The call, too strong for a bird's piping yet too slight and musical for even a child's voice, drew him back from Aldhafera to the banks of Sampson's Creek.
It was a child after all, but an improbably tiny one.
She floundered in a pool deep enough to drown even an adult, so manifestly helpless that Wesley plunged instantly to her rescue without arguing his own inability to swim. He had a briefest glimpse of hair floating like a small silver cloud about a frightened elfin face with enormous lilac eyes; then the icy pool received him and he was splashing mightily to keep his own head above water.
Momentum took him near enough for the child to grasp his sleeve. The rest, the immemorial emergency of learning to swim the hard way, was up to Wesley.
He made it, not because he was capable of meeting such a challenge at a moment's notice but because the bank and safety were after all only a few feet away. His frantic paddlings brought the two of them out, to lie panting and dripping side by side in the welcome heat of sunlight.
When he had recovered enough to sit up, Wesley examined his find with more amazement than satisfaction.
The child was smaller than any child could be, he thought, and turned out with a fragile perfection more doll-like than human. Her hair was drying rapidly to look more like spun platinum than like silver; her dress, a mothlike wisp that changed color with mother-of-pearl iridescence, seemed not to have been wet at all. There was a belt of slender metal links about her tiny waist, caught with a flattened oval buckle the size of a pocket watch.
Her lilac eyes, more blue than purple now with the shock gone out of them, looked up at him wonderingly.
"Are you hurt?" Wesley asked. The child winced from the sound and he lowered his voice, feeling like an ogre before such fragility. "Can you talk yet?"