Free The Waterstone by Rebecca Rupp Page B

brown and the saplings are dying. The squirrels have brought stories, but I have failed to heed them. I have been a fool not to understand.”
    “Understand?” Tad asked.
    Treeglyn’s face for a moment looked old and tired, and her piercing blue eyes were dim.
    Then she said, “The Nixies are awake.”

It was morning. Treeglyn had refused to explain more on the previous night, saying that it was too long a story to begin when they were all so tired. Instead she had made them a bed on the tree-house floor and left them alone in the deepening dusk.
    Tad had thought that he would never be able to sleep, perched up in the air as he was with so much
nothing
underneath him, but instead, worn out by fear and grief, he had slept deep and dreamlessly. He would have slept even more if he had not been wakened by Treeglyn, shrieking out the window at the squirrels.
    Treeglyn laid down her spoon — they were having acorn porridge for breakfast — and ran her fingers through her bird’s-nest hair, making its tangles stand even more on end.
    “So you’ve never heard of the Nixies?” she said.
    “We know a little about the Witches,” Tad said tentatively. “In the Very Beginning, before the coming of the Tribes, there were Witches. The Old Folk.”
    Every Fisher child was taught how Great Rune had shaped the world, scooping out the ponds and streams with his giant Digging Stick and filling them with water from his starry river in the sky. He had made all the people and animals, too, putting them together from pond mud and then breathing on them with his warm green breath to make them come alive. He had made the Witches first, and then the animals, and finally the Tribes. But the Witches had vanished long ago — though every once in a while, Pondleweed said, if you were very lucky, you might come upon one still, and if you were luckier yet, they might give you a magic gift, like a spider-web tunic that made you invisible or mouse-fur boots that let you cross a whole forest in a single stride. But you should never eat the Witches’ food or enter their houses, because when you came out again, it could be hundreds of years later and all your family and friends would be gone. . . .
    Tad looked up guiltily.
    “Father used to tell us a story about the Witches,” Birdie was saying. “They lived in the skunk-cabbage patch and gave people wishes.”
    Treeglyn glared at her so fiercely that Pippit gave a nervous croak. Tad hastily pretended that his mouth was full of porridge.
    “Skunk-cabbage patch indeed,” Treeglyn said huffily.
    “It was just a story,” Birdie said.
    “Malignant misrepresentation,” Treeglyn snapped. She rapped her porridge spoon sharply on the table. “There were three races of Witches,” she continued, very slowly and deliberately as if speaking, Tad thought, to persons who were very stupid. “The Dryads, the Witches of the Trees. The Kobolds, the Witches of the Mountains. And the Nixies, the Witches of the Waters. Does this sound familiar?”
    “I don’t think so,” Tad said uncomfortably. “Father just said Witches.”
    Treeglyn sighed. Her shoulders slumped, and her wild hair seemed to wilt.
    “No, of course not,” she muttered, almost to herself. “It’s only to be expected. It was so long ago. I forget how old I am.”
    “How old are you?” asked Birdie.
    Tad nudged her. It was a question Pondleweed said they were never supposed to ask. At least not of olders. But Treeglyn didn’t seem to mind.
    “So old,” she said. “I remember the forest that grew here before this one, and the forest before that. I remember the sprouting of the first trees. I was here when the world was young, when the mountains were building, when the singing in the water was joyful and sweet as the song of new birds.”
    She gazed out the little window for a moment, looking over the children’s heads. Her eyes sparkled with tears, and the room was suddenly swept with a smell of wet leaves and rain. Then, in her