39. Advanced Tides and Currents #2
An embankment exposed by the low tide sat ahead, and the rowboat rose a final time as Una pulled us through the swell. The water smashed against rock, and our boat skidded across barnacles and mollusks.
“Hurry!” Ciarán bellowed, and I turned to see another wave bearing down.
I clambered out of the rowboat, my backpack over my shoulder, as Ciarán grabbed both Fana and Jonquil’s cage.
We slipped and staggered over rocks, and water crashed behind us. Ocean spray licked at my back, and I slipped on kelp, but Orla caught me by my arm.
“You’re almost home, Wren,” she said. “Come on.”
She craned her head up to the Skalterran sky, looking like the Tortoise itself, as she drank in her last glimpse of her home world.
The cave was uncomfortably warm. Humid air clung to my face, skin, and clothes as we climbed the rocks deeper into its maw. It reeked of sulfur and dead kelp. A particularly strong swell surged around our feet, soaking our boots in salty foam before violently receding back into the ocean.
“We’re too late,” Iseult warned, but continued to clamber into the cave when a loud blast of magick echoed over the surf and shoals.
Davyn and his crew would only be able to hold Caitria off for so long.
We crested the cave’s initial incline, but my heart crept into my throat when the floor dropped in a steep slope that disappeared into dark, fetid water.
“It’s a dead end,” Tiernan said, holding a Skal bottle aloft in search of a path around the pool.
“It’s not.” The grim set of Iseult’s frown hinted at the way forward. “Jonquil isn’t going to like this part.”
She’d had the wherewithal to take the rope from the rowboat with us, and she held firm on one end and handed the other to Orla.
“What’s this for?” Orla asked.
“If I tug on it three times, that means it lets out somewhere on the other side, and it’s safe to follow me,” Iseult explained. She unbuckled her metal armor and let it fall to the cave floor, keeping only Lyria’s helm.
“Your armor—” Orla started.
“It’s too heavy. I’ll sink.”
“It was your mother’s.”
“And my mother would prefer me to live than to drown wearing her armor.” Iseult’s leg of Skal dissipated into steam as she stepped into the water.
“And if you don’t tug on the rope?” Orla blanched in the low light of our Skal bottles.
“Then hopefully I’m still conscious enough to hold on as you pull me out.”
“But how long—” Orla started, but Iseult slipped into the water.
The Skal bottles at her hip illuminated her shape as she dove deeper and then disappeared beyond the lip of the rock.
We held our breath as we waited, and Orla’s hands shook where she held the rope.
And then—
Three tugs.
“Tiernan next,” Ciarán commanded. “Quickly. Fana, go with Una. Then Orla. Wren, I assume you know how to swim?”
I tried to find the heat to quip back, but could only manage a meek nod. I’d seen enough documentaries about cave divers to know just how dangerous this could be.
And we’d only just entered the cave.
The hardest part was swimming down. The salt content of the water made it difficult to sink, but it didn’t sting my eyes as much as I’d expected it to. Sea urchins and anemones bled together in a blur of greens and purples through the water.
I followed the glow of Orla’s Skal bottles, expelling the air in my lungs to force myself to sink lower and lower. My ears popped, and the walls narrowed, but then Orla swam under the lip ahead of me and started to ascend. I closed my eyes and kicked after her.
My head broke the surface to stale air and the sound of Jonquil yowling furiously in her crab cage when Ciarán surfaced beside me.
Orla pulled me from the water, but Iseult was already leading the charge under the low ceiling of the next stretch of cave with a newly formed Skal leg in place.
Barnacles decorated the walls and we had to watch our steps to avoid slipping on retracted sea anemone. I jumped when a large crab scuttled away from the halo of light our Skal cast. This would all be underwater as the tide came in.
Ciarán took my hand and squeezed.
The cave twisted, widened, then narrowed again, sometimes with inclines so steep that we had to cut our hands on barnacles to claw our way up. There were more pockets of salt water left from the previous high tide, one of them so narrow that I wasn’t sure Una would fit.
“She can’t have followed us, right?” Orla dared to break the silence after we’d all squeezed through. Sea water and sweat mixed on her face, and her short hair stuck to her forehead.
“You can’t really still underestimate my sister, Orla,” Tiernan grunted. “Even you aren’t that foolish.”
“Your sister is the least of our concerns,” Iseult snapped. Her foot of Skal hissed and sizzled as a small surge of ocean water pushed forward to cover our toes. The cave was filling behind us with the oncoming tide.
“If the tide kills us,” Tiernan said, “then at least it’ll kill her too.”
