The Tide Reversed One kiss could free him—or drown them all. #4
His silver gaze fixed on her. “Because I can survive it.”
Finn sat forward, anger flashing through the charm like a blade through silk. “You do not get to call forgetting survival.”
Callum did not look at him. “I have endured worse.”
“No.” Finn’s voice lost all softness. “You have endured much and mistaken that for qualification.”
The blue beacon above them hummed.
Maren felt the vibration through the soles of her feet.
Callum turned on Finn then, fury giving him color. “You would rather let all four of us rot here?”
“I would rather you stop volunteering for suffering just because leadership taught you to look handsome while bleeding.”
Callum moved one step toward him.
Ronan rose.
Not quickly. Not threateningly. But the room changed when he stood. The air tightened. The fire bent low in the grate, as if bowing away from whatever lived under his skin.
“Enough,” Ronan said.
Callum stopped.
Finn’s mouth twisted, but he fell silent.
Maren stared at them, heart pounding. “All of you are insane.”
Finn glanced at her. “That is rude, but not inaccurate.”
“This is not a debate over who gets the last blanket.” Her voice shook. She hated that. “You are asking me to choose who loses everything.”
Callum looked back at her.
For one heartbeat, she saw past the prince. Past the command and the scars and the ruthless steadiness. She saw a man in terror, not for himself, but for the others.
“Yes,” he said quietly.
Maren’s anger drained out so fast it left her cold.
She looked away first.
That was worse too.
The day narrowed into small necessities.
Maren cleaned wounds because infection did not care about curses. Callum had a gash along his shoulder that refused to close, silver-edged and cold to the touch. He sat rigid while she washed it, one hand braced on his knee, the other clenched so tightly his knuckles blanched.
“You can breathe,” she said.
“I am.”
“You are plotting the murder of my washcloth.”
He glanced down at the torn linen in his grip and released it.
His palm caught her wrist before she could move away.
The contact was rough. Warm despite his fever. His thumb pressed lightly over her pulse, and the sea-glass pendant burned.
Maren looked up.
Callum’s gaze was not gentle. She doubted he knew how to make it gentle. But it held. Steady. Shielding. As if he had already placed himself between her and every wave that meant to break her.
“You should not feel responsible for us,” he said.
“That would be easier if you had not washed up on my rocks.”
A faint curve touched his mouth. It vanished quickly. “You saved us.”
“I am beginning to understand that was reckless.”
“Yes.”
She should have pulled away.
She did not.
His thumb moved once over the inside of her wrist. Barely a stroke. Barely anything.
Maren felt it in her throat.
Then he released her first.
Across the room, Finn watched with an expression too bright to be harmless.
Later, she tended Ronan.
He sat on the edge of her narrow bed because the firelight was better there, though seeing him in that room unsettled her.
Her bedroom had always been the one place in the lighthouse that belonged only to her.
Small bed. Whitewashed walls. A shelf of old books swollen from damp.
A cracked mirror. Her mother’s comb in a dish. Practical, lonely things.
Ronan made the room feel suddenly too small for loneliness.
“Lift your arm,” Maren said.
He obeyed.
The wound near his ribs had opened during the night, a dark crescent beneath one of the ritual scars. She cleaned it carefully, trying not to notice the heat of his skin beneath her fingers or the way his breath changed when the cloth passed too close to the scar.
His hand trembled.
Maren paused.
“Does it hurt?”
“Yes.”
The answer was so blunt she almost smiled.
“You hide it well.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I hide other things well.” His gaze lowered to her face. “Not pain.”
Maren swallowed.
The rain tapped at the window like impatient fingers.
She pressed a clean strip of linen to the wound. Ronan’s hand came up—not to stop her, not to touch her. It hovered near her waist, fingers curling into the blanket beneath him instead.
“You looked at me yesterday like you knew me,” she said before she could stop herself.
His eyes lifted to hers.
Silence filled the space between them.
“I dreamed of you,” he said.
Maren’s fingers tightened around the bandage. “Before you came here?”
“For years.”
The room seemed to tilt.
“That is not possible.”
“No.”
“No, it’s not possible, or no, you don’t care that it’s impossible?”
Something almost like amusement touched his mouth. “Both.”
Maren finished tying the bandage too tightly.
Ronan did not complain.
“What happened in the dreams?” she asked.
His gaze dropped to her pendant.
“Storm,” he said. “Stone. Your mouth full of blood. The sea burning backward.”
A chill moved over her skin.
“And me?” she asked. “What was I doing?”
Ronan’s black eyes returned to hers.
“Choosing.”
The word stayed with her long after she left him.
