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“Absolutely not. What if they catch you?”

Now Asher smiled. It was merely a shadow of his usual grin, but Lore appreciated the effort.

“Trust me, they won’t. As soon as we lead them away, we’ll lose them, no problem. I’ll have Isla with me—the best tracker and the best archer this side of the Tallylah River.”

Still, Lore wanted to throw up the broth at the idea of them risking their lives for her while she stayed behind. How many more lives was she going to ruin before she returned to Duskmere?

“It’s fine, Lore. I left the academy and came up to see my father because I was bored. I wanted to find an adventure, and guess what?” Isla moved in closer, as if she were about to share a secret. “I found it, thanks to you. We won’t let them catch you, okay? I just hope you can survive my brother’s general doom and gloom personality. Stay safe, Lore. We will see you before the next moon has cycled through.”

“Thank you. Both of you. Come back, okay? Don’t leave me here forever.” Her voice broke on the last word. She’d meant it as a weak attempt at humor, but it showed itself for the plea that it was.

“Never.” Asher leaned in, pressing the lightest of kisses to her lips.

And then they were gone.

Lore slept, dreaming once more of a flower crown and the dancing wisps that gleamed luminescent in the shadows, calling to her.

Chapter21

It took three days for Lore to shake the fever dreams.

She woke every few hours to steaming broth on the table next to the bed and Finndryl’s broad shoulders disappearing through the door.

From there, it took three more days for her head to clear of clouds and the wound on her side to knit together enough that she didn’t faint from pain every time she shifted in the bed. In that time, the uniformed guards cleared out of the town—at least, according to a hushed conversation she’d heard between Gryph and Finndryl.

Lore thought there might still be some like the first trio Chief Steward Vinelake had sent after her: regular males with a penchant for violence and a lust for coin. She wanted to tell them about those men, but she couldn’t make her voice work, and instead she fell into a nightmare, one where Asher hadn’t been there with her in that camp and they’d caught her, only to rip the grimoire from her and stab it with poison-tipped swords.

She’d woken up screaming, only to quickly fall back asleep to a soft touch on her brow and murmured words of comfort.

Finndryl had been a silent presence in the room, a shadow in her fever dreams, a gentle, cool hand on her forehead. He was thenudge of the bowl to her parched, cracked lips. But, despite his comfort, Lore kept screaming herself awake.

The pain and the fevered dreams were too much.

So, Finndryl began to read her stories from his books. Wild tales of fighting dragons and sailing across monster-ridden seas for lost treasure.

She would listen, eyes closed and teeth gritted from the fierce pain, but his stories helped.

He read when dressing Lore’s wound, as she gulped whiskey in the hopes that it would lessen the sensation that her side was on fire.

Once, in a rare moment when her head wasn’t pounding, she caught him sleeping. He’d fallen asleep in the chair with his head on the bed, his locs escaping their tie.

The book, she noted through a haze, was a text on alchemical theories.

Lore realized he was making the stories up himself. She marveled at the fact that this fae—who never wanted to talk—seemed to have endless tales within him that he could spin effortlessly. If she was honest with herself, his tales were the only thing that were getting her through the fever and the pain.

By the seventh day, she’d burned off every ounce of poison and every bit of fever.

She woke up feeling mostly new.

Not even a day later, she realized that if Finndryl and Gryph wouldn’t let her out of the twins’ room, she would give herself up to the royal guard just to escape. So, they compromised, and Lore found herself downstairs in the Exile, making the mutton stew she’d planned the week before.

She missed Isla and was sad the other fae couldn’t be there to try it. Gryph had gone to the market for her this time, fetching everything from a list she’d written back before she’d been poisoned and her body had gone into shock.

Lore heaped another serving of stew into a chipped wooden bowl and handed it to a scowling Finndryl. Now that she was awake, he was back to being the worst.

Didn’t change the fact that he’d saved her life, though.

Lore had almost given up on getting answers from him when she overheard him complaining to his father about Lore still being there. He’d yelled something about “not wanting to babysit.”