“What are you two so nervous about?”
“They’re coming.”
I slid my gaze across the water, looking for a telltale sign of a disturbance. Then I searched the forest, waiting for Aine to make her entrance.
Effa whispered, “If Aine goes fracky—”
“And Metis turns fish-eyed,” Caerwen hissed in her grotto voice.
I joined in with the doom and gloom, a smile tugging my lips. “What a bullspitted mess. We’ll run for the hills.”
“We should run now.” Effa pointed at the pink, purple, and white flowers popping up through the mud, petals spreading like a time-lapse video running at a rapid speed.
Then Aine appeared, materializing out of a misty cloud. Butterflies flitted around her head. She’d woven her pale hair into a coronet, laced with pale pink flowers. The gown she wore reminded me of flowing blood—glistening, ruby red, darkening to black at the hem.
The material swished with each step she took. More and more flowers popped from the wintry ground, opening with an aggression that prickled my skin. Vines emerged to coil and unwind with a reptilian intensity, matching the Queen of the Forest’s tight smile.
And then competitively, because it could be nothing else, the surface of the sacred pool churned. The sentinels for the Lady of the Lake emerged on their platform, spears and helmets gleaming. Metis followed, not stepping through mist like her sister, but exploding with a bolt of bright, dangerous starlight.
The High Priestess for all water-based nymphs displayed the same regal arrogance as Aine, the Mother for all land-based nymphs. The gown Metis wore murmured with the surging song from the oceans. The material held the darkest blues, crusted with shells and crystals. She wore the familiar crown of diamonds, although the stones mingled in were sapphires this time and not amethysts.
Still, they burned with the same inner fire. A warning.
The Queen of the Forest sneered, “Always so theatrical, Meti.”
“Better than the cliché, Annie,” the Lady of the Lake spat, adding to the insult with a wave of power that crusted the flowers in Aine’s hair with ice.
Aine’s lip curled, and it wasn’t even close to a smile. “Did you enjoy having your precious blade back?”
Metis mirrored Aine’s expression so perfectly I blinked.
“I should have cut your throat when you were a babe in a crib.”
“You always lacked imagination.”
And as entertaining as it all was, the fish-eyed frackiness, I intervened before the two trembling nymphs at my back freaked and disappeared.
“Ladies,” I said. “We’re here to talk.”
Aine flicked her hand. Smiled as flower petals fell in an avalanche from the sky, sticking in Metis’s platinum blonde hair, over her shoulders, melting into the fabric of her dress. Metis retaliated. Water poured over Aine’s head, drenching her.
I burst out laughing. “Gods—and they consider you two queens?”
“We can’t kill each other,” Metis gritted.
“A pity,” Aine agreed, her smile thinning her lips into a fine line.
Effa was fizzing. Caerwen was close to transparent, the poor dear, even with the heavy coat. I sighed, and shouted over my shoulder, “Fee, get your skinny ass out here. Tell them to behave.”
Frantic, Effa poked my back like she was a woodpecker. “You shouldn’t say things like that,” she whispered.
“Why not? He’s in this up to his bushy eyebrows.”
“It’s not… polite.”
Fee—Felix, the King of the Forest, the Green Man, the Garden Ornament—walked from the trees. He was wearing his ancient armor again, glinting in the sun.
I shook my head, unable to believe the future of the Selkirks depended on this trio of characters, powerful beings who’d been around so long they’d forgotten how to take themselves, or this situation, as seriously as they should.
