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The water was murkier than I’d expected and swirling madly all around me, leaving me so disorientated that I had no idea which way was up. I forced myself to release some air, intending to follow the bubbles to the surface, but they didn’t go anywhere. They stayed clustered around my face, as if they were confused, too.
But a moment later I abruptly hit air again, although it was less like surfacing and more like being vomited up by some great sea creature. It felt like my body partly left the water, then smacked back down again, but I couldn’t tell for sure. I was too busy gasping and coughing and retching, my starved lungs struggling to drag in breath after breath. I did not think I was doing too well.
“Dorina!”
I heard Ray’s voice, but couldn’t answer.
“Dorina!”
“I’m okay,” I finally managed to croak, although in truth, I wasn’t sure about that. Spots danced in front of my eyes and the world had gone dark. Or perhaps it had already been that way, I thought, finally blinking enough water out of my eyes that I could see.
Only what I saw didn’t make sense.
And then I realized what I was looking at, and it still didn’t.
“A cave?” I gasped, staring dizzily down at a seemingly never-ending drop. One that I was suspended over by nothing more than the water churning around me. The raft, which had floated a little way off, looked like a twiggy chandelier hung over the vast, echoing space. Even stranger, a waterfall flowed up some nearby rocks, spraying like a fountain into the air.
Even having been in a similar situation recently, I found it . . . mind altering.
“The underside of the river!” Ray corrected, his voice loud to compensate for the sound of the falls. He must have been thrown clear of the raft at some point, and had ended up a few dozen yards away. He spotted me and started to swim over.
“Why . . . did you bring us . . . here?” I gasped. “And how? Wood is . . . buoyant.”
“Yeah, well, I had some help!”
His voice echoed strangely, as did my own. It did not improve my dizziness any. “What kind of . . . help?”
“The legends about Nimue’s powers, the ones that talk about the river. She’s said to have made escape hatches for her people, in case they got surrounded—”
“That was an escape hatch?” I did not bother to keep the incredulity out of my voice.
He grinned from a little way off, having snagged what was left of the raft, which he started towing over. “It’s all relative! Her people travel across water the way we do land. Some say they can even walk on it—”
That claim would have sounded absurd to me a mere day ago, but that was before I had been to Faerie.
“—for them, what we just slid down would probably be a piece of cake.”
“A what?”
He shook his head. “I forgot; you don’t do slang. I just meant—” he broke off, and his eyes blew wide. “Get back on the raft!”
I looked for the threat that his reaction had told me was close, but did not see anything. Until he pointed at something in the water. I saw glimmering emerald depths with a crashing sea of sunlit white above—or below, depending on how you wanted to look at it. And dark figures moving against all that light, coming this way.
Fey, I thought sickly. They must have arrived in time to see where we went. Which meant—
“That we’re fucked, if you don’t get on!” Ray yelled.
I did not understand what he was talking about, since the river was upside down. It was in the cave ceiling, not running through the darkness below. There was nothing to get “on” to.
Yet he was clinging to the raft, nonetheless, gripping it with his legs and holding out an urgent hand to me. I took it because I did not know what else to do, and he gave a heave, dragging me up behind him. And as soon as he did—
The strangest thing happened.
I had been bobbing upside down, my head and arms sticking out of the water like a human stalactite. But when Ray hauled me onto the raft, it was as if the world suddenly flipped. I found myself right side up, clinging to his waist in an underground river that ran along the bottom of a large cavern.
Suddenly, everything made sense. The waterfall crashed over rocks that looked darker where it flowed, and sprayed out at the bottom as gravity demanded. The huge echoing space was now above us where it belonged, with the witchy fingers of limestone hanging downwards instead of spearing up. A few bats also hung properly down from their perches, instead of looking as if they’d gone to sleep standing upright.
/> I nonetheless stayed where I was for a moment, my head against Ray’s back, my mind spinning as it slowly adjusted to this new reality. He started to paddle, hard, and we began to move down what appeared to be a perfectly normal river. Well, perfectly normal if you ignored the sunlight sparkling below us, and the dark silhouettes swimming upward toward us.
