“Can you hold the shield?” I yell to him through the roar of the wind.

Trystan nods and murmurs a spell, feeding a more powerful rush of his fire and water power into it.

I throw off my tunic, close my eyes and exhale as my wings burst from my back, my horns stinging against my scalp as they arc up. Then I splay my palms against the shield and flow a final burst of water power into it and into Trystan’s heady rush of magic.

I open my eyes to find Trystan’s wide eyes fixed on my unfurled wings. An invigorating sting of his lightning aura crackles over my skin as I turn and leap from the rune skiff.

The wind slams into me as soon as my body passes through the watery shield. Pulling in my wings, I dive straight toward the Zonor, as another high-pitched shriek manages to cut through the roar of the wind and thunder. I catch a glimpse of the other skiffs, mere pinpricks of fogged sapphire light against the storm’s steely gray, all of them forced south. The violent, boiling surface of the water comes into sharper view through the sheeting rain, and my gut cinches.

Boats destroyed. People clinging to detritus.

A little blue-hued Urisk girl is struggling to stay afloat just below me, clinging to her mother on a bobbing plank of wood. As I watch, they’re wrenched apart by the force of the Zonor’s funneling undertow, the mother sucked into the churning vortex, the little girl screaming as she thrashes, then silenced as she’s sucked under, as well.

There’s no time to think about who should be let into the Eastern Realm and who should be kept out. There’s only the punch-to-the-gut shock of people drowning below me.

I hit the water like a crossbow’s bolt, breathing it straight into my lungs as I shear through the waves, filled by the reflexive rush of pleasure that merging with water always brings, the more violent the better. I arc upward, my wings folding back tight as the hazy form of the child comes into view, skinny limbs flailing, her mother nowhere in sight. I scoop her into my arms and arrow us both up, through the choppy waves and into the raging storm.

“Mamma, Mamma!” she screams in Uriskal as she chokes out water, her hands splayed toward the river, and my heart seizes as I scan the waters, her mother nowhere to be seen. Needing to bring her to safety, I dart toward our rune skiff as the child screams hysterically and tries to pry herself from my grip, her hair tangled and knotted from the damp, her face a pale blue from the cold. She can’t be older than six.