Reap the Wind (41 page)

He was right; I knew he was. But for a minute, I just stood there anyway, feeling old, pitted glass slide under my fingers and cottony fear crowd my throat. I had to do this, and I had to get it right this time. And yet I just stood there.

And then I threw it back, a bitter, oily dose that moved horribly on my tongue.

“Feel anything?” Rosier asked.

“Nauseous,” I gasped, staring at the bottle, afraid that maybe I’d gotten a bad batch.

Until my hand spasmed, and I watched it fall to the floor as if in slow motion, while every cell in my body exploded with light and warmth and power, so much power that I thought for a minute it was going to rip me apart.

And then I was sure it was. Reality warped, time telescoped, and the chair beside me duplicated itself into a thousand chairs that receded into the distance, like fun-house mirrors placed face-to-face. Like the rest of the pub, like the hand Rosier put on my shoulder, like the world around us . . .

Until everything slammed back together again, wrenching me off my feet and into a maelstrom of light and shadow, sound and silence, and wind that I couldn’t feel but could hear in my ears, echoing in my head, screaming past us as we fell down, down, down, into nothingness so absolute that I wasn’t sure anymore if the wind was screaming or if I was.

And, okay, I thought.

I guess it was good after all.

And then I passed out.

“Cassie! Cassie! Damn you, wake up!” Someone was shaking me. And cursing. And glaring down at me out of evil red eyes.

And then slapping me hard across the face.

And then looking surprised when I slapped him back.

I blinked and realized that the face was Rosier’s, and that the weird eyes were reflecting the sky behind him. Which was red and dark and boiling with gray-green clouds. His hair was limned in red, too, and a whipping wind had it ruffling and sticking up in a good impression of his son’s. To complete the scene, somewhere nearby, something was burning.

“Are we in hell?” I croaked, confused.

“Close enough,” Rosier snarled. And then he snatched me up, supporting me as we stumbled for the scant cover offered by a nearby copse of trees.

They were on fire up in the tops, probably a result of the embers that were blowing about everywhere. But it didn’t matter because everything else was burning, too. The trees all along the riverbank, the bushes, the
weeds
. It even looked like the river itself was on fire, the surface reflecting the flames and the wind gusts sending little gold-tipped ripples everywhere. Pretty much the only thing that wasn’t alight—yet—was the old mill, but the dark hulk was visible because the moon had come out since we’d left, big and pale and floating serenely over the chaos below.

It was not illuminating Pritkin. Or if it was, I couldn’t tell with all the leaping shadows everywhere. And with my eyes watering and my head spinning. And with the explosions, I added mentally, as another tree went up with a crack and a burst of flame, the wind whipping the burning bits at our heads.

“What are they
doing
?” I asked as we ducked for cover, both from the fire and the too-pale figures that had started it.

“Trying to flush out my son!” Rosier said, furious. “They obviously can’t find him—”

“
We
can’t find him! How are we supposed to spot him in
this
?”

It looked like the fey we’d run from earlier had given up on subtlety and were just destroying everything in their path. Which was soon going to be Pritkin—and us—if we didn’t find him quick. And we weren’t going to. I was choking just trying to breathe, the smoke from the ring of fire obscuring the areas under the trees like low-hanging clouds.

This wasn’t going to work.

And, for once, Rosier seemed to agree.

“You aren’t,” he said, looking grim. “I am.”

And then he was on his feet and moving fast.

I grabbed for his arm, but missed because my reflexes hadn’t recovered yet. So I grabbed his leg instead. “
I’m
supposed to find him. You’re supposed to—”

“I know what I’m supposed to do! But I can sense when he’s near, girl; you can’t! So I will get him out.”

“But you’re supposed to distract the Pythias!”

“There’s been a change of plan,” he said, shaking me off like a bothersome puppy. “
You
distract them, then meet me in town.”

And with that he was gone, striding off before I could point out that I didn’t know where “town” was. And that I wasn’t in any shape to distract anybody right now. And that I didn’t even have a weapon, because, unlike him, I actually cared about the—

My brain skidded to a stop on an image of Rosier’s handgun. Which, no, might not help me much itself, since using it here could trash the hell out of the time line. But which was sitting in a pack of magic that might.

A pack I’d dropped on the shore before going skinny-dipping.

A pack that might still be there, concealed by the weeds.

I glanced around again, dropped to the ground, and started crawling.

