The Water Witch Read Free

approached. I felt reassured until I looked back and saw that the vines were also intertwining behind us. Just when I thought I couldn’t stand the claustrophobic woods another second we emerged into open air: a glade encircled by ferns. I felt and smelled the coolness of water before I saw the pool, which was the same deep green as the surrounding woods. When my eyes adjusted to the murk, I realized that the burble that had drawn us camefrom a spring bubbling up from a cleft in a giant boulder and falling into a wide basin hollowed out of gray-green granite. The women formed a circle around the basin and then crouched down beside it to scoop handfuls of water to their mouths. In this age of bottled water and rampant pollution it went against most of my instincts to drink from a hole in the ground, but thirst overcame my reservations. I knelt beside Soheila, cupped my hands beneath the ice-cold trickle, and brought a handful to my lips …
    A mineral chill filled my mouth, my throat, my belly … then spread outward, plumping every desiccated cell in my body. It was like drinking pure oxygen. I took another sip and it was like imbibing the ether of outer space. After a long draft I bathed my face, resisting the urge to plunge headlong into the shallow basin. Instead I sat back on my heels to look around.
    From the basin the water spilled from rock to rock: a granite stairway leading down to a green pool scooped out of the stone. Wild irises grew around the pool; water lilies floated on top of it. I made my way down to where Soheila, Liz, and Diana were bent over, gazing into the water. I crouched beside them and stared through crystal clear water down to moss-covered stones. I leaned farther … and found myself looking into a pair of moss green eyes, the same color and shape as the stones at the bottom of the pool. I flinched and the eyes blinked—then vanished in a whirlpool that splashed cold water in my face.
    “They’re quite frisky,” Liz said, handing me a bandanna to wipe my face.
    “They’re ready to migrate,” Soheila said, pointing to the far side of the pool. At first all I could see were rapids spilling into a fast-flowing stream, the clear water twisted into skeins of transparent silk where it braided over the rocks, but as wemoved closer I saw that those transparent skeins were actually long thin bodies, slender as eels, slipping over the rim of the pool and into the stream.
    “Those are
undines
?” I asked, recalling the illustrations of the winsome maiden Arthur Rackham did for the German fairy tale. She had looked far different from these eel-like creatures.
    “Immature undines,” Soheila replied, slipping her fingers in the water and tickling the underbelly of one of the undines. It flipped over and stared at us with its large mossy eyes. Up close I saw that it did have arms, but they were loosely clamped to its sides by sheer, weblike netting. On some undines the netting had frayed to long streamers, freeing their arms. “Their arms start to separate from their bodies to help with their passage, but their legs won’t form until they get to Faerie. That’s why it’s so important that they get there. If they’re stranded here …” Soheila shook her head sadly. “They can’t survive past the summer here in this form. Poor things. During the last migration we found several dead ones stranded in the woods.”
    While I knew Soheila was ancient, it still unnerved me when she spoke about events that had taken place a hundred years ago as though they had just happened yesterday.
    “Let’s hurry,” Liz said, striking out down the narrow path beside the stream. “The first wave will be reaching the junction pool by now.”
    I followed the women, who now walked single file—Liz in the lead, followed by Diana, then Soheila—trying to keep up with their accelerated pace, but I found myself distracted by the activity in the stream. If I hadn’t known about the undines I might have thought