The Waterstone (8 page)

Pippit croaked furiously.

“Father?” said Tad uncertainly.

“Do you hear it?” Pondleweed said. His voice was slow and blurred. “Do you hear the music? The pearl-shell harps and coral pipes? And the singing? Can’t you hear her singing?”

And Tad could hear it. It was the same song he had heard in the blue-lit throne room, but fainter now and less compelling.
She’s no longer singing to me
, he realized.

The Witch can catch but one fish at a time.

The phrase leaped into his brain as if he had known it all along.

Else she would not need servants.

Pondleweed began to walk rapidly across the top of the dam, moving back toward the shore. He brushed by the children as if they were invisible.

“Father! Where are you
going
?” cried Birdie in alarm.

Pondleweed never paused. He strode past, unhearing, climbed off the dam, and skirted the cattail thicket, heading blindly toward the black water. He walked stiff-legged, as if he were a puppet pulled on strings. He splashed right into the dark lake. Black ripples sloshed over his feet.

Pippit’s croaking rose to a wail.

“Father! What are you doing!”
screamed Birdie.

“Father!
Stop!
” shrieked Tad. “Come back! Don’t go in there!”

Pondleweed never faltered. Steadily he continued to walk into the black lake, his face slack and empty of expression, his eyes staring. The black water reached his ankles, his knees, his waist. In the cattail thicket, something rustled slyly. A thick black bubble rose to the water’s surface and broke.

Tad, dragging Birdie by one arm, flung himself off the dam and raced across the black shore. Bones and dead branches snapped under his feet. He was shouting his father’s name. He threw himself forward, splashing madly into the inky water. Behind him, he heard Birdie sobbing.

“Tad! He’s gone!”

Pondleweed had disappeared. Not even a ripple showed on the thick black surface of the water to show where he had been.

Tad took another step forward.

“I can save him!” he shouted, turning back to Birdie. “I’ll swim out —”

Birdie screamed.

Her scream was echoed, long and louder, in the sky high above them. Plummeting toward them, lethal talons open wide, was the monstrous form of a hunting bird.

“Run!”
Tad shouted. “Run! Birdie,
run
!”

There was, Tad knew, no escape from a stooping hawk, but anything was better than crouching frozen on the ground, waiting helplessly to be slaughtered. Birdie fled across the barren shore toward the too-distant forest, with Pippit pelting at her side. Tad sprang after them.

But he was too late. The hawk was upon him. The wind of its killing dive was so violent that Tad was thrown forward on his face, skidding painfully across the rough rock and sand. Behind him there was a thunderous impact that shook the ground and an earsplitting shriek of triumph. Tad, scrambling to his feet, gaped in astonishment at the hawk rising into the air. It clutched in its talons a great black snake with flaming red eyes. The snake writhed and hissed in its captor’s grasp, immense fangs bared — and then suddenly went limp, dangling heavily from the hawk’s claws like a thick black leather rope.

As Tad stood, staring, the hawk dropped the snake. Or rather flung it down, hard, to lie limply motionless on the lakeshore. The bird hung in the air above the snake’s body, wings outspread, looking after it in what seemed to be disgust. Then it shrieked again, a lower-pitched cry, and swooped toward Tad, flaring its immense red-and-brown wings. Tad stumbled back. The bird retreated, then swooped once more, screaming angrily. The air thundered as it dived low over Tad’s head. It turned and circled, preparing for another dive.
It’s as if it’s driving me away
, Tad thought, frightened and puzzled.
Why doesn’t it just kill me? I’ve never seen a hawk behave like this before.

The hawk screamed and rocketed toward him again. Tad turned and ran. He tore through tangles of leafless vines, stumbled over rocks, and shoved his way through withered grass clumps. Thorns scratched and caught at his hair. He ran until he reached the sheltering safety of the forest, where he found Birdie and Pippit huddled together on the ground at the foot of a gigantic oak tree. He dropped down heavily beside them, his heart hammering in his chest and his breath coming in painful gasps.

