“I don’t think that’s possible,” I mumble.
When I still don’t move, he pulls me forward, and the tunnel floor takes asharp decline that makes me wobble and splash. No doubt it’s dropping under the moat.
When the water is up to my thighs, I’m by his side. I don’t have to bend as he does, and I’m grabbing at the air in jerks of my rib cage, like a fish in the bottom of a boat.
“We’re going to take three deep breaths together.”
His voice is so calm, I feel like the only one who’s stuck in a tunnel and having to swim throughbalasto safety is me—
“One.”
My nose burns as I inhale. And when he exhales, I do the same, focusing on that wide chest of his as it deflates.
“Two.”
I repeat the draw again, until my lungs sting from the stretching, and my sternum feels as if it’ll break open. I glance back at the carcass and remember the fight.
Countless more of them are waiting for us.
“Three—”
At the height of the final inhale, things happen fast. Merc sinks beneath the water level on a lithe dive, and before I can even approximate what he’s done, I’m yanked under by the waist. The shock of the cold water swallowing me whole causes all the air in my lungs to explode out of my nose and lips.
I lose every bit of it. And then I gasp—
The moat enters my mouth in an icy fist. Flailing around, I try to cough out the water while I fight the rope, my brain telling me we have to go back and try again after a resurface. Merc is going incredibly fast, though, and I grab on to the tether that binds us and attempt to pull on it, in hopes of signaling that drowning is already happening.
He just keeps swimming, his powerful strokes dragging me along.
My eyes bulge in the watery darkness, and I close my mouth so at least I don’t get more down my throat. As my arms and legs become useless, my mind tangles and spins, my thoughts like the rushing in my ears, all noise, no meaning. I bump along the sharply descending angle of the tunnel’s ceiling, well aware I’m going to lose consciousness yet again, the wholly unfamiliar buoyancy terrifying me—
Suddenly, my head stings with that familiar, sharp pain, and a vision bursts through the cold, midnight void:
The ocean.
The beautiful ocean at sunrise.
And I’m spearing into the salty, warm waves. Under I go, but there is nofear. There’s only joy and surety, my arms cleaving out and pulling back, my legs frogging at the heels and kicking in propulsion, my coordination as natural and comfortable as drawing a breath. Again and again, I stroke through the sea’s sweet, surging body, my heart singing.
I swim without needing air, for I am one with Anathos’s best natural barrier, that which has protected us from sieges and helped us to thrive for millennia, not isolated, but safe, from whatever is past the horizon.
I swim as a fish does.
Perfectly.
TwentyThe Last Meal Retaliates.
A dull glow guides me. The illumination hovers in the murky water like a lantern on the far side of a dense curtain, and as a moth, I zero in, stroking faster and faster. To reach the beacon, I must begin to rise, and rise I do, until I’m hindered by some kind of drag upon my torso. Unable to progress farther, I claw at the water, pulling on my slippery submersion—but then I’m abruptly free. Just as my lungs begin to burn with the kind of urgency that cannot be denied, I’m liberated and approaching the surface, and this gives me the extra energy I need. As shockingly comfortable as I am propelling myself with strokes, a timer is ticking in my marrow. I know I must take a full breath, soon.
Closer and closer. Bigger and brighter, now the light—
Bursting to the surface, I tear the linen from my head and crest with my mouth wide open. My inhale is not panicked. It’s steady, as sure and deep as my entire body, as if every muscle and all my bones have their own sets of lungs and the whole of me is filling with air at once. This happens with a confidence I’ve never known before—
Settling into a bouncing float, reality returns in a rush. This is not the beachside. This is the fetid moat, and through the muck that coats my face in a thick layer, I look around frantically forbalasin the midst of the browning lily pads. I don’t see any of their knobby, bobbing sets of eyes—
But neither do I see Merc.
Spinning in a circle, the village wall rises above me, a towering mountain made by the hands of men. This is the back side, almost directly behind the bridge and the gate. I can tell by the dappling sunlight that dances on the weathered stone and crumbling mortar. It needs to pass through leaves to get that effect.
