Already bracing herself for failure, she sank to her knees a careful foot away from the water—no one with sense would ever enterthislake without explicit permission from its occupants!—gazed into her own clearly reflected face and spoke the first carefully worded request that she had drafted earlier that morning.
“Image be clear, image be bright, I bid you now share your gift of sight. Show me what you will!”
A blue-and-black-striped dragonfly dropped down to hover just above the surface of the water. A faint rustling sounded in the trees behind her, and Leonie’s and Gisela’s low voices drifted on the breeze...but Margaret’s reflection remained utterly unchanged.
At least no one had witnessed that mortification! Flipping open her notebook to the relevant page, she read back through her options and began again.
“Picture be sharp, picture be clear, show me something far from here?”
Apparently, even the dragonfly was unimpressed. It flew away, rattling its wings in what she could only consider an unfairly disparaging fashion.
Sighing, Margaret settled in for an extended trial.
By the time she’d worked her way through the first fifteen possible invocations on her list, her knees had begun to ache, and every rock hidden underneath the sand seemed to be deliberately poking through her gown to wound her. Grumbling to herself, she shifted position, gathering up her skirts and rearranging her legs while keeping a sharp eye out for any camouflaged nixen beneath the dirt.
When she looked up again, she found a male head bobbing just above the water before her, long, wet, red hair swirling around his inhumanly sharp features and bright green eyes watching her with open disapproval. Her notebook fell from her hands as she jerked back from the unexpected sight—and the nix drawled, “Are you done bothering everyone yet, little snack?”
Margaret managed to catch her notebook just before it hit the sandy ground, but she couldn’t collect her own pride so easily. Stiffening her shoulders, she forced a steady tone in her reply. “I beg your pardon. I wasn’t aware that I was speaking loudly enough to disturb anyone beneath the water.”
“No?” He raised a skeptical red brow. “Then whowereyou talking to?”
“The...water itself?” Oh, this was too absurd! Drawing a deep breath, Margaret reminded herself firmly that shewasa professional scholar nowadays, not a stammering schoolgirl only allowed on her parents’ expeditions due to their loving indulgence. “Gisela gave me herentrance blessing.”
“To talk to thewater? I don’t think so. You humans tell many foolish lies, but this one—wait.” Frowning, he looked down, as if he’d felt some hidden signal from below. “A moment, snack.” He sank smoothly down beneath the lake, leaving only expanding circles of water to mark his passage.
Expelling her held breath, Margaret looked back down at her notebook—and the nix surged back above the water’s surface, sending water spattering towards her and shaking his hair back from his face as he crossed his arms over his bare, dripping chest. “I knew it,” he snarled. “You came to steal from us after all!”
“What?” It would be a fatal display of weakness to scoot backward in visible retreat; breathing hard, she forced herself to stay in place, but she couldn’t help darting a swift glance across the lake. Leonie and her nixe were even further away now than they had been a few minutes ago. Heads tipped close together, neither of them was watching her at all.
Could they still reach her in time if she yelled for help?
“My sister recognized the spells you were speaking, but you’re much too late,” he announced smugly. “Foolish snack! Didn’t you speak to any of your own kind before coming to take what had already been stolen from us?”
Her own kind?The only human Margaret had even met since her arrival was the probable-baroness in disguise...
...Who had said Margaret would never find Reflection’s Heart without her help.
Oh, no. Margaret squeezed her eyes shut for a moment of deep regret.Thiswas why her husband took the time to make conversation with strangers, wasn’t it? It wasn’t always a waste after all...andsheneeded to start paying better attention to the humans around her, too.
According to Olga’s story last night, it had been a greedy noblewoman who’d sparked the nixen’s rage in the first place with her attempt to profit off the Diamantensee’s beauty. This morning, the baroness hadn’t dared follow Margaret any closer to the lake, even in her all-encompassing disguise. She hadn’t even allowed her name to be spoken aloud in these woods.
Of courseshe hadn’t...because Margaret had been terribly, humiliatingly wrong in all of her own theories from the beginning.Thiswas what came of being too cowardly to face her own deepest fears.
“Augh!” Tipping her head back, Margaret clamped her hands into fists, for once heedless of the damage to her notebook. She shook her fists in the air above her as she screamed again, even louder, to properly vent her fury. “Aaaugh!”
“Uh...Snack?” When she finally lowered her head, she found that the nix had backed away from her, eyes wide and arms held out before him. “Are you rabid? Having a fit?”
“I am having,” Margaret bitout, “anepiphany. Leonie!” She raised her voice once more to yell, but she hardly needed to; the nachzehrer had apparently started running towards her at the first sound of her scream, while Gisela had disappeared from sight.
Leonie skidded to a halt only a few feet away, panting, just as Gisela lunged upwards from the depths of water just beside the male nix and threw her hands around his throat. “I gave myentrance blessing,Hanno,” the nixe hissed as he thrashed in her grip. “You do not defy that!”
“I didn’t touch her!” Hanno’s voice rose to a squeak. “She went mad on her own. She’s probably ill with some human disease!”
Margaret was too busy with her own revelations to intervene. “Leonie,” she said urgently as the argument continued, “you told me that what the baroness said about you earlier was just what you heard every time you looked into your own bedroom mirror. You said something like that yesterday, too.”
“Well...yes.” The nachzehrer shifted to turn her back to the nixen in the water and lowered her voice to a shamed mumble. “I’ve heard all those insults so many times now.”
“Were they all spoken in the same voice?”
