Morgana DeVille's Arc

Chapter 6 of 7

By morning the settlers were thirsty. Morgana watched the man with the knife scoop swamp water into his palm and lift it toward his mouth. She caught his wrist before it reached his lips. The water was brown and warm and smelled like rot. She had seen towns lose half their people to worse. Six settlers, a horned neighbor, a serpent, an alligator, a fox with three tails. None of them would matter if her people drank this and died in a week. She had four drops of blood left in the vial. She needed clean water before she needed anything else. She walked out past the reeds until the mud came up to her shins. She cut her thumb and let one drop fall. Three left. She did not ask for a servant this time. She had learned. She asked for a neighbor who knew where clean water ran. The swamp held still. Then the surface lifted and a shape rose out of it, woman-shaped from the waist up, the rest a curl of moving water. Her hair ran like a current. Her eyes were closed. Morgana said, my people cannot drink what is here. The spirit opened her eyes and pointed east, past a stand of dead cypress, to a place Morgana could not see. Then she sank back into the swamp and the water where she had stood was suddenly cold and clear. Morgana cupped it and drank. It tasted like rain. She called the settlers over and they filled every pot they had. While they drank, something small pushed up through the mud at her feet, green and round, with leaves for hair and tomatoes clustered at its shoulders. It grinned at her. It handed her a carrot from its own arm. Morgana understood the swamp was answering more than one question. By nightfall the settlers had a spring at the east edge of the clearing and a small green thing following the horned woman around the fire, pressing vegetables into the settlers' hands. No one had gotten sick. No one had run. Morgana sat by the ashes and counted again. Three drops. Seven people fed and watered. Two new neighbors who had come without being called by name. She had spent blood and gotten water and food in return, and she had not asked either creature to serve her. That was the trade the swamp seemed to want. She could work with that. But she had noticed something else. Every time she bled, more things came. She did not know yet how many the clearing could hold before one of them wanted the place for itself.