Vai collapsed beside me onto the pebbled strand. He fumbled to unbuckle himself from his carpenter’s apron, wheezing as he gulped in air.
I thought the weight of the pack was going to crush me. Rolling onto my side took all my strength. The hard stones felt heavenly because they were solid. The sea sloshed up to tickle my boots, then receded. Fiery Shemesh, but I was freezing!
The wind was coarse and unforgivingly cold.
Vai was still wheezing. I tugged my arms out of the straps to shed the pack. With the sodden basket bumping on my rear, I crawled over to him, only to realize he was not wheezing but laughing in a hoarse sort of way.
He smiled at me. Smiled!
His smile acted as an infusion of hope. My lips twitched, fighting upward.
“Look!” He gestured.
A blustery gray sea stretched away from the shore. Across the channel, barely visible under a haze of cloud, rose the blue-dark shore of another land. But that was not the strange thing. A ship glided atop the waves, three-masted, sails unfurled but unmoving despite the stinging breeze. As I gaped, wondering why I could not see any sailors racing about on the deck or climbing the masts, one of the sails began to ripple, then the second, and then the third. Where there hadn’t been one before, a man appeared halfway up the mainmast.
It was illusion, taking form in front of my eyes as he wove cold magic with a speed and dexterity that astounded me.
“We’ve been washed back into the mortal world, love.” The ship vanished as he sat up and spat. “Gah. What I wouldn’t do for a glass of my mother’s hoarhound tea sweetened with honey. Catherine! You’re shuddering.”
He pulled me against him. I could have sworn warmth radiated from his body, although it was hard to feel anything. My wool skirt clung to my legs, the fabric crackling as if it were actually beginning to freeze.
“There’s shelter,” he said. “Walk with me.”
The shoreline was stony beach. A little peninsula of land sloped up to a cliff of ice that loomed over us like fate. There was no vegetation, nothing but rock and ice and sand. Crevices and canyons had dug staircases into the ice cliff, pocked with boulders. On the tiny peninsula, lying between ice cliff and icy sea, a deposit of huge rocks formed a low cave.