A.k.a. Goddess

“Three fair figures, side by side,

Mother, son and brother’s bride.

In the hole where hid her queen,

Waits the cup of Melusine.”

The old woman nodded slowly, intrigued. “Perhaps you are one of us, at that.”

“But that doesn’t tell me where the figures are, what they are. It doesn’t say if the hole is a pit or a cave or a well.”

“Non!” My companion reverted to French. She seemed to like French better, and she was old enough to demand what she liked. “It tells more, if you only listen correctly.”

“I want to.” I touched her hand in supplication. “Please…”

She sharply nodded her decision. “You must drink of it.”

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You must promise that, should Melusine’s daughters help you in this, you will not forsake her. Should you find her chalice, you must drink her essence. Or you must let her sleep.”

“But…” My intellectual, academic side was having major trouble with this. I was supposed to drink out of an ancient cup? Couldn’t that screw with carbon dating or DNA? And how did I know what the cup had last held? The likelihood of something gross like poison or blood sacrifices was low, but still!

Still… “I will.”

“Then you will regret it.”

Was she trying to piss me off? “I promise to do as you ask, if you help me find the cup.”

The woman beside me turned—in several ungainly lurches, her body no longer as lithe as it surely once had been—to look behind her. I followed her gaze and saw that the other two old women had been unapologetically eavesdropping. The three were somehow one, I realized, logical or not. They went together like the Norns or the Fates or the Wyrd Sisters.

They nodded in answer to my companion’s silent question.

She turned back to me and said, very intensely:

“Quatre nobles avec le même coeur

Mère, père, fils, et belle soeur

Dans le tròu se cache sa reine

Attend la tasse de Melusine.”

Then she nodded, satisfied.

I wasn’t satisfied. From one cryptic nursery rhyme to its cryptic translation? Still, it seemed significant to her, and I was already noticing minor variations from my family’s version.

I slowly repeated the rhyme, word for Gallic word.

My impromptu teacher—or priestess, even?—squeezed my hand. “Perhaps you are the one. But you must remember—”

Which is when the doors at the back of the church opened, and Rhys entered. The women took one look at him and turned back to the altar, back to their devotions, as if the priest himself had walked in on us.

Rhys noticed me, opened his mouth, then awkwardly closed it. Then he pointed at himself, made walking-fingers, and pointed outside.

Then he escaped. But the damage had been done. My companion had reverted to praying.

I waited a few minutes, assuming she would finish. She just kept repeating the prayers, so finally I interrupted her. “You were about to say something. What is it I must remember?”

For a long moment I feared she’d reconsidered. Then she pressed my chalice-well pendant back into my hand and patted it, for all the world as if she were my own grandmother.

“Remember that Melusine survived,” she said.

When I emerged into the sunshine, Rhys stood across the road from the church, leaning against our Renault. He ducked his head while I looked both ways and jogged across to meet him. He winced up at me when I reached his side.

“I am sorry,” he said, before I could speak. Not that I’d meant to. I felt strangely light-headed, like after a deep meditation, or a movie…or a nap. A nap with powerful dreams.

Still, I couldn’t ignore him. “Sorry for what?”

“You had the whole nave, but as soon as they saw me…” He mimed turning a lock against his lips, then tossed the imaginary key over his shoulders, down the hill.

I grinned at the gesture, but I felt for him, too. Rhys seemed like a good guy, but just because he was a man, he came across as some kind of threat. Reverse discrimination, even unintentional, is still discrimination. “Don’t worry about it.”

Even though it felt weird, just how much authority they’d seemed to grant him. As if they sensed something I didn’t.

Rhys simply grinned and said, “Maggi? You have a handkerchief on your head.”

I palmed it off and gave it back, and he was so not an authority figure.

Which isn’t to say he didn’t have his own personal power.

“So where to?” He opened the car door and popped the locks. “Have you solved the mystery of the Melusine Chalice?”

“Nope. We’re still stuck with the obvious possibilities.”

“Those being…?”

I went around the car and climbed into the passenger seat. If we were doing Melusine’s home tour, I knew exactly what came next. “Did you by any chance pack swim trunks?”

Deeper and deeper I swam, kicking my feet for power, stretching my hands ahead of me into the murky river. I squinted at water plants, at little clouds of billowing silt, at a turtle paddling past.

I thought I saw something—a stone? Perhaps it was the large remains of a relic or a ruin, some unlikely but not impossible hint that Melusine Was Here. Tightness built in my chest from lack of air, but I was so close. A few more silent kicks…

Now I could see it was an old barrel. Rusty and moss covered. Years, not centuries, old.

Blowing the last of the air from my nose in bubbles of disgust, I aimed for the surface. I broke into the dappled summer sunshine with a splash and a needy gasp.

Rhys, on the wooded bank, called, “Do you see anything?”