I ignored the aching feeling and breathed in and out as normally as I could with the salt stinging my sinuses and the taste of it in the back of my throat. The mermaids were already crying out as I started to make the swim back to the top of the ocean, and once again their soothing melodies began. But this time they morphed into mutated cries.

Drown her.

Bind her!

She is ours!

Pretty child cannot escape her fate!

Well, whatever my fate was; two different entities disagreed.

I kicked up to the surface, finally finding the light that indicated the hole I fell through—I hoped. And with waning strength, I swam hard to the hole, noticing the mermaids stayed back and out of the light that was pouring from it.

Soren was out of my reach to truly contact, though I could feel his blistering pain, and I couldn’t send out a mental message to anyone else, so I prayed they hadn’t gone too far from where I’d fallen as I broke through the surface that already started to thinly ice over and gasped in the freezing air.

Someone rushed for me and pulled me up and out of the water completely, but it wasn’t Soren. Diaval was staring at me with light in her dark eyes, then embracing me with all she could. “Thank the gods. I don’t know what happened to you, but thank the gods it did.”

My body was already shivering, ice was forming on my clothes, my eyelashes, my parka.

“Come on,” Rose butt in between us. “She needs warm clothing. Please tell me someone packed a spare.”

“I-I-I have a spare parka in my bag,” I said.

“Okay, that’s good,” Rosamund said. “We need other things. Socks, pants, a shirt, an overshirt. Come on, I know you all like to get pretty. Soren, do you have anything?”

Soren turned sharply from where he was still staring in the water, his features twisted from guilt. “Yeah,” he coughed. “Let me grab my bag.” He slung the bag off his shoulder and quickly pulled out an undershirt and a few overshirts as Diaval handed me a pair of fur-lined pants.

The clothes I was wearing had turned to ice, and Diaval had to quickly help me pry them off, before handing me whichever piece of clothing to replace it fast enough so the cold couldn’t set into my skin and bones and turn them black. Out of the five of them, only Lydian turned away fully as I dressed—I was grateful for that. More of a spiteful grateful because I had a hunch that my disfigurements by him made him uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t pass up a chance to remind him in any way what he did to me. He deserved to feel awful toward me.