Chapter 39 #2
Llir was backing away, looking horrified. “What did you do?” he said. “How did you do this?”
I looked around wildly. We needed a blade. And there on the causeway, cast off by its owner, I saw one: a short sword, its edges glinting. But as soon as I spotted it, the next wave reached us, towering over us, about to crash down.
I threw myself forward, reached out my bound wrists, just grasped the hilt as the gray wall descended.
Smack.
I flashed back to my test in the cove. To the towering wave on the night of the ball.
That same stinging shock, that same bone-deep chill, slamming the breath from my lungs in an instant.
Salt filled my nose, my mouth, my eyes. I was tossed, tumbled, knees over shoulders, but somehow my fingers still gripped the sword.
My side knocked into something, the causeway maybe, and jarred my elbow so hard I cried out. But my voice was lost, brine pouring through my lips. I could only struggle to keep upright in the water.
Around me, other bodies were tossed by the tide. Weighed down by their armor, they sank like stones, hands scrabbling desperately, eyes stretched wide in fear.
The next wave swelled, carrying me upward. I could sense the tide’s ferocity, its singular focus, its fervor to make up the distance it had lost. I kicked my legs, trying to stay above water, but it was nearly impossible with my wrists still tied.
“Llir!” My voice splintered. “Llir, where are you?”
I knew I couldn’t use the short sword alone. But it was more than that. I needed him; I needed Llir to be all right.
My head whipped around. I could see no sign of him. But off to the north, I saw men…stuck in mud.
The sucking sands. The ones that had caught Emment.
The soldiers had fled, left the solidity of the causeway, and headed toward the mainland, trying to outrun the tide.
But it was foolish—the sea was around and ahead of us, curling inward and trapping us like hares.
Tidal bores boiled up the Cage’s channels, flooding the mudflats, drowning those who’d got stuck.
My eyes raked their forms—I was terrified I’d see Llir—when one burly figure among them caught my eye:
Uirbrig Crake.
He was still in his heavy armor. As I watched, he roared like a bear, spitting foam, yelling hoarsely to his soldiers, “To me! To me!” His legs were stuck fast, sinking rapidly—and then the next wave plowed into him, unforgiving.
The water level was rising fast. Suddenly, as the next wave lifted and dragged me, I realized I could no longer touch the causeway with my toes. A moment passed, but Crake didn’t reappear. And soon, bodies began to float past me, face down.
“Llir!”
My voice was hoarse, torn ragged. It took all my strength to hold on to the blade. My legs were on fire, my muscles rebelling, but I pumped my elbows to stay afloat. I dipped down briefly, felt my head go under, then reared up, forcing my body to obey.
And then: a hand, two hands, on my shoulder.
I turned. Llir was behind me, bone pale.
Relief flooded through me. “I have a blade,” I gasped. “Quick. I can’t hold it up for very long.”
We rose with the bulge of another huge wave. We were like dolls, utterly at the sea’s mercy. Llir sawed his bindings against the sharp edge until, after what felt like an age, they frayed apart. Then, wrists free, he grabbed onto the sword, and I cut my own ropes. He let the blade sink, panting.
“I have to get back,” he gulped, turning in the water. “Emment…” He took up an exhausted-looking front crawl.
It was all I could do not to sink down like the sword. “Wait,” I croaked, “we shouldn’t use all our energy. Llir. We need a float—” But he couldn’t hear me through the tide’s roaring.
I struggled after him, searing pain in my limbs. Pieces of leather floated past me, shards of wood.
In sheer desperation, I spoke to the water, pleading with it in a whisper as I swam. But I knew it was hopeless. I was too overwrought. And the tide wasn’t listening; it was bent on its assault. I needed to stay put, save some of my energy. Find something to hang on to, some timber, a raft…
Ahead, Llir began to dip lower in the water, his legs now sinking, his strokes more frantic. His head went right under, then emerged, sea slick. I heard him coughing. I fought to keep up.
Just as I came within arm’s length of him, he gulped some water and went down, choking. I dived, grabbed him and yanked him upward, adrenaline granting me one final burst of strength.
He came up gasping, shaking water from his eyes. His hair was dark, plastered to his head, and his shirt was billowing around us, cloudlike. I didn’t let go, afraid he would go under again, and we floated, gripping each other’s arms tightly, legs kicking beneath us. He looked wild, half crazed.
“Speak to it!” he yelled. “Speak to it now! Tame it!” His gaze flashed in the direction of the island, of his siblings.
Had Iovawn Crake excavated the ruins by now? Was he back at the castle? I pictured that stone block.
A wave broke near us, showering us in surf, and a jagged wooden board tumbled past, barely missing us.
“Do it!” he shouted, face inches from mine, as we soared together on the next great swell.
“I can’t,” I yelled over the crashing of the water, the rumble of the wave as it carried us with it. “I can’t—can’t concentrate in this—”
“You have to!” His grip on my arms was like iron. “Do you understand? I have to get to them!”
I could see it in his face: that same look from the inner ward, from the causeway after. Cuckoo. Betrayer. I closed my eyes, tried to summon my red ball, but his anger, his anguish, was leaching into me.
“I don’t think I can,” I choked out. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Then what in hells use are you?” he cried, his voice cracking open, his face soaked by spray.
Something in me broke in two.
I knew it was the desperate outburst of a boy whose family might be dying—or already dead. But that didn’t stop the bitter indignation, and then the black hopelessness, rolling over me.
He was right. What use was I if I couldn’t even do the one thing I’d been born to do?
My arms were lead weights; my legs kicked feebly. Only Llir, now, was stopping me sinking, and I wanted to tell him to just let me go.
