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.
And it didn’t look like the translation spell worked with this particular group of fey, because all I heard was chanting. Although there might be a reason for that, I thought, as a massive energy spear flashed into the hand of the fey on the outcropping. And then shot upward, toward the ceiling, where it burst into a thousand twinkling lights like falling stars.
Beautiful, I thought again, mesmerized in spite of myself.
Until I realized: these stars burned.
Glowing embers started to fall like rain, hissing off the water and sparking off the rocks. But they didn’t hurt the crowd in the boats—no, they didn’t hurt them at all. Because they were just illusions.
But we weren’t.
And now the falling embers were falling down on us.
The guard started making a terrifying screech and stomping on a bunch of rags that had just flared up. And that turned out to be the body of a third troll, who I guess wasn’t dead after all. Because he began moaning and thrashing and then hitting back and trying to put himself out.
Which actually worked great, since there was plenty of water in the bottom of the boat to help.