“Seren!” Ffion shouts. She can barely hear it herself above the clap of thunder telling them the storm is right overhead.
Four hundred meters.
And now Ffion can see a figure on the boat, clinging to what’s left of the mast.
Seren.
They’re going to make it. Ffion lets out a sob of relief. But the wind isn’t done. It swirls around Pen y Ddraig mountain and roars down the dragon’s back, gathering momentum as it travels across the lake, each wave bigger than the one before. Angharad’s boat tips, teetering on its side as if deciding which way to fall, and Ffion screams at the rescue boat to go faster, but it’s too late.
Angharad’s boat is capsizing.
Fifty-Three
January 8
Leo
As they draw closer to the wreckage of Angharad’s boat, Leo sweeps the searchlight in an arc, searching for a glimpse of Seren. The light bounces back at him, the white of the snow almost blinding. Debris floats in the water: plastic containers, rope, pieces of canvas ripped from the hold.
“Take the wheel,” Ffion shouts.
Take the—?
But Ffion is on her feet, up on the seat, with her arms raised, her coat shrugged onto the floor. One moment she’s there, the next she’s gone, entering the water in a shallow dive.
“Ffion!” The motorboat lurches to one side, and Leo clutches the wheel, fighting it back to face the spot where he last saw Ffion. Have they drifted already? Angharad’s boat has turned over, her green hull the only part visible.
Leo stares at the controls. No different from a car, right? He steers one-handed, trying to circle, all the time knowing the wind is throwing him off course, that he risks losing track of where Ffion went in. The searchlight flickers and he shakes it hard—“Not now, not now!”—pointing it at the water.
“Ffion!” he calls again, consumed with fear, with anger that he can’t swim, can’t save her. There’s a life ring on the back of the boat, but what good’s that when he can’t see the people who need it? He circles again—and again and again—and thank God the thunder has stopped, and is the snow slowing? His fingers are numb with cold, adrenaline making the beam of the searchlight shake, casting shadows on the waves, playing tricks with his mind.
Ffion.
Leo stares. Ffion? He slides up the throttle as carefully as he can, and the boat pitches forward. And there she is: kicking furiously and slicing through the water with one free arm, the other gripping a white life jacket wrapped around a motionless Seren.
Fifty-Four
January 8
Ffion
For a man who’s never been on a powerboat before, let alone driven one, Leo is doing a surprisingly good job. Ffion stays low in the boat, water swilling about her knees as she holds on to her daughter’s inert body. Seren’s barely conscious, her eyes closed and her limbs loose, but she’s breathing. Ffion feels for her pulse, but her own hands are clumsy with cold and what she finds is dangerously slow. Is that Seren’s pulse or her own?
How long was Seren in the water? Her core temperature will keep dropping; they have nothing to warm her with. Leo’s thrown his sodden coat over her and Ffion’s too, and Ffion’s rubbing Seren’s arms hard, trying to get the circulation going.
“Come on, baby, come on,” Ffion says, quiet and urgent. Seren was unresponsive when Ffion reached her, the younger girl’s head flopped back against the life jacket she’d had the presence of mind to put on. Could she have hit her head? Ffion bends over and presses a kiss to Seren’s forehead, a sob rising up from nowhere. Seren was a toddler when she last kissed her like this. Stolen moments when Mam wasn’t around, moments when Ffion allowed herself—just for a second—to acknowledge the tightening around her heart.
“What do I do?” Leo shouts. There’s panic in his voice, and Ffion looks up, realizing they’re approaching the jetty. Leo drops their speed.
“Kill the engine!” Ffion doesn’t want to leave Seren. The sudden silence is a relief, but they’re still coming in too fast. Wind and waves shove them toward the shore, and they overshoot the end of the jetty where they found the boat. “Brace yourself!” Ffion shouts. The lake bed doesn’t slope gently away from the shore—something that regularly catches day-trippers, paddling with their trousers rolled up. Instead, the bed falls away, the water depth dropping from knee-height to chest-deep in a single step. The lake has risen, and it’s hard to know exactly where the shelf is, but it must be about—
There’s a violentthud, and Leo lurches forward onto the steering wheel, swearing loudly.
—there.
The boat grinds onto gravel. Leo leaps out, up to his knees in the icy water, dragging the boat until it’s high on the foreshore.
“She’s not moving.” Ffion’s trying to be calm, trying to be professional, trying, trying, trying, but—“She’s not moving!” The wind howls, snow snapping at her face, covering Seren in icy flakes as fast as Ffion can wipe them away.