Page 103 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
And bubbling up to the surface, four slippery, mischievous thoughts flowed from the depths in front of Mitzi and Norman:
He brought friends!
Look at those flat foreheads.
Oh, I better get the cute one with the button nose.
Ugh, fingers are so creepy.
I couldn’t help myself. I grabbed onto that last thought with my mental fingers, reeling myself inward until my internal voice hovered right outside the dolphin’s mind.
Why don’t you come out and play?I whispered into its… ear? The dent on the side of its slippery head?
The dolphin shrieked and flipped, sending its companions into utter chaos until…
“They’re pink!” Cilia shrieked as the four of them jumped out of the water and twisted in midair, their giggles more like clicking cackles when Norman got a violent splash of water to his face.
“Of course we’re pink.” One of them resurfaced with its elongated mouth full of smiling teeth. “What were you expecting? That dreadfully drab gray of those sea-dwellers?”
“N-no.” Cilia blinked. “I think your coloring is quite lovely.”
“Well, of course you do. A pretty thing like you knows everyone looks better in pink.”
Cilia’s blush matched the sunburnt shade of its skin.
Over the next hour, Mr. Conine had us take turns wading into the river, playing with the dolphins who took flirting to an entirely new level—especially when Rodhi dove into the languid current.
Emelle sidled up to me as I watched him on the bank, my curls still heavy and dripping from my own time riding up and down the river on the back of one of them, clutching its dorsal fin like a lifeline. Her clothes, too, clung to her body like a sopping second skin.
“At least he’s interested in something else other than Spiders, Worms, & Insects?” Despite her attempt at conversation, her voice still held a… weight to it. Like an anchor had dragged it down an octave.
“Well, I imagine Rodhi and these dolphins have lots in common.”
Emelle turned to me with a squint. “Such as?”
I counted on my fingers. “Coy. Cocky. Social, yet constantly disappearing.” Even as I said that, all four dolphins plunged back under the surface, taking Rodhi with them for a moment before they flipped back into the air with those clicking cackles.
Emelle was still squinting at me.
“What?”
“Your head,” she said. “You’re not constantly massaging it anymore. Have your headaches gone away?”
My smile dropped. Come to think of it, Ihadn’tfelt even the ghostly remnants of pain in the last several weeks. Maybe Steeler’s lack of meddling truly was mending the fractures in my mind despite my inability to find any of those crucial memories that involved him.
Or maybe it was the fact that the smell of his black bamboo seemed to cling to me wherever I went, soothing every treacherous part of my body.
“Yeah.” How to tell the truth without revealing anything of importance? “I… I found a medicine that works, I think.”
A medicine that involved a lighthouse, a monkey, and a male faerie that was an absolute pain in my ass.Go figure it out.As if stealing a hair from an exiled Sorronian princess with murder in her veins was just a fun little side adventure.
Emelle’s mouth opened to say something, but a violent flurry of cheeping and squawking overhead had us both looking skyward through the strip of jungle parted by the river.
Birds—a flock of all shapes and sizes—swarmed us with eager pelts of news, Emelle’s blue cotinga fluttering in their midst.
“They’re alive! Your family is alive!”
“We found some survivors shielded within a burrow!”
