Teri McLaren
the shore. Enough cover, he thought, if they could get in quickly. He checked his pack for his boots and then for the totem, finding it sticky with salt, but secure. But the little bronze-bound book was gone. There was no time to look for it now.
"Og!" he rasped impatiently.
"I know. I'm coming. But isn't she lovely? Just like a queen." Og sighed. Claria shot him a killing glance at the mention of the word "queen," but said nothing.
"Hey, what is that?" Cheyne pointed to something caught in the shallows, rocking back and forth in the waves like a piece of driftwood.
"It's the staff! I thought it gone forever," cried Og, throwing his boots off as he charged into the water to retrieve the ajada.
"Not so fast-that's mine!" shouted a voice from the breakers.
Rotapan, covered in a cloak of seaweed, a water-shy coral snake wrapped around his head like a crown, bobbed under the shallow water. When he broke the waves again, Og, Claria, and Cheyne had disappeared once more, right before his very eyes, leaving only one of Og's castoff boots, and the sound of Claria's laughter rising on the wind through the tall pines.
"Well, what a lovely job you have done with the power I gave you, Rotapan. 'Rex Serpens,' was it? I have seen that stone do a lot more than draw reptiles." Riolla chortled as she shed her bobbing chair, sopping pink silks and all, and stepped out onto dry land.
Before the water became too shallow, instinct had called the trapped turtle back out to sea, but Rio 1 la's lambskin boots had never so much as touched water during the entire ordeal. One or two little diehard asps leapt from the wreckage of the sinking chair and wriggled toward the drier sand, their horned heads disappearing beneath the low dunes in seconds.