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She needed to reach it, to take it out of the water, take it back to Nan. It was precious. Sheknewit was precious, important, it mattered.
But as she inched closer, reached farther, she slipped. And scrambled back to keep from falling in.
She couldn’t go into the water, not here—no, not here, not alone. Not where she’d beat her hands to blood and cried for her father.
With her heart pounding, she reached out with an unsteady hand. She tried to focus her will, her power, to pull the pendant to her, to lift it up, out of the water.
But it only glimmered and gleamed, and waited.
“I’ll get Marco. He’s got a longer reach.”
She crawled back, pushed up. Taking up the reins again, she walked toward the sound of the falls.
She heard voices now and felt Bollocks’s pleasure as some generous soul tossed him a bite of cheese.
The great white water fell from its great height, foamed and boiled, then spread into the serene green of the river.
Pixies fluttered above the shallows and their colorful polished rocks. Guards flanked either side of the thundering falls with more of their number on both sides of the riverbank.
The pretty mare grazed as Marco sat on a stump chatting away with Brian and Mary Kate.
She started to call out, ask him to walk back with her to that curve where the pendant lay out of her reach.
Then something drew her eye up.
She saw it like a shadow, high up, on the edge of the falls. Like a small parting of water, here then gone. Then a shadow out of the shadow. And the bird it became, the raven that winged overhead.
“Brian!” She shouted it, shot her hand up.
When he looked where she pointed, he lurched to his feet. “Duncan!”
Across the bank a man—hardly more than a boy with a thatch ofstraw-colored hair and a braid that barely reached his ear—folded his arms.
Became a hawk.
“Follow! Don’t intercept.”
“I didn’t see.” An elf blurred up to Brian. “I swear to all the gods I had my eyes trained for a breach. And Gwain beside me as well.”
“I didn’t see.” Brian looked toward Breen as she hurried to him. “When you called me, pointed, for an instant, and an instant more, I didn’t see. Only sky, trees. Then the bird, already flying. It came through?”
“It was like a shadow, barely a ripple on the edge of the falls. I think it’s… I need to get closer.”
“The rocks are wet and slick with it. If you’ll trust me, I’ll take you closer.”
“I do trust you, and if you’d come with me. But I think I need to…” She closed her eyes. “I need to take myself. One against one, light against dark. Power to power. Hers and mine meeting.”
As she spoke, she began to rise off the ground. Slowly, fighting the fear that hounded her of falling in, she rose by inches.
Marco sprang to his feet. “Oh man, oh shit. Go up with her.”
“I’ve not seen her do this before, quite like this.”
A foot now, then another, and she felt it pounding in her like the water pounding on water.
The spray drenched her face, her clothes, even as the power swam through her. So strong, the thunder of it inside her drowned out the roar of the falls.
“Just a ripple, just a crack, opened and closed, closed and opened.” Her eyes, open and deep now, focused as she hovered twenty feet above the river. “Her magicks, bloody and black, claw it open, claw it closed. Small and shadowed, shadowed and cloaked. See the fog here, I see. So thin. Just enough, just enough to blind the eye. I see, I see, I see. She doesn’t, not yet.”
