Sea Spell (Waterfire Saga #4)(2)

Manon took the stone and cast an occula songspell. A few seconds later, an image of a mermaid wearing silver glasses and a fuchsia dress appeared in the stone’s depths. She was frightened, Manon could tell, but trying not to show it. It was Ava. She was already in the Spiderlair. Manon didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“That mermaid’s trouble,” Lafitte fretted, wringing his hands. “I told you she’d bring the likes of Traho to your door. You bluffed him good this time, but what if he comes back?”

Manon didn’t have an answer.

Ava Corajoso had shown up at her door five days ago, led by a growling piranha. She was thin and feverish, but she hadn’t begged for food or medicine. Instead, she’d held out what little currensea she had and asked for a charm to keep her safe from the Okwa Naholo.

“The Okwa?” Manon had said, looking her up and down. “Those nasty monsters are the least of your worries! Take that money and buy yourself some food!”

She’d started to close the door, but Ava had stopped it with her hand. “Please,” she’d begged. “Everyone in the swamps says your charms are the strongest.”

“Everyone’s right. But no charm’s strong enough to save you from the Okwa. Just the sight of them will stop your heart dead.”

“Not mine. I can’t see them. I’m blind,” Ava had said, lowering her glasses.

“So you are, cher, so you are,” Manon had said, her voice softening, her bright eyes taking in Ava’s unseeing ones. “Tell me, why do you want to mess with the Okwa?”

“I don’t want to,” Ava had said. “But they have something I need in order to stop a monster—a monster ten times worse than any Okwa.”

“Doesn’t mean you’ll get it. The Okwa might still kill you. In fact, I’d put money on it.”

“They might. But I’d give my life gladly if it meant I could save many more.”

Merl’s crazier than a swamp rat, Manon had thought. She’d been about to send Ava away once and for all, but something had stopped her. Something in Ava’s eyes. They weren’t right, those eyes, but still…that mermaid saw. Right down into you, to what was deep and true. She saw the good there no matter how hard you tried to hide it.

“Keep your coins,” Manon had said, against her better judgment. She’d led Ava inside, offered her a chair and a cup of thick, sweet cattail coffee. She’d sat down across from her and asked what she was after in the swamps. “Tell me straight. No lies, cher,” she’d cautioned. “A good gris-gris needs many ingredients. The truth’s one of them.”

Ava had taken a deep breath, then said, “A monster lies under the ice of the Southern Sea. For centuries, it has been asleep, but now it’s waking. It was created by one of the mages of Atlantis.”

Manon’s ancient eyes had narrowed. The swamp mer were given to telling tall tales. Decades of listening to them had made her a skeptical soul. “A monster?” she’d said. “Why would a mage make a monster?”

Ava had told Manon about Orfeo, the talismans, and Abbadon, and how Ava and five other mermaids had been chosen to defeat that monster. She told her about Vallerio, that he was kidnapping and imprisoning merfolk, and forcing them to search for the talismans. By the time Ava had finished her story, Manon was so shaken, she’d had to call for her smelling salts.

Rumors had come to Manon’s ears, carried on the river. Rumors of powerful objects and labor camps. Rumors of soldiers in black uniforms moving through her swamp, and of a shadowy man with no eyes. She’d thought they were only more wild stories. Ava’s arrival at her cave, and Traho’s, had convinced her otherwise.

“You need to find that talisman, child. No two ways about it,” Manon had said as soon as she’d recovered. “I’ll do what I can to help you.”

She’d fed Ava a spicy, filling stew made of crawdads, salamanders, and river peppers, and had given her medicine to break her fever. Then she’d made her a gris-gris—maybe the strongest one she’d ever made—and hadn’t taken so much as a cowrie for it. Lafitte, Esmé, and Sally had all looked at Manon as if she’d lost her mind.

As she’d hung the gris-gris around Ava’s neck, Manon had told Ava that the Okwa lived in the Spiderlair swamp and instructed her on how to get there. She’d tried to convince Ava to spend the night in her cave and rest close to the waterfire, but Ava had politely refused the offer. “There are soldiers on my tail,” she’d explained. Then she’d thanked Manon and left.

“You keep that child safe, you hear me?” Manon had whispered to the spirits as she’d watched Ava swim away. She cared for that mermaid, though she didn’t want to. Caring was risky in the swamps. The Spiderlair, a four days’ journey from Manon’s cave, was named for the large, vicious arachnids that hunted on its banks. It was the other creatures that lived in those dark waters that worried Manon, though—most of them far too clever to be glimpsed with an occula. The seeing stone showed evidence of them, nonetheless—in the bones and skulls half-buried in the swamp mud.

Manon picked up her tarot cards again now. They’d been cut from the shells of giant washboard clams, polished flat, then etched with tarot symbols. She drew one from the deck and laid it down. When she saw what it was—a tall, upright tower with waterfire coming out of its windows—she caught her breath.