Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter Two

~2~

One hundred days before the destruction of Nutharion City

Somehow things had gone very, very wrong.

Dil bobbed on top of gnashing, biting waves, holding Cole against her chest in driving rain. His lips were blue, and he hadn’t said anything in a few minutes, so she shook him gently.

“Mmmalright,” he muttered. He had his arms wrapped around himself, and he was shivering.

Idiot, she thought. My wonderful idiot.

She considered channeling a soul into him—like she had in the forest in Lurathen—to keep him warm. But there he’d had nowhere to go. Here if she lost him and he lost his mind, he might spend the rest of his life at the bottom of the ocean, thinking he was something he wasn’t. She didn’t want to take that risk.

So she clung to the soul of a sea lion and swam for both of them, and she did her best to keep him warm in the frigid water.

Directly ahead of her was one of the flat-topped rocks she’d seen from the deck of the Skellup.

The swells gravitated to it like bees to a lavender bush. She was only a few hundred yards away, and every time she rose and fell, she found herself a little closer. Even through the sheets of rain, the rock looked big. It towered twenty or thirty feet high, riddled and pocked with caves and overhangs. Seaweed and kelp dripped from its edges and mired the froth around it. Dil smelled life in the tide pools at its base―tiny crabs, urchins, little fish and anenomes.

There was food there then, and shelter. And with this much rain, there’d be fresh water in the crevices of the rock as well.

They just had to get there.

The sea and the rock didn’t coexist easily. Waves thundered against the stone and sent clouds of spray into the air in twisting, ephemeral fountains. To get caught in that struggle between earth and sea would mean a hard death, smashed against the rock until her body gave out.

So Dil flicked her feet and swam sideways, away from the chaos at the front of the rock. The rear looked just as dangerous; whirlpools seethed below it, sucking kelp and foam and water into the depths.

That left only the rock’s near side, where the heaving water was rising and falling ten feet or so with every swell.

“You hanging in there, Cole?”

“Mmm-hmm.” He clutched her arm like he was a child.

She spotted a ledge just above the tops of the swells, a little rearward of the center of the rock, and angled for it. The sea lion in her was as nervous as she was. This was dangerous water. Child-eating water. Death water. The lion wanted to head for shore, but there were dozens more rocks between her and the land, and the currents between them looked fast and vicious.

The ledge drew closer.

“Cole, you’ll have to climb,” she said.

“Hmm?” His head came up, but it looked like he was having trouble focusing.

“The ledge, Cole. Ahead of us.” She kicked to keep them from drifting to the rear of the rock. The current was stronger than she’d expected.

“You’re going to have to―” Kick. Grunt. “Grab it and climb. Can you do that?”

He blinked. Took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said.

“I’ll boost you as high as I can. At the top of the wave, grab the ledge and pull yourself up.”