sat in the middle of the stream, threatening to turn my mind inside out. I looked at it for a moment in consternation, because that . . . could not be what I thought it was.
Yet it continued to sit there, disturbing the currents. And displacing enough water that a tide had washed up, soaking our camp and the riverbank in both directions. It was as if a ship the size of a submarine had somehow surfaced in the middle of our quiet mountain stream, only it wasn’t a submarine.
It was . . . a seahorse.
It was bluish-gray, with great, translucent fins crowning its head and wafting along its sides, and a long, delicate snout. It had jewel-like scales that caught and reflected the moonlight, giving it what appeared to be an orange racing stripe down its side. I stared at it for a moment longer, and then I frowned.
Like the tide, the racing stripe was quite advanced for an illusion, which often ignored the lighting in an area entirely. It was one of the easiest ways of spotting a cheap spell, in fact, if distortions around the edges didn’t already give it away. But this had no such distortions. It was simply a huge, ridiculously pretty seahorse that my mind persisted in telling me was real when it quite obviously wasn’t.
After all, we were in fresh water here, not salt, and in any case, seahorses were not the size of school buses!
And then it spoke.
“Here! You, girl. What are you?”
The question was in English, which was also absurd, as there would be no way for any randomly passing seahorse to know what language I used. I started to say something to that effect, and about the fact that illusions didn’t work on me and that I was going to see through this one any minute. But I didn’t.
Instead, I just stopped and stared again, because the seahorse hadn’t been the one speaking, after all. Its rider had. And this illusion was even better than the last. This illusion was—
“Beautiful,” I whispered.
It was a completely inadequate word. Completely. It wasn’t even accurate because beauty was supposed to delight and please the senses, but this beauty . . .
Hurt.
It was so overwhelming that it bent the mind, resulting in a sensation very much like pain. I gasped at the creature who had just leaned over the side of the great beast, feeling as if I had been struck in the solar plexus and left breathless and disarmed. And enchanted, possibly literally, although I wasn’t sure that I cared any more.
The rider was a woman, but not like any I had ever seen. She was framed against the huge, orange moon as if haloed by it, but she didn’t need the help. The moon paled into insignificance in comparison.
Virtually anything would have.
Her thick, dark hair, which appeared to be as long or longer than her body, seemed to have a life of its own. It spread out wildly, blocking half of the moon’s light, like the branches of a very strange tree. It appeared to move on the wind the way hair usually does in water, wafting about as if on unseen currents.
Her face was almost too beautiful to look upon. Her eyes were a turbulent blue-gray that nearly matched the color of her strange steed, and her lips appeared to be greenish-blue as did the blush on her cheeks. Although perhaps that was due to cosmetics or to the strange light she seemed to give off.
She was wearing some kind of diaphanous, blue-gray-green robes that boiled around her like chiffon or, more accurately, like waves of seafoam. Only I had never seen anyone wear seafoam before. I did not know that I was seeing it now, but I was no longer annoyed.
I was grateful to see this, even as an illusion.
I was grateful.
“What?” she called down. “Speak up!”
“I said that you are beautiful!” I shouted, wondering if I had gone mad.
“Yes, I know.” She sounded peevish. “That is not what I asked.”
And, suddenly, without warning, I found myself rising off of the rocks, but not under my own power. And not to my feet. My useless legs dangled beneath me as my dripping form was levitated into the air, until I was roughly even with the astounding creature sitting on a coral saddle.
It appeared to have grown organically around the seahorses’ giant belly, then upward, before smoothing out to provide her with a delicate orange perch. There were no reins, but