The Beginning (3 page)

Jahrra’s head shot up, her cheek prickling after having left behind its mossy pillow. She hadn’t thought that Denaeh would ever propose such a thing. The Mystic was grinning up at the young girl underneath a halo of fire-red hair, a look of mischief soon replacing the look of calm composure on her youthful face.

“Now,” said Denaeh clasping her hands together in a gesture suggesting she was about to clean an untidy room, much less plot revenge, “you’ll have to attack them in a place that is in your territory. Now when I say your territory, I mean a place that is comfortable and well known by you. For instance.”

Denaeh cocked her head so one side of her face was exposed to Jahrra. “Lake Ossar . . ?”

Jahrra snorted. “Oh, they go out there as often as they can now. But Gieaun and Scede and I know it far better than they do.”

Jahrra sat up now and rested her elbows on her knees, allowing her legs to dangle freely. Denaeh stood there, her left arm supporting the elbow of the arm whose hand was now thrust under her chin. Jahrra couldn’t make out her expression; her face was downturned.

“And how deep is this lake?” Denaeh continued.

“Probably only twenty feet at the most in the center,” Jahrra answered blankly, sitting up a little straighter and returning her focus on Denaeh.

“And what sorts of animals live in this lake?” the Mystic asked casually, waving her free hand around as if trying to extend the smoky scent of burning incense.

“Oh, nothing more dangerous than large trout and bass, frogs and tadpoles, turtles, and some water bugs. Leeches, maybe.”

Jahrra counted the creatures off on her fingers, then after a few moments of silence, she chuckled and sat up fully on the large limb.

The Mystic finally raised her head.

“What is it?” she asked, looking truly confused since the first time Jahrra had met her.

“Oh, I was just thinking about what else might live in the lake, and I remembered some stories Gieaun’s and Scede’s father used to tell us.”

“What kinds of stories?” Denaeh pressed on, casualty still cloaking her voice.

“Just stories to scare us. Stories about a lake monster. They’re harmless, but they sure scared me when I was younger.”

A glint of mischief flared within the Mystic’s eyes, turning them for just a second from clear golden honey to living, burning sunlight. She smiled ever so slightly.

“A lake monster, huh?” she said composedly.

“Yeah, just legends to tell over a campfire really,” Jahrra answered lazily, letting her shoulders slouch under the weight of the fog.

Denaeh paused for a moment, and Jahrra sensed that she was thinking carefully.

“So, there’s no way that the lake is fathoms deep in the center, and it is in no way possible that a hideous creature lives at the lake’s bottom and comes up every so often to feed upon whatever disturbs the surface?”

Jahrra stared down at Denaeh with a furrowed brow. Then, as the realization of what the Mystic was getting at set in, she smiled broadly, both hands set firmly on the mossy perch on either side of her. The silent sounds of the foggy wood were soon filled with the enchanting laughter of the two women, one very young and one very old.

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Chapter Two
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The Plan

Jahrra told Gieaun and Scede the very next day of the plan she and Denaeh had concocted. She rightfully gave the Mystic most of the credit, seeing as it really had been her idea. Gieaun giggled with glee and Scede took on the same impish grin that Jahrra herself had held the day before.

“I don’t care if Denaeh is a Mystic or not, she sure has some good ideas,” Scede offered apologetically.

He and Gieaun had finally struck up the courage to visit Denaeh. They’d found her strange and eccentric, but like their friend, they’d been impressed and awed by her stories and garden of outlandish plant life. The Black Swamp still frightened them, and although they acted as if they had no more qualms with the Mystic, Jahrra could tell that they still didn’t completely trust her. That didn’t keep them from being appreciative of her offer of help, however. The scheme she’d devised, in their eyes at least, was ingenious.

The plan was simple and quite harmless in their opinion: they would construct a model of the lake monster, and they would use it to frighten Eydeth and Ellysian away from Lake Ossar. At first the three friends had no idea how to even begin such a massive project, for the creature they were to create had to be big, really big, and it had to be believable.

“We just need to come up with a design and figure out what we’re going to use to build it,” Scede said, screwing his face up in thought.

“Let’s start with the basics. What should we use for the frame?” Jahrra asked.

It had been almost a month since the plan had been hatched, and it was the first time, in several weeks, since the three friends arrived at Lake Ossar and hadn’t found the twins there. Jahrra, Gieaun and Scede wasted no time in paddling out to their little island, and were now stretched out flat on their picnic blanket staring at a blank piece of parchment. Jahrra held a piece of charcoal in her hand, and Gieaun and Scede were trying very hard to come up with ideas for their monster.

“We could use reeds to bind the frame together,” Gieaun suggested.

“No, they would fall apart under the water,” Scede said. “Wait, I know, we could use drift wood! For the frame! It would hold up, and it would make it more solid.”

