Page 81 of Lore of the Tides

Syrelle looked at her, surprised. “Well, I don’t know. Why would you ask that?”

Lore frowned, her voice tinged with sadness. “He spent his life savings on it. And then to have a curse put on him, be almost starved to death by his own queen, and come out on the other side not only with no possessions left, but... now... he was...” Lore could feel her eyes welling up again. She wasn’t sure why this, out of all the horrible parts of the story, was affecting her the most. “Completelycoinless?”

A tired, gruff voice broke in. “Turns out, my grandfather had saved the fisherman’s brother, who lived on Freya. Despite the boat being damaged, the fisherman returned every coin down to the last copper.” Finndryl rubbed his hands across his face and tied his locs back with a ribbon before shifting, stretching out, and placing his hands behind the pillow in a completely unconcerned attitude.

Finn was awake!

Minutes before, Lore’s thoughts had been spiraling into darkness. He was in a magically induced deathlike slumber. He would never wake up, and she would lose him before she ever really got him, and it was all her fault. She had murdered him even though all she wanted to do was be near him and make him smile and see him laugh and unleash his cursed magic so that he could be his whole self, in all its glory; but she had actually been so damned foolish endangering him, which had resulted in him being in agonizing, terrifying pain before falling unconscious, and oh gods,she was spiraling again.

How was he so nonchalant?

“Actually, the fisherman ended up repairing the boat and setting it up as a tourist attraction. For decades, he convinced wealthy people to pay an exorbitant sum to tour the boat. Pay double, and he would take the ‘daring adventurer’ on the very route that the Great Finndryl Hwraeth sailed to save Freya Isle,” Finndryl continued, unaware that Lore was gripping the seat to stop herself from launching across the room and swimming toward him to squeeze him until he popped.

“That’s pretty ingenious,” said Syrelle, who also sounded quite calm.

“Right? Can’t fault someone for acquiring that coin.” Finndryl sat up, punched his pillows a few times—seagrass pillows were quite uncomfortable—and pushed them up against the headboard before leaning back, now in a sitting position, his long legs crossed at the ankles before him. “On a whim, when we were kids visiting our mom on the coast, Isla and I tried to go once. We cleaned a prominent merchant’s house every day for a month to collect the coin, but the boat had apparently hit a rogue rock and sunk a few years before.”

“That would’ve been so cool to see. If I had known about it, I would’ve gone myself.”

“I imagine it was a good time. Especially because I was a kid, I was a little bit obnoxious about my grandfather’s legacy back then; I wouldn’t have shut up about who I was and how he was my relation to every single passenger on that boat.”

Syrelle raised an eyebrow, his lips quirking up into a smile. “Obnoxious back then? You arenow. I’m shocked you’ve managed to know Lore this long without recounting the tale multiple times.”

Finndryl huffed a laugh. “Honestly, I would have loved to, but someone locked us in separate prisons on his ship.”

“Prisonfeels like too strong of a word for how nice those rooms were! And anyway, that wasn’t my ship. It belonged to the crown.”

“If a room has locks on theoutside, it’s a prison.”

“Fair enough, but I’m trying to make up for that.”

“You have a long way to go.”

“I know I do.” Syrelle slid from the armrest into the seat of his chair before propping his feet on the ottoman. “So, tell me, what did you and Isla do with the money you had saved up from cleaning that merchant’s house? I imagine Isla convinced you to spend it all on sweets.”

Finndryl groaned through a smile. “Of course she did. We bought a mountain of sweets and ate them all in one sitting. I was sick for two days, and my mother didn’t even take pity on me, saying it was a lesson to be learned or some such nonsense.”

“I knew it. Isla never did grow out of that sweet tooth.”

Lore’s mouth hung open as the two of them conversed as if they didn’t hate each other with every fiber of their beings. As if... almost as if they had really been friends once. Back in the day.

She’d waited long enough; the only reason she’d contained herself this long was that she was shocked the two of them were even chatting, let alone doing it in a joking manner.

“Finn, how are you feeling?” she asked, trying to keep her voice light.

“I feel a bit as though I was dropped into a cauldron, and then when I got to temp, I was slowly devoured by a Nikoryxia.”

“That’s about how you look,” Syrelle said with a straight face.

Finndryl laughed then, actually laughed. “I don’t doubt it.”

“No, honestly, you look damned good; it’s a little upsetting. For having gone through the change all at once like that, you should at least have a black eye or something.”

Finndryl rubbed the back of his neck and feigned bashfulness. “We can’t all look this good; it wouldn’t be fair. Besides, you’ll grow into the size of your head one day, I’m sure of it.”

“I pray every night for that to happen.”

Lore blinked. Finndryl was laughing, andso was Syrelle.

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