Page 68 of A Dark and Drowning Tide

Sylvia gawped at her. “It must be.”

“Back in the days when wishes still held power,” she began, her bitter certainty solidifying with every word, “there lived a king whose realm had fallen on hard times. But no matter how poor the harvest or how hostile his enemies, he had one boon: all the waters in his land contained a strange and powerful magic. Of all those waters, the king’s greatest treasure was a pool that answered one question of each person who asked.”

“Incredible,” Sylvia whispered. “What shall I ask it?”

Then, realizing what she’d said, she clapped her hands over her mouth. Too late. That horrible voice hissed,Your heart’s greatest desire.

Lorelei stared at her in disbelief. It was so absurd, sostupid, she could scarcely formulate a coherent thought. All she could manage was “You wasted your question.”

“I’m sorry!” Sylvia cried. “I didn’t realize that would count.”

“You could have askedanything, you . . .”

Far too many insults came to mind to choose just one. All of them slipped away as her rage collapsed humiliatingly into despair. If only they had one morequestion—orperhaps a thousand more. Could it have told her whether any of the decisions she’d made had been the right ones? Could it have pointed her to the perfect piece of evidence to accuseHeike—ortold whether Ziegler had ever truly loved her?

Sylvia placed a hand on her shoulder. “Lorelei.”

It took Lorelei a few moments to realize how close she’d come to tears. At the plain look of pity in Sylvia’s eyes, her fury settled miserably into ashes. Bit by bit, Lorelei pulled herself together. They had come this far; she had to finish what they started. The weight of the spring’s anticipation pressed heavily down on her.

“Where is the Ursprung?” she asked.

The air shimmered with aether. Colors swirled through the darkness of the water and slowly, slowly, an image took shape. The full moon skated across its surface, waning as it traveled. When it hung dark in the sky again, another shape bloomed beneath it: an island in the middle ofblack waters, wreathed in mist. In the distance, Lorelei could make out fields of tulips dusted with ash and villages filled with angry, starving people. As the new moon filled with the thinnest crescent of light, the island shimmered and vanished as if it were a mirage.

Wherever the Ursprung was, it certainly wasn’t here.

Part III

The Vanishing Isle

Sixteen

ZIEGLER HAD BEEN WRONG.

Lorelei could hardly process it. All of them had given years of their lives to this project. She had rested all of her hopes, herdreams—no,her chance for survival on its success. In the end, they’d been chasing a completely false conclusion. How could Ziegler have made such a terrible mistake? How could she not haveknown?

Ziegler was not a secretive woman by nature, especially when it came to her work. Although Wilhelm had muzzled her in the months leading up to the expedition, it went against her very view of science. She shared her research freely, whenever and with whomever asked: foreign scholars, policymakers, young students. She did her best work when pitted against another mind.What good is knowledge, she’d say,if it can’t be improved upon?If she’d found the Ursprung, she wouldn’t have concealed it.

Would she?

No, Lorelei could not dwell on this now; it would break her. The image on the water’s surface faded, and the weight of that horrible, unseen stare lifted. The pool glittered with white, celestial light. Through it, all Lorelei saw was the reflection of her own drawn, embittered face.

She could not have received a worse answer to her question.

Not all the folklore Lorelei collected came in the form of neat little fairy tales. In the course of her fieldwork, she’d documented all sortsof artifacts: children’s rhymes and clapping games (her least favorite, considering children tended to sense her disdain for them), proverbs, jokes, several types of wedding ceremonies, even the ways people built their homes. And then there were the urban legends, things even stranger than the wildeleute.

One that recurred in almost every region in Brunnestaad was the tale of the Vanishing Isle. It was said that it rose up from the waves on the night of a new moon, shimmering like a mirage. And then, it burned away like mist in the morning light, reappearing somewhere else on the next new moon. In the vision the pool had granted her, Lorelei had seen it rippling in the darkness of the water, exactly as it had been described to her many times before.

The true Ursprung lay somewhere on the Vanishing Isle, and she had only the faintest idea of where it would appear on the night of the next new moon. That was only two weeks from now. She resisted the urge to kick the water out of spite. Coordinates would have been infinitely more helpful.

Sylvia lay on her back, her hair splayed across the stones like a river. The ends pooled in the spring water, and the ghostly white of it had darkened to the steely gray of morning. Like this, with all the starlight reflected in her eyes, she looked almost divine.

Lorelei had a fleeting impulse to brush away the strands of hair plastered to Sylvia’s temples, but she clenched her fist around that foolish desire. “Did you recognize the place it showed us?”

“It looked like Ebul.”

“Ebulhardly narrows it down.”

It wasn’t particularly heartening, either. They were currently stranded in the middle of Albe, which lay in the southwest of Brunnestaad. Ebul was the eastern borderland. Assuming no more deadly creatures waylaidthem—unlikely,given their trackrecord—theywould barely make it in time for the night of the new moon. If they missed it, only God knew where it would appear next.