She closed her eyes before she leapt, fearing that if she saw the sight of the crashing waves, the jagged rocks at the shoreline again, she would lose her nerve. The wind that caught her was cold, coming off the northern sea; it clouted her awake, forced her eyes open as she fell, swirling toward the ocean in the careless embrace of the air.
Typta, she chanted as she plummeted, her hands still bound, her cheeks distended in the breeze and from the pull of the Earth. Typta. Typta, Typta—
A wave swelled suddenly over her face, filling her mouth with water, choking her. She did not feel the impact of her fall; not then. The breath was knocked out of her, so she could not inhale, which in the initial seconds probably kept her alive.
A roar of green and white, then an echoing silence as she was pulled below the surface, followed by a thick drumbeat, like an underwater wind. Rhapsody’s eyes burned from the salt, her lungs from the lack of air. Above her, before all went green, she could see Michael’s face and the faces of his cohorts staring down from the cliff top, or at least she imagined that she could. She could hear their voices, though her ears sank into the water quickly.
They were staring directly down at her.
They didn’t see her, even though she was there beneath them. Because, for a moment, she was rain.
The incoming tide caught her then. In the first moments she had been floating in the crest of die waves, the foam itself, light as a raindrop, skittering across the surface. As soon as the chant was broken, her mouth filled with water, her mass returned, and with it the whole force of the raging sea.
Like a heavy curtain falling, the world suddenly went from green to black.
Don’t breathe, she thought, fighting to find the surface in the darkness, and failing. The thick noise of the waves, muted, pounded in her ears.
Then, with a great swell, she was caught up, spinning wildly, struggling for purchase where there was none, nothing to grasp or bear against, nothing but evanescent water slipping through her hands, out from beneath her. It was a sickening sensation, akin to being hurled through the air, only worse, roiling and tumbling with the madness of the waves.
Until she was slammed into a wall of solid rock.
Against her will, Rhapsody gasped, inhaling a rush of caustic seawater. Before her lungs burst she broke the surface, gagging, choking, spitting, clawing desperately in the dark at the vertical rocky surface before her, a wall that rose as far up as she could reach.
Above her there was only enough air space for her nose and the upper part of her face to bob out of the water; past that, overhead, her tied hands scraped a similar rockwall, this one horizontal. She was bleeding, she noted distantly, as her face impacted the hard ceiling above her with a swell of the waves, her side stinging as well from where the bowman had shot her.
The noise of the sea had diminished a bit; it echoed now in the dark, roaring with the ebb and flow of the waves, but not with the same broad, endless crashing she had heard atop the cliff. That was only when her ears were above the surface; with each new wave she was submerged again, hearing only the muted swishing and the sound of bubbles beneath the water.
How long she continued to bob in the dark, catching insignificant breaths of air, Rhapsody could not be certain, but it seemed hours, days, years, a punishment of eternal proportion. Her skin stung from the salt; her limbs grew tired, so she gave up the struggle to move and instead concentrated on floating, trying to quell the panic that swept over her with each wave, pounding on her lungs.
Finally it seemed as if the space above her where there was air was growing larger; she could no longer touch the ceiling with her hands when she crested the surface. After some time light broke through the darkness behind her, a small, white slice of visible sky that her stinging eyes could barely make out. It grew ever larger with each rolling wave, until finally there was a goodly space above her, and enough light to make out where she was.
She had been swept on an incoming wave into a tidal cave, a volcanic hollow in the endless cliff face that made up the many miles of shoreline from the northern Hintervold all the way down to her own lands in Tyrian, half a thousand miles away. Rhapsody choked back the irony; it was in just such a cave that she had postulated the water source that fed Entudenin had its mouth.
In the back wall of the cave she could see a shallow ledge of sorts, hewn from the rock over millennia by the slow, insistent carving of the currents; she let the next incoming wave carry her to it, clutching with all her might as she was battered once more against the back wall of the cave. It took her three tries to roll up onto the ledge and remain there after the wave receded, but when finally she was able she sat upright, her back against the smooth, irregular cave wall, and struggled to clear her lungs of the brine she had inhaled. Her stomach rose to her mouth and she retched, glad to be clear of the saltwater.
Numbly she felt for the locket around her neck; it was still there, hanging on its thin gold chain. Still coughing, she opened the clasp; a tiny, thirteen-sided copper coin that Ashe had given her in their mutual youth, and she had carried through two worlds, tumbled into her hand. She sighed in relief; having it with her still was like having a part of him there, too. Rhapsody quickly closed the coin back inside the locket and set about clearing her lungs.
When she could breathe again she stared out the cave’s opening; the light that spilled into the cave over the swirling waves was pink. Dawn, she thought weakly. I have been here all night. Now the tide was going out, emptying the cave slightly, though she could still not see the bottom in the swirling water beneath the ledge.
Risa hilue, she whispered in the tongue of her mother’s people, Liringlas, the Skysingers, who greeted the sun in its rising and setting with song. Welcome, sunrise.
The turbulent sea growled relentlessly in answer.
As the outgoing tide carried the longboats back to the Basquela, Fergus, the seneschal’s reeve, squinted in the red light, struggling to keep his master at all times in his sight.
The seneschal had said nothing from the moment they had launched, staring behind him at the rising sun cresting the towering coastline, silent as death. The sounds of morning on the sea—the cry of the gulls, the music of the wind—went unnoticed, the sky-blue eyes of the minister of justice glassy and unfocused. Fergus knew better than to annoy the seneschal with idle conversation or ameliorative attempts, so instead he merely called to the oarsmen, directing them back to the frigate in smooth, unhurried strokes.
When finally their longboat reached the ship, the reeve signaled the majority of the crew aboard, wanting to give the seneschal as much time as he needed before climbing the ladder that would be the final step in abandoning his quest. He stood silently behind his master, clutching the guy rope but saying nothing, staring at the misty cliffs in the distance, flat and stolid gray with the bright sun rising above them.
Fergus had learned long ago that the moods of the seneschal were like the wind, unpredictable, often fierce; he had weathered storms of temper that had raged for hours, like the howling of a hurricane. But if one watched carefully, occasionally one could gauge the signs of a lull.
He thought he saw one now, brought on by a combination of wretched disappointment and exhaustion.