Page 192 of Keldori By Daybreak

“It’s too heavy. I’ll sink.”

“It was your mother’s.”

“And my mother would prefer me to live than to drown wearing her armor.” Iseult’s leg of Skal dissipated into steam as she stepped into the water.

“And if you don’t tug on the rope?” Orla blanched in the low light of our Skal bottles.

“Then hopefully I’m still conscious enough to hold on as you pull me out.”

“But how long—” Orla started, but Iseult slipped into the water.

The Skal bottles at her hip illuminated her shape as she dove deeper and then disappeared beyond the lip of the rock.

We held our breath as we waited, and Orla’s hands shook where she held the rope.

And then—

Three tugs.

“Tiernan next,” Ciarán commanded. “Quickly. Fana, go with Una. Then Orla. Wren, I assume you know how to swim?”

I tried to find the heat to quip back, but could only manage a meek nod. I’d seen enough documentaries about cave divers to know just how dangerous this could be.

And we’d only just entered the cave.

The hardest part was swimming down. The salt content of the water made it difficult to sink, but it didn’t sting my eyes as much as I’d expected it to. Sea urchins and anemones bled together in a blur of greens and purples through the water.

I followed the glow of Orla’s Skal bottles, expelling the air in my lungs to force myself to sink lower and lower. My ears popped, and the walls narrowed, but then Orla swam under the lip ahead of me and started to ascend. I closed my eyes and kicked after her.

My head broke the surface to stale air and the sound of Jonquil yowling furiously in her crab cage when Ciarán surfaced beside me.

Orla pulled me from the water, but Iseult was already leading the charge under the low ceiling of the next stretch of cave with a newly formed Skal leg in place.

Barnacles decorated the walls and we had to watch our steps to avoid slipping on retracted sea anemone. I jumped when a large crab scuttled away from the halo of light our Skal cast. This would all be underwater as the tide came in.

Ciarán took my hand and squeezed.

The cave twisted, widened, then narrowed again, sometimes with inclines so steep that we had to cut our hands on barnacles to claw our way up. There were more pockets of salt water left from the previous high tide, one of them so narrow that I wasn’t sure Una would fit.

“She can’t have followed us, right?” Orla dared to break the silence after we’d all squeezed through. Sea water and sweat mixed on her face, and her short hair stuck to her forehead.

“You can’t really still underestimate my sister, Orla,” Tiernan grunted. “Even you aren’t that foolish.”

“Your sister is the least of our concerns,” Iseult snapped. Her foot of Skal hissed and sizzled as a small surge of ocean water pushed forward to cover our toes. The cave was filling behind us with the oncoming tide.

“If the tide kills us,” Tiernan said, “then at least it’ll kill her too.”

Iseult shook her head and leaned against Orla as she dissolved her Skal leg once more to avoid it hissing in the rising water.

Tiernan locked eyes with me as we continued to forge forward.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“You said when this is all over, I’ll be able to rest. I’m starting to think that’ll never happen. Rest.”

“We’re almost there,” I insisted. “Don’t listen to Iseult. We’re going to make it.”

The cave brightened as we went, and Ciarán caught me looking at our Skal bottles in search of the new light source.