by Karen Chance
And a bunch more angry nuggets peering down through the greenery.
I was more worried about drowning than about the locals, so when a wave tossed me at a huge stalagmite, hard enough to knock what little air I’d managed to suck in right back out, I held on for dear life.
And struggled to breathe with what seemed like an ocean’s worth of water crashing by on both sides. It looked like waves breaking against a cliff, to the point that I couldn’t even see the floor anymore, just a swirling mass of roaring water that wasn’t just rushing by and foaming off the walls, but was also flaring up in miniature water spouts that I didn’t understand until I looked up again.
And saw the hairy nuggets raining bowling-ball-sized boulders down through a gap in the roof.
“What the—what are they doing?” I yelled, before remembering that Pritkin didn’t understand me.
“Saying hello!” he yelled back from a perch by the wall. “We’re not armed!” he added, shouting upward.
The only answer was a bunch more rocks, peppering down like gray hail. But I barely noticed. Maybe because I was too busy staring at Pritkin. “What the—how did—did you just—”
“Translation spell!” he told me over the roar of the water.
“Transla—Then why didn’t you do that before?”
“I didn’t do it this time! I don’t know that one yet!”
“Then who—”
I cut off to flatten against the stalagmite, allowing a rock the size of my head to splash down in the maelstrom between us.
“You go home,” one shaggy thing yelled down at us. “You go home now!”
And, okay, I thought I could guess.
“Would you like to explain how?” Pritkin yelled, gesturing at the torrent spilling through the door.
The only answer was more rocks, everything from fist to boulder-sized. One hit my stalagmite’s shiny dome, shearing it off into the flood and scattering shrapnel-like hunks everywhere. Including down onto me.
“It seems he would mind!” Pritkin told me. And then he gauged the distance and made a flying leap across the narrow straight that separated us, landing on a jutting piece of my rock. It was tiny and mostly underwater, and I would have been impressed if I hadn’t been so damned freaked-out.
“How do we get out of here?” I yelled, because the roar around us was still deafening, even this close.
“I was hoping you’d have an idea!”
I stared at him. “You don’t have a plan?”
“Plans are overrated!” said the man who never made a move without one. He looked up. “And I wouldn’t worry about the *unintelligible*. They can’t hit the side of a barn—”
“The what?”
“A small type of forest-dwelling troll! The spell doesn’t translate proper names, Ohshit!”
I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the rock’s remaining bit of dome as half a river tore past on either side. I was not here; I was not hearing this; I was not, I was not. “Forest-dwelling trolls?”
I opened my eyes to see Pritkin looking slightly apologetic. “Earlier, we came through a . . . a type of doorway. And now we’re in, well, perhaps you’ve heard stories—”
“We’re in faerie!” I yelled, flailing my arms and almost falling off my rock. “I know that! What I don’t know is how we get out!”
“You know that?” Pritkin blinked, although that might have been from all the spray flying around. “I suppose I should have realized. You’re too soft for a peasant girl!”
I glared at him.
“I meant that in a good way!” he assured me.
I closed my eyes again; I don’t know why. It never helped. But I preferred it to what I saw when I opened them.
“—not so bad, once you get used to them. Just very territorial,” Pritkin was bellowing, before another rock splashed down, missing his shoulder by inches.
It landed on the bottom of the stalagmite, splintering off some more shrapnel, but this time I didn’t even flinch. I was too busy staring at something in the gloom back the way we’d come. Something that looked like a bunch of people carrying flashlights that were reflecting off the walls.
Only flashlights were usually golden, weren’t they?
And these burned pure, cold silver.
Of course, I thought dully. Because a raging river, a bunch of rock-wielding savages, and a nonexistent power stream weren’t enough. That would be easy mode. And somewhere along the line I’d transitioned over to expert. Which would have been fine if I had as many lives as a video game character.
But I had only one.
Which I was about to lose.
“—then again,” Pritkin shouted, because he was still talking, “there’s a slight chance they may not have had time to absorb my particular brand of charm on my last visit—”
“You don’t have any charm,” I snarled, and shoved him off the rock.
Chapter Forty-two
I jumped in after him, just as two more spears flashed toward us, almost invisible in the cascade of light from above.
And when I came up, spluttering, a few moments later, it was only to have to duck back down to avoid another volley that tore by my head. I heard it hit, the massive crack deafening even underwater, and felt the tremors that shook the cave like an earthquake. And that must have knocked some more rocks loose, because, suddenly, they were raining down everywhere.
“Get down!” Pritkin yelled. “Get down! Get—”
“You get down!” I yelled back, because a spear had just shattered a huge stalagmite, with a bang like a mountaintop had been sheared off. Which wasn’t far from the case, with what looked like half the ceiling cracking and shifting and then spearing down—straight at him. “Pritkin!” I screamed, before remembering that he didn’t know that name.
And then the outer edge of the wave hit, and I was going under, too.
