edge and poked at the moss upon the surface with his finger. The oily black water beneath revealed itself for a moment.
“Where did you see the hand?”
“Over there, to the right of that large root.”
Vambéry followed my gaze, then circled around to the side of the bog, getting as close to the edge as possible. He dipped his cane into the water up to the handle without striking bottom. “It is very deep.”
“When Ellen walked in, she disappeared beneath the surface only a few feet from shore.”
Vambéry acknowledged this fact with a slight nod, then plucked a long, dead branch from the tree next to him. Like with the cane, he submerged it until his fingers brushed the water. “Still no bottom. This branch is my height; that gauges the depth at greater than six feet.”
I pictured the hand reaching out from the depths and pulling the branch into the waters, then coming up again and taking Vambéry down, too. It would be over in an instant, nothing but a slight ripple on the surface of the water, then stillness. I shook off the morbid thought.
Vambéry released the branch and it disappeared under the water. “Can you feel her, Bram?”
“What?”
“You said as a child you could feel her. Is she near us now? Is she in these waters somewhere?”
“If she is nearby, I cannot tell.”
“It is possible she can block the bond binding you to her. I have witnessed such things before, particularly with the more experienced. A wall, of sorts, severing the tie.”
A single dragonfly buzzed past Matilda and she let out a startled gasp. My eyes immediately jumped to the other side of the bog, but I saw no other dragonflies, not like the last time.
Vambéry saw, too, and followed my gaze. “Some of them have the ability to command nature. Not only small animals and insects, but larger mammals as well. I have heard of them even controlling the weather.”
“How is that possible?” Matilda asked.
“I am not going to pretend to understand; I can only tell you what I know. They enlist the weaker minds and deploy them for protection. How they influence the weather is anyone’s conjecture.”
Then a thought flooded my mind. “What was she protecting? The person I saw in the water?”
“You did not see a person; you saw a hand, correct?”
“Yes, but—”
“You saw a hand snatch a dragonfly from the air and disappear beneath the surface,” Vambéry said.
“A hand cannot act alone.”
Vambéry dismissed this with a wave. “In our world, perhaps that holds true. Tell me, Bram, was the hand you saw the same hand you saw in the box in the tower? Think hard on this; it is crucial. Was it a right hand emerging from the watery abyss or a left? And what of the appendage discovered in the tower? Right or left?”
“The hand in the tower was left,” Matilda said.
“Good,” Vambéry replied. “And the other?”
I squeezed my eyes shut and strained to remember. I pictured the fingers breaking the surface of the water, the green peat sliming away as the hand came into view and snatched—
“Right,” I said. “It was a right hand.”
“I see,” Vambéry said, turning back to the water. “Would you be willing to indulge in a little experiment?”
“If it will help.”
“I want you to stick your own hand into the water.”
I thought about the creatures living in that water—eels, frogs, toads, newts—the surface clogged with sodden peat, immune to the moonlight’s attempts to penetrate the surface and illuminate what lurked beneath. The bog was deep, deeper than we could measure with a cane or a tree branch. I thought about the hand reaching up, grasping at the dragonfly, and pulling it below. Would that be my fate if I touched the water?
“You only need to touch the surface.”
“Why? What will that prove?”
Vambéry walked over to me, carefully planting his feet on the firmer ground and avoiding the puddles of moss. “This link