The Watchtower

John Dee tricked you by summoning that vampire, just as Morgane tricked Marguerite. Melusine told me that Morgane only ever grants requests that she knows will turn out badly for the supplicant.”
    “Did she?” Will asked, his lips curling in an angry smile. “That sounds about right. And yet, I stole this box from you”—he patted a leather satchel slung across his chest that I hadn’t noticed before—“and we have come all this way so that I could ask her to make me mortal.”
    “But that’s a reasonable request. You deserve to be mortal. I don’t see how that could turn out badly.”
    Turning to me, Will caressed my face, traced the line of my jaw, and tilted my chin up so he could see the marks his teeth had made on my throat. “You have an awful lot of faith in the monster that almost killed you.”
    “But you didn’t,” I said, clasping his hand in mine. “You stopped yourself. A monster wouldn’t have been able to stop, but you did. So you’re not a monster.”
    He lifted his hand to my throat and stroked the torn flesh. I trembled at his touch, not from fear but from the sudden overwhelming desire to feel his teeth there again. “Let’s hope for both our sakes you’re right,” he said. Then he turned, took my hand, and led me into the blood-lit valley.
    *   *   *
    As we descended, we walked through deep woods that obscured our view of the village, but when we reached a clearing just above the lake, we could make out the village landmarks: the tower of the abbey across the lake, the gate to the walled town—closed now, and bolted with heavy iron locks—and across from the gate the half-timbered inn looking especially quaint and rustic in the moonlight. I couldn’t make out the car park from here or—I realized as we drew closer—any cars on the road at all.
    “The village looks like something out of the Middle Ages,” I said to Will. “Maybe they got rid of the cars for the Renaissance Faire.”
    “No,” he said, pulling me under the shadow of a tree. “‘I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’”
    “What?” I asked, confused.
    “It is the Renaissance. This is how Paimpont looked in 1602. See that cottage? I remember getting my horse shod there in 1602.”
    The building looked familiar to me, too, only I recalled it housing a gas station and sporting a large sign that welcomed visitors to the Fairy Country. “Maybe they took down the sign,” I said. “Just because it looks like sometime in the seventeenth century…”
    I felt Will’s grip tighten on my arm. I turned and saw that his face had gone as rigid as the stone effigy in the abbey. “Not just any time in the seventeenth century,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s the night I stayed here with Marguerite. The night she gave up her immortality for me and I, fool that I was, left her to trade my soul for eternal life.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because there she is.”
    I followed his riveted gaze down to the edge of the pool. At first I saw nothing and hoped that the image of his lost love was only a delusion left over from his long confinement in the Summer Country. Because as distressing as it would be to think that Will had lost his mind, I was pretty sure I preferred that to the idea that we had traveled back in time to the turn of the seventeenth century.
    But then I saw her. She was wearing a dark cloak, but when she moved, a flash of white appeared at the hem, a glimpse of the long nightgown she must have worn when sneaking out of bed—the bed she had shared with Will!—and coming down to the lake. Her long black hair hid her face, but when I took a step forward, cracking a branch beneath my foot, she turned and revealed, startlingly clear in the moonlight, her face …
    My face!
    I started to gasp, but Will clamped his hand over my mouth. For a long moment Marguerite stared into the dark woods above her, her brow furrowing with concentration. What would she think if she saw us? To an immortal fey, visitors from the future might not seem impossible. We could warn her that she was about to give up her immortality for nothing, but then she’d never have mortal children. My mother would never be born, nor would I.
    After a long moment she turned back to the pool and sat down on a circular stone overhanging the water. She remained still for several moments, then she leaned over the pool, nearly touching her lips to the water, as if whispering something to it.
    Will released me