Chapter 8
I snapped awake before dawn to a thumping on my floorboards.
“Here. Bind her hands. Get that blindfold on.”
“And gag ’er. ’Case she tries somethin’ stupid.”
For a moment or two, in my groggy, disoriented state, I assumed I was back in my room at Arbenhaw and that someone was banging insistently on my door. All was dim, the glass in the window deep navy. It took me a second to realize the thumps were boot steps.
Then hands were hauling me roughly from my bed, looping a gag around my face, muffling my cries. I remembered where I was—the island, the tower—and smelled the musty, outdoorsy scent of the intruders. Not Caerig and Rhama. Not anyone I recognized from their voices.
I bucked and struggled, grunting with the effort, but there were three of them, and they were strong. Soldiers, maybe.
“That’s it,” said one, a woman’s deep voice.
As I lashed out with an elbow, tried to stop them binding my ankles, a man laughed right next to my ear. “She’s a whippet, this one, i’n’t she?”
I cringed away as I was tugged to standing and propelled from the room, toes bumping over the floorboards. They began to drag me down the steep tower steps.
In the blackness of my vision, my crimson ball of emotions sparked. There had been no point in gagging me: With my adrenaline spiking, my heart rate speeding, no water would heed me, even if there had been any close by.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind us. Another set, lighter, coming up from the cellar.
“Hoi, what’s going on?” Tigo’s gruff voice.
And Rhianne’s, groggy: “Where’re you taking her?”
Metal rang faintly, like a weapon being hefted. I tried to call out around my gag.
“Back, Mudmouth. There’s a good man, now.” It was the woman. There came another scrape of steel. “Brigant’s orders. He wants the Floodmouth. Don’t you worry, it’s all in hand.”
My ribs thumped violently. It was Rexim who’d ordered this?
They dragged me backward out of the tower.
Cool air hit me. The scent of the sea. The cold solidity of the tower’s stone floor turned softer, bumpier: packed earth and grassy hillocks. Then the ground dropped away—we were descending rapidly.
The realization came over me like a sickness. After learning from Llir what had happened on the causeway, the Brigant must have decided I was useless and was already packing me off back to Arbenhaw.
But with nothing on save a nightshift? Bare feet?
Nearby, I heard the shushing of the ocean, building its strength before it rushed into the bay. “Not far, little whippet,” came that horrible voice, and I shuddered, going limp, forcing them to half carry me down the steep cliff paths.
At last the ground levelled, went spongy beneath my feet. Freezing water pooled around my toes. I staggered on, hearing the sea’s susurration, but it was muted, as though on the other side of a wall.
I was shoved forward roughly and fell to my knees.
“Ticktock,” said the third man as he loosened my wrist bindings. He pressed something cold and hard into my palm. “You’ll want to make use of that sharpish, I warrant.”
Chuckles from the others. I heard them squelch away.
Bewildered, I fingered the object they’d given me and pricked myself on its pointed tip. A knife, small, not particularly sharp. Trembling, I raised it and hacked away my blindfold.
When my eyes had adjusted to the predawn murk, I turned in a circle, or as best I could with my ankles still bound—and stared up at the nearly sheer cliff faces around me.
They were twenty, maybe closer to thirty, feet high.
I’d been dumped in the deep cove, its only entrance to the east: narrow, like a winding alley, the rocks overlapping and concealing the bay beyond.
Three sets of footsteps led out that way, but they were already starting to disappear in the wet sand.
Above, the sky was just beginning to pale, thin clouds cloaking the waning moons.
My thoughts darted, whirled, like a shoal of fish. Why had they dropped me here if Rexim had sent for me? Why give me a knife to free myself with?
I bent down to saw at the rope around my ankles, intending to follow them as soon as I could. My gag still bit into the sides of my mouth, and my hair and nightshift were damp with a cold sweat.
“Good morning, Miss Fraine.”
I jumped, dropped the knife. Craning my neck, I saw figures on the clifftop.
Rexim Shearwater stood closest to the edge. A little way back, just their heads and shoulders visible, were Vercha, Llir, a stricken-looking Catua. The eldest, Emment, whom I’d met in the night, wore a velvety night-robe and a nauseated expression.
Llir stared down at me, face unreadable. Vercha looked thoroughly entertained, eyes glittering, her high collar sprouting with lace.
