Free Carousel Sun by Sharon Lee

carousel’s storm gate past Summer’s Wheel, and toward Baxter Avenue. The shore-side breeze brought me the smell of egg rolls frying and my stomach rumbled appreciatively.
    I figured it had a right. Breakfast had been some hours back, followed by a brisk walk up to the northern corner of Archers Beach, and the salt marsh where, six or seven weeks ago, I’d put a little bit of magical muscle into unfreezing a frozen sluice gate. Once the gate was up, the tide could go in and out of the marsh—Heron Marsh, by name—as it was meant to do, cleansing the waters and nourishing the small lives.
    Heron Marsh, having been cut off from the beneficial influences of the tide for . . . a long time, had been in bad need of cleaning. I wanted to check on my handiwork, and also on the trenvay who belonged to the marsh, one Eltenfleur. That was something I should’ve done weeks ago, but I’d thought it prudent to give him a little time to mellow out after our last interaction.
    That had been one of my better ideas. Eltenfleur was hardly mad at me at all anymore for having dumped a juiced-up Ozali on a mission to destroy into his marsh. In fact he’d seemed a little concerned.
    “I held him as close as love, Guardian,” he said, as we sat together on the edge of his marsh, “but love were not enough for him.”
    He was a brown-skinned and slender youth with long yellow hair, eyes the green-brown color of marsh mud, thin, sensitive lips, and a mouthful of teeth like a lamprey. His fingers were very long, and webbed, and so were his toes. As trenvay looks go, his trended to the middle of the bell curve. A good many trenvay are indistinguishable, visually, from ordinary folk. A good many more are strange-looking, and rightly absent themselves from the mundane world.
    Besides the keeping of his marsh, Eltenfleur’s specialty—call it his hobby—is clasping unwary trespassers in his marsh in a loving embrace and bearing them under the water. I only learned about that from research, after the event, but Eltenfleur had damn’ near drowned me at our first meeting, so I’d hoped he’d be able to handle Ramendysis. I hadn’t expected that a mere trenvay could effect the drowning of an Ozali, but I had sort of hoped that Eltenfleur would prove himself enough of a pain in the ass that Ramendysis would have gone home—and that part of the plan had worked.
    Briefly.
    Unfortunately for me—and ultimately for him—he’d then opted to immediately return to the Changing Land and carry on hostilities.
    “I appreciate it, that you tried,” I told Eltenfleur. “In the end, the land prevailed.”
    He nodded, politely, and changed the subject.
    “The waters continue to freshen,” he said, raising a languid hand to direct my attention to the marsh.
    It did look considerably better; the surface moved freely, no longer bound with scum, and the water level was higher. The cattails had recovered their cheerfulness; darning needles darted through the salt hay; even the mud smelled cleaner.
    “I don’t take them, anymore,” Eltenfleur said, almost too softly for me to hear.
    I turned my head and looked at him; his face averted, as if he was studying something highly interesting among the sparse blades of grass.
    “Beg pardon?” I murmured.
    He looked up and met my eyes, his showing slightly red at the edges.
    “I said that I don’t take them anymore—the passersby. I haven’t, since . . . since . . .” He took a breath. “For a very long time.”
    I carefully nodded, keeping my eyes on his.
    “We get older,” he said, sounding defiant. “We . . . change.”
    “Yes,” I said, feeling that resonate deep in my chest. “We change.”
    We change . . .
    I rounded the edge of the storm gate, the aroma of egg rolls making my mouth water, and swung out into Baxter Avenue, meaning to cross over to Tony Lee’s, get myself a plate of early lunch, and have a chat with Anna, Tony’s wife, who knows everything going on in the park, though she