Chapter 62 Merciful Tide
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Merciful Tide
The tide could save them—or it could ruin them.
It depended on two things: the existence of scarsharks, and whether the Sordai could drown. The monster hadn’t made any contact with the inky pool.
“Levan,” Saffron shouted, taking off at a run toward the dissolved archway. Seawater flowed into the mouth of the cave. Harrow was nowhere to be seen. “Jump into the rockpool and sink below the surface. See if it follows.”
For a split second it looked like Levan, who could not swim, might counter with petty fears such as drowning, but then his mind caught up with Saffron’s theory, and with a stoic expression, he took a running leap into the crab-strewn surface of the ink-dark water.
The Sordai pursued him while he was still on land, but the second Levan disappeared into the pool, the Sordai froze to a halt in midair. Then it floated back and forth over the surface of the water, pacing, waiting for Levan to reappear.
When Levan hauled himself back onto the edge of the rockpool, the Sordai swooped down twice as fast, twice as furious, and Saffron narrowly cast the spellshield in time.
As the monster collided with it, and then inevitably devoured it, Saffron sensed that it would be one of the last she was able to conjure.
Yet now they had a weakness to exploit.
“It couldn’t follow you,” Saffron gasped, feeling as though her bones were made of lead. “Can you—”
But Levan was already in motion.
“Don aquiss,” he bellowed, the deep tenor echoing like thunder around the cave.
The black water rose from the pool like a wall.
With a flick of his wand, Levan lassoed it into shape, hurling a long rope-like coil of it straight at the Sordai.
Though the Sordai effortlessly glided away to dodge it, there was a flare of white light in those hideous skull holes, as though it was angered.
Levan kept lashing curls of water at it, fast and furious, until two things happened.
One, that it grew harder for the Sordai to dodge, because the whole cave was a riot of water.
Two, that the rockpool gradually emptied, its bottom exposed.
As the seawater gushed in from the outer cave, Saffron wasted no time sprinting down the steep slope onto the floor of the pool, her boots crunching and squelching over the fossilized carcasses of slowcrabs and opalfish, then back up the other side, scrabbling with both hands and feet onto the platform where Miret lay moaning and murmuring.
Her palms bled, cut open on the craggy rock, but she barely noticed the hot, stabbing gush as she scooped the old man up in her arms. He weighed less than a sandbag, though that might have been the adrenaline.
Breathing raggedly, the old scholar went to hand her the relic wand.
“No,” Saffron snapped, too harshly. “Not yet, not here. If I touch it, the prophecy might play out, and the tide’s coming in.”
Levan lashed more tendrils of water at the Sordai, buying Saffron time to rescue Miret and the prophecy. But the rockpool was filling again, this time with seawater. They didn’t have long before the scarsharks descended.
“Hold on to me,” Saffron murmured to Miret.
Returning to the basin of the pool was far harder with Miret in her arms. She sat on the lip of the rocky platform, then shuffled on her backside over the jutting crags, feeling the fabric of her cloak and her trousers tear, barely wincing at the cut of rock into her flesh.
By the time she reached the bottom, the water was high enough to cover the top of her boots—and filling fast.
Wading inelegantly to the other side, she realized she couldn’t scale it while still carrying the old scholar. She pressed his limp form against the wall of the pool so that his feet angled down, his body sloping at an angle. Through gritted teeth, she cast et esilan at his boots.
He lurched up and over the lip of the pool edge, landing on the saltwater-slicked cave floor.
She scrabbled after him, smearing the rocks with a burgundy slick from her palms. Every inch of her was wet—with sweat, with wielded water, with blood.
That crushing sorrow still washed through her, like a new vein network had opened with the express purpose of transporting dread through her body. She felt certain she was about to die.
What happened next was like watching some great tragedy occur from afar.
A wide ribbon of seawater belted into the second cave, carrying with it a scarshark. Saffron saw the outline—the maroon scales, the arrow-shaped head, the snarl and gnash of venomous black teeth—before her body fully registered the reality.
The scarshark swam straight for Miret.
“No!” she and Levan both screamed at once, as a dark mouth closed around Miret’s side.
The shark’s head wrenched viciously, taking a chunk of Miret’s torso with him.
