The darkness, the cold. Perhaps the memory made me more aware of the real world, where time suspended Kessian and me in icy repose. Drowning, but slowly. Maybe it was the weight of grief. Or maybe it was just that the rocks were slippery.
I leapt but only got minimal traction. It felt as though the strid had its own gravity, sucking me down. My foot slipped on the rock of the opposite side. Kessian screamed as I slammed down on my chest, pain punching all the air from my lungs. Gasping, I grasped for a handhold to pull myself up.
Memories came back to me. Walking inexorably toward the edge. The damp cold of the roaring strid, the sound of a splash—though no one had been ahead of me to make it—and a warm hand on my wrist pulling me to safety before going suddenly slack. Then Dad had pulled me forward, heavier than me and the invisible force trying to draw us back from the banks.
It had all been a panicked blur. How could I have known the ghostly touch had been real?
All those years ago, Kessian had tried, but the shock of seeing me fail to make this jump had loosened his grip. The three of them—my younger self, my father, and Kessian—all went sprawling into the river right as I pulled myself out.
I screamed. The speed at which the strid swallowed them all made the ache in my ribs sharpen to a knife’s point. I scrambled up onto the bank and nearly dove in after them, but a stab of clarity stopped me.
Kessian had tried to change the events of history. Instead they’d played out exactly as they had in reality.
I’d always wondered how I’d survived …
In that split second, I made a decision and begged the Keepers, fate, the strid, whatever governed the world as I knew it, for it to be the right one.
Rather than dive into the strid after them, I sprinted into the woods. If I was quick, there could still be time to catch sight of the flute player. In my dream, he’d been within sight of the tree line.
I crashed through in that direction, forgetting I was a ghost, invisible and voiceless, unable to connect with people. I couldn’t grab the flutist and make him pay, but if I knew who it was, perhaps I could fix all this.
The music abruptly stopped. Ahead, a figure in the trees whipped around.
The darkness was complete. I could not make him out until he cast a spell, and the bright glow of a portal illuminated his face.
It was Marlowe.
I stopped dead, breathing hard.
Not Warwick. Marlowe. My uncle Marlowe.
In the light, his face was waxy with fear, eyes wide, searching the forest for the source of the sound and, seeing nothing, fleeing through the portal. It vanished behind him.
My pulse hammered. Marlowe had given me the talisman to protect me from the wraith. Marlowe had helped us trap it. His own daughter had been taken by it. How could he have been the one to play that song, lure all those people? Why? And how had he come by this flute, which Warwick had on display in Foxbury Manor?
I had to bury the feelings festering within me. There was no use contemplating them here on my own.
I started running again, back the way I’d come, toward the spa and the spring where I’d washed up nine years ago, the mysterious sole survivor. If my theories were right, it wouldn’t be a mystery anymore.
As the night air chilled my burning lungs and the forest floor drummed underfoot, a needle of doubt punctured my certainty. Memories from that night flooded back. My father, struggling to surface. Those struggles ceasing abruptly when a rip current drove his head into the rocks, a ribbon of scarlet streaming into the water like a loose scarf. The scream I’d let out, and all that precious air with it. The current had played with myfather’s limp body like a cat with a toy before it sucked him out of sight, into one of the tunnels pocking the stone walls of the strid’s banks.
I didn’t know if we could die in these memories, but if that was what became of Kessian, I’d never forgive myself.
I burst out of the woods, Shearwater Spa across the green, lights on as people searched for the two family members missing from their beds. The spring’s waters trickled placidly with the bright coin of the full moon reflected on its surface. I pulled up at the shore, watching and waiting.
People had asked how I’d fallen in the strid and washed up in the spring. I had never known, and my memories around that were foggy. There’d been magic like a song sung in a million different voices. A hive of music that, at its crescendo, cracked apart and let me pass through something like a portal. But mostly I remembered being cradled. In my dazed state, I thought it had been Dad, but he was dead already.
In that moment when I’d chased the flutist rather than dive in after Kessian, it had been because I was sure whose arms had held me. Not what, butwhohad saved my life all those years ago.
The longer the spring remained a smooth mirror of the sky, undisturbed, the more I doubted it.
He can’t be dead. Please don’t be dead. I couldn’t bear it. Not you. Not after tonight.
A soft glow appeared in the water. It turned bright blue, swirling out from the center in ripples. A figure broke the surface, hair painted over their face in inky stripes, mouth open to suck in greedy lungfuls of air, dragging something—someone—up with him.
Relief couldn’t break through the adrenaline. I surged forward, wading up to my waist to help them to shore. The figure flipped their soaking hair out of their face. I nearly collapsed seeing Kessian, scratched but otherwise unharmed.
The body in his arms was mine, nine years younger. I helped drag him out and lay him on his back. Kessian performed compressions on his chest. Plugged his nose and breathed into his mouth. Compressions again. He—I—looked so painfully frail. Limp, rocking with the motion of each compression, lips blue and hanging open.