But that actually turned out to be a good thing, considering the rocks and shards and what looked like whole trees pelting down from above. A rock slammed into the water a moment later, right beside me, big enough to have ripped my arm off. Except that the water broke some of the impact, so it just felt like it was being ripped off. And then the current caught me before I had a chance to wonder how I was supposed to swim with only one arm.
And forced me to start worrying about how not to drown with one instead.
For the next few minutes, my head stayed mostly underwater. But I was almost grateful for that, since every time I came up, I regretted it.
The first time I surfaced, I glimpsed Pritkin up ahead and swimming hard, which was a huge relief. And being hotly pursued by a bunch of silver fey, which was not. Especially since they weren’t having to battle the water like we were.
In fact, they weren’t getting wet at all. I wasn’t sure there was a word for what they were doing, but it might have been called rock climbing if it was done at a sprint and sideways. The best I could figure out in between waves slapping me in the face, they were leaping from tiny outcropping to minute shelf to half-inch-wide protrusion on the walls, all wet, all slippery, all at full speed ahead, and all while throwing those damned energy spears at us.
Suddenly, Pritkin’s little jump wasn’t looking so impressive anymore.
Of course, neither was the fey’s aim, which was being affected by their mad chase, by the fact that they were trying to hit wildly bobbing targets in bad light, and by the small matter of them being targeted themselves.
Because they had been. By the hairy nuggets. Who I was starting to feel a whole lot warmer toward, suddenly.
And the small fey seemed to have a big problem with their latest guests. More than they did with us. Like, way more. We’d been yelled at and threatened and had some rocks lobbed in our general direction, but that was nothing compared to the reaction caused by the silver fey’s appearance. I didn�
��t know what the little guys were saying, because I guess the translation spell didn’t do profanity, either. But they were yelling down something that sounded truly vicious accompanied by an absolute avalanche of rocks.
And it looked like Pritkin had been wrong.
They could aim, after all.
Either that, or they got lucky, because one of the fey suddenly took a bath, courtesy of a hundred-pound boulder crushing his skull.
A red plume stained the water before the current swirled it away, and I thought for a moment that one of his companions was going to jump in after him. But instead he grabbed a low-hanging vine, using it to swing to an upper one. And a second after that, three small fey were jerked through a hole in the ceiling and thrown down onto the rocks below.
I didn’t hear them land, for which I was grateful.
I also didn’t see them, for which I was less grateful, because it had to do with the cave floor suddenly giving way onto a waterfall that had me screaming down into darkness.
The second time I came up for air, I saw that, waterfall or not, we hadn’t lost our pursuers. Specifically, Pritkin hadn’t, because the silver fey seemed to be a lot more interested in him than in me. And a dozen fey warriors on one not-yet-a-war-mage weren’t good odds.
I jerked Rosier’s bag off my back and started trying to dig through it.
But if it had been hard to see before, it was all but impossible now. The waterfall had dumped us into what I guessed was an underground river, but I couldn’t be sure because there were no convenient skylights anymore. Just a vast, dark, echoing space, with the only light a rapidly dimming haze from behind and a few patches of phosphorescent lichen in the water. And the fey, glowing like beacons in the darkness up ahead. Or like deadly silver flashes as they leapt from rock to rock to rock, trying to catch up with Pritkin’s darker form.
They were doing a good job. They were doing a damn good job, since there were also patches of sandy bank that flashed by, here and there, making their weird parkour act that much easier. They were gaining, while I was facing the fact that Rosier had brought a lot of pills and potions, probably to help knock out his son, but damned little that looked like a weapon.
Other than the gun, which I couldn’t use here. And even if I could, there were more fey than bullets! And that was assuming that the damned thing still worked after being drowned and if I could get close enough to fire and if they didn’t catch Pritkin in the meantime—
And they didn’t.
But only because he suddenly sped up, I didn’t know how.
And disappeared; I didn’t know why.
Until I was grabbed and yanked ahead by something that was probably a current but felt more like a maelstrom. And I realized: that thing I’d thought was a waterfall? Was the bunny slope.
And we’d just hit the Olympic run.
The third time I came up, I could see fine, thanks to the glowing silver light spilling out from a single fey. He was only a few yards away, but he didn’t see me, being too busy battling a small, hairy creature that I vaguely recognized as the guard I’d seen by the portal. He’d found a boat somewhere, maybe pulled up onto one of the banks, I didn’t know. But he had, and had been using it to rescue his buddies who had been thrown down by the fey.
Only rescue was a debatable point, since one passenger was slumped in the bow, as lifeless as a corpse, and another was about to be.
And this one wasn’t fey.
The silver warrior landed a savage blow on a second little troll that caused him to fall back, almost into the water. And that caused his appearance to change and blur and—
Pritkin, I thought, realizing what had happened at the same time that his opponent did.
The fey lunged after his formerly disguised enemy, in order to finish the job, and probably would have succeeded because Pritkin looked dazed from the blow. But the first troll took that moment to counterattack, tripping up the fey. And a second later, he found himself fighting a desperate battle against a much larger, faster, stronger foe on a barely-bigger-than-a-rowboat craft that started rocking madly back and forth as I tried to grab the side.
