The fear of final separation broke the spell. Storm dived into the sea a gasping mini-breath before the first arrows thudded into the wood of the rowing boat, turning it into a floating porcupine.

A finger of pain scratched her shoulder, the salt-burn of seawater on raw flesh. She was shot! Terror dissolved the feelings of unreality. Storm flailed at the water, fighting it, her ears full of the enemy’s shouts. Sea-splashed eyes glimpsed bows drawn taut, arrows bristling, as she filled her lungs and ducked underwater to take refuge beneath the boat.

She was in the Dolphin’s kingdom, but the Elemental seemed to have abandoned her. Disgusted, no doubt, at her ineptitude. A muffled drumming bubbled in her ears as a second shower of arrows plunged into the water around the boat. She watched the shafts wobble as they met the Element’s resistance, slow, turn to float to the surface. The third downpour came, and an arrow grazed her leg. Storm’s lungs began to burn hotter than her shoulder. All day long, she had seen sharks hunting these waters. Her blood would bring them. She must do something! The Dolphin and Albatross would not save her if she did not even try to save herself.

Storm made her body relax until she floated beneath the rowing boat as if already dead, head back, arms and legs drifting. The pressure in her lungs eased, and she found she could hear the music of Water at last – an endless surging, a flow-and-ebb, like the heartbeat of a leviathan. And through the beat came a wriggling-jumping-trickling thread of power. Her mind grabbed the thread and she felt its power flow into her. When Storm was shining-full of the Dolphin’s power, she focused a single thought and willed the magic to its work.

The sea rushed away from her, rose in a wall of water, higher and higher. She was sucked behind, dragged in the wake of the mountainous wave surging towards the raft town of the Drowned Ones. She bumped and spun along the seabed. At last her body rose to the surface. Swallowing as much water as air, bruised and battered, Storm was tossed from wave to wave like a piece of limp seaweed. She found a leftover fragment of power to calm and thicken the water beneath her into a moss-wet mattress.

She sprawled on her stomach, coughing and spewing. The wind brought the sound of swearing and screaming growing ever fainter. The raft was still afloat! The wave hadn’t crushed the pirate town, it was merely driving the enemy before it.

“No!” Storm screamed at the sea, at the Dolphin’s betrayal. She listened, frantic, for a hint of Water-music, but all she heard was the slosh of the sea and seagulls crying overhead as they circled, hoping to make a meal of her eyes if she died. She had lost her magic again. She had failed Dain, failed Thorn. The enemy lived.

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