The Ice King (The Witch Ways 0.5)(6)
She wasn’t scared. No, not at all. She was scientific. She opened her black notebook and made a drawing of the tiny fish, listed information about the water, the colour, the smell. She sniffed at the jam jar. It was confusing because it still had a whiff of blackberry squash. Vanessa put her book down and shifted herself once more into jar-filling pose. Her arm reached downwards, downwards making an arc, exactly like swimming.
The water was deliciously cold on her fingers and, as she fell from the bowled stone the water was cool and clear against her face, her eyes blurring as her feet kicked against it and she sank deeper and the water closed over her. Blinking, she could see beneath the water, to where her hands, reaching down, still holding the jam jar, were distorted and interesting looking. A shoal of small fish, ‘fry’, she found the word at last, flittered around her legs and they were so pretty, these baby fish in their lake world with their red fins. Were they tench? Or was it roach? She rolled and yawed in the water but she would not catch them. She should look them up but not now, later, much later, because there was so much more water to fall down into and look how the weed waved and beckoned and ravelled her up.
She was sinking deeper still. She was level now almost with the end of her fishing line, could see above her where the float that bobbed on the surface, where now, suddenly the fishing line, balanced on its forked stick jaggered downward. In that moment Vanessa realised what had happened, where she was, that there was no breath to be taken down here. Her body, panicked, twisted around, trying to find which way was up but there was no up, only down. Vanessa opened her mouth, bubbles carried her cry to the surface where there was no one to hear. Her arms flailed, her feet kicked but there was nothing to hang onto or kick against. Or was there? From below her a deep sound rose, water shifted and coursed, the current pulling her down towards it. Vanessa looked into the blackness, saw the flex and curve of the flanks of the monster pike.
The pike loomed out of the shadows of the water, dense, muscular, arcing as it slid beneath her, shored her up. She felt the impact, her drift halted as the body of the pike turned and glided beneath her, carrying her and she forgot about breathing, about air. Her net, she saw, looked different down here, the knots and twists were tighter and more organised, the way they had seemed in her head as she was making it, rather than the way it had turned out; slightly matted and knotty. The pike nosed into it, its eye looking out at her from the hatching lines of twine. She looked into the eye, curious. It was like a miniature globe. Her hand reached out to touch the pike’s skin, speckled, green and bronze and black, she noted the colours. Esox Lucius, she reminded herself and, as the words came into her head the pike’s long head turned slightly, his teeth sinking into her skin like pins. It didn’t hurt. He held her up close to the orb of his eye so she could look into it. Observe. It was odd, instead of a pupil or an iris she saw a landscape, and the sky was blue cold and the snow was deep white and oh…she was there, walking, walking, walking in the snowglobe of the pike’s eye, and the sky within it was darkening and lights flickered and blurred above her head. Aurora. The word swam into the fluid of Vanessa’s head. Borealis. What was that? Watching? Waiting? There at the farthest reach? A wolf? Vanessa breathed in the cold of the lake, it cleaned her lungs, made her chest feel free. The pike’s teeth held her as they rose to the surface and as he flipped and dived so Vanessa gasped and, feet kicking, reached and found the algaed stones beneath her, the pike’s dive creating a wave that pushed her swiftly to the shore.
She ought to have been afraid, that she had been careless and fallen in, that she might have drowned, but Vanessa understood there was no time for that. Where she had been underwater and out of her element, now the Pike had beached himself beside her and was out of his.
She took up her notebook, shivered as she worked quickly, her clothes and hair and skin dripping droplets of water that puddled onto the pike’s skin. The colours were different on land, made of earth, so unlike Beneath where they had been made of water. She measured him quickly, marking on paper, drawing quickly the patterns of his skin, the shape of his head. Counted the number of his teeth and the shape of them as he opened his mouth and let her fingers touch his jawbone, understanding how it locked here, unlocked there. His eyes were black and greeny liquid now, no longer holding an image of herself walking with an aurora above her. Those eyes watched her studiously and Vanessa knew, she was being measured, drawn and memorised too.
It was mere moments, she had recorded the breaths that his gaping mouth had taken, before she finished and with a touch of his side she pushed at Esox Lucius and with a sudden powering movement he slithered back into the water. The surface closed over his spine leaving ripples rolling inward, sealing.
Vanessa sat for a long time watching the water, a breeze blew her dry, flapped a little at her notebook. She thought of the pike, of the gull, of the heat from her mother. There is nothing more cruel and powerful than this wood, her mother’s words echoed in her head. She felt the stone beneath her, the warmth it held from the sun. She was uncertain now about what strange results her experiment at Pike Lake had shown her.
She took up her pencil and began to draw in a way she’d never drawn before, as if the pencil knew what was hidden inside its core and could guide her hand to extract it.
*
They were setting the table for dinner and her mother lifted Vanessa’s bag to move it onto the sofa. As she did so the flap opened and Vanessa’s notebook not only slid out onto the floor, but opened itself up to the double page she had taken to draw the pike. Her mother looked at it for a moment, read the caption ‘ESOX LUCIUS’.