By dusk, Elias found the inscription.
Maren had gone up to the lantern room to check the lens, partly because the beacon had begun to pulse irregularly and partly because she needed distance from four men who seemed to occupy every inch of air inside the tower.
Elias followed without asking. He moved quietly for someone still half-fevered, one hand trailing along the wall as if reading the stone through touch.
The stairwell was narrow. Too narrow.
His breath warmed the back of her neck when she stopped on the landing. Maren turned, and there he was one step below her, green eyes shadowed, brown hair damp at his temples. Ink stained two of his fingers, though she had no idea where he had found ink.
“You move like someone searching for a trap,” she said.
“I usually am.”
“And?”
His gaze flicked to the walls. “The trap is the lighthouse.”
Maren continued upward because standing too close to him made thinking difficult.
In the lantern room, the blue flame revolved inside the lens without oil or wick. It gave off no heat. Just light. Cold and shifting, like sunlight seen from beneath deep water.
Elias circled the mechanism slowly.
Maren watched him instead of the sea.
He was different from the others in a way she had not expected. Callum made a room feel defended. Finn made it feel dangerous in an entirely different direction. Ronan made it feel like the air before thunder. Elias made it feel understood. Examined. Seen in quiet detail.
That frightened her more than Finn’s smile or Ronan’s dreams.
Elias crouched near the base of the lens and brushed salt from a seam in the stone.
“There,” he murmured.
Maren knelt beside him.
The floor beneath the lantern had always been carved with old maker’s marks, or so she had believed. Lines, spirals, wave shapes. Elias’s ink-stained fingers moved over them, tracing a pattern she had stepped across a thousand times without understanding.
His fingers hovered a breath above her wrist.
“May I?”
She should have asked why.
Instead, she nodded.
He did not touch her. Not quite. His fingertips moved over her skin with a sliver of air between, mapping symbols from the stone onto her forearm. The pendant warmed slowly, not burning this time, but waking.
Maren forgot to breathe.
“These are not maker’s marks,” Elias said.
His voice was calm. Hers was not.
“What are they?”
“A vow. A binding. Part of one, at least.”
“Can you read it?”
“Yes.”
He hesitated.
Maren looked at him. “Do not start protecting me now. The others already crowd that profession.”
His mouth softened. “I was not protecting you. I was deciding whether the words wanted to be read aloud.”
The beacon pulsed.
Elias looked down and translated.
“When tide is reversed and four crowns bleed, the keeper’s mouth shall choose what the sea cannot keep.”
The room chilled.
Outside, a wave struck the cliff so hard water exploded against the lantern glass far above where any normal wave should reach.
Maren rose too quickly and nearly slipped.
Elias caught her elbow.
The pendant flashed hot.
They both froze.
His grip was careful. Controlled. Yet his hand around her elbow felt more intimate than it should have. Not possessive. Not demanding. Anchoring.
“The keeper’s mouth,” Maren said, hating the tremor in her voice.
“Yes.”
“My family knew.”
Elias did not answer quickly enough.
She pulled away from him.
“My father knew?”
“I do not know.”
“My mother?”
“Maren—”
“Do not say my name like that.”
His expression shifted. “Like what?”
“Like you are sorry for me.”
“I am not sorry for you.” He stepped closer, and the blue light turned his eyes almost luminous. “I am angry for you.”
That stopped her.
Elias looked down at the carved stone. “A curse that requires willingness but creates desperation is not a choice. It is coercion wearing a pretty mask. If you kiss one of us because the storm has trapped us, because the sea is threatening your island, because our lives are draining away in front of you—that is not willingness. Not truly.”
Maren’s throat tightened.
“And if the curse knows that?” she asked.
His gaze lifted.
“Then it may be waiting for you to break yourself trying to save us.”
Below them, someone shouted.
Callum.
Maren and Elias ran.
They found Finn on the floor near the hearth, coughing seawater.
Not vomiting. Coughing, endlessly, his body bowed over, hands braced on the stone as water spilled from his mouth and steamed against the fire-warmed floor. Callum knelt beside him, one hand gripping the back of his neck. Ronan stood over them, helpless fury carved into every line of him.
Maren dropped beside Finn.
His face was gray. His blue eyes watered, but when he saw her, he tried to smile.
“Good news,” he rasped. “Still very difficult to kill.”
“Shut up.” She grabbed a cloth and wiped saltwater from his mouth. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
Callum’s voice was savage. “He tried to open the door.”
Finn coughed again, more water spilling onto the stones.
Maren rounded on him. “Why would you do that?”
His laugh broke into a wince. “To see if it opened.”
“Liar,” Elias said softly.