Ibraced myself for the frigid cold, the struggle for oxygen, the infectious cut of swirling debris, or the snap of my bones crushed into the rocky banks. The water could trap me in the underground labyrinth of tunnels like a rabbit’s warren, carved into the stone by powerful currents. Tunnels I shouldn’t know existed, but I did know. Iknewthis place.
This place.
I should be struggling for breath. The icy water still dragged me through the stream, still soaked through me, but I didn’t feel the need to breathe.
I opened my eyes.
I was floating down a river in a boat the size of a gondola. My head spun as I took in the world around me, all cast in shades of blue and green. The web-patterned reflections of tropical water flickered over the world around me as if I were at the bottom of the ocean.
Yet I was in a boat on the river, and on the banks of that river were houses, shops, buildings, cobbled together like a coral reef. A whole sunken city.
A shadow in my periphery made me snap my head around, but if the wraith had followed me down here, I couldn’t see it. I didn’t know where “here” was, but that question mattered less than another.
Kessian. Where was he?
I searched the banks, the windows of the houses, the gardens, andjolted when I recognized one of the buildings—Witches and Stitches. It was sandwiched between two stately homes rather than a pizza chain and a betting shop, but I could see Ella and Rhia through the window.
I prepared to jump out of the gondola and ask them for help or if they’d seen Kessian. The river was too broad for me to make the leap without falling in, so I’d have to swim. Just then, something moved in the water.
Next to my gondola, floating face up, was Kessian.
He looked asleep. Worse, he looked funerary, with his hands crossed on his chest, clutching his cane, his hair floating in a veil around him.
I seized him by the arms and tried to pull him out. The water burned my hands with cold like needles. The moment I pulled Kessian’s face above the surface, he gasped awake, dragging in air as if he’d been suffocating. As if that water was different from the water I was already in.
I helped him up into the gondola. It tipped precariously as I dragged him by his belt over the rest of the way. In the bottom of the little boat, he coughed and caught his breath, staring shakily up at me, then around us.
“Tal? What happened? Where are we?”
“I don’t know. It looks like we’re still in the strid. Were you—? When you were in the water, were you asleep?”
“I don’t think so. I felt—” He shuddered. “Nothing. I felt nothing, remembered nothing, until you woke me. It was like I was dead.”
My stomach dropped. When I’d touched the water, it felt cold enough to catch your death, though swirling with magic and life. Pulling Kessian from it felt just like pulling Amelia out of the wraith.
He looked out at the town square sprawling across the riverbank, full of houses, shops, and buildings from Shearwater. “This better not be the afterlife.” He turned his gaze on me, miserably apologetic. “I tried to resist the wraith. I really did. It wouldn’t even let me speak to warn you off.”
“It’s not like I’d have listened.”
“Still. You’re here because of me.”
“I could say the same to you. This mess has always been mine to deal with, and for nine years, I didn’t. We’re here now. I’d rather be here than up there, wondering what happened to you.”
“How did the wraith escape?”
My mood darkened. “Somebody must have sabotaged the sigil. I’d guess it was Warwick, though I don’t know how he’d have found it.”
Kessian shivered, looking around at the strange underwater world. “Well, we’re here now. Wherever here is.”
“Now we need to find a way out.”
The boat rounded a bend in the river, willow leaves trailing like a leafy curtain. Ahead, a pontoon came into view with a ghostly figure stood at the end, facing us.
My heart drummed. The figure glowed blue, semitransparent and vaguely humanoid the way a half-assembled mannequin or a ventriloquist’s puppet was. Its face changed like a television flicking through channels. Now a youthful woman with dark, narrow eyes. Now a portly maid with her hair styled in ringlets the way they’d only done six centuries ago. Now an old man with a wrinkled face like tree bark.
On and on it went, cycling through faces, overlapping one another like an overexposed photograph.
Briefly, I thought I sawKessian’sface, but then it was gone amongst the sea of others.
