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A crack of lightning split the sky. Fern caught a sharp breath. To her left, a rock protruded from the sea. Its surface was slightly angled, but it was flat. If she made it to the rock, Fern might be able to drag herself out of the water and rest there. Unless a wave knocked her over, she might even be able to wait out the night there.

She swam, letting the current drag her, cutting across in the valley of each wave, being pushed back under. Breaking back to the surface, she began again, giving in to the current, waiting for the valley of a wave to swim across as fast as she could, being submerged. Little by little, she was changing her direction, drawing closer to the rock.

Things always seemed closer than they were in the ocean, and the constant movement of the surrounding waves was making Fern sick to her stomach. And then she was drawing close to the rock, too close, too fast. The tide pulled her inexorably onwards.

Fern crashed into the rock, her thigh colliding painfully against its jagged edge.

She yelled but held on, slumping over the flat stone surface. The wave broke, washing over her. Exhausted, Fern collapsed onto her back. She had made it.

Every part of her was screaming with pain. Her thigh throbbed, her arm ached, her lungs burned. She could not remember what it was like to not feel pain. But she was alive. Above all things, she was alive.

In the morning, the sun would come up, the storm would wane. The tide would quieten and gently recede. Then, Fern would be able to swim to the shore at East Hemwick’s feet. She would be safe. She would survive, and return to Carthane, and report what had happened, and she would save Emmeline.

The hard part was over. Now, all she needed to do was to hold on tight and survive the night.

The night stretched onendlessly, the storm implacable. Fern, paralysed with cold, clung to her rock, battered by waves and buffeted by the gale. Though she was stupefied with exhaustion, she did not dare to sleep, terrified that she would slip from the rock and be pulled to her death by the riptide.

She tried to murmur a warming spell, but the incantation was nothing more than words on her tongue. There wasn’t enough magic inside her to turn it into a spell. She had used up everything on her pyromancy spells.

Attempting to use Wild Magic in her state would be madness, a surer death than the storm and the sea.

Fern tried to occupy her mind with thoughts, she tried to imagine the warmth of a bath or the heat of a fire, she tried to recite the fire incantations for her assignment, desperate to fill her mind with anything but dread anddespair. All in vain: her pain was an icepick lobotomising every rational thought out of her brain.

When the low clouds finally began to turn red with the light of dawn, Fern could barely believe her eyes.

She blinked through the spray of the waves, trying to focus. Her cheek was pressed to the cold, sodden rock. She barely had the energy to lift her head.

But the distant crimson stain was no illusion: the sun, finally, against all hope, was rising. The rain relented, slowed, then stopped. An icy wind blew, parting the clouds like curtains pushed aside by some great celestial hand. The angry swelling of the waves calmed, deflated, the water growing still until it lay like a smooth mirror under the sky, reflecting the blood-red sun.

Fern forced herself up. The sun had come up—she had survived. It was time.

She shuffled towards the edge of the rock and slipped into the water with a gasp of shock. Though the sea was calmer, it was still ice cold, and though Fern had already been cold, the water was colder still.

She took a deep, shuddering breath. She needed to start swimming. She needed to move, or the cold would paralyse her and send her sinking into the black water.

She swam. She swam through the cold and the exhaustion, through the pain of her arm and leg. She swam until the harsh cliff face gave way to rolling hills, until she spotted the pointed rooftops of East Hemwick rise in the distance.

Her arms grew too heavy to move, her legs too numb. She stopped moving. She was so tired. The tide would drag her in. She closed her eyes, thinking, oddly, of her parents.

Were they waiting for her, in the place where the dead waited for those they left behind? Would they be happy to see her? Would they be proud of her? Fern had never made anybody proud. She supposed she should not be unhappy, to see her parents, to be held in their arms. Darkness closed in like an embrace.

She sank, swallowed a mouthful of salt. Her eyes shot open. She heaved up through the water, coughing. Has she fallen asleep? No, her dreams were darker than the grey sea, the grey sky. There was no darkness here, not yet. If she slept, there would be darkness. But who would look after Inkwell? No, she must not sleep. She must carry on. But how? She was so very tired.

The sea and the sky blurred, merged. She sank.

Chapter fifty-one

The Idealist

There were voices, andthe screech of birds, and hands touching her face. Fern blinked. She lay facing the pale sky, faces floating above her. Sand and salt were encrusted on her skin, her eyelashes, her clothes. Cold waves lapped at her feet. Mittened hands moved her face, took her arms, propped her up.

“Are you alright, Miss?”

There was a man, his whiskered face burnished by the sun, and a woman with big brown eyes and a grimace of worry. Wide-eyed children stared in silence. An old lady knelt in the sand, shaking her head.

They all spoke, though Fern could barely tell who said what.

“Where has she come from?”