5. On the Banks of the Winsome River

5

ON THE BANKS OF THE WINSOME RIVER

NADYA WOKE WET AND ACHING, clothes plastered to her body by drying pondwater and sticky silt. She pulled her face away from the muddy bank where she was resting, coughing and spitting out a bit of grit, and rolled onto her back, staring up at the sky.

It was gray and heavy with pendulous clouds, their bellies swollen with rain yet to fall. She blinked, frowning at that sky. It didn’t look right. She hadn’t seen clouds like that since arriving in Denver. Even on the rare occasions when it rained, the clouds weren’t the deep, lowland clouds of her early childhood, the clouds she remembered from the orphanage. These clouds looked pregnant with storm, ripe and ready to begin throwing lightning from one to the next, to roll with thunder as they sheeted rain down on the land beneath them.

These weren’t Russian clouds, either, not quite, but they were closer than she’d seen in a long time, and they filled her heart with lightness, even as her hair was filled with muck. Her hair…

Pansy was going to kill her.

She sat up abruptly, the fingers of her hand digging into the mud, eyes so wide it hurt, looking frantically around in a vague attempt to figure out how long she’d been floating in the pond. Her panic didn’t recede as she realized she didn’t recognize anything around her. Instead, it built and pooled behind her breastbone, becoming something dark and terrible that threatened to break loose and sweep her away. It was a raging flood, and the dam holding it at bay was very thin indeed, barely worthy of the name.

Nadya pushed herself to her feet and considered the scene in front of her. She had washed up on the bank of a wide, rolling river that stretched out in both directions as far as she could see. The edges were a verdant wonderland of reeds and grasses, with small trees forming copses here and there, dotted along the length of the water like a deconstructed forest. On the other side of the river was a narrow stretch of muddy ground, followed by a second river, narrower than the first but rushing just as swiftly… in the opposite direction.

Nadya blinked. She had always assumed rivers ran the way they did because of gravity or the location of the sea or the angle of the land or something else mundane and immutable like that. She had never seen two rivers in close proximity flowing in opposite directions at the same time before. It seemed oddly impossible.

She turned and looked behind her, and saw that the land there was completely covered in trees, an actual forest to complement the one that had almost managed to take root along the river’s edge. It looked marshy and soft, though, and she could tell without trying that if she were to walk into it, the ground would be muddy enough to suck the shoes off her feet before she took more than a few steps. When the clouds split and doused the world, the river would swell and the forest would flood. It was at least halfway to being a swamp. While she had never heard the term “flooded forest” before, she would have known it immediately for the correct way to describe what she was looking at.

Nadya turned again, back to the original river. She couldn’t understand how she’d arrived there. The last thing she re membered was falling through the door in the pond, the water filling her nose and mouth and dimming the world as she frantically thrashed with both arms. But swimming lessons had never been a priority at the orphanage, and Pansy and Carl had yet to even offer them to her. Most people assumed she would never be able to learn to swim, and being able to join the turtles in the water had been one of the few hopes born from the acquisition of her new arm.

But it had been too new, and she hadn’t known how to use it, and she had fallen too fast. She must have breathed the water in and lost consciousness. She hadn’t drowned, she was fairly sure of that: drowned girls didn’t stand and look at rivers, or think about how much trouble they were going to be in when they got home. They certainly didn’t have silt in their underpants or caught under the lip of their uncomfortable prosthetic arms. Nadya fumbled to find and unfasten the straps, giving a small sigh of relief when the arm fell away from her stump and let her chafed, aching skin breathe.

The skin had started to redden and blister around the line where the false arm attached to her real one. She rubbed it idly with her hand, trying to ease some of the ache away. It helped, although not as much as she wanted it to. She frowned at the river.

The river burbled on.

“Hello?” called Nadya experimentally, bending to retrieve the prosthetic arm from the mud where it had fallen. “Is there anyone there?”

No one answered, the river least of all. She sighed. Apparently, she was well and truly alone in the middle of nowhere, far enough from home that she wouldn’t be able to walk back there before anyone noticed she was gone. Even if she could, they would surely notice that she was soaked to the skin and muddy, and that would be enough to get her into trouble. It wasn’t fair, really. She would never have gone past the fence if someone hadn’t hurt that poor turtle, and if she hadn’t gone past the fence, she wouldn’t have been able to fall into the pond, even if she lost her balance! This wasn’t her fault at all, it was the fault of whoever thought it would be funny to write on a turtle!

