A tentacle of icy water blasted him backwards, knocked him to the deck so violently that he lost all sense of direction, knew only vicious motion, and the sound sudden screaming laughter, and a jolt of wracking pain as he struck some hard surface, smashed through it, and crashed into darkness.
“You didn’t play your role, dear sister!” Judith’s voice screamed, bright with good humour, horribly vibrant. “But no matter. I remember how the story is supposed to go!”
James tried to find his footing. He slipped and tripped over broken pieces of something, a table and chairs, smashed by his passage through the galley wall. Cold wind and mists of ice battered through the dark, pushing him back down, forcing him to strain against the force.
Petra didn’t respond to Judith’s taunt. Instead, shudders of violence shook the ship, battered it as it rocked atop the heaving waves.
James crawled forward, cutting his hands on broken glass, not feeling it.
The broken galley wall loomed before him, revealing a barrage of magic and flailing, watery motion. Odin-Vann was there, but cringing in terror, backing away, his hands raised.
James realized, on some dim, faraway level, that it was not only the blasting force of Petra’s and Judith’s confrontation that was pushing him back. His arms and legs trembled with weakness. His vision pulsed with waves of grey. He could feel the drain as Petra drew from him, drawing strength like water from a deep well. The cord between them thrummed like a pulse.
He was her battery. Somehow, he stored and held her banked power.
He forced himself to his knees and clambered through the shattered wall. The storm raged harder than ever, forming a torrential backdrop to the battle.
Judith was in her prime again, James saw. Beautiful and terrible, her red hair loose and flying in waves, her eyes blazing with strength, her teeth bared in a fierce grin. She lunged at Petra, launching a cloud of icy arrows. Petra hunkered and dug in, extending both arms and erecting a shimmering shield, obliterating Judith’s attack.
Footsteps clanked and pounded up the mid-ship stairs. Two deck hands appeared on the port side; Merlin and James’ father on the starboard.
Odin-Vann glanced back at the newcomers, his eyes wild and terrified. His wand was in his fist, but he did not fire. Instead, he dropped to a crouch and covered his head with his skinny arms, whimpering.
“Halt!” Merlin shouted, his voice booming through the storm.
Judith flung a hand at him, turning it to a bludgeon of ice. It struck the headmaster, bowling him backwards into Harry, knocking both back down the stairs.
“The harder you resist me, sister,” Judith cried, renewing her attack on Petra, “The more of your friends will die. Poor Merlinus is no match for me here on the ocean. His strength is the green of the wild. I am the blue of the depths! I will crush him like a dung beetle!”
“No!” Petra shouted, lowering her voice to a furious command.
She planted her feet, knees bent, and shot out both of her fists, left and right. As she did, a shockwave of force blasted away from her in all directions.
James’ mind went grey. He began to crumple to the deck, completely sapped of strength.
But the deck suddenly bucked beneath him, threw him aside, and wrenched hard toward the bow. A massive, splintering crunch rocked the ship as it seemed to ram to a halt in the water. James rolled and slid on the varnished planks, fetching up hard against the broken galley wall again, his head spinning.
“Neptune’s Trident!” a voice—one of the deck hands—called out, breathless with shock.
Dizzily, James scrabbled to his hands and knees, pushed up against the leaning galley bulkhead, and blundered back toward the starboard railing.
He was utterly unprepared for the sight that met him.
The waves beyond looked like a Muggle photograph, suddenly and utterly frozen in place, shocked white as if by a flash of lightning.
Their peaks glinted like glass daggers, their troughs sloped with deep bottle-blue, perfectly still, like a split-second in time.
With a shock of surprise and awe, James saw that the Gwyndemere lay tilted hard to port, locked in an expanding island of flash-frozen ocean. Even as he watched, further ocean peaks crunched to stillness, overcome by Petra’s expanding, icy spell.
Petra’s eyes flared like twin suns.
“You shall not touch anyone on this ship again,” she declared in a voice of cold thunder. Punctuating this command, she struck out with both hands.
Her attack was a wave of force that visibly bent space around it.
The bolt connected with Judith in an instant, blasting her backwards, exploding her through the deck and railing behind.
“Petra!” James’ father called, clambering up the tilting stairs again, Merlin struggling upright behind. But Petra was already leaping to follow her nemesis over the lowered port side, landing on a slope of ice.
“Stay on the ship!” she called back. “I will keep her away and busy! When you can navigate the ship again, fly! Don’t look back!”
The storm still raged, now howling and whistling over the frozen mountains of ice, tattering their crests into sparkling streams of snow.
Rain blatted down, slicking the icy canyons, freezing into icicles from the peaks.
Judith laughed shrilly from the echoing chasms.
“Come and find me, Sister!”
The ice rumbled. Cracks appeared around the Gwyndemere, unsettling it. Black water bubbled and spurt up around it. Petra’s spell was already weakening.
James drew his wand, helplessly watching as Petra reached the bottom of the frozen wave and broke into a run, seeking the laughing monster beyond. He considered joining her, but knew it was no use.
He could no sooner assist her than he could lift the ship with his own two hands.
And then someone pushed him from behind, two hands planted in the middle of his back, hard enough to propel him straight forward over the railing.
“James!” his father shouted in alarm, but the sound was already diminishing, muffled with distance as he flipped over in air, landed hard on his back and tumble-slid down the rocklike slope of a frozen swell.
Spells lit the driving rain in flashing hues. Voices shouted.
James gasped to recover his breath. His entire body ached and shivered, both with cold and wet and weakness. He lay in the shadow of the ice-locked hull of the Gwyndemere, staring aside at the half-buried rudder, now encased in a thick sheath of ice.
Another figure slipped and clambered down the icy wave, nearly falling atop him.
“She will want you for this,” the figure gasped through gritted teeth. It was young Odin-Vann. He reached, clambered over James, and wrenched the wand from his hand.
“Come!” he commanded, grabbing James by the fabric of his shirt and dragging him roughly to his feet.
Spells spat down from the ship, competing with the flash of angry lightning.