Iseult shook her head and leaned against Orla as she dissolved her Skal leg once more to avoid it hissing in the rising water.
Tiernan locked eyes with me as we continued to forge forward.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“You said when this is all over, I’ll be able to rest. I’m starting to think that’ll never happen. Rest.”
“We’re almost there,” I insisted. “Don’t listen to Iseult. We’re going to make it.”
The cave brightened as we went, and Ciarán caught me looking at our Skal bottles in search of the new light source.
“It’s on the walls,” he murmured. “Skal.”
He was right. The water that clung to the cave walls here gave off a gentle glow. Another surge of water brought the tide up to my ankles and fear into my throat.
“All this sea water, it has to drain somewhere when the tide goes out, right? But we’re walking downwards. How does that work?”
“Maybe it drains back into Keldori,” Ciarán murmured. “Water slips from your world into ours in the cracks where Skal springs exist, but it’s got to make its way back somehow. Maybe that’s how Lyria found the doorway, by looking for the drain between worlds.”
“And she drowned eventually,” I reminded him.
“She had many successful trips as well.”
A sudden crash rocked the cave, and a sea star fell from the ceiling, shaken loose as the tunnel quaked.
The others turned and looked at me in search of the source of the earthquake, but I put my hands up.
“That wasn’t me,” I said, and Tiernan doubled back to look down the way we’d just come.
“It’s her.” Tiernan’s golden gaze darkened, and he ran to take the lead. “She’s going to bomb her way through the cave. The tide won’t stop her. We’ve got to go.”
We clung to Una three at a time to make it through the next pocket of water, but when we surfaced, there was no more dry rock to climb onto. It had risen to our waists, but swelled up to our chest when the water would surge.
I let it lift me and pull me forward when it did, but the ceiling was getting lower and the walls tighter.
“We have to dive again!” Iseult called from the front of the group as another swell knocked us into the barnacle-studded roof.
“Take the rope.” Ciarán passed its length down our line and Una squeezed to the front with the end of it in her maw.
She dove, dragging the rest of us with her before we had the chance to take a breath.
Ciarán’s arm wrapped around me, holding me tight as we plunged through the cave. Jonquil’s crab cage rattled next to me, and I shut my eyes to the salt water.
Another swell rolled through the cave, and I slammed against the wall. Shells and barnacles cut into my back, and I cried out, expelling a cloud of bubbles.
Sea water rushed to fill my mouth, nose, sinuses, lungs, and I opened my eyes to a blurry underwater cave streaming past.
I couldn’t breathe, but I couldn’t cough either, and water suffocated me from the inside.
I thrashed against Ciarán, and my grip on the rope slipped. I was saved only by Ciarán’s hold on me. He held fast even as I lashed out, desperate and drowning.
The cave disappeared, and we slipped over the edge of a drop into a wide basin.
I choked on water and air, struggling to find my footing in the pool, but the water was too deep. I slipped back beneath the surface, but Ciarán heaved me back up.
“Breathe, Wren!” He struck me on the back with the heel of his palm, and ocean water poured from my lungs and mouth.
“Thanks,” I choked and let him drag me and Jonquil’s cage through the water to a set of stone steps as I heaved for air.
He deposited me and the cat on the lowest step. Jonquil looked how I felt—soaked, shrunken, and hissing up a storm.
“That’s the doorway?” Orla’s wavering voice echoed through the chamber, and I pushed to my arms to get a better look.
The chamber was large enough to have held all of Keel Watch Harbor in its belly.
Smooth rock rose overhead, coming to an apex hundreds of feet in the air to form a dome.
Stars, moonlight, and the silhouette of tree canopies peeked through a hole in the ceiling, giving us a final, tiny glimpse of the Skalterran sky through the top of the Tortoise’s shell.
The steps where I lay led up an island of dark rock. At its lip above me, a bright glow cast the shapes of my friends in halo and shadow from below.
Another crash echoed through the chamber behind us, shaking dirt loose from the distant ceiling.
“You’re supposed to hold your breath underwater, Blue.” Ciarán’s words were sharp, but our tether betrayed his relief. He hoisted me to my feet as he grabbed Jonquil’s cage in his other hand.
“There’s no way,” Tiernan said at the top of the stairs. “We can’t. That’s not survivable.”
“The tide’s rising. It’s the only way.” Iseult walked along the lip of the rock with a new leg in place, staring down into the bright light below her.
“What’s not survivable?” I caught my breath as I came up the steps to meet them, and then staggered to a stop as that breath immediately fled me.