“That would be perfect! And we can cover it with seaweed, reeds and maybe some horse hair to make it look more gruesome,” Jahrra said, smiling brightly. “But we’ll have to find some rope or something to bind it together.”

Gieaun sat up and crossed her arms. “So we know what we are using to make it, but how big are we going to make this thing? If we want it to be realistic, it’ll have to be huge. Where are we going to hide it?”

Gieaun had a look of skepticism on her face. Jahrra slouched, feeling like they hadn’t made any progress at all.

“How about we just make the neck and the head? We don’t need to make the
whole
monster, do we?” Scede queried, looking first at his sister and then at Jahrra.

The two girls glanced at each other and then looked back at Scede.

“You know,” Jahrra said, “I think that might just work.”

Gieaun clapped her hands in delight, and Jahrra smiled more broadly than ever. Scede just sat back in smug satisfaction, a sly grin gracing his face.

“Now, all we need to do is sketch it out, and that’s your job Jahrra,” Gieaun said happily.

And so for the rest of that afternoon Jahrra sketched as Gieaun and Scede directed her to make the neck longer or the head bigger, to add more spikes or more teeth. If anyone had been walking down the boardwalk on that relatively quiet day, they may have been taken by surprise by the sound of joyful laughter spilling from an island of reeds in the middle of the lake.

In the end, it took longer than expected for the three friends to come up with a good design for a terrifying water beast, but by the beginning of winter break, they had the perfect picture of their ideal lake monster. Jahrra had drawn a hideous water dragon with a long neck, a large grotesque head and several extended, saber-like teeth.

“I don’t know what we’ll use to make the teeth,” Jahrra said as she scrutinized her artwork. “Maybe we can just use broken branches or driftwood.”

“It’s going to take us forever to collect enough driftwood and seaweed to make this thing!” Scede complained.

“Maybe, but just think of how wonderful it will be when Lake Ossar is ours again!” Gieaun added, trying to cheer her friend and brother up.

“Gieaun’s right, Scede. It’ll definitely be worth the effort.”

Jahrra smiled at her two friends, and they set their sights on the day that their creation would be finished.

As the weeks passed, the three friends spent whatever time they had collecting materials for their project, storing whatever they found on their island. Luckily, it was the dead of winter and the only other people on the lake were the occasional fisherman heading to the beach to fish or dig for clams. They even celebrated Jahrra’s thirteenth birthday out in the middle of the lake surrounded by foul-smelling seaweed as their noses were nipped by cold gusts of wind pouring off the sea. As the winter came to a slow close, the children had collected enough material to make good progress on their creature’s massive neck.

Spring arrived and with it came the warm weather that enticed the local families out onto Lake Ossar. Jahrra figured that with all of the prying eyes she and her friends would need to find an effective new way to hide their mounting pile of driftwood, rope, and bleached fish and seal bones they’d collected over the past few months.

“I have an idea,” Gieaun hissed one weekend as the three sat hidden behind the rushes and cattails. “We can build a little bit at a time and sink it below the water when we are done for the day. That way no one will ever suspect anything!”

“Good idea Gieaun!” Scede added. “We have to figure out how to keep it under the water anyway, now is a good time to start.”

The process of building a few feet of neck and then sinking it below the lake’s surface seemed tedious at first, but it was their best option. Once they’d collected enough large rocks and attached them to the base of the structure, Scede tied a length of rope to it and lowered the five feet of thick neck they’d completed into the water. It sank easily, disappearing below the lake’s crystal surface. Scede led the rope to the middle of the island and Gieaun and Jahrra helped him tie it securely to a post they’d hammered into the ground.

“All we have to do is make sure our driftwood pile doesn’t get any higher than the cattails,” Jahrra said, looking at the few pieces that were left.

“We need to collect some more soon, maybe next weekend,” Gieaun suggested, eyeing the tiny pile with little interest. “But I think we’ve done enough work for one day.”

The three friends rode home with light hearts that day. Eydeth and Ellysian hadn’t shown up at the lake for weeks, and they started wondering if maybe they didn’t have to finish their lake monster after all.

“Trust me, they’ll be back, I just know it,” Jahrra said begrudgingly as they led their horses through the small wood surrounding the lake. “Summer is coming, so I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of them around here soon. Especially since they won’t be able to harass us everyday like they do at school.”

Despite the misgivings she felt about her limited freedom on Lake Ossar, Jahrra was looking forward to the upcoming summer. Although she’d be busy once again with her Kruelt lessons with Hroombra and defense training with the elves, Jahrra looked forward to spending more time working on the water dragon, even if that time was limited by Eydeth and Ellysian and their insistence on visiting the lake. She figured if they spent at least two days a week building, and one day a week collecting material, they just might be done by the beginning of fall.
Well, time will tell. I just hope we can keep this secret from the twins a little bit longer
, Jahrra thought as she waved goodbye to her friends at the foot of their long drive.

