Page 115 of The Beast King's Bride

Now as we wade into the shallows, icy fear grips me. Embar snorts, splashing in further.

The guards stop and I turn in my saddle, reaching a hand out to them.

“Please, don’t. Don’t let me go through.” I try to turn Embar around. “I want to stay. Please!”

But one of them shouts something—“adel, Embar!”—and I hear an echo of Talen’s voice as we’d sprung out of the water right here weeks ago.

Embar leaps forward and into the deep.

Blue and green slam into me, crystal walls of cold and wet, then that sensation of falling, weightless, down a well—or maybe falling upward, so hard to tell up from down, real from unreal. Swirling colors make me dizzy as I grip the reins so hard in my hands that I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to unclench my hands ever again, the leather digging into my palms, the inside of my fingers.

I think I might have screamed. I’m not sure. Voices and clanking noises echo as we soar and spin and tumble.

Then, at last, Embar whinnies and rears up—to throw me off, I think, my teeth chattering, he’s finally given in to terror—but he leaps upward and we fly out of the water, out of another lake I can’t recognize and into the shallows, blue water rippling outward in ever-growing circles to lap against the weeping willows at its shores.

The sky spreading over us, vast and peppered with white clouds, is blue.

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