The Water and the Wild (18 page)

“So . . . gengas are what make sprites special?”

“Well,” said Oliver, “that and their keens, of course.”

“Keens?”

The word was familiar. Lottie remembered Mr. Ingle using it when he had talked about her parents.

“Yeah,” said Oliver. “You know the five senses?”

“Of course.”

“Well, of our five senses, each sprite's got one sense stronger than all the rest. I guess you'd call it a sort of—sharpness. It's a sense that's keener than usual.”

“Is that why Adelaide can hear things from far away?” Lottie asked in sudden understanding. “She's got a sharpness of hearing?”

Oliver nodded. “Though the keen is different for everyone. Some sprites with a hearing keen can only hear into the next room. Some can hear across oceans, if they're trained properly. Others can even hear certain types of thoughts.”

“And that's why Mr. Ingle talked about smells so much, isn't it? He can smell things that others can't, like how suspicious the Southerly Guard were!” Lottie was growing more and more excited. Like the proper flip of a lever, Oliver's explanation had started a whir of gears in Lottie's head. “That's why Fife—! Oh. What is Fife's keen, exactly?”

“Fife can—um,
taste
.”

“Taste?” echoed Lottie. She frowned. “Taste what?”

“Words,” said Oliver. “Though you're better off asking him about it. He's got this particular way of describing it. Something having to do with soup. He calls it ‘flavoring.'
But Fife doesn't like people talking about his keen behind his back.”

“Oh.” Lottie hadn't yet lost her excitement. “You can tell me about your keen, though. It's why your eyes change color, isn't it?”

Oliver's eyes turned a cloudy gray. “That's part of it, yes.”

Lottie nodded expectantly, eagerly. “So, what? Can you see special colors? See from very far away? Can you see through things, like X-ray vision?”

“No,” said Oliver. “I mean, there are sprites who can do those things, but my keen doesn't have anything to do with sight.”

“Then what is it?”

“Touch. My tutor calls it involuntary pigmentary transference.”

Oliver's voice had been growing lower, grittier, and more sullen the longer they talked. He was not looking at Lottie anymore, and the firelight cast deep shadows on his face.

“What's involuntary pigmentary transference?”

Lottie felt dizzy, as though she were suspended at the edge of a precipice, about to be pushed.

Oliver's eyes finally met hers. “Have you really not figured it out?”

Oliver nodded toward her left arm. Lottie clasped it instinctively. She pulled back the sleeve of her periwinkle coat, and the firelight lit a fading handprint. Another finger had disappeared from the handprint. The imprint of only three fingers remained, and even those had lightened from black to gray. Oliver leaned in to get a better look at the mark. His face was drawn tight about the eyes and mouth.

“What?” Lottie asked.

“Nothing.” He straightened up and scooted away, regaining his cautious distance from her. “It's—it's nothing.”

Lottie, in turn, found herself looking over Oliver's wounded arm, bandaged up from wrist to elbow.

It came together with startling force: the white finch, the falling tree, the hurt boy at the Flying Squirrel. Lottie understood.

“Your genga is white, isn't it?”

Oliver did not need to nod.

“It was your genga I saw in my apple tree all those mornings,” she said softly. “The white finch. It was
your
genga that I saw in Skelderidge Park, after the accident with the falling tree.”

“After Father got your last letter, he asked me to do him a favor,” Oliver said. “He wanted to help your friend, but he didn't know if you'd be ready to visit our world yet. He also wanted to know if you were safe. So I sent Keats to Thirsby Square all those months ago, and he reported back to Iris Gate every night.”

“Reported?”

“I told you,” said Oliver. “Gengas can do lots of interesting things. Keats would report to me, and then I'd report to Father.”

“What did you report?” Lottie asked, her chest thrumming.

“That you were up to coming here,” Oliver said. “That you seemed pretty terrific as far as humans go.”

Their eyes met, and Lottie felt like laughing. At least he hadn't said that she was smelly.

“As far as humans go?” she repeated.

“Well, I'd never met a human before,” Oliver said defensively.

“And that night at Skelderidge Park,” said Lottie, “you were the one who rescued me from the tree.”

“A rumor got loose in Limn a few weeks ago,” said Oliver, “that there was a Fiske still living in Earth. The king heard the rumors and wanted you captured. So he gave orders to my father and Grissom.”

“The king's right- and left-hand sprites.”

Oliver nodded. “Of course, Father already knew all about you. He'd been keeping you safe and hidden for years, ever since your parents passed away. Well, Grissom got nosy. He found out who you were and where you were living, and he also found out that Father was trying to keep you from the king. Father knew Grissom didn't trust him and that he was monitoring all his movements. That's why, on the night Grissom tried to kidnap you, Father sent me and Adelaide into your world, to rescue you.”

“And you did,” Lottie whispered. “Adelaide rescued me from Grissom, and you're the one who rescued me from that tree.”

“I'm the one who gave you that,” Oliver corrected, pointing to her arm.

“Involuntary pigmentary transference,” Lottie whispered. “That means—that means that you turn things colors without meaning to.”

“Skin,” Oliver said. “I turn skin colors. Your skin, anyone's skin. Most sprites can choose whether or not to use their keen. Not me. I can't shut it off. When I touch someone, or they touch my hands, I hurt them. I hurt them terribly, and I leave a mark. The stains last for months and months. And my eyes? They'll always change, whether I want them to or not. I can't have a single feeling without it showing up in my eyes.”

Lottie stared at the fading mark on her arm. Her stain didn't seem to be lasting for months and months. At the rate it was disappearing, it might be gone in a few days. Perhaps Oliver was being too hard on himself.

“I don't understand,” she said. “Why can't you control it?”

