The Lioness and Her Knight by Gerald Morris

Author:Gerald Morris [Morris, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

VII. In the Other World

Luneta stared at the little man. "Fetch me where?" she asked.

Come and see.

"Why?"

"You'll understand when you're there."

"I have to be back at midnight or so to talk to Ywain. How long will it take?"

The little man giggled. "That's a nonsense question. There's no answer."

"Why?"

"Come and see."

Luneta glanced over at Rhience, who had his back to them and was kneeling over the fire. "Why should I go anywhere with you? Why should I trust you?" she hissed.

"You've trusted me this far. It's a bit late to start wondering that now," the man replied. "As for why you should go with me, you'll come because as long as you can remember you've dreamed of getting away from your ordinary life, and I'm not ordinary."

He was right, and Luneta no longer hesitated. Pulling her cloak around her shoulders, she stepped into the woods behind the green man. After a few steps, she said, "By the way, I ought to know what to call you. Snowflake isn't your real name, is it?"

"All my names are real," Snowflake said.

He led Luneta through the forest, down trails that seemed perfectly obvious in the night but that Luneta had seen no trace of when she and Rhience had ridden over the same ground in daylight. They didn't go far. After only a few minutes, Snowflake led her to a pond. It could hardly have been more than twenty paces across, but in its center was an island, smaller around than King Arthur's Round Table, and on the island stood a tiny hut, barely large enough for one large adult to stand in.

"Here we are," Snowflake said.

"Are we going into that shack?" Luneta asked. Snowflake nodded, and Luneta said, "Good thing we're both little. How do we get there? Jump?"

By way of answer, Snowflake took Luneta's hand and stepped into the pond, pulling her in after him. At the very first step, they both plunged into water over their heads—indeed, Luneta never did know how deep the pond was, since she never touched bottom—and began paddling forward. Oddly, there was more light under the surface of the water than there was above in the night; a pure blue-green glow illuminated the water around Luneta, and she saw that the pond was much larger than she had thought. Snowflake pulled her hand to hurry her, and she paddled harder, looking around with wonder. They swam together for a long time—time itself seemed larger below the surface than it was above—and never once went up for air. It didn't occur to Luneta that she ought to breathe, and so she didn't bother. Instead, she swam through the warm, clear, beautifully lit water, enjoying the journey and forgetting everything else.

At last they came to land, and Snowflake pulled her out of the pond. They stood dripping on the shore of the island for a moment, outside the shack, while Luneta looked back to the shore where they had started. It was only about three or four paces away, across a narrow strip of black water.

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