Seraphina Blue's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Seraphina came back to the lagoon every night for a week. The mask sat in her bag, sealed and waiting. The vine arch across the water stayed dark. She crouched in the reeds and watched the shell at its crown catch the moon and give nothing back. Each dawn she walked home with the mask still dry. She learned the wards while she waited. On the third night she spotted them: thin metal rods driven into the mud along the shelf, each one strung with small mirrored discs. The discs turned when the current shifted. When she tossed a stick past the nearest rod, the water above it boiled white and the stick came apart in three pieces. She counted twelve rods between her crouch and the arch. She marked each one in her head and did not go closer. On the sixth night she brought a torch. It was an old thing she had pulled from her grandfather's shed, wound with swamp vine and capped with a blue crystal that would not go out in rain. She told herself it was for the walk back. She knew she wanted something in her hand when the light came. She set it in the sand beside her knee and waited. The arch lit on the seventh night. It did not flicker first. One moment the vines were black against the water; the next, blue fire ran through every twist of them, and the shells along the curve flared like small lamps. The crown shell threw a clean white beam across the lagoon and struck the sand at her feet. The gate had opened. Her hands shook so hard she dropped the torch and had to pick it up twice. She fitted the mask. The seal pulled tight against her cheeks and the orange lights along the jaw warmed. She walked into the water with the torch in her left hand and her right hand out for balance. At the first ward rod she stopped and watched the discs. They hung still. The blue light from the arch ran along the surface like a road, and the rods on either side of it stayed quiet as she passed. She counted them under her breath. Twelve. She crossed the last one and the shelf dropped away beneath her feet. She went under. The mask breathed for her. The torch burned blue in her fist and lit a column of water around her body, and below that column the lagoon kept going down, farther than she had guessed from the shore. She could see the shape of something built into the rock far below — pale panels, blue-streaked, folded like the petals of a closed flower. A gate. She kicked toward it. The shore was behind her now, and the favor she owed was somewhere ahead, and she did not yet know the name of either.