At a tunnel’s fork, she shot right. Her lungs burned, but she knew that feeling. Welcomed it. The water was a mother to Vivia, a tyrant to anyone else.
She slammed into Merik, arms looping tight. If any air remained in his body, she had just punched it out.
But he was conscious—thank Noden—and his arms were around her now, and she was in charge. She could use the foam and the violence to propel them both.
Ahead, the tunnel would widen. She sensed a gap of air above the waves.
She cannoned them upward. They cleared the surface; Merik’s rib cage sputtered against her arms.
Then she dove him back under before the tunnel shrank once more.
Vivia pushed them faster, grateful Merik didn’t fight. That he instinctively elongated his body for maximum speed. It was the Windwitch in him, she supposed. He understood—he became—a creature of least resistance.
It was the one thing she’d always envied about him. So easy, he’d always had it so easy. Yet right now, nothing was easy.
Another fork. This time, Vivia charged left. A shelf waited ahead, and Vivia sensed it only because water sprayed across.
It would have to do.
She tightened her hold on Merik, and he tightened his hold on her—as if he knew that whatever came next, it wouldn’t be nice.
Tide, she thought. A tide to carry us. She imagined the skin-shredding force of a countercurrent. Beneath her and behind.
Then the water was there. It cut under her feet. It grabbed hold of her boots before launching them both upright. The full rage of the current battered them. Fought to flip them down.
Up! Vivia shrieked with her mind. With her witchery.
The tide finally complied.
Up they shot, toward a ceiling Vivia sensed was too close. Any slower, though, and she would lack the momentum to escape these rapids at all.
Head.
Body.
Feet.
Vivia and Merik cleared the water, their arms still anchored to each other. Then the water released them, and they toppled onto the limestone.
Vivia straggled upright. She knew where she was, for she could feel where dampness hit stone, where moisture gathered on walls. Where water had pushed its way into other tunnels, other stairwells—and which passages remained clear. Remained safe.
This was the cave-in, and here, through the spindrift, was a hole in the rubble she’d only just dug through.
She towed up Merik, feeling him strain to push his muscles. Once he was standing, leaning awkwardly on her shoulder, Vivia used the mist to guide her. There was so much she wanted to say as they shambled toward the surface. A thousand questions, a thousand apologies, and a thousand gruff older-sister criticisms. Yet like the water, fast building in the plateau, all these words Vivia yearned to say had nowhere to go. They simply pressed against her ribs, bowed against her mind.
So in the end, she said nothing at all.
Merik lived. She didn’t know how, she didn’t know why. But he lived, and for once in her life—for one single day—she felt as if she’d made the right choices. As if she could forge on, knowing she truly had no regrets.
*
Iseult was almost to the river when she came upon the first corpse.
This was not a forgotten skeleton of some ancient war but a new body. A young body.
She had just circled a fallen oak, its exposed roots home to bees that buzzed over everything, drowning all of Iseult’s senses. Which was why she wasn’t expecting to come face-to-face with the dead man.
He slumped against the other side of the oak, his brown skin not yet bloated. A recent death, for though flies buzzed over the gash across his neck, no maggots yet writhed in the wound.
Iseult looked to the sky. Buzzards and crows circled, suggesting more death ahead on the river’s shore.
Iseult knelt beside the man. A boy, really, no older than she. His eyes were open, glass staring straight ahead, even as flies scuttled over. A golden serpent coiled across his belt, which Aeduan had described as the Baedyed standard. He looked nothing like the sailors Iseult and Aeduan had watched from the cliffside, though. This boy bore no saber, only knives and a spyglass.
A scout. Iseult would need to move more carefully. Folding her hand in her sleeve, Iseult reached out to close the boy’s eyes. Not because the Moon Mother demanded the dead be “sleeping” before entering her realm, nor because Trickster was known to inhabit the forgotten bodies of the forest.
No, Iseult wanted to close the dead boy’s eyes simply because it was making her stomach spin to watch the flies crawling. With a sleeve-covered finger, she eased down the boy’s left eyelid.
She moved to the right eye. Yet as the lid sank low, Threads tangled into her awareness. Hungry purple Threads, furious crimson Threads. They moved at the fringe of her magic, a frayed edge to warp around her. Focused blue Threads, hunting green.