Page 6 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire

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(THE WOODS)

“Ceridwen!” I yell, barreling through the trees.

The torrent of rain hits the canopy of leaves, roaring overhead as I move deeper into the wood.

My coat is sodden, the hem of my nightgown damp and muddy.

Every step through the thick muck threatens to send me tumbling to the ground.

I keep to the bank of the river, even though I keep slipping.

It’s my guide and a route to follow home.

I don’t slow down even as trees begin to rise so high above me that the stars disappear. The world becomes pillars of bark and whispering autumn boughs.

My foot catches on a protruding root that clings to the riverbank and I lurch forward, losing my balance, but the floor doesn’t reach up to meet me.

There’s a moment of hesitation—from me or the ground, I’m not sure—as the world seems to pause and consider my place in it.

Something decides that I’m not going to fall, and I merely stagger a few steps ahead before halting, feeling warmer than before.

If I wasn’t in such a rush, maybe I’d find it odd.

As it is, I’ve got places to be.

I run deeper into the woods, a pressure building in my head.

It gets harder to breathe. If you’ve ever lain beneath the water and let the air in your lungs become a fire, let your brain start to go quiet, you know how this feels.

My steps become heavy, clumsy. I never fall, but I’m fighting the earth as it tries to pull me down.

The forest pulses, the very ground beneath my feet shifting like a tide.

Until it stops.

Moonlight breaches the tree canopy. The pounding in my head ceases, and I learn how to breathe again.

The chill of autumn lifts, replaced by a gentle warmth that wraps around me like open arms. There are only the trees, the moss beneath my feet and a faint shimmer in the air—like beetle wings ground to a fine dust.

It’s too quiet, and I wonder why it feels like I’ve stepped into a different world.

There’s no rain. I shiver, halting in place, my boots sinking into the carpet of moss.

It hasn’t rained here, not in some time.

The ground is dry. There’s no damp lingering, no threat of a downpour.

Even my woolen coat is drier than it ought to be.

Everything is in perfect stasis, captured like a watercolor painting. Like magic.

Perhaps that doesn’t sound like magic to you, so I must make sure you understand—it always rains in Wales.

The forest goes on forever with no obvious path. I press my hand to a tree trunk, all other thoughts pushed out save for one that’s screaming at me.

It’s all real.

Magic and the teg, and forests that girls enter and never leave. My hair stands on end and the world expands around me, getting so big—so strange and unending—that I become smaller than ever and my knees start to shake.

I cannot afford to be scared of things that were stories a mere hour ago. Panic can come later. I push off from the trunk, looking for signs of Ceridwen. I force myself to breathe, to think. To listen.

There’s a rustle of leaves. There’s a branch cracking underfoot.

I whip around, searching for the source, but see only a flash of black and silver as something disappears around a tree. Maybe it was just an animal, but it was tall and it wanted to be seen as little as I do.

I hurry on. The climate is so perfectly temperate it’s almost disturbing.

There’s a perpetual breeze, but it never makes me cold, and the light seems almost shy.

Everything is too green, too sharp—the ground too even and the trees too perfectly spaced, stretching on eternally until they bleed into a thin mist and disappear.

Even the flowers, which appear in routine bursts, come only in colors that complement each other.

There’s no sound except the crack of sticks beneath my boots.

I call Ceridwen’s name and a bird flees the branches overhead. Its shadow creeps through the gaps in the leaves at intervals and then I’m alone once more. I glance down at the river; it must come from somewhere.

I pause and think of the stories Dad told—of travelers led astray in fairy meadows and dragged off course by phantom sounds in the woods. I think of whatever was there at the edge of the forest, watching me, that didn’t want to be seen.

My skin crawls at the prospect, and my breath shakes, but to my own surprise my heart is constant. An unerring beat I am unsettled—I’ll admit that to you if I must—but I am not afraid.

The river is a useful landmark. The last thing I want is to get lost, and I can use it to orient myself.

I keep to the bank. It’s soft as a pillow underfoot, quickly becoming marshy until the brook widens and deepens, its bottom disappearing under silt.

The river looks languid, but when I kneel to dip my hand into its waters, the current rushes beneath the surface, like it has somewhere important to be.

I am a strong swimmer, but even I would struggle with such a force.

After running and shouting, my throat suddenly feels dry as sandpaper.

