A Well-Timed Enchantment by Vivian Vande Velde Page A

by small cultivated fields belonging to various serfs who owed allegiance to Sir Henri—holdings, Baylen and Leonard called them. Baylen and Leonard had fought with and teased each other all the way there, and Deanna was ready to pull her hair out.
    "Well," said Baylen, "we're here."
    "Thank you for pointing that out for us," Leonard said, standing at the edge of the pond. "We're so lucky to have an expert with us."
    Baylen smirked. "Do you plan on actually entering the water, or do you intend to stand here and tell us how good you're going to be at it?" He held out the stoppered vial Leonard was supposed to fill with seawater. But then, as though on second thought, he said, "Come to think of it, you'd probably do better to get undressed. You don't want to be walking around in wet clothes for the rest of the night."
    Leonard glanced at Deanna.
    "You don't mind waiting behind those bushes, do you, Deanna? To spare our Leonard's modesty?"
    Deanna shrugged helplessly and went behind the bushes that separated two of the holdings. She sat down wearily and rested her head against her knees. Someone had planted mint among the bushes. The biting scent was so pungent that, had she more energy, Deanna would have moved away. "I can't believe we're doing this," she told Oliver.
    He stooped down beside her and asked, "What exactly are we doing?"
    Deanna shook her head. "I wish I knew."
    They were close enough that she could hear the splash as Leonard entered the water, then the
slap-slap
sound of his swimming out to the center of the pond.
    She sat listening to that, and to the crickets, until Baylen came around the bushes and grinned. He held his finger to his lips to caution silence and asked in hushed tones, "Ready to go?"
    It was only then that she noticed Leonard's clothes tucked under his arm. "Oh, that's common, Baylen," Deanna snapped. "Common and nasty and juvenile."
    Again he made the shushing gesture. "Yes, I'm rather pleased with it myself."
    "Baylen—"
    "Shh. If he hears you, he'll come out. If he comes out, he'll ruin the plan. If he ruins the plan, you'll never get your watch back."
    "But..." She couldn't see how abandoning Leonard out in the middle of nowhere without any clothes was going to get her the watch back. This was pure be-rotten-to-Leonard nastiness on Baylen's part.
    "Listen, we can call this off now," Baylen offered. "Do you want to do this or not?"
    Actually not. But Baylen was her best choice. In the dark, she couldn't even tell where they
were, much less how to get to wherever Algernon had left the watch.
If
Baylen had gotten him to leave the watch.
If
Baylen had ever even talked to him about the watch. She had to admit—despite the fact that she hated the trite sound of it—that her fate was in Baylen's hands. Baylen wasn't her best chance, he was her only chance.
    Deanna sighed and got to her feet. If she was lucky, she thought, they'd be out of hearing range by the time Leonard discovered he'd been abandoned.
    She wasn't lucky.
    They were walking across a field planted with some sort of grain—barley, possibly—when his voice caught up with them, hardly more than a whisper of wind in the leaves. "Baylen!" They had covered quite a distance and Leonard must have been shouting with all his might for the sound to reach them at all. She had never done anything so low, she thought. But, after all, what could she do? Baylen had the clothes. What was her alternative? To tackle him, grab Leonard's pants, bring them back to him, and cease to exist by noon?
    "Bay-len!"
    And Baylen only grinned.
    Oliver had glanced at her once, at the first call, as though to check whether her ears could pick out the sound, but his expression told her nothing.
    Deanna set her face—this was none of her business, she told herself—and put one foot ahead of the other. "Bayyyy-lennnn!" she heard again, fainter than before. Perhaps Leonard's voice was giving out, or he was realizing the fruitlessness of it all. And then she