“Drystan, the oar—”
“Just a minute. Just need to rest for a minute.” Drystan’s eyelids fluttered. Rinka lowered him onto the floor of the boat, which rippled and wet his clothes as he touched it.
“No, no, no,” she said. If Drystan fell asleep, would she be able to swim far enough and fast enough to get them to shore?
She was about to find out. Drystan’s head fell to the side, and the boat collapsed beneath them.
Her head was pulled under the water by the fall, but she quickly resurfaced. She looked around for Drystan, but he was nowhere to be seen.
“You can’t have gone far,” she said, reaching out into the water around her. She dipped her head back under, forcing hereyes open again in the salty water, and she spotted him sinking beneath the waves.
She surfaced and filled her lungs with as much air as they could hold, and then she plunged down as far and as fast as she could.
His body was heavy, even in the water, or maybe it was just the exhaustion in her arms, but she managed to pull him up. At first, he did not seem to breathe, but she slapped his back hard, and he coughed up a bit of water.
He blinked his eyes open. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Couldn’t keep going.”
“Hush,” she said. “You got us this far. I’ll take it from here. Can you hold on?”
He nodded weakly. “It won’t take long to recover,” he said. “Just need…a little rest…”
He was out again. Rinka managed to keep his head above the water. She wrapped her left arm around his chest, keeping her stronger arm free to swim.
It was slow going. Rinka was grateful for the times she had spent swimming in the River Eabrun as a young orc, her mother watching from the stairs as she splashed around with her younger brothers. But they must have been some miles still from shore, and while at least Drystan wasn’t trying to pull her under, dragging him along took a ton of effort.
Yet Rinka didn’t consider for a moment leaving him. He was a stranger to her still, but even if he were her worst enemy, she would never leave him, not even to save herself. It just wasn’t who she was, no matter how foolish her mother said that made her.
Finally, when the dim light of dawn began to touch the sky to the east, she could see the coast clearly. They weren’t near Sudport, that much was certain. Rinka could see little sign of civilization at all. There were great cliffs of stone surroundinga narrow strip of tan beach strewn with boulders, white waves crashing on the shore. The land stretched upwards beyond into a beautiful green hillside. Rinka’s eyes spotted the motion of tiny white sheep on the hill.
It was magnificent, and not just because the very sight meant their salvation.
“We’ve made it, Drystan,” she said to him. He had been asleep for at least the past hour, but he grunted in what Rinka imagined was appreciation.
She swam as hard as she could for the narrow strip of beach, but the ocean had other ideas. The current was faster here near land, and it pulled her so far to the east that she nearly had to swim sideways to counter it. As she was pulled off course, she spotted a narrow strip of rock near the horizon. At the end of it was a lighthouse painted with white and red stripes. It reminded her of candy they sold at a corner store in Arcas Dyrne, and her stomach growled.
“That must be where the land turns north,” Rinka said to the half-asleep Drystan. “It’s just cliffs on the other side of that.”
Rinka redoubled her effort to make it to land, but the current was just too strong. It pulled her closer and closer to the lighthouse until finally she had no choice but to aim for it instead of the beach. The land surrounding the lighthouse was dangerously rocky, and she wasn’t sure if she would be able to keep them from being dashed upon the rocks.
And yet still the current pulled. “Drystan, it would be a very good time for you to wake up now,” she said. “We’re coming around the point, and I can’t seem to stop it.”
At least the sea was relatively calm. There were clouds in the distance, but the wind was still over the water. The problem wasn’t on the surface. It was far beneath, and Rinka was powerless to stop it.
She couldn’t believe they had come all this way only to fail at the last moment. As they came around the lighthouse, she looked up and down the eastern shore for an answer.
There it was. A tiny little patch of beach tucked among the cliffs, a cave of some kind beyond. Rinka could not see if there was a way out of the cave, but if she could just get them to shore, they could rest long enough for Drystan to remake the boat.
Rinka swam for it, hard. She used every drop of energy left in her, thrashing with the current now instead of against it, and before long, she had made it. She dragged Drystan along the beach, his legs stumbling beneath him, and collapsed with him to the ground within the cave, hoping they were above the waterline.
“Welcome to Wilderise,” she said to his sleeping figure and then passed out, exhausted.
Chapter Eight
INTO THE WOODS
Alison
Alison scratched out a line in the second verse of her poem about the spriggan. It was one of the most important poems in her book, a real tale of life in Wilderise that she hoped would capture the imaginations of the audience of nobles that would arrive in just a few short days.
