I had to find Zazie. I couldn’t let Gosia lose her daughter, and I couldn’t let a girl on the cusp of becoming a young woman go through any more changes without her mother by her side. I found thinner ice and smacked my fist against the soft surface over and over until I hit something that felt like a body part.
Zazie’s mass wasn’t nearly as dense as her mom’s. I slithered into the water like a seal. Rocks were close enough I could stand. I slipped behind the girl, wrapped my arms around her chest, and heaved her onto the exposed ledge, close to her mother.
I was so focused on rescuing the women I lost sight of Laszlo and Alderose and the Fae. I searched the storm overhead and all I could see was Rémy’s waterspout beginning to falter and come apart. Random bits of flotsam that had been lifted by the initial pull began to rain down, crashing onto the weakened ice and smashing it into pulp.
I had to get Zazie and Gosia to a safer location. Shifting from a crouch, I startled at the sound of a shout. A large body scrambled across the slushy chunks, forming fresh sections of ice wherever their foot landed.
Laszlo.
“Clementine! Rémy’s power is tapped out. We’ve got to prepare for him to drop the water.”
“I got Gosia,” I said, “and Zazie. Where’s my sister? Where are the Fae?”
“Your father’s here. He and Alderose incapacitated one of the fae and they’ve gone after the other two.”
A sickening boom announced Rémy was done. Fear pierced my body, icy spears of a kind of primal dread I’d never before experienced. My brain and my body began to course toward a shutdown.
Laszlo shook my shoulders. “Clementine, get these two close to one another. When the water drops, it’s going to fill the quarry fast. Unless Rémy can somehow keep it together enough to slow it down.”
“Are they even breathing?” I asked.
Laz paused. His eyes told me he didn’t know if the beings piled by our knees were alive or dead. “We have to believe whatever the fae did to them will protect them a little while longer.”
“Tell me what to do.”
“Got threads?” When I nodded, he said, “Use them. Loop them under their arms and around their chests. Work fast.”
Frantic, I tugged on my connection to the master thread and muttered the instructions over and over while shoving Zazie up against her mother. The water filling the quarry began to surge, like a giant standing far above us was emptying a massive ewer, oblivious to where the water landed.
I kicked and kicked against the force of the rising waters, fighting to keep Zazie’s head uncovered while Laszlo propped up Gosia with one arm and attempted to swim toward the rock wall with the other.
Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.
“Can you see Alderose and my dad?” I asked. If they weren’t in the water, I couldn’t picture where their fight had taken them.
Laszlo looked away. As more water poured from the sky, refilling the quarry, we floated. Or tried to. Roiling whirlpools kept hurling clumps of debris at us. We did our best, dodging incoming clumps of rotting leaves while keeping four heads above water at least fifty percent of the time.
The sun had climbed higher. The sky was pale blue and the Rémy-produced storm clouds were gone. I spotted him, high on the edge of the quarry, standing near Maritza and Alabastair. A faint, wispy bit of white cloth hovered behind Tía’s shoulder.
We were nowhere near close enough for them to reach us. I managed a feeble sidestroke, reaching with one arm while holding the threads wrapping Gosia’s and Zazie’s torsos with my other hand. Long hanks of their hair slid together and apart like seaweed. Laszlo surfaced near me and adopted the same technique. We made it to the ledge, and the tunnel opening. He pulled himself out first. I steered Zazie and Gosia toward him and he got them out one after the other
I had to stop and take a breath, a lot of breaths, before I could accept his offer of help. My muscles were spent and I was quivering from the adrenaline overload and the prolonged immersion in the cold water.
Even through all of that, my new connection to Laz was palpable.
The bands Alabastair insisted we wear tingled. He arrived a few seconds later. Laszlo settled Zazie in the taller man’s arms and Bas disappeared. He repeated the routine with Gosia, then me, and finally, Laszlo. I slumped onto the dry ground ringing the perimeter of the quarry and lay there, spread-eagled. “Where’s Alderose? Where’s my dad?”
Alabastair pointed into the quarry. “They’re making their way to the ledge. As soon as they’re out of the water, I’ll portal them up here.”
“Where are the Fae?”
“One’s over there, in shackles,” he said, gesturing behind him. “The other two—” Bas shook his head.
“Are Gosia and the little girl okay?”
The necromancer swiped his hand across his bald head. “I—I’m not sure, Clementine.” I rolled to my side to see him kneel by the unmoving bodies. Maritza and Rémy were already working together to revive Gosia and Zazie. The little girl moaned softly. I took that as an encouraging sign and snuck a look at the Fae, trussed at the wrists and ankles and lying there, motionless.
I wanted to slap her awake and interrogate her about what she’d done to my mother the day Mom had been forced to conjure a raven. And then I wanted to stab the Fae.
There’d be time for that later. The interrogating, not the stabbing. I got to my hands and knees, peered over the edge of the quarry, and spied two familiar heads. My dad’s hair was streaked through with a lot more gray. “Hey. They made it.”
Bas disappeared, then reappeared, twice more. Rosey collapsed when he delivered her, much like I had. My father thanked Bas
