4. Tsirisma Lake

4

Tsirisma Lake

Safira Chastain

I jumped and whirled, my heart hammering in my chest, and came face-to-face with Tsirisma Lake once more. He wore his humanoid form, and he was stark naked. The face he wore looked just as I remembered it, all classical male beauty, clean-shaven and with loose, wavy near-black hair tumbling down around his face. The striking ice-blue of his eyes almost glowed against the dense black of his lashes and their contrast to his fair skin. He was muscular, in the way of a runner, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist, and handsome enough to draw the eye.

I did my best not to stare at his nakedness, though he swished his dark horse's tail and though the trail of dark hair from his navel to his groin and the furrows of his hips begged to be followed.

The water-horse tilted his head to one side as he regarded me. I tried not to let my very real fear of him show. I'd had enough of beautiful, powerful men, and Tsirisma Lake was a force of nature far more powerful than any wizard, within his scope. He didn't say anything, merely watching me, and I thought that maybe he was waiting for an answer to his question.

"Are you a mage?" I asked, lifting my chin and meeting his eyes. "The enchantment's broken."

He smiled, looking charmed by my response. "Not all of the great powers are those who make channels for the ley," he said.

His voice was pleasant—more than pleasant. It was alluring, the sort of voice that could lull you to sleep, or tempt you into indulgence. I remembered hearing stories that talked about malevolent water-horses coaxing people into touching them, so that they could drown and eat them. Hearing his voice, I believed them, all in one cold rush.

"Some of us are even inimical to the work of the ditch-diggers," the water-horse continued, with a tone of dark amusement. "It was no sorcerer that scratched the channels into that dead metal, and such shallow marks could not have hoped to weather the touch of my hand. A mere brush of my fingers overwhelmed it."

" You! " I snapped without thinking, pointing my finger at him. "Do you know how miserable it is to pump this thing by hand?!"

He stood up straighter, his shoulders going back, and his head rocking back as a smile slanted up the corners of his full mouth. "It seems that it is miserable enough to scold me for it in the way of wrens admonishing serpents," he said— Tsirisma Lake said.

I swallowed, dropping my accusing hand. But I didn't try to apologize for it, even though my instinct was to start looking for a way to slide away from the anger. He didn't look angry, though. He looked... charmed, almost, by the brazenness of a human challenging him on his behavior.

"Well," I said. "Yes. It's very miserable." I held out my hands, palms up. "I've got blisters from it already, and it's not like I don't work with my hands."

The water-horse examined my hands, leaning forward towards me, but he kept his hands by his side. I wondered if he could even be the one to touch me first. The stories always had the water-horse luring someone into touching them or getting on their back, rather than snatching them. Maybe it was simply that they found it more fun that way, but stories like that had power, especially for fey creatures. Power liked to flow in patterns, and what were stories but another kind of pattern?

"Thus we have come back to my first words: perhaps you would appreciate some assistance," he said, looking back up at my face, still leaning forward. A strange expression played on his face, a small smile that seemed at odds with the intensity of his gaze.

"Perhaps I would," I said, lowering my hands. "And perhaps you should, since you're the cause of my troubles."

His eyes lit with that, one corner of his mouth pulling up into a challenging smile. "Am I?"

"Did you put your hand on this pump?" I asked in reply.

"I did," he said, his tail swishing behind him.

I narrowly avoided dropping my eyes to his hips. "And did that damage the enchantment on it?"

His smile grew. "It did."

"And, as a consequence, does it no longer pump water for me?" I said.

"It does not," he said.

"Well, then," I said, putting my hands on my hips. "Seems pretty clear that it's your fault."

He hummed, and walked towards me. I stepped to the side, not willing to test the theory that the water-horse couldn't touch me, and he walked past me, to the pump, and ran his finger down the red-lacquered metal handle. He was just as handsome from behind, which made me clench my jaw. His hair fell long enough to brush his shoulders, tangled and loose, and the long line of his spine was the sort to make women sigh, even if it did end in a horse's tail. His ass was... spectacular. I yanked my eyes up, in time to catch him rolling his shoulders, another sight worth seeing.

"Such paltry edifices that mankind revels in," the water-horse said, as if he spoke to himself. "In the blink of an eye, it will be gone, and in another blink, there will be something new in its place." He turned to regard me, his eyes calm and curious. "You put this pump here, where you knew a water-horse grazed. Do you also challenge the rain for falling where you do not desire it?"

I smirked at him. "Actually, yes, I do," I said. "Why else do we have gods, but to yell at them for doing things we don't like, and try to bribe them into doing things we do?"

He again wore that same expression of charmed surprise, taking his hand off of the pump and turning to face me. "The rain feeds me and the mountain holds me, but I have never thought to call them gods."

There was an amusement in his voice that made me want to step closer and lift my face towards his, in the way of a bold flirt faced with a man who wanted to play. That caught me up short. Why was I even talking to the lake? Let alone... whatever sort of playful banter this was? He was dangerous and alluring, and Marin had said the worst he had ever done was watch. Why was he talking to me? Why had he broken the enchantment he'd seen me using?

