if you stop to listen every once in a while, you might hear good things.
Tera Lynn ChildsTags: tera-lynn-childs fins just-for-fins
Quince reaches me, and instead of wrapping me in a hug like I expect, he reaches for my hair. I try to swim back, away from the near-desperate look in his eyes, afraid that he’s going to fail the test.
He tugs something from my hair.
I look down and see a Padina antillarum—a beautiful little seaweed shaped like ginkgo leaves—in his hand. And it’s glowing.
“You,” he says with an explosive grin. “You are the sixteenth object.
Tags: tera-lynn-childs fins just-for-fins
Quince leans in over the map, studying, and I think he’s going to ask me something about the kingdoms or my plan or Daddy’s trident.
Instead, without taking his eyes off the map, he asks, “What happens if I fail?”
“What?” I whisper.
“If I don’t pass the three tests,” he says. “What’s the consequence?”
I suck in a shaky breath. This is the part I didn’t want to talk about, the part I hoped he wouldn’t ask about. But I guess he’s too clever—or has learned too much about how mer-world magic works—to assume there won’t be a price.
There is, and it’s a big one.
“If you fail,” I say, keeping my voice steady, “then you are banished from the water forever.”
He lifts his Caribbean-blue eyes to stare into mine. “And?”
“And?” I echo.
“I know that can’t be it,” he says. “Nothing in your world is ever that simple.”
A part of my heart breaks when he calls it my world. I want it to feel like his world, too. But now isn’t the time. He’s right; there’s more to the consequence of failure than him being exiled.
“And . . . ,” I say, wishing I didn’t have to tell him this, “I’ll be banished from land.” I swallow hard. “Forever.”
He stares into my eyes, unblinking, and I can’t read any sort of reaction. His mind is racing, I’m sure, but everything on the outside is a stone facade.
Finally, after what feels like an eternity, he says, “Then I won’t fail.
Tags: just-for-fins
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