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Calm. She forced herself to empty her mind. Calm down. No anger, no panic, just nothingness. She found that silent place of clarity that allowed her to think.
She wasn’t drowned yet. She still had the strength to kick her way to the surface. And the cloth wasn’t tied in such a hopeless knot, it was simply looped twice around her leg. She reached forward. A few quick movements and she broke free. Relieved, she swam upward, forcing herself not to panic, focusing on the simple act of pushing herself through the water until her head broke the surface.
She didn’t see Nezha as she dragged herself to shore. She scanned the wreckage, but she couldn’t find him. Had he surfaced at all? Was he dead? Crushed, impaled, drowned—
No. She had to trust that he was fine. He could control the water itself; it couldn’t possibly kill him.
Could it?
The howl of unnatural wind pierced the channel and lingered, punctuated only by the sound of splintering wood.
Oh, gods.
Rin looked up.
Feylen hung suspended in the air above her, slamming ships against the cliff wall with mere sweeps of his arm. Driftwood and debris swirled in a hazardous circle around him. With winds as fast as these, any one of those pieces might kill her.
Rin’s mouth had gone dry. Her knees buckled. All she wanted was to find a hole and hide. She stood paralyzed by fear and despair. Feylen was going to batter their fleet around the channel until there was nothing left. Why fight? Death would be easier if she didn’t resist . . .
She ground her fingernails into her palm until the pain brought her to her senses.
She couldn’t run.
Who else was going to fight him? Who else possibly could?
She’d lost her sword in the water, but she spied a javelin on the ground. Fat lot of good it would do against Feylen, but it felt better to hold a weapon. She scooped it up, opened her wings, and summoned a flame around her arms and shoulders. Steam fizzled around her, a choking cloud of mist. Rin waved it away, hoping desperately her wings were waterproof.
She focused on generating a steady, concentrated stream of flame around her sides, so searingly hot that the air around her blurred, and the grass at her feet wilted and shriveled into gray ash.
Slowly she rose up toward the Wind God.
Up close, Feylen looked miserable. His skin was pallid, pockmarked, overgrown with sores. They hadn’t given him new clothes—his black Cike uniform was ripped and dirty. Face-to-face he was no fearsome deity. Just a man with tattered garb and broken eyes.
Her fear faded away, replaced by pity. Feylen should have died a long time ago. Now he was a prisoner in his own body, sentenced to watch and suffer while the god he detested manipulated him as a gateway to the material world.
Without the Seal, without Kitay, Rin might have turned into something just like him.
The man is gone, she reminded herself. Defeat the god.
“Hey, asshole!” she shouted. “Over here!”
Feylen turned. The winds calmed.
She tensed, anticipating a sudden blast. She had only Kitay’s guarantee that she could correct course with her wings if Feylen sent her spinning, but that was a better chance than anyone else had.
But Feylen only hung still in the air, head cocked to the side, watching her rise to meet him like a child curiously observing the antics of a little bug.
“Cute trick,” he said.
A piece of driftwood shot past her left arm. She wobbled and righted herself.
Feylen’s cerulean eyes met hers. She shuddered. She was acutely aware of how fragile she was. She was fighting the Wind God in his own domain, and she was a little thing held in the air by nothing more than two sheets of leather and a cage of metal. He could tear her apart and dash her against those cliffs so easily.
But she didn’t just have her wings. She had a javelin. And she had the fire.
She opened her mouth and palms and shot every bit of flame she had at him—three lines of fire roaring from her body all at once. Feylen disappeared behind a wall of red and orange. The winds around him stilled. Debris began dropping out of the air, a rain of wreckage that dotted the waters below.
His retaliatory blow caught her off guard. A gust of force hit her so hard and fast that she hadn’t braced herself, hadn’t even tensed. She hurtled backward, tumbling through the air in circles until the cliff wall appeared perilously close before her eyes. Her nose scraped the rock before she managed to redirect her momentum and pull herself right-side up.
She drifted back toward Feylen, heart hammering.
She hadn’t burned him to death, but she’d come close. Feylen’s face and hair had turned black. Smoke wafted out from his scorched robes.
He looked shocked.
“Try again,” she called.
His next attack was a series of unrelenting winds blasting her from different, unpredictable directions so she couldn’t just ride out the current. One moment he forced her toward the ground, and the next he buoyed her upward, just to let her drop again.
She maneuvered the winds as well as she could, but it was like swimming against a waterfall. She was a little bird caught in a storm. Her wings were nothing against his overwhelming force. All she could do was keep from plummeting to the ground.
She suspected the only reason Feylen hadn’t yet flung her against the rocks was because he was toying with her.
But he hadn’t finished her off at Boyang, either. We’re not going to kill you, he’d said. She told us not to do that. We’re just supposed to hurt you.
The Empress had commanded him to bring her in alive. That gave her an advantage.
“Careful,” she shouted. “Daji won’t be happy with broken goods.”
Feylen’s entire demeanor changed when she spoke Daji’s name. His shoulders hunched; he seemed to shrink into himself. His eyes darted around, as if petrified that Daji could see him even so high in the air.
Rin stared at him, amazed. What had Daji done to him?
How was Daji so powerful that she could terrify a god?
Rin took the chance to fly in closer. She didn’t know how Daji had subdued Feylen, but she was now sure that Feylen couldn’t kill her.
Daji still wanted her alive, and that gave her her only advantage.
How did one kill a god? She and Kitay had puzzled over the dilemma for hours. She’d wished they could bring him into the Chuluu Korikh. Kitay had wished they could just bring the Chuluu Korikh to him.
In the end, they’d compromised.
Rin eyed the web of fuses lining the opposite cliff wall. If she couldn’t kill Feylen with fire, then she’d bury him under the mountain.
She only had to get him close enough to the rocks.
“I know you’re still in there.” She drifted closer to Feylen. She needed to distract him, if only for a few seconds’ reprieve. “I know you can hear me.”
He took the bait. The winds calmed.
“I don’t care how powerful your god is. You still own this body, Feylen, and you can take it back.”
Feylen stared wordlessly at her, unmoving, but she saw no dimming of the blue, no twitch of recognition in his eyes. His expression was an inscrutable wall, behind which she had no idea if the real Feylen was still alive.
She still had to try.
“I saw Altan in the afterlife,” she said. A lie, but one shrouded in the truth, or at least her version of it. “He wanted me to pass something on to you. Do you want to know what he said?”