Birdie had been crying. Her eyes were red and puffy and her voice was choked with tears.

“I thought the hawk had caught you,” she said.

Tad shook his head. He still couldn’t understand what had happened. “It saved us,” he said. He had to stop to pant between words. “The hawk saved us, Birdie. That thing thrashing around in the cattails — it was a snake. An enormous snake, like nothing I ever saw before. The hawk just fell on it and killed it. It must have broken its back.”

“Maybe it didn’t even see us,” Birdie said. “Hawks kill people. They’re one of the Four Great Dangers.” Her voice trembled as she counted on her fingers. “One: hunting birds. Two: weasels. Three: watersnakes. And four: foxes.”

“It saw us, all right,” Tad said. “At least, it saw me. It chased me. It could have grabbed me, but it didn’t. It just chased me, as though it were trying to make me run into the woods. Away from the water.”

The water.
His eyes stung with sudden tears. He had never imagined anything so terrible as his father walking past him, vanishing into that black lake. Being left to drown.

What will we do now?
he thought.
How can we live without Pondleweed?
And then,
How will we get home?

Suddenly there was a sound of running feet. A pair of gray squirrels came streaking across the forest floor, chasing each other through the leaves, leaping up tree trunks and springing back down again. Their tails bobbed up and down behind them like huge fluffy plumes. They skidded to a halt beside the children. Then, in unison, they sat up on their hind legs, peering down at Tad and Birdie with blinking bright eyes. They looked almost like twins, though one had a reddish cast to its fur and the other — the grayer of the two — had bigger ears. Together they tipped their heads back and forth, first one way and then the other. Then, in a flash of fur, they turned and swarmed up the trunk of the mammoth oak. Tad could hear them overhead, thrashing about in the branches. There was a loud thumping noise, followed by an outraged screech.

Tad and Birdie exchanged startled glances.

The screech resolved itself into words. Someone high above them sounded angry.

“What do you want
now
?” shrieked the voice. “Get out of my flower pots, you great stump-thumpers! How many times have I told you —”

The voice abruptly grew less strident. “Oh. Oh, I see. On the ground? Right now?”

More rustling. Tad and Birdie, squinting, looked upward. Leaves parted and a face, wearing a definitely cross expression, appeared. The face — brown and wrinkled as a dried-apple doll — belonged to a little woman in a full-skirted dress pieced together from tiny scraps and patches in many shades of green. The dress seemed to change color as she moved, shifting imperceptibly from yellow-green to leaf-green to olive, and then to a rich dark color that was almost brown. Her hair was as tangled and wild as a bird’s nest and her eyes were a startlingly brilliant robin’s-egg blue.

“Well?” she demanded. “What do you want? Who are
you
?”

“I’m Tad,” Tad said. He hastily remembered his manners. “I mean, Tadpole of the Fisher Tribe. This is my sister, Redbird. Birdie. And the frog is Pippit. We live at Willow-tree Pond at the bottom of the stream. The northernmost of the Ponds.”

He started to point in the proper direction and then stopped, confused.

“I’m not sure where it is anymore,” he confessed. “We were running. . . .”

A furry squirrel face poked out, one on either side of the little green lady. Both wore eager expressions of bright curiosity.

“Don’t mind them,” the woman said. “They don’t like to miss anything that’s going on.” She looked sternly from one squirrel to the other. “Nosy parkers,” she said. “Snoops. Pair of peeping Toms.” The grayer squirrel chittered at her.

She turned back to Tad. “Go on,” she said. “You were running . . .”

“There was a hawk,” Birdie said. She stopped and turned to Tad. “You tell it,” she said. “Begin at the beginning. With the pond.”

“Yes,” the green woman said. “Do.” She sat down on the branch, folded her hands in her lap, and crossed her ankles. One foot began to wiggle back and forth impatiently. “Well?”

“Our pond is drying,” Tad began, hesitantly. “The water level just keeps dropping and dropping. It fell so much that our father was worried, so he decided to take our boat upstream to see if he could find anything wrong. He let us go with him. Me and Birdie and Pippit.”

