Although I was still disturbed by the idea of going anywhere near a watery passage to Faerie, the sound of the stream was making my parched mouth water and my sweaty feet ache for a cold dip. If I could help the undines without getting into the water I wanted to do it. After all, they were harmless juvenile undines.

Only when I’d agreed to follow the three women further into the woods did I remember just how volatile teenagers could be.

We scrambled through thick tangles of shrub, following the sound of water deeper into the thicket. Pushing the vines aside, we dislodged the bones of small animals and birds. I’d seen remnants like these around the door to Faerie, the remains of creatures that had gotten stuck in the Borderlands and died there. I actually felt the pressure of the vines on my skin as we passed and heard the creak of fiber and pulp as the thicket contracted around us – like one of those Chinese finger puzzles.

“Are you sure we can make it through this?” I asked, struggling to keep my mounting sense of claustrophobia at bay. It felt like we were in a wicker basket that was contracting around us.

“Don’t worry,” Soheila said matter-of-factly. “Liz knows a spell to keep the thicket from closing in on us.”

That’s when I noticed Liz and Diana were silently mouthing words as they walked through the woods and that the vines were curling away from us as we approached. I felt reassured until I looked back and saw that they were also intertwining behind us. Just when I thought I couldn’t stand the claustrophobic woods another second we emerged into open air: a glade encircled by ferns. I felt and smelled the coolness of water before I saw the pool, which was the same deep green as the surrounding woods. When my eyes adjusted to the murk, I saw that the burble that had drawn us came from a spring bubbling up from a cleft in a giant boulder and falling into a wide basin hollowed out of grey-green granite. The women formed a circle around the basin and then crouched down beside it to scoop handfuls of water to their mouths. In this age of bottled water and rampant pollution it went against most of my instincts to drink from a hole in the ground, but thirst overcame my reservations. I knelt beside Soheila, cupped my hands beneath the ice cold trickle and brought a handful to my lips …

A mineral chill filled my mouth, my throat, my belly … then spread outward, plumping every desiccated cell in my body. It was like drinking pure oxygen. I took another sip and it was like sipping the ether of outer space. After my third long draught I bathed my face, resisting the urge to plunge headlong into the shallow basin. Instead I sat back on my heels to take a look around.

From the basin the water spilled from rock to rock: a granite stairway leading down to a green pool scooped out of the stone. Wild irises grew on the edges of the pools; water lilies floated on top of them. I made my way down to the pool where Soheila, Liz and Diana were bent over, gazing into the water. I crouched beside them and stared into the pool, through crystal clear water down to the moss-covered stones at its bottom. I leaned further … and found myself looking into a pair of moss-green eyes, the same color and shape as the stones at the bottom of the pool. I flinched and the eyes blinked – then vanished in a whirlpool that splashed cold water in my face.