I cup my hand and lap water from the river.

It’s sweet and cold, almost addictive, and I keep going back for more.

Until a webbed grip latches on to my hand.

I shriek and tear it from the water, freeing my fingers from the grasp of some… thing.

A malformed, oversized frog lands on the bank with a wet slap.

It lets out a bleat that sounds oddly like a sheep’s; its eyes point in different directions and blink out of time.

Where front legs should be, there are green bat wings, and a tail like a scorpion’s beats at the water.

I scramble back away from it, not caring that I muddy my nightgown further.

Everything feels wrong with the creature—like it was born to be a wet specimen kept on a professor’s shelf.

The creature snaps its tongue at me and lets out a grumbling croak when it cannot reach.

As I stare at it, wide-eyed, I realize what it is.

Llamhigyn y D?r. The water leaper. Llamhigyn y D?r drag those too close to the water’s edge to their deaths.

If they find a sheep, they eat it whole, and the farmer discovers the fleece downstream several days later.

When Dad told us tales about them, he would pretend to bite us until Ceridwen and I were giggling messes on the floor.

He’d only stop when Gran tutted and left the room.

And now here it is: a rank creature beached on the bank, its tongue lashing at me over and over again, too stupid to know it can’t reach.

“You’re uglier than I expected,” I tell it, at a loss for what to say.

It blinks, then licks its own eye with that absurdly long tongue.

Suddenly, bubbles appear behind it, and a pair of pale, webbed hands seize it around the middle.

It lets out a garbled cry as two pearly arms lined with iridescent scales emerge from the water, holding the creature aloft before punting it halfway across the river, where it crashes through the water with a bleat.

A girl surfaces, her dark-blue hair slicked back to her skull—long enough to pool beneath her even as she heaves her upper half onto the grass and braces her chin upon scaled arms. She stares at me with wide, unnaturally pale eyes ringed with dark, spiked lashes and grins as she cocks her head to the side.

She’s pretty in the way that poisonous flowers are pretty, luring you closer, tempting you to touch.

Her torso is bare but for the irregular patches of pearly scales that dot her shoulders, breasts and stomach.

As she smiles, a long tail arcs into the air behind her, sending water flying everywhere.

I shriek and lurch back further, colliding with a fallen tree.

“Sorry about Dwp,” she says in a voice that’s far too warm, far too ordinary. “I told him we would be having a guest. But his memory!” She taps a pointed finger to her temple. “Forgets everything but how hungry he is, Dwp does. Duw, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes!”

My mouth flaps at the mermaid’s casual tone. She uses human idioms with ease.

“You’re a—” I point at her tail.

She glances back, like she’s forgotten all about it, and laughs. “She said you didn’t know anything.”

“—mermaid,” I finally manage.

The mermaid beams. Her teeth are a little sharper than they ought to be. I can only blink at her, and the most useless question tumbles from my mouth.

“Do we have the same God?”

She tilts her head to the side. “What?”

“Duw. It means ‘God.’ You said Duw.”

Her brow furrows. “I didn’t know that. I thought it was just something people said when they were surprised. Ceridwen says it all the time.”

I practically leap to my feet. This could be a trick, but Ceridwen does have a bad habit of muttering Duw, Duw, Duw when bothered—Gran can’t stand it.

“You know my sister?”

“’Course!” The mermaid shrugs. “How else would I know that you’re Ceridwen’s sister? Or that yesterday you went to Cardiff to say goodbye to your dad, which is why Ceridwen—”

“What are you talking about?” I interject. “How do you know Ceridwen?”

She rolls her eyes. “I was getting to that. Anyway, we talked about leaving last week but she wanted to say goodbye—”

I twitch, which stops her rapid stream of speech.

“Ceridwen doesn’t do that!” she declares. “Do it again!”

“I can’t do it on demand,” I snap, but twitch nonetheless. She claps delightedly. “Never mind that! What do you mean ‘leaving’”

“Well, it’s when someone gets up and walks away and—”

“I know what ‘leaving’ means!” I stomp my foot as punctuation. “You are going to tell me where my sister is and how you know her, and you are going to tell me now.”

“You haven’t even asked my name.” The mermaid pouts. “It’s Morgen, by the way. Ceridwen was always the charming one. The nice one. That’s why I talked to her and not to you.”