotted with late-blooming purple lotuses. Smiling, Lana shed her clothes and stepped into the water. She pulled a half-opened flower from its leaf and braided it into her hair right behind her ear. She caught a glimpse of her reflection on the rippled surface of the water and laughed. Her mother was right, she did look a little more mature-her face had filled out to the point where she thought she almost looked pretty.

Lana took a deep, practiced breath and dove under the water. At first, it had been strange to dive with no need to look for mandagah, but she had learned to simply enjoy how beautiful and different the world looked underwater. A blue-scaled fish bigger than her arm looked at her curiously and then wriggled behind some nearby lotus roots. Lana moved languidly through the water, peeking under stones and periodically clearing her ears. As she moved to a part of the lake much deeper than anywhere she had ventured before, she caught a glimpse of something-a flash of silver, a sudden spray of light-in the corner of her eye. The lake's water sprite. She had seen it before when she dove in the deeper water. The other times it had merely observed her, but for some reason today it decided to approach. As it headed toward her, she could make out a strange face, so pale that she could see every pulsing vein beneath it. The sprite was no more than three feet tall and clothed in a strange green cloth that looked like seaweed. Its hair was white and hung around its head like a nimbus. Lana had never seen a water sprite before; they rarely showed themselves to humans. She panicked when she remembered the lotus flower that she had twined in her hair. Was it angry with her for taking it without permission? The creature stopped a few feet away from her and narrowed its silver, opaque, iris-less eyes at her. It reached with an impossibly narrow hand for the flower in her hair before pausing, hand poised.

"I know you," it said, the words curiously audible below the water. The sprite had the voice of a boy.

Lana was rapidly running out of air and she tried to signal this to the creature. After a brief moment he nodded and grabbed her hand. With a speed so great that she was afraid her arm might be ripped from its socket, the sprite drew her above water and onto a grassy bank beside a part of the lake she didn't recognize. She gulped air for a few moments until her vision stabilized. The sprite was seated a few feet away from her, on what looked like a lotus made of silvery water that rippled in the breeze. She had never seen anything like it before-it was beautiful, but on another level profoundly disturbing. Water shouldn't be able to form shapes like that, but clearly this sprite didn't follow the same laws as humans. Between his pale fingers he was twirling the purple lotus flower that had been in her hair. After a moment, he looked at her again. The strange effect of his opaque silver eyes was even stronger above the water and she couldn't control the sudden thumping of her heart.

"I know you," he repeated. Even his voice sounded like water, slow and drippy.

Lana took a deep breath. "How ... do you know me?" she asked.

He tossed the flower into the air. It glowed brightly and then melted, pouring in a steady purple stream back in the lake. "The witch took you to the island. She needed a stronger geas, that time ... I didn't think she should bring you. You are marked by a sacred creature of the water-you should have had no part in it. Ah ... but she is too powerful, that woman. Even I can't see her mind."

The creature's alien eyes had a kind of wistfulness. Something in his words sounded oddly familiar. She concentrated on that familiarity like an itch that needed to be scratched, and suddenly a jumble of forgotten memories forced their way through her consciousness. She had been sick and dead tired on her first evening in Akua's house, and the witch had given her more of the draught than normal. Lana hadn't even questioned what was in the tea, but it made her feel unusually sleepy and lethargic, so she had drunk less than she should have. What followed was hazy-and as she had woken up the next morning in her bed with her sleeping clothes on, she had dismissed it as a dream. She remembered seeing a look of pure avarice on Akua's face just before she hefted Lana's slight frame over her shoulder and walked out to the lake. Lana must have passed out sometime after that, because her next memory was one of being in the water, encased in a shimmering bubble of air being pulled like a chariot by the water sprite.

`You shouldn't take her there," she remembered his slow, drippy voice saying through her haze. They were above the water again, floating without getting wet right before an ancient stone staircase that ascended from the water onto a tiny island. The island was almost entirely covered by a shrine of the old style-like the pictures she saw in school of the difficult days before the spirit bindings. It had a sloped roof made with red-painted shells and a series of rounded arches around the sides. On the large wooden door (which looked much older than the rest of the structure) was an embossed carving of the three-toothed key-the ancient symbol of the death spirit.

"She belongs to the water, not to that," the creature had said again, as Akua mounted the stairs with Lana on her back.

Akua turned around to face the spirit. "She belongs to many things. And she will soon learn its power."