“I'm messed up,” Oliver said matter-of-factly. “I'm a fluke. Tutor says it's a pigmentary imbalance in my body. There's not a why to it, that's just how it is.”

“Well,” said Lottie, trying to be helpful, “why can't you wear a special sort of gloves, so that you don't go around turning people different colors?”

Oliver shook his head. “It's not that easy. The color bleeds straight through, from skin to skin. There are
potions and trainings and diets that don't work, either. My father's a healer, Lottie. Don't you think he's tried everything to make me better?”

“But that's not fair!” Lottie said. “Aren't these keens supposed to be a good thing? Why would you get one as awful as that?”

Oliver opened his mouth, and he looked very much like he was about to quote another poem. Then he seemed to change his mind.

“I don't know,” he said.

Nothing more. Lottie stared at Oliver and wondered if being so honest was peculiar to sprites, or just peculiar to Oliver. A gust blew through the wood, carrying along a batch of breeze-borne leaves. One caught in Lottie's hair, but she paid no mind to it.

“I think,” she said at last, “that it's very brave of you.”

“Do you?” Oliver asked. “Is it brave to just exist when something is wrong with you?”

“Existing can be brave enough some days, don't you think?”

Their gazes met, and Oliver gave Lottie the smallest of smiles.

“That,” he said, “is the most decent thing anyone's ever said to me.”

Lottie no longer felt so self-conscious about being smelly. “Glad to be of service,” she said.

That was when Lottie heard it: a scampering sound from behind the circle of ash trees. Oliver had heard it, too. He sprang to his feet with Lottie, and they both stood, quiet, listening. Ten seconds, then twenty, then thirty passed. Finally, Lottie spoke up.

“I don't think there's anything to worry—”

Her words were interrupted by a shrill scream. As Lottie fell to the ground, something sharp pierced her wrist, and the shrieks grew louder and shriller. Only as the ground began to slide beneath her back did Lottie realize that the shrieking was her own.

LOTTIE FISKE HAD NOT
been a spectacular child growing up. She had never won an essay contest or a spelling bee, and Mrs. Yates had never put her artwork on the refrigerator. In one thing, however, Lottie was most singularly distinguished: she didn't make a fuss when she got hurt. When she scraped her knee or fell off the monkey bars or had a bad spell or even broke her collarbone, the most Lottie offered were a few sniffs and a tear or two. Once, she had fallen down an entire flight of stairs at Kemble School, courtesy of the hand of Pen Bloomfield, and just to spite
Pen, Lottie had gotten up and limped off without so much as a yelp.

Lottie thought that because Mrs. Yates was such an emotionless person herself, her guardian secretly liked this one quality—if only one—in Lottie. Once, Lottie had overheard Mrs. Yates say to a boarder, “Mind like a sieve, that child, but she has a good head on her shoulders when it comes to scrapes.” Those words had been as precious as chocolate to Lottie, and she had made it a point ever afterward to have just as good a head on her shoulders as she could muster, even when one of those shoulders got dislocated.

So now, even though Mrs. Yates was miles, even worlds away, Lottie promptly stopped her screaming, shut her mouth, and craned her neck to see what had caused her to fall over in the first place.

It was a dog. Or a wolf. Or a lion. Lottie could not quite make out which. It was a slick, black thing with a gray mane running down its back and with silver pinpricks for eyes—those pinprick eyes from the mulberry bushes at Iris Gate. The owner of those eyes had been real after all, and now its teeth were dragging Lottie toward the wood by her right wrist. Once Lottie had made sense of all of this,
she acted quickly. She wrenched her free hand toward the creature's muzzle and made a desperate swat at its nose. The animal unclamped Lottie's wrist just long enough to give an annoyed snap at her swatting hand. Teeth sunk into skin. There was a sudden spray of blood that wet Lottie's cheeks and turned her stomach. Then the animal reclaimed its grip on her wrist and continued to drag Lottie toward the wood.

That's when the bad spell began. Lottie closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. She felt her chest crumple like a sheet of scrap paper being wadded into a ball. She tried to breathe in measured gasps, just as she had been taught by the doctor as a little girl, but each time she breathed in, she could only smell the fierce metallic scent of her own blood. She heard Adelaide shouting and she saw Oliver's feet chasing after her, but the closer Oliver's feet got, the faster the animal dragged Lottie and the more pain that shot through her wrist. At last, the mess in her chest began to fade, and Lottie found her voice again. She yelled the first, idiotic thing that came to mind.

“STOP!”

In the crack of a second, the animal stopped, heaving rasping breaths. The crumpled paper inside Lottie began
to smooth itself out. She blinked, amazed. Was it possible? Had the animal actually
obeyed
her?

“Let go of me!” she sputtered.

Immediately, the animal unclenched its teeth, sending a new shooting pain through Lottie's wrist. The creature stooped over her, panting as though it would still like nothing better than to sink its fangs back into her.

“G-go!” she said, forcing herself up on her elbows.

The animal made a small, whining noise and dashed off. Its tail smacked Lottie's cheek as it fled into the darkness of the wood. Lottie watched the animal's retreat, and though she was still trembling from her bad spell and could see blood oozing from her hand, she had never before felt so strangely
powerful
. She looked up to see Oliver staring after the creature in mint-eyed astonishment.

“H-how—?” he stammered. “How did you do that?”

Fife and Adelaide pushed past him, offering Lottie hands that Oliver could not, and Lottie leaned on their shoulders as they dragged her back to the campfire. Adelaide lowered Lottie to the ground, propping her against the log by the fire.

Fife knelt by her side. “Still with us?”

Lottie produced a strangled noise in the affirmative.

“That was incredible,” Fife said. “You're, like, my new hero! No wait, heroine?”