"Look, are you going to help, or not?" I asked, trying to cover up the concern with something like exasperation. "'Cause if you're just going to flirt with me, I've got water to pump, and about ten thousand weeds to pull, afterwards."

He tilted his head again, his eyebrows pulling together, and swished that damn tail again. It was not easy to talk to a handsome, naked man without looking at his handsome, naked body, especially when he kept drawing attention down below his waist.

"'Flirt'?" he asked, as if he'd never heard the word before.

Well, maybe he hadn't. He was a big damn lake in the middle of nowhere, and people probably didn't come and... talk to him. Maybe the sorcerers did, or worked with him, but Barixeor was abyssal, and that sat in direct opposition to water. And ordinary people like me mostly kept out of the way of dangerous magical creatures when we could. Like I'd be keeping away from this one, if he wasn't blocking access to my broken water pump with his naked body.

"Um, you know, the sort of back-and-forth thing we're doing? With all the arch smiles on your part and mild exasperation on mine?"

The water-horse looked puzzled, and I shook my head.

"Human thing," I said, even though that wasn't at all true. Pretty much everyone flirted, if they were interested in such things. "It's a type of light banter that people do when they find each other attractive, I guess?"

He rocked forward onto the balls of his feet, and crossed his arms over his chest, with the faintest lift of one corner of his mouth. "You believe that I have an attraction to you?" he asked as he took a step towards me, in that same sort of light challenge that had made me call it flirting in the first place.

I rolled my eyes. For a dangerous force of nature, the water-horse was being awfully chatty.

"I believe that you broke my water-pump, and are now using it as an excuse to pester me," I said, and walked past him to said pump. He'd stepped far enough forward that I could start pumping without touching him, though he stood only a bare handspan away. Without looking back at him, I started on my task as if he wasn't there.

It was impossible to ignore that he was there, of course. He was a six-foot-tall, naked man standing maybe six inches from my back, and he executed a slow turn that brought him even closer, looming behind me in a way that made my skin prickle and the hairs on my arms rise. I could feel the heat of his body radiating against me, and his breath stirred my hair as he looked down at me. This close, I should have been able to smell him, but he didn't smell any different from the outdoors. I guessed that made sense. He only looked like a man or a horse. He was the lake as much as he was the body standing just behind me, as I pumped water out of the ground with the unmentionable hand-pump.

"Do you believe that I am a pest?" he asked, his voice lowered and in that same beguiling, reasonable tone. "A horsefly, perhaps, come to trouble you?"

I burst into laughter, and he shied backwards from me, his shadow falling away. I looked over my shoulder and found him staring back, wide-eyed, his nostrils flaring.

"Really?" I asked, laughter still in my voice. "'Horsefly' is what you picked?"

He only stared at me, and I shook my head and turned back to my hateful task. "Didn't expect a lake to have a sense of humor."

He didn't answer, and I kept working. When I looked back, some minutes later, the water-horse was gone, and I decided to be happy about this, despite the fact that Tsirisma Lake had been fun to talk to, scary possibilities of being drowned and eaten aside. He seemed... curious, I thought, the sort of curiosity that I was intimately familiar with. I, too, had spent a long time watching a society I stood completely apart from. For me, it had been the mages of the University, and I'd had a society of my own, but I supposed that the same sort of curiosity could spring just as well from being a solitary creature watching the few people that lived here.

I looked up at the tall spear of Barixeor. It seemed strange to me that he would call such a thing a paltry edifice, though maybe he'd just been talking about the pump. But a lake like this had to be thousands of years old, maybe ten thousand or more. The Spires were something like eleven hundred years old. Tsirisma Lake would have seen Barixeor raised. He would have watched those long-ago sorcerers, maybe spoken to them, or made treaties with them. He would have seen generation after generation of sorcerers and servants, all the changeable and unchanging patterns of their lives.

What was different this time? I worried over that question as I pumped, until my arms were tired enough that I went inside for liniment and lunch. I didn't have a good answer, and I wasn't sure I wanted to draw attention to his strange behavior, so I didn't bother Marin with questions. When I came back out, I switched over to weeding, working my way down the row of bush beans on my knees.

Sometime around three in the afternoon, I looked up the hill to see the water-horse watching me, standing outlined against the sky on four hooves, dripping wet. I stared up at him for a minute, then cupped my hands around my mouth and called up to him, "If you feel like helping, you could eat the weeds I've pulled!"

His head jerked up, and I shrugged, turning back to my work. At the end of the row, when I looked back up towards where he'd been, he was gone again. I finished up the beans and went back to the pump with a sigh, leaving the pulled weeds in their own lumpy rows between the neat rows of growing plants.

By the time I was finished, my arms and hands were so tired and sore that I wasn't looking forward to having to pick up my fork for dinner, let alone collecting my weeds and bringing them to the compost heap. They'd keep, I decided. It wasn't as if they'd magically root themselves over the course of one evening, or collect enough bugs to be troublesome.

But in the morning, the weeds were gone.