I managed, somehow, but didn’t even try to pull myself up since I didn’t have the strength. Instead I pulled the only option I had and tried to aim it, while the little guard went into berserker mode, stabbing around with his spear so fast that it was almost invisible. And the silver fey started bobbing and ducking and weaving worthy of Muhammad Ali, and my hands were shaking from the cold of the water, and I was aiming the gun with my left arm because of course it was my right that had been injured, and the damned fey was shining so brightly in the darkness that he was almost blinding.
But not enough that I couldn’t see it when the troll guard was knocked aside, brutally hard. And when the fey lunged at Pritkin, who had ended up over by me, shaking his head to try to clear it. But it was too little, too late, with no more time and no more help and a silver blur shooting right at us.
And then shooting right back the other way, because it looked like a.44 Magnum worked just as well on the fey as on everything else.
And that included my shoulder.
The fey warrior staggered back, his face blooming red, and fell off the front of the boat. And my arm seized up from the recoil, dropping me off the back. Only I wasn’t sure it had seized up as much as broken.
Because now I couldn’t use it at all.
My head went under, the current being hard enough to fight even with two arms, and this time, it stayed that way. I got turned around, which is easy when everything is dark. And when your shoulder is a pulse of agony and doesn’t work. And when your waterlogged dress wraps around you, hampering what little movement you had left.
And when you realize that you can’t hear anything but a deafening echo.
Suddenly, all I saw around me was darkness.
Suddenly, all I felt was cold.
I stopped thrashing, hoping to see the direction the bubbles were heading when I let out a breath, only to find that I didn’t have one. And muscles, it turns out, don’t work so well with no oxygen. I stared around at nothing, just more dark, dark water, and panic stopped my throat.
I’d fought my way back up three times—third time’s a charm; wasn’t that the saying? Only I never wondered before, what about the fourth? Why didn’t they ever say what happened if you needed a fourth?
I was beginning to think I knew.
And then someone grabbed me.
I was jerked up with an arm around my waist, hard enough to almost cut me in two. Things went hazy for a minute as I tried to figure out which way was up. And failed, because I broke the surface in a totally different direction from the one I’d been heading, with my head reeling and my stomach roiling and somebody yelling something I couldn’t understand, because right then, I couldn’t understand anything.
But I felt it when I was hauled over the side of the boat. And fell into the slimy bottom, just a cocoon of wet wool and clammy skin and silent panic. Because I still couldn’t breathe.
I lay there, gasping uselessly, like a beached fish. Trying to suck oxygen into lungs already full of something else. There was more yelling, and somebody turned me over, and somebody else started beating me on the back with arms like Schwarzenegger, but I was too busy throwing up a bucketful of icy water to care.
It felt like I expelled an ocean. It felt like I vomited the world. But at the end, I was breathing—sort of—in ragged, thankful gasps that were so clear, so cold, and so sweet that this, just this, just air had me tearing up from the sheer wonderfulness of it.
And then a light speared my eyes, right in my face, which had me gasping and flailing and knocking it back—
Before I realized that it was an oil lamp and not a fey.
“Don’t speak.” Pritkin’s arm went around me from behind, his voice barely audible even with his lips almost touchi
ng my ear. “They may be able to tell where it’s coming from.”
How? I thought, staring at a hundred little lights, like a cave filled with fireflies.
Or, more accurately, like a cave filled with boats, hundreds of them. All bobbing about the cavernous space, stuffed with two tiny fey, a war-mage-to-be and a drowned rat hanging onto the side, gaping. At what, I finally realized, was a flotilla of mirror images of our motley crew, which now filled the river almost shore to shore.
And yeah, I thought dizzily, Pritkin might not be able to fight them, but he could still confuse the hell out of them, couldn’t he? And it was working.
The fey who had disappeared down the river must have doubled back, probably at the sound of the gunshot. Because there was a bunch of them here now. Including the one who leapt from a sandbar to an outcropping of rock just ahead. He looked like something straight out of myth, with shiny black armor that ran with the light of all those little lamps, which also tinted his long, silver hair and gleamed in his eyes as he scanned the cave. And kept on scanning.
Because he couldn’t find us.
I started grinning and raised my hand to push a sodden mass of hair out of my eyes. And then froze when all the Cassies on all the other boats did the same. It was so bizarre, like looking into a fun-house mirror, only far more realistic. The silver fey’s eyes flickered here and there, watching a few hundred repetitions of the same small movement. But his eyes didn’t stay on us any longer than on any of the others.
We floated gently past, not moving, barely breathing. And our silent host went along like a ghostly flotilla, bobbing at a good pace now, making time. We’re getting away, I thought, hand clenching on Pritkin’s thigh. We’re getting away!
And then the fey started singing.
I guess they were actually talking to each other, but the voices were lilting, sonorous, almost musical. They carried in the clear, cool air of the cave and echoed off the walls, giving an impromptu concert that I couldn’t understand but didn’t like. “What are they saying?” I whispered to Pritkin, but this time, it didn’t look like he knew, either.
