Page 29 of Bound and Tide

“Fuck it, all right!” He pulled off his coat, the chill eating up all the warmth he had built under the layer. Folding the pristine, white garment and placing it on the cleanest rock he could find, he grumbled about surprises and not liking them then returned to the spot. “I am but your humble student,” he drolled, tipped his head back, and closed his eyes in surrender.

The grip on both of his arms startled the will to resist right back into Xander, noxscura churning in his chest despite his pledge, but his ability to actually do something was decidedly weaker. Costa was on one side of him, Maia on the other, and he found himself being hauled backward.

His feet scrambled as he called for arcana, but it only swam aimlessly in his veins, overtaken with panic. He could have physically fought—he was by all rights a stronger man than the sum of a little girl and a gangly teen, but their swiftness and the non-responsiveness of his magic left him with only one thought: go dead weight.

That was probably the worst thing Xander could have done in the moment as the two were suddenly not just hauling him backward but also downward. A string of foul but grandiose curses ripped up his throat, but just as they broke free from his mouth, water flooded in.

The icy shock of the river took Xander, filling his throat, his lungs, and his heart came to utter stillness as the world went impossibly bright. Pressure on his shoulders and the disorientation of being upside down worked in tandem to keep him in place, but finally he flailed.

The grip on him didn’t relent, panic rose, chill turned to burn, and his muscles seized. He needed breath, and he needed the surface, but he was sinking away from it, that ring of brightness above tightening to nothing, plunging him into the dark.

Blackness pressed in like a rising tide, and the comfort that was meant to come with gloom was not there—it was never really there for Xander despite what had been beaten into him. The dark wasn’t home, it was emptiness and abandonment and fear. The water turned solid around him, wood, stone, brick, sealing him in, sealing the rest of the world out. And it went on forever.

If only it were death, but no, it was so much worse. It was utter confinement, isolation, the vaguest sounds of someone beyond reach, someone who had done this to him, someone laughing. The squeeze on his chest and limbs like so many hands stilled him completely. All that could save him was arcana.

So use it, a voice hissed beyond the dark.

Xander blinked, the only move he could make, but nothing changed. He called to the shadows, and despite the utter darkness, none of them bent to his will.

Or are you weak? Weak like a human? Weak like your father?

I’m not, he heard himself shriek in a voice decades younger, but the sound was all choked out of him now. I’m trying, but it’s scary!

Have I really raised such a coward?

A blade caught the light as it was thrown across the chamber followed by angry footsteps away.

Please! Don’t leave!

You are weak—so weak you would beg. Pathetic.

The voice faded, and Xander was left with only the echo of his own feeble sobbing. The sound grew to a deafening level, and then there was a shove at his back. The pressure on Xander’s chest broke all at once, and he was propelled upward and out, breaking the surface he had forgotten he was beneath.

Slamming down against the bank, Xander choked out an entire stomach-full of water. Drenched, he pushed himself up onto shaking hands and knees and sputtered out from between strands of soaked hair, “Are you trying to fucking kill me?”

“No!” Maia was laughing, equally drenched and thrown on her ass.

Costa was splayed out beside her, but groaned out a, “Yes.”

Xander glared at the boy, struggling to fill his lungs.

“I…I mean, if you don’t learn how to command the water, you drown and then you die.” Costa nervously swiveled his head from one of them to the other. “That’s what Dad said when he threw me in.”

“What if my heart had stopped from the cold?”

“Oh, didn’t think of that.” Maia scrunched up her face. “I got tossed in after the first thaw.”

“It was summer for me.”

Xander drew himself up to his feet, each step a staggered struggle as he closed the distance between himself and the two still splayed on the ground. He dripped and shivered, chest heaving with missing breaths, but there were shadows then, uncontrolled and hemming in from his back, enough to wipe the amusement off the children’s faces.

He would kill them for what they’d done. With arcana, with a blade, with the water itself—it didn’t matter. They would pay for the panic, the humiliation, the years of torment. Xander gripped each by the collar, and there was no questioning his strength then, slamming the two against one another and bearing down.

The only question was which one first? Would he rather cut out the impudent one’s tongue or carve into the pathetic one’s heart? Which to make watch, which to make suffer, which to listen to wail and plead and…

But even with the shadows in their faces, he could see their fear—could feel it mirrored back because they had his eyes, and he would recognize his own terror on any face.

“If you intend to kill a man,” he finally spat, “there are much more efficient ways to do it.” Xander dropped them both and straightened, shaking water off his arms. “Well, it seems it worked—I broke out of your ridiculous test, so what now?”

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