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Her mind refused to imagine what he would do then.
There was no other option.
But what word, what name, could possibly spare her from a fall from that height? Her mind raced
furiously as she lay on the ground where Michael had thrown her, the cloth of her torn shirt rippling in the
wind raging up the cliff face, spilling over onto the promontory, tangling her flying hair, as he conferred
with his men.
Droplets of salt spray borne on the wind slapped her face, stinging her eyes with salt. Her mind
registered them first as rain, making unconscious note of them a moment later, then shifting suddenly back
to her first impulse.
Rain.
Typta, she whispered in her Namer's voice, feeling the hum of the different vibration in her teeth. The
tone was true.
She concentrated on her own note,elct , and prepared to alter it with the roundelay.
Within the next beat of her heart Rhapsody was on her feet, running with all her strength for the cliffs
edge, chanting with the last of her breath.
Typta. Typta, Typta.
She felt the wind waft over her, lift her slightly, like raindrops on an updraft, caught the exhilaration of
speed, hearing the shouts behind her, but blocking them, focusing with all her concentration on the edge
of the precipice looming before her.
Typta. Ty
She felt the reverberation of the bolt in her back and side before the pain, a thudding lurch that threw
her balance off, shattering her concentration. Then an instant later the waves of shock radiated through
her, a sickening jolt of opposing vibration that tore the breath from her.
The impact strained the muscles of her abdomen; Rhapsody bent over, trying to catch her breath, and
as she did she saw Michael at the place where the land began to split into the promontory. A look of
shock was frozen on his face, a face with eyes that burned red at the edges, whose ancient skin was
drawn like a mummy's over the sharp bones. It was a face far worse than the one that had haunted her
dreams; seeing it made any other option unthinkable.
She closed her eyes before she leapt, fearing that if she saw the sight of the crashing waves, the
jagged rocks at the shoreline again, she would lose her nerve. The wind that caught her was cold, coming
off the northern sea; it clouted her awake, forced her eyes open as she fell, swirling toward the ocean in
the careless embrace of the air.
Typta, she chanted as she plummeted, her hands still bound, her cheeks distended in the breeze and
from the pull of the Earth.Typta. Typta, Typta
A wave swelled suddenly over her face, filling her mouth with water, choking her. She did not feel the
impact of her fall; not then. The breath was knocked out of her, so she could not inhale, which in the
initial seconds probably kept her alive.
A roar of green and white, then an echoing silence as she was pulled below the surface, followed by a
thick drumbeat, like an underwater wind. Rhapsody's eyes burned from the salt, her lungs from the lack
of air. Above her, before all went green, she could see Michael's face and the faces of his cohorts staring
down from the cliff top, or at least she imagined that she could. She could hear their voices, though her
ears sank into the water quickly.
They were staring directly down at her.
They didn't see her, even though she was there beneath them. Because, for a moment, she was rain.
The incoming tide caught her then. In the first moments she had been floating in the crest of die waves,
the foam itself, light as a raindrop, skittering across the surface. As soon as the chant was broken, her
mouth filled with water, her mass returned, and with it the whole force of the raging sea.
Like a heavy curtain falling, the world suddenly went from green to black.
Don't breathe, she thought, fighting to find the surface in the darkness, and failing. The thick noise of
the waves, muted, pounded in her ears.
Then, with a great swell, she was caught up, spinning wildly, struggling for purchase where there was
none, nothing to grasp or bear against, nothing but evanescent water slipping through her hands, out from
beneath her. It was a sickening sensation, akin to being hurled through the air, only worse, roiling and
tumbling with the madness of the waves.
Until she was slammed into a wall of solid rock.
Against her will, Rhapsody gasped, inhaling a rush of caustic seawater. Before her lungs burst she
broke the surface, gagging, choking, spitting, clawing desperately in the dark at the vertical rocky surface
before her, a wall that rose as far up as she could reach.
Above her there was only enough air space for her nose and the upper part of her face to bob out of
the water; past that, overhead, her tied hands scraped a similar rockwall, this one horizontal. She was
bleeding, she noted distantly, as her face impacted the hard ceiling above her with a swell of the waves,
her side stinging as well from where the bowman had shot her.
The noise of the sea had diminished a bit; it echoed now in the dark, roaring with the ebb and flow of
the waves, but not with the same broad, endless crashing she had heard atop the cliff. That was only
when her ears were above the surface; with each new wave she was submerged again, hearing only the
muted swishing and the sound of bubbles beneath the water.
How long she continued to bob in the dark, catching insignificant breaths of air, Rhapsody could not
be certain, but it seemed hours, days, years, a punishment of eternal proportion. Her skin stung from the
salt; her limbs grew tired, so she gave up the struggle to move and instead concentrated on floating, trying
to quell the panic that swept over her with each wave, pounding on her lungs.
Finally it seemed as if the space above her where there was air was growing larger; she could no
longer touch the ceiling with her hands when she crested the surface. After some time light broke through
the darkness behind her, a small, white slice of visible sky that her stinging eyes could barely make out. It
grew ever larger with each rolling wave, until finally there was a goodly space above her, and enough light
to make out where she was.
She had been swept on an incoming wave into a tidal cave, a volcanic hollow in the endless cliff face
that made up the many miles of shoreline from the northern Hintervold all the way down to her own lands
in Tyrian, half a thousand miles away. Rhapsody choked back the irony; it was in just such a cave that
she had postulated the water source that fed Entudenin had its mouth.
In the back wall of the cave she could see a shallow ledge of sorts, hewn from the rock over millennia
by the slow, insistent carving of the currents; she let the next incoming wave carry her to it, clutching with
all her might as she was battered once more against the back wall of the cave. It took her three tries to
roll up onto the ledge and remain there after the wave receded, but when finally she was able she sat
upright, her back against the smooth, irregular cave wall, and struggled to clear her lungs of the brine she
had inhaled. Her stomach rose to her mouth and she retched, glad to be clear of the saltwater.
Numbly she felt for the locket around her neck; it was still there, hanging on its thin gold chain. Still
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