The Watchtower

tower covered with grass and moss, like something from a Piranesi etching. I followed the stone wall through a narrow passageway into a round clearing full of wildflowers and dragonflies. Looking up, I saw the railing of the park and understood that the park was laid out on the foundations of the old château and these were its crumbling battlements. The vestiges, upon which the village held its fêtes. I imagined dances at night, children running in and out between the trees, old men sitting on the benches that once held up the walls of the Château of Lusignan.
    I thought at last that Melusine would have been happy to see the château she raised tumbled down into rocks and moss. In the cracks of one of the walls I found a thin stream of water burbling up from some underground stream, even now seeming to erode the rock foundation further. I took out the Poland Spring bottle, uncapped it, and held it over the spring.
    “You can go home now,” I said, pouring the water into the spring.
    The water from the bottle joined the stream, then pooled for a moment in the cupping rock. A faint mist rose from the pool and spiraled upward. Everything was perfectly still in the grove; even the dragonflies paused in their flicker and dart. I felt the way I had on the platform in Poitiers, that time had stopped, that I was outside time. The mist wreathed itself into a sinuous shape—a woman with serpent tail and batlike wings. She turned to me and I saw the same green eyes I’d seen staring up at me from a pile of goo on Governors Island, only these eyes were full of joy.
    “Thank you, Marguerite, my sister, for bringing me home at last.”
    “It’s Garet,” I said, recalling that Melusine had called me Marguerite and sister on Governors Island just before she’d dissolved. “Do you remember…?”
    “I remember everything, ” she said with a shudder that made the mist ripple into shards of rainbows. “Did you find the box?”
    “Yes, but then Will Hughes took it. He’s taking it to the Summer Country to summon the creature that made Marguerite mortal—”
    “You must ssssstop him!” Melusine hissed, water droplets spraying my face. “She becomes stronger each time she’s summoned, feeding on the need of those who call her. If she gets loose…” The water molecules that made up Melusine wavered in the air with her agitation. I was afraid she was about to break up again, but then she steadied herself and went on, “She’ll destroy everything if she escapes the lake.”
    “Why?” What I really wanted to ask was, if I stopped Will from summoning the creature in the lake, then how could he become mortal? And if he didn’t become mortal, how could we ever be together? But those questions all seemed a bit self-centered in the face of global annihilation. “Why does she hate humanity so much?”
    Melusine rippled in the air, her molecules refracting rainbows. “It’ssss a long sssstory,” she sighed.
    I sat down on a rock beside her. “Go ahead. I have hours before my train.”
    *   *   *
    “In the beginning the Summer Country and the human world ran side by side like two streams running to the sea.” Melusine’s voice trilled like church bells in the still air, her lisp gone. I felt that she’d told this story to herself and others—perhaps heard it from others—many times, and like a stutterer who only stutters on her own words but not set pieces, she was able to recite it flawlessly. “At first fey and humans lived peaceably side by side but with little interaction as we were too different. We fey were … ethereal .” A pulse of air and water demonstrated what she meant. “But the longer we interacted, some of us became more … corporeal .” The droplets in the air became heavier and grayer, like the sky before rain. “Most of us then only wanted to play with the humans, but some of us became so enamored of them they wanted to be human. We took shapes that combined their features with the animals they loved. We appeared as winged men and fish-tailed women”—she swished her own tail—“as centaurs and unicorns and dragons. We learned what it was like to feel the sun on our faces and the rush of water over our skin. We learned what hunger and thirst felt like, and desire and love … and pain.” The heavy droplets began to fall. I was afraid she’d disappear entirely, but she collected herself in time and reassembled her molecules. She looked thinner, though, and fainter, and I