During the first few weeks of summer, Jahrra contributed to their project by scouring the fields after her defense lessons with Yaraa and Viornen for any bit of wayward material that might be helpful in their endeavor. One day she found a very long piece of discarded rope, another day she found a nicely shaped branch that had broken off a tree. Jahrra dragged them home, hoping that Hroombra wouldn’t ask any questions if he saw her, and hid them in the back of Phrym’s stable.

As the warm season progressed, the three friends added more and more to their lake monster. By the first day back to school in the fall, they had nearly three quarters of the frame finished and weighted down below the water.

Jahrra couldn’t have been more pleased: it was perfect. All that was left was for them to devise a way to get Eydeth and Ellysian out onto the lake at the most opportune time.

“We don’t need to worry about that now,” Scede said when Jahrra brought this up. “We need to focus on finishing the monster first.”

“Yeah, but it wouldn’t hurt to start thinking about it,” Gieaun put in.

“First of all,” Scede hissed in a very low voice, “we shouldn’t talk about it here!”

They had been back to school for two weeks now, and the three of them were standing in the front of the schoolhouse waiting for professor Tarnik to arrive. A few other children were standing around, but like always, they were as far away from the three friends as possible.

“You’re right. If Eydeth and Ellysian got wind of this . . .”

Jahrra shivered. She couldn’t imagine anything worse happening. After all those months of hard work, it would be devastating for their enemy to find out about it.

It was at that very moment that a spotless, white carriage came chattering up the road, pulling to a stop only twenty yards away from them. Jahrra tensed and put a scowl on her face, ready to do battle. Eydeth and Ellysian stepped out of their carriage like mobile porcelain dolls and sauntered confidently over to where Jahrra and her friends stood.

“Haven’t seen you at the puddle lately,” Ellysian commented dryly. “Have you found another mud hole to hang out at?”

It was true. Jahrra, Gieaun and Scede had spent the last three weeks gathering all of the excess horse hair from the summer trimming at Wood’s End Ranch and hadn’t had a chance to visit the lake. Gieaun thought the bedraggled, tangled hair would be a nice touch to their already fearsome looking lake monster.

Jahrra now stared at Ellysian, wondering what her excuse had been for not visiting the lake the entire summer. Were she and Eydeth up to something again? Jahrra furrowed her brow and glared down at the sour girl, ready to give a heated retort before Gieaun grabbed her arm. She turned and saw Scede mimicking what she could only guess was a terrified Eydeth after being frightened away by the lake monster. Jahrra forgot her anger and all three friends burst into laughter, leaving the confused twins standing like dumb statues on the path.

“I cannot wait until we are finished with that monster!” Scede said on the ride home that afternoon.

“As soon as we finish the frame, we’ll be able to add the seaweed and horse hair,” Jahrra shouted gleefully as they raced their horses through the fields. “It won’t be long before our lake creature drowns those spineless twins!”

By the end of that month, they had the frame completed, all fifteen feet of the long neck and head. All that was left for them to do, other than lure Eydeth and Ellysian out onto the lake at the right time of course, was to fill in the skeleton of their creature with muscle and flesh. For that extra touch of authenticity, they gathered dead reeds for stuffing and dried strings of seaweed to hold it all together.

“It already looks terrifying.” Gieaun shivered happily, stepping back and looking at the half-filled neck that stood among the reeds of their little island like a rotting pier post.

The dark seaweed clung to the sturdy neck like thick ropes of decaying flesh, giving the strange skeleton a life-like appearance. Gieaun and Scede closed their eyes and imagined what this creature would look like once it was completed, looming out of the lake, dark and dripping, with a thick mane of grizzled hair running down the back of its neck.

“Hey, I finally found something for the teeth!” Jahrra huffed from the edge of the reeds, interrupting her friends’ thoughts.

She’d made a trip to the shore to get some more seaweed, but had found something else instead. She stepped out of the small boat with an armful of what appeared to be several bleached rib bones of some long-dead sea creature.

“Whoa!” Jahrra dropped the bones in awe when she spotted the several feet of blackish, ghoulish neck rising in front of her. “It looks great! But we’d better put it back under the water before anyone sees it.”

The children worked diligently on their little island for the remainder of the day, grateful for the quiet, cool air. Although they had their minds preoccupied with their grand project, they couldn’t help but fall victim to the change of the season and the customs that came with it. It was now the middle of autumn, and Sobledthe, the harvest celebration, was only a few weeks away. Today they might be up to their elbows in foul-smelling kelp and rough, splintered driftwood, but tomorrow would be a day of rest, relaxation and good story telling. Jahrra thought it had been far too long since she’d been to the Belloughs of the Black Swamp, and tomorrow she, Gieaun and Scede were taking a day off from their work to enjoy themselves.