Because one of the embers had just burned a hole in it.
Pritkin plunged a hand down into the spouting geyser, and it suddenly wasn’t spouting anymore. Or even flowing. More like pausing. And squelching. And then shifting and spreading out in the bottom of the boat in an odd, gelatinous way, as if the water had suddenly grown a skin.
Which would have been great if another current hadn’t grabbed us a second later, sending us spinning and plunging and sinking and tumbling into a tunnel and down what would probably have been a terrifying stretch of underground rapids if I’d been able to see them.
I mostly couldn’t.
But I didn’t need to.
Because I could hear: the massive roar and crash and hiss of what had to be thousands of gallons of water, all plunging down, down, down into darkness somewhere in the distance up ahead.
“Oh, come on!” I screamed, not that it mattered, and not that anyone could hear me, including myself. Not over all the water in the world falling off the side of it. We’re dead, I thought blankly as the boat kicked into high gear. We’re so very, very dead.
And that appeared to be the consensus, including among the trolls. The little guys stopped yelling and started rowing, but even their massive arms didn’t do much to slow us down. We were too close. And it wouldn’t have helped anyway, since the fey were still in pursuit, like splashes of silver on the cave walls behind us as they struggled to catch up to the raging current.
So it was death by waterfall or death by drowning or death by fey, and the fact that the operative word in all those was “death” had me grabbing Pritkin by the leg, which was the only thing I could reach.
“Yellow,” I gasped.
“What?”
“Yellow! Yellow!” I screamed, and really hope he heard me, because the translation spell didn’t change the way mouths worked. So lip-reading was out. But when I tried to drag my now-fifty pounds of sodden wool over the trolls to get at Rosier’s bag, and the little yellow patches inside, it seemed he got the idea. And grabbed it and started rooting around in it.
And holding up a lot of useless junk that had probably cost Rosier a pretty penny but was about to be flotsam, along with what remained of our bodies if we didn’t—
“There!” I screeched, spotting Rosier’s little yellow levitation patches, still in their plastic containers. “There! There! There!”
Pritkin mouthed something I couldn’t hear, and I suddenly realized that he didn’t understand how to get them open. And I had one hand and no nails and damn child-resistant packaging; I always knew they were going to kill me someday. And it looked like that was today.
Because when I glanced up, there was nothing in front of us but wind and mist and a whole lot of air.
Chapter Forty-three
We hit the turbulence at the edge of the cliff a second later, where thousands of gallons of water were all trying to be first over the rocks, and throwing up huge amounts of spray in the process. It was like being shot at by water cannons from multiple directions, and for a long moment I couldn’t even tell if we were right side up anymore, couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, could barely breathe, because of stark terror and because Pritkin was about to crush me in two. But it didn’t matter, not when I was out of ideas and we were plunging to our doom and—
And—
And—
And it was taking a damned long time for us to go over already.
I’d closed my eyes, but now I opened them to see a world gone white, with thunderous crashes and equally massive amounts of water being tossed around, like giants at play. And it just kept coming, soaking me and slapping me and threatening to drown me while I was still in the air, or at least on a boat stuck dangling over a hell of a lot of it. But not falling, not crashing—not yet, because the trolls, those wonderful, awesome, incredible little trolls, had wedged the boat’s oars in between two of the rocks that dotted the lip of the fall.
And trapped us behind them.
For the moment, anyway, but the oars were as old as the boat and I didn’t need to see them clearly to know they were straining. My heart skipped a beat, then another, and then felt like it stopped altogether as I realized that I had a reprieve I hadn’t earned and a hand clutching a lifeline if only I could get it open. And I got it open, biting and tearing and then staring around for somewhere to put the little patch, because these things activated fast.
But everything was wet—everything, even the boards passing for seats. Which were getting hit with just as much spray as I was and which had already been damp from soaked clothing and soggy derrieres to the point that there wasn’t a single dry spot left, not even underneath. So I slapped it down on a wet one, shielding it with my body and praying.
Only to have it float up like lunch on the space station, and how freaking stupid was that?
“They couldn’t make these waterproof?” I screamed at Pritkin, who didn’t understand me.
But he was looking at the little thing with renewed interest. And then at the nearest troll. And then back at me. And then—
“Oh, holy shit!”
But there was no time for debate; there was no time for anything. Except plunging over the side a moment later, when an oar broke and Pritkin grabbed me and I grabbed the boat and the bigger troll grabbed his buddy. Who wasn’t grabbing anything because we’d just stuffed him under the seats.