“Why not? It seems like you learned a lot from her just from talking with her for a little while. She sounds like she could help you out a lot more still,” he said.
“I guess I didn’t consider it because of the whole old magic thing,” Florian confessed, shrugging. “Kade was pretty upset that I was gone for three days. So I haven’t brought it up again. I couldn’t do that to him a second time.”
“But he’ll know what to expect this time,” Koji argued. “And you’re already using old magic for lots of things, right? So wouldn’t it be better to be trained more in the kinds of old magic she knows would be safe for you to use instead of just winging it?”
Florian was silent for a long moment. There was certainly some truth to that. When it had all happened, he had been concerned with Kade first and foremost; and he’d been so remorseful about Kade being left behind that he hadn’t even considered the possibility of going back to Elodie again. Kade’s obvious distrust of old magic didn’t help, either. But Elodie had given him essentially an open invitation to see her any time, and Florian could certainly use all the help he could get.
“Maybe,” he finally conceded. “She didn’t seem to know much about the Arrows or the Summer Court, beyond what I already knew from my dad. And that’s the stuff we know the least about.”
“I think you should consider it,” Koji said firmly. “It seems to me that more training in old magic would only help. And now that you know that time is weird in the liminal space she uses, you can plan around that.”
Florian chuckled. “You have a good point. I’ll think about it. Maybe when Kade’s back and everything’s settled down a bit, I’ll ask him what he thinks.”
Koji laughed, looking at Florian with an expression that he couldn’t quite read. “I think you’re underestimating how much influence you have over him. You don’t see the way he looks at you, like you’re the dragon that raises the sun and the moon.”
Florian felt his face burn red, embarrassment and a strange sense of satisfaction rising in his chest all at once. He had no idea what the dragon reference meant, but it certainly seemed like something good.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he laughed, but Koji only chuckled and shook his head, unconvinced.
Luckily, Koji didn’t press after that, and after a moment, he asked Florian how the television worked, so the conversation moved on.
After they’d gone to bed, Florian lay awake looking up at the ceiling. His thoughts kept going back to Kade and Elodie and Thaddeus and Soleil and his own parents. It all had to mean something, but he didn’t know what. Maybe talking to Elodie again at some point wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Maybe by then she would know more. It was worth a shot.
Chapter Eighteen
TheirflighttoNorwaywas lengthy and uneventful; mostly Florian just felt anxious about having gone so long without being able to communicate with Kade and worried to be going somewhere new to meet people who likely wouldn’t be the most welcoming. With how tumultuous everything had been with Kade, he’d barely considered what they were going to do when they arrived in the kraken kingdom; but in the long hours of their flight, it was all he could think about.
Would they be sent away, the way King Tetsuo had tried to get rid of them? Would they even have the chance to meet or talk to anyone other than the kraken king? Florian was sure they wouldn’t be able to rely on getting any help from the king himself, but would others be sympathetic to their cause? He knew nothing about the krakens or their culture—only that their king, Torsten, hadn’t liked his father and had only a tenuous relationship with the wolf kingdom. He wasn’t even sure how old Torsten was, or if he had an heir. They would be completely playing it by ear when they arrived.
Plus, he wasn’t even sure where, exactly, the curtain was: a red circle marked it on a small island off the coast in the northwest of Norway. It was so small it was hard to tell that it was even a land mass, but when he zoomed in as far as he could on an online map, it looked like a tiny island labeled “Mosken.”
And Kade wasn’t there to help him. When it was just him and Koji, somehow it felt much more like Florian was responsible for everything, and less like they were figuring things out together.
So despite their long, boring flight, Florian was already nervous when they landed in Oslo. From there, it was yet another flight to Leknes, the closest airport he could find to where they could feasibly catch a ferry to Mosken. But by then it was late, and catching a bus or train to take them to the ferry was pointless now, so they got another hotel room by the airport—this one much smaller and colder. Florian only managed to sleep because he was exhausted.
In the morning, they set back out. His mood had already been dark, but only plummeted further when he discovered, after searching on the internet and asking the one front-desk attendant who spoke English, that a ferry to Mosken simply didn’t exist. The island was uninhabited; while a ferry passed it by at a distance, traveling between the mainland and the larger nearby island of Værøya, there was no way to get directly to Mosken itself, short of sailing there on their own.
“You wouldn’t happen to know how to sail, would you?” Florian asked dubiously, and Koji shook his head.
“Not at all,” he said. “Can you?”
“Not like this, no,” Florian sighed, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “I mean, I’ve been on a boat, but it was always someone else driving, and I was never big into fishing or anything like that. My uncle and I went kayaking a few times, but this would be like... deep-sea sailing, I guess. I don’t know about any of that.”
“Won’t taxis take you wherever you need to go? Is there a boat version of that?” Koji asked, and despite his frustration, the question was so endearing that Florian couldn’t help but laugh.
“I don’t think so,” he replied, smirking as he shook his head. “Well. Let’s see what the ferry’s like. Maybe we can bribe someone with a boat.”
From Leknes it was about an hour’s drive to the town of Moskenes where the ferry set out, not that the public ferry would be of much help to them. When they arrived, Florian asked the attendant at the ticket booth about how to get to Mosken, but with the language barrier between them, she seemed uncertain as to what he was actually asking.
“No one sail there,” she said, shaking her head when he managed to explain that they were trying to get to the uninhabited island. “TheMoskstraumen—too much danger. No sailing.”
“What does that mean?Moskstraumen?” Florian repeated. The girl gave him a flummoxed expression, then typed something into her phone. When she held it up so he could see the screen, she had a Wikipedia page open, listingMoskstraumenas a series of eddies and whirlpools all along the northern edge of Mosken.
“Oh, shit,” Florian murmured, half under his breath. He nodded in understanding at the attendant, who put her phone away with an expression of satisfaction, turning to look at Koji. “I bet that’s where it is. The curtain. Don’t you think so?”
Koji had found a tourist map of the area that he was flipping through, but glanced over at Florian at the exchange.
“It could be. Or it could just be a whirlpool,” he said, shrugging. “Look. This map says that there’s a hiking trail on Mosken.” He pointed, and Florian gestured at the attendant again, pointing at the map outlining the trail on the brochure.
