Page 153 of Turncloak

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Merciful Tide

The tide could save them—or it could ruin them.

It depended on two things: the existence of scarsharks, and whether the Sordai could drown. The monster hadn’t made any contact with the inky pool.

“Levan,” Saffron shouted, taking off at a run toward the dissolved archway. Seawater flowed into the mouth of the cave. Harrow was nowhere to be seen. “Jump into the rockpool and sink below the surface. See if it follows.”

For a split second it looked like Levan, who could not swim, might counter with petty fears such as drowning, but then his mind caught up with Saffron’s theory, and with a stoic expression, he took a running leap into the crab-strewn surface of the ink-dark water.

The Sordai pursued him while he was still on land, but the second Levan disappeared into the pool, the Sordai froze to a halt in midair. Then it floated back and forth over the surface of the water, pacing, waiting for Levan to reappear.

When Levan hauled himself back onto the edge of the rockpool, the Sordai swooped down twice as fast, twice as furious, and Saffron narrowly cast the spellshield in time. As the monster collided with it, and then inevitably devoured it, Saffron sensed that it would be one of the last she was able to conjure.

Yet now they had a weakness to exploit.

“It couldn’t follow you,” Saffron gasped, feeling as though her bones were made of lead. “Can you—”

But Levan was already in motion.

“Don aquiss,” he bellowed, the deep tenor echoing like thunder around the cave.

The black water rose from the pool like a wall. With a flick of his wand, Levan lassoed it into shape, hurling a long rope-like coil of it straight at the Sordai. Though the Sordai effortlessly glided away to dodge it, there was a flare of white light in those hideous skull holes, as though it was angered.

Levan kept lashing curls of water at it, fast and furious, until two things happened.

One, that it grew harder for the Sordai to dodge, because the whole cave was a riot of water.

Two, that the rockpool gradually emptied, its bottom exposed.

As the seawater gushed in from the outer cave, Saffron wasted no time sprinting down the steep slope onto the floor of the pool, her boots crunching and squelching over the fossilized carcasses of slowcrabs and opalfish, then back up the other side, scrabbling with both hands and feet onto the platform where Miret lay moaning and murmuring. Her palms bled, cut open on the craggy rock, but she barely noticed the hot, stabbing gush as she scooped the old man up in her arms. He weighed less than a sandbag, though that might have been the adrenaline.

Breathing raggedly, the old scholar went to hand her the relic wand.

“No,” Saffron snapped, too harshly. “Not yet, not here. If I touch it, the prophecy might play out, and the tide’s coming in.”

Levan lashed more tendrils of water at the Sordai, buying Saffron time to rescue Miret and the prophecy. But the rockpool was filling again, this time with seawater. They didn’t have long before the scarsharks descended.

“Hold on to me,” Saffron murmured to Miret.

Returning to the basin of the pool was far harder with Miret in her arms. She sat on the lip of the rocky platform, then shuffled on her backside over the jutting crags, feeling the fabric of her cloak and her trousers tear, barely wincing at the cut of rock into her flesh. By the time she reached the bottom, the water was high enough to cover the top of her boots—and filling fast.

Wading inelegantly to the other side, she realized she couldn’t scale it while still carrying the old scholar. She pressed his limp form against the wall of the pool so that his feet angled down, his body sloping at an angle. Through gritted teeth, she cast et esilan at his boots.

He lurched up and over the lip of the pool edge, landing on the saltwater-slicked cave floor. She scrabbled after him, smearing the rocks with a burgundy slick from her palms. Every inch of her was wet—with sweat, with wielded water, with blood. That crushing sorrow still washed through her, like a new vein network had opened with the express purpose of transporting dread through her body. She felt certain she was about to die.

What happened next was like watching some great tragedy occur from afar.

A wide ribbon of seawater belted into the second cave, carrying with it a scarshark. Saffron saw the outline—the maroon scales, the arrow-shaped head, the snarl and gnash of venomous black teeth—before her body fully registered the reality.

The scarshark swam straight for Miret.

“No!” she and Levan both screamed at once, as a dark mouth closed around Miret’s side.

The shark’s head wrenched viciously, taking a chunk of Miret’s torso with him.

The water did not fill with blood; the scarshark’s bite cauterized the wound closed. Miret was too far gone to wail or scream. His head simply tipped to the side, as though falling asleep, the shock and pain knocking him clean unconscious.