The reddish squirrel, never taking its eyes off Tad, began to gnaw busily on an acorn. Its teeth made a loud grating sound. Tad raised his voice.

“It was a long trip,” he said. “We had to camp overnight along the way, and we met some Hunters. They had seen the Drying too. Only they just call it the Dry. The hunting was poor, they said, and the animals thin and few.”

The grayer squirrel chittered angrily. The green woman poked it.

“Then” — to Tad’s dismay he felt his eyes begin to sting and his throat tighten —“then we found what we were looking for. Something — someone — had built a dam up at the top of the stream, where all the water comes from. Behind the dam, the lake . . .”

Birdie started to cry again. “The lake was horrible. The water was black and all filled with bones,” she sobbed. “And our father just walked into it. He said he heard someone singing, and he walked right into the water and disappeared.”

The green woman’s face filled with sympathy and sorrow, then with misgiving, and finally with something that looked like shock.

“Singing? What did it sound like?”

Birdie opened her mouth and then closed it, looking puzzled. “Like harps, Father said, and . . . coral pipes.” She looked blankly at Tad. “But I couldn’t hear it. I didn’t hear anything at all.”

“The Witch can only catch one fish at a time,” Tad said without thinking.

There was a sudden pause. The green woman went silent and still, staring at Tad. The squirrels looked up, startled, beside her, and the reddish squirrel stopped chewing.

“No more she can,” the green woman said slowly. She studied Tad, frowning, her brilliant blue eyes narrowed. Then she seemed to reach some decision.

“Wait right there,” she said. She pushed the crowding squirrels aside and vanished backward into the leaves.

Birdie tugged at Tad’s tunic sleeve.

“
What
Witch?” she demanded.

Tad shook his head helplessly. Nothing made sense.

With a rapid whickering sound, a rope ladder came down, unrolling itself dizzily until it reached the children’s feet. The rope was made of twisted vines, braided, knotted, and then braided again.

“Climb up!” the voice screeched from overhead. “Bring your frog!”

Birdie, with a nervous look over her shoulder at Tad, set one bare foot on the lowest rung and cautiously began to climb. Tad followed, with Pippit clinging tightly to his back. It was a long and tiring climb, high into the very heart of the great tree. About halfway up, Pippit, who didn’t like heights, began to make nervous wheepling noises. At last — just as it seemed that they were going to have to go on climbing forever — they scrambled out onto a broad branch and found themselves at the door of a house.

The house, invisible from the ground, was firmly anchored in a crotch where two broad branches met the oak’s immense trunk. It was built of notched sticks, tightly fitted together, the crevices between them packed with clay. It had a steeply pointed thatched roof, windows hung with green curtains, a window box planted with pale blue forget-me-nots, and a braided grass doormat. As they stared, the door flew open with a bang, and a voice screeched from inside. “Come in!”

Tad pried the clinging Pippit off his back, which was difficult because Pippit had his eyes squeezed tightly shut and was refusing to let go. They wiped their feet carefully on the doormat — Pippit, protesting, was made to wipe twice — and stepped over the threshold. The green woman — Tad realized that she had never told them her name — was busying herself at a small wooden table, pouring out mugs of maple water from a baked-clay pitcher and cutting generous slices from a frosted cake on a round bark platter. The cake had a whole half of a cherry on the top and looked delicious.

“Sit down and eat,” she snapped. “Things always look better on a full stomach.”

She handed the children laden plates.

“And when you’ve finished, we will talk. And then we will decide what to do next. Clean your plates!”

Tad’s stomach rumbled embarrassingly, and he suddenly realized that he was starving. He hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and that had only been a half slice of rootbread. He took an enormous bite of cherry cake. There were no sounds for several minutes but those of chewing and swallowing. When the plates were empty, the green woman helped them to some more. At last they laid down their forks and sat back. Birdie, looking guilty, began to lick her fingers. Pondleweed was strict about finger licking. Their mother, he said, would never have approved of it.