“I hope you slept well last night, as I advised.” Rexim’s voice carried well despite the distance—a quirk of the way the wind was blowing. “My apologies for the rather uncouth method of bringing you here. But you see, if I’d asked you, I think you would have refused.”
I tried to call out, to demand to know why I was here, but the gag turned it into a series of muffled grunts. I snatched up the knife, intending to cut the gag away. But the Brigant appeared to grasp my meaning.
“Just a simple test,” Rexim said with a smile. I froze. Behind me came an ominous, growing roar. “I have to be sure, you understand. After what happened with your predecessor, I can’t take any chances. And when I was made aware of what happened on the causeway…”
My eyes flashed to Llir, my body tense with panic. He blinked, just once, his features pulled taut.
“After all,” Rexim continued, “I have my family’s safety to think of. And I need to know now if you will also disappoint us.”
Behind him, Catua snapped out a few words, but the others ignored her. The roaring grew louder.
I stumbled, turned, stared out at the cove’s entrance. I could hear it clearly now.
The rising tide.
Gripping the knife harder, I sawed frantically at my gag.
It soon came away, and I pitched it onto the sand.
But there was still a rope looped tight around my ankles.
I squatted, my pulse pounding heavily in my skull, and as I got to work on it, another noise reached my ears: the first great boom against the rocks outside the cove.
My palm was burning with the motion of the knife. The rope resisted, frayed, then began to come apart.
Another boom. I glanced up, saw the first fountains of surf.
Then steel-gray water came barrelling down the gorge.
Funnelled by the bay, and now the cove’s twisting entrance, the Waking Tide raced in like a horse at full gallop.
I barely had time to cut through the rest of the rope before the trough of the next wave fanned out around me, white veined and frothing.
I was misted with spray. I staggered back, saw the next wave already rearing, but knew I should steer clear of those jagged cliff walls…
I could be dashed against them, knocked senseless. And drowned.
The wave loomed, made monstrous by the gorge ahead of me.
I braced myself, and a second later, it crashed down, knocking me from my feet, sweeping me with it.
I caught a fleeting glimpse of Rexim’s broad silhouette, the wide eyes of the siblings, the still-murky sky, before I was under, bitter salt filling my mouth, my eyes stinging and my body seizing with the cold.
I was a strong swimmer—all trained Floodmouths were—but this was a far cry from the practice pools at Arbenhaw.
I broke the surface, flailing in a desperate dog paddle, but the dark water was rising, bearing me toward the cliffs.
Rather than take the next wave head-on, I ducked under, my body lurching with the current.
At last, a single thought broke through: You have to get hold of yourself. You have to do something.
“Please,” I choked, bubbles streaming from my mouth. “Still your waves. Grant me passage.”
But it was laughable to think the tide would heed me, with my panic spilling over, consuming me completely. It was stubborn, belligerent, a bull charging its fences. And I couldn’t shake that overwhelming sense of its immensity. By comparison, I was a fly buzzing at the bull’s ears.
Frantically I surfaced, took a huge, gulping breath, then sank again, preferring the muted buffeting underwater. I squeezed my eyes shut, tried to conjure my red ball of panic, but all I kept picturing were the Shearwaters’ faces. Vercha’s wide smile. My own messy demise.
With a wrench, I forced myself to picture Zennia’s face. But already, even though I’d seen her only a month ago, it was fuzzier at the edges; I couldn’t bring her into focus. I was adrift here, in this wild, lonely place. Cast out like a fishing line, but never to be reeled back in.
Another wave broke then, tossing me backward. Stone scraped my spine, and I cried out in pain. With the next wave, I knew I’d be flung against the cliff face.
Again I braced myself. This time for my death.
But then I felt a sort of…ceasing. Not in the raging sea around me but in my own mind. My body. A shutting-down of sorts.
I would die here—I was as certain of that as of the sunrise—and that was all right. There was nothing I could do. And because I was powerless to change my fate, surely there was no point agonizing about it?
A memory came to me. Zennia’s face, clearer now.
The first time she taught me the calming trick, explained to me how she pictured her emotions.
We’d been paired off in one of Caerig’s classes, and as usual, the Instructor had showed no mercy.
I’d panicked, convinced this was the day my mask slipped and Caerig saw the turmoil that churned within me.
I remembered Zennia’s whispers as we treaded water in the pool, our blouses ballooning, our hair slick against our faces.
“Mine looks like a hole ripped into a piece of paper. I repair it, bit by bit, until there’s just the tiniest tear…”