Then I saw what she was pointing at: not a flailing girl in the water but a fat thread of woven hemp trailing up from it, barely visible in all the chaos. A strand of taut brown rope extended up from the water and disappeared into the fog. Olive must’ve been attached to the other end, unseen.
We paddled to the rope and Bronwyn reeled it down, and after a minute Olive appeared from the fog above our heads, one end of the rope knotted around her waist. Her shoes had fallen off when her boat flipped, but Bronwyn had already tied Olive to the anchor line, the other end of which was resting on the seafloor. If not for that, she surely would’ve been lost in the clouds by now.
Olive threw her arms around Bronwyn’s neck and crowed, “You saved me, you saved me!”
They embraced. The sight of them put a lump in my throat.
“We ain’t out of danger yet,” said Bronwyn. “We still got to reach shore before nightfall, or our troubles have only just begun.”
*
The storm had weakened some and the sea’s violent chop died down, but the idea of rowing another stroke, even in a perfectly calm sea, was unimaginable now. We hadn’t made it even halfway to the mainland and already I was hopelessly exhausted. My hands throbbed. My arms felt heavy as tree trunks. Not only that, but the endless diagonal rocking of the boat was having an undeniable effect on my stomach—and judging from the greenish color of the faces around me, I wasn’t alone.
“We’ll rest awhile,” Emma said, trying to sound encouraging. “We’ll rest and bail out the boats until the fog clears …”
“Fog like this has a mind of its own,” said Enoch. “It can go days without breaking. It’ll be dark in a few hours, and then we’ll have to hope we can last until morning without the wights finding us. We’ll be utterly defenseless.”
“And without water,” said Hugh.
“Or food,” added Millard.
Olive raised both hands in the air and said, “I know where it is!”
“Where what is?” said Emma.
“Land. I saw it when I was up at the end of that rope.” Olive had risen above the fog, she explained, and briefly caught a clear view of the mainland.
“Fat lot of good that does,” grumbled Enoch. “We’ve circled back on ourselves a half-dozen times since you were dangling up there.”
“Then let me up again.”
“Are you certain?” Emma asked her. “It’s dangerous. What if a wind catches you, or the rope snaps?”
Olive’s face went steely. “Reel me up,” she repeated.
“When she gets like this, there’s no arguing,” said Emma. “Fetch the rope, Bronwyn.”
“You’re the bravest little girl I ever knew,” Bronwyn said, then set to working. She pulled the anchor out of the water and up into our boat, and with the extra length of rope it gave us we lashed together our two remaining boats so they couldn’t be separated again, then reeled Olive back up through the fog and into the sky.
There was an odd quiet moment when we were all staring at a rope in the clouds, heads thrown back—waiting for a sign from heaven.
Enoch broke the silence. “Well?” he called, impatient.
“I can see it!” came the reply, Olive’s voice barely a squeak over the white noise of waves. “Straight ahead!”
“Good enough for me!” Bronwyn said, and while the rest of us clutched our stomachs and slumped uselessly in our seats, she clambered into the lead boat and took the oars and began to row, guided only by Olive’s tiny voice, an unseen angel in the sky.
“Left … more left … not that much!”
And like that we slowly made our way toward land, the fog pursuing us always, its long, gray tendrils like the ghostly fingers of some phantom hand, ever trying to draw us back.
As if the island couldn’t quite let us go, either.
Our twin hulls ground to a halt in the rocky shallows. We hove up onto shore just as the sun was dimming behind acres of gray clouds, perhaps an hour left until full dark. The beach was a stony spit clogged with low-tide sea wrack, but it was beautiful to me, more beautiful than any champagne-white tourist beach back home. It meant we had made it. What it meant to the others I could hardly imagine; most of them hadn’t been off Cairnholm in a lifetime, and now they gazed around in wonder, bewildered to still be alive and wondering what on earth to do about it.