The Ice King (A Witch Ways Whisper) Read Online Free

soft brownish colour, and there were tiny splashes of green and the flimsy miniature form of a baby fish. There was a word for small baby fish but she couldn’t think of it, she looked at his tiny body, he looked made of glass. What was the word for baby fish? Once more, a deep ploshing sound caught at her. She looked up to see a single rolling ripple expanding out from just below the stone. Speckled. Green. Something skulked. Vanessa sat back.
    She wasn’t scared. No, not at all. She was scientific. She opened her black notebook and made a drawing of the tiny fish, listed information about the water, the colour, the smell. She sniffed at the jam jar. It was confusing because it still had a whiff of blackberry squash. Vanessa put her book down and shifted herself once more into jar-filling pose. Her arm reached downwards, downwards making an arc, exactly like swimming.
    The water was deliciously cold on her fingers and, as she fell from the bowled stone the water was cool and clear against her face, her eyes blurring as her feet kicked against it and she sank deeper and the water closed over her. Blinking, she could see beneath the water, to where her hands, reaching down, still holding the jam jar, were distorted and interesting looking. A shoal of small fish, ‘fry’, she found the word at last, flittered around her legs and they were so pretty, these baby fish in their lake world with their red fins. Were they tench? Or was it roach? She rolled and yawed in the water but she would not catch them. She should look them up but not now, later, much later, because there was so much more water to fall down into and look how the weed waved and beckoned and ravelled her up.
    She was sinking deeper still. She was level now almost with the end of her fishing line, could see above her where the float that bobbed on the surface, where now, suddenly the fishing line, balanced on its forked stick jaggered downward. In that moment Vanessa realised what had happened, where she was, that there was no breath to be taken down here. Her body, panicked, twisted around, trying to find which way was up but there was no up, only down. Vanessa opened her mouth, bubbles carried her cry to the surface where there was no one to hear. Her arms flailed, her feet kicked but there was nothing to hang onto or kick against. Or was there? From below her a deep sound rose, water shifted and coursed, the current pulling her down towards it. Vanessa looked into the blackness, saw the flex and curve of the flanks of the monster pike.
    The pike loomed out of the shadows of the water, dense, muscular, arcing as it slid beneath her, shored her up. She felt the impact, her drift halted as the body of the pike turned and glided beneath her, carrying her and she forgot about breathing, about air. Her net, she saw, looked different down here, the knots and twists were tighter and more organised, the way they had seemed in her head as she was making it, rather than the way it had turned out; slightly matted and knotty. The pike nosed into it, its eye looking out at her from the hatching lines of twine. She looked into the eye, curious. It was like a miniature globe. Her hand reached out to touch the pike’s skin, speckled, green and bronze and black, she noted the colours. Esox Lucius , she reminded herself and, as the words came into her head the pike’s long head turned slightly, his teeth sinking into her skin like pins. It didn’t hurt. He held her up close to the orb of his eye so she could look into it. Observe. It was odd, instead of a pupil or an iris she saw a landscape, and the sky was blue cold and the snow was deep white and oh…she was there, walking, walking, walking in the snowglobe of the pike’s eye, and the sky within it was darkening and lights flickered and blurred above her head. Aurora. The word swam into the fluid of Vanessa’s head. Borealis. What was that? Watching? Waiting? There at the farthest reach? A wolf? Vanessa breathed in the