Princess Willowyn's Arc

Chapter 28 of 70

The storm broke before dawn. Willowyn woke on cold stone with the minx pressed to her chest. Raven slept an arm's length away, her green-furred fox curled at her side. Willowyn walked to the cave mouth and looked out. The sea lay flat and gray, endless. No boat. No bridge. Two days of flight had carried her here, and still the water blocked her path. The warring lands waited beyond it, out of reach. "You've stared at it an hour," Raven said behind her. The witch stood, brushing sand from her cape. "It won't shrink." "There has to be a way across." Willowyn knelt at the edge of a tide pool the storm had filled. She trailed her fingers through it. "The griffin can't fly the ocean. So I stop treating the water like a wall." Raven crouched beside her. "Meaning what." "You taught me to hold water in the air. To move it where I want." Willowyn looked up. "What if I move it under us? Lift a road of the sea and carry us over." Raven was quiet. "Water that big will pull back on you. Hard." "Then help me hold it." They walked out onto the wet sand as the tide drew low. Willowyn faced the sea and spread her hands. She reached with her mind the way Raven had drilled for a year, not with want but with will. The water answered. A slow swell rose off the surface, a mound, then a ridge. It climbed higher than her head and held. Her arms shook. The ridge wobbled and began to sag. "It's slipping," she said through her teeth. Raven set both hands flat against the small of Willowyn's back. "Don't grab. Guide." Her voice stayed level. "Feel the weight. Lean into it." Willowyn stopped fighting the pull. She let the water's own weight settle into a shape and pressed only where it wanted to fall. The ridge steadied. It stretched forward over the shallows, a smooth curved wall of standing sea, wide enough to walk. It ran out past the breakers before her strength gave and it collapsed in a long crash of foam. Willowyn dropped to her knees, breathing hard. But she was smiling. "It held. You saw it hold." "For twenty feet," Raven said. Then, quieter: "Longer than I've held anything in months." Willowyn pressed her palm to the cold sand. She had her answer. The ocean was not a wall anymore. It was a road she could raise, if she learned to hold it long enough to reach the other side. "We start tomorrow," she said. "Every morning, until it stretches to the horizon." Raven pulled her back from the water as the next wave rushed in. "Then rest. You'll need all of it."