Inkspell Read Online Free PDF Page B

Anyway, you had good reasons for leaving him behind. The best of reasons.” His reflection trembled on the dark water. His face was the same as ever. The scars were still there, of course, but at least he had suffered no further injuries, his nose hadn’t been smashed in, he didn’t have a stiff leg like Cockerell in the other story, everything was in the right place. He even still had his voice so the man Orpheus obviously knew his trade.
    Dustfinger bent lower over the water. Where were they? Had they forgotten him? The blue fairies forget every face, often just minutes after seeing it, but what about these others? Ten years is a long time, but did they count years?
    The water moved, and his reflection mingled with other features. Toadlike eyes were looking up at him from an almost human face, with long hair drifting in the water like grass, and equally green and fine. Dustfinger took his hand out of the cool water, and another hand stretched up – a 20
     
    slender, delicate hand almost like a child’s, covered with scales so tiny that you could scarcely see them. A damp finger, cool as the water from which it had risen, touched his face and traced the scars on it.
    “Yes, it’s not easy to forget my face, is it?” Dustfinger spoke so quietly that his voice was scarcely more than a whisper. Loud voices frighten water-nymphs. “So you remember the scars. And do you remember what I asked you and your sisters to do for me, when I was here before?”
    The toadlike eyes looked at him, black and gold, and then the water-nymph sank and vanished as if she had been a mere illusion. But a few moments later, three of them appeared together in the dark water. Shoulders white as lily petals shimmered beneath the surface, fishtails with rainbow scales like the belly of a perch flicked, barely visible, in the water below. The tiny gnats dancing above the water stung Dustfinger’s face and arms, as if they had been waiting just for him, but he hardly felt it. The nymphs hadn’t forgotten him – neither his face nor what he needed from them to help him summon fire.
    They reached their hands up out of the water. Tiny air bubbles rose to the surface, the sign of their laughter, as silent as everything else about them. They took his hands between their own, stroked his arms, his face, his bare throat, until his skin was almost as cool as theirs and covered with the same fine, slimy deposit that protected their scales. Then, as suddenly as they had come, they disappeared again. Their faces sank down into the dark pool, and Dustfinger might have thought, as always, that he had only dreamed them, but for the cool sensation on his skin, the shimmering of his hands and arms.
    “Thank you!” he whispered, although only his own reflection now quivered on the water. Then he straightened up, made his way through the oleander bushes on the bank, and moved toward the fire-tree as silently as possible. If Farid had been here, he’d have been prancing through the wet grass like a foal in his excitement.
    Cobwebs wet with dew clung to Dustfinger’s clothes as he stood under the plane tree. The lowest nests hung so far down that he could easily reach into one of the entrance holes. The first elves came swarming angrily out when he put in the fingers that the water-nymphs had covered with moist slime, but he calmed them by humming quietly. If he could hit the right note, their agitated swirling soon turned to a tumbling flight, their own humming and buzzing becoming drowsy, until their tiny, hot bodies settled on his arms, burning his skin and leaving a tiny deposit of soot. However much it hurt he must not flinch, mustn’t scare them away, must reach even farther into the nest until he found what he was looking for: their fiery honey. Bees stung, but fire-elves burned holes in your skin if the water-nymphs hadn’t touched it first. And even with their protection, it was prudent not to be too greedy when you stole the elves’ honey. If a