“Let’s go then,” Marcus said out of the darkness.
He stood up and went to his bag to change, as Devyn and I had earlier when we realised that we were going to be here for a while.
“Wait,” Devyn stalled him. “There’s no point. Cass and I will be taking these dry clothes off. We need to swim back to the other side of the river.”
“Cassandra,” Marcus grumbled, his emphasis on the all too often missing syllables. He hadn’t said anything before about Devyn’s shortening my name, but, perhaps because his mind was elsewhere, his irritation at the dropped half of my name came out.
We stripped down and pulled the bags onto our backs, then made our way through the tall reeds which glowed golden in the red dawn, stepping through them into the dark water of the Tamesis.
“Be careful, the current will be strong. Don’t fight it; let it carry you but still make your way across,” Devyn advised.
I squirmed my way into the freezing cold water. I’d had other things on my mind the first time we took a dip; this time there was no ignoring the intolerable temperature. With the boys hanging back so that I was in front of them, I had no choice but to brace myself against it and plough forward, knee-deep, hip-deep—the water seeping up the T-shirt I had left on for modesty’s sake—shoulder-deep, and then the muddy, rocky riverbed was no longer reachable. I took one stroke and then another, my direction not as straight ahead as I had hoped; for each forward stroke, I was pulled several feet downstream by the current. Devyn’s words repeated over and over in my mind: don’t fight it, keep trying to move forward. The other side was getting closer, wasn’t it?
By the time we pulled ourselves up the muddy bank on the far side, we had been swept hundreds of metres downstream. I hopped from foot to foot, trying to get warm as Devyn opened my bag; my attempts to release the zip with my frozen fingers had been feeble. He took a shirt out and roughly rubbed my body dry with it. I winced at the sensation but thanked him for his efforts. My skin felt raw, the cloth like sandpaper on my chilled body, but at least I could pull on some dry clothes.
Marcus started walking upriver along the bank before Devyn even pulled his boots back on. We quickly caught up with him.
“We don’t have time for this,” Devyn informed him.
Marcus didn’t reply, just kept walking. The sky was now a beautiful aqua-blue and the sun had come up over the horizon behind us. It took longer than I would have expected to get to the place where Matthias’s boat had been hit. It was stuck in the bank on the other side of the river, a burning husk. There was no way anyone had lived through that. If Matthias had been flung overboard, given the strength of the current, it seemed likely that he would have floated by us. Could we have missed him in the dark? It was a possibility.
Marcus pulled off the dry shirt he had donned only thirty minutes earlier.
“What are you doing?” Devyn asked sharply.
Marcus knelt to untie his boots. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“It looks like you’re being left behind. Come on, Cass.” Devyn took my hand and started to move on. “Good luck.”
“What? We’re not leaving without him.” I pulled my hand free.
“We’re not waiting here while that fool crosses the river to confirm what he already knows.” Devyn whirled round to shout at Marcus. “He’s dead. Going over there… What’s the point? If he isn’t there, you have achieved nothing. If he is there, he’s dead. And you’ll have achieved nothing, except you will have killed us too.”
Marcus glared at him with deadened eyes.
“The sentinels think we all died. Who do you think is coming for us now? Your ghosties?”
Devyn shook his head. “You’re not listening. You’re not in your comfortable lives behind the walls anymore. People all over the land will stay in their homes this day; they will carve out lanterns and light them in their window, so the dark doesn’t cross their threshold. They will do that in the valleys, in the mountains, in the Lakelands. No one, but no one, enters the borderlands on Samhain. If we don’t get moving, we will be here when the sun sets, and whatever chance we might have during the day, we have none at all at night. So you can do what you want, Dr Courtenay, but I am getting Cass out of here.”
With that, he grabbed my hand in a painful grip and started marching away from the river across the field. Marcus stood watching us leave before he turned back to the shell of his father’s boat and resumed taking off his boots in preparation for his next swim.
I gasped as pain shot through my arm. Devyn, unheeding, marched on, pulling me with him. My entire arm was starting to tingle before another shooting pain went through me. I bit my lip to keep from crying out, but Devyn must have felt it through our connection as he came to a stop.
“What is that?” In his single-mindedness, he had forgotten that Marcus and I were tied together.
I shook my head, unable to speak as the pain rolled through me and nausea followed in a wave after it. I crumpled onto the ground, my knees genuinely too weak to hold me up.
“Marcus!” Devyn roared as I closed my eyes, sinking into his arms. “Marcus. Please.”
The pain started to ease until, looking up, I saw that Marcus had joined us.
“Are you okay, Cassandra?” he asked, not unsympathetically. “The handfast distance limit must have kicked in.”
“Already? That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, recalling the previous time this had happened. “I was miles from you before it kicked in the last time. Here, you were still within