The water did not fill with blood; the scarshark’s bite cauterized the wound closed. Miret was too far gone to wail or scream. His head simply tipped to the side, as though falling asleep, the shock and pain knocking him clean unconscious.
In his horror, Levan let all the rockpool water crash down at once.
It all fell on the Sordai, and the ancient monster went under.
The cave was nearly a quarter full of water, and the only mage who could swim was in a coma-like state, his grip on the Fifth Prophecy loosening and then uncupping entirely.
Levan conjured another thin tendril of water, lassoed it around the relic wand, and yanked it into his own palm. Tucking it into his waistband, he hauled Miret’s mangled body over his shoulder and bellowed at Saffron to follow.
Waist-deep in water, Saffron and Levan waded toward the archway, knowing that somewhere around them swirled a scarshark hungry for flesh and a Sordai that could…
do whatever it had done to Miret. Each desperate step took an eternity, heavy with water and swaying under the sheer force of the tide, the water gushing into the cave shoving them back and forth, side to side.
Somehow, they reached the archway between the two chambers, water up to their chests, normal steps becoming impossible. Because the first cave was smaller and lower than the second, it was almost entirely full of water.
“Don aquiss,” Levan incanted, voice ragged and weak now.
The water parted into two taller banks, creating a corridor through which they could run to the mouth of the cave, which was still flooding with the sea.
The tide flowed into the cave and immediately separated into the two banks, but the banks were not solid, not steady.
They tremored and wobbled under the strain of Levan’s magic, and Saffron knew he could not hold them for much longer.
Mercifully they reached the mouth of the cave—
—only to find that the rope they’d left hanging down was gone.
“Harrow,” growled Saffron, with all the ferality of a wild fallowwolf.
“No.” Levan shook his head frantically, whole body trembling. “Harrow is a coward, but he doesn’t want us dead.”
“Doesn’t he?” Saffron all but spat, thinking of how Harrow had, on many, many occasions, declared himself untrustworthy. It was easier to feel searing hatred for him than it was to feel the utter desolation of their situation.
“Maybe the rope fell after he escaped. Maybe it’s somewhere around here.”
There was the faintest scrap of magic left in Saffron’s well. She focused on the pain in her palms from scaling the craggy rocks, letting the burn penetrate the rush of fear and adrenaline. As the warmth grew into a hot, sharp sting, the magic in her well deepened and glowed like liquid gold.
She aimed her wand vaguely into the thrashing gray seawater, focusing her intent on the exact color and texture of the rope.
“Et convoqan,” she incanted, a simple summoning spell.
No rope rose to meet it.
She tried several times to no avail. Finally, desperately, she incanted another esilan at Levan’s boots, attempting to propel him and Miret high enough to clear the cliff, but they barely moved.
Her well was emptied.
Moments after her own magic ran out, so too did Levan’s.
They looked at each other, a thousand emotions passing from his blue eyes to her hazel. Tucking away his wand, he extended the hand not clutching Miret, and she took it. His skin was surprisingly warm in the freezing water.
Behind them in the cave, the banks of water crashed together, the force of which thrust against their backs and shoved them out into the icy, churning sea.
Saffron was plunged underwater, the cold and the salt stinging at her eyes and mouth, but she did not let go of Levan’s hand.
Many believed drowning to be a peaceful death, but when the will to live still burned so brightly, no death could be peaceful.
The desire to save the world, to save Levan, was too strong.
Save herself, her parents. There was so much still to do, and purpose beat through her like a heartbeat, that determination and meaning she’d found while fighting the Sordai in the cave.
Though she could not swim, she held on to life for as long as she could.
Her lungs burned from lack of air, muscles screaming.
The blue-gray of the water vignetted into black.
Save me, she screamed at all the Saints she had never quite believed in.
Save us.
There was an almighty tug of current, and at first Saffron thought that was it, the furious wave that would smash her into the cliff, but then she was above water, gasping, spluttering, and she realized it had been Levan’s arm hauling her up.
After the salt water cleared from her vision and several gulps of frigid winter air reinflated her lungs, she peeled open her eyes to see a few distinct shapes.
Levan, still holding Miret.
A rope.
A cliff.
And Harrow Claver’s anxious face peering over the top.
“Go first.” Levan’s teeth clenched with the effort of holding both her and Miret.
