Once the princess and the others had reached the other shore safely, Tavis started to wade again. Because the river was not as violent here as below the pool, he moved into deeper water, where the dark currents would prevent the ogres from seeing anything he happened to disturb on the riverbed. Half swimming and half wading, he continued upstream long after Brianna and Morten had stopped to lay their false trails. Occasionally, he approached the shore close enough to look for verbeeg tracks, but saw none.
When he had finally gone far enough to be certain the ogres would no longer be coming up this side of the river, the scout went ashore. He found two of the largest logs he could move and pulled them to the river's edge. After tying the boles together with two short lengths of rope, he slipped his wading staff under the bindings and guided the makeshift raft into the dark waters.
The swift currents carried him downriver in a fraction of the time it had taken to wade up it. He soon saw his companions waiting just above the slow-moving pool where they had crossed the river. Brianna had already-revived Earl Dobbin, who looked pale and frightened. The earl stood on one foot, bracing himself on Brianna's arm, as though his leg hurt too badly to support any weight. His stance might have seemed reasonable, had Tavis not been able to see, even from the middle of the river, that the princess had already called upon her goddess's magic to close the arrow hole.
The scout waved, and they came out to meet him, Avner and the princess swimming. Morten waded, carrying the lord mayor on his back and using both his staff and Brianna's to steady himself in the deep waters. As the four reached the logs, Tavis directed the humans to the back end of the raft. Taking one of the wading poles from Morten, he positioned himself and the bodyguard near the front, and then they were floating out of the pool. The current swept the raft down a swift-flowing tongue of black water, launching it toward a churning wall of foam.
"Hold fast!"
The two firbolgs each locked an arm under the front binding and barely got their legs pointed downstream before crashing through the froth. The raft bucked so hard Tavis thought it would jerk his arm from the socket.
Pitching side to side and threatening to fling its passengers into the churning waters, the raft shot into a boiling, roaring cataract filled with boulders as large as stone giants, bottomless craters of bubbling water, and eddies spinning like tornadoes. The descent became a crazed, lung-burning struggle to keep the logs pointed downriver. Tavis and Morten used the staffs to fend off jagged rocks that popped up to snap like bear teeth at the flimsy raft. They kicked madly in a vain, useless effort at control before the current spun them around, reducing the scout and his companions to so much flotsam tumbling down the channel with all the other debris.
The journey only grew worse as more water poured in from side streams. The canyon grew deeper, the channel steeper, and the raft began to roll, dousing them for long minutes in the angry river only to whip them back into the air so they could draw breath and endure the icy beating a little longer.
How long the torture continued, Tavis could not say. But he started to hear a certain sonorous undertone in the roaring waters, and the logs rolled with less frequency. Soon, the cataracts grew gentle enough that the raft stopped spinning and began to drift backward down the river. The current slowed, and the river broadened. The scout kicked against a passing rock-he had long since lost his staff-and slowly spun them around.
Ahead of them lay a basin of swift, dark water. On the other side of the pool, the river disappeared, as did its banks and the forest rising above its flood plain. The world just seemed to end, dropping away into nothingness, with only blue sky and distant mountains beyond.
Tavis pulled his arm out of the rope that held the raft together. "Swim!"
The command was useless, for even the scout could not hear the word he had just screamed over the roar of the waterfall. Nevertheless, he found himself trailing behind his four companions as they splashed and kicked, in seeming silence, away from the raft.
Though the river's bank was not distant, Tavis thought they would never reach it. The closer they came to the rocky shore, the faster it seemed to slip past. The scout swam with all his might, trying to angle upstream away from the deafening plunge, yet he felt himself drawn inexorably backward. He caught up to the others, but that small accomplishment brought him no relief. In the corner of his eye he could see nothing but blue sky.
