“Are you kidding? Gwenna and Annick have their own tent, a kid to bring them food twice a day, and skins and skins of that horse-piss fire liquor they drink up there. We, on the other hand, just lost our horses and are about to dive into a river that originates with glacial snowpack. I’ll take the Urghul side of the equation any day.”

The water was cold, far colder than the sea around the Islands, cold enough that Valyn insisted the three of them run the bank until they were sweaty and hot before starting across. All Kettral could swim more or less indefinitely, given the right conditions, but the seeping cold of that black running water would sap the strength from the strongest swimmer in minutes.

Cadets learned about cold water the hard way. Each year the trainers sent a group up to the Ice Sea where they were dumped in the drink and told to paddle for the shore a half-mile distant. It was a trivial distance, but no one ever made it. Valyn remembered swimming until his lips turned blue, his limbs went to lead, and his mind filled with hazy fog. The trainers were there to fish him out once he started to sink, but he still remembered the sensation, first the shock, then the gradual creeping weight in his chest, then indifference swaddling him like a soft blanket.

Halfway across the White River he found the same heavy lassitude pressing him gently beneath the surface. Laith’s head and Talal’s were barely visible in the moonlight, dark splotches a few paces from him on either side. The flier’s stroke was visibly weakening, and when Valyn glanced over at Talal he realized that all of them were struggling.

He rolled onto his side for a moment, lifting his head above the water as he swam.

“Faster,” he said. His mouth felt stiff and awkward around the word, as though the syllables were cold stones on his tongue, and for a moment he thought neither of the two had heard. When Laith turned his head for his next breath, however, he cursed briefly but eloquently, then picked up the tempo. Talal, too, seemed to get the message. Valyn was hauling the inflated bag with their weapons, and the other two started to draw away from him. Grimly he rolled back onto his stomach and redoubled his effort. He couldn’t maintain the new pace for long, but the choice was stark: swim or die.