Somebody else didn’t like the Svarestri going to earth, and they weren’t playing.
I tightened my grip on Pritkin, who had jerked us back inside the arch, the only cover available. But it wouldn’t make a difference in a minute, and his expression said he knew that. He was staring in disbelief at the wind, which was already uprooting huge trees and turning them into flying shrapnel, which was sending the outlying boulders bouncing around like pebbles, which was turning the whole perimeter of the ruins into a whirl of black and green and, increasingly, red.
“Hold on!” I said as dust rose up like clouds to choke us.
Pritkin didn’t reply. I doubted he heard. I couldn’t even hear myself. But I could feel my power reaching for me, as desperate to touch me as I was to go to it, but not quite able to make it. But that didn’t matter as much anymore, because I knew the score now. I knew that, in faerie, I couldn’t touch it, but I could ride the ripples caused by trying.
I just didn’t know if I could do it fast enough and take someone else along for the ride.
But it was the only shot we had, and the one I’d been playing for ever since I made that scream, because I wasn’t leaving him behind. I wasn’t, even though my new trick didn’t seem to be working this time, the waves it generated not strong enough to lift two. But it was going to lift two; it was going to if it ripped me apart in the process, and it kind of felt like it might. The strain had me gasping and panting and then screaming in pain, to the point that I barely understood that we were moving again, that Pritkin was dragging me even as I did my best to drag him. Only he was taking me somewhere physically and I was trying to access the metaphysical tide that wouldn’t . . . freaking . . . come—
And there were Svarestri now, running all around us. I noticed them the way you’d notice a nurse entering a room where you’re being operated on without
anesthetic. They didn’t matter . . . didn’t matter. And I guess they felt the same way about us, maybe because the storm was hard on our heels.
But it didn’t matter, either. Nothing did except for that portal, but if it was where Pritkin was trying to take us, it wasn’t going to work. Because the Svarestri had the same idea and were crowding against it, a mass of formerly rigidly controlled creatures who had suddenly become a thrashing, tearing, yelling mob. And we weren’t getting past that; we just weren’t.
And we didn’t.
We went through it.
A second before the storm ripped us to pieces, another sort of storm grabbed us. And I wasn’t sure it was much of an improvement, because my power had ceased to be ripples in a swimming pool and was now lashing at the barrier between worlds like twenty-foot seas in a typhoon in response to my increasingly frantic calls. I didn’t know if I could control it anymore, was pretty sure I couldn’t, in fact, but it was too late because it had us—
And then I lost it.
I lost it, and we fell to the ground.
Or maybe into the ground would be more like it, as a tsunami of dirt was suddenly thrown up like a wall, all on one side. I looked around desperately for the portal but didn’t see it. I suddenly couldn’t see anything except another wall of dirt erupting from the ground, like a mountain being created out of nothing.
Only it wasn’t nothing. It was the debris from a crack in the earth big enough to drive a car through. It was trying to swallow us while another mountain was trying to bury us and we were sliding and climbing and running and falling and getting back up, because the crack was gaining.
Someone screamed as he was swallowed, just behind us. Someone else went flying through the air as a cyclone grabbed him. And the wind was roaring and dust was flying and I couldn’t see anything, not anything—until another dirt wall shot up, blocking our path. Or it would have, except we were already on top of the ground it seemed to want, and we shot up along with it.
For a second, we were flying, the sheer force of the swell flinging us up and then over before we hit back down, hard enough to leave me rattled. But Pritkin pulled me to my feet and we ran some more, blind and choking and with no idea, no idea—
Until we suddenly cleared the cloud and I saw it, out of whatever was left of my vision. I smeared a mountain’s worth of dirt across my face to stare at it in disbelief, before Pritkin all but threw me down the grassy incline and into—
Water.
Sweet, cool, familiar.
Because there was the bank and there were the trees and there was the goddamned mill I’d honestly never thought to see again and—
And it had worked.
It had worked!
We were back.
Chapter Fifty-one
The water ran over my filthy hands, like something out of a dream, clear and cold and almost miraculous after the pound of dirt I’d just swallowed. I just sat there a minute, listening to Armageddon taking place somewhere in the distance and looking at Pritkin looking back at me. He’d gone from forest sprite to commando: blackened face and body and hair slick with the mud we’d made when our dirt-covered selves hit the water.
I probably wasn’t any better, and my shoulder hurt like hell again, probably because I’d hit it a few dozen times. And it felt like my left ankle might be sprained or possibly broken. And my lip was swelling up, like I must have bitten it at some point, and it was hard to breathe.
And I didn’t care.
I grinned tremulously at Pritkin and got a flash of white teeth in return.