“Do you think,” I asked Sam, my voice sounding distant, as though I were listening to myself speak from somewhere off to one side, “that they can swim?”
“What?”
“Kiss me,” I said.
He didn’t hesitate a moment, turning even as their stone hands reached for us, pressing his lips against mine.
Become water,I thought.
And I did.
Part V
The Two Inexplicable Towers
Chapter Nineteen
Lacustrine Dreams
I had become a lake, vast and smooth and cool. Snow floated from the leaden sky and lit on my surface, melting and disappearing.
Deep within me, stone figures plummeted down, down, and farther down, vanishing into the crushing depths, sinking into the thick mud far below. Back into the earth that had birthed them.
My senses were slipping away from me, my thoughts turning into lake thoughts, water thoughts. Words and memories replaced by the slow churn of sun and wind and time.
From above me came alarmed honks and quacks as a flock of startled birds flew upward. Horses and dogs and hunters and guards had turned into ducks, geese, and a single bewildered swan I suspected was the king.
Oh. So that’s where the birds came from when Jonquil didit.
As they spiraled into the sky, a goose detached itself from the group and splashed down onto me. It twisted its neck around to tuck its head between its wings and shut its eyes.
Most of what I was dissolved into the lap of waves against the shore.
The snow stopped.
Light came, and darkness, and light again.
Sometimes the goose left for a while, but more often than not it was there, dipping the paddles of its feet into me, grazing on the pondweed near my edges.
Leaves drifted across me. Rain made pockmarks on my skin, and the wind whipped it into white froth. More light and more darkness, more darkness and more light…over and over. I didn’t keep track of how often. I had forgotten what counting was.
The snow returned, softer than the rain. A delicate lace of ice, thin and transparent as an insect’s wing, spread along my shallows. Dense, murky fog crept up to my shoreline from the woods. The goose woke and cocked its head.
“If you think you’re going to evade your marriage this way,” the fog said, “you are sorely mistaken.”
I didn’t answer. I was busy reflecting the gray smear of the moon hidden behind a cloud.
“Turn back into a human at once,” the fog huffed, sending streamers of vapor across my surface. “This has gone on long enough. I didn’t raise you to spend your life as a pond.”
A pond?That stirred a response from me.I’m a lake. A deep one.I had thermal layers. I had aphotic trenches where sunlight never reached.
“Yes, yes, very impressive. Your spell didn’t go wrong. For once.”
Of course it doesn’t matter to you.She did the impossible on a routine basis. By her standards, this was nothing more than a parlor trick.
“I said it was impressive. Why do you always have to be so difficult?”
The goose honked angrily at the fogbank. But I remained silent. A lake doesn’t speak.