Seeing me crumple, feeling me sag, he tugged me upward, his sharp features tensing. “Corith,” he grated, dipping his head. “Listen to me. I know you can do this.”
But his words were muted and my vision was blurred. I closed my eyes again…
And was back in the cove. Rexim’s pinched smile. Vercha’s delight. The writhing water. The oncoming tumult. I remembered that unnatural ceasing I’d felt…but I knew that this time, giving up would mean death.
“Hey,” I heard Llir shout, “stay with me.”
But now I flashed back to the tidal wave. That terrible roaring. The dark wall of water. I’d failed then and knew I would fail now, too. Archwater was far too feral to be tamed, at least by me. We would both drown here.
I felt Llir shift. We were closer now. The cold seemed to have reached the core of my being.
Another memory came to me, this one much calmer. One I’d thought back to a few times before: Zennia’s profile, her hand rising into the air. Rhama staring at us, blank faced, across the lecture hall.
“Tidespeakers,” I mumbled, the word lost in the sea’s rushing.
As though through thick glass, I heard Llir answer, “What?”
“Tidespeakers,” I said again, opening my eyes. They stung, and I dragged my wrist across them. “We used to be called Tidespeakers. Before the Revolt.”
He gazed at me. Water dripped from his sodden hair. “Yes,” he said. “I know. I’ve read the histories. See? You were made to do this. I know you can.”
His words swam together in my mind. Made to. You can.
“Remember what you taught me?” he called over the tumult.
I did remember teaching him my trick up on the tower. And I recalled, now, the progress I’d made in the cove. When I squeezed my eyes shut, Zennia’s face swam in the darkness.
“You, Corith. You’re what this job needed.”
I had to do something. And not just for her but for him now, too. For Llir. For his family.
A new image burst into my mind’s eye: my red ball. I’d never seen the lightning so bright, so swollen. All my panic, all my despair, streaking out like flames: a great pyre of emotion.
I cracked my eyes open, gripped by renewed fear. “It’s too much,” I spluttered. “I can’t shrink it. Not this time.”
“You can.” Llir pressed his forehead against mine. Another wave lifted us, bearing us skyward, but his green gaze was steady, an anchor in the maelstrom.
I closed my eyes again, saw that red blaze burning.
And slowly, methodically, I began to squeeze it down.
All my shame, all my anger at House Crake.
All my regret at deceiving the siblings.
My disgust at the Cormorants. My fear for my life.
My frustration at my weakness, and my heart-swelling hope…
It was all there, and I let myself bathe in it briefly before squashing it, shrinking it, forcing it inward.
Slowly a preternatural serenity came over me. The ball got smaller, the lightning less frantic. It was an egg now, smoother. Then a nut. Then a pea. And finally, with one last monumental effort, I pinched it into a pinprick: a star in the night sky.
“Stop, now,” I said to the water tiredly. I took a deep breath, lips stinging with salt. “You’ll let us pass. You’ll give us safe passage. You’ll carry us east.”
I opened my eyes.
My senses zinged with a new awareness of the tide, a mutual awareness. It was finally listening. All that work I’d put in down by the cove…the ocean remembered me, had deigned to pay attention.
We were dipping, the wave beneath us diminishing. Llir drew away, staring around us in surprise.
In a perfect circle, ten feet in diameter, a stillness had descended, like the eye of a storm. The waves lapped peacefully, the violent currents gone. As we floated, the sea gently buffeted us eastward.
“Come on!” Llir had struck away from me already. I could see from the fevered glint in his eyes that all his thoughts were bent toward his siblings. He took up his loping front crawl again, and I followed, trying to block out the pain, the fatigue.
The island loomed larger but was still frighteningly far off. Outside our bubble, the waves reared, crashing down angrily. I didn’t know how long they would give us.
A shape in the distance caught my attention: two humped figures on a…boat? No, a raft. One was waving both arms in the air, but I couldn’t make them out through the spray and thin fog.
Despite the tide’s nudging, I was tiring, faltering. My muscles were corded, seizing with cold. I tried to call out, to warn Llir I was lagging, but my voice wasn’t working. Sea slopped past my lips.
At that moment, I felt a grip on my ankle, heard a croak from behind me: “Floodmouth. Thank the gods.”
I wheeled. A figure was tugging me backward, deep-brown eyes unnaturally wide, ebony hair waterlogged and stringy.
Avrix.
He looked half drowned already. Sucked in cheeks, wrinkled skin, like a corpse that had floated up from the seabed. He was low in the water, legs down below him, injured hand floundering as the other clung onto my foot.
“Morgen’s gone,” he gasped, kicking wildly. “And Ebba. But you’re a good girl. You’ll save us both, won’t you? I won’t let go.” His grip was strong as a hawk’s talons.
Revulsion rose in my gullet like bile. No, I tried to say. Let go. You’ll drown me. But nothing came out; the words wouldn’t form.
I went under.
Freezing salt filled my mouth. I managed to surface, just glimpsed Llir’s head turning, but then I was down again, deeper this time.
I kicked out, tried to shake Avrix off me, but he clung on desperately, sinking along with me.
My lungs were burning, screaming for air, and I remembered the last time I’d felt this: my exam.
I’d almost failed then. Now I was going to.
My arms moved weakly. My legs were like lead. At least, I thought, I’d gotten rid of Crake. And it was oddly peaceful down here…strangely pleasant. I could almost ignore the crushing weight on my chest.
But at last I couldn’t fight the urge any longer.
I opened my mouth, tried to suck in a breath, and choked, instead, on icy water.