Chapter 21 Sage
Sage
Once, in a skirmish with mercenaries in the alleyways of Shearwater, Sage’s party was caught off guard by a natural caster they hadn’t known was among their number.
Trapped by a time spell, Sage watched the world move at speed through a silvery veil of magic, while she herself slowed to a near stop.
By the time she turned her head, one of the mercenaries had picked their mage’s pocket and made off with the prize they sought.
By the time she managed a single step toward them, the mercenaries had already vanished out the mouth of the alleyway.
And there was nothing she could do to rejoin the world but wait for the spell to break.
That’s how it feels when Araphi tips backward. Still on her knees in the snow, her dagger in one hand and the other clasped around the tooth, there’s nothing Sage can do to stop it. She can only watch helplessly as the world spins around her and Araphi disappears into the Swallow.
No…
“Gods, did—did that just happen?” Bramble asks, frozen on the ground as well. They’re no longer trying for the tooth, but staring into the night-black water, eyes wide with horror.
Sage could run them through with her dagger right now. She’s near enough to shove the blade through their belly and watch the shock fade from their handsome, traitorous face as death takes hold; she could let their hot blood trickle down the hilt to warm her hands.
“I never meant…” they start again. “I never wanted…”
But whatever Bramble may have wanted, she never learns. Before they can finish their sentence, Sage regains her feet, tucks the dragon’s tooth in her belt pouch as she bolts toward the bank, and dives straight into the water.
She’s in the Swallow before she can think better of it, but the shock drives every thought from her head anyhow.
It’s a cold so profound, so all-consuming, that it’s all she feels and all she is.
She’s only dimly aware that she’s tumbling over and over—toward the bottom or downriver or even toward the surface, she can’t tell.
It’s so dark down here, she may as well be trapped in ink.
And does it matter where she is, when the world is nothing but cold?
Perhaps she’ll freeze to death even before she drowns.
But then the current slams her shoulder-first against rock, and the pain drives a little sense back into her.
Sage twists and scrabbles along the undercut rock wall, surely bloodying herself as she jams her fists and boots against the pitted surface, searching for anything to cling to and stop her descent.
She can’t help Araphi from the bottom of the Swallow—
Luckily, Sage jerks to a stop; or rather, her leg does as one boot wedges at last into a cranny in the slimy rock.
Unluckily, the rest of her body carries on for another heartbeat, twisting with the current while her leg does not.
Though her limbs are so numb with cold she can barely feel them, the pop of her knee—her bad knee—seems to reverberate through her very bones.
Sage screams to no effect except the last of the air bubbling out of her lungs, floating away.
All right, maybe she will drown before she freezes.
In fact, maybe she’s already drowning, this plane fading out as another beyond it comes to claim her (not again, not again).
There’s a shifting mass of golden light blooming in the deep up ahead, the water flowing around but not through it as it contorts.
And at its very center, a familiar silhouette…
With the last of the strength in a body that feels increasingly like an anchor, Sage curls in on herself to grasp her leg by the calf and try to wrench her foot free of whatever’s trapped it.
Once again, she can feel without feeling the wrongness of her knee, but the cold is encroaching on her mind so that the consequences won’t matter, so long as she somehow reaches the light before her ill-advised plunge into a murderous river comes to its inevitable conclusion.
Finally, she slips free—of the rock wall and of her boot, which she leaves behind as the current rockets her forward again.
It’s all she can do to arc her body toward the light, knowing there’s every chance she’ll be swept away from her last hope without making contact.
Or perhaps the light won’t let her in. But as the river begins to carry her past, back into the cold and the dark, a hand reaches out to clamp around her wrist and tug her inside.
Then it’s dry and bright and warm.
Though the golden light shifts around her like pollen, it holds Sage as she rolls to her back, coughing up a torrent to match the water sluicing off her clothes.
“Well! That certainly worked better than I expected.”
It’s the note of self-satisfaction in Araphi’s voice that prompts Sage to lever herself up.
She presses her palms down, and the sensation is warm like sand, yet smooth like glass.
When she lifts her head, Araphi stands before her, clutching the acorn charm she normally wears around her neck—the one Sage remembers beating against her own chest during their night in Briarwall. Only now, it blazes gold.
“How…?” Sage asks before she retches up a second helping of river water.
Araphi plunges her hand out into the water a second time, and when she pulls it back, she’s clutching Sage’s sodden, missing boot. “Why, magic, of course!”