Straight On Till Morning (Disney Twisted Tales) - Liz Braswell Page 0,77

rowed toward each other but could never find a way to meet, for no matter what path they chose the water kept them apart. The princess had her wisest witches and most wily wizards use their magic to try to help her cross. On the back of a clockwork crocodile, through a tunnel made from the breath of mermaids.…None of it worked, of course. And so the maiden and the farmer kept trying, and failing, and wept at their fate.

“All who saw them pitied the poor lovers and cried with them. Year after year the tears fell, adding to the volume—and the saltiness—of the river that divided the princess from the farmer.

“And then one day the tears were just too much for the river to hold. It overflowed its banks and burst the knot—pop! pop! pop!—straightening itself out like a snake waking up.

“Not completely, however,” Wendy added as a quick aside. “The bumps in the knots became a series of tiny islands and beautiful, rich ponds and lakes known as the Maiden’s Tears.”

Why not the Farmer’s Tears?

“Excellent point. They were known as the Farmer’s Tears, and made for quite good irrigation. The two lovers, united at last, left their boats in the river and met in the middle of the water on one of the new islands, and that is where they built their house and lived happily for the rest of their lives.”

Was it her imagination, or was a breeze picking up?

Was there a shimmer in the sky, a difference beginning in the otherwise flat white sheen?

All right, the fairy said, interrupting. But…

“Just wait. This happened so far north that it took weeks before the river joyfully managed to come all the way back down to the desert, greeting its old, lost friends and watering the sands around it. Careful, Tinker Bell. Come over here.”

Wendy stood and took her friend by the hand, pulling her into the air and moving both of them farther up the side of the gully. She couldn’t have said how she knew, but with a calm assuredness like nothing she had ever felt before, she was utterly unsurprised when a strange noise began somewhere up in the canyon.

A crashing, booming, terrifying sound.

Tinker Bell just had time to tightly grab Wendy’s finger when a ten-foot wall of water came hurtling down the ravine. It foamed and roiled in all the colors Wendy had described, red and white and green. Rainbow-sparkling fish leapt along its crest, riding it with apparent joy.

Tinker Bell swooped up backward in surprise and delight. Wendy grinned.

The river crashed up against the bank nearest them, careened off it and continued, splashing the two girls. It was like when a hundred children run down the street, out of school for the day and well aware that the marionette performer was back in the square; all violence and speed and good nature and excitement and force, bouncing off the gates and fences and alleys of London, un-slowed and untroubled by any accidental crashes.

“The river eventually found its way back to the sea, and settled with great relief into its old banks and beds,” Wendy continued, feeling that things should calm down a little bit. “Once again it divided Never Land, but never as permanently as when it was in knots.”

It’s great we have water now, Tinker Bell said, but how does this help us? You can’t swim—we’ve seen that.

Wendy shook her head at her friend and made a tch tch sound.

“Don’t you remember the story? The two lovers stayed on the island in the middle, and left their boats in the river.”

Tinker Bell opened her mouth, about to ask another question, when the boats in question came bumping slowly around the bend.

They looked a little out of place in the desert, drifting along the base of the high umber walls. The farmer’s boat was a tiny wood-and-hide thing that could have been mistaken for a pile of driftwood. It was made for quick jaunts close to the land, for poking about ponds and lakes. Not for going down the rocky rapids of a canyon wash.

The warrior maiden’s boat was far more intriguing. It was all dark wood, beautifully bent and fitted together with the complexity of a true seafaring vessel. Intricate gilded carvings covered the prow. The gunwale was painted a bright, cheery blue. A pole stood up in the back for steering. While there were no cushions left—they looked like they had been ripped out by the incredibly rough journey—the benches looked comfortable