Saffron’s body moved of its own accord, hauling up the cliff with the new rope, her cut palms transcending pain into a cold white numbness, and then Levan was climbing behind her, Miret still flung over his shoulder, and then, somehow, impossibly, they were all slumped in the snow on top of the cliff, gasping, gasping, but alive.
Rasso was there, panting, licking, wheedling at Miret’s wounded side.
“Harrow,” panted Levan, flat on his back with the heels of his hands pressed into his eye sockets. “What in all the hells happened?”
“Relar cut the first rope,” Harrow replied, breathless and leaning back against the tree trunk the rope was tied around. “After I…fled…I was waiting behind the tree line for you to reappear. Relar dashed out of the woods, didn’t see me. The rope was cut before I realized what he was doing.”
“You didn’t think to stop him?” Saffron tried to snarl, but instead erupted into a waterlogged coughing fit. She had never been as cold or as exhausted, her entire body both hard as ice and clumsy as jelly.
“I tried,” Harrow snapped back. “But he was frantic, feral. Tear-stricken, beside himself. Said the Bloodmoons protecting his grandmother were dead and soon his grandmother would be too, no matter what he did next. He fled, muttering something about letting us all destroy one another. I ran the whole way back to Flarence to buy another rope. You’re welcome, by the way. ”
“Welcome?” Saffron stared at him incredulously. “You abandoned us to fight an ancient foe and then—”
“The Bloodmoons protecting the apothecary are dead?” Levan interrupted, clearly more perturbed by this news than the King’s Prophet’s cowardice. “Whitewings. It must be.”
At the mention of the name, Harrow’s face blanched—which was impressive, when it was so pale to begin with. “Levan, there’s something I need to tell you about the Whitewings. About their leader. It—”
“Not now,” Levan muttered, forcing his depleted body up off the snow to examine Miret.
He pressed two fingers to the scholar’s throat, feeling for a pulse, and grimaced at what he found.
“Weak. Watery. Far, far too cold, and I’m out of magic.
We need to get him back to the inn. I don’t know how to begin healing him—whether this can be healed. ”
For the first time, Saffron looked at the hole the scarshark had left in the old scholar’s body.
It started just above the hip bone and ended just below the ribs, everything in between missing in a perfectly smooth semicircle.
There was something uncanny about the lack of blood, the lack of a visible wound.
“If we can get him to T?lun,” Saff whispered, “maybe he could…”
Do what, she didn’t know.
“I’m less concerned about the wound than whatever that Sordai did to him.
” Levan laid his golden palm on his surrogate grandfather’s chest, a brief but intense pain cresting on his face.
“Miret? Miret, can you hear me?” He kneeled lower, forehead resting atop his hand.
“Please, wake up. Please. Or I’ll send a necromancer to raise you, and I know how little you want that. ”
Miraculously, Miret’s eyes drifted open. The goading worked, and yet there was a sort of emptiness to the scholar’s gaze. An awful blankness.
“Can you describe what you’re feeling?” Levan sat upright, talking more urgently. “What the Sordai did?
Miret closed his eyes again. He didn’t seem to have noticed his gigantic torso wound.
“My magic—it’s gone. Not just an empty well, but…
the well entirely. It stole it from me. As the legends say.
They steal a well, then drink the magic of other mages to fill it.
And I find that I do not care. I do not care about anything, truthfully.
I could die right now and not overly mind. ”
Saffron recalled how close she had been to relinquishing her own soul, her own will, and felt violently ill. Shivering rather extremely, she muttered to Levan, “Do you think the Sordai drowned in the cave? Or do you think it managed to get out?”
Levan shook his head. “I have no idea.”
“Saints.” She let her own eyes fall closed. “We might have just released a Sordai back into the world. That’s…terrifying.”
“It is. But we also got what we came for.”
Levan pulled the relic wand from his waistband.
Harrow’s eyes widened, breath hitched.
Only now, under the rheumy light of a winter’s day, could Saffron properly discern the wand’s features.
It was smooth, hard, the color of fresh snow—an extremely rare and ancient kind of whitebeam.
Its surface was covered in various engravings, from rune-like symbols to Ancient Sarthi expressions she couldn’t translate, and the handle was a grooved cone of ascenite inset with thin gold rings.
Saffron reached out her hand, and Levan set the relic wand into it.
The world bleached white, and the Fifth Prophecy began.