As she fumed over the indignity of it all, something fell from the clouds above her and dropped toward the river like a stone, plummeting into the water. Nadya blinked, first at the falling object and then up at the clouds.

They had parted just a little where the object had come through, allowing her a glimpse of what should have been the sky on the other side. But instead of sky, it looked like a shimmering sheet of water, liquid and rippling like the surface of the pond in the afternoon sun. Then the clouds surged shut again, and the glimpse of water-sky was gone. Nadya kept staring at the place where it had been, trying to wrap her head around the impossibility of it all.

Something splashed in the water in front of her. She snapped around and saw a frog the size of a small horse come hopping out of the river, bulbous eyes blinking. Nadya blinked back. She didn’t know, exactly, how large it was possible for frogs to be, but she was quite sure she had never seen a frog this big, not even at the zoo. Not even in books.

The frog’s eyes flattened down into its head every time it blinked, a comic sight that made Nadya start to giggle. She tried to put her hand over her mouth, only to almost smack herself in the face with the prosthetic arm she was holding. That just made her giggle harder. This was all ridiculous and impossible, and now there was a giant frog. How could she do anything but laugh? It was too silly to do anything else!

The frog stopped blinking and hopped closer to her. Nadya watched it come, still giggling. The frog looked so funny when it moved. Did all frogs look this funny when they moved? Maybe she had just never noticed before.

The frog seemed to tense somehow, like it was drawing in on itself. Nadya frowned, feeling strangely threatened by the change in the frog’s posture. It didn’t look any less ridiculous than it had a moment before, but it looked dangerous all tensed up like that, like a cartoon character that was about to produce a mallet out of nowhere.

“Hello, Mr. Frog?” said Nadya anxiously. She tried again in Russian. She didn’t know why a frog might be more likely to speak Russian than English, but she didn’t know how a frog could look dangerous, either, and this one did. Better to cover all her bases.

The frog opened its mouth and its tongue came out. Not like in the cartoons, where frogs had impossibly long tongues that could snatch insects out of the air from improbably far away, but like it was flopping out of the frog’s mouth, like it was structurally somehow wrong, as if it had been anchored in the wrong part of the mouth. Nadya only had a moment to register the wrongness of the frog’s tongue—which was a small thing, given the wrongness of literally everything else—before that tongue made contact with her prosthetic arm and yanked it back, out of her hands, into the frog’s mouth, which snapped viciously shut.

Nadya froze completely, torn between the urge to run and scream and the urge to charge the frog and demand the return of her property. She would probably have run before the second thought could fully form, but she had already been told, firmly, that the prosthetic was expensive. She wasn’t to remove it when she wasn’t in her own room, safely away from any opportunities to lose it. Feeding it to a giant frog more than certainly qualified as losing it.

The frog’s throat bulged as it swallowed, eyes closing again. In that moment, Nadya saw her opportunity for escape. It would mean leaving the arm behind, but the mouth that swallowed her arm was certainly more than large enough to follow it up with a little girl. But the frog couldn’t stick its tongue out while it had something in its mouth, and it had to close its eyes to swallow. She remembered reading that in a book.

Keeping her eyes on the frog, she bent and picked up a rock from the riverbank, the largest one she was confident that she could lift. Then she took a step backward and held the rock at arm’s length, wiggling it as invitingly as she could. What would a frog find inviting? Hopefully, a rock being shaken back and forth by an anxious little girl.

The frog’s tongue shot out again, brushing her fingers with sticky dampness as it collided with the rock. Nadya let go immediately, and when the frog swallowed, eyes closing, she spun and bolted for the forest. She couldn’t get the arm back if she was inside the frog. Worrying about how much trouble she was going to get into when she got home was silly when there was a chance she was never going to get home at all.

The frog hopped after her, every impact of its body with the ground making a wet squelching noise that was going to haunt her dreams. Nadya kept running, and when she reached the muddy edge of the trees, she plunged between them, running as hard as she could for the narrowest spaces in sight.

She dove through several gaps, barely squeezing through the smallest of them, before she turned and looked back. The frog was a considerable distance behind her, unable to fit between the trees and follow her into the wood. She was safe, for now. But she couldn’t go back, and going deeper into the forest would mean admitting she was well and truly lost, and intending to stay that way.

The frog watched her as she moved through the forest, shifting its weight from one massive leg to another, and she knew down to the bones of her that her choice was an illusion. Deeper was the only way left to go.

And so she went.