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“It makes no difference,” Remy said. “I am done being marked out for anything. I make my own marks now.”

“I hope so,” Obek said.

Paelias came back to sit with them. “Lo, star elf,” one of the halflings said. “Your friend here is marked out by devils. Strange company.”

Obek turned and stared at the halfling until he looked away. When he turned back, Paelias said, “Biri-Daar doesn’t think it’s safe to tie up anywhere.”

“Didn’t Vokoun say something about rapids?” Remy asked.

“I did. There are rapids. If we cannot tie up, then we will have to run the rapids at night,” Vokoun said. Remy looked up to see the halfling pilot looking right at him, amused at Remy’s surprise. “You do know I can hear anything anyone says on this boat? No matter how quiet. On my boat, all words come to me.”

“Can we run the rapids at night?” Biri-Daar asked.

“Only if we don’t mind drowning or being dashed to death on the rocks,” Vokoun said. “If we want to live, we should find some place to haul the rafts out and walk them around. There are portages in this canyon.” He listened and Remy grew conscious of an approaching roar. “Hear that? It’s tricky in the daylight. At night? Madness.”

“This whole thing has been madness,” Paelias said.

“We run the rapids,” Biri-Daar said. “It’s too late to do anything else.”

Vokoun surprised Remy then. Rather than refusing, or arguing, he shrugged and signaled the oarsmen. “Very well!” Vokoun said. “For dying, one day’s as good as the next.”

He might have said more, but the sound of the rapids reached them, and there was nothing else to say.

The moon was almost directly overhead. In its waxing glow, the rapids of the lower Whitefall glowed a nearly incandescent violet. The ten adventurers on the boat could have linked arms and spanned the distance from canyon wall to canyon wall—and the river itself was narrower yet by twenty feet of fallen boulders and gravel. Half a mile upstream, the river was more than a hundred feet wide. Squeezed down to one third of its width, it surged and boomed over rocks the size of houses, with the walls spray-wetted for twenty feet above the river’s surface. Vokoun’s boat moved faster as if chasing the current ahead. “Oars in the water!” he cried. Remy and Obek looked at each other, not knowing what he meant; simultaneously they looked at the two surviving halfling oarsmen, both of whom were dragging their oars at an angle away from the boat. Remy did the same, and the boat swung into the center of the channel, drawn by the pull of the water piling over itself into the first chute of the rapids.

Remy had always lived on flat water, the Blackfall Estuary that stretched miles wide away from quays of Avankil. He had never seen rapids like these. The water ahead, as far as he could see under the moonlight, was white foam intermittently broken by darkness that could be either water or stone. Vokoun leaned out over the bow. Paelias was up next to him; the halfling called out something Remy couldn’t understand and Pealias looked back. “Row!” he shouted. “Row, for your lives!”

We want to go faster? Remy wondered. But the halflings were digging into the water, and they had survived this run before. He dug in, and saw Obek doing the same. The boat leaped forward again, and just as quickly swung sideways. Without warning Remy and Obek were on the downstream side of the boat. The halflings dug hard, trying to straighten out the boat as Obek and Remy dragged their oars. The boat started to pivot back—and an unseen rock tore the oar from Obek’s hands. He lunged after it, overbalancing and dragging the downstream gunwale perilously close to the water level. Vokoun was shouting something that Remy couldn’t hear. Remy hauled back on Obek, barely holding onto his own oar with one hand as he tangled the other in Obek’s belt. “Back in the boat!” Biri-Daar and the Halflings were screaming as Remy leaned back into the boat’s middle and Obek hung over the edge grasping vainly after the oar that had already vanished into