Page 50 of The Deadliest Candidate (The Last Grand Archivist #1)

Chapter fifty

The Rock

The undercurrent sucked Fern in, dragging her to the other side of the pit in seconds. She fought for a moment, taking in a huge gulp of air before letting the water engulf her.

The world became a void. There was nothing but the rush of water, the absolute darkness, the crushing terror. Fern was dragged through ice-cold water. She was falling, sinking.

Hell was not fire; it was this vortex of black water. It was the claustrophobia of knowing she could not breathe, she could not see, she could not escape. It was the burning of her airless lungs.

She opened her mouth, desperate for air, and water rushed inside her with terrifying speed, filling her mouth, her throat, her lungs. She was going to die. She was going to die, swallowed and crushed in the bowels of Carthane, consumed and absorbed. She was going to die.

Then Carthane spat her out .

Fern went flying through a chaos of water, wind and rain. The roar of a raging storm and the flashing of thunder surrounded her, became her world for that instant. A black, heaving wave rose, bloated and gleaming, to meet her.

Fern crashed into the sea. Crimson pain flared through her entire body, quickly fading in the darkness of her panic. She was overwhelmed, nauseous, disoriented. A ferocious current pulled her under. She was exhausted and in agony, but she was alive. She was alive, and she was out of the sewer. She had surrendered her fate to chance, and now she was back in charge. Nobody would save her. The ocean owed her nothing.

It was time to fight.

She broke through every barrier of terror, of exhaustion, of pain. She kicked and struck out, pushing herself up, fighting the waves that kept pushing her back down. Breaking through the surface with a scream, gulping in a breath that choked her.

She coughed, sinking back down. Her lungs were full of water. She needed to be more careful. She kicked herself up once more, forcing herself to take long, deep breaths.

Around her, the storm raged on, its fury implacable. Rain slashed from the sky, whipping the sea. Black waves rolled and crashed, flashing white in the flare of sudden lightning. The air was a deafening roar of thunder and water.

Fern stared desperately around. She could barely see anything. The tide was pulling her forward, dragging her in. She turned. A flash of lightning illuminated the craggy wall of the black cliff face. The waves were dragging her towards the cliffs, towards the jutting teeth of rocks awaiting at the bottom. Her body would be crushed in seconds.

She fought. She was too far from the shore to swim to safety. The storm was too powerful, the night too dark. She needed to find a way to wait out the tide, the storm and the night. She had come so far. She only needed to survive.

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 on endlessly, 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 and despair. 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.