A Spell of Weather

2. The Letter

I arrived breathless at the town green and scampered across the road just ahead of a morning bus. The sun had just peeped clear of the horizon. I flung myself over Town Hall's fence to avoid the guard-booth at the gate and landed with a soft crash in the bushes. Not even pausing to catch my wind, I sprang to my feet and eyed the window to Mayor Gatt's office. I'd monkey up the outside wall, break in, find that letter and steal it for imminent destruction. I had to be fast. I only had a few minutes before the tubby aide arri—

I received my second shock of the morning. Gatt's ebony-black Porsche occupied his private parking slot. Since when did the main stuffed shirt in town get to work this early?

Only today, of all days, because I'm so lucky, I thought grimly. Well, I'd snatch that letter from Gatt's hands if I had to. I shimmied up the wall to the third-floor window. Around me spread Darraby, which sat in a mostly wooded basin bordered by hills on three sides and opened out to undulating plains dotted with boulders out towards Scargill.

I reached the window just as Gatt impatiently picked up a large yellowed envelope with Cornelia's familiar scrawl on the back, and tore it open. I yanked up the window.

"Don't touch—" I began

A grumpy-faced young woman with dark copper curls stepped into view and promptly smacked me in the face with a hard binder.

"Ow!" I said, just as Gatt pulled out a single sheet of unlined paper.

"She just says "Good luck," nothing else," Gatt said with a sour expression.

"There's an intruder!" the woman said and whacked me again. I used one hand to protect my head but I was hardly paying attention to her, just staring with stupefied eyes at the letter that Gatt now tossed into an OUT tray. I was no magick, thank goodness, but even I picked up a wrongness emanating from that sheet of paper. Something bad had just taken effect, I was sure of it.

The wind changed, cold at my back, ruffling the trees in the town green with a noise like the sea.

"All that waiting for nothing," Gatt said with a bitter face. "Miserable old crone."

I started down, dazed and alarmed. A guard ran up to grab me when I landed, but I dodged and scurried back to the fence and over it, tearing my jacket, but that didn't matter. I sprinted away.

The wind continued to be restless all around me. Clouds began to knit, dimming the light. Rain began to fall at first lightly, but then getting stronger until it roared on the roofs by the bucketful. The drains filled up and then flowed out across the streets, transforming them into muddy streams as I headed home. By the time I arrived, the yard outside my building had already grown wide pools of dirty brown water.

An hour later Cornelia's rain hadn't stopped. An hour after that, the storm waters began flowing into the lowest-lying houses.

No need to panic, I kept telling myself. Darraby had a flood insurance policy. Just beyond an embankment on the town's outskirts on the Scargill side ran a valley that dipped into a really deep crease filled with pretty speckled boulders. This enormous cleft measured about forty feet deep and a few hundred yards long. Gatt could give the order to break the embankment and let the water drain into that deep fold.

But I knew this was magic rain. It could go on for days, or weeks, or months. Darraby could end up becoming Lake Darraby instead. Watching the rain cascade that morning, it seemed more and more likely that it wouldn't stop until the town had drowned.

Only another magick could stop it. I knew of a Cordelia, Cornelia's disliked half-sister, who lived in Scargill. She was a witch, too. I could ask her...except that I wanted nothing to do with magicks at all. Just the idea twisted my insides. After my experience with Cornelia, the idea of encountering more magicks filled me with oily nausea.

Troubled, I walked out in the rain to look out from the embankment. From the top, with my hair flat and water dripping from my nose, I contemplated the pretty green strip strewn with speckled boulders that would be the town's gutter. The shorter grass was already submerged in rainwater.

I could almost hear Cornelia's cackling laugh at her gleeful revenge.

But I could still stop her from winning. I could still save Darraby and do right by all those people to whom I'd brought Cornelia's malice.

I sighed and began walking to Scargill.