You shouldgo.
My sisters swam through me, yelling to get my attention. Their voices grew louder, their motion more frenzied.
GO.
I washed them from my dreams. Out of the lake. Out of myself. They drifted through my surface, into the air, vanishing in a spray of droplets.
And I wokeup.
Chapter Twenty
What Is This Thing Called Love?
I came to consciousness slowly, watery thoughts dribbling out of my head until they were replaced by a human mind once more. At some point in the process, I noticed I had a splitting headache and, except for something warm pressed up against my side, I was freezing cold.
I couldn’t tell exactly where the warmth was coming from, because I was having difficulty opening my eyes. It took me a while to understand the problem, because first I had to remember that I had a body and then that my body had eyes that could be opened. At that point, I tried to open them. And failed.
This caused me a moment of panic, until I realized the sensation was familiar. I’d encountered the same problem during my time on the plain of ice at the top of the world. My eyelids had frozen shut.
Have I mentioned how much I hate the outdoors?
My teeth ached from the cold, and the hairs in my nose had iced up as well, an irritating sensation something like beingpermanently on the verge of a sneeze. I pressed my hands against my eyes and waited for the heat of my body, little enough though there was, to melt the frost around my lashes.
“It was very odd,” said Sam, close enough that I felt his breath on my cheek, “being a goose.”
Well, that explained why my left side was less frozen than my right.
“Sorry,” I told him.
“Better that than being mashed to a pulp. And I didn’t say it was horrible. Just odd. I ate a lot of grass. Pounds and pounds of it, every day. It must be doing terrible things to my digestion now that I’m no longer a bird.”
I was able to open my eyes at last. I blinked at him a few times. He and I were both half-covered in snow. We staggered to our feet.
“You’d think so,” I said, brushing snow off my skirt and leggings, “but you probably won’t have any problems. I doubt you’ll throw anything up, even if you stuffed yourself so full that your liver turned into foie gras. It doesn’t count somehow. Although if you’d injured your wing, you might have a broken arm right now.”
He frowned and ran his fingers down his side. “Are you sure? The bruises I got from the stone creatures don’t hurt anymore. I can’t even feel my stitches pulling. They’re gone, I think. I feel better than I did before I turned into a goose.”
“Huh. Maybe you wouldn’t have a broken arm, then.”
“Why not?”
I shrugged. “Logic and magic don’t exactly go hand in hand. And a good thing, too.” I glanced around at our surroundings. “Otherwise, I’d have ended up killing a lot of innocent animals.By all rights, Lake Me should have drowned every squirrel on this…um.”
We weren’t on the hill anymore.
Instead of a rise ringed by massive trees, we were in a shallow dip on the bank of an icy, burbling brook. From the looks of things, we were still in the Tailliziani forest. But beyond that, I had no idea of our whereabouts. Lake Melilot had spanned miles and miles. Who knew where in that wide expanse we’d endedup?
Snow coated the ground and frosted the branches, and more snowflakes sifted through the treetops like fine sugar. “Why is it still so cold?” I asked, rubbing my upper arms and shivering. “Did Max lose his hat?”
Sam gave me an odd look. “Max flew off with the rest of them. Back to the castle, I’d imagine. It’s winter.”
“It’s…what?”
“You were a lake for weeks. Maybe a month? I didn’t keep track of sunsets and sunrises as well as I’d have liked; geese don’t really understand numbers. But there were more than a few.”
“Oh.” Geese were better at counting than lakes, apparently. I remembered the light and the darkness, now that I thought about it more, and had dim memories of the air above me warming and cooling, wisps of mist steaming off me in the morning and vanishing as the day progressed. But I couldn’t have said how many times it had happened. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed a month.
Sam peered up into the sky. “I hope the others are all right. Have they been birds until now, too?”