The riverbank was oddly undisturbed, except for the stretch where chunks had been carved out of it by the fey barrage. It looked worse than I remembered, an ugly, bare scar in an otherwise pristine stretch of sand, but it did help me to orient myself. Between that and the mill, I managed to find my former patch of weeds, and soon after that my discarded clothes.

And the pack!

I hugged it to me, almost disbelieving, because let’s face it, I don’t get luck like that every day. And then I pulled the “dress” over my head. Because ugly and lumpish and hot it might be, but it was also darker than my white tank top. I ditched the Keds, too—also white—but couldn’t make myself put my old “shoes” back on.

Until I thought of how extra crispy my soles were going to be, running through a fiery forest, if I didn’t, and reconsidered.

I was trying to find a missing lace, which, being leather and brown and stringy was doing a good job of imitating one of the squashed down reeds, when another explosion burst across my vision. I looked up, because that one had been a little close for comfort, and scanned the riverbank. But I didn’t see anyone.

Because they weren’t on the bank.

I had a second to stare at the sight of Pritkin, not walking on water, but
running
on it, full out, his bare feet kicking up little waves behind him in the firelit stream. He’d reacquired the board shorts, but not the Ghillie top, I guess because it wouldn’t be much use as camouflage unless it was on fire. And his precious walking stick was thrown over his back, in some kind of leather carrying device that didn’t stop it from smacking into his legs with every stride, because it hadn’t been made for a human’s use.

It had been made for the things chasing him.

And they were chasing hard. Right behind him were a bunch of fey, slipping and sliding and falling and half drowning, because they were wearing armor, not thin flax, and because they didn’t seem to find the water as accommodating as he did. But others were converging on the bank—a lot of others, a whole freaking lot of others, barreling this way like an otherworldly freight train—

And then Pritkin reached me. And snatched me up. And the next thing I knew, I was doing it, too, leaving little spongy footprints on the surface of a river less solid than land, but more than any stretch of liquid had any right to be.

For a minute, anyway. And then it was like the strange water balloon surface in front of us ran out, and we dove. Or, rather, Pritkin dove, and I fell off the edge, cursing and flailing and sinking, because he was pulling me down, I didn’t know why.

Until a flash of light missed me by a hair’s breadth, boiling through the water just above my face, scalding my flesh even through the chilly stream.

And, okay, I figured it out.

And we shot down like a bullet.

In a minute, my lungs were burning—it felt like bands of my skin had been seared off, and yet still we dove. Into blessedly cold water that was going to kill us anyway, because no way could we swim farther than the fey. There were too many of them and this wasn’t going to work and I was about to try to shift us out even if it sprained a magic muscle or brought every Pythia in five miles down on our heads, because at least we’d
have
heads—

And then I saw it: something glowing blue at the bottom of the river.

It was hazy and seemed to fluctuate with the current, so I couldn’t see it clearly. Or much of anything else, because we were too deep now. But a second later I felt it, like a drain pulling us in, pulling us down. And before I could try to shift again, before it even fully registered, we
were
in, vacuumed up and sucked down a vortex of swirling light and color and sound, until it stopped abruptly.

Really abruptly.

Bug-on-a-windshield abruptly.

And I realized that I’d just fetched up against some kind of stretchy membrane that covered the opening to a cave.

The cave appeared to be full of rocks and dark and wet, although not as much of the latter as you’d expect with a gaping hole in the wall. It was also full of Pritkin, because the membrane hadn’t stopped him. He had passed through just fine and landed in a crouch on a wet stretch of rock on the other side. And was now arguing with some waist-high shaggy thing that appeared to be mostly nose and hair and attitude.

An attitude that got noticeably worse when I started thrashing against the barrier, distorting it into the cave in fist – and foot-shaped protrusions, because a ton of water was pressing down on me and shifting wasn’t working and I was about to be drowning and—

And Pritkin grabbed the thing’s spear and threw it straight at me.

I would have screamed, if I weren’t suffocating. Or moved out of the way if I weren’t being crushed by all that water. Which was suddenly falling all around me, as the membrane dissolved in a burst of light.

And I exploded into the room, along with a few thousand gallons that tsunamied through all around me. And around Pritkin. And around the hairy little nugget, who was now an angry little nugget, appearing here and there through all the churning water to stab at us with a couple of knives.

