Chapter Twenty-Three: Dart, Dart, Cruel Dart
Guardians of the Twilight Lands -- The Sixth Book of Unexpected Enlightenment
Rachel dived straight down into the gorge. Nearly five hundred feet later, she reached the river Dart at Black Pool, just north of the Venford Brook, and hesitated. Should she go south toward Sharrah Pool and Horseshoe Falls, or north, deeper into the gorge? Where was the danger?
She listened and then sped northward, flying above the riverbed, over rapids, boulders, cascades, ledges, and wooded islands. To either side stretched ancient oak woodland. The branches were bare, but pale moss coated the trunks as well as the rocks and boulders. Ferns, lichens, sphagnum, and liverwort, all a mossy green, carpeted the forest, making it picturesque. Here and there, among the rocks, the last snowdrops of the winter bloomed.
She flew above dark waters as they danced over small waterfalls and rushing cascades. An otter sunning on a rock leapt, startled, from the lichen-covered boulder upon which it rested. As she flew on, the walls of the gorge became steeper, closing in around the river.
“Dart!” Rachel shouted as she flew. “Dart! No!”
But she was not her father. She did not have the duke’s authority to command the river to appear. She flew, bent low over the shaft of the steeplechaser, urging her broom to go faster and faster. As she sped above the empty river, she began to fear she had gone the wrong way.
The booming cry came again from behind her, low and eerie, causing the hairs along the back of her neck to stand. Rachel spun around. Signaling to Siggy, she barreled back the way they had come, over the rapids, through the ancient oaks, past Black Pool and Sharrah Pool, and onwards.
Ahead, along the right bank, was a shelf of moss-covered stone. A Persian family climbed upon the rocks, two men, two women, and three children. One of the children, a little boy about five years old, had wandered from the others and played on a promontory of the rocky shelf that thrust farther into the river. Rachel looked back and forth but saw no immediate danger.
Roar! She heard it before she saw it. Behind her, a four-foot wall of water raced down the gorge, overflowing Dart’s banks. The recent rains and the melt waters had combined to create a flood, and the floodwaters were thundering directly toward the little boy.
Rachel screamed, but over the roar of many waters, the family could not hear her. She wanted to move the child, but when she reached for her wand, she realized that it was back in her school robes. Without it, she would have to lift her hands to cast the cantrip, and she was going too fast to safely let go of the bristleless.
“There!” she cried to Siggy, who was behind her.
She threw her broom into a spin to counter her forward momentum. The steeplechaser spun horizontally at a tremendous speed, once, twice, three times, the landscape in three-hundred -sixty degrees flashing by in a blur. She flipped on the becalming enchantment, but ever since Vroomie had come back from Chanson’s Quality Bristlelesses, the drag of the becalming enchantment was so reduced that her momentum hardly slowed. As the world rushed by, she made a mental note to speak to Mr. Chanson about that.
After her third revolution, she yanked her broom upward into a vertical loop, flipping over and coming parallel to the river again. This finally slowed her. She leaned back and came to a standstill … to find herself only just above the river’s surface.
With that same roar of mighty waters, the flood struck her. Icy cold water crashed over her broom. Her chest seized up, refusing to allow her to inhale. She and her steeplechaser were thrown helter-skelter. She grabbed onto Vroomie with her knees, but the terrible power of the water caught the tail fan and dragged it, yanking the bristleless away from her legs. She still clung to the handlebars and held on with all her strength.
If she lost hold of the steeplechaser under the water, it would be swept away. Even if she held on, would it still fly? Did water hurt bristlelesses? She fought to shift so the current would push her toward her broom instead of ripping it from her. Her leg snagged the device. She clung to it as the torrent of water dragged her along. This brought a new terror: Which way was up?
Was she right side up or upside-down? She was not used to being disoriented. Usually, she would remember back and figure out where she was, but she had been tossed and turned so many times she could make no sense of it. This brought her much closer to panicking. She could not panic. There would be no hope if she panicked—for her or for that little boy.
Rachel drew on her mask of calm and opened her eyes despite the iciness of the water. Dark murkiness surrounded her. If she tried to fly the broom with great enough speed to break free of the river and she went the wrong way, she would slam into the bottom or into a boulder. The chance of escaping a broken neck was slim.
From her left came a flash of red and gold. Lucky! But he was swimming as he looked for her. Was he above her or below? Terror gripped her. What should she do? Rachel gritted her teeth. If she did nothing, she would surely freeze to death or drown. Better to act.
She kicked the tail fan and flipped switches with her numb thumbs. She threw her weight, willing the steeplechaser to move toward Lucky. For a very long second, nothing happened.
Suddenly, Vroomie engaged and shot upward. The water dragged her back, trying to pull her from the broom. Her fingers were too numb to trust. She hugged the bristleless, wrapping her arms around the shaft. If she hit a boulder like this, there would be no recovering.
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