Chapter 6 #10
Luda let go of the branch with one arm, reaching for Reylan, still too far away to grab her. The crowd on the bridge drew a collective breath, then shouted “NO!”
The thunderous bellow startled the girl so badly, she jumped and slipped. Her scream was a thin, high wail, abruptly cut off when she tumbled into the water with a splash and sank out of sight.
There were more screams and shouts—from the crowd, from Reylan and Gheza, from Disa, who then jumped into the water after her sister.
Bron didn’t make a noise. He simply climbed onto the parapet and jumped.
Cold water closed over his head, and he opened his eyes to a liquid landscape of murky light and the swaying forest of waterweed surrounding him.
He’d swum this creek numerous times, above and below its surface. This was one of the spots everyone knew to avoid. Visibility was poor, and the waterweed acted like spider’s web for the unfortunate swimmer who’d found themselves entangled in its serpentine grip and drowned.
The threat didn’t deter him. He searched for anything remotely resembling a human shape, surfacing for air long enough to fill his lungs before diving again.
On his third attempt, he spotted a tiny hand floating amidst the coiling ribbons of waterweed.
He swam toward it, caught Luda’s limp body in his arms and kicked hard for the surface.
An air bubble burst from his closed lips when he was yanked downward by a force strong enough to send water frothing past his head. He almost lost his grip on Luda and twisted to look down at what held his leg in place.
He’d expected to see a tendril of waterweed wrapped around him, but what met his gaze exploded terror in every muscle of his body.
Whether it was the lack of air in his lungs or the diminishing light filtering down into the creek’s darker deep that created nightmare visions out of water, he didn’t know, but Bron swore something stared up at him, a shifting visage reminiscent of a horse’s head but with the eyes and fanged jaws of a predator.
His throat swelled with a trapped scream as another yank pulled him and Luda farther down.
He dared not open his mouth. To do so was to die.
Instead, he kicked at the thing holding him, his struggles growing weaker as his lungs caught fire and a blackness began to creep across the edges of his watery vision.
He refused to give up, to die this way, especially when he had Luda to save.
An icy rage pumped through his veins, so hard and strong his body contorted, and his limbs convulsed.
Whatever held him in its grip suddenly let go, and this time Bron jolted up toward the surface as if shoved by a giant’s hand.
He and Luda cleared the surface in a crashing cascade of water, and sunlight burst across his eyes.
He sucked in a gulp of precious air even as the sky, the trees, and the creek itself wheeled around him, and his stomach vaulted into his chest. Wonder eclipsed fear. He was flying.
The air he’d just breathed in exploded out of him as his back hit soft ground, sending a geyser of mud skyward only to rain down on him and Luda. Blackness returned to the edges of his vision, slowly swallowing his view of blue sky instead of watery sunlight.
He woke slowly to the soft voice of a woman at prayer.
When he opened his eyes, relief cascaded through him at the familiar surroundings.
He was in his room. Hazarin sat in a chair placed next to his bed, her eyes closed, her mouth moving in the soft intonations of entreaty.
Disaris perched on a stool on the bed’s opposite side, her eyes closed as well, whether in sleep or prayer, he couldn’t tell.
His happiness at finding himself in his room and not drowned faded. “Luda,” he said, startled by the croaking sound of his voice.
Hazarin and Disaris both leaped from their seats, grabbed his hands and cried out his name. “Bron!”
“Luda,” he repeated as he was nearly crushed in their embraces.
Disaris straightened first, wiping at her eyes and sniffling. She grinned at him. “She’s fine, thanks to you, and driving Amman to madness with her constant demands to see you.” He held one of his hands and brought it to her mouth for a kiss. “You saved her, Bron.”
The following days were a whirlwind of visitors and well-wishers, many bringing gifts and expressing their admiration for his courage. A few wore odd expressions as they congratulated him, and he wondered what about him had changed since his plunge into the creek.
Luda visited him as well, clinging to him harder than lichen to a rock.
He patted her back as he held her. “I’ll teach you to swim,” he said.
She wrapped her chubby arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder. “I don’t like water anymore,” she said.
He didn’t blame her. He wasn’t as enthusiastic about it either at the moment. “Even if you don’t, you still need to know how to swim. This way if you fall in again, you won’t need my or anyone else’s help to get out.”
Though many people hailed him as a hero, they also questioned him as to how he’d managed to literally catapult out of the water with Luda.
“I don’t know,” he said, answering the question several times with the truth.
His memory of those moments were hazy, and fragmented, terrifying and not just because he’d almost drowned.
The rippling equine face with dagger teeth and a gleaming dark eye filled with ravenous hunger haunted his nightmares, leaving him shivering and gasping when he woke.
He’d told only Disaris what he’d seen, afraid he’d be ridiculed for being fanciful. Even if she didn’t believe him, he trusted her not to mock him.
Her face had paled when he described what he’d seen.
“I don’t think you imagined it,” she said.
“People forget some of the old tales or refuse to believe they’re more than just stories.
There are things that live in the rivers and lakes that hunt more than fish.
Just because most of us haven’t seen them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.” She shuddered.
“Maybe we shouldn’t fish or swim in that creek anymore.
You can just say the waterweed there is thick and acts like a trap. ”
Warmed by her unwavering faith in him, he asked her another question. “What did you see when I came out of the water?”
She grew animated at his inquiry. “None of us have ever seen the like,” she said, waving her arms about in a grand gesture.
“I was about to dive again to search for Luda when the two of you…erupted from the water as if the creek spat or sneezed you out of it and flung you to the shore.” She tapped her finger against her lower lip.
“Do you think that creature tossed you out of its territory?”
He shook his head. “No. Whatever it was, it did its best to keep us there.”
As the weeks after Luda’s rescue passed, so did people’s interest and curiosity in the event.
Visitors from other villagers sometimes pointed to Bron when they saw him and gossiped about the strange way he’d rescued the little jin Gheza girl, but for the most part the days resumed their normal routine until one day a squad of Daesin soldiers descended on Panrin and changed Bron’s destiny forever.
The squad leader had asked the whereabouts of the jin Hazarin household.
When Hazarin opened her door to his knock, he didn’t give her a chance to greet him or offer a greeting in return.
“Is this the house of Bron jin Hazarin?” And with those words the boy who wanted to become a scholar became a battle mage instead.
“A butcher of men,” he told Disaris a year later when he returned to Panrin after his first battle.
He lay on the hill adjacent to her house, his head in her lap as he stared up at the star-filled night sky and wondered if and when he’d stop seeing the blood and hearing the screams of the dying every time he closed his eyes.