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“Sorry, dear. Force of habit.” Also, he wasn’t going to go home, figurative hat in hands, and explain to Rune how he’d gotten his bride drowned on a reconnaissance mission. (That was to say nothing of relaying the news to her mother.)
He walked to the place where the bridge joined the shore, and found a transition that seemed, like all other parts of the structure, wholly natural. Back at the center, he found the scrapes Oddmarr had mentioned: wide, fresh grooves that could very well have been made by the drag of a ship’s hull.
“Ollie,” Tessa said. “There’s a current.”
“Well, yes, straits tend to have…” He trailed off as the implications of her words struck him. “Wait.”
He peered over the eastern side, down at the water, and saw that it flowed outward from the wall, a steady, swift current as if it was pouring out of the bridge. To the west, he found the water gliding into the bridge, slowing, some, but not meeting the resistance that it should have.
“There has to be a passthrough,” he said. “It’s the only explanation.”
“Is this a floating bridge?” Tessa asked with alarm, and Alfie stretched her wings, ready to take flight.
“I can’t know without looking.” He watched the water lap at the mass of earth, sliding away somewhere down below the surface, and his rippling, breaking reflection. “I suppose the water’s too cold for me to go down there.”
“Yes, it is.” Tessa’s voice went shrill, as if afraid he’d dive in.
Oliver turned a look on Percy – who shook his head, snorted, but then slid down the side of the bridge and into the water head-first, lithe as a seal. His tail tip smacked the surface before it disappeared, spraying Oliver full in the face with cold water.
“Guess I deserved that.” He wiped himself down with the edge of his cloak to the sound of Tessa’s laughter.
Percy was back a minute later, climbing back up the steep face of the bridge, wicked claws sinking deep for purchase. When he’d hauled himself up to the top, he shook all over like a dog, cold droplets flying everywhere. Tessa let out a cry of dismay, and Alfie chittered in agitation at her mate.
Oliver, who’d thought to shield himself with his cloak, laughed – until a wash of blue filled his mind, crowded his vision, and offered him a glimpse of what Percy had seen below. What looked like a natural phenomenon above the water was, at its base, an elaborate brickwork series of arches that looked startlingly like the aqueducts in Aquitaine. Oliver had never seen them in person, but he’d pored over architecture books in the library at Drake Hall, the pencil and paint-rendered splendor of the Crownlands, and all their assembled wonders. Here, the arches allowed the strait to pass through, barely impeded, and continue on.
He blinked, and his vision cleared, faintly dizzy from the transition back to his own consciousness.
“Damn,” he murmured.
“What?”
“It’s definitely manmade. Or, well, magic-made. Its supports leave no doubt. And look.” He gestured to the banks to either side. “There’s no evidence of any construction. They would have needed to block off the water, divert it somehow, dam or redirect the entire strait in order to spend the weeks necessary to build those arches. And yet nothing is disturbed.”
Tessa had gone pale, save the two spots of windburned color high on her cheeks. “They built it with magic, then.”
“Yes. They must have.” The idea sent a chill through him, one he saw echoed in the way Tessa pulled the collar of her cloak tighter around her neck.
Of all the magics they’d encountered thus far, they’d yet to meet anyone who could build a bridge with it.
Oliver gazed off across the southern end of the bridge, where it joined a beach, one that folded upward into grass-topped dunes. A short, steep verge lay beyond, and then, their bare trunks white, limbs tipped with the beginnings of spring leaf buds, stood the aspens, ghostly and dark-eyed. They seemed to be watching them.
Through those trees, and miles and miles beyond, lay Inglewood, and his cousin, and her amassing forces. Closer than she’d been in months – and still much too far.
He climbed back into his now-wet saddle, and met Tessa’s gaze. “I have a feeling,” he said, before they heeled the drakes into takeoff, “that this is far from the last new magic we’ll see in the months to come.”