That would have been more of a problem if we hadn’t been simultaneously rushing headlong down a rock-strewn corridor on the torrent of water gushing through the wall. And doing it with only intermittent light, because the roof of this cave was not in great repair. Big gaps flashed by overhead, showing not the hellscape we’d just left, but instead pieces of a discordantly beautiful day, with bright blue skies, fluffy clouds, and riotous vines waving cheerful tendrils at us.

And a bunch more angry nuggets peering down through the greenery.

I was more worried about drowning than about the locals, so when a wave tossed me at a huge stalagmite, hard enough to knock what little air I’d managed to suck in right back out, I held on for dear life.

And struggled to breathe with what seemed like an ocean’s worth of water crashing by on both sides. It looked like waves breaking against a cliff, to the point that I couldn’t even see the floor anymore, just a swirling mass of roaring water that wasn’t just rushing by and foaming off the walls, but was also flaring up in miniature water spouts that I didn’t understand until I looked up again.

And saw the hairy nuggets raining bowling-ball-sized boulders down through a gap in the roof.

“What the—what are they
doing
?” I yelled, before remembering that Pritkin didn’t understand me.

“Saying hello!” he yelled back from a perch by the wall. “We’re not armed!” he added, shouting upward.

The only answer was a bunch more rocks, peppering down like gray hail. But I barely noticed. Maybe because I was too busy staring at Pritkin. “What the—how did—did you just—”

“Translation spell!” he told me over the roar of the water.

“Transla—
Then why didn’t you do that before?
”

“I didn’t do it this time! I don’t know that one yet!”

“Then who—”

I cut off to flatten against the stalagmite, allowing a rock the size of my head to splash down in the maelstrom between us.

“You go home,” one shaggy thing yelled down at us. “You go home now!”

And, okay, I thought I could guess.

“Would you like to explain how?” Pritkin yelled, gesturing at the torrent spilling through the door.

The only answer was more rocks, everything from fist to boulder-sized. One hit my stalagmite’s shiny dome, shearing it off into the flood and scattering shrapnel-like hunks everywhere. Including down onto me.

“It seems he would mind!” Pritkin told me. And then he gauged the distance and made a flying leap across the narrow straight that separated us, landing on a jutting piece of my rock. It was tiny and mostly underwater, and I would have been impressed if I hadn’t been so damned freaked-out.

“How do we get out of here?” I yelled, because the roar around us was still deafening, even this close.

“I was hoping you’d have an idea!”

I stared at him. “You don’t have a
plan
?”

“Plans are overrated!” said the man who never made a move without one. He looked up. “And I wouldn’t worry about the *
unintelligible*.
They can’t hit the side of a barn—”

“The what?”

“A small type of forest-dwelling troll! The spell doesn’t translate proper names, Ohshit!”

I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the rock’s remaining bit of dome as half a river tore past on either side. I was not here; I was not hearing this; I was not, I was
not.
“Forest-dwelling
trolls
?”

I opened my eyes to see Pritkin looking slightly apologetic. “Earlier, we came through a . . . a type of doorway. And now we’re in, well, perhaps you’ve heard stories—”

“We’re in
faerie
!” I yelled, flailing my arms and almost falling off my rock. “I know that! What I don’t know is how we get out!”

“You know that?” Pritkin blinked, although that might have been from all the spray flying around. “I suppose I should have realized. You’re too soft for a peasant girl!”

I glared at him.

“I meant that in a good way!” he assured me.

I closed my eyes again; I don’t know why. It never helped. But I preferred it to what I saw when I opened them.

“—not so bad, once you get used to them. Just very territorial,” Pritkin was bellowing, before another rock splashed down, missing his shoulder by inches.

It landed on the bottom of the stalagmite, splintering off some more shrapnel, but this time I didn’t even flinch. I was too busy staring at something in the gloom back the way we’d come. Something that looked like a bunch of people carrying flashlights that were reflecting off the walls.

Only flashlights were usually golden, weren’t they?

And these burned pure, cold silver.

Of course, I thought dully. Because a raging river, a bunch of rock-wielding savages, and a nonexistent power stream weren’t enough. That would be easy mode. And somewhere along the line I’d transitioned over to expert. Which would have been fine if I had as many lives as a video game character.

But I had only one.

Which I was about to lose.

“—then again,” Pritkin shouted, because he was
still talking
, “there’s a slight chance they may not have had time to absorb my particular brand of charm on my last visit—”

“You don’t have any charm,” I snarled, and shoved him off the rock.