“Yet you are acting strangely,” I insist, leaning closer to catch his stare. “I think you might have a concussion. You hit your head hard enough to knock you unconscious.”
“Unconscious,” he repeats slowly.
I blink. There it is again. That odd look, that unsettling tone. He is acting…
Unlike himself.
“Is that what I was, Rhya?” His head cants to one side, eyes gleaming with incisive light. “Was I onlyunconscious?”
My breath snags. My words dry up on my tongue.
Does he know, somehow, what happened on that seafloor? Does he remember that he was not merely without breath but…withoutlife? That he was…
Dead.
He was dead.
There is no way he can know that. No possible way. I certainly have not told him. Nor do I plan to—not now, in any case. There is no reason to confide just how close he came to slipping away, nor how near I was to following him over that bottomless cliff toward eternal rest.
In truth, looking back at those dark moments, I am shocked by my own intense reaction to the prospect of losing him. My cheeks sear as I recall my own savage desperation, my mad bargaining with the gods, my reckless disregard for my own life…
Skies.
How did this happen? How did a few short weeks at his side flip everything in my world on its head? How has he become so irrevocably important that I do not want to carry on living if he is not here to do it with me?
I can scarcely own up to such truths myself, let alone lay them bare at his feet. And even if I could muster the courage, thisis not the right time or place for that discussion. Not with Penn pacing right outside the door, along with half our friends…
No.
When we are back in Hylios and I’ve had proper time to process, I will be able to find the right words. After Arwen’s life is no longer hanging in the balance, I will be able to confess how we almost lost ours at the bottom of the ocean.
“Rhya.” Soren’s brows quirk high on his forehead. “Are you all right? You’ve gone quiet.”
“I’m…” I bite my lip, swallow hard, and start again. “How close did you say we are to the Iron Isle?”
“An hour, maybe less.”
So little time. “Perhaps we should stall.”
His frame goes solid. His voice goes dark. “Stall?”
“For a few hours. Long enough to gather our strength before we storm the prison.” I pause, sucking in a gulp of air. “Neither of us will be much use if we’re drained to the point of exhaustion.”
He shakes his head. A lock of dark hair falls over his forehead, into his eyes; my fingers itch to push it back for him. I curl them into the sheets instead.
“No. If we hesitate, we’ll miss the tide. We will have to wait a full day for another opportunity to make landfall under the cover of darkness.”
I forgot about the tides.
The plan of infiltration we’ve sketched out is loose at best, but there is one incontrovertible factor. Sea level. We need it at its absolute lowest if we want even a chance to bring our dinghies ashore at the rocky cove on the eastern side of the island. According to Soren, it is a treacherous stretch of stone only exposed for two hours at a time.
We cannot miss that window.
Nor can we exceed it.
“A delay until tomorrow night’s tide will do only one thing,” he continues haltingly. “Assure Arwen’s death.”
“She will not—”