Then she remembered Akua opening that ancient wooden door and being overcome with a sudden terror. Of what happened after that, she had no memory at all.

Lana looked back at the sprite.

"Ah, so you remember a little. I had wondered how thoroughly she had drugged you. I tried to stop her, but I see it's too late now. The years have left their mark."

Lana's hands were shaking. "What are you talking about?" She felt like shouting. "What was that island? What was she doing?"

"Your master is in the service of the death spirit, little diver." Suddenly, the air before him started to shimmer and his water-lotus began to collapse back into the lake. He looked around in panic. Lana felt the presence of Akua's power and trembled. The shimmering air was doing something strange to the sprite's skin-he looked almost like he was bleeding water. He shouted something that sounded like the roar of a swollen river, but the strange thing attacking him didn't stop.

Why was Akua hurting this water sprite? The power Lana sensed felt like a geas; she remembered reading something in one of Akua's books about how it is occasionally possible to disperse their milder effects. Before she could think better of it, she bit sharply into her forearm, sucked and then spat her own blood onto the crouched figure of the sprite.

"A sacrifice from my body as recompense for his transgression," she gasped, heart pounding. She sensed a curious note of surprise, and then amusement from the power behind the geas. Lana stood there defiantly until the air stopped shimmering and the geas dissipated. The bite in her arm was still bleeding, but she hardly noticed. The sprite was sitting on its half-ruined flower, staring at her.

"Perhaps you are more than we all thought," he said, voice trembling.

"I never meant to be marked," she said.

The sprite began to sink back into the water. "Do you not wish to lay your own geas on me, for this?" He gestured toward her bloody spit, which was dripping down his cheek but somehow caught up in a tiny bubble of water.

She shook her head. How horrible, she thought, to have your entire life bound up in someone else's sacrifices. "Just ... speak to me sometimes. And maybe one day I'll find out what you're forbidden to tell me."

"Be careful, little diver. You should know better than anyone the dangers of swimming too far under the surface."

She watched as the water closed over his head, without even a ripple betraying that he had ever been there at all.

"I see you found Ino," Akua said when Lana walked into the house later, her hair still dripping.

"Who?" Lana asked, torn between fear and anger.

"The little water sprite. I had wondered if he would find you, but I hadn't expected him to approach you." Akua was sitting by the table, cutting vegetables for dinner, a task that usually fell to Lana.

"Well, why would you bind him with such a geas, then?" Lana asked. The bite on her arm was aching, and her success that afternoon made her feel a little reckless.

Akua glanced up, an appraising look in her eyes. "Caution has always served me well, Lana."

"What don't you want him to tell me? What are you hiding?"

"I'm not hiding anything, my dear. I'm merely sheltering you from knowledge that you are not quite ready for, like any good parent."

Lana thought of her mother and their hardships in Okika. Akua's motives for hiding this information from her were almost certainly quite different. But Akua couldn't know that Lana remembered some of what had happened to her that first evening. She sensed that the two of them were entering a game together, but Lana knew she was at a distinct disadvantage-not only did she not know all the rules, she also didn't know the stakes. But from the way the firelight glinted in Akua's dark eyes, Lana guessed that they were very, very high.

One evening a week later, Lana was hanging herbs on the ceiling to dry when she was startled by three loud raps on the door. Akua looked up from the book she was reading.

"Answer the door, Lana," she said.

The person knocked again and a man's muffled voice begged to be let in. "Who is it?" she asked Akua.

"Someone who wants our help, I imagine. Why don't you open the door and find out?"

Lana walked to the door slowly, wondering who it could be. They rarely had visitors, as the villagers generally avoided them.

Outside shivering in the light drizzle stood a man at least a foot taller than she, with weary bags under his eyes and a desperate, determined expression on his face.

"I ... I need the services of the lakeside witch," he said, teeth chattering.

Lana looked back at Akua, who merely nodded. "Come inside, at least," Lana said.

The man looked a little alarmed, but walked over the threshold. Lana shut the door as he took off his dripping hat and faced Akua, still sitting placidly in her chair.

"Please, I beg of you, help my wife ... she's been in labor these past ten hours and we're afraid ... she might ..." he trailed off. Lana was caught off guard by the grief in his eyes. She supposed it was to be expected that a husband would be upset when his wife was dying, but spending so much time with Akua seemed to have made her forget what normal human emotion looked like. After Akua's habitual reserve, such overt emotion seemed almost ... gaudy-though it shamed her to admit it.