The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(98)

It was a lovely little winter stream, wide and shallow and perfectly clear, twinkling and lapping along as if it were delighted to have just found this twisty channel. Wordlessly, they gathered at its edge. The rocks were capped with round dollops of snow, and the quieter eddies along the banks had iced over. A branch poking up in the middle of the stream was hung with fabulous Gothic-sculpted icy drops and buttresses all along its length. There was nothing overtly supernatural about it, but it temporarily satisfied their appetite for wonder. On Earth it would have been a charming little rill, nothing more, but the fact that they were seeing it in Fillory, in another world, possibly the first Earth beings ever to do so, made it a glittering miracle.

They had stared at it for a full minute in rapt silence before Quentin realized that right in front of them, emerging from the deepest part of the stream, was a woman’s naked head and shoulders.

“Oh my God,” he said. He took a clumsy, numb step backward, pointing. “Shit. You guys.”

It was surreal. She was almost certainly dead. The woman’s hair was dark and wet and thick with clumped ice. Her eyes—she appeared to be looking right at them—were midnight blue and didn’t move or blink, and her veined skin was a pale pearlescent gray. Her shoulders were bare. She looked sixteen at most. Her eyel absolutely sureR arrivedv with ashes were clotted with frost.

“Is she—?” Alice didn’t finish the question.

“Hey!” Janet called. “Are you all right?”

“We should help her. Get her out of there.” Quentin tried to get closer, but he slipped on a frozen rock and went in up to his knee. He scrambled back onto the bank, his foot burning with cold. The woman didn’t move. “We need rope. Get the rope; there’s rope in one of the packs.”

The water didn’t even look deep enough to submerge her that far, and Quentin actually wondered, horribly, if they were looking at a body that had been severed at the waist and then dumped in the water. Rope, what was he thinking? He was a damn magician. He dropped the pack he was rifling through and began a simple kinetic spell to lift her out.

He felt the premonitory warmth of a developing spell in his fingertips, felt the weight and tug of the body in his mind. It felt good to do magic again, to know that he could still focus despite everything. As soon as he started he realized that the circumstances were scrambled here—different stars, different seas, different everything. Thank God it was a simple spell. The grammar was a shambles—Alice corrected him in a clipped-voice as he worked. Gradually, the woman rose up dripping out of the water. She was whole, thank God, and naked—her body was slim, her breasts slight and girlish. Her nails and nipples were pale purple. She looked frozen, but she shuddered as the magic took hold. Her eyes focused and came awake. She frowned and raised one hand, somehow halting the spell before he was finished, with her toes still trailing in the freezing water.

“I am a naiad. I cannot leave the stream.” By her voice she could have been in junior high. Her eyes met Quentin’s.

“Your magic is clumsy,” she added.

It was electrifying. Quentin saw now that she wasn’t human: her fingers and toes were webbed. To his left he heard a shuffling noise. It was Penny. He was getting down on his knees on the snowy bank.

“We humbly apologize,” he said, head bowed. “We most humbly seek your pardon.”

“Jesus Christ!” Josh stage-whispered. “Dork!”

The hovering nymph shifted her attention. Stream water rilled down her bare skin. She tilted her head girlishly.

“You admire my beauty, human?” she asked Penny. “I am cold. Would you warm me with your burning skin?”

“Please,” Penny went on, blushing furiously. “If you have a quest to bestow upon us, we would gladly undertake it. We would gladly—”

Mercifully Janet cut him off.

“We’re visitors from Earth,” she said firmly. “Is there a city around here that you could direct us to? Maybe Castle Whitespire?”

“—we would gladly undertake to do your bidding.” Penny finished.

“Do you serve the rams?” Alice asked.

“I serve no false gods, human girl. Or goddesses. I serve the river, and the river serves me.”

“Are there other humans here?” Ana?s said. “Like us?”

“Like you?” The nymph smiled saucily, and the tip of a startling blue tongue appeared took a deep breathR arrivedv with for an instant between her rather sharp-looking front teeth. “Oh, no. Not like you. None so cursed!”

At that moment Quentin felt his telekinetic spell cease to exist. She’d abolished it, though he didn’t catch how, without a word or a gesture. In the same instant the naiad flipped head down and dived, her pale periwinkle buttocks flashing in the air, and vanished into dark water that looked too shallow to contain her.

Her head poked up again a moment later.

“I fear for you here, human children. This is not your war.”

“We’re not children,” Janet said.

“What war?” Quentin called.

She smiled again. Between her lavender lips her teeth were pointy and interlocking like a fighting fish’s. She held something dripping in her webbed fist.

“A gift from the river. Use it when all hope is lost.”

She tossed it at them overhand. Quentin caught it one-handed; he was relieved out of all proportion to its actual importance that he didn’t bobble it. Thank God for his old juggling reflexes. When he looked up again, the nymph was gone. They were alone with the chattering brook.